Claim: Authorities supressed alleged UFO findings of a reporter of the 1965 Kecksburg crash

[ParanoidSkeptic2]

In 1965, there was an alleged UFO sighting in Kecksburg Pennsylvania and it's been alleged that a reporter on the case, John Murphy, had found additional information, was making a radio documentary called "Object in the Woods", was contacted by government officials to not release it, and eventually was killed by them in 1968.

This was addressed in a 2015 video by a conspiracy/UFO channel and was told as if it's what happened, I'll link the video below and transcribe the bit

The video starts talking about Murphy at 8:18 (link is time-stamped)

Not everybody believed [a Russian satellite crashed in Pennsylvania]. In fact, John Murphy, the journalist we mentioned earlier, began making a documentary called "Object in the woods", where he took interviews from various people, gathered any evidence that he could find and tried to solve the mystery of things locals described as an acorn-shaped object or craft of some sort. At least that was until he was visited by two men in black suits who went into a back room with him and met for about 30 mins. And he still did come out with his documentary, but it removed everything else that he had been working on. And according to his wife he was pretty upset about it. His wife said that he became despondent, refused to ever talk about what went down in that conversation or what he saw that December 5th. In 1969 he was killed in an apparent hit and run while on vacation in California. After his death, his wife stated that he had been warned that there would be grave consequences If he ever produced evidence of that stuff he had seen that night, including a photograph he had of the object. Oddly enough, in project blue book case file on the Kecksburg incident, a photograph is mentioned but it's not part of the official reports.

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The video itself provides no sources of the description of this (or, for that matter, any) claim and when you click on their website to see if maybe they had the sources there, the website consists of just a conspiracy based podcast. The language in the video also seems so assertive of this being the case and seems dismissive of other explanations. In addition, I don't understand why the date 5th of December is mentioned when the incident occurred on the 9th of December

I looked into it and the only source I could find that detailed anything like this was from a conspiracy website from 2011.

A reporter and news director for the local radio station WHJB, John Murphy, arrived on the scene of the event before authorities had arrived, in response to several calls to the station from alarmed citizens. He took several photographs and conducted interviews with witnesses. His former wife Bonnie Milslagle later reported that all but one roll of the film were confiscated by military personnel. WHJB office manager Mabel Mazza described one of the pictures: "It was very dark and it was with a lot of trees around and everything. And I don't know how far away from the site he was. But I did see a picture of a sort of a cone-like thing. It's the only time I ever saw it."

In the following weeks, Murphy became enveloped with the incident and wrote a radio documentary called Object in the Woods, featuring his experiences and interviews he had conducted that night. Shortly before the documentary would have aired, he received an unexpected visit at the station from two men in black suits identifying themselves as government officials. They requested to speak with him in a back room behind closed doors. The meeting lasted about 30 minutes. A WHJB employee, Linda Foschia, recalled the men confiscated some of Murphy's audio tapes from that night, and that no one knows what happened to the remaining photographs.

A week after the visit, an agitated Murphy aired a censored version of the documentary, which he claimed in its introduction had to be edited due to some interviewees requesting their statements be removed from the broadcast in fear of getting in trouble with the police and Army. The new version contained nothing revealing, and did not mention an object at all. Mazza, and also Murphy's wife, remember the aired documentary was entirely different from what Murphy had originally written. (See pp. 4–5 of CFI's report in External links for details of the aired documentary.)

After the airing, Murphy became uncharacteristically despondent and completely stopped all investigation on the case and refused to talk to anyone about it again, and never gave clear reasons why. In February 1969, Murphy was struck and killed by an unidentified car in an apparent hit - and - run while crossing a road. The hit-and-run occurred near Ventura, California while Murphy was on vacation.

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Interestingly enough, in 2007 Wikipedia was edited to contain the John Murphy allegations. It wasn't sourced and in 2014, the part on the Wikipedia was word for word exaclty the same as the one on the website, thus it was removed. However, the Wikipedia page did have a few links to some alleged sources

Excerpt from the 2014 edition of the article


Excerpt from the website


The whole section was removed as it was uncited and was exactly the same as the articles on the website.

I checked the citation and it gives an error 404, I looked on the wayback machine and it seems to be just directing to the Sci-Fi documentary The new Roswell: Kecksburg. The other is a CFI report which, again, is a dead link. But using the wayback machine I managed to get the report up. It says to read the 4th and 5th page for details. The report was written by Leslie Kean who has previously worked on different UFO related stories and it pretty much retells the same exact things as the other sources (Murphy making the documentary, being supressed, releasing a censored version and eventually being killed). I believe this report is from 2005 making this the earliest source of the John Murphy planning on creating the documentary.

I couldn't find anything else aside from the rehashing of the same story so I decided to look for the documentary and again I could not find anything, the top result was the Wikipedia article and the others were either unrelated or where the same word-for-word retelling of the same story.

At this point I started to even question if the person existed, apparently there is archive footage of him as he's credited in conspiracy documentary
In addition, apparently there have been records of the documentary as, according to this website, they know how the documentary started but again it's not sourced.

Murphy advises the audience at the start of the documentary, “We regret that part of the program had to be censored and other parts of the program had to be cut out entirely.”

He then goes out of his way to make the following assertion: “This station has not been contacted by any official agency of the state, federal, or local government in connection with this program.”

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I'm quite stumped, I cannot find anything else besides the surface level re-telling of the same story and no other source I delve into don't go into anymore detail.

What do you guys think? Do you think the documentary existed and if it did, do you think it was suppressed?

 

[deirdre]

it's possible he was asked not to release photos or certain information if it was indeed Russian technology they were stealing. But it's also possible it's just a story that evolved with time. Your only alleged quote from him says it didn't happen.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Wednesday, September 9th, 1998 it is claimed the object which
crashed in the woods outside Kecksburg was in fact a
secret Russian military satellite.

The problems with this theory is that eye witness reports recall an object that was acorn shaped and much
larger than the Venera 7. Also, while it is true that Cosmos 96 did break up and re-enter the earth’s atmosphere it was 12 hours earlier than the Kecksburg UFO.

In 1991 James Oberg, a noted expert on Soviet spacecraft and UFO skeptic, reviewed the ordinants of the reentry trajectory provided by the Goddard Space Center
to see if Kecksburg’s UFO could have been Cosmos
96. Oberg concluded that it could not be Kosmos 96.


However, in 1993 he reversed himself:

"In the 1960s, U.S. military intelligence agencies interested
in enemy technology were eagerly collecting all the Soviet missile and space debris they could find.
International law required that debris be returned to the country of origin. But hardware from Kosmos
96, with its special missile-warhead shielding, would have been too valuable to give back." He believed Cosmos broke up into several pieces, one of which landed at Kecksburg.

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link to Pittsburgh Gazette:
https://old.post-gazette.com/magazine/19980908ufo1.asp

Kosmos 96 was destroyed when it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on 9 December 1965.[7]

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_96

 

[Rocky]

Like the Roswell story this always seems to get bigger then what it actually was. Mysterious witnesses coming forward, retired military personnel claims etc. It's just a mess of a nothing burger. The UFO community just loves promoting fantasy based on zero evidence.

 

[ParanoidSkeptic2]

it's possible he was asked not to release photos or certain information if it was indeed Russian technology they were stealing. But it's also possible it's just a story that evolved with time. Your only alleged quote from him says it didn't happen.

Yeah, I think it was that he was asked to not release the footage as it was during the cold war and anything that landed which was unidentified was assumed to either be secret US technology or Russian technology, either way, the US wouldn't want this going out into the public in case of unwanted parties finding out what's going on.

It's interesting to note that there doesn't seem to be any records prior to the 2000's about the claims that Marshall had some secret info, so it feels like it was a story that just evolved and escalated as they usually do; people would rather make stories that sound plausible but are backed by no evidence than accept uncertainty.

Like the Roswell story this always seems to get bigger then what it actually was. Mysterious witnesses coming forward, retired military personnel claims etc. It's just a mess of a nothing burger. The UFO community just loves promoting fantasy based on zero evidence.

Oh yeah, that's ufology and conspiracies for ya. But at least we have communities like this one that look at these incidents purely from empirical perspective.

You should see what the believers are saying, they think that this acorn shaped thing is actually a Nazi super weapon. Their evidence is that people alleged that it looked like an acorn. That's all...

 

[ParanoidSkeptic2]

it's possible he was asked not to release photos or certain information if it was indeed Russian technology they were stealing. But it's also possible it's just a story that evolved with time. Your only alleged quote from him says it didn't happen.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Wednesday, September 9th, 1998 it is claimed the object which
crashed in the woods outside Kecksburg was in fact a
secret Russian military satellite.

The problems with this theory is that eye witness reports recall an object that was acorn shaped and much
larger than the Venera 7. Also, while it is true that Cosmos 96 did break up and re-enter the earth’s atmosphere it was 12 hours earlier than the Kecksburg UFO.

In 1991 James Oberg, a noted expert on Soviet spacecraft and UFO skeptic, reviewed the ordinants of the reentry trajectory provided by the Goddard Space Center
to see if Kecksburg’s UFO could have been Cosmos
96. Oberg concluded that it could not be Kosmos 96.


However, in 1993 he reversed himself:

"In the 1960s, U.S. military intelligence agencies interested
in enemy technology were eagerly collecting all the Soviet missile and space debris they could find.
International law required that debris be returned to the country of origin. But hardware from Kosmos
96, with its special missile-warhead shielding, would have been too valuable to give back." He believed Cosmos broke up into several pieces, one of which landed at Kecksburg.

Content from external source​

link to Pittsburgh Gazette:
https://old.post-gazette.com/magazine/19980908ufo1.asp




Kosmos 96 was destroyed when it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on 9 December 1965.[7]

Content from external source​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_96

I looked into it and apparently Oberg dismissed the Kosmos-96 hypothesis

Upon study however, the flight path is nowhere near. Between Cosmos-96 and the Kecksburg UFO he finds a 13-hour discrepancy. Oberg isn’t convinced that’s the end of the matter. It could be a cover-up: deliberately misleading data to hide the fact that the US has found what would have been at that time a Soviet satellite. The coincidence of the satellite re-entry and Kecksburg UFO event happening on the same day was too difficult to dismiss.

Fast forward to 1996, and better tracking data is made available, Oberg conclusively ruled out Cosmos-96 being the object found in the Kecksburg woods. He is not ready to rule out another satellite, though he says it is unlikely.

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That's from the website that alleges that the incident was to do with Nazi technology

However, I did find a primary source from Oberg where he acknowledges that he believes that the Kosmos-96 is an unlikely explanation.

The acorn appearance of some descriptions – others describe a Hollywood-style winged space plane – intrigued me because that, in fact, is what the Venus entry probe DOES sort of look like. But then I learned that the description only originated some years later, when TV reporters and UFO buffs showed the witnesses photographs of the Venus probe – and some responded, “Yeah, THAT’S what I saw…” Sure.

‘Kosmos-96’, the Soviet cover name for the off-course Venus capsule, DID fall from orbit a few hours before the meteor was seen. The AF said it was over western Canada. Personally, I had wondered if the AF claim was a diversion to camouflage their recovery of the actual satellite. After all, it was against international law to recover and then retain objects launched by other nations – the ‘originating state’ had full legal ownership. Far better (I mused) to avoid a fuss by just never admitting possession – and far MORE valuable from an intelligence point of view if the ‘other side’ never realized that you had discovered some of its technical secrets.

But subsequent analysis of the Kosmos-96 orbit confirmed the authenticity of the AF tracking data, and confirmed that its path could not possibly be made to coincide with the path of the meteor observed in southern Ontario.

In the end, the same-day fall of the super-secret Soviet Venus capsule, and the bright meteor, must have been coincidences. That happens, too.

Content from external source

http://jamesoberg.com/statement_nasa_kecksburg.pdf

 

[Mendel]

Article:

Further examination has been conducted in the Kecksburg case. The Sci-Fi (now Syfy) Channel sponsored a study of the area in 2003 and concluded that something did crash into the woods in 1965. This conclusion was due to the damage to the trees and disruption to the soil that scientists found which dated back to the year of the alleged crash. There was also a demand for NASA to release the documents related to the case, but NASA claimed they were unable to find the information.

Source: https://popularpittsburgh.com/strange-pittsburgh/

That "demand" was a FOIA lawsuit brought by Leslie Kean; there was some kind of ruling in 2007, but I haven't found out if anything came of it.

Article:

A National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) spokesperson says there's no cover-up - the "UFO" was a Russian satellite, but government records documenting it have been lost.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20090224033619/http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0%2C%2C2-13-1443_1848103%2C00.html

MUFON says it may be US-made:

Article:

The unidentified flying object that came down Dec. 9, 1965, they say, was a General Electric Mark 2 Re-entry Vehicle that had been launched by the Air Force as a spy satellite, but fell out of orbit.

Source: https://www.post-gazette.com/news/science/2015/12/06/50-years-later-the-Kecksburg-Westmoreland-County-UFO-is-identified-probably/stories/201512060146

The topic of this thread isn't about what crashed there. The topic is about the cover-up claim.

Did the cover-up really take place?
Did the military think at the time that they had recovered pieces of a satellite, and wanted to cover that up?
Was it an invention by John Murphy to make his story more interesting and cover up the lack of information?
Has anyone interviewed his co-author, Mabel Mezza, after John's death?

 

[ParanoidSkeptic2]

Did the cover-up really take place?

I cannot find anybody talking about the alleged cover up prior to the 2000's, it seems like with the popularisation of the internet, the topic got more attention and that's where the story began to surface. The earliest mention of it I could find was from a 2005 ufology article by Leslie Kean.

Did the military think at the time that they had recovered pieces of a satellite, and wanted to cover that up?

Considering the height of the cold war, that seems plausible. There have been records of the military asking people to not disclose information but not to the violent extent as many people say.

Was it an invention by John Murphy to make his story more interesting and cover up the lack of information?

I didn't think of that, that may be a possible explanation, create a mystery where there wasn't one.

Has anyone interviewed his co-author, Mabel Mezza, after John's death?

I looked into it and I couldn't find any interviews with Mabel Mezza after John's death, the extent of information about her is pretty much what's been said.

I think its interesting to note that all these are second hand sources, I haven't come along one primary source in all of this. It seems that only conspiracy theorists mention the alleged coverup, people who looked sceptically at the whole Kecksburg incident only briefly mention John Marshall and don't mention anything about an alleged cover up.

 

[Alexandria Nick]

I cannot find anybody talking about the alleged cover up prior to the 2000's, it seems like with the popularisation of the internet, the topic got more attention and that's where the story began to surface. The earliest mention of it I could find was from a 2005 ufology article by Leslie Kean.

While I have nothing I can point to, I grew up in the region, about 50 miles away. As far back as the 80s, it was in the local popular lore as "a spaceship crashed over in Kecksburg and the Air Force came and took it away." It was basically the same story people had been telling for decades about the B-25 that crashed in the Mon River, except without "secretly lost an atomic bomb" and with "aliens."