Kecksburg

According to UFOlogists, and local media at the time, a rather large object made a controlled landing in the woods around Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, in December, 1965. Exactly what the object was has been open to question ever since. Some say a major military recovery operation was carried out, while others say nothing of the sort happened.

Investigative journalist Leslie Kean, working with The Sci-Fi Channel, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2002 seeking documents from NASA related to Kecksburg. Finally, this year, NASA released hundreds of documents to Ms. Kean pursuant to her long ago FOIA request. She reports there is no "smoking gun" in any of the documents, but that still leaves what landed near Kecksburg and what happened to it unresolved. Kean leans to a secret U. S. Government project as the answer, but says she can't rule out an extraterrestrial spacecraft as a possibility.

The more immediate concern, Kean argues, is how the FOIA works. She has a point. If the federal Freedom of Information Act is to be a tool useful to citizens and journalists trying to keep tabs on what the government is currently doing, it needs to produce faster results. Otherwise, it becomes a tool useful only to historians-- and an imperfect tool even then.