Sci Fi Channel-backed researcher sues NASA over UFO files

PITTSBURGH — A researcher backed by cable television’s Sci Fi Channel sued NASA for the release of records she contends the agency has of a UFO that reportedly crash landed and was recovered by government workers in southwestern Pennsylvania in 1965.

The lawsuit was filed Dec. 9 in U.S. District Court in Washington on behalf of Leslie Kean, a San Rafael, Calif., investigative reporter backed by the cable channel and a group called the Coalition for Freedom of Information.

“Our lawsuit is aimed at getting NASA to tell the public what it knew and when it knew it,” said Ed Rothschild, a lobbyist the Sci Fi Channel hired from the Washington firm PodestaMattoon, who is also identified as CFI’s executive director. Former President Clinton’s one-time chief of staff John Podesta is backing the Sci Fi Channel’s efforts, and his brother, Anthony, is a principal in the lobbying firm hired by the channel.

Bob Jacobs, a NASA spokesman, said he was unaware of the lawsuit and could not comment.

The filing marked the 38th anniversary of the Kecksburg UFO incident, which occurred in the unincorporated hamlet about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

Witnesses described a “fireball” in the evening sky, and a metallic, acorn-shaped object about 12 to 15 feet high and 8 to 12 feet in diameter that landed in the woods, according to news media accounts in the Tribune-Review of Greensburg and other outlets at the time.

Military personnel quickly surrounded the site, removed the object, threatened residents who tried to inquire about it, and left — later calling the object a “meteor,” according to news accounts.

James Romansky, 57, of Derry Township, was then a 19-year-old volunteer firefighter. He told the Associated Press that he was among those who drove to the landing site.

“Now, I’m prepared for a smashed-up airplane ... and I’m thinking, ‘What in the hell is this?’ I’m looking for wings, propellers, motors, a fuselage — but there’s none of that,” Romansky said. “There’s no rivet marks on it, no weld marks on it, no windows, no doors — no possible way of getting in and out of this thing that I seen.

“There was writing on it, but not writing that you or I could understand. I always referred to it as something like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. There was dots and dashes and circles,” Romansky said.

The cable network announced in June that it was backing the effort to research the Kecksburg incident in promoting a documentary, “Out of the Blue,” which examined various UFO reports.

“This should have been done a long time ago,” Romansky said. “The United States government has given us a snow job for the last God knows when. I can’t understand it for the life of me. They can’t come out and say it’s nothing because I was 10, 20 feet away from it.”

Sci Fi Channel officials said they’re looking for an explanation of what occurred. They’re also looking for viewers.

A November 2002 documentary on the suspected 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, N.M., was the highest-rated special in the network’s 11-year history. It was seen by nearly 2.4 million people, or about 2 1/2times Sci Fi’s usual prime-time audience.

The lawsuit contends NASA has thwarted Kean’s efforts to retrieve official files on the incident by sending her irrelevant information or nothing in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

1. We have it.

2. we have used some of it already.

3. Some of it we haven't figured out yet...think of a 747 landing in a caveman's front yard. How long before he figures out how to operate and fly it? That's where we are with some of it.

4. The Gov't still isn't talking because they would have to address the abduction phenomenon...which they either can't stop, or made a deal to look the other way, depending on the USG sources we are working with in declassifying this heretofore black subject.

5. Those who think this is all nonsense, you are welcome to your opinion, but since this younger generation is not being kept quiet with Cold War rationale, is preparing to blow the lid off of some of this stuff. I really no longer care who "believes" or not. It is eventually going to be revealed and accepted. The abductions are happening. Whether you choose to study any of the data and make your own judgement is completely your call. I know longer care who "believes" and who doesn't. Those who study these things, and who have worked with abductees know this is going on. Whether the media or public "believes" or not, is, frankly, irrelevant.

6. Those who want to be more educated can read. I recommend The Day after Roswell by Phillip Corso. Corso is the Army Colonel who blew the lid off the long secret medical experiments done by the PRK and Soviets on our prisoner from the Korean War. Before he died a year or so ago, he finally published his book about the work we did on the Roswell debris when he was assigned to put it to work in the Army's Foreign Technology division under General Arthur Trudeau. Some facts on Col. Corso's background can be found here

http://www.palmdigitalmedia.com/author/detail/1611

If you are interested in the abduction phenomenon, I recommend one by a skeptic...for skeptics:

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind by C.D.B. Bryan, journalist and author of the bestselling Vietnam war book, Friendly Fire. Bryan went to a conference on the abduction problem that was quietly held at M.I.T. in 1992. This conference was organized by the M.I.T. Professor of Physics David Pritchard, and Harvard Professor of Psychiatry, and Pulizer Prize winning author, John Mack. Bryan fully expected to ridicule nutcases and expose charlatans bent on making money from a gullible public. At the end of the conference he was convinced something extraordinary was going on...and that this needs further investigation. Here is Publisher's Weekly's take on Bryan's book.

Bryan (Friendly Fire) brings top-notch reporting skills to this open-minded account of a five-day conference on UFO abductions held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. Many of the purported abductees, who spoke at the symposium and in subsequent interviews with Bryan, tell of being floated aboard spacecraft by gray, four-foot-tall creatures with big heads who subjected them to clinical examinations.

Bryan believes in the abductees' sincerity but remains undecided whether such experiences are encounters with nuts-and-bolts craft and real aliens, disturbances of the collective unconscious or something else.

Among the ufology heavyweights attending the conference were bestselling abduction researchers Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs, who believe aliens are conducting an ongoing breeding experiment with humans; Harvard psychiatrist John Mack (Abduction), who emphasizes that close encounters often involve personal transformation and growth; folklorist Thomas Bullard; and Sacramento psychologist Richard Boylan, who divulges his own recent encounter with three "interdimensional" beings in the New Mexico desert.

Bryan's thought-provoking report takes us to the frontiers of current UFO research and controversy. 50,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB selections.

Among my other many hobbies, I am a state director for Public Information for MUFON. Cheers.

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