Sci Fi Channel-backed researcher sues NASA over UFO files

First Amendment Center Online ^ | Wednesday, December 17, 2003 | The Associated Press

[Momaw Nadon]

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.

[Desron13]

"A Universe, billions of light years or more in diameter and God limits his infinite attention to a sphere about 8000 miles in diamater. Seems some people don't think God thinks very big."

Great point. Traveling at a rate of speed that would take you around the earth at the equator seven times in one second, it would take you about three years to reach the nearest star. Not to sound like Carl Segan, but there are billions of stars in our galaxy alone and then there are billions of galaxies observable in the universe. It sure seems like god went through a lot of trouble just to put life on this one little dust mote located at the very edge of one unremarkable little galaxy out of all those billions. Personally, I would frankly be astounded if the universe isn't teeming with life. I don't know if any of them are dropping in on us or not but there sure are allot of credible people who have seen allot of unexplainable things. This includes both my parents who came rushing into the house one night when I was about 9 and turned on the TV just in time to hear the local news caster reporting in a condescending tone of voice, "Well, this must be the night for people to see flying saucers. It must be a full moon." What they both reported seeing while driving south on I75 just north of Detroit was a very large circular object with counter rotating colorful bands of light moving just faster than the traffic. When it got to be what seemed like about half a mile ahead of them, it suddenly moved of at a tangent to the freeway at what my father called "an impossible rate of acceleration.” They said it did this without making any decernable sound above the noise of the freeway. My father was college educated and was a First Class Quartermaster in the Navy during World War Two. Trust me, he was not given to flights of fancy. My mother noted that the drivers in the cars around them were all seeing the same thing. While I have not seen any UFOs myself, let alone any little green men. I remember clearly that night to this very day. I have rarely seen my parents so shaken. Just something for the "Alone in the universe" crowd to chew on.

[B-Chan]

I suspect that the reason this “UFO” was and remains such a mystery is that the U.S. government wants it that way — not because it was of non-human origin, but because it was an experimental Soviet combat spacecraft that accidentally crashed in Pennsylvania instead of in central Asia as its designers intended. Back in the mid 1960s, the USSR was in the process of developing a family of space combat vehicles based upon their then-new Soyuz class spacecraft., and the re-entry capsule of a Soyuz looks a lot like this UFO was supposed to have looked. Check the illustration of the Soyuz re-entry capsule at the above link: it is acorn-shaped, about the right size, and was no doubt covered wth weird, alien (Russian!) writing!

I don't see any evidence to support the idea that this UFO was a spaceship from another world. My guess is that the Air Force realized the Russians had whiffed one, tracked this sucker as it fell and quickly recovered it for study, allowing the "alien UFO" legend to grow to divert media attention from the fact that we had a top-secret Soviet spacecraft in our possession.

[WackyKat]

However, the vast distances and the limitations imposed by the laws of physics prevents interstellar travel. We have never been visited because anyone intelligent enough to consider it, would also know that it is impossible.

You're making a huge assumption-that we know all there is to know about physics.

I think 10,000 years from now, we might very well have discovered a way to travel interstellar distances quickly

Why couldn't other, much older, civilizations have already made the same discovery?I'm not saying I'm convinced ETs have visited the earth, I'm just saying that it is in the realm of possibility

[DouglasKC]

I suspect that the reason this “UFO” was and remains such a mystery is that the U.S. government wants it that way — not because it was of non-human origin, but because it was an experimental Soviet combat spacecraft that accidentally crashed in Pennsylvania instead of in central Asia as its designers intended. Back in the mid 1960s, the USSR was in the process of developing a family of space combat vehicles based upon their then-new Soyuz class spacecraft., and the re-entry capsule of a Soyuz looks a lot like this UFO was supposed to have looked. Check the illustration of the Soyuz re-entry capsule at the above link: it is acorn-shaped, about the right size, and was no doubt covered wth weird, alien (Russian!) writing!

This bears repeating because this is exactly what happened....

[VaBthang4]

Haha...the fold was Israel...the other sheep are gentiles.

Like I said earlier..."foundational".

[VaBthang4]

I cant overstate my importance if I am a Son of God.

You sell yourself short...dont hate on me for not doing the same.

[ALASKA]

"In my father's house there are many mansions"

[servantoftheservant]

sincere question.....how do you know God limited himself to having 'children' on one tiny little planet, in one tiny little solar system on the outer edges of one tiny little galaxy ....in a universe of untold numbers of galaxies?

[LibWhacker]

Do you know how silly NASA's Blaxfyvian lawyers are going to make this woman look? Best damn lawyers in the Milky Way.

[TheDon]

In a related story, Howard Dean is suing the Bush Administration for the release of records showing that President Bush knew about 9-11 before it happened.

[Lancey Howard]

I'm with you.
The odds that there are "beings" ("beings" being a human concept) who happen to share even one of the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell) that humans have (out of an infinite number of possible senses) are remote to say the least. Add to that the odds that even if such beings existed that they would share our uniquely human concepts of size, space, and time, (that is, our unique reality) and the odds are beyond remote. Add to that the odds that such beings would land a craft on the only planet with humans and, well..... It didn't happen. No little green men. Period.

[Bubba_Leroy]

Look at it this way, in Biblical times there were millions of people living in continents all around the world that were completely unknown to the disciples and the rest of the Biblical civilizations. The existence of these other children of G-d in no way takes away from the importance of the Biblical children of G-d.

Why is it so difficult to believe that there are other children of G-d living on planets currently unknown to us? Perhaps we are destined to someday bring them the Word. Perhaps they already have received the Word. Most likely there are civilizations so distant that we can never know of their existence and they can never know of ours.

Like I said above, its an awfully big universe.

[Bubba_Leroy]

Let's say that of all the stars in the universe, only 1 in a thousand has a planet capable of supporting life and of all these habatable planets only 1 in a million has intelligent life. That would mean that there are roughly 100 planets in our galaxy with intelligent life. Multiply that by approximately 100 Billion galaxies in the universe and you get an awful lot of other beings out there.

I agree with Kirkwood though that the vast distances and the limitations imposed by the laws of physics will probably prevent us from ever visiting or being visited by beings from another planet. It is possible, however, that we might someday contact someone else out there and learn to communicate (though the lag time of years to decades between responses would make a conversation really difficult).

[VaBthang4]

"Look at it this way"

No.

"G-d"

What is that supposed to be? Not spelling God is some form of pseudo respect?

For who?

I think God'd find more respect in someone showing some humilty by learning the truth instead of trying to excuse the complete incompetence of conspiracy theorists and their vanity with an arrogant & brutally shallow representation of reason.

You'd think some would've done the math after spending decades camping outside of ahem...area 51 only to have the US Military go public and admit it was the home of the F-117 Stealth Fighter all throughout it's workup and eventual deployment.

Talk about embarassing [what? Did they make up the stealth fighter to cover up the Roswell bodies? ~grin~].

Time to grow up. Get saved, submit yourself to the truth and learn God's ways. Stop chasing your tail people, it's just sad.

[Lancey Howard]

Let's say that of all the stars in the universe, only 1 in a thousand has a planet capable of supporting life and of all these habatable planets only 1 in a million has intelligent life.

Forgetting most of the above sentence for a moment, just look at the phrase "intelligent life" - - that is purely a human notion. But of course, "notion" is a human notion.

I believe that there are other "beings" in existence (let's pretend that "existence" is not solely a human notion for a minute), but these beings would not share any part of our (human) reality. It is quite enough to wonder that our human reality overlaps the realities of other life forms here on our own planet, although this is probably explained by the fact that all the "nature" that we understand is concentrated in the ecology of a single planet, Earth. So our human reality overlaps (that is, we share some aspects in our respective realities) with, for example, insects and plants. Our development occured together, over (at least) millions of years.

But (again) the odds that we humans would possible share any aspect of our reality with "beings" on another planet are (pardon the pun) astronomical. If there are "beings" on other planets, we will never cross paths, even if we were to in some way pass through each other. There are countless realities, and we have ours here on earth, alone. Our "laws of physics" are ours alone. We humans percieve such things as "gravity" and "pain" and "light" and "sound".... These are things that exist in OUR reality.

Look, I love science fiction and I even belonged to the science fiction book club as a teen. I read everything Heinlein ever wrote. But there comes a time when thinking goes deeper than the things in front of your face. When you finally realize that EVERY thought in your head, and EVERY thing that you see, hear, and touch is perceived in a strictly human context, it gets clear that our reality is ours alone.

Regards,
LH

[GeronL]

They can’t come out and say it’s nothing

oh yes they can and they will

[MitchellC]

You are aware of the irony that you support one adult fairy talk in order to talk down another, right?

I guess you're unaware of all of the historical and philosophical evidence for the one supposed fairy tell, right?

[Fledermaus]

These UFO freaks just won't give up.

Most of the stuff in the tabloids and press in the old days (60's, etc.) were actually placed BY the military to deflect from their testing of experimental aircraft.

During the Stealth Fighter program, where my brother was stationed while in the Air Force, they'd do all kinds of things to "mess with their minds".

He told me they, when really bored, would go put some shiney metal parts onto a flatbed truck, cover it with a tarp, and take it out the back way. When they knew UFO people were watching up in the hills they'd drive up to the front gate, go through and then "drop" the tarp and pretend it was an accident. Suddenly, dozens of airmen would run out and frantically put the tarp back on!

Then they'd go get a few beers and laugh their butts off the rest of the day.

[Fledermaus]

I couldn't care less about the religious implications, it's just plain BS...period.

[Fledermaus]

there is a great deal of unexplained evidence that warrants investigation.

I agree. Especially as to why somewhat decent Americans vote for Democrats. That must be an alien conspiracy.