Documents / FOIA release
This is a July 27, 2021 FOIA response from NASA's Office of Communications to John Greenewald, Jr. It covers records from Leslie Kean's lawsuit against NASA seeking Kecksburg documents. NASA released 207 pages in full, 7 in part and withheld 31, noting that most of the lawsuit case files had been destroyed under records retention rules. The enclosures include court declarations, a 2003 appeal decision ordering a broader search, a 2019 FOIA response, and Stan Gordon's account of the missing NASA fragology files.
“Headquarters”17 pages
\ ]SC PUDlIC ,rFAIRS Fa, '713- 433-4876 1 U I j . Jan 7~ P. OB I ; : , The Cosmos 96 Question is :settled once and for all Olief Sdentist for Orbital [)Qbris at the NA5~J Oh~son Space Center, Nicholas L. Johnson, who is recognized internationally a an authority on orbital debris and foreign space systems, has determined that Cosmos 6, the Russian Venera probe that has been considered a possible explanation for th\. Ked;sburg object for decadeS, did not land In Pennsylvania on the afternoon of ~ber, 9, 1965, Furthermore, he states that no other man·made object from any country 'came down that day. j : Debris from Cosmos 96 has been a leadil"lg contender as an explanation for the Kecksburg object, due to the fact that it cam~ dawn e~rly that momlng over canada. Perhaps part ended up in Pennsylvania later, ~the theory went. The Air Force stated at the time that no space debris entered the a~osphere that day, and that all aircraft and missiles Wt:re accounted for. t . J , . Johnson examined the orbital data for Cosm'ds 96 and was able to calculatk when it wou ld have passed over Pennsylvania ir it ha~ been In orbit that day. Theime, when it traveled from north to south, was at approximately 6:20 am. The Kecksbur. object came down at 4:45 p.m. "1 can tell you cate'gorically, that there is no way at any debris rrom COSmos 96 could have landed in PenflSylvaniCl anywhere arou d 4:45 p.m.," said Johnson in an Interview on October 10, 2003.. "'That's an absolute. Orbital \ mechanics is very strict." The US Sp<lce Command reported in 1991 that Cosmos 96 crashed in Canada at 3:18 a.m. Johnson does not have information aboyt the lime of demise of Cosmos 96, but he did confirm that It was over canada at this time. I One part of Cosmos 96 could not have stayed in orbit until 4:45 p.m. after the object came apart hours earlier, as some had speculated. , Even more Intriguing, Johnson's data shows that no man-made object rrom any country entered our atmosphere and landed in PennsYlvania on the afternoon of December 9. Cosmos 96 was the only catalogued object that came down at all that day. He ~ys that anything not catalogued w.ould have been so~!'imall that it would hot have survived reentry. "I ca nnot absolutely confirm that it was not some completely unreported event, but the chances of that are virtually nil," SlIid' JotlilSOll. "You can't lau"ch something without somebOdy seeing it. By 1965 the USand Soviets were oath reporting their launches." The possibilily of a US reconnaissance satellite dropping a large film canister on that day has also been ruled out. These capsules were dropped following seqet missions over the Soviet Union. Data on these flights was recently de¢assifie<.J. By dleckmg launch and retrieval times, these capsules can also been .eliminated as a possible explal"lation for whut landed in Ked<sburg. r In 1965, unlike today, the US government did not have the techniCal means of detecting natural bodiest such as a meteor, suddenly coming into the earth's atmOsphere. The only record we: would have or sudl an event ~ould be witness reports. I RIP
FOIA release, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 223 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.