The Uniontown UFO-Bigfoot Encounter

Autumn 1973. America was in the middle of a UFO wave. The Pascagoula abduction had been reported on October 11. In western Pennsylvania, Stan Gordon of the Westmoreland County UFO Study Group was logging UFO reports and Bigfoot reports from the same places, sometimes within hours of each other.

Thursday, October 25. About 9 p.m. On his father's farm near Uniontown, in the Chestnut Ridge country of Fayette County, George Kowalczyk saw a bright reddish orange ball about 100 feet up, moving toward the farm. About 15 family members and neighbours saw the red object. He drove toward it. The headlights dimmed. As it came down it turned from red to bright white, "like a big bubble," and "lit up the entire area."

Kowalczyk, 22, walked up the field with two 10-year-old twin boys from next door. About 250 feet away sat "a half-sphere with a bright, white dome and flat bottom," around 100 feet across. The size of a barn. It whirred like a lawnmower. The air smelled of burning rubber.

Two upright figures walked one behind the other along a barbed wire fence, about 75 feet away. The fence posts were 6 feet tall. One figure was over 8 feet. The other, over 7. Long, dark, brownish gray matted hair hung almost to the ground. No neck. Extremely long arms. Glowing green eyes "about the size of a half dollar." They whined, and made sounds like a baby crying. One of the boys ran. "It was real tall and it seemed like it was walking real slow but taking long strides," Kowalczyk said.

He fired tracers over their heads. One creature reached out as if to grab at a tracer. Then he fired directly at them. "It sounded just like shooting into a lake or something just like water plopping." The larger one moaned and raised its right hand. The dome disappeared. The sound stopped. The two figures turned and walked slowly back into the woods.

Around 9:45 p.m. a trooper from the Pennsylvania State Police barracks at Uniontown arrived. A glowing area about 150 feet across still lit the field. You "could read a newspaper" by it. In the woods, he and Kowalczyk heard large footsteps that stopped when they stopped, and a sound like "entire trees being ripped right out of the ground." The trooper called Gordon.

Gordon's team arrived around 1 a.m. The glow was gone. Radiation was normal. No hair, no blood, no tracks. Cattle and horses kept away. At about 2 a.m. Kowalczyk began shaking and panting. He growled, knocked down his father and team member George E. Lutz, and ran screaming into the field before passing out. A smell like rotten eggs filled the air. Afterwards he warned them to keep away from the corner, and described a strange man in a black hat and cloak carrying a sickle.

Project Blue Book had closed in 1969, and no federal inquiry followed. Psychiatrist Berthold Eric Schwarz examined Kowalczyk on November 1, 1973. He judged the witnesses truthful and called the collapse a fugue state. His 1974 Flying Saucer Review article disguised Kowalczyk as "Stephen Pulaski." Later retellings used "Steve Palmer." No hoax allegation has surfaced. Commentators have suggested stress behind the trance and misidentified animals behind the creatures. The question stays open.

The case anchors Gordon's book Silent Invasion: The Pennsylvania UFO-Bigfoot Casebook, and the 2017 documentary Invasion on Chestnut Ridge, which also revisits Kecksburg.