Today in 1965, something happened in the community of Kecksburg in southwestern Pennsylvania.

That something has had plenty of names – UFO Crash, Great Fireball, second Roswell, to name a few – so let’s explain what we do and don’t know about it.

At 4:47 pm that day, people in six states and parts of Canada reported seeing a flaming object flying across the sky.

Some eyewitnesses say the object didn’t just fall, that it changed its course before it crashed into the woods.

Officials said it was a meteor and left it at that.

But some people said they’d seen a large, metal acorn-shaped object that was eventually hauled away by the military.

They said they were convinced it was a spacecraft of some kind, though other people thought those people were either mixed up or part of a hoax.

There have been theories that it was a spy satellite, either a US device or a Soviet one.

There was even a suggestion that it was a bell shaped time travel experiment started during World War II!

But none of the theories was ever proven, so the mystery of the fireball and the crash in Kecksburg was left unsolved.

Which is how the story ended up on the TV show Unsolved Mysteries in 1990.

As part of their reenactment, the TV crews created, based on those eyewitness accounts, a big brown acorn thing with hieroglyphic-like symbols on it.

And when they left town, they left the “space acorn” in Kecksburg.

Eventually people there decided that if Roswell can draw tourists and UFOologists to New Mexico, why couldn’t their town do the same?

So they put the giant prop on a pole where anybody could come see it.

And each year the Kecksburg Volunteer Fire Department puts on a UFO Festival, complete with music, races, contests and, fittingly, bright fireworks in the sky.

Today in 2021, a sixth grader in Muskogee, Oklahoma had quite a day.

Davyon Johnson saw one of his classmates choking on a bottle cap, so he used an abdominal thrust to save the day.

But that wasn’t all: later that same day he saw a house on fire!

So Davyon helped the woman who lived there get away from the burning building and get to safety.

To no one’s surprise, he said he wanted to be an EMT.

And maybe kind of is one already.

Five decades later, the Kecksburg UFO is identified (probably) (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Space Acorn – 1965 UFO (Roadside America)

Muskogee student honored for saving 2 lives (Enid News & Eagle)

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Photo by Hawaiian Sea via Flickr/Creative Commons