Kecksburg and the Acorn in the Woods
On 9 December 1965 a bright fireball crossed several states, and in the woods outside this Pennsylvania village, according to the people who live there, something came down. Witnesses described an object the size of a car, shaped like an acorn, with a band of markings around its base. By evening the military had cordoned the woods off; by morning they announced they had found nothing. The official answer is a meteor, and astronomers did track that fireball from Ontario into Pennsylvania. A meteor does not explain a cordon. In 2005 NASA acknowledged that its files on the episode were missing. A replica of the acorn has stood in the village since the 1990s — put up for a television programme, and never taken down.
Ubatuba and the Magnesium Fragments
In September 1957 a Brazilian newspaper received a letter from a fisherman claiming that a disc-shaped object had exploded in the air over the beach at this town in front of him, enclosing several light metal fragments. The samples reached a Brazilian agricultural laboratory, which identified almost pure magnesium. The argument starts there: some analyses showed a purity above what industry could achieve at the time, others found it ordinary. The fragments were passed from hand to hand and laboratory to laboratory, some were lost, and some were studied in the United States in the 1980s. Sixty years on the result is inconclusive, and the Ubatuba fragments remain the best-known example of how physical evidence in this subject dissolves along a chain of custody.
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