Saturday, December 06, 2003
Sci Fi Channel-backed researcher sues NASA over UFO files
A researcher backed by cable television's Sci Fi Channel plans to sue NASA for 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 Associated Press obtained an advance copy of the lawsuit to be filed Tuesday in federal court in Washington, D.C., 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 Bill Clinton's one-time chief of staff John Podesta is a principle in the lobbying firm and has supported the cable channel's effort to declassify the documents.
Tuesday's filing will mark the 38th anniversary of the Kecksburg UFO incident, which occurred Dec. 9, 1965, 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 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 media accounts.
James Romansky, 57, of Derry Township, was then a 19-year-old volunteer firefighter. He told The Associated Press on Friday 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.
"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."
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.
"Despite our serious effort to uncover the facts, NASA still refuses to provide the public with any information," said Sci Fi Channel president Bonnie Hammer. "We are hopeful that our legal system will help us find out what really happened in the woods outside Kecksburg."
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