From a famous “space acorn” to a UFO spotted alongside Bigfoot (really!), here are the stories behind some of the strangest UFO sightings in Pennsylvania.
Do you believe in aliens? Or perhaps you have at least heard of the Fermi Paradox—the idea that given the vastness of the universe, there’s a high probability that extraterrestrials exist. Yet we haven’t found any evidence of them.
Or have we?
Hundreds of UFO sightings have been reported from Pennsylvania over the decades, whether we’re talking about people who simply saw unexplained lights in the sky or who have alleged encounters with strange objects. We’ve put together a list of some of the strangest stories involving UFOs in the commonwealth, including some that are famous and some that even had government investigators shaking their heads in confusion.
Many of these cases are from the 1950s and 1960s—when the Cold War and the space race had people’s attention on the sky, and the U.S. Air Force was actively investigating UFO reports. Even so, people continue to make reports of UFOs every year, often to groups like the National UFO Reporting Center.
Of course, spotting a UFO doesn’t mean one has spotted an alien spacecraft.
“A lot of things that may seem strange can be explained,” paranormal investigator Stan Gordon, who lives in Greensburg, told Uniontown’s Herald-Standard in 2014. He noted that UFO sightings often turn out to be planets, stars, satellites, meteorites, or drones. Yet, he added, “year after year, incidents occur that cannot be easily dismissed.”
Here are some such UFO sightings in Pennsylvania that have never been fully explained—and might have you questioning whether we really are alone in the universe.
The Kecksburg incident
Arguably the most famous of UFO sightings in Pennsylvania history, the 1965 Kecksburg incident has inspired decades of scrutiny and even an annual UFO festival in the small town, which is sometimes referred to as “Pennsylvania’s Roswell.”
Perhaps the best part of the story is that one core detail is undeniably true: On Dec. 9, 1965, a giant fireball hurtled across the northeastern part of the United States—thousands of people in six states and Canada reported seeing it.
The mystery begins in rural Kecksburg, about 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, where several people said they saw an object crash into the woods of their town.
This is where the story gets weird. Many Kecksburg residents, including volunteer firefighters who thought they were searching for a downed aircraft, reported a horde of military officials descending on the scene. Some volunteer firefighters saw a large, acorn-shaped object with strange markings in a hollow before government agents asked them to leave. And then, other residents said they saw military personnel drive away with a giant, covered object on the back of a truck.
The official explanation from the U.S. government was that the fireball people saw was a meteor and that it burned up before it hit the ground. But that doesn’t explain what the people in Kecksburg reported seeing. Some believe the object could have been a UFO, if not a downed Soviet space probe—but that whatever it was, the government covered it up.
If you’d like to learn more about the Kecksburg incident, the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries” dedicated part of a 1990 episode to the event and even made a replica of the acorn-like object for the show’s reenactments. That object is on display in Kecksburg as a sort of monument to the incident.
You might also visit the annual Kecksburg UFO Festival, which revisits the incident with food, fun, and a conference filled with insights from UFO researchers.
[PHOTO] A recreation of the military truck said to have taken the acorn-shaped object away, part of the Kecksburg UFO Festival in 2025. (S_P00/Shutterstock.com)
The Presque Isle UFO
It was summer 1966, and many Erie residents were enjoying the sunny weather on the beach at Presque Isle, a peninsula jutting into Lake Erie.
That is, until several people said they saw an unidentified, shining object land on the beach, with one report describing it as a mushroom-shaped vessel with bright lights that lit up the woods. In addition, a girl who saw the object said she also saw a large animal that looked like a gorilla pass in front of her car.
Following the sighting, a media storm descended on Presque Isle. Local police and the U.S. Air Force investigated the incident, with police finding tracks in the sand on Beach 6 that some people believed were “landing marks.”
Military personnel concluded there was nothing to the marks in the sand—nor to the report of the gorilla-like monster—but they couldn’t explain the lights.
Today, the Tom Ridge Environmental Center at Presque Isle State Park has a small exhibit devoted to the hubbub, complete with vintage-style posters about the event, made in the style of monster movies.
Project Blue Book reports
Beginning in the 1940s, the U.S. Air Force was in charge of a series of projects dedicated to investigating reports of UFOs. The first study began in 1947 and eventually became Project Blue Book, which officially started in 1952 before it was discontinued in 1969. During the 20-plus years that the Air Force investigated UFOs, it collected 12,618 reports of strange phenomena.
Following investigations, most of these sightings were chalked up to bright planets, stars, meteorites, aircraft, and other conventional explanations. However, 701 reports remained officially unexplained.
Some of Pennsylvania’s strangest sightings can be found in the files of Project Blue Book and related Air Force investigations. Indeed, hundreds of official reports concern sightings from Pennsylvania; 307 cases were documented by the UFO history project the Flying Saucer Files.
Both the Kecksburg incident and the Presque Isle UFO were investigated as part of Project Blue Book. Here are a few more standouts from the historical files, all unexplained:
- On July 23, 1952, several U.S. Air Force crews reported separate sightings in Pennsylvania—one over Pottstown and one over Altoona. In the morning over Pottstown, three F-94 jet interceptor crews said they saw a long, silver object shaped like a pear, while a smaller object orbited it. In the afternoon on the same day, two F-94 jet interceptor crews said they watched three cylindrical objects in a stack formation fly high above them for 20 minutes. Project Blue Book left both of these cases unexplained.
- In October 1958, a Stroudsburg naturalist said he saw a gray, flying object shaped like a pickle making loops in the sky. Project Blue Book classified the case as unidentified.
- In July 1966, two witnesses said they saw a 100-foot-wide object hovering 20 feet in the air over a hayfield near Lancaster County’s Kirkwood. They described it as bright red with yellow lights and covered in small windows. The witnesses watched the object for more than an hour and reported a humming noise coming from outside the object and a grinding noise coming from within. They also said their car radio picked up a lot of static when they were near the object. Project Blue Book left the case unidentified.
The Uniontown UFO—plus Bigfoot?
The year 1973 was a wild year for UFO sightings, which increased throughout the country, including in Pennsylvania. One of the strangest cases was from Fayette County’s Uniontown, where witnesses reported not just a UFO sighting, but a Bigfoot sighting too.
Late one evening, more than a dozen witnesses said they saw a large, red object descend into a field along Chestnut Ridge. Not long after, a man and two boys went to investigate, and they saw a large domed object in a pasture—but then they spotted two large and hairy humanoid creatures walking along a fence, making strange high-pitched crying noises. The man fired two shots but missed, and the object in the field disappeared before the creatures turned and walked into the woods.
Stories like these have ignited theories that cryptids like Bigfoot could be from space or other dimensions.
The Bucks County UFO wave
Over several months in 2008, there were dozens of UFO sightings reported in Bucks County, from unexplained lights over the Sesame Place amusement park to boomerang-shaped objects hovering around the nearby Oxford Valley Mall in Middletown Township. In fact, of 138 sightings reported to the Pennsylvania Mutual UFO Network that summer—an unusually high number, according to the group—77 sightings were from Bucks County or the Philadelphia area.
The UFO group sent investigators to Bucks County to look into the sightings and even decided to hold its annual convention in the county because of the uptick in reports.
A Discovery TV show, “UFOs Over Earth,” looked into the unsettling flurry of sightings in an episode called “The Bucks County Flap.”
The Westmoreland County triangles
According to researcher Stan Gordon, the year 2023 was “an unusually active year” for reports of possible paranormal activity, including detailed accounts of UFOs. Of the many reports in Pennsylvania that year, two stand out because they both involved sightings of triangular-shaped objects in Westmoreland County.
In late July, a witness just outside Mount Pleasant was putting out the trash when he saw a huge, triangle-shaped object in the sky, as he told Gordon. He said the object was maybe 300 feet wide, glowed green and orange, and was surrounded by an orange fog. The witness added that the object was humming and that it vanished and reappeared three times while he was watching it.
Then, after just a few minutes, the object shot away at high speed—and then the witness watched as three military jets appeared and raced after it.
Just a few days later, in early August, a man in Latrobe—roughly 16 miles from Mount Pleasant—reported seeing a large, dark, triangular object in the sky around 2 a.m. The object was encircled by white lights, with a larger red light in the center. He said it was moving slowly and was likely 100 to 200 feet long. The man tried to take a video with his phone, but the recording didn’t save.
