Coalition for Freedom of Information Seeks NASA Records of Mysterious 1965 Pennsylvania UFO Incident

On the eve of President Bush's expected announcement about a new initiative with NASA, the Coalition for Freedom of Information (CFi) with support from SCI FI Channel, has announced the filing of a lawsuit against the space agency in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The filing comes as a result of the government agency's refusal to release its records concerning the 1965 UFO incident near Kecksburg, PA. Today is the 38th anniversary of the incident.

"Our lawsuit is aimed at getting NASA to tell the public what it knew and when it knew it," said Ed Rothschild, Executive Director of CFi.

The lawsuit against NASA is the first of several against government agencies, including the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and the Department of Defense, which have been stonewalling efforts to obtain records on the Kecksburg incident under the Freedom of Information Act. John Podesta, former Chief of Staff for President Clinton and member of the 1997 Moynihan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, supports the effort stating that the public has a right to know and that the government should disclose what happened in Kecksburg.

"Although NASA has released 36 pages of documents, none of those documents pertain to any investigation of the incident by NASA or to related projects within the agency that could shed light on the Kecksburg incident," said Lee Helfrich of Lobel, Novins and Lamont, the Washington attorney filing the suit.

"Furthermore," said Helfrich, "Leslie Kean, Director of Investigations for CFi, clearly demonstrated that NASA has documents responsive to the specific requests she made in CFi's Freedom of Information Act request, but NASA has failed for nearly a year to produce any relevant documents."

On December 9, 1965, witnesses in and near Kecksburg described seeing a fireball in the evening sky, a controlled landing and the systematic military recovery of an object. As reported by local radio and newspapers, U.S. military personnel cordoned off the area, investigated the site, and left without ever providing a full report of the incident other than to dismiss it as a meteor.

A year ago, SCI FI Channel and the CFi initiated an effort to obtain classified and other government documents on the Kecksburg crash.

"Since last year, we have supported archivists, researchers and scientists, as well as partnered with investigative reporter Leslie Kean and attorney Lee Helfrich in order to obtain NASA's records in this nearly 40-year old case," said Bonnie Hammer, SCI FI Channel President.

"Now, one year later, despite our serious effort to uncover the facts, NASA still refuses to provide the public with any information," said Hammer. "That is why, today, we are supporting CFi's lawsuit. We are hopeful that our legal system will help us find out what really happened in the woods outside Kecksburg."

As Podesta stated in SCI FI Channel's Kecksburg documentary, "Certainly having the military descend on a United States town, holding people at gunpoint, is not the ordinary way we do business in this country. People should have an explanation about what triggered that sort of military response ... so that people can judge for themselves whether it was appropriate."

"The public has a right to know what happened in Kecksburg," concluded Kean. "Government agencies have an obligation to make public what they know. Instead of a willingness to open up files that rightfully belong to the American people, government bureaucrats are making it as difficult and time-consuming as they can to uncover the facts. We will persevere until we get answers."

In addition to broadcasting landmark documentary programming, the SCI FI Channel is currently lobbying Congress to gain support for more scientific inquiry into these issues. It will premiere UFO INVASION AT RENDLESHAM, hosted by Bryant Gumbel, on December 12, a new two-hour special that exposes one of the most notorious UFO incidents of the 20th century.

FMI: www.freedomofinfo.org, www.nasa.gov