The Kecksburg UFO event is one of those that probably nobody would have ever heard of,

until it became the unlikely darling of TV documentaries presenting it as fact.

The television producers do a solid job of making it appear to be a case of actual alien

visitation, but when we peel back the fiction, we find an all-too-familiar story, one

lone imaginative person who somehow manages to persuade the right people that his belief

is real.

The Kecksburg UFO is coming up next on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid.

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

Alien visitation and the Kecksburg UFO.

More than a third of Americans believe that Earth is actively being visited by aliens,

so it's no surprise that any given UFO report will find a base of believers who honestly

and seriously interpret it as another case of alien visitation.

It's no secret that this is both completely unevidence and physically implausible, so

the majority of us are often amazed that so many people could cling so dearly to such

an untenable belief.

Today, we're going to look at one example of such a claim, the famous Kecksburg UFO of

1965, aggressively promoted for the past two decades by television science channels as

a case of alien visitation.

We'll look at the reports, then devise a methodology that even the true believers can

use to see whether alien visitation is indeed the required conclusion.

Just the basic fact of the legend as it's popularly reported, which almost by definition

...