UPDATED, Nov. 9, 6:13 p.m.
Fifty years ago crowds converged on Carbondale for the chance to see an alien.
They only had to wait half a century.
The inaugural Carbondalien Festival touched down in the city’s downtown today. Hundreds of visitors from Carbondale and beyond wore lime green t-shirts and plastic alien eyes on their heads. Green triangle faces hung from earrings and peeped out from jackets.
Bigfoot was across from Carbondale City Hall. The festival embraced all things paranormal.
"It's just such a beautiful fall day. It's giving us the chance to maybe escape reality a little bit. It's like perfect timing for that,” said Nicole Curtis, who helped organize the event.
Nov. 9, 1974 started with two calls to the Carbondale Police by three teenage boys. They reported seeing a bright light whirl through the sky, hover then land in the pond of wastewater from the mining industry behind Russell Park.
In the hours and days after, thousands of people from all over the region and the country came to Carbondale, including UFO specialists, with cosmic curiosity.
A lantern used in the railroad industry was eventually pulled out of the pond and, officially, the case was closed. But the story has captivated believers and nonbelievers since.
Curtis and the Carbondalien crew plan to hold the event yearly.
"It's great to see a community come together and embrace our quirkiness," said Mayor Michelle Bannon.
She woke up early Saturday. Around 9 a.m. Bannon was having a coffee and heard a noise near the park. A UFO was on the back of a flatbed truck, reminiscent of rumors from 50 years ago. Many people swear to have seen a flatbed truck leave the scene with something large wrapped in black plastic.
Saturday it appeared to be a prop.
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Beginning on Nov. 9, 1974, Carbondale city officials and the community along with cosmic experts had a 48-hour out-of-this-world experience.
A bright light was reported to have whirled through the sky, hovered then landed in a pond of wastewater left over from the coal mines.
In the hours after, thousands of people from all over the region and the country converged behind the city’s Russell Park to get a glimpse of the object that might have came from the heavens.
Some, at the time, feared it might be an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO). Others celebrated a visit from an alien race.
The incident began at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 9. It ended the following Monday with mixed feelings when a railroad lantern was pulled out of the water.
It captivates the community to this day. And 50 years later, a crowd will converge once again on Carbondale to mark the significant celestial event in the Pioneer City’s 173-year history.
"What a fun thing to celebrate and especially in today’s day and age, when, like, everything seems so serious," said Nicole Curtis, a Carbondale native helping to organize the Carbondalien Festival. "It's just a really nice way for us to kind of escape into this world of storytelling and believing something that is kind of bigger than us. I think that that's really special, and how special for us that it, that it happened here.”
Festivities start downtown at 11 a.m. There will be a vendor marketplace, music in the park and guest speakers from the paranormal world at the Hotel Anthracite on Main Street.
The Russell Park Experience begins at noon. The Lackawanna Historical Society worked with a local playwright to devise the experience.
"They're doing this immersive theatrical presentation where it'll be people that buy tickets will be treated like they're the press. So they get a press pass, and they'll be here, like trying to get the scoop from different people that would have experienced it that day," she said.
Curtis said they’ll get to make their own assumption about what happened half a century ago.
Because 50 years later questions still remain.
Could a 6-volt battery-powered lantern illuminate a pond for nine hours? Was it actually a meteorite or a Russian satellite?
"I think this was part of an organized cover-up on the part of the police, probably following a directive from an FBI office or a government office somewhere, saying 'don't mess with the evidence. We want to see what it is. So we need a diversionary object,'” said Dr. S. Robert Powell, president of the Carbondale Historical Society.
And what exactly was on that flatbed truck that so many people sworn to have witnessed leave the scene?
"Twenty people whose credibility ... you can go to the bank on have said to me ‘Robert, I saw when the flatbed truck arrived and the backhoe went into the pond. They got a large object, they got it out of the pond, they wrapped it in black plastic, and they put it on the flatbed trailer. And the flatbed trailer drove out of the Russell Park area,'” he said.
Mayor Michelle Bannon has an idea what happened that day. She was just 5 years old and lived in the neighborhood around Russell Park.
“I know that there was something that came from outer space. So I tend to be one of the quirky ones. I tend to believe there was something peculiar there, just because it would explain a lot," she said.
Cosmic curiosity
An era-defining fascination with space sparked a controlled chaos in Carbondale that weekend half a century ago.
Powell said in 1974 there was a lot of “stuff going on in outer space."
“A lot of Soviet satellites were going up, weather satellites, everything … there was a lot of space exploration going on, and that it was a very big thing in the general population," he said.
The late Robert Gillette was 15 at the time. Alongside brothers, Bill Lloyd, 15, and John Lloyd, 13, the boys called Carbondale police to report a glowing light pulsating in the pond behind Russell Park.
“Well we seen a big bright light,” Gillette told WVIA reporters at the scene 50 years ago. “It looked like a star, that’s what we thought it was at first, a fallen star. We seen it coming down at an arch.”
The teenagers told officials they were smoking cigarettes near the wastewater when they saw something zoom over Salem Mountain. The object hissed when it hit the water, like putting a cigarette out in liquid, they said near the commotion of the operation.
The boys had to call the cops twice.
“They didn’t come up, they thought we were on dope or something, they didn’t believe us,” Gillette told WVIA back then.
According to Powell, It wasn’t just the boys who saw the light.
“I was told by people over the years, from Waymart, from down the line, from Mayfield, from Jermyn, from everywhere in the area, people saw this enormously bright thing in the sky land in the Russell Park area," he said. “So the fact that this is not an invented phenomenon, by a bunch of kids … they saw it, and a lot of other people saw it.”
Jerome Gillott was in his 20s at the time. He photographed the scene for the Carbondale Police on his 35 millimeter camera. The pictures are dark but you can see an orb of light in the middle of the photos.
“It wasn't pulsing or hissing or anything … it was … glowing in there,” he said.
He still has the camera today and the photos, which to honor the 50th anniversary, will be placed in a glass case by the historical society.
A folktale begins
Powell said some estimates put the crowd who came to town to experience a possible UFO landing in Carbondale at 10,000 people. He was out of town, working in New York.
The Civil Air Patrol (CAP) was called in.
“We’re outnumbered about 20 to 1 here,” a CAP member told WVIA.
The then-mayor Dr. A.J. Kaufman received phone calls from residents asking if they should flee their homes, according to newspaper reports. He told them no.
At least three UFO specialists showed up on scene.
Matthew J. Graeber, the then-executive director of the UFO report and information center in Philadelphia, heard about the incident around 2 a.m. on WCAU radio during a show called “Psychic World.”
By 6 a.m. he was in Carbondale, he told WVIA at the time.
In Graeber’s documents obtained from the Center for UFO Studies, he said the water that weekend was 44 degrees. The air outside was 28 degrees.
The Carbondale Fire Department brought a boat and a net to the 4-acre pond, according to newspaper reports. The net hooked an object around 2:45 a.m., but then it plunged back into the pond. Gillott remembers the light going out.
By Monday, a trench was dug — which could explain the backhoe on the flatbed trailer. Officials spent two hours pumping water out of the pond. Radiation readings were taken — there was a bit of an elevation but nothing life threatening — then two police officers, Gillott and Mark Stamey, a scuba diver from Auburn, New York, went out on the boat.
Stamey dove into the water.
Gillott said he remembers he was down there for about 10 to 15 minutes.
Stamey came back up holding a railroad lantern. Gillott had just taken a radiation training course, and tested the lantern. It wasn’t “hot,” he said, so they came back to shore.
“A lull came over the crowd when Stamey (the diver) went under the surface and it seemed as if the earth stood still until he appeared again. I think the possibility that it might have been a true incident meant more to the people than the possibility of it being an object from space,” Graeber, the UFO specialist, wrote in his report.
After the lantern was pulled out of the pond, the teenagers are heard on tape insisting that it couldn’t have been the object. They told WVIA that the cops shot at it five times. Right after the object landed, they ran around 200 yards and saw ripples on the water. The light moved.
Mayor Dr. A.J. Kaufman held a press conference at the scene.
“I've gathered by now that we found nothing to substantiate the alleged UFO sighting is anything other than what appears to be a hoax,” he said to reporters. “I know that there's been some trying moments in the past few days, and I'm aware that there are many questions … What we ask you is to understand our position. We were faced with an unknown quantity. We recognized in the beginning that it could have been a hoax, but it was our responsibility to take into consideration other responses, other possibilities.”
The police eventually closed the case, saying that it was a hoax perpetrated by teenagers. It would cost the city almost $1,000 — about $6,400 in today’s money.
The crowd went home and Carbondale’s moment of international fame faded like the light in the pond.
“If it is a hoax, it’s a cruel thing. And a good many people were taken in by it and there’s certainly no reason to feel embarrassed by it because it was one of the better hoaxes,” Graeber told WVIA at the time.
But the truth of what happened is still about as murky as the polluted water.
Revisiting the encounter
In recent years, Powell was contacted by someone who claimed to be a police officer at the time of the incident. The man asked to stay anonymous.
"I got an email who said ‘Robert, I was there. I handed this lantern. The police chief handed me this lantern, and I threw it into the pond,'" he said.
The case continues to be explored by locals, UFO specialists and amateur historians.
On the incident’s 25th anniversary, Gillette told The Scranton Times newspaper that he “tossed the flashlight into the water that day in an effort to frighten his sister, Maria, and her friends.”
Bannon disputes that and says he admitted that he made up the lantern story. Graeber, in his report, believed the boys saw a bolide — a large, bright meteor that exploded in the atmosphere — fall over Salem Mountain.
Powell has given many lectures on the subject over the years. Does he believe it was a UFO piloted by martians? No.
"I personally think ... it was space, space garbage, in effect, a satellite falling apart. What could have been a dysfunctional weather satellite. It could have been a failed Soviet exploration vehicle of some kind. Who knows what it was," he said.
What he does know is that Carbondale officials at the time were hoping for something special, including Acting Police Chief Francis Dottle.
"I think he saw this as being a wonderful moment ... for the elevation of the Carbondale police involved with this major event in America," he said.
The police were in contact with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
Officials today know that the incident, UFO or not, is something special, something to be celebrated.
Gillott thinks about the incident every Nov. 9.
“It's been just a memorable thing. It's been a milestone in my life," he said.
Powell said it's taken on an amazing importance in local history.
“It raises people's consciousness, and from many people's point of view … Carbondale is not just a sleepy little coal town. Carbondale is where big things happen,” he said.
Curtis and Bannon agree: Why not lean into the quirkiness, the wonder of it all and bring people into the town they love and are working to revitalize?
"My hope for the festival is that, first of all, people get immersed in the in the funness of it ... and just bring people to Carbondale," said Bannon. "That's my goal all the time, is that people see what a gem we are. I've often said that we're the piece of coal that's been squeezed so long that we're turning into a diamond."
The scene today
Bannon and Curtis are standing near the silt pond. The mayor calls it the “green lagoon.” The water is still, it’s unusually warm for October and the sun is warm.
The area, now labeled Abandoned Mine Land, is owned by the city with plans for a recreational area in the future.
Curtis agrees that a really amazing, special thing happened in Carbondale.
"I think that's kind of the fun of it is, we're not sure. We didn't see. People weren't here with their cell phones taking videos and selfies with the UFO and the pond. So we don't know, and but my hope is that it was a UFO, that some alien race was like 'Hey, let's check out Carbondale. We're gonna land in this pond and see what happens,'” she said.
Ultimately, Powell says, it gave the people of then and the people of today a broader view of their world, a new way to look at their everyday lives.
“How did those 10,000 people learn about that UFO overnight? They were there and they spent the whole day there wanting to know more about it. So, in a way, the UFO festival is doing the same thing again."
For more details and a schedule of events for the upcoming festivities, visit Carbondalien Festival on Facebook or carbondalienfestival.com.
