TO LEARN MORE
● Details about the Carbondale Festival can be found on Facebook or carbondalienfestival.com.
● For a comprehensive list of events and attractions throughout Northeast Pennsylvania, visit DiscoverNEPA.
Thousands will invade Carbondale this weekend to be a part of the city’s cosmic history, just like 51 years ago.
“Our goal is to kind of keep that feeling of wonder and excitement year round,” Nicole Curtis said. She is the co-chair of the Carbondalien Festival.
Last year, the inaugural Carbondalien Festival celebrated 50 years since 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.
The event on Nov. 9, 1974, behind Russell Park began a supernatural investigation that lasted two days and brought 10,000 people and paranormal investigators to Carbondale.
Curtis said last year’s festival and anniversary celebration was a wonderful blur.
"As we're sitting here planning for this year's, trying to remember details and specific things. It was for us, it was just a blur of a lot of amazing moments,” she said at Elements Cafe surrounded by supernatural motifs.
Curtis and her husband, Jack Curtis, opened the cafe a month ago in Carbondale.
New this year
Just like the original event, the second annual Carbondalien Festival is now more than 48 hours, Friday, Nov. 7, and Saturday, Nov. 8.
Stefanie Colarusso is co-chair of the family-friendly festival. She said most vendors are coming back and businesses that did not participate last year are now on board.
On Friday, a light parade kicks off at 6 p.m. down Main Street. Local businesses are decorating floats, and community organizations will march alongside a band in the parade. One of the supernatural speakers, Eric Mintel, will play extraterrestrial jazz from the back of a flatbed truck.
There will also be a costume contest for people and pets.
The Supernova concert begins at 8 p.m. and features Tom May from The Menzingers and other acts in Gravity Hall at the Anthracite Hotel.
"We thought it'd be a good kick-off too to have this great way for the community to come together downtown," Colarusso said.
On Saturday, the Landing Pad Marketplace will be larger than last year.
Streets in the city’s downtown will also be closed.
More times were added on Saturday for one of last year’s most popular features — the Russell Park Experience. The immersive theatrical presentation was created by playwright Brenda Fager.
"She actually went back and rewrote some more characters in. She's done more interviews over the year," Colarusso said. "She's looking for more information and research to continually add."
The experience takes place around the silt pond where the UFO was said to have landed.
"That's the really unique thing about our festival is that we have this immersive production at the site of the crash where people feel like they're actually experiencing the day of you know, 1974,” Curtis said.
WVIA's Alexander Monelli and Kat Bolus created a VIA Short Take about the event. Bolus will do a Q&A about the film on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Greater Carbondale Chamber of Commerce.
The day Carbondale stood still
There’s no short answer and tons of theories about what happened in 1974.
Dr. S. Robert Powell, president of the Carbondale Historical Society, thinks it was "space garbage."
Other believe it was a Russian satellite, or an actual UFO or just teenagers playing a prank.
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 51 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 the object hissed when it hit the water, like putting a cigarette out in liquid, they said, near the commotion of the operation.
Carbondale police shot into the pond. UFO specialists from all over the country descended on the town as police officers struggled to control the growing crowd.
Eventually, a diver, Mark Stamey, pulled an old railroad lantern out of the pond, and the case was considered closed. But people have not stopped speculating over the last five decades about what really landed in Carbondale. And what left the scene on the back of a flatbed truck.
A close encounter
Curtis was contacted by Stamey this year.
In 1974, he was living in Skaneateles, New York, one of the Finger Lakes. His friend had a diving company.
"They were like ‘hey, let's get in the van and drive to Carbondale, and maybe they'll let us dive in the water and pull something out, and we'll be famous, ’” Curtis said.
Stamey told Curtis that he believes the lantern was planted.
"And they used him kind of as a ploy to just distract people and get people to leave Carbondale,” she said.
Take me to Carbondale
All those years later, the festival is bringing people back.
Curtis has lived in Carbondale her entire life. She’s felt a shift in the way people perceive Pioneer City’s cosmic history.
"When I was younger, people were kind of ashamed of it and felt embarrassed by it, and now people really feel this sense of just pride and excitement about talking about it and sharing our story," she said, "and also that, you know, they get to be a part of it just by living here.”
Visit, Carbondalien Festival on Facebook or carbondalienfestival.com for a full line up of events.
