(The Guardian/China Daily)
Updated: 2007-11-12 09:14

Pennsylvania - For four decades, residents in this tiny town of Kecksburg have told their story - of strange blue lights in the sky one winter's evening and a fireball hurling into the woods.

On December 9, 1965, they say, armed soldiers scrambled to cordon off the area, where a large metallic, acorn-shaped object bearing strange hieroglyphics was driven off at top speed on the back of a lorry.

They talk of menacing plain-clothes officials visiting homes and warning locals not to tell anyone of what they saw.

Until now, the United States government has denied that anything sinister took place.

It has maintained that a thorough search of the woods by the air force, the only federal agency to have acknowledged it was there, found nothing.

But now, US space agency NASA has been ordered to examine its "X-Files" to solve the mystery.

NASA public liaison officer Steve McConnell has admitted two boxes of papers from the time of the Kecksburg incident are missing. The episode has parallels to the 1947 Roswell incident, when a UFO was said to have landed in New Mexico.

"For so many years, a lot of good people in Pennsylvania were told by their government that what they had to say was a lie or that they were hallucinating," said Leslie Kean, a journalist who launched a lawsuit four years ago to force NASA to open its archives.

Washington judge Emmett Sullivan refused to accept NASA's claim the papers had been lost. He gave it until the end of the year to examine its records.

"Something came down that night," Kean said. "NASA has been stonewalling."

Stan Gordon, a UFO investigator living close to the site, interviewed several witnesses. He said: "It's interesting that (witnesses say) it was made of one solid piece of metal with no panels or rivets, and that it was moving relatively slowly and made almost a controlled landing.

"I have no doubt the government knows a lot more about this than it has revealed to the public."

The Guardian