I suspect Keksburg was one of these Soviet Reactors which was already mentioned as a satallite falling to earth on that same night. Hope this added info helps.

        TXMarko said:

3. Your assessment as “idiotic” that “they would put a secret spy thing on a balloon” is laughable. This is how things were done back then, especially for high-altitude nuclear sampling.

Actually it’s not even just back then. Few realize that ballooning is still a serious are of scientific research. A balloon can lift instruments up to over 100 thousand feet and it can do so relatively cheaply and for an extended period of time. I don’t know if it is used for anything covert or for any military intelligence (well, of course I wouldn’t know), however cosmic ray observatories, upper atmospheric research, ionospheric study and so on is routinely done with balloons. The only other platforms that can get that kind of thing done are satellites and high altitude aircraft like the U2 – both are many times more costly and take longer to deploy.

It’s not as antiquated a technology as you might think.

        UFO Geek said:

I noticed you didn’t even consider the possibility that it was a real ufo and left out all the accounts that said the writing on it was not Russian and it did not look like a satellite. It also was bigger than the Russian probe and there is plenty of other evidence that it flew around in ways a satellite never could.

The evidence speaks loud and clear that there’s more to this than just a satellite, and by the way “Engineering Edgar,” whoever you are, the idea that they would put a secret spy thing on a balloon is idiotic as the idea that it was a weather balloon. Wake up, there’s stuff going on you just can’t explain.

UFO Geek, just how young are you? My guess is that you were not even a twinkle in your Daddy’s eye in 1965, much less a walking, thinking human. As someone who was around way back then, I ask you the following:
1. What accounts said the writing wasn’t Russian? How the hell would they know? Back then most people in the US lived their entire lives without seeing any language except English, unless they were specifically studying a foreign language, or had literature in their native tongue.
2. What does a satellite “look like”? Back in 1965 the only depiction of a satellite most anyone had ever seen looked like Sputnik: Round with small straight antennas.
3. Your assessment as “idiotic” that “they would put a secret spy thing on a balloon” is laughable. This is how things were done back then, especially for high-altitude nuclear sampling.

Sure, it could have been a UFO… but Occam’s Razor disagrees with your belief.

        eon said:

As to why the U.S. would “hush up” such a recovery, I concur with the Doctor. Except that if they wouldn’t want the Soviet space agency to know that U.S. forces had recovered “just” a failed space probe, the U.S. intelligence community certainly wouldn’t want their opposite numbers in KGB and GRU to find out that NSA, etc., had an example of the USSR’s most cutting-edge “spy satellite” technology to take apart and evaluate. Trust me- a coup like that would make somebody’s career all by itself.

Well, the United States went to extraordinary lengths to recover examples of Soviet military technology for analysis and evaluation. There’s no doubt about that. Witness the extreme lengths that the US went to with the super-secret Project Jennifer/Azorian – now that was a real example of a super-project worthy of a James Bond Movie.

As to why the U.S. would “hush up” such a recovery, I concur with the Doctor. Except that if they wouldn’t want the Soviet space agency to know that U.S. forces had recovered “just” a failed space probe, the U.S. intelligence community certainly wouldn’t want their opposite numbers in KGB and GRU to find out that NSA, etc., had an example of the USSR’s most cutting-edge “spy satellite” technology to take apart and evaluate. Trust me- a coup like that would make somebody’s career all by itself.

cheers

eon

        Calli Arcale said:

It becomes a search for a needle in a haystack, and if it’s a natural object, it may just look like an interesting rock.

I think that depends largely on where it lands. Much of the earth is ocean, and if it lands in the ocean, it’s going to be next to impossible to find, even if it floats for a while. On the other hand, if it were to land somewhere like Western Europe or the continental United States, it’s highly likely it would be found by someone and probably reported to authorities or the media.

Even if it’s a sparsely populated area, like Kansas or Arizona, if it makes a loud enough sound or lights up as it comes down, someone’s likely to look for it and quite possibly find it – if not right away, then eventually. If it hits the ground hard enough to dig a trench and break trees, someone will likely notice.

Take, for example, the Northeastern US. There are only a few areas where there’s contiguous uninhabited land for more than a couple miles in any direction. The same for much of Europe and almost all of Japan.

Of course, it could still end up not being found if it landed in Northern Canada or Siberia or central Africa or even central Australia. In that case, it would be something of the luck of the draw. Even so, there have been some incidents of large chunks of debris landing in relatively uninhabited areas and being found. A burned out upper stage was found after landing in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert and a piece of a strut the Apollo-10 lunar module was found by a farmer in New Zealand.

Of course, one thing worth mentioning with respect to similar stories elsewhere is that it’s not unheard of for objects (natural and otherwise) to enter the atmosphere in a dramatic fashion but never be recovered. Just look at the STS-107 recovery effort: they found about 40% of the vehicle and its contents (by mass). And that was a huge effort with thousands of people (government employees at all levels, private contractors, and lots and lots of volunteers) and a very good idea of where the stuff actually came down. Most of the time (there are exceptions, and reentry capsules would likely be exceptions as they are designed not to break up in the atmosphere) these things aren’t really going all that fast when they hit, so there’s usually not a lot of devastation to point you in the right direction. It becomes a search for a needle in a haystack, and if it’s a natural object, it may just look like an interesting rock.

A capsule like the Soviet one would likely have a beacon to aid in the recovery. The drawback to a beacon is that if it lands on enemy territory, it will advertise its presence, but this may not be avoidable if you want to be able to recover it under nominal conditions (i.e. it lands on your own territory).

        UFO Geek said:

… and by the way “Engineering Edgar,” whoever you are …

That’s just too funny. As if everyone knows who “UFO Geek” is.

anonymously yours,
gman

I worked west and a bit north of the crash site near the town of New Stanton. Funny thing that struck me as odd was during my morning runs near my work site. There were a few sections of woods that were restricted U.S. military. They weren’t fenced off or anything, but just a little sign saying no trespassing keep off etc. I had always correlated it with the fact that I work at a nuclear power related site and 40 years ago this particular site had much stronger relations with the govt. In fact, it was where a lot of the early liquid sodium breeder design was done. But now I’m wondering if it had anything to do with this incident since it was near the trajectory path and maybe could have had some debris. Probably unlikely, but fun to think about.

All in all, fantastic post and I was thrilled that you had a realistic hypothesis an information to back it up. I find anything and everything interesting about the soviet space program.