On November 9, 1974, three teenage boys in the small town of Carbondale, Pennsylvania, reported witnessing a “red buzzing ball” descending from the sky and crashing into a sludge pond near Russell Park.
According to reports at the time, the evening was unremarkable until the boys were sighted. The object, variously described as glowing orange or red, was seen crossing Salem Mountain before crashing into the pond, reportedly causing it to hiss, as if on fire.
The police were called and what followed was a spectacle involving local law enforcement officers, military personnel and a crowd of curious onlookers. The pond began to radiate a strange glow, durable for almost nine hours.
“The boys didn’t know what to make of this, they said it hissed when it hit the water, it was a glowing orange kind of fireball,” said Mary Ann Savakinus, the director of the Lackawanna Historial Society.
Hundreds of people gathered at the pond, waiting to see what the glowing object was.
“This goes on for several days as this story unfolds, and then a diver is called to go in and get whatever is there. They are in a rowboat and they call on some other Carbondale people to come in and help with them,” Savakinus explained.
The search for the mysterious object ended with the retrieval of an old railway lantern from the depths of the pond. Authorities quickly labeled the event a hoax, attributing the glow to the lantern’s battery and the excitement to youthful mischief.
One of the boys later admitted that he threw the lantern into the pond as a prank to scare his sister, apparently closing the suitcase. However, the recovery of the lantern did little to quell speculation; the story had taken root.
Documents released by the US Air Force under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) do not indicate any official interest in the Carbondale incident as a genuine UFO sighting.
In a 1975 statement, the Air Force indicated that the event did not warrant further investigation because there was evidence that no foreign object of interest had been found. This assessment is consistent with the historical precedent of UFO investigations in the 1970s, in which the Air Force typically refrained from investigating incidents without physical evidence.
Despite the police report and scientific skepticism, part of the UFO research community continues to maintain that the Carbondale incident was indeed an extraterrestrial event.
Further support for this theory comes from testimony from those present at the site. Over the past twenty years, witnesses have come forward and said what they saw was a UFO.
“Others who said yes saw something glowing in the sky that night, people who lived in Waymart, people who lived in the Midvalley came out of restaurants that day, they saw something,” Savakinus said.
Others have said that during the chaos, a flatbed truck came to the site and drove off with something covered in a tarp.
Gillette, now 64, hung out at the hotel on Saturday during the “anniversary and celebration of the alien landing” and now claims that what he told the newspaper years ago was not true.
“My girlfriend broke up with me, so I was in a bad mood,” he says said. “I just told them what they wanted to hear: that it was a lantern. It wasn’t a lantern. Something has been pulled out of the pond.”
Kay Pope, who was 15 at the time and is now 66, remembers riding her bicycle to the Russell Park area and seeing it cordoned off by the military. She also saw something large being removed from the area.
“We used to ride our bikes there all the time,” said Pope, who now lives in Blakely. “(I saw) a big flatbed truck on the road with something big on it that was covered, and there were a lot of people in (military) uniforms.”
David Morris was one of dozens of people who took a trolley from the Carbondale Grand Hotel to the old mining pond on Saturday to satisfy their curiosity – part of an event organized by the hotel to commemorate an incident that became international news at the time.
After seeing the pond and talking to locals who were there at the time, Morris didn’t believe the story that there was a lantern behind it. He was disappointed that Gillette did not speak at the event because he wanted to clarify some details.
“Why would you employ the conscripted people and heavy machinery to retrieve a lantern from a pond?” he wondered. “It just doesn’t make any sense. I think something definitely happened there.”
Although local authorities concluded that the incident was a teenage prank involving a lantern, witness testimony and enduring local lore suggest that elements of the story may remain unexplained, even though the official story points to an innocuous explanation.
