There are places in the world where the
boundary between the known and unknown is very thin.
Places whose natural and wild beauty hide secrets
too incredible to be believed,
until those secrets begin to reveal themselves.
When that happens, people react in wonder, curiosity,
and sometimes in horror.
Humanity often commemorates these places
by creating monuments such as Stonehenge.
Scholars suggest that it was a place from which
to observe the heavens, a place of burial,
a place of either human sacrifice or healing.
The Nazca Lines, etched into the earth of Southern Peru
carry the qualities of sacred symbolism.
The dessert southwest has kept its own disturbing secrets
from the alleged crashes of craft from other worlds,
to the all-too-real testing of atomic weaponry.
Then there's the Bermuda Triangle,
a region of the Atlantic Ocean in which hundreds of ships
and approximately 75 planes have simply gone missing,
along with passengers and crew.
Both scientific and supernatural causes have been proposed
for these catastrophes, but theories do little to ease
the pain of those who lost loved ones in the Triangle.
There are places in the world whose mysteries call us
to come and see for ourselves,
whatever the human toll might be.
Places like the Chestnut Ridge.
The Chestnut Ridge, located in Southwestern Pennsylvania,
lies on the western edge of the Appalachian Mountain range.
The Ridge rises in Southern Indiana County,
and rolls to the southwest by way of towns like Blairsville,
Derry, Latrobe, Connellsville, Mount Pleasant and Uniontown,
all the way into West Virginia where it gradually
comes to rest near Morgantown.
Villages along the Ridge were founded as far back as 1770.
The rich limestone clay soil rewarded the efforts
of early farmers and soon the communities could support
iron furnaces, whisky distilleries and general stores.
One family, by the last name of Keck, settled in the area
to bottle and sell spring water and soft drinks.
They had no way of knowing that their town, Kecksburg,
would one day become world-famous, but not for ginger ale.
Then I was 16-years-old when the incident happened
near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.
Then I got involved with that,
that evening as it's breaking on the news,
and I've been out in the field ever since that time
investigating UFOs and cryptids and other phenomena
hear in Pennsylvania.
Kecksburg, Pennsylvania's a small rural community in Mount
Pleasant township in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania,
approximately 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
Like many of the small towns
in Westmoreland County,
Keckburg sits within the shadow of the Chestnut Ridge.
The Ridge is dotted end to end with these tiny villages,
many of them founded well over a century ago.
Each of them bears their own strange history of sightings
and encounters with things not of this world.
Many wonder what it is about this particular stretch of land
that beckons such mysteries.
For decades, researchers of the strange and unknown have
journeyed back to the Chestnut Ridge in search of answers.
Their quest isn't solely confined to present day.
For over a century, mysterious circumstances have shrouded
the Ridge in a fog of unease.
I've been involved in the paranormal since I've been about
10-years-old and then I got into the field in 1997
investigating cases.
My main base of operation in Pennsylvania is the
southwestern part of the state, namely this particular area
where we're at here, Westmoreland, Fayette County,
Armstrong, Indiana, Washington.
Probably about 80% of my investigations and cases that
I've worked on have been here in the Chestnut Ridge area.
There's been a long history of various phenomena
along the Chestnut Ridge, especially along
the Westmoreland County side and Derry township.
We have many reports from those small communities such as
Derry and New Derry and Hillside and Superior and Brenizer,
and all throughout that area and many sightings from around
the Keystone State Park.
Without a doubt, there's an atmosphere to this area.
You can drive these back roads,
and you just get a weird feeling.
Some of these places you go into, some are very dark
and secluded, they just give off a really ominous vibe.
Something very strange has been going along
the Chestnut Ridge for many many years and in fact,
the earliest firsthand account I have of a Bigfoot encounter
where I actually interviewed the witness,
goes back to 1931 near Indian Head in Fayette County.
And of course, Fayette County is one of those areas that has
year after year phenomena being reported.
There are newspaper articles I've found that date back to
the late 1800s that talked about people experiencing wild
men of the forest or even gorillas or monkeys in this area.
It's not just Bigfoot related, there's all kinds of weird
phenomena from UFOs, strange lights in the sky,
cryptid creatures, haunted locations.
There's just a really concentrated area right here.
There's a lot of weird activity that goes on.
So there's been a lot of history of all kinds of strange
phenomena that's happened all around this area,
through Mount Pleasant township,
and throughout the community around here.
UFO sightings in this area have been rampant.
As I said earlier, it's a very high volume of reports.
Even all the way up to Kecksburg in the 1960s.
There probably was a time when the residents of
Kecksburg felt far removed from the tension of the Cold War
and obsession over UFOs.
While the televisions, movie theaters and drive-ins were
full of nuclear wars or countered by fantastical aliens
and flying saucers, this tiny burg remained blissfully
detached from the near hysteria that was gripping
other areas of the country.
In late 1965, that sense of security would be shattered.
I'll remember it all my life.
It's something I'll never forget.
That night, we was actually out playing football,
and we didn't actually know about it until we walked back
in the house and Mom and Dad said that there was a thing on
the radio that something crashed in Acme.
My mom looked out the window and she seen all the vehicles
and stuff on the road, she says, well,
this is right behind the house, that ain't in Acme.
I remember that evening just like it was yesterday.
It was a Thursday evening, December 9th, 1965.
I was listening to a radio station in Pittsburgh.
There was a breaking news story coming on the radio
about this brilliant fireball, this fire object was seen
from the tip on Ontario, Canada over Michigan, Ohio
and Pennsylvania.
That night, a radiant fireball was seen
streaking through the skies over Detroit
and Windsor, Ontario, moving in a southeasterly direction,
allegedly dropping hot metal debris over Michigan
and Northern Ohio before hitting the ground near Kecksburg.
All sorts of explanations were proposed.
Some thought they were witnessing an airplane accident.
Others thought a missile test had gone awry
or that a satellite was re-entering the atmosphere.
The most common assumption was that a meteor was
the brilliant light in question.
None of those, however, seemed to square
with what was happening near the Chestnut Ridge.
Local witnesses reported feeling the impact
of the object's crash landing,
seeing a wisp of blue smoke rising from the woods,
and some even claimed to discover what it was
that had fallen to Earth.
An object shaped like an acorn,
approximately the size of a small car,
with hieroglyphic-like writing around its base.
The ravine in which it fell quickly became the center
of curiosity and controversy.
And it got more exciting during the evening as reports
were coming in that the military was now arriving in the
Kecksburg area to search for an unidentified flying object.
We started watching out the windows and stuff
and I seen people coming in and out and going down into the
field down to where it was at.
And then we started seeing people come in.
We seen cars lying in our driveway.
People going up and down through the fields,
and then people coming to the house.
They used our house as a command post.
People actually believe that they saw a small military
presence within maybe the first hour after the object fell.
But it was during the next few hours during the evening
that most of the military begin to arrive on the scene.
And many people throughout this area reported seeing
what looked like a military convoy, military trucks
coming in from different roads into the Kecksburg area.
So what we learned was the fact that,
as reports of this object coming down in the Kecksburg area
began to circulate on Pittsburgh area radio and TV,
hundreds of people descended on the small rural community
to try to get a look at the object down in the woods.
An alarming scene was beginning to unfold
around the crash site, residents of Kecksburg claimed that
armed soldiers were present and were preventing people
from approaching the wooded ravine.
In one instance, a witness reported that a member
of the military instructed two neighborhood boys
to deliberately misinform curiosity seekers.
And the youngsters gladly complied by giving people
false directions to the impact site.
Things took a decidedly more serious turn, though,
the closer one came to the downed object.
A well-known jazz musician from the Pittsburgh area
claimed that US soldiers aimed their rifles at him
and his friends, ordering them off a country lane,
as an army flatbed truck hauling a tarp-covered,
acorn-shaped object made its way out of a field.
Others, who were teenagers at the time,
reported that the military response
left them fearing for their lives.
Some of the local residents who saw this object come down
that afternoon, they went down into the wooded ravine
to see what had fallen from the sky and they came across
this large metallic acorn-shaped object
semi-buried in the ground.
There was actually two important locations, there was one,
it was on top of the hill, what is now called Meteor Road,
which is where hundreds of people were jamming the road
that night, that's where most reporters were,
that's where some military, other authorities were.
Far on the opposite side of the woods was an old dirt road,
a farm lane which a number of people found themselves on,
that was closer to the crash site, the impact site,
and that's where a lot of the military presence
and other authorities were on that lane over there.
There was people in black suits came in,
and those people, they was actually
seemed like they was in charge of everybody.
We see some people coming down in a white suit
carrying a big box.
One had a NASA patch on his arm and they took this box
down into where that was at.
I seen him go down in with the box.
Never seen it come back out, but I seen the truck go down in
and I seen it come back out with something on it.
There was a lot of talk around this community
that people had seen a large military flatbed trailer truck
carrying a large tarped object out of the area
late that night, but that was in the news.
The next day, me and my brother went down in the woods.
We seen where they had covered up a hole.
It was a different kind of dirt,
and seeing all the trees broke off and walked there
over to the other side of the hill and it was all burnt off.
There was some guy over there with a Geiger counter.
At the time we thought it was a treasure-finder.
We was kids, we didn't know any better.
He asked us what we was doing down there,
told him, "oh, we live here, we're down here all the time."
He says, "well, you know there's a chance of radiation
"being down here."
"What the heck is radiation?"
You know, we didn't know.
So, we sort of ignored him and went along our way.
So, early the next morning I went to the local news stand
to see if there was any of the stories about what was seen
last night in the local papers and there it was in all
the local papers, the Pittsburgh Press, the Post, Gazette.
The Greensburg Tribune Review had two editions
and the early morning edition had "Army Ropes Off Area.
"Unidentified Flying Object Falls Near Kecksburg."
The later edition of the paper had several different stories
including one that caught my attention which said,
"searches failed to find object."
And it went on to say that, yes,
there was a search in the early morning hours,
but they found absolutely nothing,
and that the official explanation was that
it was people's imagination, they had seen a bright
meteor in the sky, but nothing had fallen to the ground.
And that's officially where the case remains today.
I can picture it in my head.
The people coming in.
People keeping quiet about things and
people I know that was there and seen it and denied it.
I'll never forget that, you know, it's something...
Something that sticks with you.
Kecksburg to me seems like it was almost the catalyst
for people becoming comfortable enough to share their
experiences and the newspaper media following these
encounters and reporting on them.
The Kecksburg experience turned the eyes
of those who lived in the area to the skies over
the Chestnut Ridge and what they saw over and over again
was more mysterious than they ever expected.
What they saw was unidentified.
In the spring of 1966, a woman in Latrobe was awakened
from sleep by her dog which had become highly agitated.
Upon taking the dog outside, she saw a silver object
hovering no more than 80 feet above the roof of her house.
The object looked and spun like a top,
and was bathed in a redish glow.
After several minutes, the top-like anomaly shot up
into the sky and was gone.
The witness faced ridicule from her family and friends
when she spoke about what she had seen.
Later that same year, two women were approaching Adamsburg
on Route 30 when they noticed a strange aerial craft
almost touching a series of high-tension power lines.
As they drove closer, the object went under the power lines
and began to dive towards their car.
Fortunately there was no collision,
and as it flew off, the women observed its dark-colored
oblong shape with a type of tail in the back
and deep groves on its surface.
The driver of the car, who,
to that point had been a UFO skeptic,
suffered repeated nightmares about the incident.
In the months and years to follow,
reports like these would become more and more common
along the Chestnut Ridge.
Eye-witnesses were left to speculate about
what they had seen and wonder what normal life was going
to be like now that they knew something was out there.
I know what I saw, it stayed with me all these years.
I haven't told a lot of people about it.
At this point in my life, it happened,
and I'm just here to tell you about it.
I grew up in Derry on Ridge Avenue.
This happened back in,
it was either the late fall of 67 or early winter of 68,
it was still dark, but daylight was coming.
I was sitting at the table in the kitchen,
when my mother was in the living room.
I heard her call, "Tom, come here."
When I walked into the living room we were looking out
the picture window in the living room, above Chestnut Ridge,
out of the picture window, we saw a circular
UFO is what I'm gonna call it.
Multiple lights spinning around the bottom, red, green,
white, orange, it was just strange.
It was something that I had never seen or experienced before
and while we're standing there, it was in the one spot,
and then all of a sudden it shot across
and you never saw it shooting across, but it was in
another position in the sky above the Chestnut Ridge.
This went on I thought for a lifetime, but it probably
wasn't that long, I'm gonna say one minute to two minutes.
And we just stood there in amazement,
neither one of us said anything to each other,
we just stood there and watched it.
All of a sudden, it just shot straight up into the sky,
and it wasn't like a sparkler, but there was a trail
of red and silver lights that came off the bottom of it
and it just disappeared.
I've looked into the sky in the last 50 years,
looking for something similar to this.
I've never witnessed anything like that since then,
although I keep looking.
Strange sightings around the Chestnut Ridge
have never been limited to the skies.
There's a long history of earthbound bizarre activity,
especially on the Westmoreland, Fayette,
and Indiana County side of the Ridge,
with witnesses reporting subterranean sounds,
strange lights, black panthers, and unusually large birds.
And then there's Bigfoot.
Accounts of hair-covered man-apes can be found in
Pennsylvania newspapers dating back to the 1800s,
and these creatures have never really gone away,
reemerging from time to time
in the southwest highlands of the state.
In the late 1960s, a young man named Stan Gordon
began to actively research the Bigfoot phenomenon.
Like many, he was excited by the search
for an unknown primate living in the Pennsylvania forest.
So it was my determination to set up a volunteer group
of research people to go out to investigate these reports.
So that's what I did and I decided in 1969
to set up my own hotline for the public.
So I'm getting calls on haunted houses and ghosts
and flying saucers and Bigfoot and strange creatures
and weird noises, anything unusual,
the calls were coming in.
By 1973, we expanded to cover
the whole state of Pennsylvania.
To our surprise, we were beginning to get referrals from
the state police and from the news media and other agencies,
so when they getting reports they would refer the number
of my group to investigate the report.
And it was very lucky that we were already established,
because 1973 comes around and here's this major UFO,
Bigfoot wave which nobody could have ever predicted,
and we were extremely busy during that time period.
It was fortunate that Stan Gordon
had assembled the Westmoreland County UFO Study Group
prior to the events of 1973.
The volunteer unit would come to include medical
professionals, law enforcement officers, pilots, educators,
engineers, former military specialists and scientists,
and they were united by a desire to gather information
as quickly and thoroughly as possible
about the odd happenings on the Chestnut Ridge.
Researchers like Barry Clark could be dispatched to the
scene of a strange occurrence within minutes of it happening
thanks to Gordon's state-of-the-art two-way radio system.
The group's field work was conducted as often
as their full-time jobs permitted,
and many risked their professional reputation
by being associated with this pursuit.
But, with their aptitude for technology,
and their vast range of vocational expertise,
the members of the Study Group shared a basic optimism
that they would eventually uncover the truth about
the outlandish sightings that seemed to multiply by the day.
Barry Clark, I went out to investigate different sightings
and events for people who saw Bigfoot, UFOs,
that type of thing back in the early 70s.
Somewhere along the line, I bet you if you talked,
in the Derry area especially, Derry to Lake Tiberias,
you'll talk to somebody who's either friends with, related
to or know somebody that had some kind of an experience.
Of course, 1973, Bigfoot was the big story.
There were multiple reports of Bigfoot sightings
all along areas of the Ridge, especially along
the Westmoreland County side and Derry township.
What's interesting about those reports from the 1970s,
73, 74, some of those reports literally took place
a couple miles from where I lived.
An older lady lived kind of, not secluded but by herself,
and the state police were there the night before,
I got to go there the next day to talk to her.
She had a little yappin' dog,
and it was carrying on and carrying on.
She looked out and she saw this thing,
and the more the dog barked, the more agitated.
It literally picked the end of her trailer up on the corner,
and dropped it, and there's no skirting around it.
When I looked the next day, you could see that it was
not back in the same position it was.
In the early 70s, the nation was still
enthralled by stories of the Abominable Snowman,
but was now even more enamored of his homegrown cousin,
Bigfoot, whose presence in the Pacific Northwest
seemed to be corroborated by a shaky full-color film
obtained by Roger Paterson and Bob Gimlin.
But to the shock of all involved,
a similar figure, massive, hairy,
sometimes leaving large thee-toed footprints in its wake,
was appearing on farms, along wood lines, and crossing roads
throughout Westmoreland and Fayette Counties.
Most distressing was the creature's fearlessness
in approaching civilization,
and the damage it sometimes caused.
But as these events of 1973 are coming to our attention,
we begin to see some unusual patterns.
For example, we would have a UFO sighting in a certain area,
within minutes to hours to days later,
we would have a Bigfoot sighting or vice versa.
And then the reports got even stranger.
That's when we began to have reports with UFOs and Bigfoot
seen together at the same time and place.
As reports were unfolding during that time,
some of the stranger reports begin to come to our attention.
One case was September 27, 1973.
This was out in an area where two women were waiting
for a friend to pick them up.
Suddenly they see this huge seven, eight-foot-tall
huge man-like creature with white hair,
running across the road towards the woods.
Strangely enough, in one of its hands,
it had a glowing ball of light.
It runs off into the woods and a short time later,
this object comes across the sky, projects a beam of light
down into the woods where the creature ran into.
So these reports were getting very odd,
and then we had the case that occurred up in Fayette County.
It was the case that convinced me and my team that there was
a lot more to Bigfoot than any of us had any idea about.
There were several young men at a farm in Fayette County,
not far from here, that, in October of 1973 saw
a very large light in the sky come down in a farmer's field.
What we found out was that about nine o'clock that night,
about 15 people in that rural community,
observed this object in the sky,
it was only about 100 feet off the ground.
It was as big as a barn,
it was bright red and like a big ball.
And it was only about 100 feet up
and it was slowly moving down towards the ground.
After he was done shooting at them,
they ran back to their truck, went back to the farmhouse,
told the family what happened,
took them to a neighbor's and called the state police.
And then a state police officer was called in, and he was
called in after the fact, after the craft disappeared.
He even mentioned how large the area was illuminated.
There was a very large area illuminated by this craft
or whatever it was that you could literally sit down
and read a newspaper in it, how bright it was.
Unfortunately there was some ramifications that happened
to one of the witnesses where he was walking through
the field and there were investigators with him
and all of a sudden for no reason, he dropped to his knees,
and apparently having visions.
Visions of end times, visions of the end of the world,
destruction, chaos, and that sort of thing,
and it psychologically messed the guy up.
Some of the most bizarre cases on record
erupted from the Chestnut Ridge in 1973 and 74.
One family was chased from the woods by an aggressive
ape-like creature with prominent fangs.
A motorist reported hitting a bipedal monster,
which vanished at the moment of impact.
Another person claimed to shoot a Bigfoot that had been
stealing apples from a bushel basket on his porch.
In many cases, the unknown figures announced their presence
with an unsettling wail that witnesses compared
to a crying baby, as well as a distinctive smell
like ammonia or sulfur.
These things happened with such frequency,
especially during the summer months,
that Gordon's investigative team sometimes responded
to multiple calls on the same night, with local newspapers
providing coverage of each disturbance.
One location where repeated oddities were reported
was the Superior mobile home court.
In August of 1973, the police were called to investigate
a close-range Bigfoot sighting, and they even located and
preserved some unusual tracks for Gordon's team to analyze.
For reasons still unknown, this incident attracted
some unwanted attention from a peculiar source.
The incident at the trailer court happened on a
Friday night, we come home from Westmoreland County Fair,
and the whole neighborhood was abuzz.
I was trying to figure out what was going on and they said,
the woman who lived across from me heard a noise
at the back of her trailer and she opened the door
and Bigfoot was standing there.
The people who lived in that trailer heard like
scratching on the end of their trailer,
they heard like a baby crying sound from close by.
They opened up the back door and only a few feet away
here's this large, very broad-shouldered,
hairy Bigfoot creature standing there.
One other witness saw it running between the trailers
out of the area.
Everybody scattered and people were tripping
and falling over each other.
They were all, the whole neighborhood was shook up.
Four days later after the incident happened,
I get an emergency call from an operator.
Well, it happened to be the woman who lived in that trailer
who, four days before, had seen the Bigfoot.
What she called was, she was very upset.
She said, "I think maybe I did something wrong."
And I said, "well, what's that?"
She said, "well, this odd-appearing man came to our trailer.
"He was asking all kinds of questions
"about what we saw that night."
I come from home work and there's this car
sitting there and it had Ohio Government plates on it.
He had some kind of an ID on him about Ohio and UFO,
but she didn't pay a lot of attention to it.
He had an Ohio license plate on the vehicle,
and he wanted to know all about what had happened here.
And there's a footprint in the sand,
and he's about to take pictures of the footprint,
and the boy who lived there, the older boy,
he went and got his camera.
As time went on that evening,
he was going over and looking at the footprints, and I guess
there were several local people looking at the tracks there.
There was a young boy, he had one of those
Polaroid Instamatic cameras.
And he started doing the same, taking a picture,
and the government guy said, "no pictures."
Started taking pictures anyway and he ripped the camera
out of his hand, I don't know if he ripped the film out,
I don't remember that part, he took the camera.
He had just developed a picture and he said,
"I just made a picture."
And this mystery man, whoever he was,
grabs that picture from that little boy's hand,
wrinkles it up and puts it in his pocket and said,
"you just made a picture for us."
And then he went over to the tracks and with his foot,
he destroyed the footprints.
And the people were very very upset over that,
started yelling at him and said "we're calling the police,"
and he ran to his car and they said,
"he sped out so fast, he almost turned the car over."
That's the last time anybody saw that fellow,
and we never found out who he was.
The incident at the Superior mobile home court
was extremely strange yet ambiguous enough
to resist explanation.
It would become far more clear that the United States
government had knowledge of the incidents
being reported around the Chestnut Ridge,
and knew who to talk to about them.
On September 20th, 1973, Stan Gordon received a phone call
from a man who identified himself
as a US Government official.
The caller indicated a strong interest in the Bigfoot
sightings taking place in Westmoreland County,
and then, to Gordon's surprise, asked that any convincing
evidence be sent to a facility in Washington DC.
The spokesman even provided a mailing address
and phone number for what he called
the Bureau of Sports Fisheries, Birds and Mammals Lab.
Less than two weeks later, Gordon would be contacted by
and would meet with two men from the office
of Congressman John H. Dent.
The visitors wanted to learn more about
Gordon's research group and their findings
and were courteous enough that Gordon kept in contact
with them while the wave of sightings continued.
Later on, Gordon would be stunned to discover that the
government may have taken a decidedly more active approach
in their information gathering.
So while we're interviewing this witness,
backs years later, probably in the 1980s, and we bring up
the fact we might have to hypnotize him again and he said,
"why do you wanna hypnotize me again?"
And he goes on to say that these two men came to his home
to interview him and he thought they were part of our group
and we said, "well, tell us about what happened."
He said, "well, these two guys come to my home.
"One's in a dark suit, one in an Air Force uniform.
"The one in the Air Force uniform has a briefcase with him."
They wanted the witness to tell the story
of seeing the UFO and the Bigfoot.
And then apparently he was hypnotized,
and they told him "thank you very much,"
that they believed what he was telling them,
that they would be in touch with him.
He never heard from this fellows again.
While Bigfoot seemed to be lumbering
through the woods of Southwestern Pennsylvania,
if eye-witness testimony is to believed,
the skies above the Chestnut Ridge were filled with
all manner of lights, craft and inexplicable shapes
flying under their own power.
In August of 1973 alone,
witnesses reported seeing an hourglass-shaped object,
a sphere dropping fiery debris,
a circular craft with illuminated windows,
a bright orange ball, red, green and white lights
that looked like Christmas tree bulbs,
and a boomerang-shaped object all floating through the air.
Another really significant UFO case
was September 3rd, 1987.
And this was on a major highway, Route 30 near Greensburg.
And that evening, numerous witnesses in the area,
including law enforcement, they see this huge cylindrical
object, metallic, about 300 feet long,
only about 300 feet up, with multiple lights on it.
I don't recall anybody reporting any sound.
It's moving across, coming across Route 30,
across from the old Greengate Mall,
where there is a power substation.
So this object is moving horizontally across the sky,
and then it turns vertical in the sky and when it does,
all the power in the area goes out for a short time.
Behind that mall was an annex where they had movie theaters
and that was all blacked out,
and when the engineers went to examine it, to investigate,
they found all three of the master fuses had been blown.
Something that's apparently unheard of,
and they were very interested in
what caused those fuses to go that day.
In September of 1973,
the aerial activity seemed to intensify
over specific locations in Derry township.
At one of these locations called the Bell Farm,
a family and their friends claim multiple eerie encounters
with both UFOs and hairy humanoids.
Investigator Barry Clark, a colleague of Stan Gordon,
spent a number of nights staking out the Bell Farm,
and soon found himself at the center of events that,
by his own admission, he found haunting.
Three times we got a call from different people saying
that if you looked up in the sky at 10 o'clock in the
eastern part of the sky,
you would see a real bright, large star,
just all of a sudden turn on.
So, the one night I left interviewing one family,
and I went back out to the farm, sometime after 10,
we were sitting there maybe 10 minutes after 10,
all of a sudden there was this bright star.
And we were watching it and all of a sudden that thing,
it would turn blood-red and then it'd go back to silver.
Turn blood-red, go back to silver.
And then there were five flashes like an arc from a welder,
and they were about a second apart,
and then there were just multiple small silver objects
went to it that looked like bees going to a beehive,
waiting their turn to go in.
But when they got there, they either reflected the red,
or they turned red.
So we stood there and watched it in awe.
The guy's wife, she screamed, jumped in her car.
She wouldn't come back out.
And I said, "there's something, it's doing something."
And then we realized is was actually coming down,
it was getting bigger, and at that point we all left.
After the incident at the Bell Farm, Barry
Clark decided that he was finished with the paranormal.
Shaken by what he saw, he never investigated another case.
But evidently, the paranormal was not finished with him.
After stepping away from the research group,
Clark experienced an episode of missing time
while making what should have been a short drive
between communities on the Ridge.
This sensation that only a short time has passed,
when in fact many hours have elapsed,
is most commonly linked to alien abduction scenarios.
Clark does not suggest that he was abducted, but neither
does he have any answers for what happened to him.
Only the disturbing reality of time
for which he cannot account,
of which he has no memory.
And along with that comes the suspicion that,
when one peers deeply into the darkness,
there's actually something looking back.
I've had some things go on through my life after that,
and what bothers me is I have a grandson,
who was born in 1986,
and from the time he was like eight, nine, 10 years old,
he kept telling us about people that were coming
into his bedroom through a hole in his ceiling.
Now, he has had lapses of time,
you know, can't explain, which I have had.
I've had incidents where I have lost an hour,
an hour and a half, he doesn't.
So I don't know if what I was doing back then
triggered something, and then it carried on to my grandson.
I don't know how that works.
All I know is, it was about 1975 when these things started.
I talked to one other person that was involved back then
that said that they were afraid,
that they were telling about,
seeing things in the mirror when they looked at themselves
and incidents like that, but,
it's quite scary when it happens to yourself.
It's nice to read about it by somebody else,
but when it's really your life...
I became friends with a guy named Sam Sherry.
He lived right in the heart of the Chestnut Ridge
up in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, a little town called Wilpen.
It was 1986 and he was fishing at a place called
Sleepy Hollow.
It's a popular spot for fishing and it's a little breezeway
or a crossover between Route 30 East and Route 30 West,
and one night Sam was out there fishing,
and he heard some noise to his left,
and he looked over to see a figure standing on an embankment
a little further down the creek from where he was,
and this was Loyalhanna Creek that he was fishing on.
So as he's fishing and doing his thing,
he notices this figure's moving closer and closer to him.
And it got to the point where it was so close to him,
that he could make out very good detail of this thing.
And as he described it,
it's not your typical Bigfoot creature that he saw.
It was an upright-walking creature that had very sparse
hair on its body, almost like it had mange.
It appeared to have a mohawk on the top of its head.
And this creature was very tall, had long arms
hanging down well past its knees.
Sam saw this thing walking closer and closer to him,
ambling closer and it kind of unnerved him.
So he got in his vehicle to leave,
and just before he was able to leave,
this creature stopped the vehicle from leaving,
put its hands on the driver-side door,
stuck its head in the window,
and he was literally face-to-face with this thing.
He said this thing actually opened its mouth,
he could see there was no teeth in its mouth,
or it was missing a lot of teeth.
It was pushing down on the car,
preventing him from driving away.
He hit the horn on his car to scare this thing,
this thing stepped back like, oh-my-gosh kind of expression.
Sam took off and left.
And he said in his tail lights as he driving away,
he could see thing waving at him as he drove off.
Although the Chestnut Ridge has yet to see another outbreak
of reports quite like the flap of 73 and 74,
unusual sightings have not stopped,
and if anything, they've become more bizarre in variety.
Otherwise sober-minded individuals professed to have seen
enormous dark-colored birds in flight and on the ground,
which are sometimes referred to as Thunderbirds,
as well as Black Panthers,
upright-walking canid creatures known as Dog Men,
winged humanoids and even a 22-foot-long flying lizard
resembling a dragon.
In many cases, observers struggled to describe
what they have seen because there are no categories
that correspond to what they have perceived.
All they can do is react to the invasive presence
of what appears to be a monster.
But there's all kinds of strange creatures
that have been seen.
The most recent was the Dog Man sighting that took place
literally miles down the road from where we're at
here in 2015.
Four women were going to a place called Ruringrun Park,
and they pulled into a pull off at the trail head
to get out of the vehicle to start hiking the trail,
and as they got out of the vehicle, they started into the
trail head and they noticed a figure walking towards them.
The one woman claimed that this thing wasn't a person.
It was actually a very tall, muscular,
salt and pepper hair-covered creature,
that had a large snout like a wolf or a dog,
had pointy ears and had a tail on it.
And it was standing upright on two legs,
and it just approached them out of the forest.
Three of the four women got back in the car.
She stood there watching it and it stood there watching her,
and the stare-off went on for several minutes before
this thing turned and walked back off into the forest.
There have been many reports over the years of not only
Bigfoot sightings, but reports of Thunderbirds,
those huge generally dark brown or black birds
with massive wingspans like a small aircraft.
A Thunderbird basically is a large bird with anywhere from
eight to 20 feet in length of wingspan.
Some witnesses describe the Thunderbird as having
black feathers all over its body while other describe
the Thunderbird as having like a reptilian-like membrane
skin on its body, almost like a Pterodactyl-like thing
flying through the sky.
I only ever heard one that
came from a guy that said that he was up on the Derry Ridge,
and this large Thunderbird,
well, didn't name it a Thunderbird,
but this very large bird flew right over the top of him.
Yeah, I grew up in Lower Burrell, I joined the army
and then in 2005 I retired, moved out here to Derry.
I just got done cutting my back field.
My family was down at Keystone State Park there.
I went down to get them to bring them up
to show them what the field looked like.
I came back up to the field, I'm looking out there at the
end of the field and it looked like there was a tree stump.
So we drove out there to the tree stump.
I go, "that isn't a tree stump, it's a deer."
It looked like a big deer, about this tall, maybe five,
five and a half feet tall, sitting up on its butt.
You know, it was like this.
And I'm getting closer and I'm thinking,
that doesn't look like a deer anymore.
And it picked up its head and it was staring at me like this
like it was mad.
Huh, so I stopped 50 yards maybe from it.
I'm looking at it.
"That's a bird."
It got up and it took one swipe,
and it starts coming towards me and I'm like,
"oh, Judas Priest."
Came over top of our bus and my yard is shaped like a
rollercoaster and when it hit that,
it came up like that into the air.
It was big-chested, just claws like this.
If it wanted to and it swooped down,
I'm not saying it's gonna pick you up.
It'll pick you into pieces and take those pieces away.
Strange events like this go on all across Pennsylvania.
And there's certain areas where sometimes you get more
activity than others, but the one area, of course, that,
year after year we seem to get more than normal activity,
is areas along the Chestnut Ridge.
There's been all kind of anomalies up on the Ridge such as
underground sounds and mystery booms and strange lights and
people seeing small little lights coming near their homes.
And they appear, as I said, very close to the ground,
or very very high up in the trees.
There's no rhyme, nor reason, nor explanation
for the pattern they move or why they move, or direction.
They just, they move, and it seems almost as if like
they're intelligent enough to move,
so they don't want you to see it.
Like you see it over here and you'll be focused over here
and then it'll appear over here and then when you look
over here, it's gone and it's back over here again.
To this point, that is the biggest event that's happened
in my life that I have no understanding of.
In August of 2015, myself and a friend of mine, Eric,
we were on the West Virginia side, near Preston County,
in a very remote location about two miles off of anywhere
that would have been near any civilized area.
Well there's a couple times where I've experienced this,
and I don't know what it is.
I really don't have an explanation,
and I don't think anybody does at this point.
We were out doing a Bigfoot investigation
in this very active area.
This night was pitch-ink dark.
I couldn't even see Eric, I couldn't even see my hand.
I mean, there was no Moon that night.
You couldn't see through the canape of trees.
No residual light from the stars.
So we were in total ink-darkness.
And I noticed off in the woods, to my left,
probably about 100 yards away, this light.
And it first looked like someone just carrying a lantern.
If you would swing a lantern as you're walking through
the forest, you could see it moving back and forth rocking.
What appeared to be a light permeating underneath
the canape of trees, was moving around very slowly,
but erratically at the same time,
almost balloon-like but it would stop,
and then it would move again.
And as more people focused on it and more people started
to see this light moving through the trees,
and we were trying to figure out where it was
emanating from, where it was coming from, if maybe there was
somebody over there in the woods with us that night.
As it got a little bit closer,
you could see, if you've seen the lava lamps of the 70s,
it has this pulsating light change going on inside of this
spherical object.
I know for a fact it was within 60 feet of us
when the next thing happened.
Well, I didn't see Eric and he couldn't see me.
Well, he has a 500 lumen flashlight.
He lit it up with a flashlight.
This window opened up in this black darkness.
It was a translucent, silvery,
almost like it was light projecting out of it.
This thing went in, this window shut,
and then we're standing there in total darkness again.
I have no idea where it came from.
I started talking to other people about it,
seeing if they had seen it, other people researched up
in that area and little by little, I began to hear people
talking about seeing these floating light in that area.
Is there a simple cause for the glowing orbs
being detected in the forests of Pennsylvania?
Perhaps an atmospheric condition
or weather-related anomaly is to blame.
Or is there something more than natural
generating light in those dark places?
What is it about the Ridge
that seems to produce a parade of the monsters?
Do these creatures crawl forth from the belly
of the Ridge itself?
And what about the strange lights that appear in its skies?
Are they terrestrial in origin,
somehow generated by the great earthen mound?
Do we even know the right questions to ask
about this window into the unknown?
In this region, mysteries tend to layer
one on top of the other.
People, they sort of make the connection between
Bigfoot or UFO or UFO along with Bigfoot.
I am no expert by any means, I think there are power sources
in the area and I think there might be a link to
power sources having something to do with this.
I know, if you look on the internet,
after that I started looking on the internet what I seen.
There's a lot of stuff that goes up on the Chestnut Ridge.
Is it strange?
Probably it's everywhere, they just don't pay attention.
But density of forest?
I'm not sure.
I don't know why this area seems to attract
the phenomenon, I really don't, but it seems to be
concentrated in the state in this area.
It seems like the mountain areas around here and the West
Virginia area have a lot of strange things happening.
Over the years, we saw certain patterns emerging,
and we thought, gee, we're getting close to some answers,
then another case would show up that would completely
dismiss your thoughts and theories.
And you're always hopeful that you're gonna finally come
to a conclusion, but the more I receive reports, even the
last few years, some of the cryptid reports we're getting
are so strange and so unusual.
They're not even close to the normal Bigfoot or Thunderbirds
or Panthers and other anomalies we get reports on, so,
there's a lot more out there going on
than any of us have any answers for,
and I think we're dealing with something very strange and
unusual and right now beyond our scientific understanding.
Some who have encountered the inexplicable
along the Chestnut Ridge
have been able to go on with their lives.
The occurrence becomes an intriguing footnote
in their personal history, nothing more.
But for others, the experience has a profound
and lasting effect, shifting their world view,
changing their thoughts about what is possible,
what is real.
Like Sam Sherry, they become obsessed with having just
one more encounter to justify what they've been through.
To prove it to the skeptics and maybe to themselves
that they're not losing grip on reality.
Or like Barry Clark,
they would rather not know what happened to them.
They'd prefer not to remember,
but to forget.
And maybe if I went and had regression,
maybe I would understand more, but,
like I said now,
I don't know if I wanna know any details.
I know what's happened, happened,
and I've had some physical stuff left behind,
but do I really wanna know?
If I did do that, would it be worse than not knowing?
It's kind of...
Kind of a Catch-22.
Today, the village Kecksburg has embraced
its enigmatic past, hosting a UFO festival each summer,
that has attracted thousands of visitors.
Families bring children to play in the shadow
of the UFO replica, once used in the filming
of a TV program about the crash.
Locals are somewhat used to camera crews in town,
as media interest in the incident never wanes for long.
The people of this community have done their best
to turn the events of 1965 into a positive.
Once again, I started this when I was 10-years-old in 1959
so this year is gonna be 58 years of research.
Why do this?
Well, I guess it's just the fact that I'm continuing
to be curious, I'm still learning more and more
about the phenomena out there, I've learned that
this is a very strange world, and there's a lot of ongoing
things out there that we have yet to understand.
And I guess I'm always hopeful that that next phone call
that might come in on my hotline or the next email I get
might be the case that, once and for all,
gives us the evidence that will prove
that at least one of these phenomena really do exist.
But countless questions remain.
What fell near Kecksburg,
and what does the United States government know about it?
What was unleashed on this region in 1973,
and did it ever really stop?
How do we talk about phenomena that are continuously
shifting, always just out of reach?
How do we describe the apparition,
already disappearing in the mist?
It seems that the rolling slopes of the hills,
the silent presence of the Chestnut Ridge itself,
is the only thing permanent.
That, and the persistence of human curiosity.