The Kecksburg UFO Festival kicks off Friday in Westmoreland County.
The festival commemorates the day in December 1965 when some claimed they saw a UFO crash into the woods outside the town of Kecksburg in Mt. Pleasant Township.
Stan Gordon of Greensburg has been a guest speaker at the annual festival since it first began. Gordon was a teenager then.
“Many, many people and KDKA, people were calling in reporting seeing this firery object in the sky and it was a fascinating night and the next day it’s the major news in all the local newspapers in the area and across the country, it’s a huge story,” said Gordon.
It’s a story that he's been investigating ever since...and one that, to this day, has never been completely explained.
“It could’ve been something that was from outside the Earth, we just don’t know and it just adds to the mystery,” said Gordon.
Just a few hundred people attended the festival 18 years ago. Last year nearly 3,000 came out for the festivities.
The festival has plenty of food and drink, along with merchandise vendors, a bed race, UFO conferences, music fireworks and more.