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UFO buffs may be unwitting pawns:For decades, UFO buffs have delighted themselves with tales of crashed saucersand government cover-ups of recovered aliens and ships. They have dedicatedthemselves to "digging out the truth" and "exposing the government'sdeceptions." Now, in a delicious irony, a famous UFO case may actually involvea real U. S. government cover-up, but UFO buffs are on the wrong side. Insteadof exposing the truth, they may be unwitting pawns in the deception.The case in question involves the alleged crash of the so-called 'KecksburgUFO,' recently featured in magazines and even reenacted on TV. The acorn-shaped object supposedly fell to the ground in western Pennsylvania on December9, 1965. As the story goes, Air Force search teams cordoned off the wooded areaand hauled a large object away. It was later reportedly seen at theWright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.One suggested identity for the mystery intruder was the Soviet Kosmos-96satellite, which actually did fall back into the atmosphere that day. butaccording to Air Force spokesmen, that craft had plummeted 12 hours earlierover another part of the planet.It was a shame, of course, because Kosmos-96, a failed Venus probe whosebooster had blown up in parking orbit, would have been a wonderful UFO. Thereentry capsule, incorporating the latest Soviet missile warhead technology,was shaped like a squashed spheroid with a sliced-off top--in other words, likean acorn.That's why in May of 1991, the Pittsburgh Press decided to verify the Air Forceclaims on its own. Toward that end, reporters obtained official space-trackingdata from the archives of the North American Defense Command in CheyenneMountains, Colorado. The decades-old data finally arrived in the form of eight"snapshots" of the satellite's orbital position. The last snapshot, whenprojected forward in space and time by a leading amateur satellite watcher whodoesn't want his name revealed, seemed to confirm the official Air Forceaccount.But going on a hunch and tapping my own expertise in space operation andsatellite sleuthing, I decided to check the data myself. The released trackingdata couldn't be positively identified with specific pieces of the failedprobe. It could have been the jettisoned rocket stage or a large piece of spacejunk. The probe itself could have been headed off toward Kecksburg.But why in the world would our government lie? In the 1960s, U.S. militaryintelligence agencies interested in enemy technology were eagerly collectingall the Soviet missile and space debris they could find. International lawrequired that debris be returned to the country of origin. But hardware fromKosmos-96, with its special missile-warhead shielding, would have been toovaluable to give back.Hard-line skeptics still doubt that anything at all landed in Pennsylvania.Robert Young, an investigator from Harrisburg, keeps finding new holes in theclaims of alleged witnesses. "I'm now more convinced than ever that nothingcame down in Kecksburg," he says. And arch skeptic Philip J. Klass attributesthe poor NORAD data "to foul-ups, not cover-ups."But those of us who've studied the relationship between U.S. militaryintelligence and the former Soviet Union still wonder. After all, what bettercamouflage than to let people think the fallen object was not a Soviet probebut rather a flying saucer? The Russians would never suspect, and the Air Forcelaboratories could examine the specimen at leisure. And if suspicion lingered,why UFO buffs could be counted on to maintain the phony cover story, protectingthe real truth.--James ObergEditor's note: James Oberg, a veteran space-secrets sleuth, is author ofUNCOVERING SOVIET DISASTERS.