Last Saturday a group of students, by way of an unknown benefactor (whoever you are, Sir or Madam Benefactor, I’d like to thank you), was given the opportunity to spend the day on retreat at St. Emma Monastery and Retreat House in the idyllic hills outside of Greensburg. The spiritual retreat, led by Fr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. (see a prior entry) Mark Gruber O.S.B., was a wonderful way to reflect and prepare for Holy Week. Absolutely everything about the retreat was fulfilling, including the tender pork and mashed potatoes for lunch. But as satisfying as the retreat was, I do not wish to fill this entry with a report of what occurred during the retreat. Rather, I would like to tell you about what happened before and after the retreat.
During the car ride to St. Emma’s, a conversation started about the location of Kecksburg, a nearby town that is home to a fascinating UFO crash site. Everyone shared his or her knowledge about the UFO story. Having fallen asleep to many “Unsolved Mysteries” episodes, I knew a bit about the case:
In December of 1965, a mysterious, flaming object streaked across the skies over Canada, Ohio and Pennsylvania before crash landing in rural Kecksburg, PA. Witness observed the object to move in an irregular zig-zag sort of pattern as it flew through the sky, suggesting that the object had some sort of self propulsion mechanism. Farmers who arrived on the scene of the crash first noted that the object was acorn shaped, about the size of a small car, and covered in hieroglyphic-like writings. Most interestingly, within minutes of the crash, U.S. Military troops were on the scene and had evacuated the area. It seemed that the military had been tracking this object and were expecting its crash somewhere in the region.

The conversation amongst my friends and I continued until its natural completion, when we all agreed that we should open a burger joint with the slogan “Home of the galaxy-famous Kecksburger… It’s out of this world!”
After the retreat, my girlfriend Samantha and I sought to speak with Fr. Mark. He agreed and asked us if we could have our discussion in the car because he had to drive a Sister who spoke on the retreat back to the nunnery. So we climbed into the back seat and went on what would prove to be an unexpectedly relevant journey.
As we rode along country road after country road, Fr. Mark pointed out various landmarks and related experiences about them. I believe it was as we were exiting the town of Mammoth that he asked if we were familiar with Kecksburg. I lit up with enthusiasm and began rattling off what I knew about the Kecksburg Incident. Fr. Mark told me that, as a child, he witnessed the object as it passed over the sky. He also said that he later spoke with people at the St. Vincent Monastery who, at the time of the incident, followed the object to its crash site! But just when I thought my mind had been thoroughly blown, Fr. Mark informed us that we were approaching the crash site and would be able to stop and see it!
He pulled into the parking lot of the Kecksburg Fire Department (where at that very moment a steak dinner was being held) and immediately I saw it. The very same orange, acorn-shaped monstrosity that you see in the picture above was right in front of me, outside on a platform and lit up by floodlights. Constructed by the TV crew for the Unsolved Mysteries episode about the object, the space acorn stands as a shining beacon of every American small-town curiosity. It ranks with the World’s Largest Teapot in Chester, WV, and the America’s Other Airship Disaster Museum in Ava Ohio, which is a trailer home-based memorial dedicated to the crash of the American dirigible Shenandoah, which crashed in 1925, killing 14 of its 43 passengers. I am enamored with these sorts of curiosities; there is a certain kind of honest, local pride that I really appreciate. I took a few pictures of the space acorn with my cell phone and spent the rest of the night bragging about what I had seen.