The Pond That Glowed for Hours
On November 9, 1974, in the small city of Carbondale, Pennsylvania, three teenage boys reported witnessing a “red, whirring ball” descend from the sky and crash into a silt pond near Russell Park.
According to reports from the time, the evening was unremarkable until the boys’ sighting. The object, described variably as glowing orange or red, was seen crossing over Salem Mountain before it plummeted into the pond, reportedly causing it to sizzle, as if on fire.
The police were called, and what followed was a spectacle involving local law enforcement, military personnel, and a throng of curious onlookers. The pond began to emit a strange glow, lasting for nearly nine hours.
“The boys didn’t know what to make of this, they said it sizzled when it went into the water, it was a glowing orange kind of ball of fire sort of thing,” said Mary Ann Savakinus the director of the Lackawanna Historial Society.
Hundreds of people gathered near the pond, waiting to see what the glowing object was.
“This goes over several days, as this story unfolds, and then a scuba diver is called to go in and get whatever it is out, they’re in a rowboat, and they call in some other Carbondale people to come in and help with them,” explained Savakinus.
The search for the mysterious object concluded with the retrieval of an old railroad lantern from the pond’s depths. Authorities were quick to label the event a hoax, attributing the glow to the lantern’s battery and the excitement to youthful mischief.
One of the boys later admitted to throwing the lantern into the pond as a prank to scare his sister, ostensibly closing the case. However, the lantern’s recovery did little to quell the speculation; the story had taken root.
Documents released by the United States 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 statement released in 1975, the Air Force indicated that the event did not warrant further investigation, as evidence suggested no foreign object of interest was found. This assessment aligns with the historical precedent of UFO investigations in the 1970s, during which the Air Force generally refrained from examining incidents lacking physical evidence.
Despite the police report and scientific skepticism, a segment of the UFO research community maintains that the Carbondale incident was indeed an extraterrestrial event.
Further support for this theory comes from testimonies by those present at the site. In the past 20 years, witnesses have come forward to say what they saw, was a UFO.
“Others who said yes they saw something glowing in the sky that night, people who lived in Waymart, people who lived in the Midvalley were coming out of restaurants that day, they saw something,” says Savakinus.
Others have mentioned that during the chaos, a flatbed truck came to the site and drove away with something covered with a tarp.
Now 64 years old, Gillette was hanging around the hotel during Saturday’s “alien landing anniversary and celebration” and now claims what he told the newspaper years ago wasn’t true.
“My girlfriend broke up with me, so I was in a bad mood,” he said. “I just told them what they wanted to hear, that it was a lantern. It wasn’t a lantern. Something was 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 what appeared to be something large being removed from the area.
“We always rode our bikes up there,” said Pope, who now lives in Blakely. “(I saw) a big flatbed truck on the road with something huge 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 county transit system trolley from Carbondale Grand Hotel to the old mine pond on Saturday to satisfy their curiosity — part of a hotel-hosted event commemorating an incident that became international news at the time.
After seeing the pond and talking with locals who were around at the time, Morris didn’t buy the story that a lantern was behind it all. He was disappointed Gillette did not speak at the event because he wanted to clarify some of the details.
“Why would you call in the people that were called in and heavy machinery to take a lantern out of a pond?” he wondered. “It just doesn’t make any sense. I think something definitely happened there.”
While local authorities concluded that the incident was a teenage prank involving a lantern, testimonies from witnesses and the enduring local lore suggest there may be elements of the story that remain unexplained, even if the official account points to an innocuous explanation.
