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4. The Fiery UFO That Crashed Near Pittsburgh The official cry of "meteor" went up on December 9, 1965 when, just before sundown, a brilliant orange object crossed the skies from Michigan over Lake Erie, over northeastern Ohio, and crashed in a woods thirty miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Almost within an hour of the sighting Dr. Paul Annear of Baldwin-Wallace College had announced his opinion that the object was a meteor. The Pentagon was quick to agree with the professor. The officially pronounced "meteor" had set grass afire over a 1000-foot area when it had crashed. The object had been sighted by several people on the ground and by many experienced commercial and private pilots. Meteors, of course, do not "fly" but are merely falling through space and become visible when friction with the earth's atmosphere causes them to "glow." Meteors are usually first sighted at heights between 30 and 60 miles and "burn out" their glow at about 10 miles. Peculiarly, this particular "meteor" was charted as making a 25-degree turn over Cleveland and was clocked as moving at about 1062.5 miles per hour. Ivan T. Sanderson, writing for the North American Newspaper Alliance, expressed his dissatisfaction with the official analysis of the fiery object. "So, this object was a meteor; was it? The minimum speed ever recorded for a meteor was 27,000 miles per hour and the maximum was 144,000 per hour, which is to say seven and one-half miles per second and 40 miles per second respectively! Since when have meteors or bolides, which is the name now given to meteors that break up in our atmosphere, started ambling along at 1,062.5 miles per hour?" Sanderson also thought it most peculiar that the military was taking such a great interest in the "meteor." Bolides crash to earth nearly every day of the year and are ignored as commonplace by all except those amateur enthusiasts who collect chunks of "falling stars." With this particular "meteor," however, "great contingents of specialists from the armed forces arrived at the scene of the fall almost as fast as the State Police got there." An armed forces' spokesman was quoted as saying: "We don't know what we have here, but there is an unidentified flying object in the woods."