CARBONDALE — Fifty years ago, a group of teenagers told police a dramatic tale of something flying over Salem Mountain and crashing into a pond behind Russell Park, illuminating the murky water, sparking a decadeslong debate and inspiring a citywide festival on Saturday.
The Carbondale UFO, or more recently the Carbondalien, drew massive crowds to the small city when it allegedly splashed down in the mining pond around 7 p.m. on Nov. 9, 1974, bringing military personnel, police, UFO researchers and curious onlookers from at least 17 states and Canada. A flatbed hauling out a tarp-covered object only fueled the speculation.
Was it martians? A flying saucer? No, according to Carbondale police at the time, who quickly announced it was a hoax after a scuba diver recovered an electric railroad lantern that had been glowing underwater.
Despite police quickly discrediting the out-of-this-world claims, and decades later one of the teens telling The Sunday Times in 1999 that he threw the lantern into the pond to scare his sister, others steadfastly believe there was more than just a lantern with a six-volt Sears battery at the bottom of the pond.
Regardless of what happened that night, the city will celebrate its Roswell-esque story with the Carbondalien Festival on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. for its 50th anniversary. Based out of Memorial Park across from City Hall on North Main Street and with mostly free events dotting the city, the Carbondalien Festival will feature a “Russell Park Experience” where attendees can relive the 1974 events with actors taking on characters from the UFO investigation; a marketplace with local artists and artisans, live music, food trucks and adult beverages including wine, mead and cider; alien hot air balloon rides for an aerial view of Russell Park; a free series of supernatural speakers; a free extraterrestrial film festival with crafts and a storytime for kids at the Carbondale Public Library, 5 N. Main St.; free alien-themed swimming at the Greater Carbondale YMCA, 82 N. Main St.; the “Extraterrestrial Express” train ride to Carbondale from the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton; and an after party from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the Hotel Anthracite, 25 S. Main St., with a paranormal researcher and investigator, among other alien-inspired festivities.
“I just love this story so much,” festival co-chairwoman Nicole Curtis said. “There’s so many questions that somebody like me can say, ‘I want it to be a UFO,’ and in my mind it’s a UFO. And somebody else can be like, ‘Nope, it was definitely a lantern.’ And somebody else can be like, ‘Maybe it was a meteor. Maybe it was Russian space junk.’ ”
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Throughout much of the past year, Curtis and her fellow co-chairwoman, Stefanie Colarusso, have worked with the city, businesses and the Lackawanna County Visitors Bureau to raise money and publicity for what they hope to make an annual festival. For a complete breakdown of Saturday’s events, visit carbondalienfestival.com.
Courtesy of the Carbondalien FestivalA police officer and photographer’s account
As a young freelance photographer in 1974, Jerome Gillott, whose father was a city police officer, often hung out at the Carbondale police station inside City Hall, waiting for car crashes and fires.
Now 70, the Clifford Twp. resident recalled the night of Nov. 9, 1974, when the department started receiving calls about a strange light.
An officer said to him, “Come on, let’s go,” and with his camera gear, Gillott headed to Russell Park on a cold autumn night.
“Sure enough, there was a light in the pond,” he said.
So, Gillott popped his Mamiya Sekor camera on a tripod and took some 5- to 10-second exposures of the glowing pond — photos he shared with The Sunday Times — and captured a glowing light emanating from the depths.
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An officer later climbed into a boat and tried to retrieve the object but was unsuccessful, Gillott said, recalling the light going out.
At the time, there were some people gathered poking around, “but nothing major,” he said.
“On Sunday, that’s when everything blew up,” he said.
Carbondale resident George Gallick, 79, was a part-time city police officer working the desk that Sunday. He stopped to see the scene Sunday morning and then headed to the police station, where the phone never stopped ringing as reporters from as far as England and Spain called the Police Department looking for information, only for Gallick to tell them he knew as much as they did.
Returning to the scene during the day, Gillott said police had cleared people from the area, though he went and snapped photos of politicians and UFO researchers at the site.
The mining pond behind Russell Park on Sunday, Nov. 10, 1974. Courtesy of Jerome Gillott.
By Monday, Gillott was at work at Weston Controls and Loral Systems in Archbald, now Lockheed Martin, when he received a call from a police officer.
“You better get up here just in case anything turns up.”
With radiation-safety training, Gillott figured he’d stop over since he knew the proper protocols in case the object was radioactive.
After returning to Russell Park, and with a Geiger counter, Gillott got into a boat with Carbondale Police Officers Mark Trella and John Barbaro.
As they floated in the pond, a scuba diver emerged from the water.
“He nodded his head, so I knew he had something,” Gillott said.
The diver held up the railroad lantern for Gillott to scan with the Geiger counter to ensure it was safe.
The next moments would permanently link Gillott to the Carbondale UFO as photographers with The Scranton Times and The Scranton Tribune captured the hand-off as the diver gave Gillott the lantern.
“I said, ‘Well, there’s their UFOs,’” Gillott recalled.
The lantern was still giving off a faint orange glow, and he placed it in the bottom of the boat and took another picture, which he also shared with The Sunday Times. The Sears battery in the lantern was encased in wax, he said, explaining its ability to continue glowing underwater.
The electric railroad lantern in the bottom of a boat after it was retrieved from a mining pond behind Russell Park on Monday, Nov. 11, 1974. Courtesy of Jerome Gillott
Since then, Gillott reminisces about the encounter every year around the anniversary, and with the 50th anniversary looming, he took out his photos and negatives that had been stowed away for the last five decades.
Asked if he thinks there’s more to the story than a lantern, Gillott said there was no cover-up.
“Worse-case scenario it was a diversion,” he said.
Because there were other reports of people seeing something in the sky, Gillott speculated if there could’ve been a satellite zooming through the region.
For Gallick, seeing the scuba diver emerge with the lantern was more embarrassing than relieving.
“I didn’t believe it was a UFO to start with, but we couldn’t figure out what it was,” he said.
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Reporters from The Scranton Times, The Scranton Tribune and The Scrantonian joined the media frenzy in Carbondale, chronicling the extraterrestrial clamor and its aftermath.
The earliest report came in the Sunday, Nov. 10, 1974, edition of The Scrantonian, which published a short article on its front page about the previous night’s incident with the headline “Veil of secrecy kept on report of area UFO.” A Scrantonian reporter wrote, “Carbondale police clamped a lid of secrecy around the Russell Park area early this morning after persons reported seeing strange lights in the area possibly from a UFO-type object.”
Both The Times and The Tribune picked up the story the next day, detailing the incident and subsequent investigation.
The Scranton Times reported on Nov. 11, 1974, that three teenagers who lived on Russell Street told police they were walking about three blocks from the silt pond when they heard a “whirring” in the sky and saw a red, sparking ball crossing over Salem Mountain from the east before plunging into the water. The teens were among several calls to police, and officers finally responded about 9 p.m. — two hours after the first call came in, according to the article.
A responding officer fired four shots into the water with his .38-caliber revolver.
The lantern emitted a bright glow for about nine hours, radiating into a 15-foot diameter circle.
Around 2:45 a.m. that Sunday, a net hooked around an object, but as it was being raised, the net went limp, the object fell, and the light went out.
Two volunteer scuba divers asked to search the water that afternoon, but police denied their request.
Gillott remembers the exchange and said police told the divers, “Nobody goes in until the authorities get there.”
When newspapers hit doorsteps Tuesday, Nov. 12, 1974, the public finally had an explanation from Carbondale officials: It was a hoax.
The Scranton Times wrote, “The hand of a scuba diver emerged from the murky waters of a silt pond behind Russell Park clutching an electric railroad lantern.” A photo accompanying the article shows Gillott reaching over the back of a small rowboat and taking the lantern from the diver, with a superimposed closeup of the object.
In a retrospective article 25 years later, The Sunday Times interviewed Robert Gillette — one of the three teenage boys. Gillette, who was 39 at the time, said he had tossed the lantern into the water to scare his sister, Maria, and her friends.
When police arrived, fearing the repercussions, Gillette told the paper, “I made the story up, and they bought it.”
However, in 2019, Gillette’s sister, Maria, appeared on a “UF BROS” podcast hosted by local barbers Shane Butler, Frank Froese and Brian “Toxic” Evans, saying she didn’t believe her brother threw the lantern in, and that she thought there was more than just a lantern underwater.
The 1999 report also addressed a long-standing mystery when onlookers saw a flatbed with a tarp-covered object leaving the scene. At the time, then-police Chief Dominick Andidora, who was a young police officer in 1974, said it was a piece of broken machinery from a coal breaker on the flatbed, which was removed early Sunday morning.
Gallick said he spoke to Andidora on Thursday, who told him, “Do you believe that this is happening again?”
A historical context
S. Robert Powell, Ph.D., the longtime president of the Carbondale Historical Society, has spent decades chronicling and preserving Upvalley history. After speaking to as many as 50 eyewitnesses, including about 20 whose “credibility was pure gold in my book,” Powell, 80, proposes an unidentified flying object did fall into the pond, but it wasn’t extraterrestrial. It was debris from space, he said.
“What was it? Was it part of a Soviet satellite? Was it a weather satellite that went bad?” he said. “Something came out of (the pond). Something, some kind of space garbage.”
Powell said he’s heard from witnesses that a bright light came from the direction of Waymart and headed over the mountain into Carbondale. People from Peckville to Forest City told him they saw the lights that Saturday night, he said.
Witnesses also told him about the tarp-covered object being removed on the flatbed.
“There was a UFO that landed in Russell Park in 1974, and that unidentified flying object is still unidentified,” he said.
The local historian attributed his understanding to “a combination of what seems undeniable, but also making educated guesses because of the nature of the event, the nature of the participants and the response by the police and by the local community.”
He believes that from early on, when police reached out to government officials that night, the response was, “We don’t know what’s going on here. We need to downplay the object and focus on a lantern.”
“This, then, became the cover-up story, the diversionary object,” he said, explaining he believes that’s why the lantern was tossed into the pond.
At the Lackawanna Historical Society, Executive Director Mary Ann Moran-Savakinus is now compiling a file on the Carbondalien because the society did not previously have one.
“We don’t draw a conclusion of what it actually was,” she said. “We just … collect the data and let people draw their own conclusion, but there’s definitely something that happened there.”
Savakinus, a Carbondale resident, spoke to several people who witnessed whatever took place on Nov. 9, 1974, and the story remained consistent.
“Something was in the sky, something was bright, something fell in the pond or landed in the pond — depending on who you’re talking to,” she said.
She also noted that the flatbed with a tarp-covered object did not leave Russell Park from its public entrance but rather took a back way out.
Both Powell and Savakinus also said they heard stories about a delivery-style truck or van roaming the area.
Now 50 years after the events unfolded, the two historians pointed to the impact the Carbondalien Festival will have on Carbondale, with Savakinus hoping to use the festival as a means of getting more firsthand accounts for the Lackawanna Historical Society’s file.
“It’s an exciting project because it’s promoting Carbondale in kind of a unique way, which puts Carbondale into a situation where they can do some tourism, attraction and economic building for it,” Savakinus said. “It’s a very interesting story, and everyone has an opinion about it.”
The UFO story gives Carbondale a sense of importance, Powell said.
“It provides the basis for people to think of themselves in their lives as being connected to something greater than they are, whether it’s true or not, but they are connected to it,” he said. “It’s part of their world.”
An organizer’s enthusiasm
With her Carbondalien Festival less than a week away, Curtis said she feels like it’s taken on a life of its own.
“I’m just in awe of it,” she said. “The things that we’ve added, the people that have joined us on this journey in such a short time, and I feel just really proud about the work that everybody’s done to make all this happen.”
Community sponsors raised more than $25,000 to help host the festival, along with about $10,000 of in-kind donations, she said.
The idea for the festival stemmed from an alien-themed mural on the side of her temporarily closed City Line Shop Cafe in Carbondale, which she owns with her husband, Jack.
They would receive questions about the artwork, and after explaining its origins, people were really interested, Curtis said.
The event expanded from the Carbondalien to leaning into the paranormal, with a free supernatural speaker series going on all day at the Hotel Anthracite, she said.
“(The Carbondale UFO) is an amazing story that we should all be talking about and sharing,” she said. “That’s part of what the festival is about — getting people to share their stories and doing it in a place that they feel safe.”
Curtis highlighted the Russell Park Experience reenactment, where attendees will receive a press pass and interview characters like the scuba diver who found the lantern, plus the giant alien hot air balloon that will take them above Russell Park.
She hopes the Carbondalien Festival drives tourism in Carbondale and helps with its economic development downtown.
“Small communities all over the country are kind of finding what makes them remarkable and special and why people should come and visit them,” Curtis said. “Carbondale has this really great story to tell.”
Originally Published: November 3, 2024 at 12:00 AM EDT
