AN OUT OF THIS WORLD CARBONDALE TALE

For the third installment of their Community Night presented by Visit Luzerne County, the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins decided to reach for the stars…

In the past, the Penguins adopted one-night-only monikers of the Old Forge Pizzas and Pittston Tomatoes. This year, the team swapped the edible for the extra-terrestrial by becoming the Carbondale UFOs, an homage to a peculiar story from 50 years ago.

AN UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT IN CARBONDALE

The story goes that on an autumn night in 1974, three high school-age boys witnessed a fiery ball of light streak across the sky. With velocity and flare, its trajectory carried the anomaly directly into Russell Pond in Carbondale. The boys quickly investigated the “crash site”, and while they did not see a molten meteor or the wreckage of a hobbled spacecraft, they did see an unmistakable glow coming from the pond’s depths.

The boys did what they thought they should, which was to contact local authorities. Police arrived at the scene and saw the same glow emanating from beneath the water. Dumbfounded, the police could not identify the cause of such a radiant irregularity. Newspaper reports at the time even mentioned one of the officers was so taken aback that he discharged his weapon at the pond.

Word of the event spread throughout the town, and countless curious Carbondale residents came to Russell Pond’s silty shores in hopes of catching a glimpse of its unexplained gleam – or maybe even something from another world.

After days of hullabaloo, local authorities instructed a diving team to retrieve the source of this light and finally put an end to the rumor and conjecture spreading like wildfire. The divers went in, and they resurfaced with the answer to everyone’s question.

It was an old mining lantern.

Carbondale had the cause for its hysteria explained away as a simple hoax pulled off by the same three boys who first reported the incident.

WE WANT TO BELIEVE

But to many, that’s not the whole story. In the days in between the alleged “streaking ball of light” and lantern recovery, many residents claimed to have seen federal government officials around Carbondale, including at and around Russell Pond. The most salacious rumor to arise from this confusion was locals saying they witnessed these federal visitors driving a large, flatbed truck to the waterline, and then leaving with a wide, covered object in tow.

And that’s what makes the Carbondale incident in 1974 such a fun piece of Northeast Pennsylvania folklore.

Some refuse to accept that a simple lantern could have caused such a dazzling sight and commotion that ensued. They believe that the true source of everyone’s fascination was removed from the pond by the government, and that the lantern was planted there as a convenient explanation.

Given the area’s rich mining history, the lantern could have been resting at the bottom of the pond for years, well before anyone had ideas of alien spacecrafts. To that same point, that also would have made it easy for the high school boys to get their hands on an old lantern and toss it in the lake as nothing more than a juvenile prank.

Or maybe that’s exactly what they want you to think…

CARBONDALE UFO NIGHT, PRESENTED BY VISIT LUZERNE COUNTY

Five decades later, the city of Carbondale has embraced this quirky tale as a touchstone of its history. UFO murals are painted on the sides of buildings, and thousands gathered in the center of town for the first “Carbondalien Festival” this past in November. The Penguins have also jumped on board, dedicating this Saturday’s Community Night presented by Visit Luzerne County to the mysterious allure of this eerie account from Lackawanna County.

— Nick Hart