Did the Allspark Cube make a crash landing in Sudan?

Okay, so maybe it wasn't really the All Spark but it certainly is a strange mystery just the same.

August 3, 1967 - Shamal Darfur, Sudan

A mysterious object plummets from the sky, slamming into the remote desert of western Sudan, approximately 60 miles north by northwest of Al Fashir.

Origin- unknown

The object is reported to be in the shape of a cube, weighing 3 tons. It is made up of smaller, tightly packed oblong cubes measuring one inch by two inches each, but the total size of the object is not reported nor the third dimensional measurement of the smaller cubes. The cubes are made of a soft metal, presumed to be light aluminum, yet cutting samples of it was said to be difficult. How exactly the cubes were fastened together forming the larger cube is unknown.

The entire cube was shrouded in a silky material. There were no markings apparent on the object to identify it. No photographs have ever been made public, though it is reported that local officials did take photos. There is no description of an impact crater.The object is reported to be a satellite, but there are a number of problems with that conclusion.

Skylab

Satellites are not designed to survive the re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. Even when the remnants of Skylab space station fell out of orbit and disintegrated over Australia upon re-entry in 1979, the largest piece to be recovered on the ground was an oxygen tank. Nowhere near as massive as the Sudan object.

Aluminum melts at 350-degrees Fahrenheit. It is unlikely it would have tumbled through Earth's atmosphere from space without disintegrating and vaporizing, unless it was either protected by a heat shield of some sort, though no such shielding is reported, or if it was originally much, much larger than the object recovered.

So what was this silk-like substance that the cube was covered by? Hardly the sort of material one might expect to be used as a heat shield. Re-entry vehicles such as space-capsules and the Space Shuttle used specially engineered ceramic tiles in order to survive the extreme temperatures of re-entry into the atmosphere. Remembering the Shuttle Columbia tragedy, we can see what happens to an object when the heat shield fails. It may be possible that the silk-like material was a parachute which deployed on the object's final descent. That might also explain the lack of an impact crater being reported if it was indeed a soft landing. But there are a few problems with that theory too.

Why wasn't the material simply identified as a parachute? Where did the heat shield go? Why would an unmanned satellite be designed to fall out of orbit, for what purpose? It costs a lot of money and takes a lot hard work to put something that large up into space. Why would you want to bring it back down?

All of these questions suddenly become academic though as we dig a little deeper and find that we could not have put it into space in the first place. If it was in fact a man-made satellite, how in fact did it get up there? To that date, there was no rocket in the world powerful enough hoist a 3-ton satellite into orbit. The only rocket powerful enough to accomplish such a mission would have been the U.S. Saturn V rocket which did not launch on it's maiden voyage until November 9 of that same year, about three months after this object slammed into the Sudan desert intact. Though now decommissioned, to date the Saturn V remains the most powerful operational rocket ever built and still holds the record for the heaviest launch vehicle payload.

Despite mankind's apparent technological inability to launch such a massive object, there have also been other reports of inexplicably massive satellites being observed over the years. The so-called Black Knight satellite is one such example of the phenomenon. Was this object that fell to the ground in Africa the Black Knight, or something similar? Check out our previous article on that here...

Black Knight Satellite Mystery

It is unlikely that if the United States launched such an object into space, that they would also be wondering what it was and where it came from. The United States officially denies that an object that massive has ever been recovered, as we see in an alleged de-classified report from the Department of State. Relevant portion quoted here...

Q and A with regard to the Soviet Space objects which fell in the middle west.

Questions asked by US Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, 92D Congress, 2nd Session, Staff Report, May 1972.

Q: Have any fragments as large as these ever come back to earth from US or other Soviet Satellites?

A: We do not have any record of a US fragment or of another Soviet fragment as large as the largest COSMOS 316 fragment surviving re-entry. The largest COSMOS 316 fragment is approximately 4 ft by 4ft and weighs 640 pounds.

So is this entire story simply a myth, a hoax? So often that's what these sorts of stories are usually written off as anyway, so it would probably be easy to do that here as well. Although we do have some corroboration that the object was recovered as part of Project Moondust. But I think we can do one better. Let's go ahead and have a look at a document I found at the Defense Intelligence Agency, which contradicts State Department report.

I originally found the document at this address which is no longer valid... http://www.dia.mil/publicaffairs/Foia/ufo2.pdf

Before it was removed though, I made a copy of the entire two part file. You will find the original document on page 52 of this pdf file... http://www.mediafire.com/?vwh4u5a20nd7ab7

Here is a screenshot of the relevant page...