Close encounters of the Carbondale kind: Carbondalien Festival's alien invasion will decorate city businesses

Extraterrestrials are coming to Carbondale.

Organizers of the upcoming Carbondalien Festival hope to have 30 6-foot-tall, customized wooden aliens crash land at participating city businesses by Sept. 1 — marking the martians' first contact with the city ahead of the Nov. 9 festival.

The festival will hold a “Business Night Out” cocktail party on June 27 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Hotel Anthracite, 25 S. Main St., Carbondale, which is sponsoring the evening, to unveil the aliens and discuss how businesses can collaborate. The “Adopt-an-Alien” sponsorship starts at $300 for one of the aliens, or $275 during the business night out, with different sponsorship tiers topping out at a $5,000 “The Final Frontier” package.

“It’s just to get local businesses on board for the festival and get them excited about our plans not just for the festival itself, but also to help drive tourism and kind of celebrate our extraterrestrial past,” said organizer and “Carbondalien-in-Chief” Nicole Curtis, who co-owns the City Line Shop Cafe, 156 Cottage St., with her husband, Jack.

The base alien designs are already painted on the wooden cutouts, and businesses will be free to decorate them however they see fit with the goal of displaying the aliens by Sept. 1, Curtis said. The aliens will then be printed on a map for a scavenger hunt, she said.

An artist herself, Curtis envisions bright, vibrant aliens throughout the city. Businesses can also dress up the aliens, and she imagines them getting creative with speech bubbles or even accompanying UFOs.

“People are going to just have a ball with it,” she said.” I’m sure that we will not be underwhelmed with the aliens. Carbondale will not let us down.”

For business owners who aren’t artistically inclined, the festival will work with them to have an artist decorate their alien, though the business will have to pay a stipend to cover the cost of art supplies, Curtis said.

The Carbondalien Festival will take place on the 50th anniversary of a storied UFO crash landing into a mine pond near what is now Russell Park.

The alien legend began when three teenage boys told police they saw a “red, whirring ball fly over Salem Mountain and into the mine pond,” drawing a frenzy of police, military, UFO enthusiasts and inquiring spectators from across the country who flocked to Carbondale.

Officials attributed the Nov. 9, 1974, incident to a battery-powered mine lantern tossed into the pond and glowing underwater, though others contend there was more to the story.

Curtis wants to treat the story with “love and respect” — not mocking it.

“I think that’s why people didn’t talk about it before ... they were embarrassed by it,” she said. “This is a cool thing, and you can believe whatever you want, but something happened here and we need to celebrate it.”

Mining lantern or not, the festival will feature a reenactment of the crash landing at Russell Park on 11th Avenue. Other interstellar festivities on Nov. 9 will include vendors and food trucks lining Main Street, speakers throughout the day, live music and the scavenger hunt.

To promote the festival, they are working with the Lackawanna County Convention and Visitors Bureau, Curtis said.

Executive Director Curt Camoni said the bureau will work with the Carbondalien Festival in any way it can, both as a sponsor and through marketing and promotion to attract people from outside the area.

“For me, it’s more about the market that’s out there for things like this, anything alien, supernatural, it is a niche market, but it has a strong following, and people are willing to travel,” Camoni said. “I think it could be exciting, and I think it can blow up.”

Tying the Carbondalien into the personality and brand of Carbondale is “going to give it legs,” Camoni said, comparing it to how Scranton embraces the “The Office.” “By making it a part of their brand, they can really stretch the economic impact of this calendar-wide.”

For Mayor Michele Bannon, Carbondale is a quirky community, and they need to expand on that and share it, she said. It’s a unique story that many locals still remember vividly, she said.

“I’m thrilled that we’re able to bring people into our community to patronize our businesses, to expand our economic development, to get to know Carbondale,” Bannon said.

Email carbondalienfestivalpa@gmail.com to RSVP by Saturday for next week's business night out.