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West Virginia almost a UFO heaven?
Posted on Wednesday, August 13, 2008 (CDT) by Thoth
 West Virginia prides itself as a land of majestic mountains, sparkling streams, coal to feed hungry power plants, a unique place in American history and a fiercely independent people accustomed to overcoming hard times with a resiliency unrivaled by anyone else. Now add another chapter to the 35th state’s storied history — more documented UFO activity than any other place in America. Even eclipsing Roswell.
For proof, author-researcher Frank Feschino points to his exhaustive study that revealed three separate alien aircraft crash-landed a combined 10 times on the historic night of Sept. 12, 1952, the benchmark of the UFO phenomena, when the “Flatwoods Monster” was born.
All of the craft escaped, although heavily damaged by hopscotching across the rugged terrain of West Virginia, flying low to avoid radar detection, he says. “They were damaged and puddle jumping, and taking off — that’s what they were doing,” Feschino says.
On a steep
hillside, a bevy of youngsters drawn away from a game of sandlot
football, along with some adults, were shaken out of their shoes by the
spectacle of a 12-foot, metallic object that emanated a pungent odor of
sulfur and made sounds that reminded one witness of bacon sizzling in a
fry pan.
Feschino has two books
published on the Flatwoods incident, and a third is a work in progress
to be titled “The Flatwoods Monster — From Myth to Reality.”
Come Sept. 12 — the 56th
anniversary of that riveting episode in Mountain State folklore —
Feschino and renowned UFO researcher-lecturer Stanton Friedman plan to
headline the opening of a two-day, second extravaganza, this one set in
St. Albans, where the author says a craft landed in a frenzy of
activity half a century ago.
This year’s show is titled
“Flatwoods Monster meets Mothman,” the latter a reference to a
bird-like creature said to have haunted Point Pleasant just before the
1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge. A key player will be Freddie May,
one of the youngsters lured from a pickup game of football back in 1952
and a surviving witness to the “Flatwoods Monster.” An illess kept him
from appearing at last summer’s first such event.
Feschino gleaned up to 70
percent of his findings in plowing through the Air Force’s official
document on unknown aircraft, titled “Project Blue Book,” and finds its
amazing that Roswell, N.M., for all its reputation, is covered very
little in government papers.
“You have some newspaper
reports that say the Army captured the saucer, but as far as the case
itself, the official standing on the Roswell case is that it didn’t
happen,” he says.
Based on “Blue Book,” 1952
was the high water mark for UFO activity, with 1,501 reports and 303
officially listed as “unknowns,” and the largest concentration — 1,134
reports — came in the summer months of July, August and September.
Officially, the government
uses the term “flap,” describing it as “a condition, a situation or a
state of being, of a group of persons, characterized by an advanced
degree of confusion that has not quite reached panic proportions.”
For some reason, Feschino
says, no one paid any attention to Flatwoods, but the author invested
17 years of his life digging into the story, learning of 100 different
locations where suspected alien craft were spied in nine states,
largely along the Eastern Seaboard.
“There were thousands of people who saw these things, up and down the East Coast,” he says.
“What I did was to figure
out the flight path trajectories. I worked with all types of people —
aeronautical people, pilots, astronomers, scientists, jet people,
police officers, Air Force people. They helped and assisted me by
putting this whole mess of sightings together.”
Using his own master map, he pinpointed the flights unearthed by exhaustive research.
“And over all the years researching the story, it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” Feschino said.
“By using the ‘Blue Book’
as my primary source, I would go into local newspapers and just pick up
the trails. When I figured out what direction these UFOs were flying, I
would go from the Baltimore area and through Maryland, West Virginia
and Ohio, and I picked up the trail these UFOs were flying that night.”
On the critical night of
Sept. 12, Feschino says, he learned of 21 hours of sustained UFO
activity, and West Virginia was the hub of it all.
“There were 10 actual crash
landings that night in West Virginia,” he says. “They’re all
documented. This is what took 17 years to figure out.”
In order, some of those
landings occurred when the first spaceship crashed at Oglebay Park near
Wheeling, at St. Albans, in Charleston, then up in a suburb named South
Hills, back into the Watt Powell Park area of the capital and in Cabin
Creek, where the same UFO landed five times, the author says.
A second craft buzzed the
nation’s capital, flew over Virginia, then landed in Flatwoods at 7:25
p.m., where the local denizens christened it the “Green Monster,”
Feschino said.
Finally, a third ship hit
the earth in a community called Holly, just outside Flatwoods, took off
and crashed a second time in Sugar Creek along the Elk River, lifted
off again and then went into a third tailspin at Frametown, the author
said.
Some debris was scattered
at the Flatwoods crash site and was shipped off by an Air Force officer
to Washington, including pieces of metal and chunks of an unknown,
plasticlike material.
“I suppose if you went digging through some of these areas, you might find something,” Feschino speculated.
Feschino cannot say if any
effort was ever made by any of the alien invaders to make contact with
West Virginians or other earthlings, but says their ships ranged from
the standard saucer-shape model to the round ones with a flat side, to
ones that resembled cigars.
Yet, his long-running and exhaustive research have convinced him that he has unearthed the truth.
“I actually re-drove and re-enacted that whole night, driving all through Braxton County,” he said.
“It took me years to do it. It was a cold case and I reconstructed it.”
Copyright: The Register-Herald
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