X-Zone Broadcast Network - Nick RedfernNick

This week I talked with Nick Redfern about his new book, The Alien Book” A Guide to Extraterrestrial Beings on Earth. It is a huge compendium of tales of alien creatures, some of them who might have originated on other planets. Nick explains this in the course of our discussion. You can listen to the interview here:

Nick Redfern.

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/19071893

However, he was also of the opinion that some the creatures we think of as terrestrial, might not be from Earth. We talked about the theory that the Loch Ness Monster might be some sort of alien creature, based on the number of UFO sightings in the area. Sure, we understood that sightings of UFOs don’t mean that the monster was alien, only that lots of people had seen UFOs around Loch Ness. But then, we also talked about the recent release of DNA evidence that suggested the monster was a giant eel. Of course, eels have been seen in the Loch for decades so that this was no real revelation because they had no pictures of a giant eel.

We also talked about the Flatwoods Monster from 1952. Nick had mentioned, in his book, that the monster resembled a British psychological operation during the Second World War. We talked about a paper prepared in the late 1940s that examined such ideas. You can read it here:

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2008/RM365.pdf

This led us to the Mothman sightings in the 1960s and eventually into the idea of a race of beings, human or otherwise, that inhabit the Earth with us but remain in hiding. In other words, we talked about just a few of the cases, a little of the information, and some of the theories that are found in the book.

Oh, for those interested, I did open the show with updates from the Mike Rogers interview. Just a couple of points we hadn’t covered and things I thought would interest some of the listeners.

Next week, I’ll be talking with Paul Davids who was the executive producer of the Show Time original movie, Roswell and who has been interested in UFOs since the 1980s. If you have questions for Paul, as always, you can ask them in the comments section here and I’ll try to get them answered during the interview.

History's Project Blue Book - The Flatwoods Monster

Well, I have posted a review of the second episode of Project Blue Book from the point of view of someone who is watching the show for its entertainment value. Now, I’ll look at it from the other side of the fence and that is as a glimpse of history.

This episode is about the Flatwoods, West Virginia, landing of September 12, 1952, and it bears little resemblance to the actual case. It was not a crash as shown, but a landing. There were several people involved in the original sighting and the subsequent events, none of whom are actually portrayed here. There were no townspeople with shotguns surrounding the house like villagers with torches and pitchforks at Frankenstein Castle. There were townspeople with shotguns who went in search of the creature that had been reported, which is not the same thing.

There was no woman held in a hospital to be tossed through the second-floor window to her death. To suggest that this is a fiction based on truth is to stretch the truth to its breaking point. Had they not told me up front, or in the previews, I might not have recognized the situation for what it was. That is, I wouldn’t have known that this was about the Flatwoods Monster.

In fact, they get into more conspiracy here than there was in the real world and this is where I jump to that other side of the fence. This would seem to validate those out there who see conspiracy behind every bush. While I understand the necessity for creating conflict, this one aspect of the show, I fear, is going to prove problematic. In all my years of UFO research, I have never run into anything quite like this. The conspiracy aspect is overblown and gives us the X-Files vibe. The only thing missing is The Smoking Man, but in this show, set in the 1950s, everyone is smoking.

Although they provide information about the case at the end of the episode and on the History website, I try to look at it from the work I have done on the case and what I have written about it. In Encounters in the Desert, I do examine the landing and provide some insight as to who did what and when. Briefly (well not all that briefly), I wrote:

One of the first of the occupant or creature reports to reach Project Blue Book was made from Flatwoods, West Virginia, on September 12, 1952. The Air Force file on the Flatwoods case contains a project card, that form created at ATIC that holds a brief summary of the sighting, what the solution is if one has been offered, and other such easily condensed data and very little else. According to the project card for the Flatwoods sighting, it was a meteor that had been reported over the east coast of the United States on September 12. In fact, the only reference to anything suggesting a creature was on the ATIC Project Card where there is the note about the "West Virginia monster, so called."

All this presents a curious problem. Clearly the Air Force had heard of the case, and just as clearly, they had written it off as a very bright meteor. There is also a note that the meteor (or meteoroid moving through the Solar System for those of a precise and technical nature) landed somewhere in West Virginia (becoming a meteorite). Apparently, the Air Force believed that the "landing" of the meteorite was enough to inspire local residents to imagine a creature on the ground. And, apparently, they believed that the meteorite would account for all the reports of physical evidence by the witnesses.

Ufologist and biologist Ivan T. Sanderson, writing in his UFO book, Uninvited Visitors was aware of both the Air Force explanation and the meteorite that had been reported. Sanderson wrote:

...we met two people who had seen a slow-moving reddish object pass over from the east to west. This was later described and ‘explained’ by a Mr. P.M. Reese of the Maryland Academy of Sciences staff, as a ‘fireball meteor.’ He concluded - incorrectly we believe - that it was ‘traveling at a height of from 60 to 70 miles’ and was about the ‘size of your fist.’... However, a similar, if not the same object was seen over both Frederick and Hagerstown. Also, something comparable was reported about the same time from Kingsport, Tennessee, and from Wheeling and Parkersburg, West Virginia.

The whole story of the occupant sighting, as it is usually told, begins with several boys playing on a football field in Flatwoods. About 7:15 p.m., a bright red light, "rounded the corner of a hill" crossed the valley, seemed to hover above a hilltop and then fell behind the hill. One of the boys, Neil (or sometimes Neal) Nunley, said that he thought the glowing object might have been a meteorite. He knew that fragments of meteorites were collected by scientists and might be valuable, so he suggested they all go look for it.

As they watched, there was a bright orange flare that faded to a dull cherry glow near where the object had disappeared. As three of the boys started up the hill, toward the lights, they saw them cycle through the sequence a couple of times. The lights provided a beacon for them, showing them where the object was.

They ran up the main street, crossed a set of railroad tracks and came to a point where there were three houses, one of them belonging to the May family. Kathleen May came out of the house to learn what was happening and where the boys were going. Told about the lights on the hill, and that "A flying saucer has landed," she said that she wanted to go with them. Before they left, May suggested that Eugene Lemon, a seventeen-year old member of the National Guard (which has no real relevance to the story, but is a fact that is always carefully reported) went to look for a flashlight.

They found the path that lead up the hill, opened and then closed a gate, and continued along the winding path. Lemon and Nunley were in the lead with May, her son Eddie, following, and they were trailed by others including Ronald Shaver and Ted Neal. Tommy Hyer was in the rear, not far behind the others as they climbed the hill.

As they approached the final bend in the path, Lemon’s large dog, which had been running ahead, began barking and howling, and then reappeared, running down the hill, obviously frightened. Lemon noticed, as the dog passed him, that a mist was spreading around them. As they got closer to the top of the hill, they all smelled a foul odor. Their eyes began to water.

Some of them reported that they saw, on the ground in front of them, a big ball of fire, described as the size of an outhouse, or about twenty feet across. It was pulsating orange to red. Interestingly, although it was big and bright, not everyone in the tiny party saw it.

Kathleen May spotted something in a nearby tree. She thought they were the eyes of an owl or other animal. Nunley, who was carrying the

Flatwoods Monster

flashlight, turned it toward the eyes. What they saw was not an animal, but some sort of creature, at least in their perception. The being was large, described as about the size of a full-grown man. They could see no arms or legs, but did see a head that was shaped like an ace of spades. That was a description that would reoccur with all these witnesses. No one was sure if there were eyes on the creature, or if there was a clear space on the head, resembling a window, and that the eyes were somehow behind the that window and behind the face.

Lemon reacted most violently of the small party when he saw the object. He passed out. There was confusion, they were all scared, and no one sure what to do. The boys grabbed the unconscious Lemon and then ran back the way they had come.

They finally reached May’s house. Inside, they managed to bring Lemon back to full consciousness. They called others, and a number of adults arrived at the May house. The group, armed with rifles and flashlights, headed back up the hill, to search for the strange creature. None of the men seemed to be too excited about going up the hill, and in less than a half an hour, they were back, claiming they had found nothing at all.

Still others, including the sheriff, eventually arrived at the house. Most of them didn’t bother to mount any sort of search that night, and the sheriff, who was clearly skeptical, refused to investigate further than talking to May and the boys. It is important to note here that the sheriff had been searching for a downed small aircraft reported to him earlier that evening. He found no evidence of an aircraft accident and no one reported any airplanes missing. The relevance of this will become clear later.

Two newspaper reporters, apparently from rival newspapers, did, at least, walk up the hill, but they saw nothing. They did, however, note the heavy, metallic odor that had been described by May and her group which provided a partial confirmation of the story.

Lee Stewart, Jr., one of the editors of The Braxton Democrat convinced Lemon to lead them back to the spot of the sighting. Given Lemon’s initial reaction, it says something about the kid that he agreed to do so. They found nothing and saw nothing but did smell that strange odor. Steward returned early the next morning and found what he said looked like skid marks about ten feet apart heading down the hill.

The next day, there were follow-up investigations. During some of these additional trips up the hill, it was reported that they had found an area where the grass had been crushed in a circular pattern. Sanderson, who visited the scene a week later, said that he and his fellow investigators were able to see the crushed grass and a slight depression in the ground. No one bothered to photograph this reported physical evidence which is one of the problems that seem to flow through UFO research. People don’t take basic steps to ensure evidence is preserved in some fashion even if it is just a photograph.

Sanderson pointed out that the other physical evidence that had been reported, skid marks on the ground, an oily substance on the grass, and the foul odor, might have been part of the environment. The type of grass growing wild in that area gave off a similar odor and the grass seemed to be the source of the oil. Sanderson said that he couldn’t find the skid marks, and knew of no one who had photographed them.

Gray Barker, a UFO researcher, also arrived a week later and coincidently on the same day as Sanderson, found others to interview. He talked with A. M. Jordan, Neil Nunley’s grandfather who said that he had seen an elongated object flash overhead on the night of the landing. It was shooting red balls of fire from the rear and it seemed to hover before it fell toward the hilltop.

Barker also interviewed Nunley, whose description of the craft disagreed with that of his grandfather though he did say the object seemed to stop and hover before falling to the hill. I wonder if the disparity came from the different perspectives of the witnesses. Sometimes the angles from which something is viewed seems to change the shape of the object and the direction in which it appears.

When this story is reported, it always seems to end here, with the one group, led by May and Lemon, seeing the strange creature or entity. The investigations, carried out by various civilian agencies, always fail to find any proof. Many believe that if there was some corroboration, if someone else, not associated with May and her group, had seen the creature, it would strengthen the report.

As often happens, continued research produced others who said they had seen something strange that night in that area. Alice Williams said that about 7:00 p.m. she saw a slow-moving, glowing object at a low altitude west of Charleston, West Virginia. She, along with Clarence McClane and his wife said they saw ashes falling to the ground as the object seemed to come apart in the sky.

Woodrow Eagle, who was nearing Sutton, West Virginia, not all that far from Flatwoods, said that he had seen what he thought was a small airplane crash into a hillside. He turned around and then stopped at a service station to call the sheriff. The sheriff drove to the site, but he didn’t find the downed aircraft. This was the case the sheriff was investigating before he headed out to May’s house.

The trouble here is that both these witnesses, Williams and Eagle, were apparently members of a group that included Sanderson, and Sanderson had called others in that group to investigate the Flatwoods landing. Given that, a good case for cross contamination can be made. It doesn’t mean that there was any confabulation involved, only that these witnesses were not completely independent of other another as it seemed before those connections were made.

Years later, in the mid-1990s, Kathleen May Horner, was interviewed about the sighting. She told investigators that the two men that everyone thought were newspaper reporters were, in fact, government agents. She also remembered that a local reporter received a letter from some unidentified government agency that revealed the creature was some sort of rocket experiment that had gone wrong that day. There had been four such "rockets" and all of them fell back to earth.

The government agents were able to recover all but one and that one had been seen in Flatwoods. It must be noted here that there is no corroboration for this story of government intervention and that it did not surface until forty years after the fact.

There are few points of corroboration for this tale, even among those who were together that night. The descriptions of the craft in flight sound more like a bolide, that is, a very bright meteor. Newspapers from other communities in the region report on just such a meteor. P. M. Reese from the Maryland Academy of Sciences suggested the red fireball was relatively slow moving and 60 to 70 miles high.

And we know that meteors can seem to climb, though that is an optical illusion, that they can seem to hover briefly, and that they can seem to maneuver, again optical illusions. The witness testimony here is not sufficient to reject meteor, especially when it is remembered that the object was seen over a large region, suggesting something that was very bright and very high. People looking up into the night sky are simply unable to judge height and speed with any degree of accuracy. A meteor of sufficient size and brightness was seen that night.

Even if we reject, for whatever reason, the theory that any of the Flatwoods witnesses saw a meteor, we can look at the descriptions and how they vary. Even those who trekked up the hill report things differently, from the color and shape of the craft to even whether anything was sitting on the ground. Sanderson reported that the object was black but glowing red and shaped like the ace of spades, but Barker said it was spherical and some of those he interviewed said they hadn’t seen it at all.

Jerry Clark reported that the witnesses stuck to their stories but that doesn’t mean what they saw was grounded in our shared reality. That they were truly frightened only suggests they were telling the truth about what they thought they saw, but not that they saw an extraterrestrial being.

As I reviewed the literature on this, I am struck by the disparity of the witness descriptions and how these sorts of things can be overlooked. I am surprised that there are descriptions of physical remains but there is little to document any such evidence. I am struck by a number of witnesses who said they saw the bolide and that the bolide was what everyone saw... and yes, many believe that a bolide has landed close by when it has either burned out and not touched down or it landed hundreds if not thousands of miles away. In fact, several bolides have been reported to authorities as aircraft accidents... just like the one the sheriff investigated that night.

This case seems to be the result of the bolide and the hysteria brought on UFO sightings that were headline news around the country including the impressive sightings from Washington, D.C. It seems that those who climbed the hill, believing they were going to find a landed flying saucer, talked themselves into the hysteria and when they saw something in a tree with eyes that glowed in the light of their flashlights, convinced themselves they had seen an alien creature.

And, no, this isn’t a perfect resolution. It makes too many assumptions. But the evidence for a UFO sighting and a landing with an alien creature or maybe some sort of an alien robot is very weak at best. Given the timing of the sighting, given the lack of physical evidence, given the conflicting witness statements and given the well-known bias of the original investigators, and there isn’t much left here.

In the end, I’m afraid that the terrestrial explanation is more likely the correct one here. I’m not completely sold on it but it seems that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that. Until something changes, that’s probably where it is going to stay.

This then is the story of the Flatwoods monster. There was another sighting nearby that night but it is not relevant to our discussion. I covered it in Encounters in the Desert. Since History’s Project Blue Book did not mention it, I have left it out of this.

I will point out that the idea that the Air Force had sent in investigators is not corroborated by the Project Blue Book files. In fact, the entire Blue Book file on the case, as noted, consists of two pages, the project card and a one-page synopsis of the sightings. The idea that there were two Air Force investigators in the area surfaced much later.

I look forward to the next episode, which looks to be about the Lubbock Lights. I can tell you all right now that the lights did not affect the power grid in Lubbock, but the graphic in the preview did look interesting

Project Blue Book - Paul Hynek's Words

I was more than a little disturbed by the latest episode of Project Blue Book. The case, based loosely, and I do mean loosely, on the Flatwoods, West Virginia, landing of September 12, 1952, was barely recognizable. They portrayed it as a crash and left out many of the witnesses, focusing on three… a mother and her two boys.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek

What disturbed me was the first interaction between that mother and Allen Hynek. The captain with him introduced him as Dr. Hynek and it was clear the mother thought that he was a physician. He didn’t do anything to suggest he wasn’t and I couldn’t see Allen Hynek doing something like that.

But I also know that those of us not involved shouldn’t assume outrage on the part of those who are. You can think of many things in the modern world where someone gains attention by his or her outrage on the part of another. I thought I would find out what the family of Allen Hynek thought about this series and the way Allen and his wife were presented. Here is the response I received from Paul Hynek. I have left out the very kind words directed at me. With his permission, I quote in part:

Project Blue Book is a highly dramatized portrayal of my father's work with the US Air Force. As with other dramatic representations, it is not meant to be accurate in all of its details. So you can find many incidents depicted in the show that didn't actually happen in real life. I don't know offhand if my father read the whole Encyclopedia Britannica (let alone twice) when he was indeed laid up with Scarlet Fever. It wouldn't surprise me, given the frequent exhortations he made to me as a child to consult the damn encyclopedia. I have, however, attached photos of the astronomy text book that he had during this time that he often cited as creating his interest in astronomy to begin with. This is an example of something that perhaps not accurate, is certainly authentic. 

My father was a public figure, and HISTORY could have made Project Blue Book without any input from the Hynek family. However, they invited my brother Joel and I to serve as consultants on the show, so I know first hand that creator David O'Leary, showrunner Sean Jablonski, the producers, HISTORY executive Arturo Interian, and Aidan Gillen and Laura Mennell and the rest of the cast have gone to great efforts to portray my parents and the other characters in an authentic and respectful fashion. In addition, each episode is based on a real case as you remarked on in your article with the Gorman dogfight, is followed by actual information, and also has additional accompanying interviews on the website with Jacques Vallee, Robert Friend, Richard Dolan, Joel, me, and others to present actual recollections. HISTORY has also invited Joel and me to participate in numerous public forums to talk about our real life father and his actual views.

In broad strokes, the show accurately portrays my father as a highly intelligent scientist who initially thought that flying saucers were nothing more than post-war hysteria who comes to believe there is something to the phenomenon. He therefore wound up butting heads with an Air Force that was more concerned, and rightly so, with national security and tamping down public hysteria than they were with honest scientific inquiry - at least conducted out of Wright-Patterson. I also believe that should the show continue into subsequent seasons, it will show the evolution that my mother underwent as well to become an important figure in UFOLOGY in her own right. As a loving and admiring son, I'm delighted that my father's decades of work trying to answer one of the most important questions ever to face mankind are once again getting their just due.

Hynek’s family is participating in the project, and if they are cool with the way he’s portrayed, then how am I to be outraged by it. While there are other problems with the show, and I don’t know how many people bother with following up to learn the truth about the incidents presented, Paul Hynek, believes they are making a sincere effort to get the real information out to the public.

I will admit here that I am ambivalent about all this. I see the show as just that. A show. Just like any other scripted series on television, though one that is attached to the real world. I see that they have worked hard to recreate the world of more than half a century ago, and they seemed to have captured the flavor of the times. I do wish they wouldn’t bring in the nonsense of MJ-12 and the MIB, but then this is a television show and you must have some conflict or you end up with, well, I wanted to say Seinfeld, but that certainly worked for a decade or so.

I say again that I am disappointed in the direction it is taking but I say that as one who has been immersed in the UFO field for a very long time. I’m disappointed by the way the military is shown, but only because they don’t understand military customs, something they could have fixed with consultant who had actually served as an officer.

On the other hand, I do enjoy the show and I just can’t help it. I guess I’m able to separate the program from UFO research. They do make it clear that the stories as they tell them are not the reports as they were actually received. As I say, I’m ambivalent at this point… I just don’t know if I should be outraged or entertained… at the moment, I’m opting for entertained.

As a final thought. This from Paul Hynek. “If my Dad were still around, I can imagine him putting on his slippers, cooking some popcorn, sitting in his comfy chair and watching the show, having a grand old time.”

Cars Stalled by UFOs - Part Two

I have long been under the impression that in many UFO EM cases in which car engines stalled, the car spontaneously started when the UFO departed. I then noticed in a couple of cases that it was reported that the car was restarted, which is not the same as it just restarting up on its own. I had suggested that we might want to revisit these cases of EM effects to see what we might learn from them.

Using various sources including my files, Project Blue Book, Dick Hall’s The UFO Evidence, Mark Rodeghier’s UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference (because, frankly, I wasn’t all that interested in UFO interference with radio stations, TV sets, and other such manifestations of EM effects) and The Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (known as the Condon Committee), I was able to learn some interesting things.

The first reported instance of a UFO (described as a globular light) causing any sort of EM effect was on May 19, 1909. A motorcyclist said that his headlight failed as the light passed overhead. When it was gone, the motorcycle light came back on.

The first case in which an engine was stalled was from California in the spring of 1944 or 1945. According to the APRO Bulletin of Jan/Feb 1968, two school teachers were driving in the mountains when their car engine stalled. They spotted a cigar-shaped craft hanging motionless in the air. After watching it for a while, the driver turned the key to start the engine, but it wouldn’t start. When the object left, the driver tried again, but the car still would not start. After several minutes a tow truck driver stopped to help but could find no reason for the engine to quit or why it wouldn’t start when it started by itself.

The first case in which the car had to be started after the UFO disappeared was reported on September 13, 1952 from Frametown, West Virginia, which is part of the Flatwoods Monster case. A couple said they were traveling with their daughter when they saw a bright light and their car stalled. They did see a creature, which is irrelevant to us here. When the UFO took off, apparently after recovering the creature, the car could then be restarted.

From then on, it seemed that the rule was that the car, if stalled, had to be restarted. According to an analysis of the cases, it seems that in only five to six percent of the reports that involved a stalled engine did the car start without an action taken by the driver.

I will note here that there were a number of cases in which it wasn’t clear if the car had to be restarted or if it restarted on its own. In those reports, it was noted only that once the UFO was gone, the “car acted normally.” That could mean almost anything, including that the engine started spontaneously or that the driver started it.

The other thing to be noted is that I found many cases in which the radios filled with static and the headlights dimmed or faded out completely, but the engine didn’t stall. In some of them the engine began to run roughly or sputtered, but never stopped. In these reports once the UFO was gone, the engine smoothed out and the lights and the radio began to operate properly as well.

Rodeghier reported that for a long time that it was only the gasoline engines that stalled but diesel engines seemed to be immune. Rodeghier wrote, “For example, a UFO passed over two tractors in Forli, Italy, on November 14, 1954, one tractor with a diesel engine the other with an internal combustion engine. The engine of the diesel tractor continued to operate, but the other tractor’s engine stopped and could not be started until the UFO had vanished.”

The Condon Committee, without much apparent enthusiasm, attempted to study EM effects. They looked at one case that had happened while their investigation was in progress. They found discrepancies in the witness story, didn’t like that it was single witness, and found no evidence that the car had been subjected to a powerful magnetic field. They concluded that, “Because of the vagueness of the witness’ description of the ‘object,’ the wide inconsistencies in his estimates of its size and distance, the fact that no one else observed the alleged event, and the fact that the car body did not show evidence of exposure to strong magnetic fields, more detailed investigation of this event as a source of evidence related to electro-magnetic effect on automobiles did not seem warranted.”

They eventually concluded the claims of interference with engines were the most puzzling. “The claim is frequently made, sometimes in reports that are impressive because they involve multiple independent witnesses. Witnesses seem certain that the function of their cars was affected by the unidentified object, which sometimes reportedly was not seen until after the malfunction was noted. No satisfactory explanation for such effects, if indeed they occurred, is apparent.”

Or, in other words, this is truly puzzling, but we’re just not sure that such things happen. We investigated one case of a single witness, and we just don’t like it because he was unable to estimate the size and distance to the UFO with any sort of reliability. And while we know about Levelland (as noted in their index with but a single reference to it), we just don’t think these things happen and therefore we reject them.

What I learned here is that very few of the cases in which the car stalled, did the engine seem to restart spontaneously. The number of them so low, that I wonder if, as has been suggested by others elsewhere, that those reports are in error. That the driver, without realizing it, did something to cause the car to restart. There seems to be no mechanical, chemical, or electrical reason for the engine to start without an action by the driver. Nearly everyone agrees with this from the scientists of the Condon Committee to mechanics and automobile engineers. Once the circuit is interrupted, the car will not start unless someone does something.

Frank Feschino and the Flatwoods Monster

Let’s talk about the Flatwoods Monster one more time. This is a case, because of its high strangeness, that is easy to dismiss. A flying saucer landing on a hill with some kind of floating creature coming from it. One that might have had glowing eyes or one that might have "shot" rays from its eyes. Something that might have left landing traces that no one bothered to document at the time. And one in which the craft and creature disappeared before the corroborating witnesses could get there to take a look around.

And one that I found difficult to believe because one of the researchers, Frank Feschino, had posted on a web site a quote attributed to me about his book claiming that the Air Force had engaged in combat with the flying saucers after an order had been given to "Shoot Them Down."

What have we learned in the last week.

The webmaster, Alfred Lehmberg, came forward and said that Feschino had nothing to do with that mistake. Lemberg said that he had taken the quote from a closed discussion group and attributed it to me because I had started the specific thread. Someone else, posting a comment to that thread had made the comment and Lehmberg didn’t pay close attention to the attribution. An honest mistake, he said.

I can live with that. People make mistakes in attribution.

(Richard Dolan, in his massive UFOs and the National Security State makes something of an error in attribution. In writing about the testimony of Barbara Dugger, he credits, in a footnote, Stan Friedman and his book. If you follow that to Friedman’s book, you find the interview attributed to me. Don Schmitt and I had conducted it and provided a copy of the video tape to the Fund for UFO Research. Friedman, and Don Berliner used the tape as a source in their book. So, the attribution was essentially correct, but the original source of the interview had not been made clear. But I digress...)

What this also means is that Feschino had nothing to do with the misidentified quote.

What it also means that one of the reasons to reject the information in his books has been eliminated. You might find his work sloppy or that he leapt to conclusions, but you can’t say he was responsible for the misidentified quote. That belongs to Lehmberg and he has taken complete ownership of it.

Where does that leave me on the question of the Flatwoods Monster. Well, in this world, in which it would be nice to be invited to speak at all these conventions, where it would be nice to have others buying the books that I write, I find it difficult to say something or embrace something in which I have doubts. If I embraced everything... abductions, cattle mutilations, crop circles, every strange and bizarre UFO story... then I would find myself on lots of convention programs. But I just can’t do that.

I have to believe what I say about the topic and with the Flatwoods Monster, I have difficulty embracing the tale as told. It seems that the bolide explanation for the sighting is reasonable. It seems that the hysteria of the witnesses contributed to their sighting. It seems that, by September, 1952, with the newspapers filled with stories of flying saucers, reasonable to believe that the idea of alien visitation wasn’t all that far from the minds of the witnesses. It all seems a reasonable explanation to me.

But Frank Feschino has found some interesting information. I do not know why an officer in the National Guard would talk about deploying soldiers into the area. Deployment of National Guard forces is strictly controlled, if for no other reason than purposes of pay. An officer can’t order his soldiers into the field unless there is imminent loss of life and then he better have some very persuasive evidence.

So, I suppose as some say, this would be in my gray basket (though I dislike that term) but it would be a very light gray. I don’t believe there is much of substance here, but it never hurts to take a closer look. Sometimes I find that I have been mistaken... but only sometimes.

The Flatwoods Monster

Since I was asked about this case, I thought that I would review it and see where we are on it today. I will tell you that the first thing I found was a web site promoting a book about the case (or the follow on book that is an outgrowth of this case as seen here) that I hadn’t read, though I knew about it. I wouldn’t have mentioned this, but the first thing I saw was a quote, from me, endorsing the book, using language that I wouldn’t use and failing to identify me as a retired Army officer.

Given this, I’m more than a little concerned about the validity of anything that appears in the book, or the research that produced it. Using me to endorse the book when I did no such thing suggests someone who is less than candid in other areas of research. The only question is who is responsible for the quote and why was it even put up. I’ll have more on this in a later post.