Paranormal Magazine

Government files pose more questions than answers over Oxfordshire sightings, says local UFO expert. To read more, click here.

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.”

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BARELY a week has passed this summer without one national newspaper or another carrying a story about UFO sightings across Britain.

And now UFOs are claimed to have been spotted over Royston, Hertfordshire too.

The Crow was contacted by paranormal investigation group Scope Paranormal, which said that four employees on the York Way industrial estate had spotted an unusual object in the sky at 1am on July 25.

The witnesses said that they saw a “bat-winged” shape with an orange circle of light in the middle hovering silently over the industrial estate for about 20 seconds. It then disappeared at speed.

And when Scope Paranormal decided to visit the industrial estate to investigate further, we went to meet them.

Sharon Chesterman, one of the group’s investigators, said that most of this summer’s sightings can be dismissed as Chinese lanterns, which are often lit and released into the night sky at parties and barbecues.

But she does NOT believe that Chinese lanterns are responsible for the sightings in Royston.

“We are taking this sighting seriously because the shape of the bat wings is very rare and there was also more than one witness,” she said.

“Out of hundreds of sightings nationally this summer, we believe this is the first bat-winged object.”

According to information released by the Ministry of Defence, the last reported UFO sighting over Royston was on September 2, 2001.

The report states that a witness saw a rectangular-triangle shaped object with a white pulsating light moving north-east.

Scope Paranormal was founded in November 2007 and offers a free, confidential investigation service for all things paranormal, including UFO sightings.

Trevor Shreeve, one of the co-founders of the group, said: “We use scientific techniques to try and prove or disprove whether something is paranormal or a natural or man-made occurrence.”

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UFOS have been popping up en masse over Texas and Brazil recently, grounding planes in Chicago, menacing Indiana Jones and the Energizer Bunny, and planting themselves firmly in the minds of the American public.

The spaceships arrived in San Jose this past weekend, as the floating annual symposium of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) was held this year at the Doubletree Inn. Co-organized by local businessman Les Valez (founder of the Organization for Paranormal Understanding and Support) MUFON ‘08 attracted nearly 600 registrants with presentations like “Britain’s X-Files,” “Resolving Current Reporting Bias of Pilots” and “Chilean Army Investigates UFOs.”

Alejandro Rojas, MUFON’s press agent, quoted from the ad campaign for the new X-Files movie, responding to the common perception that UFO researchers have hyperactive imaginations.

“We don’t want to believe,” he said. “The evidence led us to believe.”

While several attendees debated the purpose of alien visitations, there was no real consensus among the collection of researchers, field investigators, interested skeptics and “experiencers.” It’s agreed, at the very least, that so-called “UAPs” (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, the new, politically correct replacement for the much-maligned “UFOs”), are “an observed technology beyond our own.”

Ted Roe, co-founder and executive director of NARCAP (the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena), said the Air Force coined the term “UFO” to be objective. “But just the opposite has come to be the case,” he said.

Nick Pope, who investigated UFO sightings for the British Ministry of Defence, summed up the belief of many of the attendees: “It’s always been my contention that this is a defense and aviation safety issue … and the government is the only group which can do a proper investigation.”

The hottest selling item at the MUFON shop, a sky blue T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Doing the Air Force’s job since 1969,” sums up the UFOlogists’ sense of above-board governmental interest in the topic. But recent sightings in Texas, a number of television shows, the 2006 sighting over Chicago’s O’Hare airport and astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s recent statements, have all contributed to a renewed interest among the general public.

“Ultimately, this subject is events-led,” Pope said, explaining that the U.K. is in the middle of the biggest wave of sightings in decades. “When they’re filmed over military bases and reported by police, it’s little wonder that our biggest daily newspaper has made this a front page story.” To much applause, he continued: “Can you imagine that happening in the States?”

Although Texas state director Ken Cherry put MUFON on the “international map” by getting the word out about January sightings in Stephenville, Texas, the federal government has yet to release any kind of official statement—on anything UFO-related. (Cherry’s report helped increase sightings reported to MUFON from 200 to 800 a month.)

While half of the attendees were local, others traveled from as far afield as Tennessee, Canada and Mexico. The international panel of speakers included a retired Belgian major general, an army pilot from Chile, an attorney from Peru and researchers from Mexico and Turkey.

Larry Lemke, a San Jose–based aerospace engineer who develops space mission projects for NASA, said he applied “the process of scientific and engineering analysis to UFO reports to uncover their cryptic aspects.”

I also learned that the hot spot replacing Area 51 is on the border of Colorado and Utah, and that some “experiencers” can draw down UFOs almost at will. One conference attendee claimed that military-grade night-vision infrared glasses can make the skies “look busier than the 101 freeway.”

The majority of speakers went out of their way to avoid such terms as “alien” and “extra-terrestrial.” From the podium, Ted Roe practically admitted that MUFON attendees telling tales of alien abduction are deluded.

“Most of the UFO community doesn’t know that there’s not one proven incursion by nonhuman intelligence,” Roe said.

That being said, many of the attendees claimed to have been affected or even traumatized by what they’ve either sighted or encountered. One Pennsylvania “experiencer” said he has been contacted and abducted by a number of different alien races.

“They’re here because radiation puts holes in space time,” he said, also informing me that pyramid-shaped UFOs are “evil” while pointing to his chest, the location of an alien implant.

The MUFON conference is one of the few places where he feels at home.

Researcher Leslie Kean, who organized a press conference aimed at governmental UFO disclosure, called for an honest discussion about unexplained phenomena.

“We deserve more openness and a serious pursuit of the facts,” Kean said.

A number of countries—including France, Britain, Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Ecuador—have already made their UFO files available to the public. “The U.S. is holding everybody else back,” she said.

“Our government doesn’t mind scaring us,” one attendee commented. “They do it all the time. I’d prefer some kind of recognition of this phenomenon, which is just as relevant as a terrorist alert, and less frightening.”

Hopkins said during the closing panel that from his research with abductees, “We don’t have much that’s pleasant or benign.” With that in mind, co-organizer Valez urges locals who feel they’ve had an experience to get in touch with OPUS. Intersecting with MUFON, the group helps “people who have had paranormal experiences.”

“Paranormal,” for OPUS, has mostly meant out-of-this-world. “There’s no question that something is happening,” said Valez, who helped get the MUFON conference held here for the first time since the 1960s. “Perhaps it’s extraterrestrial in nature. Or time-travelers, or interdimensional beings.”

Another notion is that there’s element of UFO action that’s military, and definitely terrestrial.

“It could be all of these planes that we’re dealing with,” Valez said. “The point is, we still don’t have the tools or the terminology.”

Bright lights hover in the sky, sometimes in a triangular formation, and then apparently fly off at great speed.

They have been witnessed for months by Mrs Lorraine Senior at her home near Woodkirk Valley Country Club. Leeds Road. Finally, she took some shots of them on her mobile phone camera and showed them to her sceptical sister, Yvonne Hawthorne, of Beeston.

Yvonne, 47, who works on National Express trains between Leeds and London, called at the British Library for a coffee break.

There she showed the eight-minute film to a UFO enthusiast who declared it to be first class footage.

“When my sister first told me the lights were coming near her balcony, I said she was hallucinating,” said Yvonne. “But she insisted she was right.

“They come regularly at weekends about 11.30pm and hang around for about 20 minutes. They are oval and diamond-shaped and have multi-coloured lights.

“Sometimes they fly in a triangular formation and shoot off at great speed. I would guess they are about half a mile away. There is nothing in the area but green fields. I’m a believer in them.

“I have been itching to tell people about them but it’s embarrassing unless you can provide footage like this.”

A close encounter of the first kind is a sighting of one or more unidentified flying objects which include odd lights and flying saucers. Whereas a close encounter of the third kind, popularised by the Stephen Spielberg film of that name, is observation of animate beings linked to a UFO sighting.

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