Our Heroes Betrayed - Part I of IV

Our Heroes Betrayed 

The Other Side Of The Flatwoods Monster

The 65th Anniversary of the Flatwoods Monster Incident

by Alfred Lehmberg with Frank C. Feschino, Jr.

PART I of IV

It's September 12th, 1952, and you're a flight officer in the nascent Air Forces of the United States. You've been assigned to an airbase on the azure, green, and frothy white coast of panhandle Florida. You are trained and educated to be part of the pool from which would later be drawn moon-walking astronauts. You're not arrogant, only appropriately confident; see, with few contenders of this Earth? You and your brothers would compete to rule Earth's skies. The reader will remember, and this writer recalls two decades of hands-on experience with same:

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth 

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; 

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth 

Of sun-split clouds -- and done a hundred things 

You have not dreamed of -- wheeled and soared and swung 

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, 

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung 

My eager craft through footless halls of air. 

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue, 

I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace 

Where never lark, or even eagle flew. 

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod 

The high untresspassed sanctity of space, 

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God. 

-- RCAF Flight-Lieutenant John Gillespie Magee Jr. 

(1922-1941)

At the time, reader, America is involved in a Cold War with the Soviet Union and then further embroiled in the beginning quagmire of near, middle, and far eastern war. Korea.

A new type of conflict has been going on above the battlefields in the ironic "land of morning calm." One might predict it would not be a better one.

See, this war, unlike any before it, involves a very different type of conflict currently perpetrated to preceding... ...almost quaint attempts. These include a new type of fighter aircraft. Turbine powered jets are the terrible original thing.

A new plateau of medieval savagery is reached. The aerial struggle between the Soviet MIG-15s and American Air Force jets were a novel kind of "grueling and deadly." Does the reader recall the lurid tales of "MIG Alley"? Stories pale to reality's existentiality.

Stateside, these new Air Force and Navy fighters are spring-loaded around the continental US in anticipation of a Soviet nuclear air strike. A newly formed Ground Observers Corps, sky-watchers 200,000 strong (volunteer civilians across the entire country), assisted the Air Force in monitoring the skies... on the lookout for Soviet bombers. This writer's mother was in the GOC and still has her awarded "Observer" Wings. See, during this time, the radar network throughout America was decidedly insufficient and there were many defense "holes" across the country, especially under the 5,000-foot elevation. Something had to be done.

The implementation of volunteers placed at strategic observation posts across the United States to report suspicious aircraft to the Air Force was a major assistance to the Air Defense Command, but these were not enough! The problem was bigger than that... another 300,000 volunteers were needed to sufficiently accomplish this defensive effort. That's reaching for 500,000 thousand, perhaps, close to the Air Force and asking questions... half a million people talking to their friends... calling their Congressman, perhaps... 

Yes, there was a great deal of public awareness, real pressure on the United States Air Forces during this time. Still, at this precise moment, oddly enough, another vast problem had cleared an evidentiary horizon. This other and very highly strange problem complicated matters even further and had nothing to do with Soviet bombers. 

Question. What else might be seen and reported by the GOC?

In not to be forgotten redux, the 1952 "Summer of the Saucers" UFO flap had begun over America as the Air Force reported a record amount of UFO sightings to Project Blue Book for that year. There were 1,501 of these reports, of which 301 were evaluated as "Unknowns." Unknowns, remember, are quantified as that which has enough information so as it should be known, but remains unknown, still. Cue, here, the ominous music...

For reference, Blue Book chief, Captain Edward Ruppelt informed, "If you can pin down a date that the Big Flap started, it would probably be about June 1." Now, during those summer months of June, July, August, and September, the USAF received a staggering, 1,134 UFO reports. Eventually, an updated Blue Book evaluated 303 of those sightings as "Unknowns." The music remains to unsettlingly echo.

Now, enter two of the most well-known UFO incidents in American history occurring over and near Washington, DC. These occurred on the consecutive weekends of July 19-20 and July 26-27.  On those two weekends, UFOs wreaked holy havoc with the Air Force near the Capitol, prompting the Air Defense Command to scramble fighter jets in an attempt to intercept them.  

On July 28, 1952, the Washington Daily News reports a follow-up story in its article, Jets Ready to Chase Lights-24-Hour Alert Ordered After Second Appearance Here. It summarized, "Jet interceptors of the Eastern Air Defense Command are on stand-by-round-the-clock orders today [July 28] to take off immediately if any more mysterious lights show up in the sky or on radar screens." More menacing music, reader.

On the following day, July 29, additional information was released to a jittery American public with regard to the "growing flying saucer problem" across the country, revealing how the Air Force was handling the problem. To some, it was comforting to know that our Air Force was protecting our country from intruders, but to others it was an outrageous and disturbing, forget horrifying, revelation! 

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reported in their headline from an "International News Service" release, "Air Force Orders Jets to Shoot Down Flying Saucers If They Refuse To Land." A USAF Senior Public Information Officer revealed the following on July 28: "Lt. Col. Moncel Monts, Information Officer stated unequivocally, "Jet pilots are and have been under orders to investigate unidentified objects, and to shoot them down if they can't talk them down." The music intensifies threateningly.

The San Francisco Examiner reported the "International News Service" release information in their July 29 article: "Jets on 24-Hour Alert to Shoot Down 'Flying Saucers.'" It stated, "The Air Force revealed today [July 28] that jet pilots have been placed on twenty-four-hour nationwide 'alert' against 'flying saucers' with orders to 'shoot them down' if they refuse to land."  Harsh musical climax, like a blow! This is fact. The music can fade, for now.

Back to you, Pilot, a crackerjack jet-jock and honest-to-God air warrior able to trespass on the sky's hallowed halls; you're excellent at your craft and bear out all the expectations of peers and superiors alike. Just this moment, almost, you've been signed off as worthy enough to helm the business seat of America's cutting edge and state of the art fighter jet, the F-94 Starfire.

This blowtorching winged cigar, looking like a beginning meld of the 20th and 21st Centuries, was an edge-of-the-sonic-envelope attack dart which could be bristling with rockets entirely able knock out Soviet bombers with single punches, at least four 50 caliber machine guns for lesser mayhem, some new far-reaching sensory avionics, and a first ever computer assisted targeting system. Yeah. That far back.

A craft for beginners? No, it was top guns who were trusted with this airplane, friends and neighbors. Make no mistake about that. A million dollar airplane is a million dollar airplane and difficult to grow on trees. This one went over four million in today's dollars.

Tyndall AFB, 1952 

Currently, you're on standby alert at a coastal base in Florida named, oh... Tyndall, perhaps. Why?

Revealed by one Frank C. Feschino, Jr., author of the well regarded books and papers extant on the subject of this essay, America, and assuming collaboration with like-minded friends and allies, decided as mentioned above that it would be in America's best interest to shoot down all unidentified flying objects refusing to identify themselves or even make contact with authorities in the air. Hubris can sometimes know zero bounds.

As the reader now knows, the history of that time shows the summer of 1952 sporting a well reported, if inordinate, amount of UFO activity, everywhere, but essentially and especially over restricted areas in Washington DC, to include even the White House! This was, again, the "Summer Of Saucers" flap of your year, Pilot, reminding the reader that it was the biggest one of our history, hands down.

Standing orders became authorization to shoot down uncommunicative UFOs, remember, wherever they were detected... at all cost to man and machine as we shall see; we wanted one of those things... badly. Suffer a brief history lesson now, reader.

Pioneer UFO researcher, Combat Aviator, military aide to Charles Lindbergh, and popular author Major Donald Keyhoe, who worked closely with the Air Force in gaining information about the saucers, wrote about UFOs in a few of his books. In his 1960 manuscript, FLYING SAUCERS-TOP SECRET, Keyhoe revealed the following about an Air Force statement made in 1947.

"On June 27, the Air Force stated," Keyhoe informs with regard to a heard testimony from top military officials, "...'We have no idea what they are.'..."

Keyhoe continues, "[I'm] seriously concerned they ordered their pilots to down a UFO for examination by shooting them or by ramming them and then bailing out." Jay, Joe, and Marigold!

See, in Keyhoe's 1955 book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy he explains, "In 1949 the Air Force told me that they had been ordered to 'get' a flying saucer by any possible means. This was admitted by an intelligence officer at the Pentagon, Major Jere Boggs. In front of General Story Smith, Boggs told me that one Air Force pilot had fired at a saucer over New Jersey." All Keyhoe's reports were from first-handers well inside.

In one of Keyhoe's later books published in 1973, Aliens From Space, Keyhoe discloses even more startling information from his 1949 meeting at the Pentagon. He makes known another stunning quote from Major Boggs: "We were naturally anxious to get hold of one of these things. We told pilots to do practically anything in reason, even if they had to grab one by the tail." Ramming doesn't seem so entirely out of the question. 

During the famous July 29, 1952, Flying Saucer Press conference held at the Pentagon, Major Gen. Roger Ramey, USAF Director of Operations, confounded, confabulated, and confused the press with his double-talk in the form of "temperature inversion" explanations. This was a disingenuous attempt to dispel the public's growing fear of flying saucers. Sure, lie to the public. That always helps.

Additionally, in an unsettling half-turn on July 30,  it was reported by the Louisville Courier-Journal in its article, Radar Spots 'Saucers' Over Washington Again, that "Major General Roger Ramey, Deputy Chief of the Air Force Staff of Operations (sic), told the news conference that interceptor planes had raced aloft several hundred times as a result of reported sightings of unidentified objects. He said, that was standard procedure." ...For temperature inversions?

Justifiably, Air Force jets chasing after UFOs with the possibility of intercepting and shooting one down did not sit too well with some people. This was especially true with one man in particular, the esteemed Robert Farnsworth, the President of the United States Rocket Society.

~~

Next: Farnsworth recoils in horror and makes a heartfelt plea, Outrage and Incredulity, Numerical justifications and red flags, ...and your air alert gets called.

Part I of IV
https://alienviewgroup.blogspot.com/2017/08/our-heroes-betrayed-part-i-of-iv.html

Part II of IV
https://alienviewgroup.blogspot.com/2017/08/our-heroes-betrayed-part-ii-of-iv.html

Part III of IV
https://alienviewgroup.blogspot.com/2017/09/our-heroes-betrayed-part-iii-of-iv.html

Part IV of IV
https://alienviewgroup.blogspot.com/2017/09/our-heroes-betrayed-part-iv-of-iv.html

...Thought Makes Real...

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Consider enigma—uncertainty's principle… And the man who brought it forth? He's a bright star in the blackness, on which we'd quickly shut a door.
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It's said he served the Nazis. Why? To build atomic bombs. The watchers watched him closely… He could've built them all along!
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See, they drank the "heavy water," in the Nazi camp of Hitler. Heisenberg deterred best thrust. He was that project's crippler.
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...Onward? Contribution! He explained the all and all. Too, a half turn from what polarized? Then we clearly hear his call.
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He saw that fateful glimmer in the logic of pure math… ...How we shimmer in a vagueness of a hard to follow path; it's observation makes the *facts*—we call reality! Too, that truth, of course one sees, contrives for you and me.

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This is why your *everything* is not what others think! That's why and how your *everything* degrades and rots to stink! This is when you dump your toxins, then, in other people's garbage. This is why and how you don't know peace... or any gainful yardage!

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Heisenberg's new principle would save us from mere stasis, and the wealth of chance is offered up in view. 

Heisenberg informs us, friend, that anything can happen! As it happens? Then it can! It's just and true...

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Heisenberg suggests that you can think and make things happen. All your prophecy and dreams can come alive… 

...Just be careful what you wish for... many times it is suggested: That the clothes you wear in hell you have contrived.

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Heisenberg suggests that this *uncertainty* is everywhere... ...Under every rock as it's ensconced in every closet! 

...Regarding disappointment when what's cherished doesn't happen? You're standing in their queue contrived to take your small deposit?

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Probability's reality and it happens in a curve. Anything can happen, as it must. 

Any wonder raucous "Bells," then, are tolling unexpected? ...With the Earth abiding, violently, erosions of her trust?

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It's the choices that we make that are the fixing points in space. "Choice" is but a measurement we tool. 

Make a choice in one way and a joy is had for all; make another? You're a monster... or a fool.

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My hat is off to Heisenberg for showing us we've chance. As anything can happen, we may even do what's right! 

Know all is as you think it, even though it never was! ...And justice only happens when you make it in your sight.

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• lehmberg2002@gmail.com
• www.AlienView.net

You want justice—you MAKE justice. Try noisily pointing out its sullen antithesis where you think it might be lurking! Those contriving to bitch about your contrary activity in this regard are the ones profiting most from things staying as they are! Consider "property seizure" on arbitrary suspicion — consider the IRS. Consider the FED. FDA? Feh!
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Consider being accused of putting radioactive material in someone's toothpaste… Bogus is as bogus does...
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Consider that there is no thing above examination. No institution or government. No agency or corporation. No God or religion. No me, myself, nor I... No friend, enemy, nor simulacrum of same.
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Media? A smearing of all the preceding deserves special attention and a consummate reportage as it defines what our aggregate consciousness endures. These individual consciousnesses are important because an aggregate consciousness makes our reality out of whole cloth. Isn't that marvelous?
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Heisenberg was first to articulate this. We think ... ...so make things so.
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Our recognition of this is a result of developing a new mammalian aggregate consciousness at the expense of the old, outdated, and increasingly irrelevant reptilian one —I suspect— as this pertains to the soul of our culture and fabrics of our societies.
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Once again, the individual is key. All it ever took was one vote to win remember... which is what is so egregiously destructive about the current so-called government of the United States.
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...A result of likely fraud, gerrymandering, corporatism, moral and ethical corruption, banal criminality, and a mixture of church and state? It discounts individuality, free thinking expression, and creativity... ...so must fail for the same reason classical communism fails... ...for the same reasons repeating tyranny fails... for the same reason hatred fails, I digress...
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...Though I like it when I do that...
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Read on...
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Insult & Unleavened Grace

Stephen King could have written this story.

Insult & Unleavened Grace
The Flatwoods Festival 2009
by Alfred Lehmberg

"It's ET, folks, and so far up your nose you feel alien knees scuffing your top lip!"


Almost upon my arrival in Flatwoods, West Virginia in September of 2009 for that year's Flatwoods Festival, I'd begun to wish I'd brought my guitar. It was that kind of place the reader would find—a place filled with the otherworldly energies of unmistakable artistry where that artistry can be a desire to grow, in all ways efficaciously and honorably, but with modern eyes fixed on some looming and inescapable, if transitive, future-reality we can all share. Such was my intuition regarding Flatwoods. It was a magic town... an emerald city with a stranger history.

Flatwoods: a splendid example of micro-town America even if in the shadow of that highly strange alluded to! Especially when in the shadow! I longed to communicate that musical reflection for this town.

Oh, I wouldn't have had the nerve to actually play in front of anyone, mind. An undisciplined if constant dabbler, I'm not worthy.

No, I'd sneak off somewhere and play for the curtain-like branches of the tall White Pine festooning the area like the textured walls of tall green temples, the temples themselves sporting blue-sky ceilings, rocky pulpits, and wood-wrought forest tabernacles. See, a result of the aforementioned Festival, this affected land where I'd found myself additionally crawled with quality musicians of every type and description so musically intimidating I wouldn't want anyone knowing I played at all, actually. I was a musical skateboard spinning rusty wheels while they resembled Stately Sedans and Thunder-Road cars burning high-test musical nitro!

Even apart from these exquisite local musicians—and one young Flatwoods woman in a chaste blue dress who sang sweetly in some special stillness that Sunday a welcomed tune so engaging, high, and otherworldly that it opened portals of ultraviolet light for hyperspace elves. I'd never heard the song before and not heard it since... It was a song of spacial enchantment; you could see as well as feel it in the air! Suffice to say: the thirst to make music, be a conduit for it, was compelling everywhere. Such was where I'd found myself after a GPS facilitated 14 contiguous hours on my I-Pod driving north northeast from Southeast Alabama.

I'd had company. Riane Eisler, Lorenzo Hagarty, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, plus Terence McKenna of course—and among significant others—lectured their alternative philosophical harmonies in my undistracted ear and otherwise danced in my imagination like intellectual not-sugar-plum faeries.

Yeah... there are "reasons," good reader—none of them fair and balanced—why you either never heard of these people, or you've heard and been compelled to mistrust them. That's a crock, I submit. These are giants on the shoulders of which we should all be clambering to stand! I digress, of course, but suffice to say "my third eye was well squeegeed" by these giants for new and jaw-dropping—albeit sober born—experiences, woven out on the highways and by-ways on the road to West Virgina.

I was wide-open, then, for where I finally arrived—open minded that is—so much so there's decided risk my brain could fall out, even, but... I'll risk it, eh? That's right... it's my brain. Besides, I'll gladly risk going somewhere the closed-minded can't, won't, or shan't. To do less seems unintelligent, unprogressive, and unbrave. In all humility, experienced based, I know something about courage, the promise of the progressive, and at least the aspiration to intelligence...

Where was I? I was at the geographic center of one very heavily paranormal State of West Virginia. Specifically, I'm in the microcosm of unleavened grace that is the brave mini-municipality of Flatwoods, home of the "Flatwoods Monster." Unleavened grace? Yeah...

See, since September 12, 1952 and again, and over again, periodically, especially via a 2010 Discovery Channel "Documentary" train-wreck of esoteric ridiculousness and proportion, these good people have endured unjustified ridicule, errantly cast aspersion, and the falsest of false assignations regarding ...the most intellectually electrifying activity of this or any other time. I speak, of course, about one's assured confidence regarding the extant existence of the "other," reader! Those conjectured occupants of the flying-saucer-intimated UFO! Flatwoods is ground Zero!

How is this not the most exciting thing, ever, better or worse! All else is trumped. Surely, that'll run a "grace" out of its "yeast and baking powders," verily!

See, it's hard enough to smile after being betrayed by the "legitimate authorities." Who does one go to for redress, after that? Crooks and charlatans?

Flatwoods suffered, and continues to suffer an undeserved National disgrace good reader, the worst kind of betrayal: societal betrayal—social betrayal—while Flatwoods' unthinking loyalty remains expected by that authority or society? C'mon! Enough is too much! Spit in the eye won't be taken for eye-wash, forever! It never is! Talk to your awakening Trump supporter...

This malfeasant tragedy of authority's ass-covering "scapegoatery" which Flatwoods had to bear then—and that the reader discovers it continues to bear now—was to be the result of the Flatwoods townspeople and their very heavily documented interaction with the proposed occupant of perhaps only one of four witnessed UFOs above—and on—Flatwoods' old Bailey Fisher farm that fateful day!

I remind the reader that this very specific date of September 12th in 1952 was a period nearing the end of the biggest flap, ever, in US UFO history: the so-called Summer of Saucers!

These are events—and pay attention reader—damned close to having UFOs actually landing on the freaking White House lawn! Over-flying same, they were everywhere! They festooned the US skies, besides! This is, of course, forgetting the standing—and very well prosecuted—orders to Shoot Them Down! Yes! We exercised Extreme Prejudice on sovereign ET, friends and neighbors! We shot UFOs down! Think we didn't? What were we thinking?

Flatwoods, one sees first, needs to make no apology for experiencing what everyone else in the world had been experiencing, paupers to Presidents, folks, all over our North America for decades! Centuries even!

Why, endemic across the US—and at those same hours and moments of that September 12th and chronicled by the subject Flatwoods affair—Air Force jets were chasing UFOs on all US coasts east, west, and south! Flatwoods is the penultimate CLIMAX of the "Summer Of Saucers." The final air battle in Humanity's undeclared secret air war with ET...

Wait! There was more to come. Every bit more a real credulity strainer than the last!

Too, it doesn't help that the time-tested if "out of fashion" extraterrestrial hypothesis seems realized... and so far up the observer's nose they feel alien knees scrubbing top lips! That's part of the problem... an ETH has lately become "un-hip," you see. Out of fashion. Fallen from favor. Uncool...

This tense and ongoing ufological ETH kafuffle at Flatwoods is understandable, if unacceptable still, as early on, folks: the "dis-info fix" was in. Such was so.

One noted researcher, Frank Feschino, discussed more in a moment, has discovered that on September 12th, Flatwoods was immediately crawling with no-nonsense intelligence types and two separate heavy squads totaling 60 combat equipped men! Some ten thousand astonished gawkers would arrive to poke around town in the next two weeks to rubberneck! ...Quite a reaction over stink-weed and a "barn owl," and not a welcome one I add. This was a "side-show" that was a "side-show" at all because it was provoked, by betraying and conflicted "authorities," to be a "side show" from the start!

The second of these aforementioned military heavy squads —subsequently deployed in a provoked reinforcement action obvious to this retired soldier—was detailed from a battalion-sized force of 180 soldiers already deployed, just hours before, to the west southwest of Flatwoods on still another UFO matter! This outlandishly huge—and so inexplicable—contingent of fighting men combed the West Virginia countryside around nearby Frametown for a crashed... ...something... never found! Unsettlingly, the story even includes a few documented Men In Black as the tale is told. ...Quite a reaction to "kids seeing a 'spook' on a mountain top around Halloween."

I encourage the reader that this is an over-the-top and credulity straining story as pointed out, already! Though, it's a little more seriously regarded, actually, when one is occasioned by the opportunity to sit and visit with the persons involved, become aware of official documents and first person accounts extant and available, and then, finally, to walk the 57 year old footsteps where these outré events took place.

In person and on tape these are persons unblinking and defiant that... they saw what they saw. They'll spit in your eye and charge for eyewash. Ask Frank Feschino, lately reviled, errantly, by an offended contingent in town as on the blame-line for the aforementioned and humiliating Discovery Channel "Documentary" fiasco... Feschino was, of course, blameless.

Still, the duplicitous "establishment" went to great lengths in '52 to cap this whole Flatwoods affair off. Persons were intimidated! Witnesses were ignored! Families were badgered by "authorities." These were the manipulative mechanisms used in 1947... and so, reminiscent of Roswell this writer is reminded. 

Later on, when a popular 1950s television magazine would, forever, characterize the monster as a red-faced cross-dressing Goth-nixie sporting grasping claw hands ...in a sweet-sixteen skirt no less, if sans any poodle embroidery... the misdirecting die was lastingly cast; a recurring theme as it's turned out remembering the dreaded documentary already alluded to.

I digress briefly to point out that media continues to go out of its way to get the Flatwoods story very wrong, forgetting that Discovery Channel's mock-umentary of 2010 regarding same. History repeats like a perverse and toxic flatulence.

Consider, reader! Then must come again the disturbed and agitated legions to laugh and poke their fun at Flatwoods folk, eh? These legions aforementioned are mawkish gawkers scattered amidst non-adroit and unimaginative writers, tragically, writers who smirk and prosecute their misdirecting inanity to facilitate the "credulity bumper" of mal-cultivated and so very cack-witted tabloid followers. No love lost here for these toxic enabling facilitators. An innocent Flatwoods is dis-served.

Indeed, notice the casual ease with which "the authorities" dismiss hapless Flatwoods folk as provincial bumpkins prone to distort the prosaic into "aliens from beyond the stars." These must be "bumpkins" of some unusual imagination, reader! Though seriously, first person experiencer Freddie May, in a nail paring, has more integrity, class, and intelligence than those "bumpkin labelers" could have in their entire flaccid meat-ware! I digress again to say true.

This ill levied shame alluded to became so great by September 1953, actually, that the "green monster affair" was not talked about easily, if at all, ever after! Actuality became legend and legend, myth! Snoopers were discouraged.

Third generation kids living right in town didn't know a thing about it, at all! One wonders if history must repeat itself given the most recent cultural backhand wrongly delivered to Flatwoods' undeserving cheek by the History Channel, that 21st Century version of the slack-jawed media. That's a lot of effort over time to encourage people to forget something, eh? Why?

...Care to add some gravid insult to abundant injury? In the early nineties, Joe Nickell—lapsed English teacher and malfeasant CSICOP debunker spokes-puppy—would fatuously assert his facile "appropriation" that the people of Flatwoods could not tell a barn owl from a space alien, that they were sickened by a miasma of noxious gas from underlying coal deposits or seasonal plants (moonshine fumes?), and that they were, again, provincial bumpkins easily confused by a "well known" meteor event of September 12th... a meteor I remind the reader is not academically recorded, anywhere, only sucked from a reductionist's bum! No, the meteor was ever only an early offered supposition of the Air Force to explain irrepressible and annoying facts, and just like the Nickell further appropriated owl and gas suppositions... cack-fodder and bat-squeeze! Supposition is not fact.

Stop right here! See? If a "meteor," reader, it was a meteor lingering in the sky for 21 hours and change from the Eastern seaboard all the way into Flatwoods! If dogs and children are sickened, reader, by some "coal-gas produced miasma" or "pungent plant," it has not happened before, or since and not geologically or botanically relevant, anyway. If an owl, reader... but come on! That's just ludicrous. "Thunderbirds" and "Rocs" are more myth and produce far less documentation!

Moreover, these Flatwoods folk are with-it country people. They knew owls... barn, or those decidedly unlike Doctor "immaterial" Joe Nickell, that glabrous symbol avatar of all skeptical wisdom and intelligence... pause for squirtty giggles.

Verily, this disparaging mechanism of a Flatwoods Cover-up would continue unabated up through the mid nineties... apart from the small justice assessed to Docca Nickell when he was run out of the local Shoney's on a disgruntled rail, I gather with amusement, retching dirty metaphoric feathers and dripping hot rhetorical tar! Flatwoods won't suffer a disrespecting fool gladly; it won't matter how many immaterial doctorates he has.

Besides the good doctor's recounted embarrassment, a result of the well deserved if discursive treatment he received at the hands of insulted Flatwoods locales, it is also revealed that he is in Flatwoods, at all, to confront Frank Feschino—noted Flatwoods subject matter expert and author—whom Nickell assumed must live there.

Frank Feschino lives in Florida, reader. This must speak volumes regarding Docca Nickell's investigative acumen, otherwise, nes't ce pas? I mean, you can call Frank Feschino on the freakin' phone and find out where he lives!

Frank Feschino? Frank Feschino writes books working out a strong evidentiary trail or audit path for an undeclared and covered-up war with Extraterrestrials—pause to let that sink in—where hundreds of high performance planes and many of their brave pilots are perhaps lost in this hair-raising conflict with piloted UFOs! Read that again.

So conveys Stanton Friedman, who admitted further that the data found regarding the Flatwoods Affair eclipses that data found on Roswell, and he, among others, have been diligently researching Roswell for 30 years! Such is, also, so.

Digressing necessarily regarding those intrepid pilots and aircrew who sacrificed all, reader: these were brave men posthumously insulted to this day! Ask the families of lieutenants John Jones and John DelCurto, pilots and craft involved in the 1952 Shoot Them Down affairs and never seen again—just a few among many. Their exemplary reputations—and the reputations of others—are tarnished for incompetent boobs flying mechanically unsound planes until they ran into each other like stooges... or more simply run out of gas... to futilely crash... ignobly! Memories of brave men smart, good, and true, languish in this deleterious smear! It's an outrage!

These were largely men, after all, who saw action in World War II and Korea. These were men of vast experience, or at minimum, men satisfying rigorous flight checks determining the minimum competency required to even be allowed to operate a million dollar, state of the art jet aircraft in 1950, at all!

Finally, these are men KNOWING as they spin up their screaming engines in sweaty and agonized alert on dark tarmacs... that they are under orders to fly out into the teeth of a terrifying new unknown... sally forth regardless into "lurid duels of death," with UFOs! These "lurid duels" are revealed by 1952 Blue Book Chief Captain Edward Ruppelt and are not a fantasy.

What stupendous bravery, reader!

One of these pilots, the reader might come to understand, salvos 24 or more Mighty Mouse rockets at a UFO, point blank, perhaps, in this undeclared war! These "mice" are 70mm unguided if transonic darts, pilgrim, fence-post sized heavy-metal shafts capable of delivering six and a half pounds of point-detonating high explosive in a furious concussion approaching twice the speed of sound! Mayhap at the UFO... the UFO later forced to land at the Flatwoods Fisher farm!

Too, regarding the presumed "impervious armor of UFOs," consider there may be occasion it won't matter at all what kind of armor you sport when hit that hard and that fast or that often with obliterating concussions. It's got to complicate your general physics, at best! At worst, maybe its "Alien Blackhawk Down"—ground zero at Flatwoods!

Non-presupposing witnesses run up the hill on the Flatwoods Fisher Farm expecting to see a crashed plane or a meteor crater and are not really expecting "God knows what." They encounter "God knows what"! "God knows what" is thrust upon them! How is this their fault?

Their government dares to shoot UFOs down, reader—without notification or informed consent of the population it serves—and without regard to where spent shells and rocket casings might fall, astonishingly, forgetting for a moment where the intended target of those munitions might land! There were incidents of such...

Action has consequence. One consequence might find its damaged and parts-dripping way to Flatwoods.

Flatwoods? Flatwoods is as it was: a town of genuine, hardworking, and clever country people. They "saw what they saw" and they "know what they know." These are not mere fools fit to be the subject of catcalls and ridicule from literate organizational lack-wits fronting for a diseased status quo! These are the proud sons and daughters of the only State in the union to be physically shredded—torn in twain reader—by the American Civil War! WV was on the right side of that war, too.

 These are a town of tested souls who have endured every hardship, surmounted every obstacle, and overcome every insult—insult to their intelligence, insult to their reputation, and insult to their recollection. Why should those insults continue to be endured? They are without merit, fidelity, or substance.

No, these are a town of personable persons braver than many, more faithful than most, and assay more non-cloying community and out-of-your-business responsibility in a resident's nail paring, remembering Freddie May above, reader, than any other community this writer's teleported to with the mechanisms GPS, IPOD, and motor car! Such was, indeed, so.

Why, I'd rather live there, it seems, than the south of France! Such is the music made and metal tested in the geographic center of the grand State of West Virginia. Such is the brave micro-municipality of Flatwoods, the best and most underrated of small town paranormal America.

Flatwoods? Eminently salute-able, this writer salutes you.

Read on.

ÆL