Bio of Frank C. Feschino, Jr.:
An Overview of his ongoing
"Flatwoods Monster" Investigation
by Alfred Lehmberg
Frank C. Feschino, Jr. is a graduate of the Paier College of Art in Hamden, Connecticut, where he studied illustration, commercial art, and photography. He was trained by several world-famous artists including Kenneth Davies, Rudolph Zallinger, and John Massimino. He earned his four-year Fine Arts diploma in 1981. He knows why truth is important. He'd hold your high ground.
Feschino next moved to Florida where he studied film and video production at Phillips Jr. College in Daytona Beach. There, he was instructed by legendary Hollywood camera operator Rich Davis, thus honing his technical competence and communication skills. In 1994, Frank graduated with an Associate's Degree in Film and Video Production, plus a minor in Business.
Feschino would come to be interested in UFOs in the early 1990s when he chance visited a relative's farm in Braxton County, West Virginia. Crop circles had appeared there overnight, unexplained to this day; additionally, UFOs were frequently sighted over the region and for many years. This was great material for a one-off project for film school, Feschino reasoned!
He very carefully and meticulously documented these anomalies, a perspicacious student of a craft, and then shared his research with British crop circle expert and electrical engineer Colin Andrews. Andrews would subsequently catalog Feschino's information in his world database and even become a major fan of his work.
During that time, and in pure serendipity, Feschino became aware of the famous "Flatwoods Monster" UFO crash incident of Braxton County. This is that singular "attractor" event that had occurred on September 12, 1952, after a "Summer Of Saucers." Entirely captivated, he dove in. Little did he suspect that his school project "one-off" would become his life's work!
This case, in a quick review, involved a downed UFO and its alien occupant, a 12-foot-tall exo-suited and armor-clad being, we come to find, who encountered a group of unsuspecting local Flatwoods townspeople. This terrifying "close encounter of the third kind" quickly made headlines across the globe, was obsessed about, effusively, on the radio, and was featured just one week later on a nationally broadcasted live TV program.
The program alluded to, We The People, hosted by Dan Seymour, was an extremely popular show that, but for one show iteration subsequent, would be immediately canceled after the "Flatwoods program..." We'll leave that there... another story, we can read about that, later.
Still, the far-reaching news about the "monster" from West Virginia was actually one of the world's top news stories of the year. Yet, although the popularity and fame of the "Flatwoods Monster" had risen quickly in the public eye, there was a dark downside to the story as well!
Intelligence Agencies, it can be shown, had covertly stepped into the picture, kept a watchful eye over the unfolding situation, and quickly worked to diffuse it, it would appear. Such seems, abundantly, so. Why? There were reasons good and bad... and weird...
Verily! Inconsistencies in reporting the incident abounded and became horrendous early on, abiding even today! The witnesses were constantly misquoted, the incident was heavily bowdlerized and contrived to seem doubtful, and the forthright witnesses were, and have been, ridiculed and laughed at for decades!
The government's official explanation reported that the incident was "attributed to hysteria" and the witnesses probably misinterpreted the "monster" as a "big barn owl perched high on a branch at dusk"! ...Hillbilly's skeered o' haints in the dark around Halloween! What's not to laugh at that? Not true on any level, aspect, or indices... of course. All ridicule is ridiculously baseless... and suspicious for that.
This "monster" incident, as well as many other UFO (Summer Of Saucers!) cases in 1952, had the American public worried and agitated because UFO sightings were at a historical (not hysterical!) high over the country that whole year! These UFO encounters were hugely intensifying that entire summer! Here, the cover-up of this alien encounter was determined as necessary by the government, it is reasoned. That actions to squash it were quickly implemented is no stretch...
Yes... "Mass Hysteria" was indeed, avoided! Existential reality was circumvented, yet again! Yes, this writer asks, "...but, at what cost," ultimately.
Subsequently, the "Flatwoods Monster" case was well on its way to becoming just a "West Virginia" (heavy eye-roll!) myth of sketchlessly entertaining folklore sullenly degraded to the absurd. ...And scene!
Heavy Sigh... This writer must momentarily digress, constructively, to observe that "Life may be a part played on a stage," but it does remain that life is not that play metaphored. See, a play's players go home to real lives when the curtain comes down, apart from their momentary and more fictional portrayals flatly irrelevant to day to day actuality. We look forward to and sometimes dread the materiality impacting roughly from the corporeal. We laugh and cry, exhault and suffer to something on the telly or stage, fridges fret their nutritional stockage, rolled socks and underwear in their appropriate drawer, ...personal tragedy and conditional comedy. Romeo and Juliet may be typified and reiterated all over the planet daily in reality, but the play is only allowing us to recognize the reality typical of its even predictable plot, and other plots, in that reality. The play's not the thing, it's the thing allowing us to recognize and remember the thing.
In a play; however, a curtain must come down. The corporeal reality has no such curtain. It must of needs have more validity than a mere illustration of it. Neither the play nor the reality giving birth to it can have meaning when you can't tell one from the other. That's what can happen when one, even with the best intentions, circumvents reality.
We are individuals of the corporeal in the felt presence of the moment. We are Life's players and subject to the consequences of our performances. Our payments are dire. Critics matter. It seems likely we're best served with the truth, then, or our culture is flawed and self-defeating... sick, only to get sicker. What are we seeing currently?
Suffice to say, returning from our digression, the majority of the public wouldn't believe the Flatwoods tale. The famous "monster" case was to be shelved as a curiously ridiculous legend! ...Only, wait... the real story behind this mysterious alien visitor and the circumstances surrounding its enigmatic incident, extant if in a scattered record, ... was never fully known to the public!
That was all about to change!
You see, in 1952, there were a few people of consciousness and conscience. They believed that this terrifying story actually did happen. Luckily, they left some historical documentation about this case in their books, their published periodicals and private newsletters... their personal correspondence, reader... key evidentiary components lain fallow for decades! Enter, forty years later, illustrator and filmmaker, Frank C. Feschino, Jr.
Intrigued and perplexed by the story, Frank picked up this cold, cold case (where it had been left for dead back in 1952), was immediately engaged, and so captivated by same that he must run hard with it, never looking back. Defeating insurmountable obstacles, Feschino would overcome the slings and arrows of incompetent publishers and errant skeptibunkies to truly become the first primary investigator involved in the case since it was originally studied in 1952... ...Feschino would bring the "Flatwoods Monster" case to a whole new level!
See, while still attending film school, Frank began an intense and extensive investigation into the case. It would become his primary focus and occupation. Now armed with video equipment and newly acquired communication skills, he taped many compelling interviews with a plethora of the first-hand eyewitness. Further, he photographed the many locations involved in the story, untouched by time.
During his arduous, sometimes even personally hazardous, investigation, Feschino traveled extensively in West Virginia, hill to hollow, accumulating a literal mass of information. These included the forgotten works of aforementioned past researchers, unseen and overlooked government documents of vetted officiality, book and magazine publications, and pertinent newspaper articles from around the world! Unsettlingly, he discovered the Flatwoods case's evidentiary trail was covered-up deeply by the officiality and that there remained scattered clues and widespread pieces to this cold-case puzzle, telling a truth, if strewn about—buried all across the country!
Feschino not only discovered that this alien encounter had indeed occurred, but he also put together an astounding timeline of events actually illustrating 21-sustained hours of unending UFO activity occurring over ten east coast States that day! Ultimately, and reminding the reader that our military forces at that time were under public orders to shoot UFOs down wherever they were encountered, Feschino was able to pinpoint 116 documented locations involving 25 separate and distinct UFOs over those ten States, and he also discovered that four of those UFOs were heavily damaged!
These made repeated landings, by report; one of those damaged and downed objects held an occupant that abandoned its craft?! This "occupant" would come to be called, the "Flatwoods Monster."
Feschino fleshes all this out in an analysis of his "Master Map." This cited initiative contained the information included: the plotted points of the UFOs locations, the type of craft described, the time stamps of each object, and their flight trajectories... it rather forensically recreated a total scenario for just what had happened in Flatwoods on that harrowing Indian Summer dusk of 1952.
