...Just another Flatwoods Reminder, Inc.
 |
| "Based on truth!" |
First There's Insult,
Then Comes Injury
by Alfred Lehmberg
Flatwoods, Sandbagged First By MonsterQuest... Then Project Blue Book Bats Some Clean-up.
There's the "injury of insult," and then there's her mirror-twin sister, the "insult of injury." These live in a realm where truth languishes in unnecessary fogs on darkening plains of complacent social indifference and so putting the planet at serious peril. The indifferent and unaware if criminally beguiled play out the consequences of their betrayal, as they are roundly betrayed.
See, proud lights of incisive intelligence should be shooting up like photonic skyscrapers. Humanity's grasp and reach could be coming together to breathe on the glittering majesty of a 1st Category civilization... truly, a kingdom at hand, truly...
Though, there is currently only ever that burgeoning threat of existential despair as the imposing unease of our too malleable shared mal-reality contrives to fool and confuse us. This is a mal-reality accessorized with intellectual tyranny and a tragic lack of constructive imagination. It plods off to its Bethlehem to be born... That's the lay of the land.
Consider, a TV was always a wasteland, but it was a wasteland where one could not knowingly communicate an untruth. It couldn't lie and know it. Once, the media had some honor and you could bank on the Evening News. That hasn't occurred this century.
No, There used to be consequences for lying knowingly on Public airwaves, but Ronald (rhymes with Donald) Reagan killed that FCC doctrine of democratic wisdom in his first two years. "Truthiness" "Officious Propaganda" and "Alternate facts" were the result and resultant soup of the day. Toxic fruit currently rolls far from the toxic media tree alluded to, and verily.
Some fruit of that tree? There's a plethora from which to choose. OK. This writer has a traditional bone to pick with UFO-infomercial TV. We can start there.
Our Television wasteland has never been more sickeningly vast. See, twice burned, hard, on the same issue, I can't see a time when I won't be shy about wasteland corporate TV. The reader may feel the same way.
The latest nasty burn? The HISTORY [snurf-chortle!]
Channel's Project Blue Book. Deception's "weave" is ever to deceive, I say true.
The previous burn on Flatwoods, penultimate to PBB, came as a result of the History [snurf-chortle!]
Channel's MonsterQuest episode of March 10th, 2010 featuring Frank Feschino, Stanton Friedman, a first responder to the Flatwoods affair, Fred May, and other witnesses from the stealthily infamous town of Flatwoods, West Virginia. ...And myself, actually.
On that program, I was the bearded fellow, the only bearded fellow, I believe, associated with the Flatwoods segment exclusively. I wore the black UFO Magazine hat. Finally, I was crew, working with the big Helium Camera Balloon and assisting Feschino vis a vis the "sighting" at the "hunter's camp" in a deep forest beside the spring-fed stream.
My one spoken line on the program, used apart from where I actually said it was, "Frank, there's a hot spot up there...," or some such... It regarded a remark I'd made about an instrument reading observed in deep forest on an infrared scope we had access to via a MUFON investigation team, also on site. That sound-bite was placed entirely apart from where it occurred and for a different reason, entirely.
That is not "artistic license." That's unblinking duplicity. That is communicating an untruth. No lipstick for that pig.
...all that said: Folks? You can quote me on the following!
I have no idea what that program was remotely about, at all! It was wholly divorced from any thrust of our conscientious participation... it was a flaccid, disingenuous, and entirely misdirecting distortion regarding what was purported to be "true reporting," and in a presumed sincere documentary? More insult and injury.
...And Hoo-boy-howdy... note that there's that smell of burnin' pork lard. Pretty acrid.
Why, apart from Joe Nickell (klasskurtxian pork lard and decidedly true to form) I didn't even recognize who was involved in it! The reader may begin to see the clear parallel suggested between this old Monsterquest episode and the current Project Bluebook about the very same Flatwoods affair.
...Consider, did anyone recognize Dr. Hynek as accurate in the HC's PBB? Anyone? I rest my case.
See, all this is a real irony for me, reader, given I was at Flatwoods, one of three extended personal excursions, for a week during the shooting—and I do mean shooting—of the Flatwoods segment in the earlier MQ program. Moreover, I have an appropriate and professional intimacy with all the principals shown on the MQ Flatwoods segment and have had such for many years, now. It follows I might possess better than a layman's understanding of just what occurred in and around Flatwoods that Indian Summer night in 1952.
Ladies and Gentleman, let me digress to say that, entirely apart from what the Reader saw on a decidedly "flawed" MonsterQuest or wholly "FUBARed" Project Blue Book episode, the following is more likely what occurred on that one startling night in 1952... that one amazing night in Flatwoods, a Flatwoods perhaps touched by the cosmic of a truly unknown unknown! That seems to be at the end of the evidentiary trail, eh?
As already pointed out, remember, and antithetical to most UFO cases? The closer one gets to this case the more substantive it becomes. Existential rabbit hole alert, reader, and deep!
https://paratopiary.blogspot.com/ or
https://flatwoodsmonster.com/
I remind the HONEST reader that this referenced map and document data is supported by an official Project Bluebook, in the first place, and then timestamped in named Newspaper reportage and first-person witnesses of the time for an impressive second place, in that order of importance. The story hangs neatly on easily connected dots unstretched and abundantly documented.
On investigation, the reader discovers that the History [snurf-chortle] Channel had had the time, opportunity, and all the requisite data it needed to produce a stunning program about the infamous Flatwoods affair in 2010, too. This is a preceding parallel similar that which was produced currently in PBB, and it's a real irony it's Feschino's story the likes of which has never before been seen... likely the problem, eh? "Real," can get too real for some, am I right?
See, what the History Channel did instead, reader, just as in Project Bluebook, was to contrive a manufacture of senseless factoid "mash-ups" regarding entirely unrelated cases... ... cases from which was drawn what could be most easily "faux-discredited" in either of them by "experts" of the inveterate skeptibunky "intelligentsia." Suggesting this, then, bogus and so dismissable array of laughable relationships, ones not even remotely tenuous or supported... inventive salacious conjecture... was the two programs' kiss of less-than-mediocre death... ...death for what might be true and real.
Sincerely, none but those entirely honest with themselves dare call these very poor, contrived, and inauspicious tellings of the Flatwoods story as anything but a blithering incompetence, a fatuous cluelessness, or a distorted propaganda! More irony is revealed given Feschino, Friedman, and I had to sign sworn statements indicating our contribution to the program was true as we knew it to be true! The History Channel reportage of same, paradoxically, was not. There's an irony to choke a Dune sandworm.
With a track record like this? How stalwart can Project Bluebook be? That would be a rhetorical question.
See? The informed person understands that Flatwoods was the tail end of the biggest UFO Flap in US History: The 1952 "Summer Of Saucers" chronicled by Frank Feschino, Wendy Connors, various other authors, and a then in an as yet un-sifted Project Bluebook finally sussed out by the painstaking work of Feschino! Gripping tale right there! Over corporate heads, perhaps.
Reader! The true story was not about "Lizard Monsters" allegedly lurking the woods for 60 plus years, and to this day, as was intimated. Plainly, this is the scurvy distortion prosecuted by the History Channel.
...And this! The something less than intrepid MonsterQuest documentarians wrongly called the more honest Stanton Friedman a "doctor" and made the dissembling (to be kind) Doctor (degree immaterial) Nickell look "reasonable" in contrived comparison! Friedman would have said, "No free degrees, thank you."
Glowing eyes? Not before or since. Ground miasma? Not before or since! Mass hysteria? Not before or since! Noxious weeds? Not before or since! Roc-sized barn owls? Not before or since! How could they have got things so canted and impossible and insultingly and injuriously wrong!
I'm still sick at heart and was really ticked off at the time... Feschino, who deserved better than this, his initiative again wrongly hulled below the waterline, was fit to be tied! See, he's telling the culture changing but real story, and is dismissed and discounted out of hand!
Nickell and company shills for the guys insulting the reader's intelligence and obscuring real history! Case in point: "Mass Hysteria" as touted by Dr. Nickell... is a clueless dodge contrived only to communicate that one actually has no idea what was going on in Flatwoods with any available cranial capacity shoved north of an intellectually superating south hole, but wants to run that hole "authoritatively," anyway!
See, the witnesses at Flatwoods, a gang of playing children of late adolescence and a couple of young adults, presupposed a meteor, predominantly, on the Fisher farm in the hills above the school that evening. They'd been learning about them recently in school.
Nickell dissembled when he reported they expected "monsters"... People do not run up a hill armed only with a flashlight to look for "monsters," Reader! C'mon! That only happens in the movies and Joe Nickell's impacted and cack-witted imagination! They went up the hill to pick up pieces of a strange meteorite, effect rescue for a downed plane, or perhaps see a UFO!
No, the Flatwoods story was not remotely told by the corporate fudge-factory at the History [snurf.. chortle] Channel in either of their two programs. The historical facts regarding the "Flatwoods Monster" incident were distorted only once again in a series of unending dissemblings by a mediocre toxic soap-selling TV show preying on the gullible in an honorless wasteland. Verily, baseless ridicule for the Flatwoods Story goes back decades and is ever a struggle uphill.
Tune in to the actual Flatwoods story, cited above, to tune up, sincerely. See, it's not a story about a giant lizard in a "hover-round" "attacking" a group of Flatwoods residents with a harmful gas. The gas, remember, was more likely an exhaust emitted from pipes surrounding the lower torso of the body, perhaps a "keep away" gas. The lower torso was likely part of the propulsion system of this giant "metallic" structure propelling it and causing it to hover. Moreover, apart from the gas, the "Flatwoods Monster" never made any aggressive or threatening maneuvers towards the witnesses during the encounter! No humans died even as they were sickened...
More crass inaccuracies?
The nearly 60-years of "sightings" reported by the MQ show were not all "monster" observations, as the duplicitously over-edited Feschino and Friedman footage would misleadingly seem to indicate, but were UFO sightings! This is what the two researchers reported on. UFOs, reader! Not lizard monsters! ...and not Thing-like burnt carrots, psychotic hillbillies, or lesbian intrigue as in Project Bluebook.
The "Flatwoods Monster" incident, the Snitowsky "Frametown Monster" incident and the "Frametown Hunter" incident are the documented entity sightings, reader. These, and other "monster" sightings... never occurred again! See, it's the UFO sightings that are ongoing! This was the actual report and testimony of Friedman and Feschino! They signed they'd tell the truth as they knew it!
Other "real" entities documented on record in the Flatwoods area are as follows:
Dec. 30, 1960. Hickory Flats, WV, Located in Webster County and just across the southern Braxton County border - Witness Charles Slover, 35 years-old, was driving a delivery truck and sighted a 6-foot tall hairy biped, man-like creature near the road. This was unreported by the History [snurf-chortle] Channel.
Dec. 7, 2005. Braxton County, 7-8 miles from Flatwoods. A wildlife trap camera took a photograph of an unknown entity that has been called the "Braxton Beast." This was unreported by the History [snurf-chortle] Channel. Meager and unrepeated stuff!
UFO sightings abound, reader, not "monster" sightings! A UFO sighting that occurred in Holly, Braxton County on Nov. 8, 1957, was documented by Jacques Vallee in his book Passport To Magonia.
Holly is located near Flatwoods. In Case #437, Vallee reports that Hank Mollohan and eight other local witnesses saw an elongated object that was 12-metres long! UFOs, reader! Not monsters.
More UFOs! Frametown Area, 1990: A Frametown couple saw several UFOs over the area of the Middle Ridge area southeast of Frametown. When one of the witnesses walked outside of the house to get a closer look, one of the UFOs flew into the back-yard and shot a bright beam of light down towards the witness. This Frametown incident was documented and broadcast in 1990 by a national TV show of the time, Current Affair With Maury Povich back when he was still trying to have something to say before genetics could so accurately determine paternity. I digress.
In 1991, Feschino documented crop circle rings in Frametown, WV., which were recorded by Colin Andrews. Throughout the early 1990s, Feschino also photographed and videotaped UFOs in the same area of Middle Ridge southeast of James Knob.
OTHER MONSTERQUEST AND PROJECT BLUEBOOK DEGLECTED (sic) POINTS:
The Sept. 12, 1952 "Master Map" of UFO locations was not shown or referenced in any way. This is a key point validating the whole of the story...
The flight-path trajectory of the "Flatwoods Monster" UFO was not shown or mentioned. This was the "Washington DC. to Flatwoods, WV UFO" flight-path. Check the included link for same.
The Colonel Dale Leavitt Interview was not shown or mentioned in the MQ program, nor was it alluded to in PBB, nor was there any mention of the sizable West Virginia National Guard involvement in and around Flatwoods.
There was no reference to the fact that the USAF had heavily documented the Flatwoods incident.
The First person witness-journalist John Barker interview was not mentioned in either program.
Well respected reporter and first-person responder A. Lee Stewart, Jr., who broke the National story, was not mentioned. The drawings of the metal piece that he found on the farm were not shown.
There was no mention or reference that there were strange metal and black plastic-like pieces found on the Fisher Farm by the locals, shortly after the incident, and policed up by the Army.
The five known drawings made by five of the boy witnesses who saw the "Flatwoods Monster" were not shown." Despite being separated by Stewart, remember, and challenged individually in the "third degree," the drawings are astonishingly similar!
The "Flatwoods Monster" color illustrations painted by Feschino from first-hand eyewitness descriptions were not shown.
The 1996 Fred May pencil drawing of the "Monster" was not shown. It depicted the figure as "mechanical." This was a point errantly avoided by MonsterQuest and PBB, opting instead for the sensationalist misnomer and more injurious insult!
Let's put a fine point on it. The foremost Flatwoods expert, Frank Feschino, Jr., was not even consulted in what was touted by the History Channel as exhaustive consultation with regard to some promised, even perspicacious, storytelling! Still, corporate goes on and on, on their website, with regard to how "exhaustive" their research was. That's on them.
The Flatwoods reenactment segment on MQ did not show the actual "mechanical" figure as described by Mrs. May and Fred May. The incorrect 1952 "We The People" mock-up, which depicted the arms and claws was shown instead... and then was senselessly compared to the "Frametown Monster."
Finally, the "Star child skull" and the entities in Flatwoods/Frametown were errantly compared! These cases have no relationship to each other, what-so-ever, all respect to the late Lloyd Pye! We spoke after the program and this writer can report that he would agree.
I'd hoped for the best regarding the History [snerk.. chortle] Channel. What happened?
"Hollywood" happened, reader... corporate manipulations apart from, and not interested in, telling the real story... These contrive a mash-up between two unrelated cases and, "highlighting" what was "prosaically explainable," in both, work to "faux-discredit" either... actually! We were sand-bagged, IMO. Project Bluebook is the current injury on top of the insult.
The only good thing... the Flatwoods story was broached, at all, in a no-nonsense manner by Frank Feschino, Freddy May, John Barker, and Stanton Friedman! Too bad none of that translated to the screen!
Though, seriously, People are eventually going to wonder where the "lizard monster" (sheesh!) came from and how it came to be in Flatwoods at all. That story? Again, right here: http://flatwoodsmonster.com/
I personally apologize, again, to the people of Braxton County, Frametown, and the town of Flatwoods specifically, that the story was not portrayed as it was related by the honest principals to the production company. We regret their time was wasted. It's not Frank Feschino's fault that the creative control was well out of his more capable hands... as it will be on all these programs. "Ya pays yer money an' takes yer chances."
We all got burned. All the credible stuff went to the cutting room floor.
Project Bluebook, moreover, is the current interaction of selling boner pills and reverse mortgages with sensational "truish" story-telling allowed in an honorless mass media. It may sell the predatory mortgaging pills... but it doesn't tell the story... well, at all.
Rest somewhat assured, though, MonsterQuest and Project Bluebook at least showed enough to get interest kindled in other quarters, perhaps. There's a lot of life left to tell the story, still! You can bet Frank Feschino will be banging the Flatwoods drum, verily!
I remain firmly in his corner! There are many rounds left in this fight. Frank is strong and as focused as he ever was!
Closing, Flatwoods and Frametown residents wrote to tell me that the James Knob site east of Frametown is still ufologically active. Right now, reader.
Well, I suspect that if ET had swooped in and landed on the pasture that night while Friedman, Feschino, and myself were all up there on James Knob, and the Monster Quest people had shot miles of film of it? THAT footage would have languished on the cutting room floor with all the other pertinent material, too, one presumes.
The MonsterQuest program regarding Flatwoods was dissembling hypocrisy... and a shame! The unearned opprobrium thrust on the actual existentiality of Flatwoods is ongoing via the HC's Project Bluebook and serves none of us.
One last point, in the dodgy MonsterQuest "cooked" portrayal, Fred May, Stanton Friedman, and Frank Feschino seem to indicate that Big Lizards in "hover-rounds," plus other monsters, still lurk dangerously in the West Virginia mountains around Flatwoods. No reader. They are not. Nothing these men actually reported to the film crew made that indication. Their contribution was edited beyond credulity.
Sincerely, be disabused of the notion that dangerous monsters haunt our hills and forests! Fred, Frank, and Stan made no such intimation. I was there. I know.
With regard to Flatwoods, there has always been baseless ridicule. That's suspicious in itself. That the story still strongly stands is credible testimony to an antithesis of falsehood extended by way of a duplicitous corporate and its importunate programming discrediting same. This may indicate how true the story might actually be!
It remains. Insult is uncalled for and injury will not be abided. It hasn't thus far. Flatwoods abides, for all the uninformed ignominy it has unjustifiably endured for decades. It's that big a story.
 |
Who we were. Who we are. Who we could be.
Proud and free and off our knees! |
