The State Police Facilitate A Cover-up of the "Flatwoods Monster" Incident?

 

                                                    The Oakland Tribune. Monday, September 15, 1952

The West Virginia State Police 

and the Initial Cover-up of the 

"Flatwoods Monster" Incident 

by Alfred Lehmberg

Shortly after the "Flatwoods Monster" incident occurred, the government began keeping a watchful eye on the events now quickly unfolding in Flatwoods. "Why would that be," we remark with some significant side-eye!

Mrs. Kathleen May told Frank Feschino, Jr., "The amount of people that came up here later the next day [Saturday, Sept. 13] was unbelievable! The National Guard roped off the area at the access road." This was just the beginning. Even now the story pops and sizzles. Erupting flame is justified...

During that day and over the entire weekend droves of newspaper reporters, writers, and curious on-lookers descended upon Flatwoods... to actually existentialize the Fisher Farm place-name where the incident took place, whether they knew it or not! Donald Keyhoe would auspiciously remark later that, "People will remember...".

Meanwhile, intelligence operatives had already put the wheels in motion to begin to diffuse the escalating "monster" story; thought necessary for reasons both reasonable... and for reasons less than reasonable it could be thought? 

Cold War with the Soviets had paranoid military and Government leaders reluctant to survey skies for both Soviet Bombers AND UFOs, eh...? They didn't want people distracted by UFOs when Soviet bombers, festooned with nuclear bombs, were the more pressing issue? 

It remains that there are now well-known presidential orders to shoot UFOs down... (All credit to Feschino) ...rather confirming their existence at all*... and the Government would have wanted one... for more reasons good and bad. ...Only consider, if the reader will:

We'll talk about "ego, pride, arrogance, and hubris" later.

...And given suspicious Agency activities and even property thefts of key evidentiary bits from Flatwoods (one such theft even on our newspaperman and sworn official/first responder A. Lee Stewart!) it is reasonable to presume that information manipulation by the clandestinely operating Government was occurring, and that some of that agency manipulation included working covertly through... the West Virginia State Police! 

The State Police visited Flatwoods the day after the incident! They also visited nearby Sutton, the county seat of Braxton County during that weekend. Their objective? To shut the locals up! Discourage them, in point of fact, from giving any information to anyone investigating and to debunk the "Flatwoods Monster" incident outright! ...Encourage the disparagement, laughing at, and actively ridiculing the story? Yes.

What were the real motivations for this? We don't know. We can only follow the data, and go where it leads?

Mass Hysteria?

The State Police started claiming, abruptly, that the incident was due to "mass hysteria" and that the damaged craft that the boys saw that night, "was a meteorite." Remember that the "whys" and "hows" of this alleged "meteorite" have been so thoroughly debunked that the concept of it is nothing but entirely risible!

At this point, then, and deliberately, the initial debunking phase of the government's plan was implemented, it seems apparent, and the cover-up of the "Flatwoods Monster" incident began in earnest. Moreover, this cover-up story was used by intelligence officials at Project Blue Book right up until the time the "Flatwoods, West Virginia" case was recorded on one of their "Project 10073 Record Cards." The incident was filed as "case #2078"! It was "evaluated" as: 

"Conclusion: [X] Was astronomical." ...Astronomical... a meteor lingering in the WV skies virtually every minute for over 21 hours... A credulity strainer, for sure! 

No... It might be said here that "conclusions" were not supported by documented evidence, and that the later "Condon Report," as would all UFO studies until just recently, continue to prosecute this unconstructive program of ridicule, mockery, and derision... we'll call it "ufological minimization." Why, one is provoked to ask... again!

The aforementioned Pioneer researcher Donald Keyhoe investigated the Flatwoods incident heavily as we know. He reported the following through his connections in Washington, D.C. 

Keyhoe would say, "I discovered that the Air Force had not ignored the Sutton [Flatwoods] report! To avoid public attention, intelligence had worked through the West Virginia State Police, securing all the details." Well, slam, swoosh, game-over, and let's beat the crowd to the parking lot! 

Keyhoe would add, "...Their check through the state police showed more interest than they had admitted." Ominous music could be cued at this point in our narrative.

One first-person local Jack Davis, who witnessed the damaged "Flatwoods Monster" craft go down that Friday night told Feschino the following about the West Virginia State Police. He reported, "...I was in Sutton and a patrolman by the name of Gumm talked to me a little bit. He expressed to me that any remarks or anything that people might ask about it ["the monster"]...not to give them any information and not to discuss it." Jack Davis indicated the WVSP trooper who spoke to him was insistent he not provide any "legs" for this story.

Davis also encountered state troopers in Flatwoods during this time and reported the following, "They told me just not to discuss it with anyone. They said it was not to be discussed with anyone and not to tell a bunch of tales about something I'd seen that I didn't know anything about. ...That if you couldn't tell them what it was, then you didn't tell them some 'phenomenon tale.' " He added, "I would notice that very, very often they'd come along on rounds and stop at the local stores in the area of Flatwoods—basically, just in my opinion, to disperse the loafers or whatever you want to call them." The bulls roustin' the woo-woos & looky-loos...

A. Lee Stewart, also indicating this official "discouragement," said the name of the WVSP trooper leaning on him was named, "Corporal Ted Tribbett."

On Sunday, September 14, 1952, the first report of the West Virginia State Police's cover-up involvement, as it can be called, "debunking" the "monster," appeared in "The Charleston Daily Mail" newspaper. That paper's headline read, "Braxton Co. Residents Faint, Become Ill after Run-In With Weird 10-foot Monster." 

"Smelly boogieman," indeed... Well, they sure smelled something!

In part, it further read, "However, State Police laughed the reports off as hysteria. They said the so-called monster had grown from seven to 17 feet in 24 hours." Uh... no, it didn't. Everyone knows what the last guy reports in the party-game "Telephone." Corruption and bupkis of the transmitted information will be made inaccurate and distorted in transmission. There's a lesson to be learned.

On Monday, September 15, 1952, the United Press picked up the story and several articles across the country carried the State Police's debunking story. One such article appeared in "The Wheeling News-Register" with the headline, "Metallic Odor Indicates Meteor—Officers Shake Heads Over W. Va. Ogre Tale." Yeah... that's "helpful" where it's not dismissive and insulting. The principals in this affair would endure insult for many years. ...Until Feschino, it is offered. Then some respect would be shown. 

The News-Herald. Franklin, PA. Monday, 
September 15, 1952.

 

The paper reported, in part, "SUTTON, W.Va. Sept. 15—(UP)... Authorities said they believed the 'flying saucer' which Mrs. May's sons saw, was a 'meteorite.' The incident occurred during a meteor shower over a 3-state area." Remember reader, and we reiterate! There were no meteors recorded by skywatchers on the night of September 12, 1952! There was only 21-hours of sustained UFO activity over the United States and in that region..."Summer Of Saucers", remember! That's what people were seeing!

Undeclared air war with ET providing for a UFO's forced landing in Flatwoods? We can only follow the data. 

...But no meteor showers as had been unreported by the perspicacious and duly diligent "meteor nerds" of the time, boy howdy, who were looking into the skies for something, anyway, as a result of the annual ε-Perseid meteor shower of about that time! Still! They recorded no significant meteors or showers.

A virtually unceasing 21 Hours and some minutes of this! Meteor?
They had to call it something, for reasons good and bad!

There were more newspaper examples of the West Virginia State Police's involvement in the initial debunking of the "Flatwoods Monster" case. ...But this would not have been the end of the "story manipulation" by a suspiciously anxious officialdom, a "story manipulation" including the denial of the very existence of military pilots lost in this "ET air war"—violently prosecuted that very night of the 12th—until Feschino ferreted them out... a "story manipulation" only getting more detailed, compelling, and data-rich the more one immerses themselves in it! 

The reader can do that immersion here, themselves, in the way most advantageous to Mr. Feschino... His book is a trove of compelling information gleaned from the factual record and painstakingly stitched together over many years to be a supported truth... frankly, a truth told to be understood so that it can be believed!

Closing, it remains, reader! There was an extraordinary activity, then, that Feschino has recorded in our human history—the scope of which is so open-ended and serendipitous that it has the potential to rewrite the whole of human history... while wholly enhancing our script on that path forward and beyond, reader... to a more expansive and fulfilling history yet to be writ! That's THIS writer's intuition.

The price? We don't know! We've NEVER known! We reach and try to close our grasp! Though, the reader can bet that a lot of ego, arrogance, pride, and hubris has to be cast aside before that more fulsome path can be realized... 

Isn't that the ZEN? Isn't that the WAY? 

It may be we're not behaving in a manner demonstrating a worthiness for those futures, howsoever they might have been realized. That should be considered. 

Too many times in our hoary, hoary history... have we not believed ourselves to be at the very center of things, be that very center jewel in Creation's crown... ...only to find that the evidence was always irrefutable that we were not? 

We might take a lesson from that? It could bring the saucers down. Until then... buy Feschino's book!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*...Why we don't use the term UAP. See, UFOs are presumed, on reasonable evidence, to be a real thing in a real world with the existentiality of a brick thrown through a plate glass window of a CSIcop commissary... substantial in the corporeal... by definition! UAPs? They don't even have to be there, at all. We won't give a flatulent fat fiddler for the UAP, only by what is there in the real world... whatever THAT turns out to be. We're going to stop taking Zebras, up close on a clear sunny day, for probable horses only misidentified by the misleading, the gullibly misled, and the mentally ill.