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From Myth To Reality—Foreword, Part I of II
by Alfred Lehmberg
It was 2004. I was, at the time, fresh from deep wounds suffered in a substantive and emotionally messy donnybrook of the ufological kind, just ended for me. Short story, I was roundly betrayed by one of ufology’s ubiquitous liars, cheats, and scurvy “valor” thieves, if an especially nasty one, that fulsome swine! I’d been swindled! It was precisely because of this lurid UFO donnybrook that the late Budd Hopkins was also taken for a “Mr. Toad’s wild ride”! That ride would not go well for either of us. The point? I was close to being burned out on UFOs, entirely, as a result.
It was a betrayal of my trust that was the issue—brazenly and before, during, and after the fact—a stark betrayal as regards some kind of corporeal thread or inroad into this “THING” we’re all interested in involving UFOs… but UFOs pursued sensibly, with sensibility, and aspiring to the honest sensible!
“Mr. Toad” nearly ruined me on the subject of UFOs... Later on, Frank C. Feschino, Jr., ironically enough, would rescue me from all that! I digress. I’d bet on the wrong horse, frankly, as Mr. Hopkins had! I’d been as humiliatingly hoaxed as he was. More, as it turned out…
I am a serious person. Husband, father, grandfather, Vietnam air combat veteran, retired military officer, a Summa college graduate with reasonable intelligence… and an aspiring UFO writer because inattention to them seems unintelligent, unprogressive, unimaginative, and unbrave! Remains, I was now badly burned… and as a consequence? Maybe three times shy!
Decidedly, and to the point, I was not at all ripe for any subsequent UFO story referencing the likes of a tabloid “Flatwoods Monster,” sincerely! Consider… this ridiculous and unlikely entity was said to be a garment-wearing, claw-handed, and hovering space nixie with bad flatulence, a horrific appearance, and a miserable attitude! That was how Flatwoods had been sold or blithely portrayed when it was talked about, publicly, at all… that was the official projection!
Bigotry? Thy name is legion and for the worst reasons, too.
Also, this “green monster” was alleged to have been sporting a sweet-sixteen pleated skirt… a skirt tricked out with a huge bodice collar high in the back, ostentatiously resembling a big ace-of-spades! It was further said to have shot orange beams from its eyes, ooze a poison gas, and it “spooked a bunch of West Virginia hillbillies” in the mountains of West Virginia just weeks before Halloween!
OK... and hoo-woo-woo! Seriously, this seemed like something out of a bad 1950s creature feature… sincerely and boy howdy! I would be a fool to involve myself, eh? Yes, indeed, I would be. Such are the usual wages for the honestly uninformed and innocently credulous. See, remains that it’s the liar, sinning, always… NOT the one lied TO!
I know Frank Feschino, Jr. and have known him... well… I knew him even when I didn’t realize that I knew him, and a good thing, too! We had a bad start!
At a "Project Awareness" UFO conference in Florida back in 1996, right out of the gate and wholly unwarranted, an unintroduced (and so unknown to me!) Frank Feschino embarrassed me, somewhat, in front of Stanton T. Friedman. I was decidedly nonplussed.
The reader might suspect that, just perhaps, this would put a person even further “off” the “Flatwoods Monster” incident, an incident already carrying fishy baggage! It certainly would have added to it. Knowing who he was, I’d likely never have gotten a copy of Feschino’s betrayed first book, The Braxton County Monster, by Quarrier Press... and perhaps even written off Stanton T. Friedman in the bargain, had I known of or remembered him. Too many unnecessary hurdles!
Flatwoods was a tough sell to me in the beginning, anyway! Knowledge of Frank's identity would have been the sour kicker, surely!
Here is my ironic provenance with Feschino. Briefly, after meeting Mr. Friedman for the first time in 1996 at the Florida conference alluded to and making the classic blunder of calling him “Doctor Friedman,” I suffered his obligatory admonishment not to do so! Friedman stated, “No free degrees,” an admonition he would become famous for saying! Continuing, I would gush, admittedly fanboyish, having consumed all his books, that I had been “following you for decades, Mr. Friedman.”
“Ohhh boy…!” …This seated dark stranger wearing an unrecognized "Flatwoods Monster" T-shirt and at Mr. Friedman’s table, would immediately quip! He’d further add, "Hey Stan, it’s lookin’ like you might need another one of those restraining orders!” Subsequently, there was some small laughter in the sizable group around Friedman. Feschino remained seated... or I would have remembered him. Feschino is a TALL man.
I hope I didn’t go, too pathetically, red-faced. I was nonplused! Hey! Even General officers, perhaps catching me short on something, didn’t mock me like that! I was a professional! I was used to more respect… Embarrassed, I didn’t hang around.
The years ticked by. After that 1996 "Project Awareness" UFO conference, I continued to “follow” Mr. Friedman as part of my “triad” of ufological stalwarts, including, at that time, friends Robert Hastings and Richard Dolan. Later on, I’d be astonished to find that one “Frank Feschino, Jr.” would be added to this group of credited persons for my new “quadriga” of trusted UFO subject-matter experts.
It would be along this circuitous interest in all things Friedman where I would discover that Friedman was also cultivating an interest in that unlikely affair regarding that aforementioned “hovering space nixie”! The “Flatwoods Monster.”
Luckily for Feschino, during this time, I didn’t know he was the guy who had huckle-berried me in front of Friedman… that he was the “Flatwoods guy”! These words might never have been written for this book's foreword!
Some irony? Passing all recognition, I would never have remembered Feschino’s original transgression as Feschino’s… but that Frank, years later, reminded me, himself! He was that guy! That was a rush! We had a good laugh… the joke at my expense wasn’t mean-spirited. I’m glad he came forward and lanced that boil...
Back at the ranch? Friedman would eventually suggest to me that I team up with Frank and assist him with a website presence highlighting his findings.
Whoa! I was still reluctant. It remains that my incredulity and vague (wholly unsupported!) disappointment concerning Mr. Friedman’s interest in the Flatwoods case, at the time, was not “real” or justified by the facts! Overriding was that Friedman was, well...so profound for me otherwise… …But c’mon, the 1952 “Flatwoods Monster” affair just had to be wild blueberry and rained-on horse-muffin… nutz!
Well, real irony is the subsequent personal breakthrough that one makes just beginning to pull back the cover on this Flatwoods thing! A quick aside reader: unusually, and in the inverse compared to most other UFO cases, which tend to get more nebulous and dismissible the closer one gets to them… the closer one gets to the Flatwoods incident and IT is examined and studied, the more detail-heavy it gets!
To my surprise, the discovery that this “Flatwoods thing” was a stark and very citation-heavy body of serious work… work reflecting all due diligence… well, it just rekindled my fire! Frank Feschino’s work was a very well-documented reality of an actual incident... now?
My “fire” just gets bigger as time rolls on! It works like that sometimes.
By now? We were all into the cynical new century, the 9/11
terrorist attacks were behind us, even if still a fresh injury… and, as I
already alluded, I was still raw with my own wounds wrought of a hoaxer's
singularly psychopathic betrayal, a result of that disgracing
“Mortellaro Incident.” …But Stanton T. Friedman was Stanton T. Friedman,
reader, after all! Didn’t I owe him (and myself!) the benefit of a doubt?
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