UAVs And The Flatwoods Monster
Commenter Bill Hancock pointed out the similarities of the “Guardian” UAV in my last post to recently re-rendered paintings of the famous Flatwoods (WV) Monster. I checked, and damned if it doesn’t look like a UAV staring out at us from fifty years ago. What are we to make of this?
Frank Feschino, Jr. researched the case, talked to orginal witnesses that were still alive, and wrote a thorough overview entitled, appropriately enough The Braxton County Monster. He is also a gifted illustrator and when he presented the pictures to the witnesses, they apparently agreed that it more closely resembled what they had seen on September 12th of 1952.
I am reasonably certain that UAVs were only a dream in 1952, if anyone had even thought of them yet. The “Guardian” model pictured above is unique in the designs I have been able to find. Most UAVs resemble airplanes or helicopters (with the exception of the “Cipher,” which was unveiled about 10 years ago and looks like a flying saucer with a triangular structure bolted to the top.)
The witnesses couldn’t have been so terrified that they wouldn’t have noticed helicopter blades, but then again, helicopters were relatively new in the early 1950s, and people living in the isolation of the West Virginia mountains may not have recognized them as such. Also, there appears to be a disturbance in the grass below the object that resembles a rocket blast. There was no mention of rockets or noises of rushing air in the original accounts. One of the notable aspects of the case was a very strong smell surrounding the object. Exhaust of some kind?
Aliens? Time slips? Coincidence? YOU DECIDE!
Nick, any ideas? I know that you have met Feschino.
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Jan 06 2007 
January 6th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
i’d say coincidence. the flatwoods monster could’ve very well been a machine of some kind but the link to UAV’s seems pretty tenuous if you ask me.
January 6th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Frank Feschino, Jr. is a good artist with an active imagination as to what he thinks the Flatwoods Monster looked like, but his work is not much of a match for the eyewitness drawings – made at the time – fifty years ago – from the people that were there.
See here Flatwoods: September 12th at Cryptomundo.
January 6th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Loren,
This sounds like a discussion that I have no business getting into, but…
Feschino claims that the depictions are more accurate, verified by witnesses. The pictures on your page seem like the standard ones that we have seen for years, which Feschino seems to think were not right. Were the drawings with the “skirt” thing and arms done by the original witnesses, or another artist as Feschino claims? The only one on your page that is labeled as a witness drawing is something that looks like a “head” in pencil by Fred May, who is apparently not one of the witnesses, unless “Eddie” or “Teddie” May are nicknames for “Fred,” or one of them went by his middle name.
If you have any original witness drawings, I’d like to see them. I don’t know this Feschino person, but he is not mentioned in your post, although he is identified in the newsclipping of the anniversary festival, along with Stan Friedman.
There were many UFOs sighted that evening, according to a radio interview with Ivan Sanderson that I have in my posession, and the connections between Cryptids and UFOs is a long and robust one.
January 7th, 2007 at 7:31 am
As it is related on the website for the book, Feschino was in and out of WVA back in the 1990s because he had a relative who owned property there. He heard the tale from someone ( being totally unfamiliar with it himself…generation gap), got curious about it, and started researching it. As part of his research he actually went to Flatwoods, delved through old records there, talked to “old-timers”, and did extensive interviews with the surviving original witnesses (this was mid-to-late 90s), some of whom have since died. But Feschino both audiotaped and videotaped the interviews. Prominent among his interviewees are Kathleen May and Fred May. As to what name Frederick goes by, he calls himself Fred, and…from an autographed photo of the old group he looks to have been called Freddie back “in the day”. Feschino’s Flatwoods Monster site is full of trivia and info with every click-on, a lot of extremely interesting.
One of the things Feschino claims he was quickly disabused of was thinking that the “monster” looked like the famous drawing people have viewed for years. This came from the eyewitnesses themselves (all down on tape). As the Mays told it..to Feschino’s surprise…that drawing was not some kind of guided rendering that they did for a composite I.D. artist, but, rather something they had sprung on them when they went to New York City to be on a nationwide television program called “We The People”, which aired on September 19, 1952. It was, apparently, done by a t.v. station staff artist and based on the general appearance as published in the press, as well as on a “quickie” sketch Fred had done of the head section (though Fred never claimed to be much of an artist). The Mays’s claim, according to what Feschino has written and spoken of in appearances, that “the picture” was there for the show and the show aired with it, and they weren’t going to be impolite enough to challenge its accuracy on national television. Privately, however, according to their owned taped testimonies from the 90s, they didn’t think it looked very much at all like what they’d seen. But the media loved it, went with it, and it passed into UFO history as such.
Feschino asked the witnesses what was wrong with the rendering and they told him. So he re-worked the description based on what he was being told was wrong with the original. In this instance, then, this would be…decades after the event…the first GUIDED rendering (by the witnesses) to be done of the “whatsit”.
Some of what went into the re-draw was of this nature:
“Now it didn’t have arms. The (famous) drawing showed arms, but it didn’t. It looked like something like antenna sticking out from it, between the body and the head”
…Kathleen May
“It was mechanical. It wasn’t alive. Maybe inside that thing there could have been something that was alive, but what I seen was either a small space ship or a suit of some kind. Something it was wearing. It was mechanical.”
…Fred May
Feschino also states that in his discussions with the witnesses that they said when they said the thing had a kind of “skirt” at the bottom, they were referring to a kind of “border” or encirclement…not a “clothing” kind of skirt…which the NYC tv artist rendered literally. In this sense they would be talking about something similar to a “fender skirt” or “wheel skirt” in older cars, or, even more ironically, like something from this “skirt” definition from the 1969 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: “Skirt.3.b.The lower outer section of a rocket vehicle.”
So, from this assemblage of data, it would seem that Feschino is not working from his imagination here, but is having his reconstructed guided by the actual surviving witnesses to the event (he also, I believe, documents testimony from other people who, over the years, have heard the witnesses state that the well-known “official” portrait of the “monster” left a lot to be desired in terms of accuracy).
I noticed the look of “rocket blast” looking flames (?) at the base of the new “skirt” myself. Don’t know about propulsion. Feschino should be contacted about this.
January 7th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Greg…I was on Adam’s show recently.
I’ve been to the site myself and read Feschino’s book. I commented to Adam that an Army National Guard Intelligence Unit was on that hillside that night. They claim they were just “observing,” but the scrape marks found afterward indicated that a heavy mechanical object was dragged around.
One of the principals in my documentary, The Mothman’s Photographer, saw something like that UAV in 1967 in Charleston, WV. In that case I myself saw the marks in the ground afterward, myself. The odd thing is that another neighbor, Harriet Plumbrook, saw a cigar-shaped UFO in the same spot and later, an almost identical reprise of the Flatwoods monster. She says it morphed into something akin to the Virgin Mary. This was at the same spot that I later saw an entity of some kind exit from a tree. I assumed it was Mothman because Mothman had been seen by the kid who had seen the UAV.
Andy Colvin
January 7th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Under the eyewitness section of his site, and in the book, Feschino covers the account of Col. Dale Leavett, the WVA Army National Guard commander at the time, who affirmed that his unit was officially dispatched to Flatwoods on September 12th to search and investigate this incident. It seems they went “with troops”. This would be very unusual in “just another” flying saucer report of the period. Feschino, rightly or wrongly, ties this to a “shoot ‘em down” policy implemented, he says he has evidence of, following the Washington, DC, “extravaganza” of July, 1952 (and he has a new e-book to this effect, which says 1952 was really THE year in terms of “earth vs. the flying saucers”…to use the name of the fictionalized version of all this, made by Ray Harryhausen later on). He seems to be asserting that “Flatwoods” may have been an actual shoot-down and the “monster” was a probe/UAV of some kind that was part of the crashed vehicle. If the AF took co-ordinates of a “crash” and radioed them to DoD, that might…Feschino postulates…have sent in the ground troops (which Leavett admits were there).
All of this is problematical, but there is enough of a thread of “interesting activity” there to keep this old mystery intriguing over the years. And the troop arrival is reminiscent of that incident in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania in the 1960s.
January 8th, 2007 at 1:09 am
[...] This was going to be an answer to the Flatwoods and UAV post, but it became so long that I figured it deserved it’s own post. I had no idea that it would genrerate so much commentary! If you haven’t read it, do so, and be sure to read the discussion, which is even more interesting. [...]
January 8th, 2007 at 7:31 am
Greg
Re any ideas? Well…I did indeed meet Freschino at Ryan Wood’s crashed UFO gig this past November. He gave a good lecture, with lots of visuals and on-screen interviews, and it all came across as genuinely weird case – which it was of course.
Now it may have been something truly anomalous (and the witnesses were there and I wasn’t of course) but the one thing that does make me wonder if this was a UAV of some type is that it does come across like a curiously antiquainted machine – and a somewhat clumsy one, too – rather than a state of the art alien space vehicle.
Maybe we need to research the full extent of UAV technology back then…
January 8th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
One thing that did strike me was that it was less than 10 years after the Flatwoods incident that NASA began its Ranger lunar missions (August 1961). If you take a look at the Ranger, it looked very similar to the re-rendered Flatwoods image except it had lateral “arms” at the base. IIRC the first lunar missions began circa 1958, only 6 years after Flatwoods, and NASA wasn’t created until 1958. Crazy connection? Definitely! But it occurred to me that the “eyes” of the Flatwoods monster might be camera lenses…..and where DID the testing for prototypes take place before the inception of NASA?
January 8th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
BTW there’s an image of the Ranger here.
January 9th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Nick,
Unless the U.S. was playing with anti-grav back then, I don’t think this was a bona-fide UAV, even if you allow 10-20 years jumpstart on the publicly-known tech of the 1960s or ’70s. No one reported any rocket noises, as far as I know.
Maybe the witnesses projected some sort of clumsy representation of a UAV of the future from somewhere in their collective unconscious…but we’re veering off into weirder territory here!
January 9th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
“Butterfly,”
I think we’re veering off into weirder territory here, but good catch. We can also say, like Bill Hancock, that the Star Trek episode with the alien probe “Nomad,” resembled the Ranger spacecraft. Archetypes in the making?