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?

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!

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…

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.

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

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.

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.