Peeking at Ivan's SITU files: the Flatwoods Monster.

I promised that once the scanner worked again I'd try to get a little tidbit up on the Flatwoods Monster, so here it is. Most of you don't need this but: Flatwoods was an extremely unusual case during the 1952 wave, which happened during September [well after the July peak of the flap] and in Braxton County WV. The witnesses to the main event were one adult, one almost adult, and several teen-age boys. The early sensationalization of the encounter by the press did the credibility of an already hard-to-swallow event no good. The "entity" was painted by the press as a giant monster with grotesque arms and clawed hands --- neither of which existed according to witnesses. This Hollywood Monster in a Hill-billy setting made the event laughable. Much mockery and misunderstanding ensued and does so to this day.

Recently, at least two well-known UFOlogists have taken their turns debunking the "monster" and its ignorant West Virginian witnesses. As I am from a family of West Virginians, I take a fair amount of offense at the slurs, while maintaining my objectivity about the facts of the case itself. Our little "news item" here is because Ivan Sanderson was one of the second wave of investigators to study this event [he arrived about a week and a half after the date]. Because of his involvement, we are privileged to have a still-surviving notebook containing some of his work. What did our intrepid Ivan find??

Flatwoods is a very complicated affair and I'll not deliver a "review paper" here --- someday I probably will, but this is what I can do now. Ivan interviewed several of the boys. He did this in isolation from their buddies and their parents [at least to get the initial bulk testimonies.] He found the boys to be intelligent [one of them exceptionally so] and consistent in their general descriptions. Differences when they occurred were in small details. Sanderson, therefore, "bought" the general testimony. He made drawings of elements of the case, two of which are presented here. Please give Ivan a break and don't complain about the browning of the glue that he used 50+ years ago to stick these to his notebook paper. On the drawing above, the ugly whitish blotch in the middle of the monster is my own whiting-out of the worst of a rather bad discoloration. {panic not, my purist preservationists: the whiting out is not on the original but a copy I have made}.

The drawing indicates several interesting things to me: 1). it gives the lie to the Ace-of-Spades Monster idea; 2). the Entity appears much more like a robot or a fancy protective suit than some biological form; 3).the entity turns out to be eerily like the recent descriptions given to Frank Feschino in his revisiting of the case, despite the fact that the witnesses have probably not seen Ivan's artwork for 50 years, if they ever saw it at all. That sounds like a pretty firm attestation to the validity of this report; 4). if this is as accurate as it seems, it thrashes a lot of the debunkers' arguments.

The drawing is meant to convey a solid dark green "body" and a solid red "hood". The internal sphere was "dark" and the beams [emitted from two "things" within] colored blue. Those beams never altered their relation to the body, and always focussed more-or-less levelly ahead, never down at the boys. Exactly how close anyone got to the thing is unclear, but thirty feet is a maximum --- and thirty feet is plenty close enough for a very good look indeed.

This entity may have "activated" at the shining of a flashlight upon it, and moved down the sloping path [hovering above the ground] towards a glowing object, which was, perhaps, from where it came. That object was also a bit "ace-of-spades-like" in that it was a large inverted teardrop of glowing red-hot heat. Its own color was debated by the boys, some of whom thought that it WAS red, and others thought dark, but glowing because it was heating up. This teardrop was big and investigation of the area the next day found a large dried and depressed ground-marking [15' diameter] which was still clearly in evidence when Ivan arrived.

As some people try to write the case off to a meteor/meteorite, this redhot glowing 15' diameter twenty-foot tall "meteorite" makes a dandy anomaly of its own. I wonder who had a strong enough crane to whisk that much nickel-iron out of there overnight?? That hypothesis is, of course, preposterous, and only can be mentioned with a straight face if one utterly discounts the testimonies of those ignorant hillbillies, AND assumes a grand multiple hallucination. It's the sort of thing that, frankly, xxxxxs me off. [Pardon the unprofessionalism]. I believe after having glanced at Ivan's files, and earlier at Gray Barker's files [Flatwoods was, by the way, the only case that he made an honest effort on, and it was his first one], that this encounter is a true one, despite its high strangeness. Some skeptics think that they can take heart in the comfort that the USAF didn't bother to study the case. But even there, they are wrong.

This is NOT from Ivan's files.

The USAF sent no obvious investigation team that anyone noticed anyway, but the Pentagon was very interested in it nevertheless. We know this because of the above released document [actually in the Project Blue Book OSI microfilm all along.] As you can see it is a Routing and Record Sheet which is classified "Restricted" and is asking for a soil analysis. Of What?? Of Flatwoods soil. There was a report that the entity floated down the hill towards the UFO and that "skid-marks" had been initially seen. Whether soil samples from there, the area under the tree, or the depressed-dried area were taken for analysis, this record doesn't say. But it sure DOES say that the USAF's Pentagon UFO desk officer, Dewey Fournet, was interested [see Dewey's designator "Maj.Fournet" in the upper right --- that's where you find who really wrote these documents that higher officers sign --- and Adams was Dewey's boss, and another UFO=ET believer, so this document makes sense].

One last thing: Dewey is pushing for some urgency on these tests. Why?? He tells you that there is a second case that he thinks might be the same sort of thing, and he wants to see if the soil tests are similar. Really??! What's the other case he's excited about? It's not in the document directly, but you could guess from the dates involved --- but we don't have to. Someone scrawled the name in pencil on the form: "Desvergers". [sic: should be Desverges]. Sonny Desverges. The infamous "scoutmaster" case. BUT THE ONLY LANDING TRACE CASE THAT RUPPELT COULD NEVER CRACK. Ruppelt went to his grave knowing that this one wasn't explainable no matter how flaky the witness. Microwaved soil. He even used the case when he talked to groups of new intel officers about UFOs.

Hmmm...Flatwoods. Microwaved soil from the Desverges case. Dewey Fournet pushing his analysts hard. No interest in the Pentagon, eh? Yeh...nonsense...move along...nothing to see here.