 In just June and July of 1952, the U.S.
lost NINETY-FOUR fighter jets Worldwide and 51 men confirmed killed. Planes
were falling to the ground two and three at a time in some cases. The entire
month of September records are missing. According to the NY times ONE
HUNDRED AND NINETY-TWO aircraft vanished or were destroyed between
the years 1951 and 1956.
-
- Quotes:
-
- Donald Keyhoe, 1955... "In 1949 the Air Force told
me they had been ordered to 'get' a flying saucer by any possible means.
This was admitted by an intelligence officer at the Pentagon ...Major Jere
Boggs. In front of General Sory Smith, Boggs told me that one Air Force
pilot had fired at a saucer over New Jersey."
-
- The San Francisco Examiner. July 29 1952... "The
Air Force revealed today that jet pilots have been placed on twenty-four-hour
nationwide 'alert' against 'flying saucers' with orders to 'shoot them
down' if they refuse to land."
-
- The Louisville Courier-Journal. July 30, 1952... "Maj.
Gen. Roger Ramey, deputy Chief of the Air Force Staff for Operations, told
the news conference [July 29] that interceptor planes have raced aloft
several hundred times as a result of reported sighting of unidentified
objects. He said that was just standard procedure."
-
- Robert Farnsworth, President of the U.S. Rocket Society...Telegram
to President Harry Truman, July 29, 1952: "I respectfully suggest
that no offensive action be taken against the objects reported as unidentified
which have been sighted over our nation. Should they be extraterrestrial
- such action might result in the gravest consequences, as well as possibly
alienating us from beings of superior powers. Friendly contact should be
sought as long as possible."
-
- Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, 1956... "Other assorted
historians point out that normally the 'UFOs' are peaceful, [fighter pilots]
Gorman and Mantell just got too inquisitive, 'they just weren't ready to
be observed. If the Air Force hadn't slapped down the security lid these
writers might not have reached this conclusion. There have been other and
more lurid 'duels of death.'"
-
- Leonard Stringfield, 1977... "Back in the early
1950s, when I knew of the jet scrambles that sometimes led to disaster,
I agreed wirh Major Keyhoe's writings that in these we may know the intent
of the UFO. I also agreed that 'losing our aircraft to the UFO' may have
been the reason for official secrecy, fearing that the public would panic
if they knew the truth."
-
- General Benjamin Chidlaw, Head of Air Defense Command...
- Uncontested quote, as told to investigative writer Robert
Gardner in February of 1953. "We have stacks of reports about flying
saucers. We take them seriously when you consider we have lost many men
and planes trying to intercept them."
- CIA memorandum - "Subject: Flying Saucers."
Dated Sept. 24, 1952... H. Marshall Chadwell, Asst. Director of Scientific
Intelligence: "A world-wide reporting system has been instituted and
major Air Force Bases have been ordered to make interceptions of unidentified
flying objects."
-
- The Fullerton News-Tribune, CA July 26, 1956... "The
United States Navy will not publicly admit that it believes in flying saucers,
but it has officially ordered combat-ready pilots to 'shoot to kill' if
saucers are encountered, OCNS [Orange County News Service] has learned.
The information was first learned when Navy pilots navigating trans-Pacific
routes from the United States to Hawaii were ordered in a briefing session
to engage and identify ' any unidentified flying objects.' If the UFOs
(saucers) appeared hostile the briefing officer told the pilots of Los
Alamitos Naval Air Station reserve squadron VP 771, they are to be engaged
in combat... It was found that the orders are not unusual."
-
- Donald Keyhoe, 1973... "In the late 1950s, as a
number of futile US chases mounted, some pilots were convinced that the
UFOs were immune to gunfire and rockets. Several Intelligence analysts
believed the aliens might be using some negative force linked with gravity
control to repel or deflect bullets and missiles. But the top control group
disagreed. In a special evaluation of US. and foreign reports they found
evidence that UFOs were not invulnerable. Some had been temporarily crippled,
apparently from power or control failures, and a few others had been completely
destroyed by strange explosions. In one or two cases, it appeared that
missiles or rocket fire could have been the cause."
-
- http://www.amazon.com/Shoot-Them-Down-Flying-Saucer/dp/0615155537/
ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-4897833-4701606? ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192646167&sr=8-
-
-
- "Shoot Them Down"!
- Review By Alfred Lehmberg
- 10-17-7
-
- On the "Strange Days Indeed" radio program
with Errol Bruce-Knapp one Saturday night I heard Stanton Friedman say
that Frank Feschino's book on the Flatwoods monster would likely never
win a Pulitzer. I suspect he's, right-likely, right.
-
- ...Only... hold On. You'd be taking Mr. Friedman
well out of contest if you left it, altogether, there, reader. Endeavor
not to leave it there. It's likely never there, anyway!
-
- Perhaps that Pulitzer denial would not then come as a
result of reasons most immediately thought of, you know? You know
what I mean.
-
- I refer to those reasons concerning conjectured (if judgmental)
mainstream assessments that Feschino's book wasn't good enough. Gifted
enough. Polished enough. Detailed enough. Cited enough...
-
- ...Appropriate enough. Pertinent enough...
-
- ...Important enough? Right?
-
- I'm betting that's not Mr. Friedman's thinking! Plainly,
he seems to have a key understanding just how important Feschino's book
actually may be.
-
- Perhaps arguably, a close look at Mr. Feschino's work
and detailed research begs the question. Is it good enough? Is it gifted,
polished, cited, appropriate, pertinent, and important... ...enough?
-
- Consider, the aforementioned Mr. Friedman is willing
to put his name on the book and write within it fore and aft! Reader!
-
- It's been a long string of decades illustrating the issue
that that honorable gentleman has failed... my friends, only with regard
to disgracing himself professionally, or in any other way! Eh? I suggest
Friedman's studied endorsement is compellingly invested, and a ready tell-tale
for your attention, reader.
-
- Yes! The reader discovers one doesn't have to squint
ones eyes very much, if at all, to begin to wonder that the preceding might
indeed be so. That's right! Feschino's book might be good enough,
after all... Consider further.
-
- What's a Pulitzer? What did Mr. Pulitzer extort the intrepid
aspirates of his prize to do, anyway, but:
-
- <a> Unflinchingly study the social, political,
and moral realities of fellow human beings.
-
- <b> Make accurate records of the expressions regarding
the character displayed by these fellow individuals, and...
-
- <c> Report, equally unflinchingly, on the principles
of the aggregate world condition as it is, and has been, reflected by the
persons employing these principles.
-
- Unabashedly, I submit the case could be made that Mr.
Feschino has abundantly addressed each of the preceding points in turn...
in spades, and in extremis. That's right, too.
-
- ...But he'll never win a Pulitzer. No, reader! He can't!
How does that work?
-
- To recognize Frank Feschino for a Pulitzer is to knock
a supporting cornerstone from the
- edifice of a stagnant, authoritarian, officious, and
largely illegitimate and irrelevant "status quo" we all continue
to endure at peril to ourselves! Feschino can't get a Pulitzer, flatly,
because the *establishment* lacks the righteous sack it needs to cut its
own throat to give him one!
-
- I won't pretend that this is enough justification for
an *establishment's* reluctance to take its own life. Some throats,
very likely, should be cut, I suspect, but I digress...
-
- Be much of that as it may, Frank Feschino took more than
15 years of his life to rationally actualize on one startling set of very
unsettling conclusions! How unsettling? Well... pretend it's something
like... "humanity-in-pitched-battle-with-aliens-from-beyond-the-stars...with-a-twist,
reader, and get close!
-
- I won't apologize for that. Having looked into it myself,
I can't be ashamed that I said it.
-
- See, reader? These aforementioned conclusions themselves
were all sensibly kindled by a chance serendipitous interview Feschino
had made, in Flatwoods West Virginia, near the start of his remarkable
15 year quest! This interview was startling ...even during a first
investigative wash when he didn't know what he had! Ufologically?
Keys to a big part of the kingdom!
-
- After that propitious interview the data would accumulate
steeply over the next decade and change what began as a garden variety
project in college, patient reader... into a life's work and consuming
occupation! The interest is abundantly understandable.
-
- See further! Thoughouhly investigating all aspects of
an accident-site which was the result of a UFO forced down in aerial combat
operations with the United States...(read that again please) ...can provoke
that kind of "provoked obsession." No shame, reader, knowing
how "B"-movie nuts that sounds.
-
- I'm not making this up! Neither is Mr. Feschino. Relax.
Everybody's cheese is squarely on its cracker. That's what should
provoke your interest, actually.
-
- Recapping: This reviewed book is the result of an investigative
effort employed where Feschino was, again, unflinchingly steadfast in
a study of the sociopolitical realities revealed to him! He was made aware
of moral and ethical sub-realities that these *larger* realities further
implied! Heady stuff, reader, forgetting Feschino's kept his, Stanton Friedman
confirms, and I so report!
-
- Indeed 'Reality' was revealed, considered, and then assiduously
chronicled by Frank Feschino. In the final analysis (and we'd have never
heard about it otherwise, good reader!), Feschino came, he saw, and he
wrote it down. "Veni, vidi, scripsi," it could be said!
-
- The data are revealing, reader! Feschino reports them
to us in detail. Indeed, we weren't in 'Kansas' any more after 1952...
and may not, I submit (remembering a wealth of old history scribed in old
ink and stone... ...epic poetry indicating same?), have ever been in 'Kansas'!
Roll that and smoke it!
-
- Call the Ayahauscaroes, alert the Shamans, and get Dr.
Strassman on the line! The kingdom is at hand. The mundane plane is pierced!
Let's move on!
-
- We're not in 'Kansas'... now, reader! Got it?
-
- Moreover, get used to it, even as it is more good news,
really, is my suspicion. The future looms.
-
- Back to the discussion at hand, the aforementioned and
tumultuous "interview", an interview with the ranking military
person peculiarly involved with the Flatwoods affair (...a vetted hard
as nails hero of WWII...) ...occurred in a moment of idle interest born
of a distracted and tentative conjecture on the part of an unassuming and
non-presupposing Mr. Feschino! At the start? Feschino didn't give
a tinker's damn about UFOs!
-
- Mr. Feschino's initial interest, actually, in the beginning,
was with regard to a little throw-away film documentary he might put together,
about the Flatwoods "myth," ...to satisfy a course-requirement
for school, remember! What it turned into would be a taproot into the most
important events of our (...and any other!) time, or... yes...
-
- ...Even more compelling evidence that we are not alone
in billions of years of space, time, and surface area... a googolplex of
alien surface areas and maybe even a googolplex of aliens to inhabit them!
-
- ...More, anyway, than the reader can imagine is stealthily
hidden behind a grain of sand held at arms length into a night's starry
sky, sir or madam! True enough! Be humbled.
-
- The warm breath of an un-guessed infinity of potentiality
is only the beginning of the beginning for all of us. More good news,
if inexorable in its approach! Feschino writes the preamble of all
that.
-
- We are not alone, folks. An antithesis is ludicrous.
Moreover, all the major propeller heads, a few of the high-domes, and a
smattering of leading-edge, vetted, and credentialed intelligentsia think
it's ludicrous, too. I digress, again. Sorry, not.
-
- Something occurred in Flatwoods of Braxton County, West
Virginia September 12,
- 1952 that was just the tip of an iceberg, reader! The
data are beyond convincing! See if that isn't so!
-
- Something occurred (is occurring?) as surely as flying
saucers came close to landing on the White House lawn in July of that same
year... and they did come close to landing on the lawn, reader. Believe
that, too!
-
- In the town of Flatwoods, Braxton county West Virginia...
on a warm Indian Summer evening and interrupting playing children and relaxing
adults at the end of their working day... begins the strangest story never
told. Multiple objects interacted with multiple witnesses, people
were made ill... ...and a dog ran home in gibbering fright... then subsequently
died! None of the participants involved in this eerie affair were
ever the same again.
-
- Justifying that aforementioned Pulitzer, Mr. Feschino
makes a durable record of the expressions of character displayed by dozens
of individuals concerned with, and material to, this matter... people both
guilty and innocent in the matter... by persons both truth telling and
glibly lying regarding the matter... by folks both brave and cowardly,
warm and cold... by persons encountered on a foggy 'audit trail' Feschino
was driven to plod... ...a trail rife with dead ends, detours, and official
double-dealings...
-
- Feel the outrage with regard to the systemic disrespect
with which YOU are treated, reader, by a jealous and corrupted culture
of needless secrecy! Feel the burn!
-
- It's quite a ride. Mr. Toad is efficaciously eclipsed
Mr. Feschino! Moreover, in truth, the satisfied requirements for
Mr. Feschino's Pulitzer seem to steadily resolve! I spit in the mainstream
eye!
-
- More coal to Newcastle, but Mr. Feschino risked bodily
harm on numerous occasions during his investigation. This threat would
come, ironically, as a result of the very persons from which he'd have
to draw his story. Consider.
-
- In fourteen years Mr. Feschino was too often mistaken
for the same kind of glib cheap-shot-artist reporter or faux-journalist
*investigator* who'd glutted the area since that fateful night... ax-grinding
skepti-bunkers coyly generating the disdain, the derision, and the patent
disrespect stalwart Flatwoods witnesses had had to endure for half a century
... an unwarranted contempt and ridicule officiously imposed that innocent
people unjustly suffered... punished by their own society for having the
temerity to stand up and report the highly strange account they had all
had on that warm if bizarre September night!
-
- I suspect Feschino had his shirt-front grabbed more that
a few times by this angry group of betrayed citizenry. He was so
threatened on more than one occasion...
-
- Again, with regard to Pulitzer, the questions remain
begged! Has not Mr. Feschino reported on the principles of the aggregate
world and the condition reflected by them? Has he not spent many years
tirelessly trying to ferret out important details that would have gone
undiscovered and unreported but for his painstaking research, tedious dot
connecting, and unflinching perseverance?
-
- Has he not validated a couple of generations of innocent
persons trying to come to grips with the inexplicable thrust upon them?
Has he not vindicated these people to some extent and alleviated some of
their suffering as a result of his work? Such a person may have earned
more than a mere Pulitzer at the denouement. Verily!
-
- Does 'Nobel' have a category that applies? Unabashed
to the last, remember!
-
- All things equal? Feschino earns his Pulitzer. He has
more sack than many who've aspired to that prize, I suspect. Moreover,
I'll bet Mr. Friedman agrees with me. Feschino wins my award, at any rate.
-
- Along those same lines, Mr. Feschino can not be faulted
for his brave attempt to fill the societally imposed "information
void" (he suffers with the rest of us) by starting at the end of an
incredible story rife with suspicious details and curious facts... and
then working arduously -- modeling, graphing, and plotting backwards on
that stark and hostile trail... trying, thoughtfully, to connect those
aforementioned ephemeral dots... flesh out one more 'official' story that
won't add up from the 'official' account... This is a key concept, folks!
-
- Indeed, his admitted *conjecturing* and clearly identified
personal (if provoked!) *belief* may actually add up, ironically, to the
astonishing story he reports in his book!
-
- It just may be, reader, that given the clear evidentiary
audit trail of same...(read again please)...that there was an aerial battle
with ET out in the Atlantic that night in 1952. It may be that 8 to 10
American jets were destroyed in that struggle, alone, their crews lost.
Perhaps one Lt. Jones and crew, valiantly sacrificing themselves, even
rammed one of the UFOs, bravely, with his plane in the one-sided fight
Humanity likely provoked... and lost!
-
- Also consider... given that a postwar American military
was aggressively over-touchy and otherwise spring-loaded on the balls of
their very twitchy feet... especially after the repeated UFO over-flights
of prohibited airspace in Washington D.C. the previous July... it's not
that much of a stretch that it would react decisively to multiple UFO's
and
- their blithe transgressions over an imaginary fighting
line on the coastal ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone)... ...with folding-fin
aerial rockets and exploding 50 caliber machine gun fire! Yes!
-
- Further, Feschino's speculation is not remotely unreasonable
given the statement by Benjamin Chidlaw, a four star general commanding
the very high-profile "Air Defense Command", to wit: that many
"planes and crews" had been "lost" trying to "intercept
UFOs"... these are his words, it is reported. This is forgetting,
reader, the "many lurid duels of death," reported by Edward Ruppelt,
Air Force UFO point-man vis a vis "Project Bluebook."
-
- Mr. Feschino is not making the story up, at any rate,
I'm confident. Mr. Feschino is trying to make sense of the very real
story that is already there, I do believe. Extant is a sincerity in his
book, as a result, that this writer can relate to and find some substance
in, I not so humbly report.
-
- Additionally, I don't believe, especially after having
spoken with him for many hours (where I asked some pretty pointed questions),
that Mr. Feschino has it in him to write a sociopathic fiction, fobbed
off to the credulous as fact to crab their dollars... then smirk at that
betrayed reader's "nose-bubble credulity" as he orders up goth-hookers
and greasy-cheeseburgers...
-
- No, Feschino's only telling you the credible story he
knows, or... he is otherwise hanging some 'substance' on the astonishing
facts that he has, undeniably, uncovered! Veni, vidi, scripsi, friends
and neighbors. Verily, Feschino is the very best, shocked and truly concerned
with what the hell happened to 100's of likely terrified aviators who flew
right into the teeth of pretty strange stuff following orders to "Shoot
Them Down"!
-
- There is more there, more to the story, than you get
in the published book, reader... witnesses you don't hear from... alluded
to are the unsolicited and credible reports about other involvements, other
sightings in the area, and still other startling corroborations of fact
and circumstance attendant to the whole astonishing affair! It's breathtaking,
actually.
-
- Also, it's all very hard to discount intellectually.
Increasingly so. Try!
-
- An extraterrestrial being (or artifact of ET intelligence)
arrived Earth-side in a damaged craft... rightly or wrongly terrorized
an entire town of good, sober, and horse-sensed people in September of
1952, and then the government worked furiously to cover it all up... impugning
the honor of the aforementioned soldiers and citizenry (and ourselves!)
in the process... the very tip of the obligatory iceberg. Feschino tells
the whole story!
-
- Tragic, needless, and suspicious madness, reader.
You'll be amazed!
-
- As Feschino wrote to me in the inscription of the review
copy he sent:
-
- "The questions and answers I have provided in this
book are only the beginning..." Buckle-up, folks. Extinguish your
smokes. Prepare for take-off!
-
- See, I suspect that quote comes up as a bit of an understatement
from Mr. Feschino. But that's only my feeling. I'm comfortable going with
it. I submit you can too.
-
- Get more info about Mr. Feschino's book: "Shoot
Them Down -- The Flying Saucer Air Wars Of 1952" at, http://www.flatwoodsmonster.com/
-
- Read on!
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