Reinhold Schmidt went on to become a typical contactee. He claimed repeated contacts with the ufonauts for years afterwards. Like fairies, Brothers, and Elders, once the ufonauts make contact with a human being, they often hold on until they completely ruin him or her. In Schmidt’s case, they kindly told him where there was a mine of quartz with some unusual properties. This quartz could somehow cure cancer. Schmidt bought up the mine and began selling shares. His stockholders eventually hauled him into court, and the friendly spacepeople deserted him.
Is Hitler alive and well and living on Venus? Or were the German-speaking ufonauts of Kearney, Nebraska, and Dante, Tennessee, merely ultraterrestrials playing out another of their endless games? Aryan saucer pilots have become rare since 1957. For a time in the late 1950s, a group of beings with high foreheads and large catlike eyes appeared before cat-loving Englishmen. There have even been a number of cases in which nymphomaniacs from outer space have spread their favors among horny young farmers and college students. I investigated a rash of these sexual liaisons on several different college campuses in 1967, soon realizing they were a variation on the much older incubus and succubus phenomena (demon lovers). The short, blonde ladies with exceptionally long fingers and willing ways once plagued lonely monks and priests. In the last century, black males in the south often encountered these same evil ladies cavorting nude in the woods, trying to lure them into a tumble in the grass timed so they would be discovered by passing white men. In those days, the poor black would be lynched on the spot, while his mysterious partner uttered a banshee-like wail and ran off into the woods never to be seen again.
Not all the ultraterrestrial games are harmless fun.
Flatwoods is a tiny cluster of houses saddling the hills of Braxton County in West Virginia. It is about five miles from Sutton, the county seat. Braxton County is a window area, rich with folklore about monsters, UFOs, and things bumping in the night. For a few days in September 1952, Flatwoods enjoyed unhappy fame in the national media. A special kind of monster landed there, displaying all the characteristics I have been discussing.
There was a massive UFO flap in the United States in 1952, following the usual patterns. It spread up and down the West Coast, then a pincer movement in the Midwest began with sightings stretching up into the Mississippi valley from the Gulf of Mexico, while other LITS (lights in the sky) swept down from Canada over the Great Lakes region and engulfed Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, etc. The Ohio River joins the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois. When Cairo enters a flap phase, we know that the activity will quickly spread up and down the Ohio valley through Kentucky to Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The problem is to figure out exactly where and how the phenomenon will strike in these areas. In one flap, it might produce a series of landings and contacts with little men. In another, it might come up with a brand new type of monster.
At 7 p.m. on Friday, September 12, 1952, a “fireball” roared across Baltimore, Maryland, headed west. It was seen by thousands of people on the East Coast.
A few minutes later Mr. Woodrow Eagle was driving near Gassaway, West Virginia, on his way to Sutton when he saw a flaming object hurtle out of the sky and crash into a steep hill to the south. Thinking it was a plane crash, he turned around and drove two miles to the nearest telephone to call the sheriff in Sutton.
At Flatwoods, a group of boys were playing on the local football field when, at about 7:15 p.m., they saw a bright red object coming at slow speed around a hill. It seemed to stop in midair and then dropped behind the hill. A moment later, a bright orange light lit up the sky and faded slowly away to a cherry red glow.
The boys started running toward the hill. At last something interesting was happening in Flatwoods! They raced up a hill road, passing a house occupied by the May family. Mrs. Kathleen May came out on the porch and asked them where they were going.
“A flyin’ saucer’s landed on the hill,” young Ronald Shaver told her. “We’re gonna take a look at it!”
Mrs. May asked them to wait while she picked up a flashlight. Eugene Lemon, a 17-year-old neighbor, joined the excited group as they continued on up the hill in the darkness, his dog trotting on ahead. They came to a five-foot-high gate on the path, fumbled with the latch, passed through it, and closed it carefully behind them.
Near the top of the hill, the dog began howling and whining, then it let out a bloodcurdling yelp and came dashing back, a streak in the dark shooting past the group and heading downhill as fast as it could go.
A pulsing red glow lit the blackened hilltop, and a peculiar mist hugged the summit. When Mrs. May and the boys rushed into it, they were greeted by an overpowering “sickly” smell that made their eyes water.
The frightened dog and the terrible stench slowed their pace somewhat. Gasping for breath, they turned the final bend in the path and stood on the summit.
“There’s nothing here,” one of the boys announced.
“Over there. By that tree,” Mrs. May cried, pointing to her left. Young Neal Nunley, who was carrying the flashlight, swung his beam to the tree. A large pair of eyes seemed to glow on a high limb. The whole party froze, transfixed for one awful moment. There, seeming to float in the air by the tree, was a gigantic object the size of a very large man. Its head, all the witnesses agreed later, was shaped like an “ace of spades” distinguished by two large luminous eyes which threw out powerful beams of pale blue light. No arms or legs were visible. It shifted slightly, moving its whole body, and the beams from its “eyes” turned to a spot in the grass where a large object suddenly pulsed, changing from a bright red to orange and back again.
Eugene Lemon did the rational thing. He fainted dead away.
It would be an understatement to say they were terrified and confused. The other boys dragged Lemon to his feet, and they all beat a strategic retreat. When they reached the gate in the path, they didn’t bother to open it. Mrs. May somehow jumped over it, a feat she could never repeat. The others went under it, around it, over it—none of them remembering how.
Lemon’s dog was stretched out at the foot of the hill, vomiting.
A few hours later, the local sheriff arrived, accompanied by newspaper reporters from Sutton. The sheriff dismissed the whole story and refused to visit the hill, but the reporters found the area still reeked with a pungent odor that offended nose and throat. There were traces of a 15-foot, circular flattened area in the grass but no sign of the monster or the object.
According to our law of synchronicity, a similar monster should have turned up the same night in California or some other distant place. But the phenomenon threw us a slight curve. The monster reappeared all right, and the very next night—but near Frametown, West Virginia, the other side of Sutton.
At 10 p.m. on September 13, 1952, Mr. and Mrs. George Snitowski and their little girl were driving near Frametown when their car suddenly stalled. Mr. Snitowski got out of the car and noticed a strong sulphurous smell in the air. He started walking towards a very bright light in some nearby woods, thinking something might be burning. Nearing the light, he felt electrical pricklings throughout his body, and he staggered back to the car, falling down several times. He found his wife cringing in abject terror. She mutely pointed out a giant 10-foot-tall human-shaped entity about 30 feet away. They locked themselves in the car as the thing circled it, seeming to inspect it, then it loped away into the woods, Moments later a brilliant sphere of light rose from the trees and soared away, leaving a luminous trail.
A few days after the Flatwoods monster paid his visit, two men appeared in Braxton County posing as peddlers. They systematically visited the homes of most of the witnesses, showing little interest in selling pots and pans but anxious to talk about the sightings for hours.
The law of synchronicity has created a fascinating statistical anomaly that suggests that witnesses are not accidental but are actually selected. In fact, the deeper you penetrate into this business, the more obvious it becomes that very little chance is involved. The sigh
tings follow preset geographical and time patterns. In the seemingly chance contacts, they often carry out repetitive actions (i.e., inspecting their machine with a flashlight) that almost seem rehearsed.
While handling great mounds of clippings and reports dating back to the 1890s and naming thousands of witnesses, I noted the prevalence of odd surnames, such as Snitowski, and the relative rarity of really common names like Smith and Jones. Since we are dealing with thousands of reports,[13] not a mere handful, certain basic statistical laws should surface. They have not. If there are more Smiths than Snitowskis in the United States, why have so few Smiths been named in these reports?
Back in 1964, the Social Security Administration released a list of the most common surnames in the United States based on a computer readout of their records. The top ten were (in order): Smith, Johnson, Williams(on), Brown, Jones, Miller, Davis, Martin(ez) (son), Anders(on), Wilson. Even if you take a comparatively small “population,” such as the 37 presidents, you find that three had names from this top ten (Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson). Why are there so few Wilsons and Johnsons among UFO witnesses? Simple odds alone should give us more Smiths than Snitowskis.
In 1966-67, people with the surname Reeve(s) were caught up in the UFO games. The members of a Reeves family in Oregon were driven from their home by eerie lights that passed through walls and chased them from room to room like ball lightning (but this was definitely not ball lightning), while larger objects hovered above their roof and shadowy little figures moved about in their fields. A few months before that, John Reeves (no relation) of Brooksville, Florida, claimed contact with a being in a space suit who landed on a sand dune. And one of the most prominent UFO investigators of the 1950s and 1960s was an engineer named Bryant Reeve.
Mere coincidences, you might say. But ufological lore is shot full of coincidences. One of the victims of the collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, site of a big UFO wave in 1967, was named Alvis Maddox. Three months later, in March 1968, a deputy sheriff in Texas was mentioned in a widely published UFO sighting. His name, too, was Alvis Maddox.
In my travels I noted a number of odd variations in this name game. Spectacular sightings and landings occurred at places called Misery Bay, Misery Point, Mount Misery, and Misery Hollow. In each case I found the places had been so named because, logically, weird and miserable things had been happening in them for many years—hauntings, murders, strange noises, bizarre phantasms, disappearances of children and animals without explanation.
Sightings in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, were followed by sightings in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Sometimes UFO sightings or monster appearances will occur simultaneously in two widely scattered places bearing the same name.
Some of these coincidences can really boggle the mind. The Flatwoods monster was one of the best-publicized events of 1952. There were few publicized sightings in the U.S. after that, until all hell broke loose in Kentucky in 1955.
Hopkinsville, Kentucky, has one chief claim to fame. It was the boyhood home of Edgar Cayce, the celebrated medium and prophet. On the night of August 21, 1955, a family named Sutton reportedly saw a light land on their property, and several silvery little men with elephantine ears attacked their farmhouse. The Sutton men grabbed their rifles and fired at the creatures for hours. When they hit one of the fellows, he would somersault (they had amazing agility) and come back for more. Finally, the family piled into their jalopy and fled to Hopkinsville for the sheriff. On the way back, the sheriff saw a light rising into the sky. There was no question but that the terrified family had seen something, and the bullet holes all over the property proved they had been desperately shooting at something.
The story was flashed around the country by the wire services. In 1952 the Flatwoods episode had made Sutton, West Virginia, temporarily famous. Now, three years later, a Sutton family was in the news. The Hopkinsville shootout has become a “classic” and is probably one of the most overrated episodes in the UFO annals.[14] The family was questioned routinely by officers of the Air Force, but about two weeks later a couple of hardware peddlers visited the area. They sold no merchandise because they were too busy questioning everyone about the incident.
Not many Suttons have been involved since, but I did finally meet a witness named Jones in 1967. Later, in the fall of 1973, 1 complained to various correspondents and researchers about the dearth of Smiths and Joneses in the incoming reports of the big October flap. Apparently some Venusian was also reading my mail. On Thursday, November 1, 1973, Mrs. Wanda Jones looked out her kitchen window and was stunned to see a rotating, orange-colored object hovering about five feet above the ground. It was “about the size of a double-car garage,” she said, and it emitted a loud buzzing sound. She gathered her children and fled to a neighbor’s house.
“There’s no doubt about it, Mrs. Wanda Jones saw something that caused her to become hysterical,” Police Sgt. Gary Jurkowski told reporters.
Mrs. Jones lives outside the village of Perry, New York. Most of the people in Perry are of Polish descent and have difficult names, like Sergeant Jurkowski’s. So why did our friendly Venusians decide to show themselves to one of the few Joneses in the area? The answer is as simple as it is paranoid.
Perry is my hometown. Mrs. Jones knows my family. This was one of the first UFO sightings in the Perry area since 1966.
Allied with the synchronous events is what I call the reflective factor. Somehow the phenomenon reflects back material that supports whatever beliefs or theories motivate the investigators. Once, just for the hell of it, I doodled with the notion that some of our parahumans might be aquatic. They were often seen wearing turtleneck sweaters, and I wondered, not very seriously, if their turtlenecks might be concealing something like gills. Naturally, I didn’t discuss this preposterous theory with anyone, but—and this was utterly amazing to me—the week I played with this idea I suddenly received a letter from a young man in Florida who described a remarkable encounter. He had been hitchhiking and was picked up by a very strange man who had gill-like flaps on his throat. I’ve never received any other reports of this type. It is a one-of-a-kind.
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The two sounds most closely allied to the monster sightings are a baby crying and a woman screaming. The baby crying sound is also well-known to psychic researchers and, according to the folklore of North Carolina and other southern states, is often heard in haunted houses and deserted cemeteries late at night. The sound of a woman wailing or screaming is, of course, the classic cry of the legendary banshee known from Africa and Ireland to Southeast Asia.
Actually, the banshee cry could be mechanical, caused by an abrupt temperature change. Phoney mediums produce this sound in séance rooms by rubbing a warm silver dollar across a piece of dry ice. Sudden temperature changes are quite common in both ghost stories and UFO reports. A room, or the interior of a car, can become unbearably hot or unbearably cold in a matter of seconds in the presence of an apparition or UFO. Flying-saucer believers regard this as a mechanical effect of the UFO’s superior technology.
It is more probable that these sound waves are being produced by the same phenomenon that alters the chemical composition of the air and generates the terrible stench. They do not emanate from a set of lusty, hair-covered vocal cords but are the result of an abrupt temperature change, which creates sudden sound waves as the warm air is forced away from a mass of frigid air.
The animals have been heard to make another sound, but it is a guttural, blubbering noise.
Sound plays another role in the monster mystery. Do you know why your local church has a loud bell, which jars you out of a sound sleep every Sunday morning? It is a holdover from a very ancient tradition known and practiced by almost every tribe on this planet. Demons are supposed to be allergic to loud sounds, particularly sounds in the ultrasonic range. When an Abominable Snowman is reported in the Himalayas, the local lamas still turn out with their bells and horns and set up an enormous rac
ket to drive the creature away. Loud bells were used in temples long before the Christian era, not to summon worshippers but to drive away devils and evil spirits on holy days. Very high-pitched bells and musical instruments similar to dog whistles (which can’t even be heard by human ears) were the most effective way of getting rid of dragons and red-eyed monsters.
Apparently some footprint-making phantasms dissolve when exposed to a high-frequency sound. But loud sounds lower on the scale also affect them. A blast on an auto horn, for example, will send a BEN (Big Hairy Monster) scurrying for cover. A shrill note on a trumpet will clear the sky of UFOs. Police and fire sirens are also effective anti-bogeymen devices.
Dogs, cats, horses, and other animals with hearing far more sensitive than human ears often react with fear and panic before the human witnesses hear or see anything unusual. Gordon Creighton, a retired British diplomat, has compiled a catalog of hundreds of cases in which such animal reactions were noted before or during UFO sightings and occult manifestations. Flying saucers are frequently accompanied by weird science-fiction-like hummings and beepings high up on the audio scale. These sounds have even been recorded on tape a number of times. UFO enthusiasts generally explain such sounds as being the by-product of the technology of the objects. But in studying many of these cases, it occurred to me that areas were being bathed in high-frequency sounds for some other purpose. Were these things driving away other entities or forces on the ground before they swooped down to collect a few cows or whatever? Or is the purpose even more sinister than that?
THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum Page 12