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My name is Gray Barker.

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I have just written a book called Bay News Too Much about Flying Saucers.

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This is not going to be a speech.

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This is not going to be a lecture.

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I'm just going to sit here in front of my tape recorder and talk to you quite informally.

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I'm making this recording on July 4, 1956.

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I'm here in my office today.

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I probably should be out having some fun.

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It's such a nice day.

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However, I had a great many things to do.

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I've been jumping around all over the country, making lectures, television, and appearances, radio talks, and so forth about my book.

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And as a result, on a holiday, I'm afraid I'm back at the office, hard at work.

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Perhaps I should tell you something about what I do before I get into some of the points I would like to bring out about my book,

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and some of my experiences in investigating this phenomenon called Flying Saucers.

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I'm a businessman here in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

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I operate a film-buying-looking agency.

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I'm the seller who says what pictures are to be put into certain theaters.

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I handle a number of theaters in this manner in West Virginia and Maryland, Virginia, and Ohio.

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All of this keeps me very busy.

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In fact, a lot of my business associates, when they pass me on the street and say hello, look at me,

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they think I wonder why that fellow is moving around with such a subject as he claims to be investigating.

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I rather odd subject to these people.

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Flying Saucers, where I'm sometimes seeing how they work, piles up, I wonder myself why I ever got into this thing,

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as I'm sure a great many of you people listening often wonder too.

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A fellow called me up about a television appearance from New York recently.

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One of the first things he asked me was, did you ever see a Flying Saucer?

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Well, that is a very embarrassing question for me, for actually, I have never seen anything that I could really interpret as a Flying Saucer.

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I surely would like to see one, and I'm still looking for them, but I haven't seen any.

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This person in New York on the other end of the line acted as if he were surprised that someone like myself who interested in the subject

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had never seen one.

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I told him that just because I had never seen one was certainly no reason that I should not discount the mounting pile of evidence

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that is accumulating for Saucers.

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Nor can I disbelieve the reliable people who say they have seen them.

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Perhaps my experiences in the field goes back, I would say, to 1952.

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In 1952, I suppose I was like a great many other people today.

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The man on the street that is, I thought that Flying Saucers were the bunk, or perhaps I just didn't think too much of them at all at that time.

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At least I wasn't cognizant of everything that was going on.

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I was going about my daily life in a very normal way.

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When all of a sudden something happened, I was sitting having breakfast in fact.

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I picked up a newspaper and I saw a story written in my hometown, or what I call my hometown.

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It was written in Sutton, West Virginia.

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It was a United Press story.

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I must quote you some of that story if I might.

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Sutton, September 14, United Press.

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Seven Braxton County residents vowed today that if Bank and Spain must be with DO, drove them from the hilltop near here,

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the police figured the smelly boozy man was a product of mass hysteria.

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The thing described by witnesses as half man, half dragon, had not been reported since Friday night,

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but residents of the area said a foul odor still clung to the hilltop yesterday.

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All this started when Mrs. Kathleen May of that word said she and six boys, one of 17-year-old National Guardsmen,

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climbed the hill to investigate her two small sons report that a flying saucer landed there.

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They said they found a five-reading monster 10 feet tall with a bright green body and a blood red face,

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that waddled toward them in a bouncing floating motion and sent them scurrying down the hillside.

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He said the monster exceeded an overpowering odor like metal that so sickened them they vowed for hours afterward.

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It looked worse than Frankenstein's at Mrs. May. It couldn't have been human.

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Well, naturally I was a bit skeptical at least after I read this story,

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which did sound very much overwrought and of course it was rather.

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But since this happened near my home, I was very serious about it.

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I have a farm near Flatwood, West Virginia. In fact, I grew up in a country near there.

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Those people are very near to where my sister and brother live, near Flatwood.

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So I thought I would go home and just look around and kind of find out what this was all about.

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I thought, surely this must be a hoax of some sort. Surely this must be cooked up.

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This just couldn't have happened and I was determined to get at the bottom of it.

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Really, if something such as this were a hoax, it certainly deserved to be exposed

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because a lot of people naturally were believing it.

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So I picked up my bag as soon as I could and departed for Sutton, which is the county seat,

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a little town near Flatwood. Flatwood really couldn't be considered a town.

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It's just a post office, a general store and one or two other businesses.

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I arrived in Flatwood late of an evening and I found that the oldest boy, Jean Lemon, who was 17,

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and Mrs. May, the housewife, were in New York where they would appear on the We The People television program.

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So I couldn't see them immediately.

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About the next day I talked to the mayor of Sutton, Mr. J. Holt Bern, who also was editor of the Braxton Central,

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a weekly newspaper, and Mr. Bern was ready to talk to Ivan Sanderson, whom I imagine some of you know about.

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Ivan Sanderson had come to Flatwood to investigate the thing for a newspaper syndicate.

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Mr. Bern had first thought, surely this was a meteorite of some sort, there are a lot of gases,

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it might have looked like a marker, but after thinking about it and interviewing some of the witnesses, he wasn't so sure.

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Well, because I'd known Mayor Bern for a long time and knew he was a very level-headed fellow,

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I began to think, well, maybe there is something to this, but to find out about it,

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Mr. Bern told me that Neil Nunley, one of the seven witnesses, Neil Nunley was about 14 years old,

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he said that the boy was a very level-headed fellow and could tell me just what he did see in a sensible manner.

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So probably the next morning after I arrived, I went to Flatwood.

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The boy wasn't there when I arrived, so I talked to his stepfather, and Mr. A. M. Jordan,

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who had seen an object come over the house before it landed on the hillside.

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He drew a picture of it for me, in fact, and at the time he thought of it as jet plane when it went over,

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but of course after talking with the boy, his stepson, he wasn't so sure.

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The Nunley boy came into the house after a while, he seemed to be a very serious-minded youngster.

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So I asked him to tell me just what he saw.

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I had my tape recorded there, and I do have some tapes I made on this investigation,

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and on some other parts of the book, they knew too much about flying saucers.

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I do hope on some future tapes to include excerpts of these tapes,

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but unfortunately I don't have on hand a kind of re-recording equipment necessary for such a thing,

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so I'll have to leave them out.

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But I'm sure if you heard some of these, you would be convinced as I was that these people were telling the truth.

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Anyway, the Nunley boy gave me a very complete story of just what had happened, just what he had seen,

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so I'm going to try to relate it to you.

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It was around 7 o'clock in the evening that day, in September 1952, it was just getting dark.

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The sadders were beginning to come over the hills, and the kids were playing, incidentally,

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in a little ball park near a schoolhouse.

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They were playing softball or baseball, something that the kids liked to play anyway.

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When they looked up into the air, seeing something bright go overhead,

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the most peculiar thing about this object was that it seemed to land on the hilltop.

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It went over rather fast, and it slowed up, seemed to hover for a second,

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and then just seemed to fall down on top of the hill.

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Some of the children said it looked like a silver dollar going into the air.

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They were not all in complete agreement as to just what this looked like.

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Anyway, as Nunley's back in reach instructed, they believed it was a shooting star,

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which went over and had landed on the top of the hill.

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So, like most anyone who would be curious to see what it was,

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they decided to go up to the hilltop and investigate.

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The playground is about a half a mile from the hill, so it was a little while before they arrived here.

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Mrs. Kathleen May lived at the base of this hill.

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They ran into a house and perhaps cared to go with them.

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At first, she didn't believe there was anything to it all.

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She said, now you're sitting to me.

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But they said we'll come out onto the porch.

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We can tell you this thing on the hill.

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It's still lighted up up there, so she went out on the porch,

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and she herself could see the light on the hill.

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This light seemed to be pulsating dim to bright and dim to bright in cycles.

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There were seven in this party which went up to the hilltop.

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And Mrs. May, Jean Lemon, 17 years old, Neil Nunley,

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who I interviewed in Great Mike who was 14 years old, Tommy Hire, 10.

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Ronnie Shaver was also 10 years old, and Mrs. May's two children, Andy and Fred,

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they were 13 and 12 years old respectively.

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They naturally didn't expect to see anything like they saw at the top of the hill,

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or surely they wouldn't have investigated.

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And near the hilltop, the first odd thing that happened was they're encountering a kind of mist, or fog,

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which of course isn't too unnatural, but this involved a strange pungent odor of some sort.

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I tried to get a good description of this odor,

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but apparently they had never smelled anything just like it before and couldn't describe it.

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They did all agree that it was quite irritating to their nostrils and seemed to choke them.

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Myself, I probably would have gone back right then, however they didn't.

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Perhaps you knew it wasn't too strong at that point, or they just thought the mist was ordinary fog.

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I don't really know.

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Anyway, at the top of the hill, everything really happened.

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And I tried to construct it as nearly as possible, trying to figure just exactly what they could see in what order and so on.

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Of course, when you're really frightened, you don't really know everything that did happen.

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However, the Nunley Boy just gave me a very straight account, I believe, of the events that they occurred.

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As soon as they had reached the top of the hill, they looked down over the other side.

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They saw they're a huge, very globes-like shape.

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Nunley didn't know how big it was. He said, it's big as a house. That's the way he described it.

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But let us remember that the descriptions of something being a few moments of fright may be quite difficult to describe correctly.

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Now, about the time they saw this globular shape down over the hill, they also saw something else.

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The Nunley Boy said he thought he saw animal eyes and a tree nearby and directed his flashlight at it.

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And at that brain moment, they became aware of a huge shape to their left about 15 feet away.

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Now, this huge shape, which looked something like a man, I suppose, seemed to be moving to them, not walking, but floating, it seemed, and Nunley.

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It also seemed to be describing an arc or moving in a circle toward them, but on an arc that would take it back down over the hill to this globulite shape they saw.

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The best thing to describe this monster, the paper is called it, was that it was from 10 to 15 feet high.

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Its body was dark, however, Mrs. May thought she saw clothing like folds around it. Not all of the witnesses saw this, however.

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Its face, if you could call it a face, was described as blood red.

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And out of its eyes, or eye-like openings, I imagine, seemed to project rays of light.

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Now Nunley said they were greenish orange things.

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And Mrs. May, who probably was the most excited of the party, said the rays were directed right at her.

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But Nunley seemed to keep her level of head during all this excitement, so they projected out over their heads.

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Now, no one knows how long they stood there watching a very, but it must have indeed been a very short period.

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I suspect they took the shortest look imaginable and then took off running as fast as they could.

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They don't know exactly how many seconds they watched.

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I don't know if that's a thing that freezes you there for a moment while you look at it, or whether you take the briefest glimpse and run.

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Anyway, this seems to me to be something entirely alien to anyone's experience.

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Something that would really frighten a person running onto it without any preparation.

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And evidently, this is how it affected these people.

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A general director who wouldn't give me the story for fear of publicity, I suppose,

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happened to be around there and gave the people first aid after this experience.

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I understand that it made some of them quite ill.

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Anyway, the first thing they did was to call the sheriff.

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But the sheriff had already been called to another nearby town, Frametown,

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where a hitchhiker had got out of the car, come and thrown into the county street to the sheriff's office,

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said he had seen a hyper-tubbed plane on fire which seemed to land on the hill.

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The sheriff was in Frametown investigating this particular report.

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However, he didn't find any evidence of any trashed aircraft,

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so he wasn't available to arrest a flat-wrestle to investigate the report he received from there about the monster.

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So it must have been an hour and a half later when the sheriff arrived in flat words at the scene of the monster fighting.

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He went up onto the hilltop immediately, but he didn't find a thing.

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He said he couldn't know any odor either when I asked him about the thing and his cough as a part of my investigation.

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The first witness is on the scene after the people ran back down off the hill as nearly a second reconstructed

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for two boys, Junior Edward about 18 years old and a joint Martin about 20 years old,

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who didn't see anything at all on the hilltop, very shortly after the people were seeing the monster.

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The next witness, as I can reconstruct, was Mr. A. Lee Stewart, who is the editor of the Braxton Democrat,

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another weekly newspaper of that area.

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He arrived, of course, checking on the thing for his paper and decided to investigate, of course,

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and see if there was anything on the hilltop.

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The people were still quite frightened, and he asked the boys to go with him to the top of the hill,

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and no one was accompanying him at first.

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Finally, he talked to the lemon boy into going with him, who was still cowering there and trembling.

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He said they're still very much frightened, but just shortly after he walked behind Stewart and Stanley,

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they reached the top of the hill and there was nothing there.

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Which is a rather odd thing about the fighting.

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No one saw whatever it was leave, although perhaps it could have, and all the excitement,

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and no one would have ever seen it.

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Stewart, finding nothing, however, decided to come back the next morning when it was daylight and investigate further.

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He was the first person on the hill the next morning.

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He heard about the odor, and having had some experience with gas,

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he was in war there, he was in the Air Force, farmally.

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He felt that the gas may have settled to the ground,

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and so he bent to the ground and stuck there, and he could smell the odor clean to the ground.

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He said that he had never encountered any odor like that, any sort of gas that he could recognize,

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which was like this.

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He also described it as being basically irritating and diagnosing it.

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He said it seemed to constrict the nasal and throat passages also.

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He did find some peculiar markings, however, on the ground.

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After place where the people had reported saying the huge figure,

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he could see what he described as skid marks on the ground.

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These skid marks were 10 feet apart.

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Mr. Stewart imagined if someone were to find it possible to ride down over the hill on skis,

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it would leave such marks.

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Another unusual thing about these marks was that it had nearly written down the grass

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that hadn't cut into the soil at all.

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The skier, if that's what it was, had merely tossed a few stones aside.

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Whatever it was had not been heavy in weight.

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At the termination of these skid marks down over the hill where the people had seen the huge globular shape,

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a large area of grass had been traveled down.

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Now some of the people around the flatlands who didn't believe the story told me that a Mr. Brooks Fisher,

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who owns the farm, had been cutting hay on the side of the hill,

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and that his tractor had left these marks.

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I checked immediately with Mr. Fisher and found there was nothing to this,

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that that part of the terrain was too steep for farm equipment,

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and that certainly he had not been there with any such equipment.

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Anyway, it all boiled down to the fact that no matter how I tried to test the thing,

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it appeared that this certainly was no joke or a hoax,

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or these people certainly were not telling a fit about it all.

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I had come to flatlands quite skeptical, not wanting to believe the story in fact,

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and it just rather threw me after I had got all the facts which were in within my reach.

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I figured that it would be almost impossible in fact for these people to create such a hoax,

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if that were what it was.

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As nearly as I could find out, these people had not read any science fiction.

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They were rather unsophisticated, I would say, very simple country people,

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who are usually basically honest.

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About perhaps I thought maybe someone had rigged up a monster,

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and they had seen that and become frightened at it,

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but then I thought, how could that be?

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This had been synchronized with a display of aerial objects over several states.

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That very same night, people over a wide area had seen what they very aptly described as shooting stars

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and the air-ights flying saucers going over.

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If someone had rigged up a stunt, it would have been too great a coincidence to have done it.

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At the same time that all of these things were going over to the air,

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and especially to have one seemingly land on the hilltop,

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just at the time this thing was cooked up.

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So I certainly cannot speak here any way of this being a hoax.

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And I imagine a lot of other stories which we disbelieve would turn out to be similarly quite realistic

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if we had the opportunity to really investigate them

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instead of merely scoffing at them from a far off vantage point.

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I didn't know quite how to interpret what these people had seen,

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and I still haven't been able to arrive at any hard and fast conclusion.

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I have only arrived at this conclusion,

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but these seven witnesses did see something that was terrifying and which was unfamiliar,

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something rather similar to what they described.

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Now, but it is the interpretation of these points that is difficult.

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Because of the widespread talk of her and the belief in flying saucers,

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I was inclined to connect the incident with flying saucers.

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The appearance of the thing before it presumably landed was similar to many such old flying saucers,

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though it just presents different aspects to different viewers.

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The aero-oncic seen by Mr. Jordan and the children certainly did not behave like a meteorite.

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Well, if it was a flying saucer, why did it land?

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I asked myself, was it a mechanical difficulty?

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Could it have been, or did its pilot wish to make observations?

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Yes, this was a thing which got out of a flying saucer.

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The hilltop would be a vantage point from where he could survey a great deal of the country.

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He could see a great deal from that point, and it would seem to me as if whatever it was landed on the hilltop,

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and a creature got out of it and went to the top of the hill to see what he could see.

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And seeing the people coming up the hill, or maybe it even was frightened of them,

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or did not want interference, it is very hard to say.

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Anyway, I am convinced that the people did see something in Blackwood's West Virginia that night in September,

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and that if something wasn't anything ordinary to our Earth, at least it served to start needed thinking.

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Here was evidence that one would accept in a courtroom from seven witnesses,

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so it was quite puzzled.

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Anyway, there was one thing that was going through my mind,

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but I was determined to find out more about so-called flying saucers.

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If there was something to this report, surely there must be something to a great many other reports.

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So, I suppose at this time I got the press.