Showing posts with label Point Pleasant. Show all posts

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Mothman Museum, Point Pleasant’s Number-One Tourist Attraction

Mothman Museum lays out evidence for believers and skeptics

By Zack Harold
www.charlestondailymail.com
9-17-14

POINT PLEASANT — Museums are usually reserved for proof.

Their exhibits — whether it’s a taxidermied specimen of some long-extinct animal, a collection of dinosaur bones, a historic document or some famous work of art — are meant to prove the existence of something and preserve those artifacts for future inspection.

Not so with the Mothman Museum, Point Pleasant’s number-one tourist attraction.

There is no Mothman specimen. There’s not even a clear photo of the creature, or any other definitive proof of its existence.

Like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, Mothman is a mythic creature that some people adamantly believe is real, even though the larger scientific community does not.

However, the museum does feature several different kinds of “evidence,” such as it is, laid out for visitors to form their own opinions. . . .

Continue Reading . . .

See Also:

Mothman: Myth or Reality?

Mothman is Still a Hot Topic

Mothman Festival

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West Virginia: "More Documented UFO Activity Than Any Other Place in America"

West Virginia almost a UFO heaven?

By Mannix Porterfield
The Register Herald
8-10-08

West Virginia prides itself as a land of majestic mountains, sparkling streams, coal to feed hungry power plants, a unique place in American history and a fiercely independent people accustomed to overcoming hard times with a resiliency unrivaled by anyone else.

Now add another chapter to the 35th state’s storied history — more documented UFO activity than any other place in America.

Even eclipsing Roswell.

For proof, author-researcher Frank Feschino points to his exhaustive study that revealed three separate alien aircraft crash-landed a combined 10 times on the historic night of Sept. 12, 1952, the benchmark of the UFO phenomena, when the “Flatwoods Monster” was born.

All of the craft escaped, although heavily damaged by hopscotching across the rugged terrain of West Virginia, flying low to avoid radar detection, he says.

“They were damaged and puddle jumping, and taking off — that’s what they were doing,” Feschino says.

On a steep hillside, a bevy of youngsters drawn away from a game of sandlot football, along with some adults, were shaken out of their shoes by the spectacle of a 12-foot, metallic object that emanated a pungent odor of sulfur and made sounds that reminded one witness of bacon sizzling in a fry pan.

Feschino has two books published on the Flatwoods incident, and a third is a work in progress to be titled “The Flatwoods Monster — From Myth to Reality.”

Come Sept. 12 — the 56th anniversary of that riveting episode in Mountain State folklore — Feschino and renowned UFO researcher-lecturer Stanton Friedman plan to headline the opening of a two-day, second extravaganza, this one set in St. Albans, where the author says a craft landed in a frenzy of activity half a century ago.

This year’s show is titled “Flatwoods Monster meets Mothman,” the latter a reference to a bird-like creature said to have haunted Point Pleasant just before the 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge. A key player will be Freddie May, one of the youngsters lured from a pickup game of football back in 1952 and a surviving witness to the “Flatwoods Monster.” An illess kept him from appearing at last summer’s first such event.

Feschino gleaned up to 70 percent of his findings in plowing through the Air Force’s official document on unknown aircraft, titled “Project Blue Book,” and finds its amazing that Roswell, N.M., for all its reputation, is covered very little in government papers.

“You have some newspaper reports that say the Army captured the saucer, but as far as the case itself, the official standing on the Roswell case is that it didn’t happen,” he says.

Based on “Blue Book,” 1952 was the high water mark for UFO activity, with 1,501 reports and 303 officially listed as “unknowns,” and the largest concentration — 1,134 reports — came in the summer months of July, August and September.

Officially, the government uses the term “flap,” describing it as “a condition, a situation or a state of being, of a group of persons, characterized by an advanced degree of confusion that has not quite reached panic proportions.”

For some reason, Feschino says, no one paid any attention to Flatwoods, but the author invested 17 years of his life digging into the story, learning of 100 different locations where suspected alien craft were spied in nine states, largely along the Eastern Seaboard.

“There were thousands of people who saw these things, up and down the East Coast,” he says.

“What I did was to figure out the flight path trajectories. I worked with all types of people — aeronautical people, pilots, astronomers, scientists, jet people, police officers, Air Force people. They helped and assisted me by putting this whole mess of sightings together.”

Using his own master map, he pinpointed the flights unearthed by exhaustive research.

“And over all the years researching the story, it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” Feschino said.

“By using the ‘Blue Book’ as my primary source, I would go into local newspapers and just pick up the trails. When I figured out what direction these UFOs were flying, I would go from the Baltimore area and through Maryland, West Virginia and Ohio, and I picked up the trail these UFOs were flying that night.”

On the critical night of Sept. 12, Feschino says, he learned of 21 hours of sustained UFO activity, and West Virginia was the hub of it all.

“There were 10 actual crash landings that night in West Virginia,” he says. “They’re all documented. This is what took 17 years to figure out.”

In order, some of those landings occurred when the first spaceship crashed at Oglebay Park near Wheeling, at St. Albans, in Charleston, then up in a suburb named South Hills, back into the Watt Powell Park area of the capital and in Cabin Creek, where the same UFO landed five times, the author says.

A second craft buzzed the nation’s capital, flew over Virginia, then landed in Flatwoods at 7:25 p.m., where the local denizens christened it the “Green Monster,” Feschino said.

Finally, a third ship hit the earth in a community called Holly, just outside Flatwoods, took off and crashed a second time in Sugar Creek along the Elk River, lifted off again and then went into a third tailspin at Frametown, the author said.

Some debris was scattered at the Flatwoods crash site and was shipped off by an Air Force officer to Washington, including pieces of metal and chunks of an unknown, plasticlike material.

“I suppose if you went digging through some of these areas, you might find something,” Feschino speculated.

Feschino cannot say if any effort was ever made by any of the alien invaders to make contact with West Virginians or other earthlings, but says their ships ranged from the standard saucer-shape model to the round ones with a flat side, to ones that resembled cigars.

Yet, his long-running and exhaustive research have convinced him that he has unearthed the truth.

“I actually re-drove and re-enacted that whole night, driving all through Braxton County,” he said.

“It took me years to do it. It was a cold case and I reconstructed it.”

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Friday, December 14, 2007

Survivor Recalls Plunge From Silver Bridge into The River

By Jake Stump
The Charleston Daily Mail
12-14-07

Truck driver William Edmondson was hauling 35,000 pounds of tire fabric on his usual run back to Detroit on Dec. 15, 1967.

Coming from Winston-Salem, N.C., Edmondson would cross the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant two or three times a week.

The suspension bridge, which connected Point Pleasant and Kanauga, Ohio, was built in 1928 and named for the color of its aluminum paint.

For Edmondson, then 38, it was just another freight run.

That is, until the bridge shook unusually as he drove his rig over it. He recalls the bridge tilting right, collapsing and dumping him and everything on the deck into the Ohio River below.

The impact launched Edmondson from the driver's seat through the passenger glass window.

Immersed in 43-degree water, Edmondson floated downstream to the mouth of the Kanawha River. He eventually came upon a barge, where some men helped the battered and bloodied trucker out of the water.

"If I hadn't been conscious, I would have drowned," Edmondson said.

Edmondson was transported to Pleasant Valley Hospital and treated for a broken right arm and several cuts on his arms, legs and head.

He's one of the few to

live through the disaster that killed 46 people.

It is believed there were 37 vehicles on the span when it crumbled, and only nine people survived the fall.

Saturday marks the 40th anniversary of the collapse. Jam-packed with rush hour traffic at around 5 p.m. that day, the bridge gave way because of the failure of a single eye-bar in the suspension chain, investigators concluded.

A newspaper reporter described the event by writing that the bridge "bent sharply to the north, spilling its contents into the river, then groaning, went down in slow motion on top of the sinking vehicles, apparently crushing many of them against the river bottom."

Now 78, Edmondson lives in King, N.C., a town of about 6,000.

He considers himself a lucky man, because so many others, including his driving partner, didn't make it.

Harold Cundiff, who was riding with Edmondson, was sound asleep in the back of the cab.

"They didn't find his body until six weeks later," Edmondson said.

After he recovered, Edmondson went back to work in early 1968.

He would finally decide to give it up five years later after he got pinned in a tractor-trailer for three hours after a crash on Interstate 95 near Washington, D.C. He suffered a broken collarbone.

"I thought, 'You get me out of this truck and I'm not going to get into it ever again,'" he said.

Though Edmondson said the Silver Bridge collapse didn't dramatically alter his life, he would still get a jolt of fear every time he drove across a bridge.

For a while, he had nightmares.

"It took me a while to get over it," he said during a telephone interview this week. "But time heals. I'm just as good as ever. I busted up my elbow and that's the biggest thing that happened to me."

He still experiences stiffness in his elbow and it's not as useful as his left one.

Out of curiosity, Edmondson returned to Point Pleasant three years ago to see how things have changed in the river town. He also wanted to see how the town was dealing with the past tragedy.

He was even on-hand when the Silver Memorial Bridge was constructed to replace the old one in 1969.

Ever since, he's built up a collection of newspaper clippings and pictures about the Silver Bridge.

He said he doesn't stay in touch with any fellow survivors, but remembers sharing a hospital room with one, William "Frank" Wamsley, after the collapse.

"I tell you what's strange," Edmondson said. "There were three of us named William who survived it."

Wamsley, of Point Pleasant, was 28 at the time of the collapse.

Also surviving were Howard Boggs, of Bidwell, Ohio; Paul Scott, of Middleport, Ohio; William Needham Jr., of Asheboro, N.C.; Samuel Ellis, of Winston-Salem, N.C.; Frank Nunn, of Greenville, N.C.; Margaret Cantrell, of Gallipolis Ferry; and John Fishel, of Petersburg, Va.

Many of those listed could not be reached and were unlisted in telephone directories.

Scores of others on U.S. 35 that day were fortunate enough to cross the bridge moments before it collapsed.

Delegate Bill Anderson, R-Wood, who was then a sophomore studying education at Marshall, remembers traveling home to Williamstown for Christmas break.

Anderson and a few friends made it across the bridge about five minutes before it fell.

"I know there was a lot of wind on the river that day," Anderson recalled. "It was extremely windy."

On the way home, he noticed heavy traffic heading in both directions, and an unusually large amount of tractor-trailers on the bridge.

Anderson, a teacher, said he tells the story to his students.

"I let them know I was pretty close," he said. "I'm a firm believer that the Lord wanted to leave me here. I tell the kids if I went across that bridge five minutes later that they may have never had to encounter me."

Though Anderson didn't personally know anyone who died in the collapse, he said it's piqued his interest when dealing with transportation safety issues at the Statehouse.

In Point Pleasant, the bridge collapse is just one of several unusual events that are associated with the town.

Immediately after the collapse, some residents theorized about possible causes.

Some claimed to have heard a sonic boom around the time the bridge fell. Investigators determined that if a sonic boom had occurred, there would have been damage to other structures.

In later years, a Time magazine reporter speculated about the collapse and the curse of Chief Cornstalk. In 1777, Cornstalk, a prominent leader of the Shawnee Indians during the American Revolution, made a diplomatic visit to Fort Randolph at Point Pleasant. American militiamen, however, were less cordial and detained Cornstalk at the fort. He was later killed.

The area has since been said to be under the curse of Chief Cornstalk.

People have also pointed at the Mothman, the mysterious winged-creature supposedly spotted several times in the Point Pleasant area, as a reason for the disaster.

Mothman sightings were reported frequently in the months leading up to the collapse. But following the collapse, reports of sightings seemed to quell.

In the 2002 film "Mothman Prophecies," starring Richard Gere, the movie ends with the collapse of the Silver Bridge.

Jeff Wamsley operates the Mothman Museum in downtown Point Pleasant.

"It depends on who you talk to," Wamsley said about the Mothman-Silver Bridge connection. "Technically, the bridge collapsed due to a failed eyebolt that had rusted over the years. But since the bridge fell around the same time all of the UFO/Mothman sightings, some locals thought this was more than a mere coincidence.

"There seems to be a conspiracy angle to most big disasters and the Silver Bridge collapse seems to draw many different opinions on why and how the bridge fell. Regardless of the reason, there were 46 people who died and countless families' lives were changed forever."

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