In 1966, Ralph Turner was a 27-year-old reporter at the Huntington Herald-Dispatch, writing stories about city politics and crime that would lay the groundwork for a distinguished journalism career.
On a chilly November night that year, Turner was sent out, on what seemed at the time like a wild goose chase, to do a story that lives on to this day.
He spent a few hours in a Mason County field under cover of dark waiting for a chance encounter with the Mothman.
This weekend at the Fifth Annual Mothman Festival, Turner will recount the time he spent investigating sightings of the creature in the Point Pleasant area and his part in one of the most best-known mysteries in Mountain State history.
It's a story Turner once pledged he wasn't going to tell anymore.
But the monster, or the myth at least, has a hold on him.
Deadwood, South Dakota - Weird aircraft(s) reported to 911. I know because I was the one that reported them. About 9:45pm on September 14th I stepped outside my home to get some fresh air and could hear what sounded like 4 or 5 B1's flying overhead.
Not overly freaking out, because we live close to Ellsworth AFB home of the B-1 Bomber wing and hearing a B1s fly over every once in awhile... but several at the same time? No... We're not going to war are we? Then I looked off into the near distance (approx. 5 miles) and could see the strangest formation of lights flying straight north. Normally B1's don't fly information, as far as I know.
I just stared in amazement, not being a little green men fanatic, trying to figure out what I was looking at. This was more than a group of plains it appeared to be as large as a small town. Being a US Army Veteran, it certainly wasn't something I could recognize or didn't sound like a B1 either. Hmmm! I went and asked my son if he heard the strange plane and he said he did. I told him... I saw a U.F.O. Unidentified Flying Object. Then I went back to watching TV.. With in a matter of a few minutes like "10 -15" the noise returned.
London - It's a jungle out there: the number of sightings of non-indigenous, exotic animals in Britain has sky-rocketed in the last six years, according to a recent study. More than 10,000 sightings of everything from wallabies to dangerous spiders, crocodiles and even a penguin have been recorded since 2000, with the rise attributed to climate change, zoo thefts and animal escapes.
- Sightings of flying object over Britain worried MoD- Questions threatened to strain relations with US
It is the stuff of internet conspiracy theorists' dreams. A top secret, hypersonic, cold war spy plane that was allegedly flown by the Americans in UK airspace without the government's permission.
Publicly, the UK government played down newspaper stories about people who reported seeing UFO-like phenomena. But documents released under the Freedom of Information Act suggest the Ministry of Defence took the rumours much more seriously. Its investigations even threatened to strain the special relationship. "It does show that they were concerned that this thing did exist and the Americans were flying it around willy-nilly over the UK," said David Clarke, a social scientist at Sheffield Hallam University, who obtained the documents. "It certainly suggests that the British government suspected that they were being kept in the dark."
The United States has never confirmed the existence of the mysterious aircraft, called Aurora, which was supposedly designed to sneak at very high speed over the Soviet Union and take covert snaps of what the enemy was up to. It was rumoured to be capable of flying at up to mach 8 and so could reach anywhere on the planet in less than three hours. In the early 1990s there were a string of supposed sightings and strange sounds over Scotland which some bewildered locals attributed to UFOs. Rumours in the press that Aurora was operating secretly out of RAF Machrihanish on the tip of Kintyre prompted Scottish MPs to ask questions in parliament.
Laura Knight-Jadczyk & Arkadiusz Jadczyk
SOTTFri, 09 Jun 2006 12:00 UTC
Part I by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Almost thirty years ago, I received my first formal training in hypnosis. Over the years, I not only sought out additional training, I employed this skill on behalf of many troubled individuals. Until 1994, I had never encountered what is popularly known as an "abductee" - that is, an individual claiming to have been abducted by alleged aliens. I have to admit that when I did, it presented certain problems both in terms of having a well-established technique to deal with it, as well as my own categories of what is or is not possible.
I often tell people in a sort of joking way: of all the people who never wanted to know anything about aliens and UFOs, I deserve a place at the head of the line. Very few people really understand how deeply serious this remark is. When I opened the door to consider the possibility - quite remote as I thought - of the possibility of "other worldly" visitors, life as I knew it ended. That was eleven years ago. But then, a completely new life was born from the ashes. And so, here I am producing a book about UFOs and aliens. The road from there to here has been difficult, to understate the matter, and complicated by all the High Strangeness that seems to surround the subject.
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
SOTTMon, 09 Jun 2003 12:00 UTC
© n/a
Assembled into this article is some information compiled back in 1995 and posted to an internet mail list to which I (Laura) was subscribed. The source of the information was an article in the book series "Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time," and was written by Hamish Howard and
Toyne Newton, edited by Peter Brookesmith, UK.
Brigantine - It was a pretty typical Saturday evening for Dan and Jean Ciechanowski as they worked the barbecue and chatted with neighbors this past weekend.
Then it happened.
Dan Ciechanowski heard a noise that he described as the sound a missile makes and saw something moving across the sky at a 45-degree angle.
It smashed into a vacant lot next to his property with a crash that shook the foundation of his house.
Port Shepstone - The National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) is monitoring a mysterious situation on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast.
"Numerous" eye-witnesses reported an unidentified flying object crashing into the sea on Saturday.
NSRI Shelley Beach station commander, Eddie Noyons, said eye-witnesses had reported an unidentified object - possibly an aircraft - crashing into the sea behind the breaker line off-shore of the Port Shepstone High School.
Police, rescue craft and a fixed wing aircraft were alerted to the scene to investigate.
Noyons said: "Following a full-scale search of the area covering 12 square nautical miles nothing has been found.
Comment: Another possible explanation: a meteorite.
A 2-foot-long chunk of ice that looked like compacted snow but whistled like an artillery shell crashed through the roof of the Drayson Center at Loma Linda University on Thursday morning.
No one was injured when the ice hit sometime between 8:55 and 9:15 a.m. The ice broke into pieces in the lattice work above the floor of the unoccupied Opsahl Gymnasium.
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| ©The Press-Enterprise
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| A chunk of ice that ripped through the roof of the Drayson Center on Thursday also tore through a coating of tar paper and plywood underneath, then through a layer of insulation and the ceiling of the gymnasium.
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Maintenance workers retrieved a chunk about twice the size of a man's head, double-bagged it and stuck it in a freezer to save for Federal Aviation Administration officials.
Oakland - Did it come from outer space? Was it a transport vehicle for illegal aliens of the extraterrestrial kind? The tail of a comet grabbed by gravity?
Jokes were flying Saturday morning after a block of solid ice, measuring more than two feet on a side, crashed to earth with a tremendous bang, digging a three-foot hole in the grass at Bushrod Park, 5800 Shattuck Ave.
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| ©ktvu.com
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Comment: More information from
this account of the ice slab incident:
"It was totally amazing. ... I saw this flash, like a streak. Then I saw this explosion, like a big boom! I came over and it (the field) was all covered with ice. Some were this big," Purat said, making a head-size circle with his two hands.
Comment: Another possible explanation: a meteorite.