Unidentified in West Virginia (part 3)

E ditor’s Note: This is the third in a series about UFOs in West Virginia.

[image error]More-official accounts of UFO sightings in West Virginia abound in the reports of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. From 1947 until 1969, the Air Force collected and investigated reports of unidentified flying objects. Here are some of the many West Virginia reports:

November 1, 1957 – A woman in Huntington heard a crash, the sound of a jet engine and then beeping. When she went outside to see what caused the noise, she saw an “object like two (2) hemispheres joined off center.” She said the object was metallic and the size of a car. The bottom hemisphere appeared to provide the power as the object vibrated and rotated. She watched the object until it rose straight up and disappeared.
March 11, 1949 – A man wrote a letter to Air Force officials describing an object he had seen that looked like a flattened funnel as it flew. “I have not spoken to anyone about the incidents because you have to see them to believe they exist,” the man wrote in his letter.
March 25, 1949 – A witness in Morgantown saw a red-gold object as large as two city blocks hovering about five feet off the ground.
March 8, 1955 – Witnesses in Morgantown reported a round object “brighter than the sun on aluminum” that had no edges and made no sound.
June 1956 – A young boy reported seeing a silver-colored object the shape of a reverse teardrop flying at an altitude of around 8,000 feet.

The Air Force then commissioned a study to be done of the reports. The University of Colorado conducted the Condon Report. The Air Force had investigated 12,097 UFO sightings and the Condon report found that only 697 could not be identified. Common identifications included UFO’s were bright stars, planets, comets, meteors, satellites, aircraft and weather balloons. For instance, the March 8, 1955 incident above was classified as a weather balloon sighting. The report also found “no direct evidence whatever of a convincing nature for the claim that any UFOs represent spacecraft visiting Earth from another civilization.”

UFO supporters claim the investigations were poorly handled and researchers were too eager to list objects as identified when they really weren’t.

So the question remains…are we alone in the universe or have we been visited by ships and creatures from other worlds? And why do so many of them seem attracted to West Virginia?

What have you seen in the sky?

You might also enjoy these posts:

Unidentified in West Virginia (part 2)
Unidentified in West Virginia (part 1)
A Wonder of Natural Resources: West Virginia at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair