Child of the Sixties Forever: May 2019

The Mothman of Pleasant Point, West Virginia. (Events of 1966)

The Mothman of Pleasant Point, West Virginia.

John William Tuohy

Point Pleasant, West Virginia, is a wonderful little town that sits on a point where the Ohio River joins the Kanawha River.

The Battle of Point was fought here in 1774 between the Royal Virginia Militia (West Virginia was once part of Virginia) and the local Indians.

October 10, 1774, some 1,100 Virginia militia led by Col. Andrew Lewis defeated 300-500 Shawnees and Mingoes led by Chief Cornstalk, a prominent leader of the mighty Shawnee nation. (His Indian name was Hokoleskwa, which, loosely translated mean “A stalk of corn”)

Cornstalk opposed European expansion west of the Ohio River. However, at the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1774, the Iroquois had agreed to cede the lands south of the Ohio River in present-day West Virginia and Kentucky, but the Shawnee and others had not been present at the Fort Stanwix negotiations and when Europeans (White settlers) started to move into the area, bitter clashes followed.

The commander of the Virginia forces, Andrew Lewis, was born in Donegal Ireland but the family fled there in 1732 when his father, John Lewis murdered his landlord in a dispute over rent.

The Lewis’s became the first European settlers in western Augusta County. Andrew Lewis, trained as a surveyor, eventually helped to found Liberty Hall (Today’s Washington and Lee University) He and his father surveyed and explored much of Greenbrier County, Virginia. Lewisburg, West Virginia is named for him as is the Tri-State Area Boy Scout’s Council camping area in Ona, West Virginia.

Cornstalk’s forces attacked Lewis’s encampment starting a battle that lasted for hours and was finally reduced to hand-to-hand combat. Lewis managed to send several platoons up a nearby creek to attack the Shawnee from behind, breaking their ranks.

When the battle was over the Militia lost 75 men and suffered 140 wounded. The Indians carried away their dead and tossed them into the river, but the Colonials discovered almost thirty dead braves later in the day.

Cornstalk retreated and reluctantly accepted the Ohio River as the boundary of Shawnee lands in the Treaty of Camp Charlotte. At the treaty Virginia officer, Col. Benjamin Wilson, wrote of Cornstalk's speech to Lord Dunmore at Camp Charlotte in 1774: "I have heard the first orators in Virginia, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee, but never have I heard one whose powers of delivery surpassed those of Cornstalk on that occasion."

In 1908, the U.S. Senate declared the battle Point Pleasant was the first war of the American Revolution because the battle probably prevented an alliance of the British with the Shawnees Indians when the long-expected revolution did come around.

As for Cornstalk, the fall of 1777, he paid a diplomatic visit to Fort Randolph, a Colonial fort in Point Pleasant. The fort's commander arrested him and tossed him into the brig. On November 10, militiaman from the fort were killed, brutally, by Indians, it has never been made clear what tribe they from. In an act of mindless retaliation, the commander executed Cornstalk, his son Elinipsico, and two other Shawnees.

The executions caused ripples across the Colonies since the Americans believed that Cornstalk was their only hope of securing Shawnee neutrality. Virginia Governor Patrick Henry called Cornstalk's killers "vile assassins" and had them arrested and tried for murder. They were acquitted.

Cornstalk was originally buried at Fort Randolph but in 1840 Cornstalk his remains were moved to the Mason County Courthouse grounds. In 1954 the courthouse was torn down and he was reburied in Point Pleasant.

Point Pleasant is also known for being the town visited by an insectoid flying creature with bright red eyes who resembled both a moth and a man. Some claim the creatures origins are supernatural, others say it’s an alien, or government experiment gone wrong or perhaps a previously unknown species of animal Some locals said that the Moth Man was revenge from Cornstalk.

On November 17, 1966, a Wednesday, Steve Mallette, 20, and his wife of five months, Mary, and another young married couple, Roger and Linda Scarberry, were out for a ride and had just driven past a former a munitions production and storage site converted into a 2,500 acre McClintic Wildlife Station, a wildlife reserve, about five miles outside Point Pleasant. It was around midnight

"We came over a little rise in the road out near the old power plant when we saw the eyes over in the bushes. They glowed red and were six inches apart," Mallette said, a life-long hunter. He knew it wasn’t a raccoon or another animal.

Mallette sped the car through a maze of dirt roads and fishponds. "When we reached the paved road there it was again sitting on the bank across the road" Mallette added saying that they now saw that the creature had a man-like form. It stood over six feet tall, its wings protruding from the center of its back "like an angel." torso resembled a human except it had no arms and the face was hard to distinguish. It walked clumsily, "like a penguin," up."

The two women burst into tears as the group sped out of woods. "I'm not one to scare easy," Roger Scarberry said, "but I was for getting out of there."

But as they drove out, at speeds of up to 100 and 105 mph, the creature hovered above the car, casting a dark shadow over the rear window. "I was doing 100-105 mph and it was just gliding over top, sorta moving from side to side You could hear a flapping noise Then it came down at the car making a squealing noise like a mouse," Scarberry said.

They raced to the police station and returned to the preserve where they had seen the creature and deputy Millard Holstead watched "shadows circled the building" but added the sight “could have been the bird."

The couples offered to take lie-detector test. Mary Mallette said "We understand people are laughing at us. But we wouldn't make up all this to make us look like fools." A small armed posse of deputies, city police and others searched an abandoned building, a former power plant, in the preserve and spotted oval-shaped footprints measuring about 4% inches across and fresh animal droppings none of the natives in the party could identify.

Then it was learned that the night before the sighting, November 12, 1966, five men who were digging a grave at a cemetery near Clendenin, West Virginia, claimed to see a man-like figure fly low from the trees over their heads.

That same evening, contractor Newell Partridge, who lived g in a rural part of the county, told police that he was watching television at about 9:00 PM when suddenly the set omitted a loud screech and the burst apart. He said that immediately afterward he heard odd noises out in his yard and went to investigate, and his flashlight beam caught a couple of glowing red discs that he assumed were eyes from some sort of creature that was chased off by his German Shepherd, but the Shepherd disappeared as well, never to be seen again. Partridge said that when he aimed a flashlight at the creature its eyes glowed "like bicycle reflectors."

Dozens of people flooded into McClintic Wildlife station to catch a glimpse of the monster. Two of those people were volunteer firemen Captain Paul Yoder and Ben Enochs who actually did see something. They reported that they saw an extremely large bird with large red eyes fly away from them. Another local man shot a large Snowy Owl, which he maintained had been the source of the trouble

That sighting brought in Dr. Robert L. Smith, associate professor of wildlife biology at the University of West Virginia. Smith concluded that the creature flying around Point Pleasant was actually a sandhill crane, the second largest American crane, which stands almost as high as a man and has a wong span of more than seven feet. He said the "red eyes" could the large circles of bare reddish flesh around the crane's eyes. Smith said the bird appeared to have wandered out of its normal migration route and was resting in the Wildlife Area. The crane was unrecognized because it was not native to the region.

Joe Nickell, an author and investigator with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry has looked into the case and has determined that the Mothman was more than probably an owl. “I think to do this, you have to take people at their word,” he says. “You take people’s description—allowing for some error—and match it to a real animal in the real world.”

Nickels says that the Moth man’s shape was originally reported is very owl-like, with a head and body that blended together. Yet as Nickell investigated, he became less convinced that a Barn Owl was the answer. Linda Scarberry, one of the women in the original car, had reported seeing huge, glinting red eyes in the car headlights, a description backed up by following sightings. That sounded like the product of eyeshine, a feature found in nocturnal animals like dogs, cats, alligators, and owls. However, Barn Owls have a relatively weak eyeshine but the Barred Owl, a large species, does have considerable eyeshine. What’s more, the McClintic Wildlife Management Area had a large population of Barred Owls live on the refuge.

There were other sightings over the next few months which added to the legend. Now, the story went, glowing lights in the sky appeared just before someone saw the Moth man as the creature was now called. Televisions and automobiles malfunctioned during the sightings, farmers reported cattle mutilations and peculiar and mysterious "men in black" dressed in clothing 30 years out of style, olive-skinned, unfamiliar with eating utensils, and unable to blink came to town and menaced witnesses. Mason County Sheriff George Johnson commented that he believed the sightings were due to an unusually large heron he termed a "shitepoke".

Frequent reports said that the creature seemed protective of children but devoured dogs. There was a theory that the creature was a mutant bird created by radioactive debris from the former mutinous plant. Reporters from the national and international news combed the city to look for evidence of the supernatural. The collected Mothman stories became a bestselling book, The Mothman Prophecies, and a feature film with the same name.

A large number of hoaxes followed the publicity generated by the original reports. In one case, a group of construction workers who tied flashlights to helium balloons. Others sightings were probably pranks, misidentified planes, and sightings of a barred owl, and albino owl.

The stories came to a halt several months later when, on December 15, 1967, the towns primary bridge, the Silver bridge (It had been painted silver) collapsed, killing 46 people.

Most recently, on November 23, 2016, a man driving along State Route 2 in West Virginia near Point Pleasant, said that he snapped pictures of the creature. There are no other details of the picture other than it was taken with a cell phone. Skeptics think that what the photo shows is a bird, perhaps an owl, carrying a frog or snake away.

However, the people of Point Pleasant were about to let the Mothman fade into history. Each September, starting in 2002, the town holds the annual Mothman festival. They built a 12-foot sculpture of the Mothman, based on eye-witness descriptions and even a Mothman museum.

Pepé Le Pew

In France, the cartoon character Pepé Le Pew has an Italian accent.

Pupniks

One of the Soviet space dogs’ puppy, Pushinka, was given by Khrushchev to Kennedy as a gift. One of Kennedy’s dog, Charlie, took a liking to Pushinka, resulting in the birth of four pups referred jokingly by Kennedy as “pupniks”.

Operation Northwoods: The CIA’s plan to commit terror attacks in America.

Operation Northwoods: The CIA’s plan to commit terror attacks in America. (Somehow, this all sound oddly familiar)

“The courses of action which follow are a preliminary submission suitable only for planning purposes. We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida. (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely published. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of(supposed) Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government”

In the 1990s, through unclassified documents, the world learned about the CIA’s Operation Northwoods begun in the early 1960s as a means to rid the world of Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro by causing a war between the US and that island nation.

Our intelligence sources and our state department were caught mostly unprepared for the toppling of the once American dominated Batista government by Castro in 1959. For the next decade, the US government did its best to discredit Castro and remove him from power. But almost all of those efforts failed and failed miserably including the ill planned Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961.

In 1962 Operation Northwoods was created by the CIA as a solution to the Castro problem. The plan was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and signed by Chairman Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer. The operation called for a series of terrorist attacks on American military bases and civilian targets, conducted by CIA personnel disguised as Cuban agents. Federal officials would find direct evidence linking the attacks to Cuba and therefore have full justification for an invasion of Cuba.

In the overall plan, Anti-Castro Cubans living in the US, disguised as Castro’s army, would attack the Army Base at Guantanamo Bay while a series of terrorist attacks would be conducted by CIA agents in Miami (Where a number of Anti-Castro Cubans would be murdered) and Washington and other places.

There was also a plan to hijack a commercial jet and simulate a crash with an empty airplane that would give the appearance of all of the innocent passengers being killed. A boatload of Cuban refugees on their way to Florida would be killed and that too, would also be blamed on Castro. In the crashed plane plan, the agency suggested using Cuban refugee pilots to provoke a distracting in-flight argument with a Cuban pilot over the radio. There was another plan to distribute valid one-way airline tickets to Mexico City or Caracas, Venezuela, to create unrest and dissension amongst the Cuban people.'

There was a plan for a random, mass shooting of civilians on the street by men dressed as Cuban military, the bombings of various well known buildings, and a sort of “Remember the Maine” boat bombing. The last stage of the plan also called for a fleet of captured MiG fighter jets to fly over American airspace, harassing civil aviation and perhaps even shooting down an American airliner bound for the Caribbean.

President Kennedy personally rejected the proposal. One member read “The President said bluntly that we were not discussing the use of military force, that General Lemnitzer might find the U.S. so engaged in Berlin or elsewhere that he couldn't use the contemplated 4 divisions in Cuba."

In a follow-up memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, General Lemnitzer wrote that the Joint Chiefs believed that the Cuban problem “must be solved in the near future. Further, they (The Joint Chiefs) see no prospect of early success in overthrowing the present Communist regime either as a result of internal uprisings or external political, economic or internal uprisings. Accordingly they believe that military intervention by the United States will be required to overthrow Castro.

Kennedy then removed Lemnitzer as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, although he became Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in January 1963. He remains the only person in history to serve as Army Chief of Staff, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Supreme Allied Commander for NATO.

But the rift between Kennedy, the Intelligence communities and the military only worsened because the Pentagon and the spies began to believe that Kennedy was too soft on Cuba. The rift only widened during Kennedy's disagreements with the service chiefs over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Remarkably, almost unbelievably, in 1975, President Gerald Ford appointed Lemnitzer to the Rockefeller Commission on CIA Activities within the United States. Part of the committees job was to investigate whether the Central Intelligence Agency had committed acts that violated US laws, and allegations that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

You can't fault them for trying: Operation Acoustic Kitty

In 2001, the CIA disclosed Operation Acoustic Kitty launched by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology during the height of the Cold War. It started when the CIA noticed that Russians assigned to almost every Soviet Embassy in the world, would often gather in small circles outside the embassy build and hold hushed conversations. Whatever they were discussing, it was more than probably some sort of dissent, could be valuable information. The problem was, for the US, getting an earful of the discussion.

At the time, the CIA was testing methods of audio surveillance by inserting miniature microphones (developed by hearing aid manufacturers) into bullets strong enough to withstand the force of a gunshot and still keep recording. These tests yielded smaller, rugged microphones, but no “spy-bullet,” since microphones would pick up all sounds, relevant or not, making most recordings largely useless. So in 1961, the CIA had been conducting successful research in radio equipment and animal training and had worked on creating surgically altered cats (Cats were selected because, like humans, their cochlear anatomy allows them to filter and focus sound.) who were implanted with state of the art acoustic and radio transmission technology.

The concept was that the cats would be free to wander the ground of the Soviet properties around DC, recording conversions. At a cost of a remarkable $100 million, a prototype cat had been trained to wander around building and people. In an hour-long procedure a veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone in the cat's ear canal, a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull and a thin wire into its fur, allowing the cat to innocuously record and transmit sound from its surroundings.

CIA officer Victor Marchetti wrote; “They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that. Finally, they’re ready. They took it out to a park bench and said, “Listen to those two guys. Don’t listen to anything else – not the birds, no cat or dog – just those two guys” (It should be noted that Marchetti was a prominent critic of the CIA)

A heavily redacted memo on the project was declassified in 2001, implying the CIA was too embarrassed disclose all the details of the project so there are two version of what happened next. Robert Wallace, a former Director of the CIA's Office of Technical Service, said that the project was abandoned due to the difficulty of training the cat to behave as required, “The cat” he said “wanted to do what the cat wanted to do, and not what we wanted it to do” and that “the implant could not affect any of the natural movements of the cat, nor could the cat experience any sense of irritation or the presence of the device, lest it induce rubbing or clawing to dislodge components or disturb performance……. the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time and lived a long and happy life afterwards".

The second version is that the cat was driven in a van loaded with equipment to the Soviet Embassy’s communal residence building on upper Wisconsin Avenue in D.C. (The Soviets somehow managed to get a property located at the highest point in the city) The cat was let out of the van and when it walked across the street was run over and killed by a taxi. The project was cancelled in 1967.

We lost an H Bomb

John William Tuohy

In 1968 a US plane carrying four H-bombs crashed into sea ice in Greenland and exploded, contaminating the area around the site with radiation.

Operation Chrome Dome was a US airborne alert program initiated in 1961 during the Cold War. As part of the operation’s, nuclear-armed Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers were flown to designated points on the Soviet Union’s border as a deterrent to the Soviets. Four bombers remained on alert each day, with the flights being conducted without the knowledge of civilian authorities in the States.

On or about January 21, 1968, one of the B-52 bombers was assigned to fly over the Thule Air Base, the US Air Force’s northernmost base on the Danish territory of Greenland. The bomber carried four hydrogen bombs.

It was an otherwise normal flight until, six hours into the flight, a fire started in the plane and the crew couldn’t extinguish the flames. A mandatory third pilot named Major Alfred D'Mario had placed three cloth-covered foam cushions on top of a heating vent under the instructor navigator's seat in the aft section of the lower deck. Shortly after take-off, another cushion was placed under the seat which ignited.

The captain declared it an emergency and requested emergency landing at Thule airbase. Minutes later the plane lost electricity and the cockpit was overwhelmed by dense smoke rendering the instruments useless to read and making an emergency landing impossible. Six members of the crew managed to, but co-pilot Leonard Svitenko died in the accident. (Captain Curtis R. was found six miles away from the base, lost on the ice for 21 hours. Although he suffered hypothermia, he survived by wrapping himself in the parachute.)

The bomber had continued flying, over the air base and crashed into dense sea ice in the nearby North Star Bay. The hydrogen bombs detonated on impact, but a nuclear explosion was not triggered due to the design of the weapon. However, the detonation still dispersed a huge nuclear payload that contaminated the area with radioactivity. Gallon and gallon of Jet fuel burned for six hours after the crash, melting the ice sheet sinking the bomber into the ocean.

The entire area was filled with radioactive contamination. Understandably, the Danes demanded the nuclear material not be left in Greenland after the cleanup operation was complete, so the contaminated ice and wreckage were packed in steel tanks and shipped back to the US. Some 700 specialized personnel from both countries had worked for nine months to clean up the site, usually without adequate protective clothing or decontamination measures.

Worse yet, one of the bombs had not been recovered although the US Military insisted that all four bombs were destroyed. In 2008, a partly declassified documents appeared to confirm that within weeks of the accident, investigators realized only three of the weapons could be accounted for.

The Chrome Dome operation was suspended immediately following this disaster. The incident caused a major political scandal in Denmark because the country had designated itself a nuclear-free zone, yet government officials knew that the US Army was stockpiling nuclear weapons there.

In the US, the scandal deepened after it was learned that in 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara proposed cutting the flights because they had been made obsolete by new technology. Also, cutting the operation would save the US $950 million dollars. However, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed the plan and McNamara agreed to a compromise of allowing a smaller force of four bombers would be on alert each day. But the SAC continued the operation without the knowledge of civilian authorities who SAC commanders determined did not have the "need to know" about specific operational points.

The sounds of silence at the record store

Simon & Garfunkel’s first album was so unsuccessful on the charts that the duo split. Their producer took one of the songs from the album, overdubbed/remixed it without their knowledge or permission, and “The Sounds of Silence” became a hit. The duo made four more albums.

RFK

Following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, his body was taken to New York City for a funeral mass in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. After the completion of the mass, Kennedy’s coffin was transported by a private funeral train from New York to Washington, D.C., to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery on June 8. It was a Saturday, and mourners came out by the hundreds of thousands to line the tracks along the 225-mile journey. A trip that would normally have taken four hours ended up lasting more than eight hours. On board the train that day, on assignment for LOOK magazine, was staff photographer Paul Fusco, who ended up taking thousands of photographs of mourning faces, tributes, and patriotic displays along the way. The collection of photographs ended up becoming more than a document of Kennedy’s final journey; they became a powerful collective portrait of America at a pivotal moment in history.

From Russia with Love

Because President Kennedy had named From Russia with Love among his ten favorite books producers Broccoli and Saltzman chose this as the second Bond movie. From Russia with Love was the last film Kennedy saw at the White House on 20 November 1963 before going to Dallas.