UFO Landing in Danese? (1968)

Formerly known as Noel, Danese is a small, unincorporated town in Fayette County, West Virginia. It is also the site of an alleged UFO near-landing one winter day in the 1960′s. 

Ben Crookshanks lived along Route 3 in Danese, and was a regular reader of the Beckley Post-Herald, a newspaper from neighboring Raleigh County. Crookshanks wasn’t just a reader, however. He also enjoyed writing letters to the editor on a variety of subjects, many of which were published over the years. But, it was a letter received by the Post-Herald in February of 1968 that would earn Crookshanks a place in wild and weird history. Actually, there were two letters….

In a column dated 15 February 1968, Charlotte Fleshman of the Post-Herald noted that two letters had recently been received by the newspaper, both coming in the same mailbag, actually. The first was a letter from the UFO Research Institute, based in Pittsburgh, PA, asking for UFO sightings within a 200 mile radius of them. The second, ironically, was a recent UFO sighting by none other than Ben Crookshanks, which hovered over a hill about half a mile from his home.

According to the article:

Crookshanks  qualifies that, “I couldn’t say for certain that it was a flying saucer, but something unusual had been there. There was a hole in the snow about four feet long and about two and one-half feet wide, sort of egg shaped.”

“Something with terrific heat had caused it,” he wrote, “because the snow was better than a foot thick and the hole was melted into the ground. There was a wide ring of heavy ice around the hole. The ice was blue in color.”

The Danese man added that “if it was a flying saucer, it didn’t actually land, but only hovered over the snow, because the ground was undisturbed.”

Theresa’s Note: So, I don’t know about you, but when I read that no actual craft was seen…only an impression surrounded by blue ice, my mind jumps to one conclusion: Crookshanks didn’t stumble upon a UFO landing site; he found some sewage leakage from an airplane! Although there are plenty of urban legends about this blue ice, airlines assure us that there is no mechanism to actually dump their raw sewage out of a moving plane. However, leaks can and have occurred, leaving chunks of blue ice to cause destruction and perhaps…even ufo legends…in their wake. (Learn more about blue ice HERE)

Beckley Post-Herald 15 February 1968