Logan Man Has Several Sightings During Teen Years

"The more you look into [the UFO phenomenon], and the more people that you talk to and read about that have done serious investigations, the more you know that this stuff is real." —Wayne Green, founder of Byte Magazine

(Editor’s Note: The following is from an actual interview. This story and fifteen others will soon be released as a book, Appalachian Case Study: UFO Sightings, Alien Encounters and Other Phenomena, to be published by Woodland Press, LLC)

Frank Allen, at eighteen years of age, was like most teenagers growing up during the 1970s. He liked listening to rock music, and he liked cruising around the small town of Logan—circling Stratton and Main Streets—with his friends.

One night in 1972, after a night out with friends, Frank returned to his home along State Route 44, Omar Road. He and his family lived near the small village of Chauncey, in Island Creek District.

There just happened to be an Appalachian Power Company substation near his home, and on this particular night, he pulled his old pickup truck in front of his parent’s house. It was after midnight and Frank decided to listen to some more music on his 8-track player before going inside.

“I always listened to music in my truck,” he recalled. “I was just relaxing. I had just kicked back and shoved in the tape. For some reason I raised up and looked toward the electrical power plant building.

“I saw a radiant red light. It appeared to be coming from the bottom of an unidentified aircraft,” Frank remembers. “It was hovering and balancing over top of the substation.”  Although the object was large, Frank didn’t hear any detectible sounds emanating from the spaceship.

“I was scared as heck. This was a close-up sighting and I could see it plainly,” he recalled, stating that he was frozen in place from fright. “It was odd how it didn’t make any noise at all.”

He said the UFO was about one thousand feet away from where he was parked, and he described the craft as “wedge shaped,” smaller at the bottom where the red light was located and larger—much larger—at the top.

The teenager watched it, nervously trembling while hunkered down in his pickup, until about 1:30 a.m. The UFO remained hovering over the transformers and moved only slightly at opposing angles.

“I was so scared, I was scared to get out of the truck to go into the house,” he admitted, and he was also frightened to leave the parking spot to go report the incident to law enforcement.  “I laid down and stayed in my truck until about six in the morning,” he said. “I didn’t sleep for I was too upset. It was beginning to be daylight when I finally went into the house.”

Frank says by then the object had left by that time. He is not sure when it took off, but he was just glad it did.

He had never told anyone about the incident until this interview.

*  *  *

Frank had other sightings over the years. He even had another witness with him during one of the sightings. He and a friend, Pat, were driving up Route 44 one night, several years after Frank’s first experience, in the late-1970s.

“I saw this object. I guess you would say it was a UFO, because we definitely couldn’t identify it,” Frank explained. “I don’t know what it was.

“First I noticed this light in the sky. It was not a star or conventional aircraft. It made a couple of quick moves that an airplane just can’t make—darting to and fro at will,” he said.

Frank said that at one point the object made an immediate 90-degree turn. 

When he first spotted it, he asked Pat to look in the same direction to substantiate what he was seeing. Pat also saw the object. “It made another 90-degree turn,” Frank said, “then it did the same thing again and again.”

He said, that unless the United States government had some kind of experimental aircraft in operation at the time that could make hairpin turns or travel at bizarre, death-defying angles—all at extremely high rates of speed—it had to have been a UFO that they witnessed. 

He has many questions about those experiences that have never been answered to this day.

*  *  *

On still another occasion, in the 1970s, he and the same friend, Pat, went to assist his aunt, whose car had broken down on a rural road in Logan County.

“We went over to help her get back on the road,” Frank remembered. “That is when I noticed a low flying object. My first thought was that this thing was flying awfully low—too low. It was sort of shaped like a cross. At least that is how it appeared.”

He described an intense light at the rear of the structure that suddenly went to the front. Then, when three other lights caught up with the first illumination, it returned to the back of the craft—as if it would slide back and forth. 

Frank said he even realized at the time how uncommon and uncharacteristic this object was than what is typically described as a UFO. It was not a cylindrical or triangular in shape.

It then occurred to Frank that the large object could have been more than one object, possibly four, flying in formation. “I knew it wasn’t a plane or jet,” Frank said. “It was flying so low and it didn’t make a sound—at least not that we could sense.

“We finally got my aunt’s car running and got the heck out of there—quickly!”

*  *  *

In his quest to understand his unique experiences, Frank eventually retrieved specific information from a former Air Force officer who was stationed in the southeastern United States right after World War II. He said the local man, Jim Young, had made a career in the service, but decided to retire and move back to his home state in the 1980s.

“Jim was a friend of the family,” Frank explained. Although he is now deceased, Frank had several conversations with Jim over the years, often pertaining to UFOs. 

It was Jim’s job to test metals; and, even after he retired from the service, he stayed on for a while as a consultant. “That was his field of expertise,” Frank said.

On more than one occasion, Jim made references to the famous Roswell UFO incident, and even told Frank a few details about where the debris was eventually shipped. 

“Jim said some of it was sent directly to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio, but some of it was shipped to Langley Air Force Base, in Hampton, Virginia, and to several other bases,” Frank said.

Although Jim was often vague, and wouldn’t talk in great detail about his specific work, he did tell Frank that he felt the United States began to move quickly in the field of aeronautics after the alleged crash of a UFO in the New Mexico desert.

“The United States was only flying prop planes in World War II,” Jim said. “But in just a few short years after the Roswell incident, we developed highly sophisticated jet fighters and many other systems.”

Frank’s friend explained how the country took “major leaps” and made great advances after the discovery of a crashed alien space ship. He inferred that “reverse engineering” had taken place soon after the crash discovery. Reverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation. 

Jim went so far as to allege that this is specifically how scientists and engineers moved so rapidly in developing the first evolution of the SR-71 Blackbird jet—actually being fashioned by analyzing and eventually dissecting, piece by piece, the crashed saucer and its systems from the Roswell incident.

“There were many things we could not figure out about the spacecraft,” Jim had once stated. “However, we gained enough knowledge from the saucer to enhance our own technology by leaps and bounds.”

Frank was told that during the Cold War, the United States tried to keep many things as secret as possible from countries li

ke the Soviet Union and China. One of those secrets was the Roswell incident and the capture of a crashed saucer.

Jim later told other accounts of how the U.S. Air Force tested several new jets and other technologies in the southeast; but he maintained that they could not have made the great strides they did without some kind of unearthly assistance, or without knowledge that was not available to them before 1947.

*  *  *

“I don’t typically tell individuals about the sightings I’ve seen over the years, and I haven’t, until now, discussed anything that Jim shared with me about Roswell and our national technologies,” Frank, who now works in the mining industry, said. “You just get weird looks when you blab too much.”