Hinton Furniture and UFO Craze of 1947!

It's finally Friday, and this week I've got a Friday Funny coming to you from Hinton, West Virginia! As we talked about before here on Theresa's Haunted History, people from Hinton definitely had a penchant for seeing flying saucers throughout the years, and it all started back during the 1947 UFO wave during July. After the nation was swept up with speculation as to just what exactly crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico and if it was from another planet or not, people from all over the country began coming forward with their own stories.

One such woman was Lee Ramsey, a housewife living on Summers Street. On July 10, 1947 she witnessed a series of six unidentified flying objects over her Hinton home. The sighting was written up in one of the local newspapers, The Leader. (Read my blog post, Hinton Has Saucers, Too for more info). However, it wouldn't be until the following May (and after another sighting by a Hinton resident) that an enterprising employee working for the Hinton Furniture Company would come up with a clever, tongue-in-cheek way to incorporate the UFO craze into the company's advertising!

The advertisement above was published in the May 21, 1948 edition of the Hinton Daily News. It reads, "Flying Saucers: Those people who saw the flying saucers last year were a little behind the times. An astronomer in Italy saw a flock of flying saucers on November 30, 1880. You will be right up with the times if you purchase your furniture and home appliances from us." 

I'm not sure if it was Hinton Furniture's owner, Ray Walker himself, or another employee who was tasked with advertising, but I have to applaud whoever it was who came up with this ad! If my assumptions are correct, the author evidently was a fan of the OG Fortean Historian---Charles Fort! It was Charles Fort who collected the strange little story about an Italian astronomer's experience and brought it to the public forefront. But, I wouldn't necessarily call what was seen a flock of 'flying saucers.' Rather, it sounds like a flock of flying CREATURES! Here's what was published:

Signer Ricco, of the Observatory of Palermo, writes that, Nov. 30, 1880, at 8:30 o'clock in the morning, he was watching the sun, when he saw, slowly traversing its disk, bodies in two long, parallel lines, and a shorter, parallel line. The bodies looked winged to him. But so large were they that he had to think of large birds. Sig. Ricco's estimate is that these objects … must have been at least five and a half miles high. -Source

I'm not sure if the winged bodies observed by Signer Ricco were humanoid in shape, but even with the description of birds makes me automatically think of West Virginia's own favorite winged creature: Mothman. However, even I have to admit that three parallel lines of Mothmen flying around the sun (the greatest lamp in the solar system) is more than a little frightening! 

The Plumley Building
Later home to Hinton Furniture
Source: WV History on View

Hinton Has Saucers, Too

 

The Leader
10 July 1947

I just love an interesting tidbit of flying saucer lore from the Mountain State! This little article was published in the 10 July 1947 of The Leader, a small newspaper out of Hinton, West Virginia. Just DAYS after the story broke about an alleged UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, a housewife from Hinton reported her OWN eyewitness account of no less than six flying saucers over the southern WV town of Hinton, located in Summers County. 

The inevitable report of saucers flying over Hinton came into the Daily News office today.

B.M. Ramsey, 419 Summers street, said his wife, Lee, saw them Saturday afternoon at 2:50 o'clock and "they were about as big as those little plates you get out of boxes of oatmeal."

"She was sitting on the front porch and saw them come over Cemetery hill. I was in the house and she hollered to me, but by the time I got outside they were gone.

"She said they were standing up on edge, cutting through the air. I asked her how many there were and she said she couldn't tell, but she counted six.

"A plane had come over just a minute before, and she glanced up and saw these saucers come over the hill. They were flying from south to north and disappeared over the mountain."

Five years later, Hinton would once again jump on the UFO bandwagon. As reports of flying saucers were coming in from all over the United States, including Washington, D.C., multiple sightings made the local newspaper that summer! In late July of 1952, three women (also on Summers Street) saw a spinning UFO. A month later, a bus driver and several passengers saw what looked like a slow-moving 'wash tub.' I've discussed these two cases in depth in an earlier blog, which you can read here: UFOs Over Hinton

Is Hinton, West Virginia some kind of UFO hotbed or area of high strangeness? Were the locals simply influenced by bigger UFO cases gripping the nation at the time and simply made a misidentification based on those perceptions? Did the newspaper editors just have a brilliant plan to sell papers? Whatever the reason for the influx of UFO cases over Hinton, the fact that they were preserved by the local paper has inevitably tied them to West Virginia's weird and wonderful history...a history that I hope to help document and share with future generations!

*If you have a UFO sighting or experience you'd like to share, please leave me a comment below, or find me over on Theresa's Haunted History Facebook!*