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wondered, been cured by fright (unlikely, say the doctors) or by the heat from that eerie ‘‘something’’? The wire services had a lot of fun with that story—‘‘Alligator Bite Cured by Flying Saucer!”” But somebody somewhere took the two men seriously. Low-flying light planes, apparently unmarked, flew back and forth over the area of the sighting for the next two days. Shortly after the incident, two strangers turned up at the sheriff’s office looking for Deputy Goode. They tracked the officer down in a local restaurant and immedi- ately proceeded to describe in detail what the UFO looked like—even before Goode had an opportunity to tell them. Then they suggested that if he should encounter a similar machine in the future, he should cooperate with its occupants and keep any conversations with them to himself. The identities of these two mystery men have never been determined. There have been innumerable cases in which witnesses have felt heat radiating from low-flying unidentified flying objects, and there are several heavily documented cases in which people have suffered burns from the objects, but the Texas incident is one of the rare ones in which a wound weve 2 Weta. katate ee at ee. ees ----- 8 was apparently healed by such radiation. When this story first appeared, it seemed so absurd that most ufologists neglected it and concentrated on the almost trivial sightings in Exeter. However, we now know that the absurd cases are the most important and that the endless aerial sightings are practically meaningless. Giant winged beings, usually described as headless, are an integral part of the UFO phenomenon. On September 18, 1877 (the year that marked the beginning of Jessup’s Incredible Decade) a winged human form was seen cruising casually across the skies of Brooklyn. In 1922, there were two cases in Nebraska of 8-foot-tall winged creatures disem- barking from circular flying machines and soaring away under their own power. Headless winged creatures were reported over Scandinavia in 1946, and on November 16, 1963, four teenagers in Kent, England, claimed that they had witnessed the landing of a spherical globe of light while returning home from a dance. A giant, headless figure with batlike wings waddled from it and terrified them, they said. A decade earlier, a 6- to 7-foot-tall man with wings reportedly appeared in Houston, Texas. UFOs were also seen at the time. Starting in November 1966 and continuing throughout 1967, more than 100 people in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, insisted that they, too, had encountered a giant winged creature with blazing red eyes set deep in A Sure Cure for Alligator Bites / 227 A Major Miracle