Eight-year-old Devon Heenan stood with her arm extended in the parking lot of the Ingles in Cashiers. With her cell phone camera, she and a friend were taking pictures of the summer sun in hopes of seeing a sky ship or UFO like her mother Glynis Heenan.

The night before Glynis Heenan saw a bright light in her backyard. She thought it was the moon and stepped outside to have a better look. Instead, she said she saw a circular sky ship with radiating rainbow colored lights.

“The first thing you do is feel afraid,” Heenan said. “It’s amazing how afraid you can be of what you don’t know.”

But Devon Heenan wasn’t afraid. She turned her head from the sun and snapped another picture. When she looked at the screen, she saw the outline of a ship in front of the sun.

The picture Devon Heenan captured finally pushed Mary Joyce and Evelyn Gordon to create a forum where people from across Western North Carolina could report similar sightings and information.

“That’s the picture that started the whole thing,” Joyce said.

In 2008, Joyce and Gordon launched www.skyshipsovercashiers.com. Since then, the website has gained international attention and got the duo a speaking engagement in Laughlin, Nev., at the 2010 International UFO Congress, the largest UFO conference in the world.

In front of an audience of more than 900, Joyce and Gordon presented a log of UFO and spiritual sightings in Western North Carolina.

At 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 13, the women, along with eyewitness Glynis Heenan, will share their conference presentation and answer questions at the Jackson County Senior Center, 100 County Services Park in Sylva.

“This isn’t about us,” Gordon said. “It’s about helping the world.”

Seeing UFOs is commonplace for the women. Gordon claims she receives telepathic messages from them, which Joyce then transcribes. The two have delivered letters to presidents and foreign dignitaries.

Although most of the messages are personal – secrets only known by Joyce, Gordon and the recipients – Gordon and Joyce will share portions of the more generic messages with audiences.

The three women also will tell of spiritual sightings in the area such as 30-foot hologram of Jesus and a man with the face of Jesus wearing a maroon space suit.

Military actions, missile silos and nuclear power plants attract alien activity, the women say.

According to Joyce, what may draw the aliens to Western North Carolina in particular is a secret underground facility at Balsam Mountain.

The facility goes six stories deep into the earth and has electromagnetic equipment that can erase memories, the women posted on their website.

“We’re seeing a lot of activity in North Carolina period,” Gordon said.

Gordon and Joyce have known each other since the 1980s when a mutual acquaintance suggested they meet. The two have been a team since, and Joyce has written books Gordon has helped promote. They moved to Western North Carolina 12 years ago from Florida.

Joyce lived within eyesight of Kennedy Space Center, and every time a rocket launched, her Cocoa Beach apartment would vibrate. She’d see UFOs guiding the rockets through the upper atmosphere and into space, she said.

Joyce said an unnamed NASA insider she knew said all astronauts who’ve been to space have seen UFOs. The group’s website includes testimonies from law enforcement officers, a security watchman, a man who was in the Navy, among others.

For more information, visit www.skyshipsovercashiers.com.

Hear it firsthand

“Sky Ships and Cosmic Spirituality” will take place 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 13, at the Jackson County Senior Center, 100 County Services Park, Sylva.

“The only reasonable verdict here is for Sheriff Ashe,” Patrick Flanagan told the jury. “He did not commit any wrongdoing here.”

The eight-person jury in the Bryson City federal courtroom agreed, taking slightly less than an hour to clear Jackson County Sheriff Jimmy Ashe on five complaints that alleged he used his position and influence to interfere with the business operations and free speech of David Finn, owner of Blue Ridge Public Safety. Blue Ridge Public Safety is a private security force hired by upscale developments in the greater Cashiers area to patrol their communities.

The case pitted two of Jackson County’s leading law enforcement officers against one another in the federal district courtroom of U.S. District Judge Martin Reidinger.

Finn’s lawyer, Frank Contrivo Jr., spent three days calling witnesses, reviewing subpoenaed phone records, and otherwise building the case against Sheriff Ashe.

Ashe’s lawyer, Patrick Flanagan took only a few hours to offer a defense.

His message was simple: The only evidence that Ashe had interfered with Finn’s contracts was circumstantial, and Ashe’s own testimony that he had not used his office to put Finn under duress was credible.

Finn first sued Ashe in 2007, accusing the sheriff of using his position to scuttle the sale of Blue Ridge Public Safety to an Asheville buyer named John Hale.

The complaints alleged that Ashe, working in concert with a lawyer for an influential group of Cashiers-area residents, inappropriately shared information that led to a slew of investigations into Finn’s business, which holds security and patrol contracts worth more than $1 million.

The day before Flanagan called his defense witnesses, Contrivo withdrew the leading claim driving the case thus far –– that Ashe had actively participated in ruining the sale of Blue Ridge Public Safety to John Hale for $1.5 million.

With that claim off the table, the case came down to whether Ashe interfered with six existing Blue Ridge Public Safety contracts and on whether he infringed on Finn’s First Amendment right to free speech.

According to Finn, Ashe was motivated to disrupt the business of Blue Ridge Public Safety because of a disagreement between the two men over proposed legislation that would have given company police broader powers, including jurisdiction on U.S. highways adjacent to the communities they patrol.

An important component of Contrivo’s case for Finn was the extent to which Ashe communicated with Cary-based Lawyer Mark Seifert and his clients. Seifert created and represented two groups: the Committee of Sapphire Homeowners and the Sapphire Association of Concerned Citizens Committee.

Seifert testified that he was hired by Cashiers property owners in 2006 to investigate Finn and that his goal was to put Blue Ridge Public Safety out of business.

Contrivo alleged that Ashe and Seifert “were singing a duet” as they worked in concert to manufacture claims against Blue Ridge Public Safety that hurt the business and ruined contracts. He showed through phone records that Ashe and Finn had had extensive contact with one another –– nearly 150 calls amounting to 30 hours of conversations.

“What we’ve seen in the past three days is a snapshot of the nightmare experienced by Mr. Finn’s business,” Contrivo told the jury in his closing argument.

Flanagan, who served as a captain in the U.S. Army JAG Corps, presented an argument that was repetitive, process oriented and clinical. He focused on the fact that not one witness testified to Ashe’s direct participation with Seifert or even to the fact that Ashe had spoken ill of Blue Ridge Public Safety.

“What we didn’t hear at all –– there was no evidence, no testimony –– was that the sheriff has ever made a derogatory comment about Mr. Finn or his company,” Flanagan said.

In contrast, Contrivo at times raised his voice to cajole the jury and at other times spoke in a barely audible whisper to contribute to the gravity of the moment. He tried to paint a picture of Ashe as an expert at behind the scenes deal-making who managed to get away with a crime by staying at arm’s length from it.

“We hear about a man who was turf conscious, jealous of his power, and jealous of what he perceived as a threat to his power,” Contrivo said, pointing at Ashe.

Contrivo asked the jury for $200,000 worth of damages to cover Finn’s lost contracts and legal fees. The jury wasn’t convinced. They cleared Ashe on each charge and entered zeroes in the spaces on the verdict sheet that asked for award amounts.

After the trial, Ashe said the verdict upheld his faith in the system.

“This has been a long process that needlessly burdened the taxpayers of our community,” Ashe said. “The quick verdict of the jury attests to what we have asserted from the beginning of the matter.”

Ashe also indirectly expressed his dismay that he had spent so much time over the past two years embroiled in the civil suit.

“There is no business more important than the people’s business, and I am proud of the confidence that the good people of Western North Carolina have shown in me and our deputies,” Ashe said. “I look forward to many more years of public service, and it’s time to get back on task.”

Neither Finn nor Contrivo responded to requests from comment on the case after the trial, so it is not clear whether they plan to appeal the verdict.

Flanagan said a potential appeal could take two forms. In the first scenario, Contrivo could make a motion to Judge Reidinger to set aside the jury’s verdict in his final judgment, which will be entered in the next few weeks.

A second approach would be for Contrivo to file an appeal with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. within 30 days of the final judgment being entered.

Each weekend, Carol Austin figures out what meals her family is going to eat during the upcoming workweek. She shops for groceries and fills her vehicle’s gasoline tank before Monday morning.

When the well heeled are in need of a pampered retreat in Western North Carolina, they often look toward the Old Edwards Inn and Spa in Highlands.

By Sarah Kucharski • Staff Writer

A lawsuit over deed restrictions that could prevent a controversial high-rise condominium near Highlands from being built is past due for mediation.

By Michael Beadle

Growing up in South Carolina, Robert Lathan remembers how just about everything and everyone was named after Wade Hampton — schools, parks, hotels, towns, and especially children. More than a century after Hampton’s death, this wealthy landowner, Confederate general, governor and senator of South Carolina continues to cast a long shadow on the lands and the people he encountered — including the Cashiers community in Jackson County.

By Sarah Kucharski • Staff Writer

As residents in the Cashiers area pull together to address their community’s needs through the creation of a civic association, members of some of the region’s established grassroots groups weighed in on what makes such an organization successful.

By Sarah Kucharski • Staff Writer

Members of the Cashiers area are organizing a new civic association to direct the community’s future.

The formation of the association is an outgrowth of a planning project a group of Louisiana State University students undertook last year. The students, led by LSU landscape architecture professor and part-time Cashiers resident V. Frank Chaffin, studied the area in terms of demographics, land use and projected growth. Their semester-long study resulted in the recommendation of aesthetic-yet-functional element such as the creation of a public park and preserving in-town wetlands.

By Sarah Kucharski • Staff Writer

Approximately 80 workers will be laid off from Cashier’s Consolidated Metco plastics plant beginning in January in the largest downsizing in Jackson County since the Ashley Company furniture plant closed in 2002.