Flatwoods Monster

On the evening of September 12, 1952, a brilliant fireball crossed the sky over several eastern states. In Flatwoods, Braxton County, West Virginia, boys playing football watched it drop behind a nearby hilltop and fetched Kathleen May, National Guardsman Eugene "Gene" Lemon, and others to investigate by flashlight. They met an acrid mist, a pulsing red glow on the ground, and then, in the flashlight beam beside an oak, a figure some ten feet tall: a dark cowl shaped like the ace of spades around a reddish face, eyes throwing orange-green light, a torso like a dark green pleated metal skirt. It hissed and glided toward them; the party fled headlong down the hill, several sick and vomiting that night. Investigators found only flattened grass and skid marks the next day.

The encounter landed in the middle of the great UFO flap of 1952, two months after the Washington, D.C. radar incidents, and papers such as the Charleston Gazette gave it heavy play; Kathleen May and the boys appeared on New York television. Local writer Gray Barker's article "The Monster and the Saucer" in the January 1953 issue of Fate magazine fixed the Flatwoods Monster — also the Braxton County Monster or the Green Monster — in the saucer-age bestiary.

Skeptic Joe Nickell's 2000 investigation offered the standard explanation: the fireball was a meteor, the pulsing glow an aircraft beacon, and the monster a startled barn owl, its heart-shaped facial disk inflated by fright into the spade cowl. Braxton County has embraced the creature regardless, with a Flatwoods Monster Museum and giant roadside monster chairs for travelers' photographs.