The Flatwoods Monster
Six West Virginia boys aged ten to seventeen observed a UFO descent near the village of Flatwoods at dusk on September 12, 1952. The thing came from the sky like a fireball, landing on a hill that was part of the nearby Fisher farm. The boys dashed to a nearby house and corralled a housewife, Kathleen May, who went with them to the point of impact, where flaming debris littered the ground.
A noise caused the group to look up into the trees, where a hissing, shiny-eyed alien perched among the branches. Although a nauseating gas or mist emitted by the debris partially obscured the creature, the boys and Mrs. May were able to make out a heavy, pendulous body with no visible lower limbs, apparently draped in fabric, and with a face shaped like the ace of spades. In a heartbeat, the creature displayed what Mrs. May called “terrible claws,” before gliding from the tree and toward the startled group. One of the boys dropped his flashlight, and the entire group scattered. Ever after, the creature has been called the Flatwoods Monster. (Because Flatwoods is in West Virginia’s Braxton County, the creature is occasionally referred to as the Braxton County Monster.)
Courtesy of Charleston Gazette-Mail
A sheriff’s investigation a day later turned up nothing, but a day after that the editor of the Braxton (WV) Democrat discovered what may have been impact marks on the ground, and a peculiar gummy substance. On assignment from Fate magazine, UFO researcher Gray Barker arrived very soon after the incident, to interview witnesses and take a look at the site. Barker reported that the boys’ sighting coincided with reports from other locals of “illuminated objects in the sky” over a twenty-mile radius.
The Flatwoods case is part of the 1952 “UFO explosion.” That it has not become lost in the plethora of reports from that year marks it as unique.
Admittedly, the narrative has been muddied by published accounts that draw upon—and embellish—earlier ones, and by some discrepancies among the witnesses. In some published accounts, the airborne object gave off a pulsing light, which is easily explained by a nearby trio of airplane beacons with flashing red illumination. Sometimes, all six boys belonged to Mrs. May, when only two, Eddie and Freddie, were hers. In certain retellings the creature’s face is round and red, and topped by a pointed cowl (organic or possibly fabric; regardless, the detail is in line with the more precise “ace of spades” description). Some latter- day chroniclers note a green body that, green or not, ranges from “man-sized” to ten feet tall.
The witnesses’ nausea is consistent among accounts, though historians cannot agree on whether the fumes emanated from debris or from an intact craft.
Another possibility, though, is evening fog, which is common in the area in September.
During a trip to Flatwoods in 2000, researcher Joe Nickell uncovered locals that remembered the original stir from 1952–53. (A pair of plainclothes USAF investigators working on behalf of Project Blue Book visited Flatwoods early in 1953, to conduct routine research. Over the years, their presence has morphed— according to some sources—into a visit from Men in Black.) One longtime resident, ninety-five when Nickell spoke with him, recalled that the general consensus among townies was that the witnesses saw a meteor. Although some accounts from 1952 suggest that multiple objects were spotted that evening, Nickell intuited—probably correctly—that witnesses separated by geography simply saw a single object tracing a course across the sky.
More than one local felt that the gummy deposits and marks of ground impact reported by the Braxton Democrat are easily explained: leaked oil and skid marks from the ten-year-old Chevy pickup owned by a man named Max Lockard, who had driven to the site and found nothing, whereupon he executed a muddy U-turn and departed.
In later years, Kathleen May insisted that she and the others had not seen a monster at all, but an experimental aircraft. (Apparently eager to be disassociated with the “monster” story, neither Mrs. May nor son Fred agreed to be interviewed by Nickell in 2000.) As for the creature itself, Nickell’s research satisfied him that the creature in the branches was a barn owl, a large bird with a “cowled,” heart-shaped white face and large eyes easily visible from the ground. The species has a variety of startling vocalizations that might easily be described as a hiss. Indeed, one common name for the barn owl is the hissing owl. The monster’s gliding movement and claws also suggest a large bird.
Besides its publication by Fate, Gray Barker’s account of the Flatwoods Monster dominated the first issue (September 1953) of his mimeographed Saucerian. Early in 2016, a bookseller in Cooperstown, New York, offered a “near fine” copy of that issue, The Saucerian Vol. 1 No. 1, for $1,250.