Flatwoods "Monster," 1952
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By the early 1950s, claims of contact with alien-like entities began to appear alongside stories of UFOs and “flying saucers.” In the fall of 1952, a group of local boys saw a fiery, red object fly across the sky near the small town of Flatwoods, West Virginia and appear to touch down on a nearby farm. There, the group found a large, glowing object, and a monstrous, mechanical entity that sent them running for their lives. The group’s remarkable story captured the public imagination, and preceded a rise in UFO entity encounters around the world.
The Encounter
Around 7:15 p.m. on the evening of September 12, 1952, brothers Fred and Edward May, aged 11 and 13, and their friend Eugene Lemon, aged 18, were playing football on the Flatwoods school playground with eight other boys when they all caught sight of a glowing red, pear-shaped object with a fiery tail, travelling blunt-end first. It flew over their heads and stopped in the air before descending on the nearby farm of a Mr. Bailey Fisher. The May boys ran to their mother, Kathleen May, who took the three boys, and three others, aged 13, 14, and 14, to inspect the “landing site” marked by a reddish-purple glow in the trees. The group left the Mays’ home about 7:40 p.m., joined by the Mays’ dog, Lemon’s dog, and later, by a neighbourhood Collie, and the boys’ 10-year-old friend.
Lemon, a National Guardsman, led the group by flashlight, taking them up a steep hill and into a wooded area. After beginning the climb, the group detected a warm, fog-like mist and a nauseating, sulfur-like odour that burned their eyes and noses. At least one of the witnesses also heard a mechanical whining sound. As they neared the summit around 8 p.m., the Collie froze and growled, then ran into the mist. A few minutes later, the group heard it barking aggressively, before it came running back down the hill and into town.
The group continued through a wooden gate and up to the summit of the hill where they’d seen the glow. The younger boys stayed at the gate with Lemon’s dog, who refused to go any further. The five that continued experienced a more concentrated form of the mist and odour, and Mrs. May heard a hissing sound like frying food. In approaching the summit, the group saw a large, rounded black object about 15 meters away in a gully to their right. The ball was over 6 meters wide, and the entire thing was glowing from within, pulsating between a cherry red and a pale orange.
As the group continued up the path, Lemon noticed what he thought were the eyes of a raccoon sitting in a tree to the left of the object and shone a light in their direction. In the beam of the light was a dark, metallic ”monster" standing 3 - 3.5m tall that seemed to suddenly come alive. Its face was lit red from behind, and its eyes were like portholes that passed beams of yellow light. Its head, which the witnesses assumed to be a helmet, was shaped like the ace of spades. Though some disagreed on the appearance of the entity's body, Mrs. May described it as being pleated like a skirt, and believed that there were small antennae protruding from the shoulders.
As soon as the beam of the flashlight hit the creature, it began gliding in the group’s direction, apparently hovering over the ground. A thumping sound came from inside the creature's body and it began to glow, red in the face, green in the body. It then emitted a shrill hissing noise and released a more concentrated form of the mist detected earlier. It passed right in front of the closest three witnesses, and Mrs. May claimed it spit out an oily substance that she later found on her outfit. Everyone ran away, but the entity didn’t chase them, and turned instead towards the pulsating red light. Nevertheless, Mrs. May and the boys sprinted back to their homes, in a nearly hysterical state. They never saw the being or the craft again.
The Aftermath
Everyone in the group experienced nausea, irritation of the nasal cavity, and severe swelling in the throat after inhaling the odorous mist. Lemon had multiple convulsions and went into violent fits of vomiting almost immediately after returning home. Some of the children could hardly swallow water, and Mrs. May had to take her boys to a doctor. The doctor who treated them claimed that their symptoms were similar to those experienced by victims of mustard gas.
Immediately upon returning home at 8:45 p.m., Mrs. May phoned the Sheriff’s department, who were occupied in a search for a reported plane crash, but the State Troopers sent photojournalist A. Lee Stewart, Jr. to the scene. Stewart arrived around 9 p.m. that night, and convinced Lemon to guide him back to the site. There he smelled a "sickening" odour and found two, 9m long tracks in the tall grass over half a meter wide and 3m apart, leading from the summit of the hill down into the valley where the glowing object was seen. Stewart noticed a dark, oily substance on his clothes after walking through these tracks, and when he visited the next morning he found a globular lump of metal like dripped solder. He then interviewed all seven of the boys on tape, and obtained these drawings. Sheriff Robert Carr arrived later that night with two police dogs, but both refused to climb the hill.
The night of the encounter, the US Air Force contacted the commander of the West Virginia National Guard, Captain Dale Leavitt, who was already in Braxton county searching for the plane crash, and asked him to inspect the scene. In an interview with Frank Feschino in the early 90s, Leavitt claimed that he arrived on the hill with 50 or 60 men around 1:30 a.m., and took samples of the dirt, leaves, wood, and an oily substance like graphite grease where the monster was seen. He also found a 6m circle of depressed grass where the children saw the glowing object. An article in the Charleston Gazette in October 1954 revealed that Leavitt found at least one metallic fragment, and alleged that curious locals found bits of black, plastic-like materials in the following days. Leavitt sent the samples to the Air Force for analysis, but never heard back about the results.
Mrs. May said that two men who claimed to be reporters showed up at her door the day after the incident. Upon request, she escorted them to the site and showed them the tracks. One of the men went down amongst the trees in the valley and came out covered head to toe in an oily substance, even though he was wearing an expensive, formal suit. They left after talking about bringing samples to “Ed.”
The day after the sighting, two papers in Charleston covered the “fiery objects” seen streaking through the skies, and the Charleston Daily Mail covered the monster sighting the following day. A week later, renowned anomalist Ivan Sanderson visited the scene for a follow-up story in True Magazine. Fate magazine and the Civilian Saucer Investigation also followed-up on the case. All spoke to many other witnesses to UFOs, strange entities, and foul, metallic odours. For example, the director of the board of education saw an elliptical object take off near his house around 6:30 the morning after the group encounter, and only learned of the previous night’s events when he called the local paper. Frank Feschino, Jr. published the definitive account of the Flatwoods incident in 2004, and found evidence of sightings from 116 separate locations across 10 U.S. states. For 21 hours on September 12, there were hundreds of documented reports of flying, landing, and crashing objects, but the Air Force never performed an official investigation.
A week after the encounter, Mrs. May and Eugene Lemon posed for a photo in a New York city TV studio with an artist’s depiction of the monster they’d seen. This depiction of the entity inspired a number of video game monsters, including the cow-napping “aliens” in Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Though this image has achieved iconic status, it contains many distortions of the witnesses’ descriptions, giving the monster a cloth tunic, a humanoid torso, and skinny arms with clawed hands. The witnesses had actually stated that the torso was cylindrical, and that the whole body was metallic, not cloth. They insisted it had no arms, just antennae.
Explanation
While nothing the group had seen that night left any sure trace of its presence, something had undoubtedly provoked an extreme physiological response in the witnesses. Sanderson pushed the extraterrestrial hypothesis, referring to the monster as a pilot in a spacesuit, and argued that there had been a whole fleet of craft over Braxton county that night. Feschino also supports the ETH.
UFO debunkers, by contrast have dismissed the sightings at Flatwoods as an unlikely confluence of misidentified natural occurrences. Joe Nickell revisited the case for Skeptical Inquirer in 2000, and spent a day in Flatwoods. Here he found a local who said he’d left the tracks in the grass when he’d driven his truck through the site the evening of the encounter. Nickell concluded that the flying object was a meteor, while the landed, red orb was one of three nearby airplane beacons. The witnesses had encountered a dense fog at the scene of the encounter that they came to believe was a poisonous gas when their hysteria had caused them to feel nauseous. Finally, the “monster” was a barn owl that flew towards the witnesses with its claws outstretched, lit by the red glow of the nearby beacons.
Still, the tracks were described as much wider and much more far apart than a truck’s wheels, and neither the truck nor the owl explain how Mrs. May got oil on her uniform, how the kids got so violently sick, or why there were so many other sightings in the same area that night.
Summary
The case of the Flatwoods monster established a template for later UFO landings, which became much more common in the 1950s. As in the Lonnie Zamora case of 1964, or the Falcon Lake incident of 1967, the UFO landed in full view of witnesses, as if to entice them over to the site only to startle them and fly away. This suggests the landing may have been contrived in order to effect the witnesses, although Feschino argues that it was an emergency landing due to technical issues.
Mrs. May and the children were certain that they had seen something truly unusual that night, but as is the case with most entity encounters, there is no extant physical evidence to establish the truth of their claims. Nevertheless, the case has become a classic, largely due to the work of Stewart, Keyhoe, and Sanderson. The media publicity over the Flatwoods monster helped establish the threat of alien invaders in the public imagination, and contributed to a developing mythology of extraterrestrial contact that matured in the later 1950s. And the stories only got stranger from there.
Sources:
Frank Feschino, Jr. The Braxton County Monster: the Cover-up of the “Flatwoods Monster” Revealed. Revised Ed. USA: Lulu Enterprises, 2013.
Joe Nickell, “The Flatwoods UFO Monster,” Skeptical Inquirer 24, no. 6, November/ December 2000.
Donald E Keyhoe. Flying Saucers from Outer Space. New York: Henry Holt, 1953.
Ivan T. Sanderson, Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFO’s. New York: Cowles, 1967, 37-52.
See two of the original newspaper sources here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070927195213/http://sites.eoi.com/folder5715/index.cfm?id=187109&fuseaction=browse&pageid=27
Support new videos on Patreon: https://patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Illustration by Colin Campbell. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
UFO Case Review contains sound design with elements downloaded from Freesound.org. Typewriter_2rows.wav, Uploaded by Fatson under the Attribution License.
By the early 1950s, claims of contact with alien-like entities began to appear alongside stories of UFOs and “flying saucers.” In the fall of 1952, a group of local boys saw a fiery, red object fly across the sky near the small town of Flatwoods, West Virginia and appear to touch down on a nearby farm. There, the group found a large, glowing object, and a monstrous, mechanical entity that sent them running for their lives. The group’s remarkable story captured the public imagination, and preceded a rise in UFO entity encounters around the world.
The Encounter
Around 7:15 p.m. on the evening of September 12, 1952, brothers Fred and Edward May, aged 11 and 13, and their friend Eugene Lemon, aged 18, were playing football on the Flatwoods school playground with eight other boys when they all caught sight of a glowing red, pear-shaped object with a fiery tail, travelling blunt-end first. It flew over their heads and stopped in the air before descending on the nearby farm of a Mr. Bailey Fisher. The May boys ran to their mother, Kathleen May, who took the three boys, and three others, aged 13, 14, and 14, to inspect the “landing site” marked by a reddish-purple glow in the trees. The group left the Mays’ home about 7:40 p.m., joined by the Mays’ dog, Lemon’s dog, and later, by a neighbourhood Collie, and the boys’ 10-year-old friend.
Lemon, a National Guardsman, led the group by flashlight, taking them up a steep hill and into a wooded area. After beginning the climb, the group detected a warm, fog-like mist and a nauseating, sulfur-like odour that burned their eyes and noses. At least one of the witnesses also heard a mechanical whining sound. As they neared the summit around 8 p.m., the Collie froze and growled, then ran into the mist. A few minutes later, the group heard it barking aggressively, before it came running back down the hill and into town.
The group continued through a wooden gate and up to the summit of the hill where they’d seen the glow. The younger boys stayed at the gate with Lemon’s dog, who refused to go any further. The five that continued experienced a more concentrated form of the mist and odour, and Mrs. May heard a hissing sound like frying food. In approaching the summit, the group saw a large, rounded black object about 15 meters away in a gully to their right. The ball was over 6 meters wide, and the entire thing was glowing from within, pulsating between a cherry red and a pale orange.
As the group continued up the path, Lemon noticed what he thought were the eyes of a raccoon sitting in a tree to the left of the object and shone a light in their direction. In the beam of the light was a dark, metallic ”monster" standing 3 - 3.5m tall that seemed to suddenly come alive. Its face was lit red from behind, and its eyes were like portholes that passed beams of yellow light. Its head, which the witnesses assumed to be a helmet, was shaped like the ace of spades. Though some disagreed on the appearance of the entity's body, Mrs. May described it as being pleated like a skirt, and believed that there were small antennae protruding from the shoulders.
As soon as the beam of the flashlight hit the creature, it began gliding in the group’s direction, apparently hovering over the ground. A thumping sound came from inside the creature's body and it began to glow, red in the face, green in the body. It then emitted a shrill hissing noise and released a more concentrated form of the mist detected earlier. It passed right in front of the closest three witnesses, and Mrs. May claimed it spit out an oily substance that she later found on her outfit. Everyone ran away, but the entity didn’t chase them, and turned instead towards the pulsating red light. Nevertheless, Mrs. May and the boys sprinted back to their homes, in a nearly hysterical state. They never saw the being or the craft again.
The Aftermath
Everyone in the group experienced nausea, irritation of the nasal cavity, and severe swelling in the throat after inhaling the odorous mist. Lemon had multiple convulsions and went into violent fits of vomiting almost immediately after returning home. Some of the children could hardly swallow water, and Mrs. May had to take her boys to a doctor. The doctor who treated them claimed that their symptoms were similar to those experienced by victims of mustard gas.
Immediately upon returning home at 8:45 p.m., Mrs. May phoned the Sheriff’s department, who were occupied in a search for a reported plane crash, but the State Troopers sent photojournalist A. Lee Stewart, Jr. to the scene. Stewart arrived around 9 p.m. that night, and convinced Lemon to guide him back to the site. There he smelled a "sickening" odour and found two, 9m long tracks in the tall grass over half a meter wide and 3m apart, leading from the summit of the hill down into the valley where the glowing object was seen. Stewart noticed a dark, oily substance on his clothes after walking through these tracks, and when he visited the next morning he found a globular lump of metal like dripped solder. He then interviewed all seven of the boys on tape, and obtained these drawings. Sheriff Robert Carr arrived later that night with two police dogs, but both refused to climb the hill.
The night of the encounter, the US Air Force contacted the commander of the West Virginia National Guard, Captain Dale Leavitt, who was already in Braxton county searching for the plane crash, and asked him to inspect the scene. In an interview with Frank Feschino in the early 90s, Leavitt claimed that he arrived on the hill with 50 or 60 men around 1:30 a.m., and took samples of the dirt, leaves, wood, and an oily substance like graphite grease where the monster was seen. He also found a 6m circle of depressed grass where the children saw the glowing object. An article in the Charleston Gazette in October 1954 revealed that Leavitt found at least one metallic fragment, and alleged that curious locals found bits of black, plastic-like materials in the following days. Leavitt sent the samples to the Air Force for analysis, but never heard back about the results.
Mrs. May said that two men who claimed to be reporters showed up at her door the day after the incident. Upon request, she escorted them to the site and showed them the tracks. One of the men went down amongst the trees in the valley and came out covered head to toe in an oily substance, even though he was wearing an expensive, formal suit. They left after talking about bringing samples to “Ed.”
The day after the sighting, two papers in Charleston covered the “fiery objects” seen streaking through the skies, and the Charleston Daily Mail covered the monster sighting the following day. A week later, renowned anomalist Ivan Sanderson visited the scene for a follow-up story in True Magazine. Fate magazine and the Civilian Saucer Investigation also followed-up on the case. All spoke to many other witnesses to UFOs, strange entities, and foul, metallic odours. For example, the director of the board of education saw an elliptical object take off near his house around 6:30 the morning after the group encounter, and only learned of the previous night’s events when he called the local paper. Frank Feschino, Jr. published the definitive account of the Flatwoods incident in 2004, and found evidence of sightings from 116 separate locations across 10 U.S. states. For 21 hours on September 12, there were hundreds of documented reports of flying, landing, and crashing objects, but the Air Force never performed an official investigation.
A week after the encounter, Mrs. May and Eugene Lemon posed for a photo in a New York city TV studio with an artist’s depiction of the monster they’d seen. This depiction of the entity inspired a number of video game monsters, including the cow-napping “aliens” in Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Though this image has achieved iconic status, it contains many distortions of the witnesses’ descriptions, giving the monster a cloth tunic, a humanoid torso, and skinny arms with clawed hands. The witnesses had actually stated that the torso was cylindrical, and that the whole body was metallic, not cloth. They insisted it had no arms, just antennae.
Explanation
While nothing the group had seen that night left any sure trace of its presence, something had undoubtedly provoked an extreme physiological response in the witnesses. Sanderson pushed the extraterrestrial hypothesis, referring to the monster as a pilot in a spacesuit, and argued that there had been a whole fleet of craft over Braxton county that night. Feschino also supports the ETH.
UFO debunkers, by contrast have dismissed the sightings at Flatwoods as an unlikely confluence of misidentified natural occurrences. Joe Nickell revisited the case for Skeptical Inquirer in 2000, and spent a day in Flatwoods. Here he found a local who said he’d left the tracks in the grass when he’d driven his truck through the site the evening of the encounter. Nickell concluded that the flying object was a meteor, while the landed, red orb was one of three nearby airplane beacons. The witnesses had encountered a dense fog at the scene of the encounter that they came to believe was a poisonous gas when their hysteria had caused them to feel nauseous. Finally, the “monster” was a barn owl that flew towards the witnesses with its claws outstretched, lit by the red glow of the nearby beacons.
Still, the tracks were described as much wider and much more far apart than a truck’s wheels, and neither the truck nor the owl explain how Mrs. May got oil on her uniform, how the kids got so violently sick, or why there were so many other sightings in the same area that night.
Summary
The case of the Flatwoods monster established a template for later UFO landings, which became much more common in the 1950s. As in the Lonnie Zamora case of 1964, or the Falcon Lake incident of 1967, the UFO landed in full view of witnesses, as if to entice them over to the site only to startle them and fly away. This suggests the landing may have been contrived in order to effect the witnesses, although Feschino argues that it was an emergency landing due to technical issues.
Mrs. May and the children were certain that they had seen something truly unusual that night, but as is the case with most entity encounters, there is no extant physical evidence to establish the truth of their claims. Nevertheless, the case has become a classic, largely due to the work of Stewart, Keyhoe, and Sanderson. The media publicity over the Flatwoods monster helped establish the threat of alien invaders in the public imagination, and contributed to a developing mythology of extraterrestrial contact that matured in the later 1950s. And the stories only got stranger from there.
Sources:
Frank Feschino, Jr. The Braxton County Monster: the Cover-up of the “Flatwoods Monster” Revealed. Revised Ed. USA: Lulu Enterprises, 2013.
Joe Nickell, “The Flatwoods UFO Monster,” Skeptical Inquirer 24, no. 6, November/ December 2000.
Donald E Keyhoe. Flying Saucers from Outer Space. New York: Henry Holt, 1953.
Ivan T. Sanderson, Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFO’s. New York: Cowles, 1967, 37-52.
See two of the original newspaper sources here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070927195213/http://sites.eoi.com/folder5715/index.cfm?id=187109&fuseaction=browse&pageid=27
Support new videos on Patreon: https://patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Illustration by Colin Campbell. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
UFO Case Review contains sound design with elements downloaded from Freesound.org. Typewriter_2rows.wav, Uploaded by Fatson under the Attribution License.
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