Mysteries Uncovered: True Stories of the Paranormal and Unexplained

An unidentified flying object flashing across the West Virginia sky and seemingly falling to earth prompted a local family and their friends to investigate. Before long, they would come face to face with the bizarre, frightening creature that has since achieved legendary status as the “Flatwoods Monster.”

The bizarre story of the Flatwoods Monster began on the evening of September 12, 1952, in the small village of Flatwoods, Braxton County, West Virginia. It was around 7pm when some boys playing football on the local school playground saw what they described as a bright, oval-shaped object land on a nearby hilltop, belonging to a farm owned by G. Bailey Fisher.

The boys rushed to the home of Kathleen May, mother of two of the boys. Some of the boys were adamant that they had seen a flying saucer, while others said it was probably just a meteor. Several of the boys stated that the object looked like a silver dollar spouting an exhaust trail that resembled red balls of fire. They also said it had come from the southwest.¹¹ Kathleen May told the excited group that they were just imagining things. Then she looked toward the hill and spotted a strange red glow in the sky. Grabbing a flashlight, because dusk was falling, she and the boys set off to investigate. The group consisted of Kathleen; her two sons, Eddie, 13, and Freddie, 14; Neil Nunley, 14; Tommy Hyer, 10; Ronnie Shaver, 10; and National Guard member Gene Lemon, 17.

As Lemon led the party up the hill, he noticed that the path in front of them was shrouded by a strange, low-rolling fog. The fog curled around the trees and soon enough engulfed the entire area ahead of them. “It was very hazy in the area along the path. It was also very misty along the tree area,” recalled Freddie. It wasn’t the typical evening fog that settled through the mountains, but instead appeared to be emanating from a specific source. Undeterred, the group carried on through the fog and noticed that there was a strong odor in the air, similar to burning sulfur, which irritated their eyes and nostrils. Nevertheless, the party continued on up the hill. Suddenly they were stopped in their tracks by an eerie sight: a pair of bright-red eyes in a tree.

At first, they thought that the eyes were simply those of an opossum or racoon perched on a tree branch. However, Lemon and May both shined their flashlights toward the gleaming eyes—to reveal what Lemon described as a 10-foot (3m) monster with a “blood-red face and green body that seemed to glow.”²² As the flashlight beams struck the monster, its glowing eyes projected a powerful beam of light toward the group that illuminated the foggy area.⁷⁷ Terrified, Lemon let out a deafening scream and fell backward.

Kathleen recounted that the monster was around 4 feet (1.2m) wide and started moving toward them with a floating, bouncing motion. “It just moved. It didn’t walk. It moved evenly. It didn’t jump. It was kind of floating. It was about a foot to a foot and a half off the ground, but it didn’t have any kind of feet or anything that we could see.” As it came closer, Kathleen registered a pungent mist and “an overpowering, gaseous smell that burned my nostrils and made me feel sick.” The group turned on its heels and ran for home, but not before the monster spewed what appeared to be an oily fluid onto the ground, some of which spattered their clothing. “Nobody said anything—everybody ran,” recollected Lemon. “We just got a good look at it and left.”

Back at Kathleen’s house, they telephoned the Braxton County Sheriff’s Department in the nearby town of Sutton, but were informed that Sheriff Robert Carr and his deputy were near Frametown, investigating a reported plane crash. Meanwhile, several of the group felt sick. Lemon was particularly badly affected during the night, experiencing convulsions and vomiting attacks. The throats of the May brothers were so swollen that they were unable to drink water. When Kathleen took them to the doctor the next morning, his examination revealed that they had symptoms similar to mustard gas poisoning.

The group soon reported what they had seen to the police and the local press. Kathleen May and Gene Lemon described the figure they had seen as having the shape of a man, but with a blood-red, heart-shaped head with a distinct point at the top. They added that the monster had a bright-green body that appeared to give off a strange light and a pungent smell, similar to rotten eggs, that burned their eyes and nostrils. It looked “worse than Frankenstein” said Kathleen. “It couldn’t have been human.”³³ As the monster floated toward them, they said it emitted a loud, shrieking and hissing sound, like the sound of frying bacon. Others of the group claimed that the monster was dark in color, while one of the boys said, “The monster was obviously black really, but as it was hot. It was getting red hot like a poker.”

The police laughed off the group’s statements as mass hysteria. They also dismissed the so-called flying saucer as simply a meteor, claiming that there had recently been a meteor shower across a three-state area. The monster was probably an animal in a tree, glowing in reflected light. “The rest was pure imagination,” said Sheriff Robert Carr.⁴⁴

The locals were torn between believers and skeptics. A. Lee Stewart, Jr., co-publisher of the Braxton Democrat, organized an armed posse, who set off to investigate the following morning. “The odor was still there,” he recalled. “It was sort of warm and sickening.” In addition to the strange, unpleasant smell, he discovered skid marks and “two places about six to eight feet in diameter where the brush was trampled down.” Alongside the flattened grass and skid marks were traces of “an odd gummy deposit.”⁵⁵ While Stewart couldn’t explain the odor, he reported back that he couldn’t quite believe the group’s claims of a monster.⁶⁶ He did say, however, that the group that claimed to have seen the monster were “scared—bad scared!”

The following day, several newspapers ran pieces about the alleged monster. Police Capt. J.B. Jack told reporters that investigators had failed to find anything that could shed further light on the story and had found no evidence of a monster or a UFO. Mayor J. Holt Bryne speculated that the so-called monster was nothing more than “vapor” that could have come from a meteor. He said that a meteor could account for the strange object the boys saw in the sky, as well as the bad odor.⁷⁷ However, no meteor fragments were found at the scene.

The Baltimore Sun individually interviewed the key witnesses—Kathleen, Eddie, and Freddie May; Neil Nunley; Tommy Hyer; Ronnie Shaver; and Gene Lemon. They each drew pictures of what they had seen and described the monster as being around 10 to 12 feet (3 to 3.7m) tall, stating that they could tell how tall it was because the top of its head was level with a certain branch on the tree. Several of them also described a large object that they had spotted alongside the monster: a truncated cone or globe with a smaller cone or globe on top of it with a circular transparent window in front, from which a small blue spotlight shined out. Neil Nunley described the object as more like “a big ball of fire,” as opposed to a cone or globe. As the group turned to run back home, they described how the monster started to glide toward this large, glowing object. The Baltimore Sun ’s report concluded by confirming that the drawing of the glowing object and the Flatwoods Monster was sent to the Air Force District of Washington (AFDW), which had responded that it would not be investigating the strange occurrence.⁸⁸

A week after the sighting, Kathleen May and Gene Lemon appeared on We the People, a national television show, to talk about their experience. A sketch artist drew a representation of the monster based on their descriptions. However, this drawing did not match what May and Lemon said they had seen. The artist sensationally portrayed the monster as having large claws and a hooded garment and dress.⁹⁹

According to Frank Feschino Jr., author of The Braxton County Monster: The Cover-Up of the Flatwoods Monster Revealed and Shoot Them Down! The Flying Saucer Air Wars of 1952, his research and interviews with the Flatwoods witnesses led him to conclude that the monster was not a flesh-and-blood being but a metal-like structure, similar to a rocket or possibly even a creature in a suit. “It had great big eyes, portholes, or whatever you want to call them . . . And basically, it was funny-looking orange in the portholes,” May told Feschino. May’s son, Freddie, also told Feschino that “over the head was a big ace of spades covering,” adding that it “was something that looked like a helmet.” Over the years, the description of the monster in the media has become wildly distorted. “I don’t think there are two stories about the Flatwoods Monster that are the same,” observed Feschino.

At the time, the authorities did take the Flatwoods Monster seriously enough to mount an investigation. Federal investigators and scientists visited the scene and took pictures and soil samples. However, the results were never released.

A few weeks after the sighting, Kathleen May received a letter from the Pentagon, along with a picture of what they claimed she and the rest of the group must have seen in the woods that evening. The object they had encountered was a “moon landing vehicle,” which was supposedly being test-flown over desolate regions of the country. The letter explained that whenever the vehicle had to land, pilots would typically choose areas that were uninhabited, but on September 12, they had mistakenly landed in Flatwoods. The letter also stated that the group that had spotted the object in the woods were the very first civilians to ever see the vehicle.¹⁰¹⁰

Intriguingly, the Flatwoods group were not the only people to witness a strange phenomenon in the area. At around 8 p.m. the following evening, September 13, George and Edith Snitowsky from New York were driving between the towns of Gassaway and Frametown, West Virginia, with their 18-month-old son when their car stalled. As George tried to restart the engine, a sickening smell overpowered them. George described this odor as, “like a mixture of ether and burned sulphur.”⁹⁹ Suddenly, a violet beam of light, emanating from a wooded area bordering the desolate road, illuminated their car. George got out to investigate, but as he drew closer to the light, he experienced the “sensation of thousands of needlelike vibrations” on his skin.¹¹¹¹ The sensation—like an electric shock—was so strong that George buckled at the knees. Unwilling to venture any closer, George staggered back to the car.

As George approached the vehicle, he saw his wife, Edith, frozen in fear in the passenger’s seat. She was staring out the window over George’s shoulder. George turned and saw a terrifying sight: “A figure . . . standing immobile, on the fringe of the road, about 30 feet [9m] to my right.” He described the figure as around 8 or 9 feet (2.4 or 2.7m) tall. It had the general shape of a man, with a head, shoulders, and a bloated body. He also said that the figure had “long, spindly arms” and was gliding rapidly toward him. George managed to jump back into the car and the family huddled together as the figure came closer. They looked on in horror as one of its arms stretched across their windshield, as if inspecting their car. George saw that the end of its arm was forked. The creature then glided back toward the woods. Moments later, George and Edith saw a glowing globe, swaying back and forth, as it lifted above the trees and vanished into the dark sky. Their car now started without a problem.

The following morning, after a night of broken sleep at a motel in the town of Sutton, the couple noticed a burned spot on the hood of their car that had not been there before. This bizarre experience terrified George and Edith so much that they didn’t report what they had witnessed until 1955, when George recounted his experience in Male Magazine, a publication specializing in sensational stories.

Since then, the Flatwoods Monster has become one of the most curious unexplained events in UFO history, intriguing scientists, paranormal investigators, and conspiracy theorists all over the world. Some maintain that the monster was simply a product of mass hysteria. Others, however, are convinced that the sighting was of an extraterrestrial. “Things that people can’t explain, they just don’t want to accept or have any belief in,” said Judith Davis, a Flatwoods historian and retired schoolteacher who, accompanying herself on an autoharp, used to entertain her students with a song about the monster titled “The Phantom of Flatwoods.”

Over the years, one of the most common theories is that the object spotted in the sky that night was a meteor shower. Dr. Joe Nickell of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal suggested that the group had witnessed a meteor shower and then spotted an owl in the tree with the underbrush below it, giving the impression of a much larger figure. However, Harvard Meteor Project, which tracked 2,500 meteors between 1952 and 1954, recorded no meteor activity on that specific date. Furthermore, there was no shock wave, no crater, and no meteorite fragments found anywhere in Flatwoods or the surrounding area. In addition, the owl theory did not explain the presence of the foul-smelling odor and the oil-like substance found at the scene and on the group’s clothing. Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist who worked on government studies for a number of companies, described the meteor and owl theory as “trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.” The astronomer Hal Povenmire, author of Fireballs, Meteors, and Tektites, told Florida Today : “It definitely wasn’t a meteor.”

Ufologists are convinced that, that night, the group experienced a genuine “close encounter of the third kind”—an encounter with a UFO and an extraterrestrial lifeform—with added elements of US government cover-up. The reported sighting of the Flatwoods Monster coincided with a wave of UFO reports throughout Braxton County and a number of other Eastern states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Maryland, and Washington, DC. In fact, there were 21 hours of UFO sightings on September 12, 1952. Many people reported objects blazing through the sky. Some thought that they were witnessing an airplane crashing in a fireball. Former Flatwoods Mayor Margaret Clise recalled that, as she was walking to her grandparents’ home, she “saw this thing that looked like a burning star.”¹²¹² The sight disturbed her so much that she broke a bowl she was carrying as she rushed to get inside the house. Later, she said she noticed the tops of several trees in the area appeared to be scorched. “Some people insisted it was a meteorite, but they never found a meteorite,” she said. “Some people think it was just a figment of everyone’s imagination, which is impossible, because too many people saw it. We know something happened. We just don’t know what it was.”¹³¹³

On the same day as the Flatwoods Monster sighting, there were reports of the loss of an F-94 Sabrejet pilot and radar operator. John A. Jones and John S. DelCurto were reported missing after they took off from Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City to conduct a “local, routine training flight.” According to news articles at the time, the men had reported bad weather and were ordered to land at Moody AFB in Georgia before losing contact and presumably crashing after running out of fuel. On the night of the Flatwoods Monster sighting, the West Virginia National Guard was mobilized in Braxton County under the direction of the United States Air Force. National Guard troops were also mobilized in the Frametown area to search for evidence of a crashed airplane. This was why, when Kathleen May called the Braxton County Sheriff’s office, she was informed he was in Frametown, searching for a downed airplane.

When Feschino attempted to locate the official records of the disappearance through military archives, he was met with a bureaucratic runaround and informed that no records of the incident existed. However, he did discover that other accident reports from that time were often incomplete or missing at the National Archives, and words such as “disappeared” and “disintegrated” quite often appeared in news accounts of these events. According to Feschino, the US Air Force changed the time of the disappearance, presumably so it didn’t coincide with the sighting of the Flatwoods Monster. In Feschino’s book Shoot Them Down: The Flying Saucer Air Wars of 1952, he revealed a disturbing number of fatal air engagements and a number of disappearances of veteran combat pilots along with their aircrafts.

After investigating the case for over a decade, Feschino came to the conclusion that “as many as 20” American planes had been attacked and shot down by UFOs and that the multiple sightings of UFOs that night had been a “rescue mission” by UFOs to salvage a damaged UFO. Feschino came to this remarkable conclusion after tracking down and interviewing numerous eyewitnesses and military and government sources. He believed that the objects people saw in the sky that night were 16 UFOs in groups of four. He contends that the Truman administration gave the Air Force orders to seek and destroy the UFOs to alleviate mounting public tensions over the spate of mysterious sightings in the sky. “Of course you could cover this up. They do it all the time. Look at all the planes that got shot down during the Cold War on missions that supposedly did not exist. They made up cover stories and told the families back home all sorts of lies,” said Feschino.

Feschino recreated a possible scenario for the night of September 12, 1952, by carefully plotting each UFO sighting from that night. He then compared the reported sightings with the official explanation of the event and spoke with military sources who knew about the incident. “I had to read between the lines of the government cover-up,” he said. At the time, the US was locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union and people were starting to realize that Russians could fly over the country and could potentially drop an atomic bomb.¹⁴¹⁴ Feschino believed that at least one of the UFOs was damaged by the Air Force and crash landed in Flatwoods. According to Feschino, the first sighting of the Flatwoods Monster was the creature encased in a protective metallic suit and the second sighting, by the Snitowskys, was of the creature partially out of its suit.¹⁵¹⁵

In 1975, Ufologist Major Donald Keyhoe documented in his book Aliens from Space that many reported UFO sightings from around the same time were covered up by the government. Much like Feschino, Keyhoe believed that the military had scrambled jets to intercept the UFOs, which were violating United States airspace. He said that Pentagon sources had told him that a spate of unexplained fatal air accidents had occurred as a reprisal for an attempt to shoot down a UFO by Air Force jets.¹⁶¹⁶

Despite the evidence of UFO activity all over the eastern United States on the night of the Flatwoods Monster, government officials continued to explain the sightings as deriving from a single meteor. How a single meteor could have been seen in so many different places, at different times and going in different directions remains a mystery.

A final theory is that the Flatwoods Monster was a manifestation of the bizarre natural phenomenon ball lightning. This supposition was put forward by Paul Sagan in his 2004 book Ball Lightning: Paradox of Physics, in which he interviewed the Flatwoods Monster witnesses. Ball lightning varies in appearance from translucent to multicolored, and has been observed at altitude (the Flatwoods Monster was encountered on a hilltop), near power lines, during thunderstorms, and even, apparently, on sunny days. It has been reported as hovering or moving in erratic ways, also exploding, making a hissing noise and leaving a sulphurous smell (both reported by the original Flatwoods group).

Whatever the witnesses encountered that night in Flatwoods truly remains a mystery, but it has become an essential part of local folklore. In fact, the Flatwoods Monster has become something of a mascot for Flatwoods’ population of around 270 citizens. Signs at both ends of town read, “Welcome to Flatwoods. Home of the Green Monster.” To nurture the Flatwoods legend and attract tourists, the Flatwoods Museum opened in Sutton in October 2017. There, visitors can learn all about the Flatwoods Monster, as described by the original witnesses, and purchase memorabilia, including mugs, figurines, t-shirts, baby clothes, even a spectacular, thronelike Flatwoods chair representing the fiery-eyed monster. Colby White, a Morgantown-based musician, was so inspired by the Flatwoods Monster that he has a tattoo of it on his forearm. He is one of many locals who believe the hype. “Here comes a bunch of kids, a woman shining a flashlight in this dude’s eyes or this creature’s eyes. Next thing he knows he’s getting blinded and freaks out and starts vibrating and basically throws up some weird oil on them. So, I think they startled him. That’s my theory, I think they startled the Flatwoods Monster,” he declared.¹⁷¹⁷

The captivating story of the Flatwoods Monster dominated the front pages of local newspapers for weeks on end, putting Braxton County firmly on the map. While some view the Flatwoods Monster as little more than a tall tale, others contend that there is some truth to the legend. “That night, they saw something that scared the heck out of them. It’s hard to tell what can become a monster. We want people to think whatever they want to think,” said Andrew Smith, director of the Braxton County Convention and Visitors Bureau.¹⁸¹⁸

The Flatwoods Monster