Flatwoods Monster

On the evening of September 12, 1952, at the height of the postwar UFO flap, a small group in the hamlet of Flatwoods, West Virginia had one of the strangest close encounters in American history. Two boys saw a bright object streak across the sky and appear to land on a hilltop belonging to the Fisher farm. They collected siblings, a neighbor named Kathleen May, and a seventeen-year-old National Guardsman named Gene Lemon, and set off up the ridge with a flashlight and a small dog to investigate what they assumed was a downed meteor.

What they described finding has become iconic in UFO literature. Beside a large pulsing red sphere stood a ten-foot figure with a spade-shaped or ace-of-spades-shaped head, a pleated dark body seemingly clothed in metallic drapery, tiny claw-like hands, and glowing orange or red eyes. The thing hovered rather than walked and emitted a hissing sound and an acrid, sulfurous mist that left several witnesses nauseated, with throat irritation and eye inflammation that persisted for days. The dog ran ahead, came back whimpering, and died shortly after, according to family accounts.

The Braxton County sheriff and a reporter named A. Lee Stewart arrived that night and documented trampled grass, skid marks, and the lingering chemical smell. Stewart's story spread through wire services within forty-eight hours and the Flatwoods Monster, sometimes called the Braxton County Monster or the Phantom of Flatwoods, entered the national imagination. Early investigator Gray Barker, a West Virginian who helped found modern UFO research, drove up from Clarksburg within the week, and decades later Frank Feschino Jr. produced the most comprehensive book-length treatment, interviewing surviving witnesses and tracing the night in hour-by-hour detail.

Skeptics have argued the witnesses saw a barn owl in a tree fronted by a reflective meteor trail, an explanation offered by the Air Force and by author Joe Nickell. The witnesses themselves, including Kathleen May in interviews given over the following fifty years, insisted until their deaths that something unearthly had been on that hillside. Flatwoods today embraces the encounter openly with a small museum and an annual festival, and the spade-headed silhouette has become a permanent fixture of American cryptid and UFO iconography.