The Flatwoods Monster

The figure hung below an oak branch rather than standing on the ground. The group who climbed the hill at Flatwoods in West Virginia one evening in September 1952 described it as ten to fifteen feet tall, with a round blood-red face, a black conical hood and eyes that threw greenish-orange beams. They had gone up because children in the town watched a bright object cross the sky and appear to come down on the hilltop, where a pulsing light showed. Kathleen May was among them with her two sons. A foul metallic mist rolled over the group. They fled and several of them vomited for hours afterwards.

What is on the record

Four claimants come out of five tellings, all carried by one channel's four videos: Kathleen May, Raymond Walters and two of the young people who climbed the hill, a boy of fourteen and a seventeen-year-old National Guardsman. The tellings do not agree on the size of the party, seven in one and fourteen in another, a fault in the record-keeping rather than in the night.

Physical claims attach to the site: skid marks and matted grass where a globular object was said to have sat, a circular depression, and by one account a dog that sickened and died within days. The newest telling goes further. It has the object crash into the mountaintop and knock off treetops, and says Sanderson, Barker and others reached the site a week later. They found tripod hoof-like impressions and coils of a white plastic-like material that Monsanto could not identify. Another telling says no traces remained at all, so what was left behind depends on which version a reader follows.

Two primary documents sit in the file: a CIA record released under FOIA and a US Air Force flying-discs file covering September to December 1952. Two tellings describe the descending object in comet-like terms, which leaves an ordinary reading of the light available without settling what stood on the hill.

Why it sits where it does

Flatwoods grades L4: multiple claimants to one connected event with government paperwork in the file. The tier reflects the number and consistency of witnesses and the paper beside them, not confirmation of a creature. On file are a hillside, a crowd that climbed it, a figure they all ran from and an illness they shared afterwards. What they met under the oak is not resolved here.