The Flatwoods Monster

Briefing

On the evening of the twelfth of September 1952 a bright object crossed the sky over the eastern United States and appeared to come down on a hilltop farm at Flatwoods, Braxton County, West Virginia. A group of local boys and a neighbour, Kathleen May, walked up to look and reported a towering hooded figure that hissed and moved at them [3].

The documentary position is narrower than the story’s fame suggests. A surviving U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book working paper treats the object of the twelfth of September as a fireball and states that the computations “tally with… a meteorite” [1]. No Blue Book investigative report of the hilltop encounter itself appears in the digitised Project Blue Book collection — the only Flatwoods-titled file there is the fireball plot [1]. The ground-level explanations most often quoted — owl, aircraft beacon, vehicle tracks — come from later named investigators, not from a released Air Force finding [3].

Sequence of events

Evening — the twelfth of September 1952

• Approximately 19:00 EST. A brilliant greenish-white object, egg-shaped with the smaller radius in front and bluish green at the rear, is observed for five to six seconds; apparent size about twice the moon’s diameter [DOCUMENTED] [1].
• The object’s direction is recorded as “from about 30° north of east to 30° south of west” at “about 30° from the horizontal”, observed through an arc of roughly 45° over some 135 miles, first seen about 65 miles above the surface [DOCUMENTED] [1].
• About 19:15. Youngsters playing football on the Flatwoods school playground see a fiery object streak across the sky and apparently land on a hilltop of the nearby Bailey Fisher farm [REPORTED] [3].
• The group go to the home of Kathleen May, who supplies a flashlight and goes up the hill with them [REPORTED] [3].
• Nearing the crest, the group see a pulsing red light some distance ahead. Gene Lemon, 17, sees a pair of shining, animal-like eyes and aims the flashlight at them, revealing a towering “man-like” figure with a round red “face” surrounded by a “pointed, hood-like shape” [REPORTED] [3].
• The figure is in view only momentarily. It emits a hissing sound and glides toward the group; Lemon screams and drops the flashlight, and everyone flees. The group notice a pungent mist and some are afterwards nauseated [REPORTED] [3].
• Later that night, a few locals and then the sheriff and a deputy — arriving from a reported aircraft crash about ten miles south-west — search the site and “saw, heard and smelled nothing” [REPORTED] [3].

The thirteenth of September 1952 and after

• A. Lee Stewart Jr. of the Braxton Democrat finds two parallel “skid marks” in the meadow grass and an “odd, gummy deposit”, which are attributed to a landed “saucer” [REPORTED] [3].
• Within days the story reaches the national press; the Trenton (NJ) Times of the fifteenth of September 1952 carries an account of the sighting [REPORTED] [5].
• Writer Gray Barker is on the scene about a week later and writes the Fate magazine account (January 1953) from tape-recorded interviews, followed by a book in 1956 [3][4]. The writer-investigator Ivan T. Sanderson is on site in 1952 and publishes accounts in 1952 and 1967 [3].

Documentary record

The single Air Force page located is headed “TYPICAL METEORITE (FIREBALL) PLOT”, captioned “FIREBALL – SEPTEMBER 12, 1952”, and annotated by hand “FLATWOODS, W. Va.” [1]. It records the time as “Approximately 7:00 P.M. E.S.T.”, a duration of five to six seconds, and velocities of twenty-five and twenty-seven miles per second. It states that, “assuming that it passed over Cumberland, Md. in the flight to Flatwoods, West Virginia, it passed within 160 miles of Akron” [1]. Handwritten notes on the same page read “Observed by a number of places between Cumberland, Md. and a point 160 [miles] E. of Akron, Ohio” and “(All computations tally with speed, description, trajectory and other characteristics of a meteorite)”, with the names “Dr. La Paz” and “Dr. O’Keefe” appended [1].

One caution about that scan: the second page in the same digitised file is a Project 10073 Record Card for a Fort Worth, Texas sighting — a different case that happens to sit adjacent on the microfilm. It is not the Flatwoods card [1].

Project Blue Book ran as the Air Force’s UFO investigation from 1947 to 1969, receiving 12,618 sightings, of which 701 remain classed “Unidentified”; the declassified records are held by the National Archives as roughly 42 cubic feet of textual records and 94 rolls of microfilm, publication T-1206 [2]. A search of the digitised collection for identifiers containing “Flatwoods”, “Braxton”, “Sutton” or “Gassaway” returns only the single fireball file [1]. Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book in 1952, does not mention Flatwoods, Braxton, or a West Virginia monster anywhere in his 1956 book; a full-text search returns no occurrences [7].

The later explanatory literature is secondary throughout. Joe Nickell of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, who visited Flatwoods on the first of June 2000, concluded that the aerial object was a meteor, that the pulsing red light was most likely one of three aircraft beacons visible from the hilltop, and that the creature was a barn owl (Tyto alba) perched on a limb, with underbrush below supplying the apparent “lower” body [3]. Nickell reports that Max Lockard told him the skid marks and oily deposit were left by Lockard’s own 1942 Chevrolet pickup, driven through the field that evening [3]. Citing Donald E. Keyhoe (1953), Nickell also writes that Air Force Intelligence sent two men in civilian clothes to Flatwoods posing as magazine writers, who concluded the object was a meteor that “merely appeared to be landing”, that the “monster” was probably “a large owl perched on a limb”, and that the youths’ illness was “a physical effect brought on by their fright” — no Air Force document corroborating this was located [3]. Sanderson (1967) is quoted as saying the smell in the grass was “almost surely derived from a kind of grass that abounds in the area” [3], and a former local newspaper editor (Byrne 1966, quoted by Nickell) wrote that a large meteor was visible that Friday night in at least three states — Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia [3].

The witness list is not fixed by any primary document located here. The Barker-derived account gives Kathleen May, Gene Lemon (17), Neil Nunley (14), Eddie May (13), Freddie May (14), Tommy Hyer (10) and Ronnie Shaver (10) [3]. The e-WV encyclopedia lists Kathleen May, Eugene Lemon, Teddy May, Ronald Shaver, Neal Nunley, Teddy Neal and Tommy Hyer, and describes the figure as “nearly 12 feet tall and about four feet wide” with “a red face and bright green clothing” and a “spade-shaped” head — conflicting with the ten-foot height given by Nickell [4][3]. Both lists are recorded here without adjudication.

Open questions

1. No released Air Force document found states a conclusion about the creature — only about the aerial object [1].
2. The Blue Book fireball page gives approximately seven o’clock EST; the encounter accounts put the sighting at about a quarter past seven [1][3]. Nothing located reconciles the fifteen-minute gap.
3. The document is headed “EXAMPLE” and describes a “typical” plot, which leaves unclear whether it is a case finding or a teaching illustration drawn from the case [1].
4. Who compiled the plot, and in what relationship “Dr. La Paz” and “Dr. O’Keefe” stood to it, is not stated on the page [1].
5. No primary medical record, laboratory analysis or radiation measurement relating to the reported nausea and throat irritation, or to the “oily”/“gummy” ground deposit, has been found; all such accounts trace back to Barker, Sanderson or Keyhoe [3].
6. The widely repeated detail that Gene Lemon was a National Guardsman is not stated by any source consulted for this file.
7. The frequently quoted Air Force statement explicitly dismissing the figure exists here only as Keyhoe’s second-hand paraphrase, never as a document [3].
8. The Black Vault’s Flatwoods case-file page carries a 2002 essay by Stanton Friedman referring to oily samples collected by a “Colonel Leavitt” that were sent away and never returned; the page hosts no primary documents supporting this [6].

Status

This file is CONFIDENTIAL. It is admitted on the strength of one contemporaneous federal document — the Project Blue Book fireball plot — which establishes that a bright object was tracked across several states that evening and was assessed as a meteorite [1]. Everything concerning the figure on the hilltop rests on witness testimony recorded by writers days to years afterwards [3][4], which would not on its own clear this archive’s editorial bar. The aerial object as described on the Blue Book page — egg-shaped, brilliant greenish white, with a bluish green rear — sits alongside the archive’s other egg-shaped object reports, though the record here identifies it as a meteorite rather than a craft. Readers should note that an apparent landing is a separate claim from an apparent luminous object, and the saucer-form sightings attached to this case derive from the meadow traces reported the following morning, not from any witness account of a vehicle.

Nickell reports that Kathleen May later said what she saw “wasn’t a monster” but “a secret plane the government was working on” (citing Marchal 1966), and that both she and her son Fred declined to be interviewed for his investigation [3]. West Virginia’s state-published Goldenseal magazine marked the fiftieth anniversary in Fall 2002 with a recollection by Buddy Griffin, who was five in 1952 and heard the story secondhand [8]. Updates pending the location of any Blue Book record card or signed conclusion covering the encounter itself.

References

1. U.S. Air Force, Project Blue Book file “Flatwoods, West Virginia” — fireball plot, 12 September 1952. Undated frame 6384139, digitised in the Project Blue Book collection at the Internet Archive. Public domain.
2. National Archives and Records Administration, “Unidentified Flying Objects / Project Blue Book”. Programme dates, sighting totals, holdings and microfilm publication T-1206; declassified and open for research.
3. Nickell, Joe (2000). “The Flatwoods UFO Monster” (Investigative Files). Skeptical Inquirer vol. 24 no. 6, November/December 2000, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Site visit of 1 June 2000.
4. e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, “Flatwoods Monster”. West Virginia Humanities Council.
5. Newspaper account of the sighting, The Times (Trenton, NJ), 15 September 1952, reproduced by e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia.
6. The Black Vault, “Flatwoods Monster UFO Event” case-file page, hosting a 2002 essay by Stanton Friedman.
7. Ruppelt, Edward J. (1956). The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Project Gutenberg full text, searched for “Flatwoods”, “Braxton” and “monster” — no occurrences.
8. Griffin, Buddy (2002). “The Legend of the Flatwoods Monster”. Goldenseal, Fall 2002, West Virginia Division of Culture and History.