THE UNKNOWN: The Flatwoods Monster

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All right, um.

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Kids have vivid imaginations.

There's always a monster under the bed, a ghost in the closet, a witch in the woods.

Most of the time, that monster is just a blanket or a forgotten toy.

The ghost is a billowing curtain.

The witch is a branch or a squirrel.

As soon as the parents come in to take a look, the fear is gone.

But in 1952, in Flatwoods, West Virginia, that typical story was flipped on its head.

Because when two brothers brought their mother to see a spooky-looking creature in the woods, she saw it too.

This is Supernatural.

I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This week, I'm talking about the Flatwoods monster.

In 1952, a group of children saw a mysterious light flying across the sky and land in a nearby field.

When they went to investigate, they spotted a 15-foot-tall humanoid figure, a monster so strange it could only be from outer space.

I'll have more on the Flatwoods monster after this.

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Miss, I've been hitting up McDonald's for years.

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We need snack wraps.

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It's the return of something great.

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It's about 7 p.m.

right around dusk on September 12th, 1952.

A group of young boys are playing football in the tiny town of Flatwoods, West Virginia, when they see a strange light shoot through the sky.

It flies straight overhead towards the nearby hills.

At first glance, it could be a meteor.

It's round and has what looks like a tail of fire following it.

Except it's flying low, like lower than you'd expect from a meteor.

It's almost hovering.

The boys start teasing each other like, it's a flying saucer or watch out, a man from Mars will jump out and get you.

But they quiet down when the object tilts upward, goes over the hill, and then suddenly drops out of sight, as if it plunged to the ground.

Based on what they know about the area, the boys assume that it landed in this flat field at the neighbor's farm just past the hill.

Especially once they see this pulsing light from behind the hill, like the object is still there, waiting.

At this point, they're obviously very curious.

A few of the kids are still joking about how it must be aliens, but 12-year-old Freddie Mae is like, don't you pay any attention in class?

It's obviously a meteorite.

Another boy says they should go gather fragments for the state geological foundation because that's what a teacher at school told him you're supposed to do.

Now, kid logic aside, the rest of the group decides to at least go check it out.

But it's getting dark out, so Freddie and his 13-year-old brother Ed lead the group back to their mom's house to warn her that they're heading out.

Their mom Kathleen is a beautician who's just returning home from work.

She's about to hop in for a shower when her boys run through the door and scream that they saw a flying saucer.

Of course, Kathleen's not buying it.

She chalks the story up to her boys' wild imaginations, but the boys insist that they saw something and they drag her out onto the porch to prove it.

When Kathleen looks out into the distance, she doesn't see anything in the sky.

But she does spot a bright flashing light and a strange red glow on the hill, exactly where the boys say the saucer landed.

So Kathleen changes her tune a bit.

She's like, okay, you can go see it, but I'm coming too, and we need to be cautious.

She grabs a flashlight and calls a local 17-year-old by the name of Gene Lemon, who happens to be in the National Guard.

Someone's dog tags along too, and the whole group heads over to check out this mysterious object.

Gene leads, holding the flashlight.

The boys and Kathleen follow him up a dirt path and towards the top of the hill.

Through the brush, they can sort of see the lights from the object.

Occasionally, they dim and then brighten again.

As they keep walking, the air becomes warm and thick with mist, and a strange fog rolls into the path ahead.

Kathleen turns around to look back at the town, but she can no longer see the street lights.

They don't really have a choice but to keep walking forward.

But as they get closer, suddenly there's this horrible smell.

It's like some sort of burning metal or maybe sulfur.

Freddie, the would-be meteorite scientist, says it reminds him of when their TV tubes would burn out.

The boys' throats begin to itch.

Kathleen has a little trouble breathing, and everyone's eyes are burning and stinging.

Whatever this is, it isn't coming from any ordinary meteor.

I'd probably want to get my kids out of there in case there's like a toxic gas leak or something, but who knows?

I mean, it's the 50, so they just cough it off and keep moving.

When they reach the top of the hill, they see that the object is still there.

It's about 50 feet away in the middle of a neighbor's farm, a large, glowing mass that definitely isn't a meteor or a plane.

It's still pretty dark out and it seems like the group can't see the object clearly because when they describe it later, their accounts all differ.

Some say it's kind of flat on top, or that they hear a low thump like someone beating on a drum.

Some say it hisses like a jet plane.

And while the size also varies from witness to witness, a few boys say it's as big as a house.

Neil, a 14-year-old, describes it as a big ball of fire that doesn't make any noise.

And while he's standing at the edge of the hill looking at it, he's so fascinated that he doesn't notice something creeping up to his left.

Until Gene looks over and screams.

The boys all turn around.

15 feet away, just in front of a massive oak tree, there's this tall, dark, and towering figure, just floating.

It's human-shaped, but maybe twice as tall as a person, with something dark and pointy on top, almost like a hood.

It's got a round, reddish face.

There's no nose or mouth, but it does have eyes, or at least what they think are eyes.

They're more like holes projecting beams of greenish-orange light.

Gene's National Guard training apparently kicks in.

He pulls out the flashlight, turns it on, and points it at the creature, only to see that it's translucent.

It It looks like there's a light glowing inside the monster.

A few boys see folds of clothing around its body and strange claw-like hands.

Kathleen thinks it's encased in metal and says the hands look like antennas.

One of the boys thinks the eyes look like portholes, almost like it's part beast, part machine.

From the boys' position, they can't quite see below its torso, but it doesn't appear to have legs or feet or be moving at all.

It's just floating there, perfectly still,

until the monster squirts out some sort of oil and moves towards them.

Gene is so shocked that he collapses to the ground and drops the flashlight.

The dog takes off, running out of sight.

Gene gets up and they all sprint away so fast that when they reach the wooden fence, they don't even bother to open the gate.

They just jump over and run home.

When they get back, they find the dog trembling under the porch.

The group gathers together in the living room, trying to regroup, but it's absolute chaos.

The boys all have trouble breathing from the odor on the hill.

They're still coughing, gagging, and tearing up.

I mean, Gene is so sick that he runs to the bathroom and vomits.

The other boys' throats are so swollen that they have trouble drinking water.

Some are bruised or bleeding, and the monster's oil got on a few of their faces.

Kathleen is trying to hold it together but she is convinced that whatever they saw was not normal.

The only thing she can think to do is call the sheriff.

Sometime around 8.15, Kathleen gets a hold of the station and reports a mysterious flying object in the hills.

She adds that a group of boys need immediate medical help, but the office says that the sheriff isn't available.

He's He's actually in nearby Frametown investigating the site of a different crash where a plane had just disappeared without a trace.

Coming up, unidentified objects light up the West Virginia skies.

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Now back to the story.

On September 12th, 1952, at almost the exact same time as the UFO sighting in Flatwoods, Braxton County Sheriff Robert Carr gets a pretty serious phone call.

It's from a local hitchhiker, and his story goes like this.

He's getting a ride when he spots what he thinks is a Piper Cub in the sky.

And that's one of those small two-seater planes usually painted bright yellow.

All of a sudden, it burns up and crashes into a hill near Elk River.

He asks the driver to pull over at the nearest telephone, calls it in, then continues on his way.

But by the time Carr arrives at the site, there's no evidence of any sort of plane crash at all.

No metal, no flames, no smoke, nothing.

So Carr is like, well, this was a waste of my time, probably a hoax.

He heads back to the sheriff's office where they're still trying to find someone to head over to the May house.

Since everyone else is out, they eventually ask photojournalist and Air Force Force veteran A.

Lee Stewart to step in.

Now, Stewart is no stranger to accidents and crime scenes.

The West Virginia State Police actually call him pretty often.

And that might seem weird, but remember, this is a very small town, so I guess it's not unusual for journalists to help the police.

So Stewart arrives at the Mayhouse roughly a half hour after the sighting.

And at this time, it's still chaos.

Gene and two other boys are throwing up.

Everyone's coughing.

Kathleen has that mysterious oil splattered all over her uniform.

But what's worse is that all of the boys, and even Kathleen, are scared out of their minds.

So much so that they can barely tell Stuart what or even where the monster was.

It takes some coaxing, but eventually Stuart convinces the oldest two boys, Gene and Neil, to take him up to the hill.

And he grabs a shotgun just in case.

But when they arrive, Stewart doesn't see anything.

The craft and flashing lights are gone and there's certainly no monster.

It's as if the boys made absolutely everything up.

That is, until he smells the ground, there are still traces of that sickening metallic odor.

Stuart says it's something like mustard gas, but different, not like anything he's ever encountered, even in war.

But Stewart is a reasonable man with journalistic integrity.

He doesn't want to publish anything until he's examined the site in broad daylight.

So he visits the scene again first thing in the morning.

And sure enough, right where the monster stood the night before, there are skid marks, roughly eight feet apart.

Stewart traces the marks from the oak tree all the way to where the flying saucer allegedly landed.

It's as if the monster, like, like, got on a set of skis and like slid down the hill to return to its craft.

And while there's still no trace of any sort of flying saucer, there is oil residue and a huge swath of grass that's been flattened down.

Now, it could be easy to assume that this is just from a car or some kind of tractor or other kind of vehicle.

And a few people do admit that they were in the area that night.

One person with a tractor, another with their pickup, but they didn't actually go down the hill.

They couldn't.

The slope is too steep and rough, so it's unlikely these marks came from anything man-made.

That same day, Kathleen gets a knock on her door from an odd pair of visitors.

It's two men claiming to be journalists from the nearby town of Clarksburg.

They've heard about the monster and want to check out the field where it was spotted.

Now, Kathleen's a little suspicious.

They're wearing nice suits, apparently too nice for journalists, but she's willing to take them up the hill.

They see the skid marks and the oil.

They actually touch the oil so much that it gets all over their suits.

And they keep saying something to each other like, what do you think Ed's going to think of this?

Kathleen is baffled, but they just thank her and leave, covered in oil.

But the next day they come back.

Only this time they freely admit that they aren't from Clarksburg and they aren't even reporters.

They're officials from Washington, D.C.

Of course, Kathleen is like,

why didn't you tell me this sooner?

The two men claim they were worried that if they did, she wouldn't tell them anything.

Then they start asking all sorts of questions about the oil, like what was it?

How much did it spray?

And most importantly, what did she do with her uniform?

Kathleen hasn't washed it yet, so she she hands it over to the two men.

They take a sample and that's that.

About a month later, she receives a letter from the Pentagon.

It contains a five by seven picture of something that looks exactly like the monster and an explanation.

They say that on the night of the sighting, they sent out four experimental rocket ships.

One went missing and that was probably the flying saucer Kathleen and the boys saw.

It had been having oil trouble and had two men in it.

Now, the letter doesn't make it clear what actually happened to the passengers.

I assume the Pentagon thinks one of the men was supposed to be the Flatwoods monster or that one or both of them died in the crash.

Regardless, something about the response just seems suspicious.

They even allegedly ask Kathleen to keep this all a secret.

And she she does.

She doesn't tell anyone about the letter for many years afterwards, mostly because she just doesn't believe it.

Like there are so many things about this story that just seem off.

But really, it wouldn't matter if she did talk because word about the monster has already spread far and wide.

Remember, the sheriff's office sent a journalist to the house instead of an officer.

So of course, the local newspaper and TV and radio stations report on the sightings immediately.

Pretty soon, a Pittsburgh paper sends a writer to Flatwoods to cover the event.

A minister in Brooklyn, New York calls Kathleen, thinking the creature is similar to one he saw in a dream.

There's even a scientist from Newfoundland calling for a description.

It's enough to attract the attention of a famous paranormal investigator named Ivan Sanderson.

Within a few days of the incident, he and his colleagues arrive in Flatwoods and interview the boys and other residents.

And after a number of conversations, Ivan and the other researchers find out that many locals saw something in the sky that night.

A nearby farmer describes this giant ball of fire traveling through the sky.

He says he didn't see it land, but he did watch a piece break off of it.

This would be roughly in the same area and at the same time that the boys saw their object.

A five-year-old girl says she was returning a bowl to her grandparents when she also saw a bright orb in the sky.

She was so terrified that she sprinted to their house, tripped up the stairs, and broke the salad bowl on the porch.

A third resident claims he saw a large orange craft immediately after the incident.

It was flattened at the top with jets of fire shooting out of the sides.

It circled the hilltop for about 15 minutes, then took off towards a nearby airport.

The sightings pile up and not just in Braxton County.

There's reports of mysterious flying objects in Maryland, DC, Pennsylvania, and even one in California.

Not to mention that earlier plane crash, which still hasn't been explained.

So this gets Ivan thinking.

After mapping the sightings, this is the story he puts together.

On the evening of September 12th, 1952, there are five unidentified objects flying over Braxton County.

One, spotted by the Mayboys, lands in Flatwoods.

Another, the plane reported to the sheriff, flies into the hill at Frametown.

One goes east towards the county airport.

A fourth soars over Sugar Creek.

Number five heads for Charleston and disintegrates in the air.

But what are these things?

Sanderson isn't sure, but he comes up with a theory about where they came from.

The fleet of objects must have come from the Atlantic, passed over Baltimore, and then then veered towards West Virginia.

There, something went wrong and they all veered off in different directions.

One of the craft managed to land in Flatwoods and its pilot, the monster, got out just in time.

But when the monster realized it had been spotted by a group of humans, it sprinted back to its ship in a panic.

That was a bad decision because the craft was burning up from the friction of entering the Earth's atmosphere.

Once it hit the ground, it slowly disintegrated, leaving no trace except for a gaseous smell.

Now, listen, I'm not exactly a stranger to out there explanations on this show, but this is pretty far-fetched.

As an alternative, a few other residents put together some more reasonable theories.

A local scientist hypothesizes that the object was one meteor that broke into several pieces.

When a piece landed in Flatwoods, its gases created a bunch of like weird shadows in the night fog, which the boys and Kathleen mistook for a monster.

It's possible that they knew their sighting wasn't totally credible, but once the story was out there, they doubled down for publicity's sake.

I should note that over the next few decades, Braxton County decides to literally market itself as the home of the Flatwoods monster.

Like, I mean, there are toys you can buy, giant monster chairs to sit in for pictures, even an entire museum.

But there are a few details about this gas explanation that don't entirely add up.

For one, if the object was a meteor, why couldn't anyone find any trace of it?

Like, no particles in the ground, no rocks that aren't native to the area, nothing, not even a meteor pit.

Second, if there's nothing unusual about this, why did the US government get involved?

I mean, sure, Kathleen could have been making up that story about the officials who visited her.

We have no actual evidence apart from her testimony, but there is documentation on the incident in the Air Force's Project Blue Book files, which means the government was clearly interested in something at Flatwoods.

Not to mention all the other sightings across the East Coast that same evening.

Maybe they guessed correctly that this wouldn't be a one-time occurrence.

Less than three years later, there's a very similar incident just 400 miles away in Kelly Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

Only this time, there's not just one monster.

There's an army of them.

Coming up, the Little Green Men Invade Kentucky.

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Now back to the story.

On the night of August 21st, 1955, the Sutton family gathers around the dinner table thinking it's going to be a normal evening.

Around 7 p.m., one of their house guests, this guy named Billy Ray Taylor, offers to fetch some water from the well.

But when he goes outside, he sees something strange shoot through the sky.

It's bright, silvery, and egg-shaped, more like a spaceship than a plane.

Suddenly, it slows, stops, and drops into a gully.

Billy runs back into the farmhouse, telling the Suttons he's just seen a flying saucer.

Of course, everybody laughs at him, but roughly a half hour later, the dog begins to bark.

Billy and Lucky Sutton head outside to see what's going on.

At first, they don't see anything, but the dog suddenly runs underneath the house, terrified.

Then, this figure emerges in the distance.

It looks a bit like a man, but not really.

It's maybe three and a half feet tall with a perfectly round head and hands that look like claws.

Its eyes have a strange yellow glow, and the creature looks metallic, just like in flatwoods.

Lucky and Billy run inside and grab their guns.

They wait in the house as the creature approaches, and when it's close enough, they shoot.

The creature scrambles back, disappearing into the darkness.

But a few minutes later, another one appears at the side window.

They fire again, and this time they hit.

But when they go outside to see what it is, they're bombarded.

There's another monster in the trees, more in the shadows of the yard, talons reaching down from the roof.

The men continue shooting, but these creatures are fast, almost as if they're flying.

And every time Lucky and Billy drive them off, even more return.

This continues for nearly four hours.

The men burn through four boxes of bullets.

Eventually, the family manages to sneak into into their car and drive to the Hopkinsville police station.

They run inside and tell the police chief they're fighting off some kind of alien invasion.

Soon, there's a group of roughly 25 reporters, deputies, and investigators at the Sutton farm.

But they find absolutely no evidence that anything out of the ordinary occurred, only the shell casings and the grass.

So, by 2 a.m., the police leave and tell the Suttons to just go to sleep.

Honestly, they think the family is probably making the whole thing up, but they promise that they'll come back in the morning just to be on the safe side.

A half hour later at 2.30, another resident of the Sutton house is trying to sleep when she sees a glow through an open window.

She sits up and looks closer.

And suddenly, she sees little claws on the screen and a creature staring right into the room.

Frozen in fear, she calls out to the rest of the family.

Lucky runs into the room and shoots at the window.

The shot damages the window frame and seems to scare the creature off temporarily.

But a few minutes later, it's back again, this time with friends.

The creatures return periodically and the family keeps firing to drive them off until almost 5.30 in the morning.

It's not clear why the attackers stop at that point, but it's almost as if they don't want to be out in the sun.

So the Suttons have to figure that the police are bound to find something when they show up for a daylight investigation.

But when they come back, they scour the area and they still can't find evidence that anything happened.

The neighbors and the newspapers all ridicule the Suttons.

They claim the story was invented for publicity or that they were drunk on moonshine.

10 days after the event, the Suttons literally literally have to move to escape all the gossip.

For decades, nobody thinks about it again, and the Suttons return to life as normal.

But by 2010, the situation changes.

The town is desperate for money at that point, and they remember this strange incident with the Suttons.

So, a group of residents create the Little Green Men Festival, which is a celebration of aliens and flying saucers.

It occurs every year on August 21st, the same day as the shootout, and it brings hundreds of tourists to town.

And I'm not gonna lie, it's kind of tasteless to capitalize on this 60 years later after the Suttons were literally driven from their home by the ridicule from their neighbors.

If the festival had started right after the incident, it might be different.

Then we might be able to dismiss this whole story as a publicity stunt like people often do with the Flatwoods monster.

But the Suttons clearly did not embellish their story for the sake of tourism.

They gained nothing from their encounter.

So we have to assume the family saw something.

But what was it?

Apart from aliens, the best answer anyone can come up with is, and I'm not kidding, owls.

If you think about the description of what the Suttons saw, then look at a picture of a barn owl.

It kind of makes sense.

Barn owls have creepy, deep eyes, round faces, and coloring that makes them look like they're wearing some sort of hood or cape, which is partly what they saw in the Flatwoods Monster 2.

The owl would have looked tall perched up on a tree, and the witnesses did say the Flatwoods monster was hovering right in front of a tree.

Remember, it was dark and everyone was already on edge.

They were already joking about flying saucers and alien invasions.

Their subconsciousness could have turned something as simple as an owl into a terrifying monster.

But there's something not entirely satisfying about this explanation.

I mean, owls don't squirt oil.

And as far as the UFO itself, I don't see how it could just be a meteor or something.

Meteors don't glow with pulsing lights or smell like burning machinery or disintegrate without a trace.

And what really gets me is even in the face of these more grounded explanations, the witnesses involved still can't get over what they saw.

I mean, it is almost 70 years later.

The Mayboys want to believe the Flatwoods monster was just an owl, that it was all a figment of their imaginations, but they can't.

Whatever they saw that night terrified them for decades.

It was creepy enough that even today, people from all over the world visit Flatwoods Monster Museum every week to see evidence with their own eyes because seeing is believing.

The hill where the creature was spotted is now on private property, but you could bet that if they could, those same people would trek up, sit by the tree, and wait for the creature to come back.

Thanks for listening.

I'll be back next week with another episode.

To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all audio check originals.

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