The Flatwoods Monster
West Virginia
On the evening of September twelve, nineteen fifty-two, two brothers playing in Flatwoods watched a pulsing red light streak across the sky and crash onto a nearby farm. They ran home, and their mother, Kathleen May, gathered them and three other boys, plus a seventeen-year-old National Guardsman named Gene Lemon, to go investigate. At the top of a hill they met something they could not explain: a towering figure, ten feet tall, with glowing orange-red eyes, a spade-shaped head, and a metallic-looking lower body. It rose toward them in a cloud of nauseating mist. The group fled.
The story reached national television within days. The U.S. Air Force investigated as part of Project Blue Book. Investigators concluded the light was likely a meteor and the creature an owl perched in a tree, its eyes reflecting flashlight beams. Whatever the explanation, the Flatwoods Monster lodged itself permanently in American folklore. The town now has a museum, and the creature's silhouette has become Braxton County's unofficial mascot.
