The Flatwoods Monster: the night 7 people climbed a hill and ran back down
Just after 7 in the evening on 12 September 1952, a group of boys was playing on a school field in a small town in the hills of West Virginia, in the eastern United States.
Something bright crossed the sky above them.
Then it seemed to drop behind a hill, onto a farm at the edge of town. Some of the boys said they could see it glowing on the ground.
They ran to tell an adult.
Within half an hour, 7 people were climbing that hill in the dark. What they said they saw at the top became known as the Flatwoods Monster.
Here is the mystery in one sentence: 7 local people, among them a mother and a young soldier, described a glowing figure about 3 metres tall that glided toward them on a farm hill, and more than 70 years later nobody has shown what it really was.
The town and the people
Flatwoods is a village about 310 km west of Washington, the American capital.
The boys ran to the house of 2 brothers among them. Their mother worked as a beautician in the town. She listened to them, and decided to go up the hill herself.
She took along a 17-year-old who served in the state National Guard, a part-time military reserve. He brought a flashlight. A dog came along too.
The sources do not fully agree on who was in the group. Most accounts list 7 people: the mother, the young guardsman and 5 boys between about 10 and 14. The names of 1 or 2 of the boys change from one account to the next. On the mother and the guardsman, every account agrees.
Up the hill
The slope was steep and covered in tall grass, with a line of trees near the top.
As they climbed, a mist began to drift across the grass. The witnesses later said it smelled sharp and metallic, and that it stung their eyes and noses.
The dog ran ahead of the group and vanished over the crest. They heard it start barking. Moments later it came racing back down past them, with its tail between its legs.
Near the top, one of the boys said he saw a red light pulsing off to the right. Some of the group later said there was a large round shape on the ground in that direction, glowing.
Then the guardsman swung his flashlight toward 2 shining points under a tree.
What they said they saw
The beam lit up a figure.
The figure was very tall, between 3 and 3.7 metres. It had a round red face. Around the face was a dark shape, pointed at the top like a hood, or like the ace of spades on a playing card. Where the eyes should be, 2 points of light glowed, greenish or orange.
Below the face the body was dark. Some said it was green. Some said it hung in folds, like a long skirt. A few spoke of small thin arms ending in claws. Others saw no arms at all.
It made a hissing sound. It did not walk. According to the witnesses, it slid toward them through the air.
The guardsman fell backward and dropped the flashlight. Everyone ran down the hill.
The same night, and the morning after
Back in town, the mother telephoned the county sheriff. She also called a co-owner of the local weekly newspaper.
The sheriff and a deputy were already out that night, checking reports that a small plane had crashed somewhere in the area. Late that night they went up the hill together with the newspaper man and the guardsman.
Here the sources conflict. One account says they found nothing at all: they saw nothing, heard nothing and smelled nothing. Another says there was nothing to see, but that a sharp smell still hung in the air.
Early the next morning the newspaper man went back up alone. He reported 2 long marks in the ground, like skid marks, and grass flattened over a wide patch. He also described an oily, gummy deposit on the ground.
He said his throat hurt, and that the mist had made him sick the night before. Several of the boys reported vomiting and swollen throats in the days that followed. The mother said she had seen an oily film on their faces. A local doctor examined some of them. According to the reports, he found no cause he could name.
A story that went national
Within days it was national news. A news editor from the area later recalled that radio networks carried it, and that hundreds of phone calls came in from all over the country. The national news services later ranked it among the top stories of the year.
The mother and the newspaper man were taken to New York to appear on a national television program. While they were there, an artist drew the creature from her description. That drawing, with its spade-shaped hood and glowing eyes, is the image almost everyone knows today.
It is worth remembering that the artist never saw anything on that hill. The famous picture is one woman's description, as a stranger imagined it.
2 private investigators of strange phenomena also came to town and interviewed the witnesses. Both wrote about the case, and both treated it as a real visit from something unknown.
Here is where what we know ends
**The documented record is the witness statements, the marks in the grass and the reported smell. Everything beyond that is interpretation.**
7 people described something on that hill. Their descriptions agree on the red face, the hood shape, the glowing eyes and the smell. They disagree on the arms, the colour of the body and the height.
Nobody took a photograph. No object was ever recovered. As far as the record shows, no sample of the gummy deposit was ever tested in a laboratory.
The fireball that others saw too
One part of the story was confirmed from outside the town.
On that same evening, a bright meteor was reported by people in 3 neighbouring states. A staff member of a science academy in the neighbouring state of Maryland confirmed that a meteor had crossed the sky shortly before the sighting in Flatwoods.
Then there are the tracks. Years later, a local man admitted that after the sighting he had driven his pickup truck around that field, hoping to see something. The skid marks and the oily patches may have come from his truck. The early investigators had credited them to a landed craft.
So the light in the sky has a likely explanation, and so do the marks on the ground. What the flashlight lit up under the tree is the part that remains.
Conclusions and Open Questions
There are 3 main explanations. Each answers part of the story, and none answers all of it.
**It was a barn owl, seen in a moment of panic.** This was proposed by an American skeptic investigator who visited the site in 2000 and spoke with surviving witnesses. A barn owl has a round, flat, pale face that can look red under red light. It hisses when it feels threatened. Perched on a branch with leaves hanging below, it can look like a figure in a long skirt. Its talons gripping the branch could explain why some saw claws and others saw no arms. The pulsing red light, he said, came from 3 flashing red warning beacons on aviation towers that could be seen from the hilltop. The problem: a barn owl is about 35 to 40 cm tall. The witnesses described something taller than a man. For an owl to look that big, it would have to be very close, caught suddenly in a flashlight beam, by frightened people in the dark. The skeptic argued that this is exactly what happened. Many of the people who were there never accepted it.
**It was shared fear, fed by the news of that year.** 1952 was a peak year for flying saucer reports in the United States. In July, objects were reported on radar over Washington itself. A group of children and a mother, already half expecting a crashed plane or a spaceship, climbed a dark hill. A strange smell and a terrified dog could have pushed the whole group into the same panic at the same moment. A skeptic writer later described the vomiting and sore throats as typical results of fear and over-exertion. The problem: this explains why the group was frightened. It does not explain what the beam lit up. Several witnesses described a specific shape, in similar terms, from the first night.
**It was what the witnesses believed: something unknown.** This was the view of the 2 investigators who came in 1952, and it is still the view of many people in the area. They point to the smell, the illnesses, and the fact that the witnesses kept to their stories for decades. The problem: there is no physical evidence. No object, no tested sample, no photograph. And the best-known details, the claws and the shape of the body, come largely from the drawing made in New York and from accounts written after the story was already famous.
What remains open:
What was the smell? A meteor does not leave a mist on a hilltop.
Why did the witnesses differ so much about the arms and the body, yet agree so closely about the face?
And can anyone still check? The witnesses are gone now. The hill is still there.
Today the town has a sign welcoming visitors to the home of the Green Monster, there is a small museum devoted to it in the county seat nearby, and a gathering is held every year. The figure under the tree was never explained in a way that satisfied everyone. Instead, it became part of the place.