Flatwoods Monster

## Overview and Sighting

The **Flatwoods Monster** was a possibly extraterrestrial being allegedly sighted by several witnesses on the night of September 12, 1952. Often linked to the mothman, another West Virginian folkloric character, the creature has since become a claim to fame for the small town of Flatwoods and has since become one of the most well known alleged close encounters of the 20th century.

Eyewitnesses described the creature with varying consistency, but many characteristics were universal. They described it as standing at least ten feet in height, although it also reportedly hovering quite a bit off the ground. The entity's body was green, metallic, and resembled a large conical 'skirt'. Its most notable feature was its head, which was shaped like an ace of spades and filled with a blood-red face dominated by luminous orange eyes. Some witnesses described bony arms with claws, but this detail was not present in other stories. The creature levitated off the ground and seemingly emitted toxic gases and shrill hissing sounds.

The original sighting began when three boys, brothers Edward and Fred May and Tommy Hyer, noticed a bright object streaking across the sky while they were playing in the yard that evening. Seeing that the object seemingly crashed on the property of a nearby farmer, they, along with their neighbor Kathleen May, two other children named Neil Nunley and Ronnie Shaver, and National Guardsman Eugene Lemon, ascended the hill to investigate the crashed object. At the top, the group noticed a bright pulsing red light. When Lemon shined his flashlight at the hill, he briefly illuminated the spade-headed cybernetic entity that began gliding toward them while releasing toxic gases. Terrified by what they were seeing, the group fled and several among them developed breathing problems and extreme nausea over the next few days.

Skeptics have routinely denied the idea that the creature was an extraterrestrial visitor, a hypothesis that they maintain doesn't have sufficient verifiable evidence. No photographs or videos of the creature were taken, and aside from some burn marks found by local authorities at the site of the encounter, no real physical evidence was ever discovered. Many paranormal investigators, such as Joe Nickell of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, have suggested that the glowing object in the sky was a meteorite and the entity itself was a startled barn owl sitting atop a tree branch, with the foliage beneath it creating the 'green skirt' and the red face being due to flashing aircraft beacons.

## Popular Culture

### Video Games

* The Flatwoods monster appears as the final boss of the 1988 NES platformer game *Amagon*.
* The Flatwoods monster appears as a wild creature in the 2018 open-world game *Fallout 76*, one of several creatures in the game based on Appalachian folklore (others including the mothman, snallygaster, and the Grafton monster). This version of the creature has a transparent glowing head.
* A group of extraterrestrial beings referred to as "Them" invade Romani Ranch in *The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask* with appearances based on the Flatwoods monster.

## Sources

1. ↑ https://braxtonwv.org/the-flatwoods-monster/
2. ↑ https://skepticalinquirer.org/2000/11/the-flatwoods-ufo-monster/