What the Children Actually Described

At about a quarter past seven on the evening of 12 September 1952, a group of boys were playing on the grounds of Flatwoods Elementary School in Braxton County, West Virginia, when a bright object crossed the sky and appeared to come down on a hillside belonging to a farmer named G. Bailey Fisher.

They ran to tell somebody. The nearest adult was Kathleen May, mother of two of them. She came, and brought along a seventeen-year-old National Guardsman called Gene Lemon and the family dog, Richie.

Seven people and a dog walked up a farm road in the dark to look at what they assumed was a meteorite.

The description

This is the part worth sitting with, because it is unusually specific and it has barely changed in seventy years.

A pulsing red light near the top of the rise. Lemon swung his flashlight towards it. What the beam found was something around ten feet tall with a head shaped like a spade — a pointed hood or cowl — and below it a body they described as a dark, pleated metal skirt. Clawed hands. A face they remembered as red.

There was a smell, sharp and chemical. Several of them were sick that night; some had irritated throats for days.

They ran. A local reporter, A. Lee Stewart Jr. of the Braxton County Democrat, went up the hill later the same night and found flattened grass, marks on the ground, and the lingering odour. His account went out on the wire services inside two days, and Flatwoods became briefly famous.

The explanation, which is good

In 2000 the investigator Joe Nickell went to Flatwoods, walked the site, and interviewed surviving witnesses. His account is the most convincing one available.

The light in the sky was a meteor — a bright one, reported the same evening from at least three states, seen as far away as Baltimore, three hundred miles off. That it seemed to land on a nearby hill is a known illusion; bright meteors are almost always described as coming down just over the next ridge.

The figure was, on this reading, a barn owl. Perched in the fork of a tree, wings raised in a threat display, throwing a shadow. A barn owl's face is a pale heart shape above a body that hangs in folds — and if you are looking for the origin of a spade-shaped head over a pleated skirt, it is right there. Barn owls hiss and snap. They defend nests aggressively.

Nickell also found that the hillside had a nesting pair.

Why that is not the end of it

Because it does not really change what happened.

Seven people did walk up a dark hill expecting a crashed meteorite. Something on that hill frightened them badly enough that a grown woman and a Guardsman ran. Kathleen May gave interviews about it for the next fifty years and never once softened the account.

An owl at nine feet in a torch beam, after a fireball, in the middle of the 1952 UFO flap, when everyone in America had spent the summer reading about saucers — that is not a boring answer. It is a story about how quickly the mind assembles a shape out of a bad light and a real fright, and it is the same mechanism that runs underneath most of this index.

The children were not lying. They were nine to seventeen years old, they were terrified, and they described what they saw as carefully as they could.

Going there

The Flatwoods Monster Museum is in Sutton, on Main Street, and is free. It grew out of a single display case in the county visitor centre and it still doubles as one, which means the person behind the desk can point you at the rest of Braxton County as well.