The Flatwoods Monster
Flatwoods Monster Museum/FacebookA sketch of the Flatwoods Monster, a bizarre cryptid on this list that may have visited from space.
In September 1952, a group of boys in the town of Flatwoods, West Virginia watched a strange object soar through the sky above them and land in a nearby field. It sounds like the start to any old UFO story, but the boys didn’t encounter any “little green men” that day. Instead, they supposedly found themselves face-to-face with the 10-foot-tall Flatwoods Monster.
Interestingly enough, it wasn’t just the young boys who claimed to see the strange creature. A mother of two of the boys, Kathleen May, said she too saw the monster, as did a National Guardsman named Gene Lemon. They described the monster as “Frankenstein-like” with “a blood-red body and a green face that seemed to glow.” Other witnesses said its head was spade-shaped and that it seemed to be wearing a dark, metal dress.
The group immediately went to the police to report what they had seen, but the officers just laughed and said that it must have been some kind of hysteria. However, other residents in Braxton County, West Virginia reported strange sightings around the same time. One woman claimed to see a ball of fire on a hill, then said that an eerily tall man emerged from the fire.
Another couple claimed that they saw the Flatwoods Monster after their car broke down. As they stood on the side of the road, they said they smelled sulfur before seeing a 10-foot-tall creature with clawed hands and a reptilian head in front of them. It didn’t attack them, though; it touched their car, then drifted into the woods. After it left, the couple said their car started up again.
Flatwoods Monster Museum/FacebookA police sketch of the Flatwoods Monster based on witness testimony.
The police may not have taken the residents’ claims seriously, but local news reporters were very interested in this story. Even national outlets, including CBS, began to reach out to witnesses, and eventually the story spread so far that the U.S. Air Force launched an official investigation. They ultimately came to the same conclusion as the local police, though.
The U.S. Air Force said that the streak in the sky was a meteor. And as for the monster with glowing eyes — well, it was just an owl.
That said, not everyone believed the official story.
