High strangeness / The Bailey Fisher farm, Flatwoods, Braxton County, West Virginia
The Figure on the Fisher Farm
After a fireball crossed several states on the evening of 12 September 1952, a group of boys and a local woman climbed a hill at Flatwoods to look for what they took to be a landed object. By Joe Nickell's account of the earliest reports, they saw a pulsing red light, then a tall figure with shining eyes and a hood-like head that hissed and glided toward them, and they fled. The sheriff and a deputy who searched later found nothing, and the next morning the editor of The Braxton Democrat reported "skid marks" in the grass.
The Air Force filed the object as a meteor. For the figure, Nickell argued in 2000 for a barn owl on a limb, lit by a nearby aircraft beacon, and reports that Donald Keyhoe wrote in 1953 that Air Force investigators had concluded it was "probably a large owl". The Blue Book file itself does not say so.
AI illustration · not an evidence photograph
File
BR-0025
Date
12 September 1952, evening
Place
The Bailey Fisher farm, Flatwoods, Braxton County, West Virginia
AssessmentD · a specific mundane cause fits better: a meteor on file, an owl argued
The record on file
Witnesses
Kathleen May, her two sons and four other boys and youths, by Joe Nickell's account; the county sheriff and a deputy, who searched the hill later that night
Evidence
A Project Blue Book record card and an Akron astronomy club's fireball computation; skid marks in the grass reported by a local newspaper editor the next morning
Record made at the time
The Project Blue Book record card for Flatwoods, on the ATIC form revised 26 September 1952, whose comment reads "The West Virginia monster so called. Actually the object was the well known Washington area meteor of 12 Sep landing near Flatwoods, W. Va.", with "Was Astronomical" and "Was Meteorite" marked; filed with the Akron Astronomy Club's fireball computation. The 1952 press and investigators' reports are known here only as cited by Nickell.
Agency
Braxton County sheriff's office; Project Blue Book
On the evening of Friday 12 September 1952 a bright object crossed the sky over central West Virginia and seemed to come down on a hilltop of the G. Bailey Fisher farm at Flatwoods, a village in Braxton County. What a small group found on the hill became the "Flatwoods monster". The light was explained within weeks. The figure has only ever had a later explanation.
What was reported
By Joe Nickell's account, drawn mainly from Gray Barker's tape-recorded interviews published in Fate in January 1953, boys playing football at the school playground at about 7.15 p.m. saw a fiery object streak across the sky and apparently land. They ran to Kathleen May, a local beautician, who took a flashlight and went up the hill with them. Nickell lists her sons Eddie, 13, and Freddie, 14, with Neil Nunley, 14, Gene Lemon, 17, and Tommy Hyer and Ronnie Shaver, both 10. The rosters differ: Skeptoid gives Fred May as 12 and adds a Teddie Neal, and the e-WV encyclopedia names Teddy May and Teddy Neal while leaving out Fred.
Near the crest they saw a pulsing red light. Lemon saw a pair of shining eyes and turned the flashlight on them. The beam showed a tall "man-like" figure with a round red "face" inside a "pointed, hood-like shape", seen for only a moment before it hissed and glided towards them. Lemon screamed and dropped the light, and everyone ran. The group reported a pungent mist, and some were later sick. e-WV gives the figure as nearly 12 feet tall.
The record and where it is held
The case stands on this shelf because of a record the witnesses did not make. The Air Force's Project Blue Book file "Flatwoods, West Virginia", held at the National Archives at College Park in Record Group 341 and filmed on microfilm T1206 (roll 15), contains two documents. The first is a record card on ATIC Form 329, revised 26 September 1952, giving the time as 19.30 EST. Its comment reads: "The West Virginia monster so called. Actually the object was the well known Washington area meteor of 12 Sep landing near Flatwoods, W. Va." It cites confirmation from an astronomy club in Akron, Ohio, whose president's name is blacked out.
The second is that club's typed fireball computation. It puts the fireball at about 7 p.m. EST, "brilliant greenish white", passing over Cumberland, Maryland, towards Flatwoods. A handwritten note says all the computations tally with a meteorite. The file says nothing about the figure.
The other near-contemporary records are known here only through Nickell: the sheriff and a deputy, who arrived after checking a reported aircraft crash and "saw, heard and smelled nothing"; A. Lee Stewart Jr., editor of The Braxton Democrat, who reported "skid marks" and an "odd, gummy deposit" in the grass at 7 the next morning; and a Charleston Gazette report of 23 September 1952 that the monster was an illusion created by a meteor's gas. Skeptoid names the sheriff as Robert Carr. None of the 1952 newspapers was opened for this write-up.
What investigators concluded
The Air Force filed the object as a meteor, and the computation supports that. Nickell quotes a later local editor's statement that the meteor was seen in at least three states, Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Barker and the writer Ivan Sanderson, who both visited, preferred a landed craft. Donald Keyhoe wrote in 1953 that two Air Force men posing as magazine writers had concluded the figure was probably "a large owl perched on a limb". Nothing in the Blue Book file supports or records that visit.
The leading conventional explanation
The leading explanation, set out by Nickell in Skeptical Inquirer in 2000, is a chain of ordinary things. The meteor seemed to land as it dropped behind the hill. The pulsing red light was one of three aircraft beacons that Sanderson himself said were in sight from the hilltop. The skid marks were left by Max Lockard's 1942 Chevrolet pickup, which he told Nickell he had driven round the field that evening. The figure was a barn owl on a branch, its round face and hood-like facial disc caught in the flashlight, with foliage below making it look tall, and its hiss and gliding flight matching the description.
Its strength is that it accounts for each reported detail with something known to be present, and that the meteor is confirmed independently. Its weakness is that the owl is an argument from the witnesses' descriptions nearly fifty years later, not an observation. It asks a great deal of a frightened glimpse: a bird of 14 to 20 inches seen as a figure of ten feet or more, and a "fiery orange" head that Nickell explains with either the beacon's light or a female owl's darker plumage.
What remains unexplained or disputed
The light is settled on the file's own terms. The figure is not, because no one examined the site with the owl in mind at the time. The number and names of witnesses, the time of the sighting (19.30 on the card, about 7 p.m. in the computation, 7.15 in Nickell), and the figure's size all vary between accounts. Keyhoe's report of an Air Force owl finding remains unconfirmed by any surviving government paper.
The Flatwoods UFO Monster(archived) — Joe Nickell, Skeptical Inquirer 24(6), 2000. The witnesses, the sheriff's search, Stewart's traces, Keyhoe's owl report, the beacons, Lockard's truck and the barn-owl argument.
Flatwoods Monster(archived) — Buddy Griffin, e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, revised 2024. An alternative witness roster and description, and the case's local afterlife.
The Braxton County Monster(archived) — Ryan Haupt and Brian Dunning, Skeptoid, 2014. The sheriff's name, differing witness ages and the three-state meteor reports.
INDEPENDENT FIELD ARCHIVE