The Green Monster of Flatwoods

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Shop eBay for millions of finds. Each with a story. eBay. Things people love. Astonishing Legends Network. Astonishing Legends. We'd like to thank Squarespace, Quince, Mint Mobile, Factor, the Disturbing History Podcast, our contributors at Patreon.com, and you, our listeners, for making tonight's show possible. On September 12th, 1952, five boys were outside on a school playground in the small town of Flatwoods, West Virginia, just before dusk, when they saw something that would change their lives forever. A ball of fire streaking across the sky. By that description alone, one might think it was a meteor, but it was moving slowly and appeared to be under intelligent control, especially when it landed just over a ridge not too far away from them. The boys described it as about the size of a house and noticed that it decelerated before performing what appeared to be a controlled landing. Although this was 73 years ago, a few of the eyewitnesses remain, and even though they are reluctant to grant interviews, in 2018, Ed and Fred May, along with others, did speak to our friends at Small Town Monsters for a documentary, and what they had to say needs to be heard. It made things clearer and more complex at the same time. As you might expect, when this thing came down out of the sky, these boys immediately wanted to check it out. They all went to the May house, and there they convinced Ed and Fred's 32-year-old mother, Kathleen, to come with them, along with another older visiting cousin, Gene Lemon, who was in the National Guard at the time. What they found when they reached the landing site was incredibly bizarre. An imposing 12- to 15-foot-tall, vaguely humanoid-shaped object that may have been biological or mechanical, hovering silently in the air and surrounded by a strange mist. Then they shone a flashlight on it, and it, quote, lit up like a Christmas tree, making all kinds of loud sizzling sounds as it began to pursue them. Many of the additional details are bizarre and terrifying, and this astonishing legend has taken on a life of its own in the intervening years, shrouded in more misinformation than inaccurate information. Which brings us to one of the reasons this story warrants coverage by us. Seven people saw this thing, including a young adult member of the National Guard and a 32-year-old mother of two. And that doesn't include all the other things people saw in the skies not only above the immediate area that night, but several states away. This was not an isolated incident, and some of the skeptical explanations about what these folks saw are downright insulting and reminiscent of our series on the Kelly Hopkinsville goblins. The Flatwoods Monster is a global cultural phenomenon by now, but so many misconceptions surround what really happened that this story needs to be told in a more accurate way before we can even begin to try and figure out what happened, and tonight, that's what we're going to do. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess. It made a hissing sound like frying bacon. Gene dropped the flashlight and screamed. He screamed so loud and fell back and stumbled over one of my boys and took off running. It was a hideous sight, and I wished I had not seen it. From an interview with Kathleen May transcribed by Small Town Monsters from their documentary, The Flatwoods Monster, A Legacy of Fear. Join us tonight as we dive into the legend of the Flatwoods Monster. And we're back. That we are, folks. It's good to be back. Thank you so much for joining us again. If you've been craving a little more of us than what's on our regular feed this summer, we recently guested on the fabulous new podcast, Gods, Ghosts, and UFOs, hosted by J.E. Peterson, Mallory Everton, and our good friend and former guest on the Astonishing Legends Bloodfall series, Tom Maxwell. Oh, yeah. You know, we had a real blast talking to all three of them, and that could have gone on for hours. Yeah. If we were all sitting around in a tavern having beers, I certainly would have. But we appeared on episode 13 of their new show. Can you imagine doing an episode 13? It was a long time ago. It was 300 episodes. 301 for us. Yeah. Speaking of which, they've also got our full 51-minute interview with them on their Substack at ggupodcast.substack.com. Yes. So go check that out. And finally, we wanted to let everyone know that for the past few weeks, we've been quietly slipping something curious into the ether. A newsletter filled with the kinds of oddities and insights you've come to expect from Astonishing Legends. Mm-hmm. Inside, you'll find behind-the-scenes glimpses into our research and recording process. Wait, you haven't been recording me when I'm not paying attention right now. As far as you know. Don't count that as behind-the-scenes. That's not safe for work content. Well, it also has, seriously, rare video content you won't find anywhere else. Strange news from around the globe, listener spotlights, which I always love, and other curiosities that defy easy explanations. Yes, and this is free, but like all good legends, you have to know where to look. Subscribe now before it vanishes. Head to astonishinglegends.com slash newsletter dash sign dash up. That's astonishinglegends.com slash newsletter hyphen sign hyphen up. Can't find it? Email Tess at astonishinglegends.com. And yes, she gave me permission to give out that email address. She'll never be checked again. Tess at astonishinglegends.com. Yes. Okay, all right. Last note before we get started tonight, a quick shout out to our friend John Killian, who valiantly fought through some life-threatening medical issues recently. Yes, John, we're glad to hear you're on the backside of it, sir. Thank you for keeping us posted, and we hope you feel all the way better soon. All right, let's dive into this fascinating story. Forrest, I think we should start, as we always do, with the basics. A little bit about the area where this occurred, which is Flatwoods, West Virginia. That's a town in Braxton County. It's about a mile off of Interstate 79 near exit 67. And Braxton County, fascinatingly, is right at the geographical center of the state. It's characterized by high, misty, forested hills, shadowy hollers, and dark back roads, much like the Smoky Mountains here in my home state of North Carolina. It's, in fact, in the Allegheny Mountains, which is a range just west of the Appalachians and really part of the Appalachians themselves. In fact, before the Appalachians were called the Appalachians, the whole range was called the Allegheny Range. Yeah, and I just love to hear you say holler in your cackalacky accent. I love hollers. Yes, I do say holler. Lay it on thick. Lay it on me. Well, there's a bunch of hollers up in the mountains there. In fact, my best friend growing up, his family owns a Christmas tree farm in North Carolina called Smoky Holler Christmas Tree Farm. They once provided the tree for the White House many years ago. Well, I was hoping you'd ladle it on a little thicker like your famous barbecue sauce there, but that'll do. You just sound like yourself. I mean. Well, I know. I don't really. Holler is, that's, the thing is, in North Carolina anyway, there's like six, seven, maybe more accents. And that's very different in the mountains from where I live in Greensboro. And there's different ones down at the beach too. So I'm probably not great at it. You know who is good at it, who actually lives in a holler, is our man Josh at Dead Street Productions, who does all our graphic animations. Yeah. He'll probably have something to say about that. Right. Well, describing the town of Flatwoods, and we will be talking, of course, a lot about the Small Town Monsters documentary where we get a lot of our background and a lot of corrections too, from the people who were there. I love that part of it, that aspect of it, because they're on camera telling you what's what. But as described there, and as you may know, sir, it's centrally located. So geographically, that's an interesting area as a part of the state. Very typical, just a lovely little country village in a sense, or even, there's definitions, I know, between village and Hamlet and this and that, but just a rural country town there. That's right. As it's been said there, a lot of lifelong residents and families, and a lot of the people that live there have just, they've always lived there. That's right. They've grown up there. And there's a few people that move in and move out again, but it's a great place, as you know, the South in general, for oral tradition and Southern folklore. But as we say on the show, there's always that seed of truth at the root of legends like these. And that's what we're going to talk about tonight. Hopefully they sprout and become germinated and bear fruit. Yes. So a church was founded in this area in 1830, but Flatwoods didn't appear on the maps as a town until 1873. It was officially incorporated 29 years after that in 1902. But the town did good thanks to the now defunct, long defunct, West Virginia and Pittsburgh Railroad, which had extended a branch right through Flatwoods in the late 1800s. It was also a halfway point on the Baltimore and Ohio railroads, Clarksburg-Richwood branch, the B&O having taken it over from the aforementioned company by 1899. That's interesting. And I'm not a real big train fanatic as a kid, but I had model trains and you always see them passing through here. And B&O, I don't think I ever realized what that stood for. So yeah, Baltimore and Ohio. And the train is a big factor. I think the station was pretty small, but it's a lifeline. Because the other thing I was going to mention about that we'd heard from one of the residents there talking about her grandparents growing up in Flatwoods is that most, if maybe not all, the roads were dirt in her grandmother and great-grandmother's time. And they would get rutted to the point where you couldn't take a car out very successfully if it had been raining and stuff. So they would walk a lot and like five to six miles to the store, she said. So those stories you hear that are kind of a joke now, like I had to walk five miles uphill each way in the snow to get to school. There's some kernel of truth in that as well. So the railroad was very important. And didn't you tell me once as a kid, you had a model train, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad? I did. It was the only train I had. I loved it. It wasn't an accurate layout or anything, but I had the engines and all that. It was pretty cool. I still remember what they looked like. It didn't stop in Flatwoods or St. Joseph, did it? No, it didn't. Its entire universe was on a four by eight piece of plywood. I'm pretty sure Flatwoods wasn't on there. Okay. No, that's still very cool. And better than mine, I had to set up on my bedroom floor and then put it together and then take it apart each time I wanted to play with it. Oh yeah, that's not fun. It wasn't a set thing. But as of 2020, Flatwoods had a little less than 300 residents. So that's what we're talking about when we say small or everybody knows each other, knows all the stories, very friendly town. Everybody kind of respects each other, even though they may disagree, which is hard to find these days. But thanks to tonight's astonishing legend, not our show, the actual legend, it's definitely world famous now. Put it on the map. The incident at the heart of tonight's show took place on September 12th, 1952. And from that, Flatwoods earned the nickname Home of the Green Monster. Now I tried to look up why it was called Flatwoods. And I think I got to ask a silly question, get a, get a silly answer, which was, well, the woods, the wooded areas are kind of flat there. So of course that's where it gets its name and the being or whatever that thing was that was seen goes by different names. We're going to talk about, you know, because it's in Braxton County, Braxy and various other monikers. But yeah, Home of the Green Monster was the nickname that Flatwoods earned. And again, yeah, I thought there was maybe something special about that region. Kind of like, I don't know, maybe I was just thinking about, about Pine Barrens. Yeah. It's like, well, it's just a bunch of barrens with pines and don't look, or then maybe I was thinking of Scape or Swamp. And that did have a story behind the name, which, so nothing that colorful here, but kind of a lovely place and just real nice folks with a lot of Southern hospitality. And, uh, you know, while some people initially made light of this story, of course, cause it's, it sounds like 50s sci-fi. We're going to talk about that angle of it. Yeah. Why is it like that? Why is it, uh, seemingly from that era when it should be? That story became deeply embedded in the local folklore. And so if you're from there, everybody knew about it and people were concerned. I mean, as we'll hear from some of the town residents, one kind of assumption was that about half the people in the town believe the story. The other one, the other half didn't, but they still got along. It's just kind of a clean division of people of like, yeah, I don't know. Y'all made that up. And then the other folks are like, no, I saw some of that. I think you're telling the truth, even though they weren't a part of that initial group. So in hearing the, the testimonies of people is that there were a lot of people who were genuinely terrified. Yeah. And I mean like afraid to walk home from the school bus, kind of terrified. Yeah. Because they did believe that something like that was possible. And then yes, you can look at larger psychological and sociological factors going on, the red scare, most world war two, communism, all these kinds of things, fear of the other, you know, these are all bigger kind of things not to get too academic about it, but that was what was going on during this time. And he wondered like, did that affect what people saw or what they expected to see? Yeah. It's just an interesting period of time. Also not too long after Kenneth Arnold's sighting in 1947. That's right. So it was kind of fresh in people's minds. And, but here, you know, I think something really extraordinary happened to just a really nice little town that wasn't expecting any of this, but is any town expecting anything like that? Yeah. And it's become an accepted and now celebrated part of their heritage. You know, local interest and pride has grown significantly over the years. They've embraced it. It's now seen as a crucial part of Flatwood's identity, putting it on the quote unquote world map. It's not really so much about belief either, but acceptance. And it's just part of their folklore. And I will say this, it's like, you know, the aptly named small town monsters, it's all these small towns. And we've seen this over and over again. And we're going to look at the patterns here compared to other stories, compare and contrast. And I personally love it when a town like this, kind of like Point Pleasant or any place, they embrace it. And then you have a festival and you invite people in and you, you boost the economy and it gains interest. And I think there's something good with that rather than the other reaction was like, this is really embarrassing. We're not going to talk about this forever. And we're going to shun and mock people who do. So I'm glad when a place like this, the Loveland Frog, all these places that have a little festival, they embrace it. It's like, yeah, let's celebrate something odd about it and get people interested in our town. Well, as Forrest said earlier, the creature at the heart of this encounter has been known by a lot of names less famous than the current one, the Flatwoods Monster. It was originally known as the Braxton County Monster or Braxy, as he said a minute ago. It's appeared in TV shows, children's toys, video games like Fallout 76, which is a hugely popular game that I know many of you have played. And everybody's Golf 4, which may be not as popular, but I was pleased to see the image of the Flatwoods Monster. I'm surprised about that. Yeah, yeah. It's also been on album covers. Oh, of course. The Flatwoods Monster Museum is in Sutton nearby, and there are five large monster-shaped chairs around the county serving as tourist attractions. Flatwoods has even hosted a Flatwoods Monster convention since 2019. Fantastic. You know, these conventions are great. They're really terrific. They keep the legends alive, but they also help the small towns thrive, as I was saying. You need a little injection of outside tourist money. Yes. People to come and have a good time, and they're not all coming down there to make fun of you. Well, the people that do already live there, so anyway. But not to put you on the spot, man, but what album covers are the Flatwoods Monster on, if you know offhand? Did you make some notes on that? Well, you always ask me this kind of stuff, so I drilled down on it, and I do know one of them anyway. It's an album by The Scary Jokes that came out in 2016 called April Fools, and I had not heard of them. It's a singer-songwriter named Liz Lehman, and I checked it out. I really dig it. It's synth pop or bedroom pop, I guess, but it's pretty groovy. You can find it on Spotify. Well, very cool. Nice. And I thought I'd catch you off guard here, but no, you're not too, again, I'm not trying to train you anything or beats a reaction into you. Well, I just didn't want to be like, oh, I don't know what album covers. And I certainly didn't want to be like, oh, yeah, it was famously on Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin or something, so I decided to dig down. No, of course not. But what I like seeing that is that it's somebody in the know. Yes. Like if you saw them at a show and you met them offstage or at the bar after the show, you had a connection to talk about that. Speaking of that, I got to give a shout out to my guys, Hans Gruber and the Diehards. Ah, yeah. They, who I've seen play here in North Carolina, they listen to us when they're on the road, I know. So, hey guys, you seem like you're always touring. I don't know how you do it. Hats off to you. No, I thought I'd ask you about that because, again, it's somebody you knew, and it's not somebody that I would imagine a band, a big band would have that on an album cover, but it is very iconic. I will say this before we get really into the weeds here. It's one of my favorite beings that have shown up in a encounter. Yeah, me too. There's nothing else like it, as the locals say. It's its own thing. Yes. As we're going to describe what they saw and the elements of it, it's just visually striking. Exploring the unknown is what makes Astonishing Legends so much fun. But when it comes to dinner, nobody wants surprises. Marley's Spoon helps you eat well without overthinking it. Each meal is chef-designed, made with quality ingredients, and balanced so you feel good about what you're eating. With over 100 recipes to pick from every week, there's always something new to try, whether you're in the mood for a comforting classic or something a little more adventurous. Marley's Spoon adapts to your life, from breakfast to dinner, and even those in-between snack moments. The subscription is simple and flexible, so it fits your schedule, no matter how busy things get. 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Let's get back to Astonishing Legends. Well, let's get into the initial encounter here, and that would be the night of September 12th, 1952, as this whole thing unfolds. And why don't you start off here by telling us about the initial sighting. How did this play out? So it was late in the daytime, and again, the details are all over the place. And folks, I just wanted to say, I do want to give another shout out and a thank you to Small Town Monsters. Check out their YouTube channel, everything they've got. Look on Amazon for all of their stuff. The good friends of ours, and also very prolific producers of great material on topics like this. And they're one of our trusted sources here, just like we like to lean on the author, Troy Taylor, because these are people that we know are doing the work and getting the real story, and talking to the eyewitnesses, and going to the local libraries, and talking to historians, and getting as much of the real story as you can, and not all the stuff that gets obfuscated by, let's just say, sensational journalism, after the fact kind of stuff, authors who are looking to make a buck by aggrandizing things, and we'll talk about some of that tonight. Right. But this is at the root of it. So again, thanks to Small Town Monsters for some of this. But when it comes to these details, if they conflict with other reports that you've heard about the Flatwoods Monster, that's because we're taking them from accounts that were given directly by the eyewitnesses, just a few years ago, to Seth and his team over there, and Courtney at Small Town Monsters. So it was in the afternoon of September 12th, 1952, late afternoon. There's five boys. They're out playing on a playground at the grade school there in Flatwoods. It's Fred May and Ed May, brothers, or Freddy and Eddie, Neil Nunley, Teddy Neil, and Tommy Heyer. We'll talk a little bit more about their backgrounds here in a minute. But they were somewhere between 10 and 17 years old, and I really think there's another boy who's going to join along the way here in a minute. I think he was a 17-year-old, so I think they were all a little bit younger. Their names are misspelled and misrepresented all over the place online, but that's the right list there. So these five kids are out playing on the grade school playground, and it's a pretty day. And it's not quite dark yet. So that's the other thing to remember. This ends up right on the cusp of darkness or at dusk. Right. But it starts out before the sunset, really. They don't officially say that, but that's what's implied, because by the time they hike up there, it's dusk, right? That's right. Yeah. So that's good to know is that initially it was all not taking place at dark. They could see very well. So it's before twilight. Yeah. And it's a very lovely late summer day with a nice breeze, just neighborhood kids having fun. And another thing I love about this story is that it's kind of the setup for some of my favorite films in the feel and the vibe of it, like a Spielberg movie or like Super 8 or any one of those where it's a group of kids just doing their thing and pick any of them, but E.T., The Goonies, everybody loves The Goonies, where the kids are just kind of having fun. It's a summertime thing. I can really feel the vibe here and what it was like. And then something extraordinary happens. And they all kind of group together to experience this thing. And like a Spielberg movie, I think he's really good at having a lot of interesting things happen in a short amount of time. Not as fun, loving, I would say, this whole experience for them, but certainly extraordinary and life-changing, no doubt. Yes. As they were there at the Flatwoods grade school playground, they described it as a ball of fire or this big flaming thing, quote unquote, rolling across the sky. And what they described, it wasn't fast like a shooting star. And so I think these are very important because as you can already probably imagine, that's going to be one of the big explanations that's foisted. Everything that people are seeing here, it's like, it's a bolide, it's a meteor breaking up or just a, you know, it's some kind of natural thing re-entering the atmosphere. And that's what they were seeing. But as they described, you know, of course, again, kids, we've all seen shooting stars and we've all stayed up late at night looking at meteorites, sleeping outdoors. And you know what those look like. They're just quick streaks. That's different. They said this was like, it was floating down. Yeah. And then it slowed down. It seemed to be, it was going too slow for any of that. Right. Because if you've seen online videos, it's like, yeah, it's not always a quick streak, but it's moving much faster, it seems, than what they're seeing. And it appeared to land, and that means slow down, change course a little, and drop down right on the other side of the ridge as they could see it. And so the object seemed to pause when it topped the hill, then slowly sink behind it with its light pulsing. So right off the bat, that's a pretty, I'd say, accurate description from the kids at the time. That's what they saw. And we're already off, to me, diverging from some kind of meteorite explanation, but more about that later. So the reaction was, they just thought it was cool. They thought like, well, they all wanted to go run up to see what it was. They weren't really scared. It's just like, again, this is what me and my friends would do with our bikes and the cards in the spokes and all that. Yes. And owing to, and by the way, everyone will say, Stranger Things, why aren't you saying that? And yes, Stranger Things, but Stranger Things borrowed from all the stuff we're talking about. The other thing I will say, yeah, I always remember the line from the older son in E.T. when they hear the crashing out behind the house, and he goes real sing-songy. He goes, you stay here, mom, we'll check it out. And they all go running out the back door. Yeah. D. Wallace. Yeah. No. Yeah. Cause he's good at capturing that kind of feel here. And that's kind of what it starts off with. Yeah. Before the terror. But here it's like, this is something interesting. And they, they just want to go see what it was. They'd get on their bikes. One of the boys, Fred May, one of the two lead boys, I guess you could say here, his initial thought was, you know, just curiosity. And, and again, thinking it was natural, like, okay, maybe it was a meteorite and quote, might have gold on it. Well, I mean, here's the thing, as we know now, I don't know about the attitude back then, but nowadays meteorites, if you find some, could be worth tens of thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on how large it is. Yeah. Because people collect them and they have a lot of rare minerals on them. So. That's right. And this is mining country. The locals know about rocks, you know. Yeah, exactly. Right. No, they, they know the worth of it. Plus it would just be cool to dig this thing up or at least see what, what crash landed. So. That's right. One of the other boys, Neil Nunley was heralded, well, he's described as being pretty bright and intelligent. Yeah. And he urged them on thinking that, quote, something may have landed and we may be able to get something for the geological survey. So he was applauded by a lot of researchers for having that kind of a frame of mind where it's like, hey, this thing is of some importance. Let's just not continue on. Let's go check this thing out. And it's an adventure before dinner, before it gets too dark. Yeah. So they have decided now, these five boys are like, you stay here, mom, I'll check it out. Except in their case, they're like, actually, let's go get mom and check it out. Yeah. So. Well, mom was on the way. They had to pass by their house getting up there. That's right. This ridge where they had seen this thing go down, on the way to it was past their house. It was about a half mile from where they were. And so they're like, right, we're going to go up by the house and we're going to get our mom a true character in herself, Kathleen May, who at the time was 32 years old. They decided they were, okay, we're going to go tell her about it. And when they get to the house, she is also there with a cousin of theirs, a distant cousin of theirs named Gene Lemon or Eugene Lemon. And he is thought to have been around 17 and also thought to have been, and the memories are vague now for these young boys who are older at this point, but they were pretty sure he was in the National Guard at the time. So old enough to do that and be measured in the way that you have to be to participate in the National Guard. So they picked him up. And so it was Eugene now and Kathleen and Fred and Ed and all the others. And they're heading up the hill to go find out what's on the ridge. There was also a dog that in the Small Town Monster documentaries described as the community dog or the neighborhood dog decided to go with them. Yeah. I'm sure he just, everybody fed him when they could. And he was just, he would just show up and hang out with the kids. And yeah, it's a little like Petey from Little Rascals, except I think, I'm not sure which one of them owned Petey, but oh, come on. He's got the ring around his arm. Yes, I know. Just look him up, folks. But no, again, it's starting off as a great, almost Hollywood story here of just a collection of kids. And I love the description of Kathleen May. She was described as, first of all, she's now a single mom and just a very intelligent, great sense of humor, spunky, feisty even. And I love that she just didn't say like, you kids, you don't go up there. You get back in the house and wash up for supper. You know, just like she was ready to go on this adventure with them. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, speaking of Little Rascals, I had to look this up real quick, but you know, the very last one of them just passed away a month ago on June 13th. She was 96, Betsy Gay, one of the little girls who was on the show with that. So pretty wild, 96 years old. Anyway, so the full group is now consisting of Fred May, Freddie May, Eddie May, their 32-year-old mom, Kathleen, Neil Nunley, Teddy Neal, a cousin named Gene Lemon, and another little boy named Tommy Heyer. Tommy Heyer being, quote, a little squirt. And so small, he was in the back and didn't really see anything, according to the other witnesses. So they're climbing up this ridge. They're going to go up the hill. Kathleen and Gene are out in the front, you know, mom and the National Guard, the young man in the National Guard. And they begin their climb up the hill. And now it's just starting to be dusk. And so they got into some woods and it got kind of dark and they felt like slowing down a little bit instead of running. And they saw from a distance a clearly visible object that they described as big as a small house that was emitting a strange glowing orange light. So as they get up closer to this object, they can hear a strange hissing noise and they see something below them that they described as egg or saucer shaped. And it was maybe hissing and whirling and it had, and it had landed the blunt end down and was standing upright. And there was a thick mist or a ground mist that was laying all around the object. The dog apparently ran into the mist, barking at it. And according to the father of cryptozoology, Ivan T. Sanderson, who got involved in this case, he later said on an interview that the dog immediately set up a howl and took off and was subsequently found having vomited all over a veranda and died. But Ed May actually explicitly stated in the Small Town Monsters documentary, The Flatwoods Monster, A Legacy of Fear, which again, you can watch for free on YouTube on their channel. He said, quote, a lot about everybody getting sick and a dog dying. None of that is true. We dug out a lot of groundhogs with that dog after that. So the dog lived on for all of you that worry about the poor animals that get caught up in these cases. Did not suffer the fate of Snowball from Delphus Rick. Yes. Not Snowball, nor the dogs that were turned into goo at Skinwalker Ranch. All right. So what did this thing look like? Well, there's the devils in the details here. And admittedly, one of the May brothers said, you know, yeah, we were kids. It was a long time ago. So things were foggy. But also in that kind of traumatic experience in that moment, when you're seeing something that is not of our earthly reality, you know, something that's outside of reality in a large sense. I think it also makes a really distinct impression. So the details here are important because a lot of people will get those wrong, conflate them. It's a massive game of telephone here or Chinese whispers. We've always talked about that with newspapers and then people wanting to sell the papers and all the media and it's getting passed around nationwide. And so a lot of details are wrong. So I, but I would still go back to the source of these kids. So what did this thing look like? Well, they said, what got their attention is that they're looking at this, whatever object had now just kind of floated down. And then suddenly a little noise behind them, quote unquote, made them turn. And then one of the children said, and I think, uh, I can't remember which one, but he said, look up in that tree and underneath the branch of this isolated oak tree. That means that it was, I think for that ridge in there, it was pretty well known because it's standing out by itself. And there's a, there's some brush around the area, but it's a little bit of a clearing, but this is now a tree that is standing out by itself and some kind of creature or things that was described was suspended up in the air. And so it was kind of a, not hanging from a branch, I would say, but just kind of levitating. So at this prompt, Gene Lemon, who we say is, you know, one of the older guys, he's, I would guess 17, 18. I think if he was in, uh, the guard, if the rules are the same, yeah. If he was in the national guard, he would probably have to be 18 at the time. So, but he's, uh, yeah, he's one of the older, older guys there. One of the, uh, you know, leading the kids and he's got a flashlight with him and he aimed it at where they thought this thing's eyes would have been. And so at this point, they're all kind of, just imagine your brain trying to process what you're seeing in an instant, just after seeing something that's kind of extraordinary, this thing kind of landing and sitting there glowing. And the light from his flashlight revealed a towering man-like figure. So it's sort of humanoid. It's very tall. And as it was described later, because they, they took measurements of, uh, with that tree as of reference, they said, uh, anywhere from like 14, 15 feet tall or nine to nine to 14. Yeah. Because the branch that was a reference for them was, I think they said 12 feet off the ground, right? It was its head or whatever the top of it was, was in that region. So at the shortest, it would be nine feet. I'd say at the tallest 14 or 15 feet tall and, uh, large and imposing, they were not that far away. The mother, Kathleen May said, uh, that she was less than 20 feet away. So go measure that out. That's not very, it's pretty close. Yeah. And she also said when the flashlight hit this thing, that it quote, lit up like a Christmas tree, end quote. Now I take that to be that this thing was not just reflecting light or was eye shine, which we're going to talk about, of course, because that's one of the explanations. Somehow this light, it reacted to the light being shown on it is that it had some kind of sensor. So this thing lights up emanating light is what I mean. It's not reflecting the, the flashlight light. This thing lights up like a Christmas tree that it had lights on it or was able to emit light itself. So, yeah. Yeah. So again, uh, talking about taller than a human and this thing seemed to glide or hover. So it was, it was already kind of hovering and when the light hit it, it got its attention and it started to glide or hover towards the group silently. And then some claimed it kind of tilted perhaps kind of side to side, like it was scanning something. Uh-huh. Like it was, uh, it was an activation mode, like, you know, like, like the term search and destroy or just like find out like, who is that? And then at this point it's sounding more like a machine than an organic being in this description. Yes. That's a very good point is that it's not reacting like some kind of animal or a human in a costume. Yeah. Now the colors are interesting because, uh, you, of course, uh, all of us, I'm sure if you, if you love the genre, you know, you've seen caricatures and the, the famous illustrations of the Flatwoods monster. And that's one of the things I love about it because it's so unusual. But I think in researching this, it was hard to gauge what parts were what colored. Other than that, we're going to talk about a very large round face of some kind that was blood red, a very deep red, but round. The other colors on the body of this thing were black, green, and red, or a dark black or greenish body. The main torso part of it going down to the bottom of it. And, uh, in what configuration, I'm still not sure, but the head was very clearly described as being hood-like pointed at the top, some kind of cowl, but I love this something resembling the ace of spades from a playing card. Yeah. Yeah. So dark, that kind of shape. And so that, that shape has endured, uh, through all the illustrations. And that's also what kind of makes it distinct. So that was very clearly, uh, identified by, uh, people in the group. The eyes glowed with fire or some kind of light emitting from it, greenish orange, or some kind of eerie orange. It was either Fred or Ed May who, and I just want to get this in case we forget, or it's not in our notes here, is that he said, again, he did not think these were natural animal eyes. He described them as like portals. Portal windows. Yeah. Portal windows. Now he also described- I mean, he didn't say the word window, but that's the implication of a portal. Yeah. Right. Portals. And, uh, it was, it, was it Ed May who said the body of it looked like, or reminded him of the V2 rockets used by the Germans in World War II to bomb, uh, London. So it was that kind of shape a little bit. So rocket like shape with a taper, these were round portal-like openings or apertures through which light of some kind shone out. So I'm, I'm trying to make a differentiation between that and eye shine. Yes. And they were glowing. And, uh, the mother, Kathleen, uh, she at least described it as having small claw-like hands or something twisted and clawed extending in front of it. You could probably picture a T-Rex, uh, just little arms and hands, but something claw-like appendages in front of it. She also described the body portion of it or the bottom part as having drape-like folds or perhaps a cloth-like covering on the lower part and described as, as some by would, would you call a metal dress? Now that was another thing I like about how many of these things do you see wearing a skirt or a kilt? Yeah. Yeah. The first time I saw like, what is that? I, I gotta know more about this. Yeah. Uh, first time I laid eyes on the, uh, the Flatwood Monster, uh, illustration. Now here's this, something I wanted to point out is that later, or at least in some descriptions or testimony is that it may not have been skirt-like but metallic, but she described it as having folds. So if it was metal or some kind of metal drape or a metal cloth of sorts, it had folds in it. That's what she noted. Fluted, uh, perhaps. The other thing that she said, Kathleen, the mom, and, uh, I, I really, uh, give this a lot of weight is that she said this thing was emitting a hissing sound like frying bacon. As I interpreted her description, it was constant. So not bursts of sound. It was a constant drone of like this loud hissing sound like sizzling or, uh, something frying. What's funny is that the, when the craft landed, they described it as, uh, or at least, uh, Ivan Sanderson's description from the interviews is that it was saucer-like or egg-like, egg-shaped. Yes. And the blunt end of it was the part that landed. So now you get your bacon and eggs. Yeah. Like Mork from Mork and Mindy. Yeah. Right. And when also, when I think when, uh, about the sizzling sound or whatever, to me, that also could be a description of an electrical discharge, like you would imagine, you know, with, uh, with- Yeah. Buzzing. Some crackling. Yeah. Yeah. Low constant crackling. Uh, something electronic. Something is making that sound, but I will posit here that it is not anything that they're familiar with, with all these folks having grown up generations and flatwoods. We always say this, the folks there know what their animals sound like. That's right. Their grandpappies and grandmammies have told them and they have grown up. I'm sure they've gone camping. They've been out there. They live in the woods. They don't need to go camping. They live out in the sticks. They're going to hear that stuff just outside. Yeah. Every animal that makes a noise, they will have all heard it at some point. And so this is not that. Yeah. This is a very unnatural sound of them and kind of raises their hackles. They're, they're now very gaining rapidly alarmed. Uh, the other thing was a violent thumping inside of this thing. Some kind of, uh, again, it sounds possibly mechanical, like it's a machine or an engine of some kind. And then also accompanied with this was a dense cloud of mist that was emanating directly from this thing or just around it or from the craft itself. Or maybe it was a side effect of the landing or. Exactly. Maybe it's a temperature differentiation between this craft and the warm earth, the summertime earth there in the mountains. I want you to, uh, repeat something you told me too about, uh, folks going up in the, uh, you know, the Appalachians and the smoky mountains and the, the fog that sets there all the time. It's every day. Yeah. I mean, everyone knows what it looks like. The great smoky mountains here in North Carolina and in Tennessee where the two states meet up just absolutely stunning up there. It's beautiful, but the smoke in air quotes is a fog or a low lying mist or clouds that settled down right on the mountains. I guarantee you, Micah Hank sees them every day because that's where he lives. He's up there near the Brown mountain lights. These folks know what that looks like. And that's the, and also that collects in the hollers, frankly, because of, uh, temperature variances and humidity and all that kind of stuff. So that's, they know what that looks like. They wouldn't have even mentioned that. I don't think. Yeah. If it looked like what they were used to seeing, that wouldn't have even been part of the description, in my opinion. Right. So what they're describing in this is that something is now forming this very rapidly and surrounding this being and the craft is that suddenly it just kind of came up, not a natural weather event here. Some describe the shape as a quote, very heavyset man. So still man-like or human-like. Right. But rotund. Right. And, uh, Ivan T. Sanderson says, you know, turning slowly, that's the quote there. He says, uh, this thing was kind of waving from right to left. Yeah. As if it were searching the horizon with these beams. So now light is coming out. So I'm going to, I don't know specifically laser light, but, uh, beams of light were coming out and kind of scanning things is one description. Again, uh, estimated to be 12 to 15 feet tall in relative position to the tree. One of the people interviewed a lot, and I liked his approach and what he had to say, uh, John Gibson from the documentary relayed a lot of facts that he'd heard just growing up and, uh, from the time there that, uh, again, this thing was black, red and green in color in that its eyes glowed with fire or light. So not typical eye shine here because also the flashlight was dropped. So that was kind of a brief, uh, thing we're going to talk about the reaction here in a second. Fred may described it. And this is very important as a mechanical thing. I think both of them said this was not a natural animal type of a being. This thing was somehow mechanical, like a machine and had a pointed top and portholes with lights that were behind or inside them. And he said, admittedly said, yeah, I just got one quick look, but I think it made an impression on him. And may that's one where I, where I said, uh, he thought it almost looked exactly like one of the V two rockets used by the Germans. Right. Which by the way, we're not at this point or ever been fired into the North American continent. No, but that was an overseas situation. Yeah. Yeah. During that time, uh, you know, most people, a lot of people were getting their news, uh, from news reels and newspapers and, and national geographic and different, uh, magazines. Uh, there was no nightly news of sorts or was that was just being developed. This also predates Sputnik. So our own space program, this is, you know, it's not like Kecksburg where you can say, oh, we had things orbiting and all of that stuff. This is before all of that. Just so people. Right. Exploring the unknown is what makes astonishing legends so much fun, but when it comes to dinner, nobody wants surprises. Marley's spoon helps you eat well without overthinking it. Each meal is chef designed made with quality ingredients and balanced. So you feel good about what you're eating with over 100 recipes to pick from every week. There's always something new to try, whether you're in the mood for a comforting classic or something a little more adventurous. Marley spoon adapts to your life from breakfast to dinner, and even those in between snack moments. The subscription is simple and flexible, so it fits your schedule. 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Our programs are designed for people who never stop. You bring the fire, APU will fuel the journey. Learn more at apu.apus.edu. Forrest and Scott, thank you for supporting their sponsors. I'm Josh Shear. Now back to the show. Okay, so let's pull back here and take a look at the people that are involved in going up the mountain, right? So we have Fred May again, or Freddie at the time, he's now known as Fred as an older man, but he's the son of Kathleen May. His father had moved to Michigan after his parents' divorce. And he described Flatwoods recently as a nice country community that everybody knew everybody. And he was on the playground originally, and he was one of the ones who saw the ball of fire appear to land on the ridge at the Bailey Fisher Farm. And they, of course, went to see what it was. Now, some things that are interesting about Fred is that personality-wise, he claims that he was initially unafraid and just curious about it, as Forrest said earlier, thinking it might have gold on it. And he has also said that he believes it was a mechanical thing, not a monster. And this is a big point for us about this episode. And obviously, everyone has covered this. All of our friends have covered this. I'm sure Graveyard Tales, everybody. I'll be truthful. I don't know where you're at, Forrest, but I have not listened to anybody else's coverage. So I don't know what observations the other shows have made beyond Small Town Monsters documentary, which, of course, they lean into all the mystery and stuff. That's their style. They didn't really ask the same question that we're asking. It's like, how is this different from the story everyone knows? And one of the things that really stands out to me is that both Fred and his brother, Ed, were like, this was not an organic creature. This was a mechanical thing of some kind. I think the language you might even say it was in today's day and age might be like drone-like or like an occupant inside of some kind of casing to protect it or something like that, or robotic. Right. And, you know, I'm thinking about one of the witnesses in the Small Town Monsters documentary. And this phrase or description stood out to me where, maybe you can refresh my memory of who said that or check our notes, but they said from their feeling that it was kind of a scout, that whatever this machine- Oh, a sentinel. A sentinel. That's it. That's right. Yes. Yeah. That was Fred that said that. That was Fred that said that. Right. That's what I thought. He said, and he said, and I quote in the Small Towns Monsters documentary, he said, it's my theory that something landed up there and they put what they call a sentinel down because that was the only road exit that could get up to that place. They put a sentinel down there. So he thought it was some kind of guardian over the landing site or crash site or whatever you would say that thing was that came down. Right. That, that makes sense. That, that follows protocols we hear now. Why risk whatever your biological native life is out in a strange world? Right. Unless you're Star Trek. Then you send out five security guys in red shirts and they all get wiped out. Let's get out of here before one of those things kills Guy. That's from Galaxy Quest. One of my favorite. I was just about to say, yes, Guy, the terrific Sam Rockwell's, I'm going to get killed. The first guy who gets killed. So yeah, you know, and then they would send a probe, but to a planet in general. But the first thing that you said when we were reading over this, the research materials is that, and I agreed immediately because that's what popped into my mind was that it sounds like Cisco Grove in some way, in a lot of ways, is that you have these really funky mid-century antiquated machines. Well, they're not antiquated for the time. Certainly they're far advanced, but kind of goofy, at least goofy looking, being sent out and receiving orders from some kind of central location where it's just like, okay, try this or go out and scan for this to see what you find. And then the flashlight, this is my thinking, the flashlight from Mr. Lemon there activated it or just alerted it. So it's like, okay, there's something out there. What is that? Go scan, check it out, observe, return data. Yeah. It's the most simple thing. And that it's not the pilot of the craft itself. I never got that. And neither did the Bay brothers feel that way. It was just some kind of mechanical scouting device or Sentinel or probe sent out first. And that's the big joke is that to them, it probably looks pretty benign, but to us it's frightening. And it also reminds me of a Twilight episode I just recently saw just on a couple of nights ago with Agnes Moorhead, where she is on, you know, she's a simple country woman out by herself in this cabin, you know, just tending to herself and, and gets essentially invaded by these small creatures, these tiny 50 style robots. And she's terrified. And why wouldn't you be? And they're trying to probe and then they zap her, I think a few times and it just immediately turns bad because in her mind, it's like, what is this? You know, she doesn't know what these things are. Right. Something strange has landed. It's trying to get into her house and it's probing and zapping her, injuring her, giving her small blisters, or maybe she think, you know, they think she's some kind of large monster and they're trying to defend themselves or even attack. And it just, it's just bad communication. And it sounds a little like that is the case here. But to your point about the other podcasts covering this, of course, we saw the Small Town Monsters documentary when it came out, not too long after it came out. What year was that, Scott? Yeah, we were like high level supporters on the Kickstarter. And as a result, I have a, a gorgeous 3D model of the Flatwoods monster, actually. That's right. I guess in theory, half belongs to you. So let me know if you want me to cut it in half. Well, you can hold onto it. I have no place to properly display it, but what year was that? 2018. You know, and it's, again, this is a story from 1952. So obviously it's been out and talked about for quite a long time. And I, you know, vaguely remember other shows covering this in to the depth that they do, but I will give a, again, another big shout out to Small Town Monsters because they get the actual people on film. And that's a big deal because in this case, well, I'd probably most of these cases is that the story gets convoluted as we were talking about earlier and details get mashed up. And if you're only sourcing as internet sleuths, like we are from articles and other people's reports, even if it's people that we really admire, like Ivan T. Sanderson, Gray Barker to a degree and others, you're really just getting information from semi to totally flawed sources. Right. You know, whatever's true about this, I'd rather hear from the people that were there than saw it. Yes. Yes. Right. So, so now we have pretty accurate descriptions. That's a great point about it being mechanical in nature and kind of the dynamics of what was happened, even if the eyewitness testimony is flawed after all these years. And we know that's certainly possible and probably likely you're starting from a more authenticated and trustworthy base. So in this cast of characters here of the West Virginia Goonies, you have essentially two main characters and that would be the brothers, Fred and Ed. Yes. The mother, she was very vocal at that time. And I really give a lot of credit to her and really admire her for, again, not kind of clamming up. Now I understand in the years after that happened, they didn't give many interviews because they were tired of just talking about it. They Ronnie'd everybody. So that's another reference to Ronnie from the Delphus Ring incident where he was essentially said he was willing to talk to us and then it was, didn't return our calls because, and we were like, that's fine. We get it. Yeah. Just like, just one more interview. Had enough. Who are these yokels? I don't know. But we have the mother here, you know, so we have some adults in the mix, not all just kids because that's another thing you hear is like, well, it's just excited kids. And, and, uh, it again, a probably given some shade to rural folks, but you have at least two adults, Gene Lemon and Kathleen, uh, who both saw it and had slightly different reactions, but, and the descriptions do vary a little bit. And I'll chalk that up to, you know, the adrenaline pumping at the time, seeing something that's so out of the ordinary that your brain may not be able to comprehend it and put that into words and descriptions that get sealed in your brain. But there are a lot of consistencies, which admittedly, even the skeptical investigators will point to as, as being the same with each of them. But let's get back to descriptions, if you would, of the brothers and the rest of the crew here. Yeah. Well, and so one last thing before we depart from Fred, I do want to say that he, he, again, aside from what we said about him saying it was a mechanical thing, he also said that he was, uh, while initially not afraid, he became afraid after the sighting. And he also stated he would like to forget the whole thing, but by the same token, he wants to publicize it for the community because it does bring attention and commerce into the community. So that's why he does that. But otherwise, as an experience, he has said he wishes it had never happened. Now his brother, Ed also was there. They were playing on the playground. He also saw the initial big flaming thing, which some of the skeptics and demunkers will say was a meteor. But he said too, what they saw when they got up close to it looked almost exactly, and that's a quote, almost exactly like the V2 rockets the Germans flew over London. Right. That's interesting. If it's a meteor, why are we seeing a V2 rocket in the woods up on the ridge on the Bailey Fisher farm? Yeah. All kinds of strange things in the sky. And I was thinking about it a couple of days ago because this also popped into my head about strange flaming things going through the sky. And I've mentioned this before on the show, but I'm going to do it again here as I am prone to do. This was a eyewitness testimony from a good friend of mine. I haven't seen him in years, but it's an editor, a video editor I used to work with. You may even know him, Scott, from our editing world. Yes, I do. And Todd, he was an outdoorsman. He loved to go camping trips with his family and attend events. And Birding Man was a big one. I think he went every year. And, you know, he loved the DJ and get really involved with that. But he said one year, I did go one year with him and that's the only year I've been there. And that's a whole other story. But this was a year I think after I went and, you know, he got back to the office and I was talking with him and he said, oh, anything, you know, obviously a lot of fun stuff happens, anything unusual. And he said, yeah, he said, you're not going to believe this, but during the day, and it may have been in the late afternoon, something came over the sky over the whole camp. And this is in the latter days when you're talking, I don't know, 20,000 people out there. And the way he described it, he said, it looked like a crumpled ball of tin foil with all the wrinkles and the folds, but in a ball shape. And he said it was tumbling rather slowly across the sky over them. And it was flaming, just like a flaming ball of aluminum foil crumpled up, rolling slowly over. Not too slowly because it passed, I think, before people really got an idea of what was going on. And of course, there's tons of people with cameras and video recorders. And I don't know if anybody got a shot of that. I never really looked into it, but he said like, this thing just kind of tumbled across the sky. And he said, you could hear the whole cat go, oh my God, you know, and yes, there are a lot of people who are altered, let's say, but he was not at the time. And he said, yeah, I clearly saw this thing. Everybody was just astounded. It was just awesome in a way, visually. And people were just like, what is that? And it just kind of rolled across the sky, went over the horizon and that was it. So again, that's not a meteor because we know they don't move that slow and they're not that large. And you can't usually make out the detail of what the materials are. But I believe our friend was accurate and again, never looked into it, but that was, I always remembered that. What, do you know what year that was? It would have been the mid to late nineties, I think. Oh, okay. Maybe even to the early 2000s, but. Okay. Cause I just found a UFO video from Burning Man dated in 2012 that I'm looking at right now. Probably later. Yeah. That was probably way after that. And I, look, come on, if you're a UFO, what better venue to buzz people just to freak them out. Yeah. Well, here's one in 1999. There's a 20 minute video about it. I'll save this. We'll watch it later. Okay. Very good. Yeah. My point in bringing that up though, is that the descriptors of that incident sound a little bit the same way that I get the feeling that is happening here with the Flatwoods incident is that I said, this just a little while ago is that we've all seen meteors. Now we've not all seen giant bolides burn up through the sky, like Tunguska or Chelyabinsk, you know, where that causes a, there's a massive sonic boom, window shatter, car alarms go off. Nowadays, everybody's got it on a ring cam or their dash cam. I'm not talking about that. This is something where it moves so differently or just differently enough that people notice and recognize that it's not something completely natural. And that's what we have with our friends here is that something's going on. Something's landing. We should check it out. It's not just a meteor streaking across the sky, but that's where your mind goes to at first, because that's the most logical, natural explanation. I will just say that I have seen a bolide, uh, down at the coast of North Carolina and it is truly a stunning sight. A slow moving giant ball of fire. Like it looked like a baseball with fire coming off of it, uh, slowly entering the atmosphere out over the Atlantic ocean down off the coast of Wilmington, North Carolina. I did see that. Um, I can't remember how long ago it was now, but it was, I was stunned by it. Uh, but I, I think it was just a, a regular astronomical phenomenon. I didn't, you know, I didn't think it was, but it did, it is radically different looking from a shooting star or a meteor. It's, it's, it was slow moving and disconcerting, but it wasn't landing. It, it's, it went towards the horizon and ballistic motion disappeared. Yeah. Yeah. Ballistic motion. Yeah. Didn't change, didn't slow down, stop, and then drop down straight. Right. Right. Yeah. Getting back to our, our people that are there. So we've got Fred and Ed, the other thing about Ed or Eddie at the time, he says it was immaterial to him, whether people believed him. He still says that. And he also says like his brother, I know it was mechanical, but he said he had no theory beyond that noting quote, it was a little early in history to see something like that end quote, and that he was petrified when they saw it. And he doesn't remember a whole lot. And like his brother, he wishes it had never happened. He doesn't want to explain it. He doesn't want to answer questions about it anymore. He's like, it's something you can't prove. And people's opinions aren't going to change. And so you get the sense from both of them. They're frustrated with trying to explain it to people who weren't there. It's like you and I say for us, don't tell me what I saw. These guys are that way. And these are intelligent guys. I want to add to that. Cause once you watch them being interviewed in the small town monsters documentary, these aren't just, you know, hillbillies, which is what I think a lot of skeptics circle around to when they're like, well, you just saw, you know, and we'll talk about that in a minute. We did talk about their mom, Kathleen. She was 32 at the time. She passed away in 2009 at the age of 89, but they picked her up on the way to the ridge where this was. And she was the one that said she was less than 20 feet from the creature. She did do some television interviews later, including one, I believe with Ivan T. Sanderson. And she described it as a hideous sight, which I think is interesting because that use of hideous back then was different. It was more like, it meant startling as opposed to, you know, hard to look at or ugly. It was, you know, it's more like, I wish I'd never seen it. It's another word for like, it's throwing my world out of balance. And that makes it hideous. Yeah. Like the Bugs Bunny cartoon. Remember the witch? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Hideous. And one of the shows she appeared on was a television show called We the People, which by the way, that title, try looking that up right now. You'll never find the media for this, that phrase, We the People, but it's out there. I did find the show. It's listed on IMDB and Wikipedia and it was a talk show. I would love to have found the episode she was on, but I couldn't even find a transcript of it. Sometimes you can find that stuff in the Library of Congress or somewhere else. A few episodes ago, I tried to find a Dick Cavett episode and I talked to the people that own the rights to that. I don't even know if I told you this. And I was like, can we just borrow a few lines from this episode of Dick Cavett? And they wrote and they're like, sure, $10,000. There's no way. Just like, just never. I was like, this is a podcast. I know. Well, no, they did. That's their way of saying like- People don't even remember Dick anymore at this point. Like, can you just give us a sentence? You know? No. It's their way of telling us to buzz off. Yeah. Well, they were super nice though. Oh yeah. I do have to say they were super nice, but most media outlets have more cash, I guess, than we do. But the other person we talked about was Gene Lemon, the one that everyone believes, but they can't remember clearly, the living folks, if he was definitely in the National Guard at the time, but they think he was. He was a distant cousin of the May family. So Fred, Ed, and Kathleen's cousin, he was visiting the house. He was the oldest of the young men, as you said, Forrest, maybe 18 or so if he was in the National Guard. And he is also the one that freaked out the most when they got up there and this thing reacted to them and reacted to his flashlight, which is funny to me, you know, being the oldest man, you know, on the scene. And he's like, ah, you know, drops the flashlight and runs away. And as Kathleen said, ran over one of her boys getting out of there. Like George Costanza getting out when they're, when fire is screamed, mowing down people. All due respect to Gene. Yes, of course. But you know, that's the thing. It's, it's, I've always said this, these kinds of incidents and interactions are so personal. It gets right at your core being of, and again, that's not to say you're chicken or yellow bellied, but you know what I'm saying? Like, we don't know how we're going to react. You could say like, oh, I'd be, I'd be very brave. And I go up and I'd, I'd lick the UFO. You don't know how you're going to react because it's just so out of touch with our normal reality. I don't think anybody really knows how they're going to react until it happens. And sometimes it's for, with some people, it's fascination. Some it's utter fear. Uh, sometimes I think emotions or reactions are forced upon you or you're either paranormal apathy or just to get you out of there, you're subjected to a feeling of intense terror. And also, yeah, this thing is frightening. You've never seen this before. You don't know what it is going to do, but you know, it's more powerful than you and it's, it could have negative intentions. And one thing here I want to bring up because you never know. And again, this is probably thoroughly researched, but it's been so long ago in the documentary, there's a local researcher and investigator from the area and he's from there, Dave Smith. And he appears in the documentary. Now he claims that, uh, there was, uh, evidence or it's part of the story from the locals at the time that the national guard, or I'm thinking perhaps the air force sent out what he calls like special forces guys, an elite crack team of, of soldiers to secure the area. I'm, uh, and again, I know that the air force has an elite team that's a search and rescue and, uh, they're more of a combat, uh, unit because they go into rural hot zones there and LZs to retrieve people. I don't know what this team was, but that's what he claimed is that it wasn't just the military had interest in it, just like Kecksburg, just like all these other ones. And this was nothing. If this was just, Oh, you just saw some meters or we're testing this and that, or maybe there's a crash of something. Yeah. And this, by the way, is real. The leader of that unit is found and is a real person. So this isn't just hearsay that's, it was a real situation. And we're going to talk a little bit about it in a, here in a minute, but yeah, so that's the other thing that's fascinating about that. And then, so the remaining young boys that were with this crew, Neil Nunley, he was described as being about 14 years old. Although I would take any of these ages with a grain of salt because the memories are fuzzy there. He was supposedly the one who said, look up in the tree, maybe the first person to see the drone or the sentinel or the, or the being, whatever that was. And he's described as pretty bright and intelligent. He's also the one that said, you know, we need to get something for the geological survey. So this was, you know, maybe a science minded kid, even at a young age. We also had Teddy Neil. He was with that group. He was young as well. And Tommy Heyer is the youngest one who was described as quote, just a little squirt at the time. So short and hardly saw anything as a result. But he was with the group that went up there. And then the dog, I mean, we all talk about the dog that ran up and supposedly, as according to Ivan T. Sanderson, quote, immediately set up a howl and took off practically to the speed of light down to the village and was subsequently found having vomited all over a veranda and subsequently died, end quote. But Ed May himself was like, no, that dog was fine. That's a misinformation. We dug out a lot of groundhogs with that dog after that. But that's the whole crew that went up the mountain. I wish we knew the dog's name. I know there, there was some implications that the dog's name was Richie, but I don't think it was. I don't think it, I probably didn't have a name if it was a community dog. Yeah. So, you know, there's all kinds of misinformation out there. I didn't want to say, well, it was called that because I don't think it was right. Exploring the unknown is what makes Astonishing Legends so much fun. But when it comes to dinner, nobody wants surprises. Marley's Spoon helps you eat well without overthinking it. 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Success starts with your drive, and American Public University is here to fuel it. With affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs, APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward. Whether you're changing careers, starting fresh, or pursuing a lifelong passion, our programs are designed for people who never stop. You bring the fire, APU will fuel the journey. Learn more at apu.apus.edu. I'm General Josh Makowski, owner of Karma Tattoo Studio in Erie, Pennsylvania. And when I'm not laying down some sick ink, I'm listening to Astonishing Legends. Now let's get back to the show. So now we get down to the aftermath and the illness. We just wanted everybody to understand who this group of people was. Again, we have Kathleen May as an adult who was present, and then we have the next oldest person being Gene Lemon, theoretically in the National Guard, or soon to be in the National Guard if he wasn't already. There is stories that several of the members experience severe illness, including nausea, vomiting, convulsions, and throat irritation for weeks. These symptoms were compared to mustard gas exposure in the newspapers. And there are stories saying that Gene Lemon was particularly ill for two weeks and having difficulty swallowing. But there's going to be some contradictions to that later. So just put that in your back pocket for now. Let's talk a little bit about the official response to this. The local sheriff, for example, Robert Carr, he investigated the incident. And he had been out on a similar call that night concerning what was supposed to be a small airplane crash that somebody had seen in a nearby area. And he went hunting and couldn't find any evidence of a plane crash or a fire. So that lends credence to the idea, as some of the more professional skeptics like Joe Nickel have said, well, it's because it's a meteor or it was like a slow-moving bolide or something like that. And the reason there was no crash is they thought it was an airplane crashing, but in fact, it was something that just never made contact with the earth. It either burned up or, I guess, skipped out of the atmosphere or something like that. So that lends a little to that. Then there was, as Forrest said, the National Guard or the Air Force dispatched this team, a crack team of special forces personnel from the West Virginia National Guard that the Air Force sent over, which I'm not sure exactly how that works. But that was led by Captain Levitt, L-E-A-V-I-T-T. And they supposedly searched the Bailey Fisher Farm all night. And apparently they found a ground impression approximately 20 feet in circumference where something had seemingly landed. And they found a greased type substance in the grass that smelled of burnt sulfur. And supposedly Captain Levitt was ordered to send all collected evidence post-haste back to Washington, D.C. to the Pentagon. Not too long after all this, Kathleen May, Fred and Ed's mother, later recalled receiving a mysterious letter from the Pentagon that claimed the UFO seen on September 12th were merely experimental rockets, in quotes, and ended with a warning to keep quiet and not tell anyone anything about the event, end quote. So here we get into the, I mean, this is the can of worms, right? This is the, well, who did that come from? Did that come from the men in black? Did it come from the government? Did it just come from some fruit loop that lived up the street? We don't know, but they send that to her and is this part of a big cover-up? It's like, don't talk about it because it's national defense related. We were testing something and it crashed, or are we covering it up because they live among us and we have to keep that a secret. We have a pact with them and all of that kind of stuff. Like there's that, that kind of stuff is just crazy. I don't think Kathleen made that up about the letter. The question is, where did the letter really come from? Right, right. Now it's like, uh, Jerry Betts, uh, getting, getting visits from strange people, uh, inquiring about the, uh, the sphere. But also what I love about this is that whatever this letter threatened, she immediately ignored it and then immediately went on to, uh, we, the people, uh, show a few days ago in New York, which they were not, they were not paid for the interview, but their expenses were paid for travel and launch. That's right. They got free travel, got to stay in New York. That was probably kind of fun. You know, it's not a place they had maybe gone to before. Yeah. That's a really good point. And at the heart of a lot of these stories, you get a strong woman like that, which is fascinating. And by the way, I do want to give a shout out to the Betts family. Jerry Betts passed away almost exactly a year ago, peacefully. And, uh, I just want to give a shout out to that because of our series on the Betts fear and still being connected to that family. So amazing woman, amazing woman. So, but anyway, yeah. So that's interesting about Kathleen and this letter from the Pentagon. There were samples taken from the field that they sent out for analysis, but local resident John Gibson said they'd never heard anything back. And the government's response was just some sort of a bogus answer. Later we'll hear that a local kid may have been driving his pickup around trying to see the site himself. And they were blaming, uh, the skeptics were blaming the oil, the presence of oil and anything else up there as coming from his 1942 pickup truck. Right. Oh, I forgot to say something earlier that I remember from Small Town Monsters about Kathleen May, uh, where Fred was talking about his mom and he was saying how there was this article that said that she, when they ran away, they ran so fast, it was a six foot fence and that their mom had jumped it. And he, he said in the Small Town Monsters film, he was like, she was athletic, but not that athletic. So it's just like, there's just all these details out there. I know, I know that the Fosbury flop, Dick was a Dick Fosbury and the, uh, the first one to kind of go over a, uh, the high jump, uh, shoulders first on his back. Uh, but yeah, no, that's, you know, there's a lot of exaggeration again. They're trying to sensationalize it, which the May brothers clearly state that was the case. And some articles, uh, I think we may have mentioned this, you know, they got the names wrong of the people, the kids that were there. That's still messed up all over the internet. There's just so many, cause one kid's first name is Neil and the last, the other one's last name is Neil spelled differently, but you're just like, it's just a mishmash of stuff. The list that I made for us to talk about here came from Small Town Monsters because they were talking to Fred and Ed May. They were there. If those guys don't know who was there, nobody does. So it's like, exactly. Yeah. Well, let's talk about these other connected sightings that were nearby. And this, uh, the first one that's most prominent is called the Snitkowski encounter. That's what we're calling it. This was on September 13th. The very next day, George and Edith Snitkowski were driving in an area not too far away and their car stalled out and they couldn't get it to restart. They smelled a noxious sulfur like odor. And then they saw as they were trying to figure out what was wrong with the car. I think George got out. He thought maybe it was on fire. He popped the hood. There's no fire. He was worried that something was wrong. Couldn't find anything. And then there was a glowing object off the side of the road in the woods or something like that. And then they saw a creature quote with no legs to be seen and the lower half being a solid form end quote. And this was on the road between Gassaway and Frametown there or Gassaway. I'm not sure how the locals pronounce it. I think Gassaway. G-A-S-S-A-W-A-Y and then Frametown, F-R-A-M-E-T-O-W-N. I thought those were typos. I looked them up. Those are real cities. So I just wanted to make sure I knew that. But, um, this evidence is noted as lending credence to the theory of multiple objects and strange creatures visiting West Virginia the night before and that night. And what's interesting about this is the similarities and the idea that maybe they saw the same thing or there was more than one being or the being came back or whatever this thing was. Again, a creature with no legs and the lower half being a solid form. There are other details surrounding the Snitkowski encounter that indicated that it had a reptilian bony head and a lizard-like hand that dragged across their car's hood. I'm pretty sure that's all fabricated sensationalistic press stuff. It also says that George got violently ill and their car restarted only after the creature drifted away, which I think is true. But, and supposedly those details were recounted by George in, um, Mail Magazine in 1955. So I'm more inclined to believe the simpler one, but I was like, why are you believing any of this? UFOs and aliens and whatever, you know, if you believe any of this at all, as we say, but it is interesting that that was their report just a day later. And, um, that is in addition to a couple of pilots who were flying that night who saw large unknown craft streak past their planes and a United States Air Force B-29 bomber crew reported in, uh, Charleston same night, a fleet of bright metallic objects racing past their plane for up to 15 minutes. So there's a lot going on that night, but again, is everyone just seeing a meteor shower? And we'll, we'll come to that when we start to talk about the explanations, but there was another sighting for us, uh, which, uh, do you remember seeing about that, uh, that interview in the small town monsters documentary? Yeah. Uh, so I alluded to this a little bit earlier here, being part of other stories connected. And again, these are classic details and you could say, well, people have heard this from, uh, you know, from other encounters and tales and fate magazine and, and newspaper articles that go viral, uh, as viral as they did back then. And just borrowing all these details, but like the car stalling, that's such a common thing. The sulfur smell tracks with the night before and a noctuous odor, the sulfurous residue that was left at the site, the landing site, uh, or, uh, as Ivan Sanderson, I think said is that he smelled it when you get your face up close to the grass and that's like, well, then, then, uh, you know, that's grass. It smells like that anyway, is, uh, some, uh, yeah, there's a native grass to the area that apparently has that smell, a sulfurous smell. He has a little bit of an odor like that. Yeah. So, uh, you know, and then the gelatinous goo that, uh, was, was there and all the oil. And the only thing I could think of, you know, when they're talking about the oil is that if that pickup had lost that amount of oil, uh, the rods would have blown, you know what I'm saying? It's like cars drip and leak oil, but if you've lost that amount, uh, yeah, you're going to blow the engine. Well, this account here that is, uh, told by the granddaughter of Audra Harper, who I was talking about when we were talking about the dirt roads and how rural this place was, that account comes from Ashley Teeths and she appears on camera in the small town monsters documentary. And that was her grandmother. So she relays her grandmother's tale, uh, which is very pressed upon her to remember, uh, very clearly that Audra Harper, and this is Kathleen May's cousin. Yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah. So related, and again, a small little town here, she encountered a ball of flame that floated and then winked out in her words, ball of flame, winked out. And then get this, it transforms into a black figure three times as tall as a man. Now, this is what we were talking about earlier when people would routinely walk several miles, in this case, five or six miles just to go to the store when the roads are run it out. And you couldn't easily get a, uh, a passenger car over them. So this happened while she was walking one evening and she believed whatever she saw had been part of the Flatwoods event. So she thought definitely was connected. Well, it was the next day. So come on, probably, uh, if that, then this kind of a thing here. So in any case, her testimony here from her grandmother's story was that, uh, her grandmother was going through a box of old papers and she said, oh, hey, take a look at this. Uh, you need to read this. And Ashley says, well, what is it? And he says, well, I wrote it down when I was about your age. And what it was is she type wrote out a story of her encounter. What happened. Exactly. What happened. And it's three pages and, uh, she just typed out and, you know, you can read a little bit of it. If you see in the documentary, it's like, well, I'm not, I'm not a writer, but I needed to get this down. And she talks about her experience then and how the, uh, you know, the dirt roads would get rutted. But she said at this time here, it wasn't dark out yet. It was about twilight and her and her friend were going to the store and they had to cross through this field and they started down into the field and then they thought what looked like a campfire up on the hill. And so, um, there's always campers or I think a fox chase. Not quite sure if they, if I got the note correct on that, but you know, it was something natural, normal. And then they get a little bit further and then this, whatever it was, turns into a huge ball of flame and it floated off the ground. And that spooked them because then they knew it's something unusual. It's not a campfire. Before they could even turn away, they said it winked out. And then there appears this big black figure, you know, again, three man lengths, three body lengths. And she says she couldn't tell what it was, but she knew it was black. There was no color to it. That scared the crap out of them. So they, they screamed and ran away. They were running so fast that there was a barbed wire fence that, uh, Audrey couldn't even remember getting over it. They just tore through there. And then they come to a gate and as you were explaining earlier, she said, uh, and this is a scary horror movie part of this. Right. You know, they always look back, never look back. Well, you gotta look back. And, uh, her friend opens the gate, grandma runs through it. And, uh, then her friend says, oh my God, it's right behind us. This is the other thing. Her grandmother was trying to close the gate, which also makes me laugh. She wrote down, it was like, she wanted to latch the gate. I'm like, I love also the idea that like a giant three human being tall being is chasing you. And you think you could just latch a gate and it's going to stop it. Well, you never know what it's going to, gates are very, uh, spiritually important. I'm not being facetious here. That's true. That's true. We've talked about that. Doorways, gates, uh, whatever you can, but that's what you do in, in every movie you see when somebody's chasing you, then, you know, you go through the kitchen and then you knock over a shelving full of pots and pans. Yes. Right. You gotta, you gotta put some roadblocks up there to slow them down at least. So I can understand that. So she's also being polite, a nice Southern lady just being polite. Now you can't come in here. Right. Uh, well, somebody else's field, but they, uh, they said the field before them was. That's true. That's a rule in the rural areas, by the way, that's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up because if, if they have livestock in the fields or whatever, you don't ever leave the gates unlocked. So that's a super valid point, which I should have taken into account before I made my glib remark. So. That's a good point there. But yeah, I stand in there panic, you know, when something that crazy is chasing you and it makes me think of the, our encounter in Alberta, Canada. I remember for one of our Halloween stories where he just got on his horse after shooting this, whatever this thing was in the field and not looking back and doing a full gallop back down to the barn, uh, back down to the ranch house. Well, in this case, the field that they're going to cross was so full of rocks and boulders, uh, you could barely walk over it. As she says, without stubbing your toe, but they just broke for hell or high water and they just ran through there and they never saw anything that was chasing them after that. Like it just, whatever it was, stop there. But as you were saying before, after that day, she would not even go to the store. She would not cross that way again or that field, you know, that was it. Like I should, she would just would not go to the store. She'd wait till it was daylight or somebody could drive her if she couldn't walk there. So it scared her that badly. And, uh, she knew like, this has got to be connected. So, and then another account, this comes from Weston, the town of Weston, which is about 11 miles away. And this is a, from a 21 year old girl who was hospitalized for three weeks after seeing a figure of the same description, whatever this large black character was, and it was emitting a similar odor. This is a week before the May family's experience. So again, also something very common we see is that sometimes it's just the one encounter with some strange intruder. And sometimes they pop up all over if you do a little digging and somehow they're all connected. It's kind of like, uh, reminds me of, uh, the Momo encounter, the Momo monster in that, uh, you thought like, well, it's just some one, you know, it's always some couple out. They saw some kind of muddy thing or somebody goofing around and it's like, no, there were a lot of counters before and then after that, but with varying descriptions of different colored fur and this and that. So again, and also like the moth mat, it's not just the one showing. So that was a couple of things that were going on around the same time. And like I said, continuing on since then, uh, there's a phantom wagon that appears on the highway and occasionally, I think there's still lights in the sky that happen that people report, but no big flap like this. That's that well documented. And, uh, you know, just speaking about the aftermath here, I don't think anybody ever reported seeing something like that more specifically ever again, or if they did, they didn't tell anybody. Well, we did talk about the law enforcement response already. Another character that's prominent in this story is a Lee Stewart jr. He was the editor of the Braxton Democrat at the time. He's the one that said he saw skid marks and an odd gummy deposit the next morning in the area where the craft supposedly landed, which UFO enthusiasts attributed to a saucer landing. Again, a recent term at that point, uh, the word saucer for flying saucer, they did find an impression that the national guard did, which we talked about earlier in that substance, which they got no results on. Now the media just blew up on this. It got national attention. It was a rated number 11, the story for the year by the national press services. There were hundreds of phone calls, reporters and UFO writers who like, we're going to talk about here in a minute. Gray Barker showing up, Ivan T. Sanderson, they all came to Flatwoods. And here's something interesting about this, just to remember Flatwoods is about 100 miles east as the crow flies of Point Pleasant. And that would be the future sighting of the Mothman, but not for 15 more years. 15 years after this is when the Silver Bridge collapsed in, uh, 67. So we also mentioned the appearance on We the People. That was Kathleen May, Fred and Ed's mother, Eugene Lemon, the young national guardsman and A. Lee Stewart jr., the newspaper editor from the Braxton Democrat. They were all on that. And Stewart is the one that did the most famous picture of the Flatwoods monster. And that's the one that everyone who knows an image recognizes. A lot of investigators that have looked into this over the years, even the ones who are skeptical about it, do believe that the witnesses were genuinely frightened and that the sighting itself was not a hoax. All of the theories, all of the skeptical points of view are just saying, well, their perceptions were distorted by extreme anxiety and fear that they were confused about what they saw. Uh, we're going to tell you what you saw. Cause you didn't see what you think you saw. It had to have been this cause you were so scared. And before we go any further, I did want to mention for people who are legend trippers and stuff like this, the Bailey Fisher farm is no longer available to visit. So don't go there looking for it. It's now private property. Access is restricted. We've already mentioned this, but the Oak tree at the center of this story died a long time ago and is gone. So there's, you're, you're, you're unlikely to even find that, but you'd have to be trespassing to do that. So, uh, we wouldn't recommend it. Trespassing on someone else's farm is a good way to get shot. So just for that. So, uh, you know, but definitely if you want to go and check out Flatwoods or go to the festival, absolutely would recommend it. It's going to be amazing. They have it every year. It's not something you want to miss, but I want to circle back for us to this cast of characters, the writers that are people that who have been listening to our show for 10 years or more now we're, we're closing in on our 11th year. They're going to know some of these folks from our coverage of the Mothman. Again, this that's 15 years later that that story is going to happen, but some of these folks were on the scene for this and that would be Gray Barker and Ivan T. Sanderson. Now, Gray Barker, we talked about extensively in our Mothman series. He is the father of the men in black concept. He is the guy that created that all men in black stories lead back to Gray Barker's writing about that. But the interesting thing about Gray Barker, he wrote for, uh, Fate Magazine a fair amount back then. And he wrote the Flatwoods story for Fate Magazine back then. He also published the infamous book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers in 1956. And he also wrote in 1970, The Silver Bridge, which linked the Silver Bridge collapse to the Mothman. And that actually predated, uh, the Mothman prophecies by Kiel by five years, which is fascinating. Also, for instance, I wanted to tell you, I just procured a copy of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, first edition, not in very good condition because I couldn't have afforded that, but I found one for $45 and it's almost linked to me. Wow, okay, that's a deal. Sure. Yeah. So I'm looking forward to getting it. I don't mind when they're worn. You know, Rich had them with all his fancy books and their plastic jackets and like, you know, I don't mind if it looks a little old or, you know, it's inscribed to someone else or whatever, but that's mostly because I can't afford them rich. I like the, a well-worn copy from someone else who enjoyed the book. And sometimes I like to see what they underlined. Yes. Pencil pen or highlighter. Yes. Yes. There you go. So that I can't wait to read it actually. I'm surprised I didn't have it. But one of the things about Gray Barker that I wanted to say, again, going back to our Mothman series, which a lot of people at this point may not have heard because it was so long ago, is that Gray Barker and John Keel were essentially competitors for the same kind of eyeballs and readers and magazine publishing venues. They're all trying to get their work out there. And Gray and John are two very different folks in terms of their approach. Gray seemed to be okay with making things up. He himself described his writings of the time as kooky books in quotes, that he didn't believe any of it. And he viewed it as a game to make money. He was known as a prankster and a hoaxer. He would engage in deliberate hoaxes to deceive UFO enthusiasts, sometimes publishing fictional material as fact for sensationalism and sales. And the other thing that he famously did was apparently pranked John Keel more than a few times. He would pretend to be a men in black or he would make phone calls and give cryptic messages to John Keel. And Keel was like, this is all fun and games and that's fine, but you got to watch out a little bit. There is some danger here. And we mentioned this in the Mothman series, but Keel actually had an event happen to him with some folks that came to his apartment. You wanted to remind our listeners about that story that was never published anywhere. And he, and he asked, he advised Barker to pay attention, to be careful. Well, this is one of my favorite anecdotes. And again, going back to the podfather, I believe I first heard this in an interview with Jim Harreld on his Pernamal podcast. And it was an interview with Brad Steiger, who's just endlessly entertaining and full of information. And, and I just respect him for all these guys, actually, just because they, they went out there and they got the information. And as a note to a gray Barker, kind of the same thing. And I don't know if that was, I mean, you can speculate about this. We don't know about the man that was really going on inside his head, but if you want to do some kitchen counter psychotherapy here, maybe it was a way to buffer himself for respectability to be taken seriously to say, well, yeah, this is all just to kind of sell books. And I think there was genuinely some aspect of that. It's like, it's making him money. Maybe he really didn't believe in all this stuff, but he actually did go out and get a lot of these, these interviews with people. He did the legwork and I guess it's kind of a long ways to go, or at least maybe it's just part of that game, but he did a lot of work that is kind of seminal. Like you said, in collecting these anecdotes and interviewing people and researching these sites and putting these books together. And he may not have believed in it, but you can take his data. Again, if it was transcribed and noted, reported on correctly as accurate, then it is worth something. Yeah. But I just want to say about Barker, remember he's the one that we're pretty sure fully fabricated the story about the Mothman chasing the blood mobile to get the blood. Well, those were the things that you have to take with a grain of salt. And honestly, to me, it's okay to mix a little camp with these stories. It is entertaining and it's kind of fun and it's a cool genre in that way, but it doesn't mean that real things aren't at the heart of it. And that was the difference between Barker and Keel. And Steiger was in a whole nother, you know, none of these guys are with us anymore, by the way. Brad Steiger was on Jim's show, but he has since passed away. They were all in different lanes, but on the same highway, you know? So that's the best way to look at it, I think. This anecdote supposedly I think happens to John Keel in New York, I believe in his apartment, it was relayed to his good friend, Brad Steiger, and was never published anywhere. And then Brad Steiger tells this to Jim Harreld on his podcast, the Paranormal Podcast. The story goes that Keel just, you know, was in his apartment. He comes into the living room and now there's three guys just standing there and the doors were locked from the inside. They just appeared. Now he did not see them materialized. They were just there. He's like, what the heck are you doing here? And they told him, you got to back off on this investigation stuff you're doing. It's not good. It's dangerous. You know, this could be harmful to you. Basically just a big strong warning from these three imposing guys. And, you know, John Keel did not shy away from this stuff very easily. And he said, look, I don't know who you are and how you got in here, but you know, this story has to be told. This is what I do. I'm a reporter, you know, an investigator. And how do I know that you even know anything about this? And I think basically on that challenge, one of the guys then goes into his kitchen, reaches under the kitchen cabinet, under the sink, grabs a bottle of bleach, comes out and proceeds to drink the whole bottle of bleach, or at least some of the bleach, enough bleach. Right in front of him. Right in front of him. And so it's Sean Keel's own bleach. So he knows, you know, the guy didn't bring it with him, which is an odd thing also to do to prove that you're something different, maybe non-human or maybe robotic, like the wire hanging out from your pant leg. You're some kind of android. So he grabs it and he chugs some of this bleach, at least a little bit. And that gets Keel's attention. He's oh, okay. All right. And he said, yeah, this is just a warning. Yeah. Don't continue with this. You can knock it off. And so, okay, thanks. And I can't remember what else happened, but basically I can't remember if Keel goes into another room where they told him to, and basically they just kind of vanish from his apartment. So that was the main highlights. One guy drinks bleach and lives through it, whatever that guy was. But it's typical men in black. I'm not even sure they were even dressed in all black. It was just three kind of imposing weird looking characters that just showed up. So that was told as fact to his buddy, Brad Steiger, who then related. I guess there's a quote from Keel saying to Gray, you know, you got to watch out because you don't know what you're dealing with here. These people play for keeps. Yeah. And so it's a little bit of a warning to Gray. And so you got to decide where you're at with these guys. Well, you know, John Keel's a full believer. Gray seems to be a partial believer or maybe not believing any of it at all. But once he got in the mix, things change. So the interesting thing about this though, is that Keel never published this. He told Steiger this story, according to, you know, Steiger relaying it on Jim's show. So a lot of fascinating stuff there going on. Exploring the unknown is what makes Astonishing Legends so much fun. But when it comes to dinner, nobody wants surprises. Marley's Spoon helps you eat well without overthinking it. Each meal is chef designed, made with quality ingredients, and balanced so you feel good about what you're eating. With over 100 recipes to pick from every week, there's always something new to try, whether you're in the mood for a comforting classic or something a little more adventurous. Marley's Spoon adapts to your life, from breakfast to dinner, and even those in between snack moments. The subscription is simple and flexible, so it fits your schedule no matter how busy things get. Go to marleyspoon.com slash offer slash pod 45 for 45% off your first order and free delivery. 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You bring the fire, APU will fuel the journey. Learn more at apu.apus.edu. I'm Sarai Sosi, and this is Astonishing Legends. Let's get back to the show. All right. So before we get into our conclusions here, Forrest, I think it's important for us to look at the skeptical side of this story, which is really fascinating to me. And I just want to make clear to our audience here, we have some folks that get upset. When we get upset with the skeptical approach, I want to come out and say, first of all, that's part of the fun. It's fun to debate this stuff. It's fun to respectfully debate it with, you know, I wish we could talk to the people who had written these things. Joe Nickel is a prominent skeptic who we respect. He passed away, I think, just last year, and was a really amazing guy, and always respectful of people on our side of the fence that like to lean into these things more. But he wrote a lot for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. And we read an article that he wrote about this. It's one of the most prominent ones, refuting what happened here. So let's get into a little bit. There's a lot of people, it's like, oh, well, this is meteors. A lot of the locals themselves and early investigators, including Air Force personnel, believed that the initial light was a meteor. And supposedly, a meteor was observed across Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia on that night, and that passed over Baltimore around 7 p.m. So a lot of people might have seen that. And there was this implication that the landing was an illusion because the meteor disappeared over the hill. Now, here's the thing where I have a little bit of a problem with this particular theory. One of Joe Nickel's theories was that the pulsating light that they saw, and that another witness saw from a distance, was a plane beacon. And that it was up on a tower, and there were three such beacons visible from the hilltop, according to Joe Nickel. And he thought maybe a misperception relating to fear, lack of perspective could cause a distant beacon to appear as a hovering, pulsing object. And so, you know, these are the kinds of things we love to drill down on for someone. Let's dig into this and see what we can find out about these beacons, particularly in the West Virginia area. And we found an amazing website with a list of beacons called thesurveystation.com. That's thesurveystation.com slash airway hyphen beacons. All right. So if anybody else wants to look at this, we'll have the link in our show notes. They have all these files and tables on these old beacons, not only the red lights, but for everybody who has TikTok and Instagram, and what is this thing on Reddit, who have seen the big concrete arrows that people are always like, what is this thing I found in the desert? It's a giant concrete arrow. Those were original navigation aids for airplanes, and they're still out there. This list shows where all those arrows are too, the ones that are still left behind. But it shows where the airway beacons are. I was able to download a KMZ file, which goes into Google Earth and gives you an overlay that shows where the beacons are around Flatwoods. And I put pins on them on our version of Google Earth. And then the Bailey Fisher Farm is, you know, you're not allowed to go there anymore. And it's so I'm not going to say exactly where that is, but we know where it is. And we took a look at that. We put a pin in that. And then I was trying to take a look at where the beacons were that might've been confused, according to Joe Nickel, by these panicking folks. And so the closest one is 1.89 miles away from the rough center of the Bailey Fisher Farm. The next one is about five or six miles away. And then the next one after that is 23 miles away. So there's, I disagree with Nickel that there's three in the area that were visible from where they were. I think two, maybe if the third one at 23 miles away, maybe, but with the curvature of the earth and the altitude of where they were and where that other beacon was, I'm not convinced, but I haven't been there. I want to be clear on that, but it just seems crazy. So the closest one is 1.89 miles. There's a couple of things that I want to say about that. The counterpoint to the skeptical assumption that these guys were looking at a beacon. And one of them is that's a red light that's flashing all night, every night in the same spot that every local person from their house, from wherever they live, they know where that is. I know, cause I know where every beacon is around where I live. And even on the road trips that I routinely take, whenever I drive down to the beach in North Carolina and back to my home after dark, I know where every radio tower is. I know where to expect to see these things. It just seems like I can't imagine the panic I would have to be in to think that one, two miles away was somehow a pulsing object very close to me that I thought was a UFO. I just am not seeing it. And I think it's a little bit reductive to say that these folks, the May family and all these folks that live there a half mile from where they were, wouldn't have recognized this beacon or the other witness who said that he saw a pulsing light that got dimmer and dimmer and dimmer, and then winked out, which is another thing that beacons don't do unless it's the daytime and you're turning off because the sun's coming up. So that's my thought on that. I just don't, I don't think there's any credence to the idea that they mistook a beacon any more than it's, you know, Venus. I don't know. What do you think, Forrest? Well, first, it reminds me of the rational explanation of the lighthouse being the source of the red light floating through the woods in the Rendlesham case. Right. Because now we're going to get into this, you know, in a little bit here, but that's all you got from a rational viewpoint is that these, you're trying to pull these things in that are real and solid and mundane to fit this crazy story. And as with Rendlesham, and I've talked about this a lot, I shouldn't really memorize who this, uh, the skeptical investigator was, but they're saying that the, uh, you know, what the military saw, Colonel Holt, Pendleston, and, uh, all the people that were at Bentwaters, the personnel on two, over two nights, successive nights around Christmas, the red ball, uh, orb that was floating through the woods, what they saw was the lighthouse and not realizing, well, the lighthouse doesn't point the light back at the lab and the lighthouse would have had to walk several miles from its position to be able to do that. But that's all you got the walking light. Right. And so in this case here, uh, you have some possible light sources and I understand that like, you know, that's all you have, but from what you've calculated and you saw on the maps there and from what the eyewitnesses said, it's like, that's not very likely, but that's again, that's all you have. That's kind of my big point here. Uh, that's the only major light sources. You're trying to make it fit. And so here, but like you said, the third beacon there is really probably too far away. I know they're elevated or can be, but it's really, uh, you're going over terrain and trees and landscape and it doesn't sound very likely. Also the distance from the other ones, it's not going to be that bright. So it's not as they describe where like these were fiery orbs coming out of the portholes on this machine being and scanning with beams of light nearby to see what was going on or this thing lighting up like a Christmas tree after, uh, 11 turned the flashlight onto it. And so it just doesn't fit everything else. And you have to, then you have to throw over the side, all the other descriptions from the eyewitnesses as being so far off the mark that what they saw were these beacons and their minds made in the rest. And I just want to point out, I was just looking their horizon for a person, you know, five to six feet tall standing at the edge of the ocean. The horizon is about three miles away. So now we're talking about hilly country here and you can be on elevated land and this is hilly country in West Virginia, but it's fairly consistent. The variance between the low points and the high points. So, which probably averages out to not too different in this immediate area anyway, to flat ground, if you look at it. And so the idea that a beacon that was 23 miles away was visible seems unlikely. The two mile one, yes, the five or six mile one, even that one should be on the edge of it. But again, this is a group of people, including, you know, an adult woman at 32 who saw something right in front of them. In what world does panic make you think that something two miles away is right in front of you? Yeah. That's just seems like such a stretch to me. This is all speculation by people many years later, decades later, who, who weren't there. They're just going off of descriptions and information that's probably wrong to begin with or not completely accurate and not totally from the source. So you're trying to gauge, you're trying to frame, uh, an explanation here, starting off with bad information. Exactly. And that's the, and that's something that we'll say clearly is, you know, eyewitnesses have different accounts. These people were all different ages. They were interviewed over the years. They all saw different things. They probably had different levels of panic. Some of them were calm. Some of them were freaked out. So everyone is telling a different story. It's the Rashomon thing. They're all experiencing something different, but whatever's at the root of it. And in that case too, it seems highly unlikely that one thing would fit the mold for every single person that was there. So that's another thing. We're talking about seven people. They're all confusing an aviation navigational beacon. They're all confusing that for a UFO that's in close quarters to them. It just seems like a stretch. Now we, we did talk about like the skid marks and the, and again, it was Max Lockard who was driving his 1942 Chevy pickup around there that they're like, well, this was that let's write this off. He went up there to look around and it left so much oil on the ground. That's what it was, which they mailed the sample off and didn't hear back of. Gray Barker would like got there a week later, but he couldn't find any trace of the oil or the marks that he were there. He thought could be from all the people that went to see the site, but plus it had rained a ton. We also come back to the pungent mist, the sulfurous smell. That could have been a lot of different things. There was an abundance of this grass in the area, but usually you wouldn't smell that unless you got down close to it. Right. That's what Ivan Sanderson, according to Joe Nickel, admitted that Sanderson said, well, yeah, you can smell it. It's abundant in the area. I'll admit that, but you have to get your nose down close to it. It's not like it's a pungent miasma floating through the air. Right. Unless maybe something interacted with it, a hot surface or a cold surface or a depression or like some other thing came down and it might've triggered, you know, just like a lawnmower releases the odors of grass that you wouldn't normally smell until they get cut. So is that a possibility? I mean, it's as possible as these other ideas, in my opinion. Right. And, and same thing, uh, I think what the sulfur, you know, you always point out too, especially in these, uh, rural settings here, uh, the sudden smell of sulfurous, uh, gases or, or just a strong sulfur smell as with George and Edith on their night, they're having that really strong, uh, sulfury smell kind of come upon them and then leave and, uh, making them nauseous. Uh, here it's like these folks know what the smells are around them. Yeah. They live there. And there's a, yes, they're possibly, uh, yeah, there could be possibly a natural sulfur spring or cave nearby. It's common in West Virginia, but if it just suddenly belched out a huge cloud, that's one thing, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. And if it's a natural occurring odor, that's, uh, you know, it's a lot less, uh, pungent and concentrated and they would have known about that. So as, as well as other investigators that came there. So again, what was described by the, uh, experiencers doesn't seem to match up with something that's naturally emitting a sulfurous odor in that strong of a concentration. Heightened perception due to fear? Absolutely. Your adrenaline's pumping. You're seeing something that you believe, uh, is unnatural and frightening. And so, uh, your mind is, is racing to get, uh, literally it's head wrapped around it. Yeah. It's, it's like Andre the Giant did in the Princess Bride when he went to scare everybody, right? He put the big hood on and was like, oh, it was my way. And everyone got super scared. Cause they're like, oh my God, it's a giant, you know? So that's like. So in this case, it's something that they perceive to be very large, you know, and again, even, you know, Joe Nickel and many others will say like, no, I don't believe this is a hoax having talked to the people around them, but I, I do think they're incorrect. I, but I don't think they're making it up. So they did see something unusual. He'll, uh, he'll admit, but, but did they get every detail wrong? Some conflict, but that could very likely be from bad reporting around that time. And, uh, could also be from, again, it's you, like you said, the Rashomon thing, everybody's perceiving something different. If you want to expand that out into a paranormal framework, then you're asking, uh, is that the experiencer changing the experience? It's a little more tailored to each person's, the limits of their brain power and perception. Is it changing for them a little bit? There's enough there that matches up, that lines up that I think they're all seeing the same thing, not just the one thing. And if it's going to be something that we're going to talk about here in a second as being a natural culprit to this, I think they all would have had a more closely aligned description of this thing. Well, there is the additional idea that the, the folks who got sick from this, that was a physical effect brought on by being scared to death. Uh, it was consistent with hysteria and overexertion. Although some folks, I guess, compared people getting sick to exposure to a chemical agent like mustard gas. But the thing is the May brothers are like, nobody got sick. Right. That didn't really happen. So my thing, and I would say our thing really here at Astonishing Legends is like, why are we even addressing something that it's questionable if that was ever even a symptom or a part of this story? Exactly. So same thing with, uh, these, uh, latter day investigators, they're not going to the source. They're going off reports that are, you know, widely accepted here, but incorrect. And so, and then you're debating that and you're trying to knock those down. It's like, and that's fine, but those things didn't actually happen. So again, you're trying to add that to your quiver, right. You're trying, you're, you're at, you know, you're trying to make a list or a laundry list of like, well, this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. This is what happened. This is what happened. And a few of those things, or maybe even half or most of those actually didn't happen. Right. And well, this brings me to my favorite part of the skeptical argument against what these folks saw in the Flatwoods Monster. And that is the barn owl theory. So, uh, there was a time when our show wasn't that old and I would just say, you folks know what I'm talking about, but now at this point it's been out there 10 years. So there's a lot of you that may not have heard our series on the Kelly Hopkinsville goblins. That was a fun series that we did quite some time ago. And owls were thought to be the culprits there too. We'll come back to that in a second, but this is something that Joe Nickel came up with. And apparently the air force investigators agreed with now, of course you have to wonder Joe Nickel, no agenda other than being a skeptic and trying to take a rational scientific view of something like this. The air force, well, maybe they don't want whatever was really happening to get out there. They may have ulterior motives, but the barn owl is the culprit for them. The Tito Alba, what the suggestion was, was that up on this branch, the 12 foot branch up in the Oak tree, a barn owl was sitting. And what happened was that underneath it, maybe there was some kind of evergreen or tree that had a skirt like shape to it. And so when the group walked up on this thing, they looked up, they see the barn owl at the top and it has the ace of spades shape to its face and what looked like big white eyes and that what appeared to be a skirt or a formless body at the bottom was a shrubbery growing underneath the Oak tree branch. And that they were all so confused by this that they became scared. And so when this thing lunged at them or floated towards them, it was the barn owl jumping off the branch and flying down because it was startled and being protective of its area. I think it was not necessarily the time of year for hatchlings to be present. No. So it wouldn't necessarily have been defending a nest, but Nickel thought maybe it was a female barn owl based on the reddish brown plumage on their faces, which he suggested with a flashlight beam could appear fiery orange. And then with Kathleen May describing the claw-like hands, his suggestion was that that was the raptor's prominently extended talons gripping on a branch. So I have about 10 million problems with this. And again, I would like to reiterate, big fan of Joe Nickel, a lot of respect for him. Not mad about this. I love that. I want to debate it, but there's all kinds of issues. That's his answer for everything. Yeah. And to be fair here, as I said in the Kelly Hopkinsville series, being rational and a highly skilled critical thinker like Joe, that's all you got. That's the closest thing that you can come up with as a natural thing. So yeah, that's fine. Let me put it this way. In this case, it's like, okay, so you're saying it's an owl. All right. You've made your points here about trying to match up what Kathleen and the voice that they saw happen. And you're trying to, you know, the buzzing sound like the sizzling bacon and it's a constant hum. And then, well, that's a screech of the owl, the barn owl. And okay, let me put it this way. If the experiencer said what we saw was an alien, we think it's an alien or some kind of machine. Now I'm thinking of the mechanical owl from Clash of the Titans. I can't remember his name, but you know, some, some kind of mechanical thing, but like an alien. And it was about two to three feet tall and it was hovering or maybe perched a tree or something, but it was hovering. And then it had these glowing eyes and it came at us, it swooped down or, or floated towards us. And it had these, uh, claw like appendages that were short. And then, uh, it got wider or expanded and, uh, we were scared and it hissed at us and we ran away. And that's your explanation of the alien after this crash. And you said, that's what we saw. We think that's an alien. And then you have Joe Neal come in and say, no, that sounds like an owl. It was about what a foot wide, a half a foot wide, two to three feet tall at the most claw like things. I'm going to go with that. I'm going to go with the owl. This is not what they experienced or explained as having seen. And so it's just too much of a stretch for me because one is the proportions like, okay, what's a very large owl's head about the size? Maybe at the, at the most, it's the size of a cantaloupe, maybe a volleyball. What they're talking is something very, this thing's anywhere from 12 to 14, 15 feet tall. The head is proportionate. They didn't say it's a little tiny head, a little melon head on top of this giant V2 rocket shaped man body, uh, throwing in all of those descriptors. No, this thing is a, uh, a roundish head to portal, like where eyes might be, but kind of like glass portal things to see out of or, or beam out of. And it floated down towards them and there was something underneath it. Now, if this thing never moved and, and Joe said, well, it's just perching a tree because he has a drawing where he kind of lines up what they thought they saw with what the owl was. And the bottom half of this underneath the owl would be shrubbery, would be, uh, uh, bushes that look like a folds in a skirt or some kind of body underneath it that was tall. And the owl happened to be up high. It swooped out and made flapping noises, which we know owls are pretty silent predators. They don't really have a flapping noise when they flap their wings, but he's, they're dead silent to the, they are notoriously dead silent, right? The thumping that they heard the thumping coming from the machine. He said, well, that was a flapping of the wings. That doesn't really line up for me or biology. So it doesn't line up for science. Exactly. Right. So, so he's saying, you know, this is coming down and they, so my point is what they described as the face, uh, the eyes were beaming out light, not like eye shine or yellow eyes as you would see with an owl when you're shining a flashlight. These are, things are constantly beaming an orange, fiery orange light, scanning the, uh, the locale there. And the roundish face was what they described as a bright red or a blood red color, not a tawny dusky owl, female owl color with the feathers. And also as it's flying down, this is the proportions are off. It's just totally off. It's way off. And so this is not this thing. This is not the size of an owl, especially like what Joe said, uh, we'll swoop down at them. It's like, well, then the shrubbery is not coming with it. You know what I'm saying? The shrubbery underneath it's not coming with it. So now it's just a bird. Also you shown a flashlight right on it. At what point do you start to say, Oh, that's an owl. Like what, how has nobody, the light shined on this thing. And when do you say, Oh, I'm looking at an owl. I'm Kathleen May. I'm 32 years old. I live in the middle of nowhere on the edge of Flatwoods, West Virginia. And I've never seen an owl before, even in a flashlight. And, you know, cause I don't know who knows, maybe Gene Lemon was a city boy. I don't know, but I kind of doubt it. I kind of doubt it. So that's the other thing. It's like, how are you confusing this for now at that point? But I want to come back to, I want to remind everyone Forrest that Fred and Ed May were like, this was mechanical at no point, any interview they have ever done. Did they say that they thought they were dealing with something organic? Right. One thing that is interesting though, when I did find this compelling, I'm going to put a point in Joe Nichols column here is when they were talking about the sounds that the Barn Owls make and the comparison between something, not this crackling bacon so much, or the sizzling which was, you know, as we said, consistent. The owls, the female owls do hiss sometimes when they're threatened. And I, and I couldn't find a public domain recording of that, but everybody just Google Barn Owl hissing and it comes up on YouTube. You can find it. There's some there, but I did find a public domain audio clip that we can use of the screeching that it makes the high pitch squeal, which is the same sort of thing they said they heard. So Sarah, if you'll, if you'll roll that clip for our listeners, I just want to warn everybody, this is a pretty disconcerting sound. Sorry. If you are going to sleep to our show, this is going to be a very unpleasant wake up when you hear this. Okay. Yeah. So sorry there. If it woke you up, that was a Barn Owl. I will say for me of all the things that Nichol posited those sounds, I'm like, well, that's a little bit interesting to me in terms of maybe some confusion. The other thing that forced you and I talked about offline yesterday was how do you sneak up on an owl? It is literally besides a cat, the perfect predator. I can't see six people walking through the woods or seven of what the final total was, but I can't see that many people coming up through the woods and surprising an owl enough for it to like become aggressive and swoop down off a branch. It's the owl is going to see him coming a mile away. That's another thing. I'm just like, I don't know how. And I said this to you yesterday too. I have owls in my neighborhood. I've been out walking the dog and have startled one tree, kind of small trees by the side of the road. And when I say small, I mean like 30 feet. One flew out of one tree and all it did was just fly over to the next tree about 50 feet away. Again, dead silent. The wings don't make a flapping sound because they're perfect predators. They make no noise. It silently went from one tree to the next. I walked right over to the next tree it was in. This is not a big tree. I still couldn't see it, but I knew it was in there. It saw me. I was walking my dog. That's probably why it went from one tree to the other. I just have a hard time with the owl of it all. And again, if you go to our Kelly Hopkinsville series, you'll understand why owls push a special button with us. But the idea here, especially with Fred and Ed saying this thing was mechanical, you know, and the other folks, they saw something different, but it's hard for me to check off. Oh, it's an owl. It's an owl. You know, even if the sound is similar, because I'm going to give Joe that. I do think that the sound there, there's something to that part of it. Right. It's similar, but with an owl, it's not constant and consistent and goes on for a long time. You know what I'm saying? These are the squeals and the hissing are in bursts and they could be coming at them. But what was described is it was a constant frying, sizzling sound, a buzzing, a hissing, a constant thumping. So there was no break in it. Well, this is a fascinating story to me. And I love that we finally covered it. It's such a big one. And like everybody's done it in a sort of rite of passage for our genre that used to be so small. There's a million shows now we're all doing this stuff and we're all, everyone's got to do Flatwoods sooner or later. But I feel like the ace in the hole for us was this outstanding research and witness interviews that Small Town Monsters did. Again, we encourage you to look for the Flatwoods Monster, A Legacy of Fear on their YouTube channel, which is available free, as well as some of their other older projects. They're just getting better and better every year. A special thank you to Courtney, the producer over there for sharing a transcript of that with us. But, you know, it's easy to dismiss this. And this is where we got to with Kelly Hopkinsville. It's like, well, you know, the skeptics, there was even a paper written on it where they're like, this was essentially a bunch of drunk hillbillies who don't know what an owl is. With the Kelly Hopkinsville Goblin, their house was under siege from lots of little creatures. And they were saying, well, it was a bunch of owls. But there was a lot of suppositions and assumptions made about the whole family being drunk, including people that were there that didn't drink or were too young. And a lot of other things. Go listen to that series if you want to hear more about that. But it's the same thing here. And it irritates me, being from the South, it irritates me a little bit when I feel like it's a bit reductive for, you know, the deep thinkers to come in and be like, look, these guys, you know, they went up there, they were scared to death. An owl scared them to death. And they were confused. And it was an aviation beacon two miles away that they thought was a pulsing object in front of them. And then, you know, you get the being that Ed and Fred described as mechanical. What was that? I see parallels there, Forrest, and I don't know about you, but with the attack at Cisco Grove, which we covered, look for that series, CISCO. These were robotic beings. We've encountered that before. The same thing with Pascagoula, which we just did when they talked about them having a solid lower half and floating. There's some parallels here, folks, with other encounters. Yeah, no, there's a lot of things that line up, maybe especially with Cisco Grove and some kind of robot being also with goggle-like eyes that were like portals described with light coming out of them. Again, not eyeshine. That one was so far off the mark. If you said that one was owls, I would have to laugh you off the premises. But yeah, in this case here, I get where you're coming from with that. But I have to keep in mind, as we all should, it's all about perspectives when you go to investigate this and the perspectives and logic and reasoning and boundaries of the individual investigator. And so if it's Ivan T. Sanderson, look, this guy was into cryptozoology, maybe one of the fathers of cryptozoology and hearing stories and having a sighting himself of some large clawed bird, like an extent extinct pterodactyl, I think in somewhere in South America that he saw personally, I believe that's correct, while on the river. And so in his mind, okay, that's my point being is that for him, that's on the table. It's like, okay, Al doesn't really fit with this, but could it be some other kind of creature that's in the area? Perhaps Sanderson could say like, okay, I'm not going yet with alien from another planet in a machine, but maybe it was something like the Van Meter monster, which was very large, pointed head, shot a beam of light out of its third eye, I guess, at people. Yeah. And it was creating light. That was in 1903. That was right in 1903. So he, boy, I don't know his writings all that well, but maybe he was familiar with that. So my point being is that for him, okay, not going with alien, but something strange from this earth that's paranormal, not supernatural, but paranormal that they saw that was in the tree and it kind of looked like it was gliding towards them or maybe crawling, but it did have, somehow it had bioluminescence. It's shown a light. It made this constant sound that was humming or hissing or like frying bacon. Could it be some kind of strange creature like that, that just coincided with a bolide sighting? For him, that's on his table. And I believe also, yes, he was into UFOs. So UFO alien thing and sentinel machine might also be on his table. For folks like Joe Nickel, people we really respect and we're not giving him any shade because that is their point of view. Or like Ryan Hopp, who wrote a very insightful, skeptical viewpoint as well on this case. He was talking about the truck and the boy driving the truck out there. And by the way, I get that. The truck maybe left skid marks. Maybe it was leaking a bunch of oil and it left that on the grass and people are looking for too much there. But it's sort of like that thing, Forrest, that you pointed out when we were covering The Conjuring House, when people were like, oh, with a ghost, it couldn't have been this ghost because that ghost lived up the street. And it's like, all right. Well, so we're saying that none of this could have happened because a truck drove in the field where the thing supposedly happened. It's too much throwing the baby out with the bath water and looking for that pat hand. If you're playing cards, it's like, okay, let's attack this thing, this thing, and this thing. No matter how kind of far out we're filling in the columns, well, check this one off. It's an owl. It was the truck. These are hillbillies who've never seen an owl before or heard one, even though they're clearly owls are going to be screeching all night long outside the May house. I'm sorry. That's just what, that's what they're going to be doing because of that house. I know where that house is. It's surrounded by woods. And so what, there were no owls near them, but a half mile away, there was an owl up there that they'd never heard that sound before. There's a lot of leaps there. Well, that's what I'm saying though about, well, take The Conjuring House. It's like, it couldn't have been the ghost of this woman. Okay. But forget that because you don't believe in ghosts, right? So that's not on the table. And that's my point is like, it can't, well, one, that's wrong for two reasons because that person didn't die there. They died three blocks away. So that's wrong. And then secondly, there are no such thing as ghosts. That's also wrong. So none of this fits. This has to be just, you're imagining things. And I understand that. Right. That's the other thing. It does the downstream checkoff. It's like, well, this was an airplane beacon. Therefore there could not be an alien because it was a red light on a tower two miles away that they saw. Right. So everything else is out the window. And it's like, oh, look, can we wait a minute on that? Because even if like, for example, the meteor, you can have meteors and UFOs on the same night, I think. I mean, is there a rule that says no? It's a meteor. So absolutely no chance any UFOs were in the sky that night because there were meteors. Right. But again, that's the edge of the table here. What I'm saying is that if you're an investigator of that ilk, you're drawing in everything from the edge of your table and the edge of that table stops at UFOs, stops at aliens, stops at crypto creatures, stops at anything that is not mundane and explainable. So what do you have then? Then you pull in, it's like, well, we've got beacons, we've got owls, we have a truck that's leaking oil, a lot of it, and leaving some kind of gelatinous, greasy substance that made the skid marks. And so some of those, okay, skid marks, sure. You go up there and then it's not really landing skid marks, but they look like tire tracks. You'd have to analyze it there at the time. And that would be easy, but not a week later when Gray Barker did it. Or years later, then you're going off of what Joe Nichols thing is that, well, this guy said it was his truck. And then others, as we see in the documentary said, there was no farming or lawn cutting up there. There was no farm machinery. Nobody was up there. There was no equipment. There was no equipment. There was no truck. And you have one guy and for whatever reason saying like, well, I did drive up there. It's like, okay, I'll grant you that. You know, some of these things may be right. Some of these things may be not part of the actual narrative of something strange, but for these folks, like that's the edge of the table. So it's not, it has to stop there because those other things are not real. There are no UFOs. There are no machines that make noises and hiss and wear skirts. There are no, it's gotta be an owl. That's the closest thing we have. And I said this in Kelly Hopkinsville, like that's all you got. So you're going to go with that and then make that fit within the points of the narrative. And then everything else they said that doesn't fit, well, they're just mistaken or they're wrong. But I understand that again, I'm not throwing any shade on that because that is a, it's a valid viewpoint of just like, well, these things don't exist. Like I understand that there's a lot of things I didn't think existed before. And then again, not seeing a whole lot of strange things in my years here, since the podcast started, but a few things that shouldn't have happened happened. And then you would say like, well, look, I'm not crazy. I don't think I was imagining things. I saw something a little strange that should not, you know, broke the laws of physics or, uh, you know, my perceptions, which were not off. I was not hallucinating that did happen. Other people saw it with me. So what do you do with that? It's like, well, then we almost have been imagining the same thing. It was a moment of mass hysteria of groupthink, group delusion. And, uh, you all were with a heightened sense of awareness and frightened. And, uh, you ended up seeing something that was just an owl. It's like, okay, then that's the last tug away from the edge of that table. You know what I'm saying? Like, and that's it. So you go no further from that. But if you're, you're like us and you have a room for more things on the table, it's like, then your perspective changes. It's like, okay, could this have been a craft or two, like you said, two separate things. They're not mutually exclusive. Could have been a bull light. And then this other weird thing showed up. Could have been a dog man there. You know, like there could have been something else weird, you know, ghosts and Bigfoot also show up that night. People just missed seeing them. Yeah. Well, like a lot of places around the country, uh, they could be described as thin places or just, uh, lands of enchantment like New Mexico. And, and, uh, obviously Ohio, we go back to a lot. West Virginia has its own handful of things. I think in every state and every place they just happen. And, uh, I wondered about this, like if this was some kind of a craft and a collection of them heading this direction over several States, why did they stop there in Flatwoods? What was the purpose of that? Was it intentional? Like I said, there was, there seemed to be maybe a crash of something before an unexpected, uh, mechanical failure. And they had to stop there and they sent out the Sentinel to check the place to make sure it was okay. Classic sci-fi stuff. You know, you send the robot out like the day the earth stood still, you've got the occupant and then you got a robot helper, which is maybe where, you know, some of the stuff, uh, overlaps, but maybe it's just natural. It's all kind of within this natural framework. And maybe there are some places where the veil is just extra thin for a little while and things pop out and then they pop back in again. That's going to wrap up episode 314 of Astonishing Legends. A very special thanks to Seth Breedlove, Courtney Swihart, and the Small Town Monsters crew for allowing us to lean heavily on the research they did for their amazing film, The Flatwoods Monster, A Legacy of Fear, which is available for free on the Small Town Monsters YouTube channel, along with a lot of their older projects. And look for their special on the Monroe Monster in just a few days on July 27th, 2025. It includes an account of a father-son encounter from May of this year. Links in our show notes. Our main show is currently on a brief summer hiatus, but always look for new episodes of the Dead Letter Office weekly on Tuesdays and keep an eye on our Patreon for more bonus content. Astonishing Legends is edited by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound. Our co-producer is Tess Feifel, who also leads our research efforts and manages our social media. And we're grateful for the hard work of our technical producer, Ed Vakola, behind the scenes. Special thanks to our announcer, John Bolin, for lending his voice to our shows. Hi, I'm Josh Shearer. Andrew, A-N-D-R-E-W. My name is spelled S-A-R-A-I. Doug, D-O-U-G. Hello, I'm General Josh Makowski from Erie, Pennsylvania. And I give permission to astonishing legends to use my voice however they see fit. Galaxy-wide in perpetuity. I understand this is with no implied promise of present or future compensation. M-A-K-O-W-S-K-I. Our theme, which is available as a ringtone, was composed by Judson Crane at FounderMusic.com. All other music and sound design for the show is composed and created by Alan Caressia. Our logo was created by Tommy Beaver Design, and our animated graphics for social media and YouTube are done by Joshua Sloan at DeadStreetProductions.com. Many episodes have transcripts available. For ones that don't, you can request them by emailing transcripts at AstonishingLegends.com. Astonishing Legends would not be possible without you, our listeners. Visit our store at AstonishingLegends.com or interact with us and other listeners on Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, Discord, and YouTube. You can also visit us at Patreon.com slash Astonishing Legends, where patrons have access to commercial-free versions of both the main show and the Dead Letter office, as well as additional bonus content, including the Patreon-exclusive show. Exploring the unknown is what makes Astonishing Legends so much fun. But when it comes to dinner, nobody wants surprises. 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By the time I hit my 50s, I'd learned a few things, like how family is precious. Work can always wait. And 99% of people over 50 already have the virus that causes shingles. Not everyone at risk will develop it, but I did. The painful, blistering rash disrupted my life for weeks. Don't learn about your shingles risk the hard way. Talk to your doctor or pharmacist today. Sponsored by GSK. Go the Astonishing Jump Drawer. No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. Exploring the unknown is what makes Astonishing Legends so much fun. But when it comes to dinner, nobody wants surprises. Marley's Spoon helps you eat well without overthinking it. Each meal is chef-designed, made with quality ingredients, and balanced so you feel good about what you're eating. 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