By Charles Lear
On September 12, 1952, a woman and six boys in the town of Flatwoods in Braxton County, West Virginia, reported that they’d had an encounter with a landed UFO and a strange creature. The woman, Mrs. Kathleen May, described the creature to a reporter as “a fire-breathing monster, ten-feet tall with a bright green body and a blood-red face.” She said the creature emitted an odor “like metal” that caused everyone to vomit for hours after the encounter. She added, “It looked worse than Frankenstein.” The witnesses all agreed that the figure had a red face with two openings like eyes that projected beams of greenish-orange light over their heads and that around the face there was a dark hood-like shape that came to a point like the ace of spades. The creature has become known as “The Flatwoods Monster.” By September 15, the case was reported in newspapers all over the country. It is likely that most readers are aware of this case, but many may not be aware of reports from nearby Wheeling, West Virginia, just a couple of days later.
On September 16, 1952, the Wheeling Intelligencer carried an article with the headline, “’Monster’ From Outer Space Arrives Here Via ‘Saucer.’” According to the article, the phones of the Wheeling Police and the Intelligencer were “kept humming” as “anxious citizens” called asking about a reported saucer crash and monster in an area near the Vineyard Hills Housing Project. Callers also asked if it was true that a policeman had had his arm badly burned and that the burned body of a woman had been found. The only mention in the article of an actual report from the callers is that “an unpleasant odor was produced by the monster.”
The writer of the article, Dent Williams, chose to report the news with an emphasis on humor. The ‘monster’ is referred to as “Bashful Billie” because, according to Dent, none of the callers had actually seen the “creature from fairyland” but were “passing on reports from people who had talked to people who had talked to people who had heard about the “Vineyard Hill Frankenstein.” Dent reports that Lieutenant Murphy didn’t send a patrolman to the area because “no members of the department are equipped with Buck Rogers’ rocket guns.”
What may be of interest to those familiar with the Flatwoods case is a report from two men and one woman. According to them, they were near Independence, Pennsylvania, and “were watching an airplane from Independence airfield when a ball of fire zoomed over the horizon.” They described it as being very small and said that it had no sparks trailing behind it. Wheeling resident William Downey is quoted as saying, “I’ve been watching every night since I first heard of flying saucers and I’ve never seen one, until tonight that is.” Around the time of the Flatwoods incident there were reports of fireballs coming into police stations and newspaper offices all over the southeastern United States. Flatwoods investigator Ivan T. Sanderson determined that there were six fireballs in total and speculated that they were spaceships that had started to malfunction over West Virginia due to its polluted atmosphere.
The rumored crash and creature of Wheeling, West Virginia might have been completely forgotten if not for Frank Feschino, Jr., who published a book about the Braxton County incident in 2012 titled, “The Braxton County Monster.” Feschino includes the entire Intelligencer article in his book along with an article from the September 16, 1952 Fairmont Times headlined “Green-Eyed Monster Again Reported Loose in State.” This article is a more straightforward account and includes the police explanation that the “rumors” came from the “active imaginations” of citizens who’d read the newspaper articles about the incident in Braxton County. Feschino speculates frequently throughout his book and states as fact that the Wheeling Police had actually discovered the burnt remains of the reported creature. Whatever the case, Bashful Billie lives on in memory.