Peeking into the Corners of 1952, Part Six

 

by Michael D. Swords

What happened at Flatwoods?

 

In 1952, the UFO phenomenon did not involve close encounters as far as the military experienced it. Some in the military wished that it did (so they could explain it), others were happy that it didn’t (for fear of what they’d find). CE2s were rare, and CE3s of any credibility were at least as rare. At Project Blue Book, Capt. Edward Ruppelt wished that he had something more tangible to go on. Then along came Flatwoods.

As the year stumbled into September, the UFO wave was still rolling and Ruppelt found himself in demand almost everywhere, every day. Therefore, he basically missed the Flatwoods event entirely. Just about dusk on September 12, 1952, a bunch of kids playing ball, the one adult (Kathleen May, the mother of two of them), and 17-year-old Eugene Lemon, all witnessed some very strange things.

Flatwoods is in rural West Virginia—lots of hills and trees and not a lot of people. Those folks are quite used to the woods and everything in them, and what they saw wasn’t any of that. What they reported was: unusual lights, a big pulsating light, a foul and dangerous mist, and a “monster.” The big light allegedly came down out of the sky and landed on a hillside, so it was a “UFO.” There followed the death of a dog, hospital treatment of a witness, and a general hullaballoo and search party.

Local authorities got involved, and so did the editor of one of the Braxton County newspapers. Thus, in a couple of days, the story that a monster had landed in West Virginia was out on the news and being read by civilians, writers, publishers, and the Air Force. In Charleston, West Virginia, Hugh McPherson, the main disk jockey at radio station WCHS, heard the report and put the word out. Clarksburg, West Virginia, resident Gray Barker saw the story in the newspaper and decided to go there. In New York City, True magazine publisher Ken Purdy told his main assistant John du Barry to tell zoologist and nature writer Ivan T. Sanderson to get over there. Who told who to do what on the US Air Force side, no one to this day really knows (strangely enough).

As we know, Gray Barker (left) was capable of being a completely non-serious nut, but this was very early in his UFO interest—before he became ufology’s court jester due, in my opinion, to the absurd behaviors of Albert Bender and “The Men in Black” paranoia. Barker went to Flatwoods and did a decent job attempting interviews and data gathering. To this day, some people use his report to learn about the case. You too can read it in the first issue of his zine, The Saucerian, for September 1953, pp. 8–21.

But the bulk of the useful information comes from Sanderson. In fact, if it weren’t for him, I think we’d have no chance at all of making any sense out of this. Fortunately, the Sanderson research files have been preserved and are in my archives for safekeeping. So, what’s in them?

Sanderson (right) was a young zoologist at the time, writing for a living and chasing “monsters.” Here, noted du Barry and True magazine, was a “monster.” New York and West Virginia are not impossibly distant, so Sanderson got in his car with a friend and off they drove. He was also in contact with two UFO enthusiasts, Earl Walker and Bert Ash, who happened to be chemists at Monsanto in South Charleston. (I used to ride the bus to high school past their plant every school day, and Hugh McPherson was also right there in Charleston. I suspect that he had something to do with getting people in touch.) Sanderson said that he couldn’t have managed this complicated case without the science-minded support of these two fellows. Together, along with the local newspaper editor and several young male volunteers, they examined the site and other areas nearby, interviewed every relevant person (individually and in groups), took pictures (one of the chemists was a photographer), and grabbed samples.

In the photo below, that’s Sanderson on the right, chemist Bert Ash on the left, and editor J. Holt Byrne (center) on the site in Flatwoods. Chemist Earl Walker took the photograph.

The testimonies, according to Sanderson, were quite consistent, both individually and with one another. They also differed from some of the early newspaper reporting, and the drawing of the monster particularly was off. Let’s list some of their findings and examine Sanderson’s drawings of the points of interest (below). 

1. The children said that they saw a pulsing object shaped like a pear go across the sky and land on a nearby hillside.
2. There the object continued to pulse, though all you could see from their vantage point was the pulsing once it landed.
3. They approached and saw the object had landed on its bulging end (black but pulsing red-orange) with a narrow top.
4. Nearby on its right was a thick, nasty, dark mist that stunk of a hot metallic odor and was very corrosive.
5. On the hilltop to the left was a thing of indeterminate height but tall. It had beams in its “head,” seemed to notice them, smoothly floated towards the object, and scared everyone into running “for their lives.”

 

Sanderson’s drawing of the landing site in Flatwoods, West Virginia

Sanderson speculates about a controlled landing

Object and monster (mist not drawn, but it would be a low black cloud to the right)

The monster seemed metallic (brown areas are glue discolorations)

Drawings of the monster by the five boys

Sanderson was confident that he was getting a straight story with no hoaxing involved (as time went on, no one believed that a hoax had anything to do with this). He had an adult and a near adult along with the kids, and he was impressed with the detailed spontaneous intelligence of several of the boys, including even the youngest. The main witnesses were all sure that the pear-shaped object traveled blunt end first and was red-orange when it pulsed. They were also convinced that it had landed just over the rise near them and when they went after it, there it was sitting upright.

There also seemed no way to wave off the reality of a nasty mist. After all, a dog who entered into it died two days later of apparent respiratory problems, and the young man who bent into it had serious repercussions from his foolish bravado as well. A lingering odor may have persisted several days, but that is uncertain (Sanderson thought not). So, what about the “monster”?

Sanderson, the zoologist, saw no obvious signs of biology here. What he had were five or more descriptions of some “thing” having a vague head-like bulb on top with two orifices from which beams of light came. There was some odd halo or helmet top on it, which had no clear function. There were no appendages, but rather a columnar-shaped “body.” The whole structure might have been 10 feet tall. It is hard to say, but when it moved it may have moved silently and almost like floating. Sanderson was rather serious about not pushing descriptions of things if he had witness descriptions to work with. And, when he speculates, he tells you.

The tree where the monster was seen

Sanderson and colleagues comb the hillside

What we have at this point is what is reasonable to trust on this case. An object was seen in the air and it landed. It was roughly pear-shaped and narrow at the top. It was black and pulsed red-orange even on the ground. A corrosive mist may well have accompanied it and lingered dangerously for a time. An entity that seems more robotic than biological (or maybe a shell-suit containing something biological) was visible uphill and separate from the UFO, and it moved to rejoin the UFO when the humans and their dog came close. After that, the narrative gets very speculative, and in my mind, goes far beyond the facts.

There are just a few more comments to be made about Sanderson’s field trip, and we can then examine the military action (or inaction).

We humans often seem to be just a small step away from becoming emotional lunatics in many of our interactions with the world. This trait manifests in the Flatwoods case by almost everyone getting fixated on the monster and forgetting the UFO. Sanderson did a little of this himself, but he was a zoologist and had already hunted large beasts in Africa and Central America for zoos, so he’s forgiven. But he did try to look for physical evidence in the field, as he was trained to do.

He did, and he didn’t, and he maybe did find traces. The “did” is for me the big deal. What he and others noted was a large (about 15 feet in diameter) rough circle of “jammed down” grass and leaves. Within this space were three pod-marks set in a triangle. I really wish he had drawn these but he didn’t. Forgive my attempts to reconstruct them in the drawing I completed (below).

Case drawings by Michael Swords

I have biases, but to me the focus on the monster defuses the obvious concreteness of this case. What do we have? A good multiply witnessed close encounter of the second kind complete with a landing trace and an intense set of interviews. We have secondary witnesses, almost immediate reporting and follow-up, fieldwork by a guy who is pretty much an expert in that, and—well, what’s the problem? Is it that the witnesses were just West Virginia hillbillies and so everyone assumes them to be stupid? As West Virginians like Tom Deuley and myself can attest, “stupid” is not the defining characteristic of someone who lives there; and to suggest, as debunkers did and still do, that we do not know about our own environment (mistaking owls for 10-foot-tall robots, for instance) is … well, who really is the stupid one in the conversation?

Sanderson went on to try to find more stuff on the ground—a good hunter looking for spoor. He searched hard for the alleged skid marks claimed to be existing 2–3 days earlier when the posse of townspeople raced up to the site just after the incident was reported. He couldn’t find them. He tried to find any leftover slick, greasy material also noticed then. No luck on that either. He searched that entire hillside and even went to another hill where the team felt they had a lead. At the second site there was maybe another trace that was not as obvious. There were odd-looking bits of white debris scattered around. Sanderson didn’t recognize this. It was sampled and tested later by the Monsanto labs and found to be some kind of calcium-based biological material, perhaps snake-related. Still not recognized. It was a mystery, but not one that really could be tied into the case. (Though Sanderson wondered what the stuff was for a long time.)

During the extra work, something did come up that might well have been important, but it was a single witness and distant. We can take it for what it’s worth. Another local resident, a farmer, was sitting out on a different hillside with a view to the landing site some distance away. He knew nothing of what was going on. He saw a glow coming from the hill. He went and fetched his binoculars. Aided by them, he saw the larger object sitting on the ground and pulsing. The object did not take off. Instead, it continued to pulse and get smaller and smaller, until it just went vanished. If this report is accurate, we’ve just taken a strange UFO case into High Strangeness territory. (Frankly I’m all for it in this case.)

The only other major thing that Sanderson found, which he felt particularly important (and I do not), was that there were several fireball reports from individuals nearby and in other states at the same time. This intrigued him, and he constructed a scenario where there was a small fleet of UFOs moving in parallel paths that crashed, or landed, or went on. To my knowledge, there are no reports indicating multiple objects rather than, say, one good fireball sighting. Nevertheless, Sanderson was amused by the idea, and it later served as the basis for a much wider theory (that I don’t support and won’t go into.)

Though I don’t buy the reckless UFO fleet crashing into West Virginia hillsides because of Monsanto air pollution (yep, weirder than believing in a robotic monster), leaving no known debris, this case, as a CE2t (landing trace and also a physiological effects case), is a lollapalooza for me. That this could be my West Virginia affections getting to me, I will accept. All the same, I like the case. But one big mystery still sticks in my craw: What the heck were the military doing in all this?

I don’t believe that we know (perhaps someone reading this does, and I would be interested). What we do know comes from a few of the standard historical sources that we have: UFO writer Donald Keyhoe (left), Project Blue Book chief Edward Ruppelt (second on the right), and USAF public relations officer Al Chop (first on the right). Air Force Intelligence officer Maj. Dewey Fournet gives us a small hint and another mystery, and there is one other fragment of information. Let’s sweep some of these scraps together.

Ruppelt didn’t even include the Flatwoods case in his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (though he knew that something had happened). Why not? What could possibly explain that misfire?

It can only be an opinion, but I believe that Blue Book had nothing to do with the case; it never came to them. Ruppelt was snowed with work at the time, and he didn’t trust anyone else at the Project except his assistant Lt. Anderson Flues to do a good job, so maybe the Pentagon didn’t even send them there. Ruppelt has a 3×5 card in his files that briefly lists seven cases wherein an entity might be involved. Next to “West Virginia” he types: “Monster was walking, let the Army have it.” That reads like a joke, and maybe it was, but it wouldn’t be completely unthinkable to pass a case off to another authority. The Army? Maybe not them, but some other group seems to have made an investigation.

This leads me to Al Chop and Donald Keyhoe. Keyhoe writes in his 1953 book (Flying Saucers from Outer Space) about a conversation between him and Chop about Flatwoods. Keyhoe knew of the case, as it was his business at the time, but why talk to Chop when Ruppelt didn’t know much of anything of it? The answer can only be that Dewey Fournet and the higher-ups in USAF intelligence do know a lot about it.

When he first contacted Al Chop, Chop denied any Air Force interest and mentioned that they had astronomers saying a meteor went overhead and the people just imagined all the rest. Keyhoe pointed out that that the sensational monster story was gaining traction in the press, so why not debunk it for good? Chop said they had already explained it with the meteor theory, and the attention span of the public would let it die out.

Keyhoe didn’t agree that it would die out, especially if the Pentagon came clean about UFOs. (As Chop had hinted, the top brass at this time were seriously thinking about releasing a positive statement on UFOs, the data in the Blue Book case files, and the Tremonton, Utah, film.) He brought up the Sonny DesVergers “scoutmaster” case from August 19 as an example of a case with scare potential. And Flatwoods “plants the menace idea ten times more than DesVergers’ story did.”

Chop waved that off. Why didn’t you send investigators over there, Keyhoe asked? Chop: it was a crazy report, and we don’t have the officers or the money to chase such things. Keyhoe thought that was unlikely, but Chop wouldn’t give in.

Keyhoe soon found out that the Pentagon had been quite interested and covered the case by secretive means. He learned that state police were involved and possibly plainclothes Air Force personnel. Elsewhere in the UFO literature are statements that the National Guard was involved (this became obvious as one of the photos of National Guard Captain Dale Leavitt (left) appeared publicly soon after). Captain Leavitt said there were skid marks and an oily substance on site.

Other information implicated the FBI and there were even hints of substances sent out for lab testing. Still the mystery remains cloaked. What did these other probes find, and why was this case buried by a Pentagon normally sympathetic to UFOs?

I think that the intelligence community was scared of the emotional impact on the public of genuinely alien UFOs. This cut (below) from a 1951 comic book shows that violence from an alien civilization was considered a distinct possibility. And no one would believe that the military could protect anyone. Flatwoods, whether it deserved it or not, was a case with an alien monster, even a killer monster. This is, of course, exactly what Keyhoe was talking about above.

The Air Force must have been both interested and secretive at the same time. And we just might have a hint of that interest that we don’t have to simply guess about.

Lost in the Blue Book files was this lonely page (below). One notices the following: It was written by Dewey Fournet to the Air Force Directorate of Special Investigations in early October 1952. It refers those parties to a record sheet of a month earlier pointing out the importance of scientific testing in UFO cases. Specifically, it says, we need “prompt analysis” of soil samples from two UFO cases that are “seeming to have the same general characteristics.” The two cases are Flatwoods (specifically named) and the Sonny DesVergers case (penciled on the page): “Utmost priority.”

It occurs to me that not everyone will be up to speed on what the Air Force’s interest was in the West Palm Beach (DesVergers) case. Very briefly: Sonny DesVergers was a terrible witness because he was an opportunistic liar. But his original report was reasonable, and the showboating began later when he found that he might become famous if he added in some sensational elements. Despite the fantasy fabrications by this idiot, the case had a very puzzling aspect—a seemingly impossible soil trace (below). The soil beneath the UFO landing area had damaged plants with subsurface root trauma as if they had been “microwaved” six inches down—but not at ground level. No one has ever been able to explain this effect in any credible way.

Ruppelt puzzled over this anomaly well after he left the Air Force. So, crummy witness or not, the soil effect was extremely anomalous and seemingly highly technological. Finding a solution to this would be desirable. Finding another case like this, also containing a scary element, would be uncomfortable.

So really? Are the Flatwoods and DesVergers soil samples generally the same? How did the Air Force even obtain the Flatwoods samples? How did they decide that they were generally the same as West Palm Beach? What did they find?

All this makes you want to give up, and also not give up, at the same time.

 

Read Part One of Peeking into the Corners of 1952.

Read Part Two of Peeking into the Corners of 1952.

Read Part Three of Peeking into the Corners of 1952.

Read Part Four of Peeking into the Corners of 1952.

Read Part Five of Peeking into the Corners of 1952.