Flatwoods Monster

The Flatwoods monster is West Virginia's 1952 one-night wonder: after a fireball crossed the sky, a group including children and a national guardsman met a towering hooded figure with glowing eyes and a mechanical hiss on a dark hilltop, and fled sick with fright. Investigators reconstruct a meteor, a startled barn owl on a branch, and adrenaline doing the sculpting. The witnesses' terror was never in question — several were physically ill for days — which is exactly the kind of detail that keeps juries from voting too quickly.

Related on this site: /cryptid-encounter-stories/ /alien-stories/ /tag/small-town/