According to the stories, it all started on the afternoon of September 12, 1952 at the town of Flatwoods, in Braxton County, West Virginia.
The first thing that happened was that Sheriff Robert Carr and Deputy Burnell Long were called to investigate the fall to earth of a burning object below Gassaway on the Elk River. The object was thought to be a downed aircraft.
Then, just before dark, something else came to earth on a hill next to the Flatwoods School. Four boys, who were playing football on the schoolground, saw it land on top of the hill on the Bailey Fisher property. Frightened but curious, they decided the check it out. They walked up the hill and stopped at the home of Kathleen May to tell her and her sons about what they had seen. Mrs. May and her two sons joined the group and they continued on to the place where the object had been seen to land.
At the top of the hill, Mrs. May noted that,"…the night was foggy and there was a mist in the evening air." She noted as well that "… the air had a metallic smell which burned their eyes and noses." One source said that a dog that accompanied the group ran ahead of them, but soon came back with his tail between his legs.
About 100 yards away, they could see a glowing, hissing object that was about 10 feet in diameter. A few feet to the left of the object, they could see two lights in the dark, about a foot apart. One of them had a flashlight, and when he turned it on the spot where the two lights were, the group was astonished to see a creature about 10 feet tall with "… a bright red face, bright green clothing, a head which resembled the ace of spades, and clothing which, from the waist down, hung in great folds".
When the creature seemed to float towards them, the frightened group ran back down the hill to the May home, where they called the sheriff's office. Apparently that's not the only place they called, since by the time Sheriff Carr got there, the scene had been trampled over by dozens of people who had heard the story and come to look for themselves.
Half an hour after the incident, the witnesses were interviewed by A. Lee Stewart of the Braxton Democrat, who said that something had frightened them so badly that they could hardly speak. Stewart and one of Kathleen May's sons went back to the site. Stewart noticed an odd smell, but found nothing else that was unusual. When he returned to the site the next morning, he found some skid marks leading up to the spot where the object landed.
The skeptical Sheriff Carr theorized that the group had seen a meteor come to earth. Then, when they got to the top of the hill, they had seen the eyes of some animal in a tree, such as a raccoon or an owl, glowing in reflected light. The rest had been pure imagination.
There were others who saw things that night and the next, though. A Birch River resident claimed to have seen a bright orange object circling the Flatwoods area. A woman and her mother came forward and said that they had seen the same creature at a spot eleven miles away. When John Keel investigated the case years later, he found a couple who claimed to have seen the creature on the next night, September 13, and to have then seen a spherical object rise from the woods into the sky.
Naturalist Ivan Sanderson also investigated the case, taking soil samples and numerous photos and Interviewing the witnesses several times, but the results
of his investigation were never made public.