Also suggestive of an owl is the description of the creature’s “face” as “round” with “two eye-like openings” and a dark, “hoodlike shape” around it (if not the “pointed” appearance of the latter). (Barker, 1953) The barn owl has a large head with a “ghastly,” roundish heart-shaped face, resembling “that of a toothless, hook-nosed old woman, shrouded in a closely fitting hood” and with an expression “that gives it a mysterious air.” (Jordan, 1952; Blanchan, 1925).
Very evidential in the case of the Flatwoods Monster is the description of its cry as “something between a hiss and a high-pitched squeal.” (Barker, 1953) This tallies with the startling “wild, peevish scream” or “shrill rasping hiss or snore” of the barn owl. Indeed its “shrill, strangled scream is the; most unbirdlike noise.” Its “weird calls” include “hissing notes, screams,” and “guttural grunts.” (Blanchan, 1925; Peterson, 1980; Bull and Farrand, 1977; Cloudsley-Thompson et al., 1983). The latter might explain the monster’s accompanying “thumping or throbbing noise.” (Barker, 1953), if those sounds were not from the flapping of wings.
Descriptions of the creature’s movement varied, being characterized as “bobbing up and down, jumping toward the witnesses” or as moving “evenly,” indeed “describing an arc, coming toward them, but circling at the same time.” (Barker, 1956) Again, it had “a gliding motion as if afloat in midair.” These movements are strongly suggestive of a bird’s flight. When accidentally disturbed, the barn owl “makes a bewildered and erratic getaway” (Jordan, 1952)—while hissing (Blanchan, 1925)—but its flight is generally characterized with “slow, flapping wing beats and long glides.” (Cloudsley-Thompson et al., 1983)
According to Barker (1953): “Not all agreed that the ‘monster’ had arms,” but “Mrs. May described it with terrible claws.” Sanderson (1967) cites the witnesses’ observation that “the creature had small, claw-like hands that extended in front of it,” a description consistent with a raptor (a predatory bird). The barn owl is relatively long-legged and knock-kneed, sporting sizable claws with sharp, curved talons that may be prominently extended. (Peterson, 1980; Forshaw, 1998)
It is important to note that the youths and Mrs. May only glimpsed the creature briefly—an estimated “one or a few more seconds,” and even that was while they were frightened. Barker (1956) asks, “If Lemon dropped the flashlight, as he claimed, how did they get an apparently longer look at the ‘monster’?” Some said the being was lighted from within (probably only the effect of its “shining” eyes), while Nunley stated that it was illuminated by the pulsing red light (ostensibly from the supposed UFO but probably from one of the beacons mentioned earlier). This might also explain the “fiery orange color” of the creature’s head (Sanderson 1967), but an alternative explanation, while the barn owl is typically described as having a white facial disk and underparts, in the case of the female those parts “have some darker buff or tawny color.” (“Barn Owl” 2000)
Split-image illustration compares fanciful Flatwoods Monster (left) with the real-world creature it most resembles, the common barn owl (right). (Drawing by Joe Nickell)
For this reason, as well as the fact that in this species (a medium-sized owl, measuring about 14-20 inches [Peterson, 1980]) the male is typically the smaller (Blanchan 1925), I suspect the Flatwoods creature was a female. It is also interesting to speculate that it may not have been too late in the year for a female to have been brooding young. That could explain why “she” did not fly away at the first warning of intruders (given barn owls’ “excellent low-light vision and exceptional hearing ability” [“Barn Owl” 2000]); instead, probably hoping not to be noticed, she stood her ground until the invaders confronted her with a flashlight, a threatening act that provoked her hissing, attack-like swoop toward them.
Significantly, the locale where the Flatwoods Monster made its appearance—near a large oak tree on a partially wooded hilltop overlooking a farm on the outskirts of town—tallies with the habitat of the barn owl. Indeed, it is “‘the best known of farmland owls.” (Cloudsley-Thompson, 1983) It builds no nest, but takes as its “favorite home” a “hollow tree.” (Blanchan, 1925) It “does not mind the neighborhood of man” (Jordan, 1952), in fact seeking out mice and rats from its residence in “woodlands, groves, farms, barns, towns, cliffs.” (Peterson, 1980)
Considering all of the characteristics of the described monster, and making small allowances for misperceptions and other distorting factors, we may conclude (adapting an old adage) that if it looked like a barn owl, acted like a barn owl, and hissed, then it most likely was a barn owl.
HOW MONSTERS APPEAR
It may be wondered, however, why the creature was not immediately recognized for what it was. The answer is that, first, the witnesses were led to expect an alien being by their sighting of a UFO that appeared to land and by the pulsating red light and strange smell that seemed to confirm the landing. Therefore, when they then encountered a strange creature, acting aggressively, their fears seemed to be confirmed and they panicked.
Moreover, the group had probably never seen a barn owl up close (after all, such birds are nocturnal) and almost certainly not under the adverse conditions that prevailed. The brief glimpse, at night, of a being that suddenly swept at them—coupled with its strange “ghastly” appearance and shrill frightening cry—would have been disconcerting to virtually anyone at any time. But under the circumstances, involving an inexperienced group primed with expectations of extraterrestrials, the situation was a recipe for terror.
And so a spooked barn owl in turn spooked the interlopers, and a monster was born. A “windy” newspaperman and proparanormal writers hyped the incident, favoring sensational explanations for more prosaic ones. Such is often the case with paranormal claims.
—JOE NICKELL
References
Barker, Gray. “The Monster and the Saucer,” Fate, January, 12-17, 1953.
________. They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (Tower Books, 1967).
“Barn Owl.” 2000. www.vetmed.auburn.edu.
Blanchan, Neltje. Birds Worth Knowing (Doubleday, 1925).
Bull, John, and Farrand, John Jr. The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Eastern Region (Knopf, 1977).
Byrne, Holt.. “The Phantom of Flatwoods,” Sunday Gazette-Mail State Magazine (Charleston, W. Va.), March 6, 1966.
Clark, Jerome. The UFO Encyclopedia, second edition (Omnigraphics, 1998).
Cloudsley-Thompson, John, et al.. Nightwatch: The Natural World from Dusk to Dawn (Facts on File, 1983).
Collins, Henry Hill, Jr. Complete Field Guide to American Wildlife: East, Central and North (Harper & Row, 1959).
Forshaw, Joseph. Encyclopedia of Birds (Academic Press, 1998).
Jordan, E. L.. Hammond’s Nature Atlas of America (C. S. Hammond & Co., 1952).
Keyhoe, Donald E. Flying Saucers from Outer Space (Henry Holt, 1953).
Marchal, Terry. “Flatwoods Revisited,” Sunday Gazette-Mail State Magazine (Charleston, W. Va.), March 6, 1966.
Peterson, Roger Tory.. A Field Guide to the Birds (Houghton Mifflin, 1980).
Reese, P. M. (1952) Cited in Sanderson, 1967.
Ritchie, David. UFO: The Definitive Guide to Unidentified Flying Objects and Related Phenomena (Facts on File, 1994).
Sanderson, Ivan T. (1952) Typewritten report quoted in Byrne, 1966.
________. Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFO’s (Cowles, 1967).
“flying saucer” An expression commonly used to describe an unexplained aerial phenomenon. The words do not always convey a just conception, since much of what is reported is not saucer-shaped nor can it be assumed that they are solid bodies utilizing aerodynamic principles. This particular designation was coined on June 25, 1947, in the newsroom of the East Oregonian a newspaper serving Pendleton, Oregon. Newsman Bill Bequette denominated the phenomenon during an interview with private pilot Kenneth Arnold while the flyer was relating his famous sighting of strange, “tail
less aircraft,” an episode that took place the previous afternoon over the Cascade mountains.
Some maintain that the distinctive appellation “flying saucer” was derived solely from Arnold’s description of the undulatory flight of the things he saw, which, he said, traveled through the air like a “flat rock” skipped along the surface of a pond. Nonetheless, the Chicago Daily Tribune, as early as June 25th, quotes Arnold as saying the objects were “shaped like a pie plate.” Later, when questioned carefully, Arnold insisted that the objects he spotted were wide and flat, but none of the nine were true disks, one being crescent in outline and the other eight having curved leading edges and pointed trailing edges. U. S. Air Force experts rightly doubted Arnold’s ability to make out an object’s shape at a distance of twenty-three miles, a distance Arnold claims separated him from the flight path of the unknowns, an estimate he refused to retract.
Since his attention was initially attracted to the swiftly moving objects by sunlight flashing from their shiny wings as they sped through the air in an undulating manner, Arnold’s perception of the objects may have also been hampered significantly by the rapid dipping motion changing the intensity of the reflected rays of the sun. It may, nevertheless, be safe to assume that the objects Arnold saw were thin, flat, and tailless, words which do not rule out a true disk shape.
The word “saucer” was first used to describe an unidentified aerial object in 1878, when a farmer named John Martin told the Denison, Texas, Daily News on January 25th, that a mysterious saucer-shaped object had flown over his property south of town.
The “flying saucer” design is actually not that modern; as early as 1918, the science-fantasy magazine Electrical Experimenter featured a saucerlike craft on the cover of its March edition to illustrate R. and G. Winthrop’s novelette “At War with the Invisible.” It should also be noted that a year before the big UFO wave of 1947, the pulp magazine Amazing Stories had an interesting fictional illustration on its back cover showing a group of “flying saucer spaceships” in V-formation.
—LOREN E. GROSS
Flying Saucer Occupants (Signet/NAL, 1967). Coral and Jim Lorenzen set forth their belief that three races of alien beings are visiting Earth, but the CIA and Air Force are probably not aware of the problem. Conspiracy theorists who believe a coverup exists, say this husband and wife team, exhibit a need for “instant reassurance” which comes from a fear that no authority figures may be in control, or even aware, that UFO visitors pose a problem for humankind.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Flying Saucers (Harvard University Press, 1953). With this book Harvard University astrophysicist Donald Menzel became the first scientist to craft a rational, natural phenomena explanation for UFOs in a presentation tailored to a mainstream audience. Flying saucers are real, he says, as real as rainbows, sundogs, mirages and other optical tricks the atmosphere plays on the human brain. These misidentifications of natural phenomena account for both contemporary and Biblical accounts of UFOs. Ironically, with this 1953 discussion of ancient UFO sightings, Menzel would one day claim the dubious credit for having ushered in the spate of ancient astronaut theories and books which flooded mainstream literature more than a decade later.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Routledge & Kegan Paul/Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1959; Signet/NAL, 1969). Psychologist Carl Jung sees UFOs as projections from the collective unconscious of humanity and a symptom of psychic change in our species.
Jung examines the UFO phenomenon as a complement to, or the cause of, “longlasting transformations of the collective psyche.” This psychic component of the phenomenon Jung details in three stages or interconnections: in the first, an “objectively real, physical process forms the basis for an accompanying myth”; in the second, an archetype, whose specific form our collective instincts take, creates a corresponding vision; finally, emerging with these two “causal relationships,” we experience synchronistic behavior, the meaningful coincidence, in which the psychic stress of humankind and the appearance of UFOs coincide as a meaningful pattern.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Flying Saucers and the Straight-line Mystery (S.G. Phillips, 1958). Aimé Michel, a French mathematician and engineer, recounts a wave of UFO sightings in France which included human encounters with alien craft and creatures. When he charted these sightings chronologically several patterns emerged. Sightings occurring on the same day were found to be in straight lines on maps. Aside from the extraterrestrial hypothesis, Michel wonders whether another explanation might be that human thoughts actualized these visions in the sky.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Flying Saucers are Real, The book (Fawcett Publications, 1950). This book by Retired U.S. Marine Major Donald E. Keyhoe was the first ever devoted to the flying saucer topic.
It was essentially an expanded version of Keyhoe’s seminal article for True magazine under the same title. In this book Keyhoe states his main conclusions, which defined the modern flying saucer era: “ (1) The Earth has been under periodic observation from another planet, or other planets, for at least two centuries. (2) This observation suddenly increased in 1947, following the series of A-bomb explosions begun in 1945. (3) The observation, now intermittent, is part of a long-range survey and will continue indefinitely. There may be some unknown block to making contact, but it is more probable that the spacemen’s plans are not complete.”
—RONALD D. STORY
Flying Saucers from Outer Space (Henry Holt, 1953). With this book retired Marine Corps Major Donald E. Keyhoe became the first prominent and outspoken conspiracy theory proponent.
He claimed that flying saucers are piloted by extraterrestrial visitors, the U.S. Air Force is aware of the truth, it is engaged in a coverup, and it is up to civilian UFO groups to end this secrecy. He is also the first author to speculate that UFOs have an electromagnetic propulsion system.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Flying Saucers Have Landed (The British Book Centre/Werner Laurie, 1953) by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski. America’s first famous contactee, Adamski, collaborates with an Irish journalist to tell how he met a Venusian with long sandy hair in the California desert.
Supposedly he and other beings from Venus are here on this planet to express their displeasure with nuclear testing, a theme which soon became a cause taken up by other contactees. Adamski hit the lecture circuit after the book and later circulated a series of photos of Venusian spaceships which were generally regarded as crude hoaxes.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Flying Saucers–Serious Business Lyle Stuart, 1966). Radio broadcaster Frank Edwards wonders whether the race to the moon between America and Russia has the ulterior motive of being the first to contact aliens based there. He points out how the shapes of reported UFOs have been evolving over the years from dirigibles in the late 1890s to flying disks in the 1950s to eggshaped craft in the 1960s.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Flying Saucers Uncensored (Cidadel Press, 1955) by Harold T. Wilkins. Author catalogues UFO sightings and incidents over the U.K., Western Europe, U.S., and Australia from 1947 through 1955 and speculates that extraterrestrial visitants are possibly established in bases on the moon and other planets; a cosmic general staff may receive reports on terrestrial affairs as well as biological and ecological samples from Earth for purposes of study and experimentation.
—LYNN CATOE
foo fighters The foo fighters, or “kraut balls,” as they were also called, were first observed as very small (from a few inches to a few feet in diameter) balls of light that followed and seemingly “teased” military fighter and bomber aircraft during the final months of World War II. These miniature-sized UFOs would appear alone, in pairs, or in groups, and seemed at times to be under some kind of remote, intelligent control. They would sometimes emit a steady glow of red, gold, or white light; other times they would blink on and off.
Although it is customary i
n most UFO literature to associate the foo fighters with the beginning of the “modern” phase of the UFO phenomenon in general, there are important differences between these and most other UFO reports. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that the foo-ball mystery is explainable in nonprosaic, albeit earthly, terms.
The earliest reliable report of the specterlike apparitions came from a pilot and crew belonging to the 415th Night Fighter Squadron based at Dijon, France. The 415th patrolled both sides of the Rhine River, north of Strasbourg, in eastern Germany, seeking out any German planes in the area with the aid of U. S. Army ground-based radar stations. Lieutenant Ed Schlueter (pilot), Lieutenant Donald J. Meiers (radar observer), and Lieutenant Fred Ringwald (intelligence officer, flying as an observer) were on such a mission on the night of November 23, 1944, when Ringwald first spotted what appeared to be stars off at a distance. Within a few minutes, the starlike points became orange balls of light (eight or ten of them) “moving through the air at a terrific speed.” The “objects” could not be picked up by radar, either ground-based or from the plane. The lights then disappeared, reappeared farther off, and within a few minutes vanished from view.
More reports followed, as the mystery spread to other parts of the world. The foo fighters (a name that was picked up from the Smokey Stover comic strip, wherein it was frequently said that “where there’s foo, there’s fire”.) appeared also on the bombing route to Japan and over the Truk Lagoon in the mid-Pacific. The reports were similar: speeds generally estimated at between two hundred and five hundred miles per hour, orange, red. and white colors. steady or blinking lights, alone or in groups, but not detectable by radar.
The consistency of these well-authenticated encounters is unlike any other set of UFO reports. According to the Italian aircraft engineer and writer, Renato Vesco, it is for good reason. In an article published in Argosy magazine (August 1969), Vesco writes:
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 38