The Phantom of Flatwoods

Seventy years ago this weekend, a West Virginia woman and a group of boys were coming back from the fright of their lives. On Friday evening they had gone up a hill in their hometown of Flatwoods in search of a flying saucer. They came back down soon enough after encountering a creature that came to be known variously as the Phantom of Flatwoods, the Braxton County Monster, the Green Monster, and most famously the Flatwoods Monster. The monster's ace-of-spades headshot is also famous. Fans would know it anywhere.

Two years before, on May 26, 1950, Lippert Pictures had released the science fiction film Rocketship X-M. In doing so, the company had beaten George Pal and his film Destination Moon to the punch, but only by a month and a day. Both have become classics of science fiction filmmaking, for fans if for no one else. Destination Moon is based on Robert A. Heinlein's novel Rocket Ship Galileo, from 1947. It was the first of his many juvenile science fiction novels. Don't let the "juvenile" appellation fool you, though. Heinlein's juveniles are very good books and better than many novels written for adults.

The setup in Rocketship X-M is roughly the reverse of the setup in Edgar Rice Burroughs' planetary romance The Moon Maid (1923): the travelers in The Moon Maid are aiming at Mars and end up on the Moon, while those in Rocketship X-M mean to go to the Moon and end up on Mars. The movie itself is based in part on an article called "Rocket to the Moon" that appeared in Life magazine for January 17, 1949. Here's a still from the movie, the rocketship here based on the original article:

Remember that part where I said that fans of the Flatwoods Monster will recognize the ace-of-spades-like head or helmet of the creature anywhere? Well, I think there might be some recognizing going on right now.

I have written before that flying saucers come from science fiction, not from outer space. I have also written that before these things can be seen, they must be imagined. I was not there on that long-ago Friday as twilight crept over a misty hilltop in central West Virginia. (I was there, in Flatwoods, this Friday, though.) I don't know what the witnesses saw. But I feel certain that they saw something they could not explain and that terrified them. They were primed to see something, though: they went up the hill to look for a flying saucer they thought had landed there. In other words, science fiction had placed a vision in their heads. You could say that fantasy or horror or weird fiction had placed a vision there, too, for the Flatwoods Monster was the first monster of the flying saucer era. It remains as one the best. And the story of the monster and of the encounter is a real story, one that makes them appealing even now, seventy years later.

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I dedicate this to Jane, Steve's mother, who was born there and remembers the event. With a borrowed dollar, she bought a coloring book from me and put me over the top for one of my own events. I dedicate it to my own mother, too, who didn't remember the original event at all, even though her young son implored her and expected her to.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley