At approximately 7:15 in the evening on Friday the 12th of September 1952, three young boys were playing in the schoolyard of Flatwoods Elementary School, in the small Appalachian town of Flatwoods, West Virginia. It was almost fully dark. One of them looked up. A bright, pulsating object was streaking across the sky. It appeared to descend and crash on a nearby hillside, on the property of a local farmer. The boys ran home to tell their mother, 27-year-old Kathleen May. Kathleen called on her 17-year-old cousin, a National Guardsman named Eugene Lemon. Two other local boys joined the group. The family dog, Rickie, came along. Seven of them altogether. Six boys, one mother, one dog. What they said they found in a clearing at the top of the hill has become one of the most persistently unsettling paranormal encounters in American history. They said they saw a creature. They said it was ten feet tall. They said its head was shaped like an ace of spades, glowing red and orange in the dark. They said it emitted a foul, sulphurous mist that burned their throats and eyes. They said it did not walk. It glided toward them. By the time they got back to the May family home, six of the seven witnesses were vomiting. Their eyes were red. Their throats were swollen. The dog was cowering. The local sheriff came. The local newspaper editor came, with a shotgun. Multiple neighbours reported strange lights that night. Nothing physical was ever found at the site. But for the rest of their lives, all seven witnesses would stand by exactly what they had seen. And nearly 74 years later, no one has ever definitively explained what it was.

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