The 1976 story from Gray Barker about a 1968 encounter with a Vegetable Monster in Marion County, West Virginia, is certainly a hoax. But long before West Virginia became a state its general land-area was plagued with a spooky reputation for being home to monsters and strange creatures, possibly even portals or gateways to other worlds. Besides bigfoot and giant prehistoric birds, Mothman is probably the most famous and unique of all cryptic-creatures, manifesting multiple times between 1966 and 1977 in West Virginia. Two years before the Point Pleasant sightings a monster called Grafton was also witnessed in Grafton, West Virginia, depicted like Mothman but without wings or red eyes. Going East of Point Pleasant takes you to Braxton County where over a decade before the two previous cases the Flatwoods Monster was witnessed in 1952. One day after the initial sightings of a tall, fiery, floating monster, a young couple and child encountered the same creature, near Frametown, West Virginia. They described it as having a reptile-like head and terrible smell. It examined their car and disappeared into the woods, and then presumably, based on the witnesses, off planet in a ball of light. This latter case has all the hallmarks of classic UFO/abduction encounters, from strange smells and driving on a lone road at night, to electrical interference, years before such cases were made public. Electric interference was part of the Mothman saga too. The September 1952 encounters were within months of releases of ‘The Thing from Another World’ and ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’, but before federal authorities decided to officially use Hollywood to disinform the public on the subject. Admittedly, the Flatwoods encounters share some relationship to the humanoid robot Gort. The US Air Force even investigated this case, which means it likely was not an incident of their own making like the 1965 Kecksburg UFO crash.

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