Hey there. First time caller. Been listening to your show for a while now, figured it was finally time to share something that happened to me. Something I've carried around for over seventy years. September 12th, 1952. I was seventeen years old, home on leave from the National Guard. It was a Friday evening in Flatwoods, West Virginia. Little town, maybe three hundred people. You probably never heard of it unless you know the story I'm about to tell you. I was at my cousin Caroline Mitchell' place, just visiting. She had two boys, Evan and Frank, 13 and 12 years old. Around 7 15 that night, those boys came running up to the house with their friend Toby, all out of breath. They'd been playing over at the schoolyard.
The boys were excited, talking over each other. Said they saw something streak across the sky. Bright light, red and orange, moving fast. They watched it come down over Bill Fletcher's farm, up on the hill behind the school. Looked like it crashed, they said. Now, Caroline wasn't the type to just dismiss what her boys told her. She stepped outside, looked toward the Fletcher property, and I'll be damned if there wasn't a strange glow up there on that hillside. Reddish light, pulsing. Didn't look like any farm light I'd ever seen. So she decided we should go take a look. Me, her, the three boys. Couple of the neighbors' kids, Nick Nelson and Rick Sanders, they heard the commotion and tagged along. Seven of us total. Oh, and the family dog, Rocky. He ran ahead of us up the path. I had my flashlight from the Guard. We started walking up toward Fletcher's property, following that strange glow.
The walk started normal enough. Just a hill path, grass and brush on either side. But as we got closer to the top, maybe three quarters of the way up, things started feeling wrong. First thing I noticed was the smell. Sharp, acrid. Burned the inside of my nose, made my eyes water. It wasn't like anything I knew from the farm, wasn't fertilizer or manure. Almost metallic, with a sulfur tang to it. The kind of smell that makes your body tell you to turn around. Then we saw the mist. Thick, greenish gray stuff hanging in the air between the trees. It wasn't fog. Fog doesn't hang in patches like that, doesn't glow faintly in the dark. This was something else. Rocky, the dog, he got to the mist first. He stopped dead, started whimpering, then turned tail and bolted back down that hill faster than I'd ever seen him run. always know when something is wrong, I hope Rocky got away okay - Nolan' Dogs got good instincts. We should've listened to him.
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