According to History, it was at dusk on September 12, 1952, that six boys, one mom, and a dog allegedly witnessed the strange arrival of the Green Monster in the tiny town of Flatwoods, which at the time had a population of less than 300. Two brothers — Ed and Freddie May, age 13 and 12, respectively — were playing in the schoolyard with their 10-year-old friend Tommy Hyer when they witnessed a strange streak of red light careen across the sky and land with a crash nearby. The Mays went to get their mother to go check it out, at which point they were accompanied by a few more boys, one of whom brought his dog. As Roadside America explains, the locals soon found themselves face to face with a 10-foot-tall monster that let out a shrill hiss and started to float above the ground towards them through a shroud of mist. The oldest boy among the group, 17-year-old Gene Lemon, was a National Guard member who claimed to have seen a pair of bright eyes in a tree, followed by the emergence of the red-faced, green-bodied, claw-handed, pointy-headed monster we all know and love today.
The seven witnesses and the dog all fled in terror — one contemporary of the boys claiming that one of them wet his pants — and were soon violently ill, which they claimed was due to a poison gas shot at them by the monster. Later visitors to the site found no sign of the monster or UFO, but smelled an unexplained "sickening, burnt, metallic odor."
