The ten-foot green monster is the wire. The closer description is Barker’s, from a tape of Neil Nunley and from the others, and it does not all match. Nunley said the first thing in view was a ball of fire down the far side of the hill, about fifty feet off, dimming and brightening. The figure was to the left, about fifteen feet away, under a tree limb. Barker measured that limb at about fifteen feet, which is a ceiling, not a height. The face, they agreed, was round and blood red, with no nose or mouth they could see, and eyes or eye-like openings that threw a greenish-orange light. A dark hood came to a point above the face. Nunley remembered the body as dark. Others said green. Mrs. May saw folds like clothing, and claws. Nunley said it did not walk. It moved in an arc, evenly. Other tellings have it duck-walking or bobbing. The wire’s “fire-breathing” is not in Nunley’s account. He said the look lasted a very short time, and then Lemon fell back and they ran. The dog was later found under the porch, shaking.

The marks do not hold. Stewart said he found skid marks and a gummy deposit the next day. Barker was told, in Flatwoods, that a tractor run by Brooks Fisher would leave both. Max Lockard drove a pickup to the hill about an hour after the fright, before the sheriff, and he and the people with him found nothing. Later notes say he had driven around the field hoping to see something. The oily traces and the tracks were afterward credited to the figure. Nothing was kept, and nothing was tested.

Barker is the reason the case has a costume. Fate wired him that the story was probably a hoax and that he should investigate and not speculate. He wrote that he also wanted the magazine piece. His January 1953 article, and the drawing made from Mrs. May’s description, fixed the ace-of-spades head, the pleated body, and the claws. That picture is not in the United Press story. Ivan Sanderson was in town the same week. Neither man was on the hill that night.

Joe Nickell’s reading, in 2000, splits the night in three. The light across the sky is the meteor already on the wire. The pulsing red light on the hill fits an aircraft beacon, and three such beacons were visible from that ground. The figure fits a barn owl in the tree: a pale face that reads as a spade or a hood, a hiss, a body that does not walk, and talons on a limb that become claws. Foliage and mist under the light become the green dress. The sickness fits a hard run and a scare. A barn owl is about a foot and a half tall. The ten feet, and the ball of fire Nunley put fifty feet down the slope, are the parts that reading does not measure. It is a reconstruction from the descriptions. It is not a photograph of the limb.

The night is one date. Flatwoods later put up a “Home of the Green Monster” sign, a museum in Sutton, and a set of monster chairs. Those are the town’s use of the story. They are not a second look at the hill.