Since scoutmasters are traditionally upright citizens, the story seemed to merit attention. Investigators from ATIC visited the scene, interviewed all persons concerned, and sent the cap and the machete to Dayton for analysis. Very soon, however, the drama began to fall apart. The scoutmaster, after being interviewed by Air Force investigators, assumed an aura of mystery and stated publicly that he had been warned not to talk. At the same time he hired a press agent and offered to sell his story to the newspapers. A study of the landscape showed that the boys could not have seen any “machine” from the road. The townspeople did not consider the woods dangerous. Aircraft preparing to land at the airport regularly flew over the area in question with their landing lights on; to a person on the road, the lights might seem to be flitting through the woods. Furthermore the study showed that the scene had been set in advance for a frightening incident. As they drove along the lonely road, the scoutmaster had been talking about flying saucers and, after he stopped the car, had warned the boys that they might need to go for help. The man’s reputation for veracity, too, began to melt away, and one townsman remarked that if the scoutmaster claimed that the sun was shining, he’d look up to see for himself before accepting the statement. The knife and cap showed no radioactivity. The laboratory report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed that the burn on the cap was made by a cigarette, and the “burns” on the hand and arm proved to be only superficial scorching of the hair and could easily have been produced by the flame of a kitchen match. This investigation cost the usual amount of time and money, but it was unquestionably a hoax[VII-4]. _Monster in West Virginia_ The final incident in the summer’s panic occurred on the evening of September 12 when a family group near the town of Sutton, West Virginia, saw a flaming object flash across the sky and apparently land on a nearby hill. Taking their flashlights, they set out to investigate and, on reaching the hill, smelled an unpleasant odor. When they turned on their flashlights, they stated, they saw two red eyes glaring at them; a huge monster, ten feet tall, breathing fire, with a bright-green body and a blood-red face, waddled toward them, and they turned and ran[VII-5]. Air Force investigators concluded immediately that the flaming object first seen was the meteor observed that night by thousands of persons in Virginia and West Virginia and reported officially to various observatories. What the frightened family saw when they reached the hilltop and flashed the light was probably the glowing eyes or body of some mundane creature of the woods. A local group of civilian saucer investigators rejected this explanation, as usual, and after making its own study concluded that the monster story could very well have been true!