Jeff and the Metal Man

Accounts of UFO encounters, like poltergeist reports, tend to all sound alike after a while, so I was pleased to come across one such story which has that little something special.

On the night of October 17, 1973, Jeff Greenhaw, the Police Chief of Falkville, Alabama, received an anonymous--and slightly hysterical--call informing him that a “spaceship” had just landed in a field outside of town.

Police officers tend to be skeptical about anything that smacks of The Weird, so Jeff’s instant assumption was that he was hearing from “an idiot.”  However, he dutifully drove over to the field to investigate, and hopefully have himself a good laugh.

When he arrived, he found nothing to be humorous about.  He was confronted by a tall--over six foot--figure wearing some reflective material, like aluminum foil.  He later recalled, “It looked like his head and neck were kind of made together.  He was real bright, something like rubbing mercury on nickel, but just as smooth as glass.  Different angles give different lighting.  I don’t believe it was aluminum foil”  It moved in an odd, robotic manner that reminded Jeff of something out of “Lost in Space.”

He gave the stranger a polite greeting, but received no response.  The bemused cop took out his Polaroid camera and snapped a few photos of the figure.  As he did so, Metal Man began moving away from him.  “It wasn’t moving like you or I would move.  It’s like it had springs on its feet or something.”  It was traveling faster than he believed any human could move.  Jeff decided to “chase it down, and, if I have to, run over it.”  However, his patrol car was unable to catch up to the being.  Metal Man soon faded into the darkness.

Jeff kept the photos he had taken of the figure--one likes to keep mementos of interesting events--but almost exactly ten years later, someone (something?) broke into his house and stole them.  The service revolver and shotgun he had had in his police car on that memorable night also disappeared.  

Jeff told people about his encounter, only to find that he had turned himself into a public laughingstock.  Within weeks of his meeting with the strange creature, the town council fired him, and he subsequently kept out of sight as much as possible.  Years later, he mused, “I turned out to be a person I never dreamed I would be because of what happened…I came close to losing my sanity, but my wife and God kept me from losing my sanity…I am still a believer in life after death and at one point, I didn’t believe there was any other life source in the universe, but that really changed.”

The moral to our little tale is that if you should ever encounter tall, foil-covered robot aliens, it would probably be wisest to just ignore them.  And, yes, I do think that “Jeff and the Metal Man” would be an excellent name for a rock band.