I know I say this every time!  But each new episode of MonsterQuest is more hilariously over the top than the one before.  Last time I thought there was no way they would be able to top "giant killer bees."  And then they trot out this confusing hodge-podge of Appalachian monster sightings, UFO encounters, and also a skull some kid found in Texas in the 1930s.

The fact that the show's producers even tried to stitch this together into a coherent episode is impressive, to say the least.  

The Flatwoods Monster reports really start on September 12th, 1952.  On that night, a group of Flatwoods residents witnessed a bright light pass overhead, heard a loud crash, saw flashing red lights in the sky, and saw a creature with a heart-shaped face which appeared to be hovering, with tubes or a green skirt floating below it.

Now, the skeptics in the back row are quick to point out an alternate interpretation of the events.  On that night, a large meteor was tracked by local air traffic control as it passed across three states in the area.  It hit the ground approximately eleven miles from where the "UFO" was said to have crashed.  Airplanes (with red beacons) were also in the sky.  

Those same skeptics might point out that if you take a barn owl and park it on a branch at eye level, it will look remarkably like " a creature with a heart-shaped face, large dark eyes, small clawed hands, and tubes or a green skirt (i.e. branches) beneath it."

Long story short: in the 1950s a group of rural West Virginia residents saw a meteor, then got the bleep scared out of them by an owl. 

I don't want to use the phrase "confused hillbillies," but I will if I have to.

Somehow the monster is said to be floating around the Appalachian countryside in a personal hovercraft which looks quite a lot like a metal trash can.  It also "emits a piercing noise and dangerous toxic gases," looks reptilian, and "gave out gas" and "had lights."  

Oh floating lizard trash can monster, where would we be without you?

Meanwhile, in what should have been an entirely different MonsterQuest episode but wasn't, in 1930s Texas a little girl found a cavern with a skeleton lying on its back, near a smaller misshapen skeleton which had been buried.  Crackpots leaped on this discovery, dubbed it "The Star Child," and swore that it must be an alien-human hybrid.

Looking at this skull, I felt such sorrow.  It was clearly a profoundly deformed child, which had survived for many years.  I imagined that the find represented a mother and her deformed child, who had been ostracized from their tribe.  (Carbon dating showed the skeletons to be about 900 years old.)  The child's skeleton looked like someone suffering from progeria to me, but what do I know?

MonsterQuest sent the "Star Child" skull to a forensic anthropologist who determined that it was entirely human.  And that, far from being the forlorn outcast suffering from a birth defect that I imagined it to be, that "Modification to the skull was intentionally inflicted as part of a cultural practice."  

The Star Child was apparently a helpless victim of a practice known as cradle boarding, in which an infant's head is strapped to a hard object in order to mold it as it grows.  So I guess MonsterQuest did find its monster after all - but it wasn't the child, that's for sure.