The Van Meter Visitor
Over five nights in autumn 1903 Van Meter, Iowa, reported a winged creature with a glowing horn that shrugged off bullets and hid in an old coal mine.
The Van Meter Visitor is a winged creature that townspeople in Van Meter, Iowa, said they saw over five nights from 29 September to 3 October 1903. Witnesses described large bat-like wings, a horn on its forehead that shone a blinding light, a foul smell, and a body that bullets did not seem to hurt. On the last night two creatures were said to fly out of an old coal mine at the edge of town and go back down it. The story was printed in the Des Moines Daily News and picked up by the New York World on 5 October 1903. No physical evidence survives.
Five nights in 1903
Van Meter was a small farm town west of Des Moines. The 1900 census counted 407 people. Earlier versions of this page said about a thousand.
The first report came at about 1 a.m. on 29 September. U. G. Griffith, an implement dealer, saw what looked like an electric light moving on the roof of Maher and Grigg’s store. It vanished, showed up across the street, then disappeared.
The next night Dr A. C. Alcott, the town physician, was woken by a blinding light shining through the window of his office, where he slept. He went out with a gun and fired five shots at close range at a large shape. It showed no sign of being hit. Earlier versions of this page spelled his name Olcott.
On 1 October the bank cashier Clarence Dunn sat up inside the bank with a loaded shotgun. Around 1 a.m. a flash of light hit him and he saw a large form outside. He fired through the plate glass window. In the morning three-toed prints were found outside, and Dunn is said to have made plaster casts of them. Earlier versions of this page added a colleague called Peter Dunn who backed him up. We found no trace of him in the accounts.
On 2 October O. V. White, a hardware merchant, fired at the creature from his room above his store while it sat on a telephone pole. He was then hit by an overpowering smell. Sidney Gregg watched it climb down the pole and move off with a hopping, kangaroo-like gait. When a train came through it took off towards the old coal mine.
After midnight on 3 October J. L. Platt, a foreman at the brick plant, saw a creature fly out of the mine shaft, followed by a second, smaller one. Accounts say an armed group of townsmen waited at the mine and fired at both at dawn, again with no effect. The creatures went back down the shaft. The men sealed it with heavy planks. The Des Moines Daily News wrote that the noise from the mine sounded as if “Satan and a regiment of imps were coming forth for battle”.
What it might have been
The sources are thin. Everything we know comes from newspaper stories, and the original witnesses were never interviewed by anyone later. Three readings come up most often.
The first is misidentification. An owl or a great blue heron seen at night from below can look far larger than it is, and a crest or beak could pass for a horn. That does not explain the light. The second is a hoax, either by townspeople or by a newspaper. Small-town papers of the period printed tall tales as news, and a run of named local men shooting at a monster has the feel of a running joke. Against that, the witnesses were named, and no one has found a later confession. The third is simple contagion. Once the first report spread, every odd light or noise at night became the creature.
The idea that 1903 had no template for flying monsters is not quite right. Only six years earlier, in 1896 and 1897, newspapers across the Midwest had been full of reports of mysterious lighted airships. The Wright brothers’ first powered flight came later that year, on 17 December 1903.
Rediscovery and the festival
The case dropped out of sight for most of the 20th century. It returned with a 2013 book, The Van Meter Visitor, A True and Mysterious Encounter with the Unknown, by Chad Lewis, Noah Voss and Kevin Lee Nelson, with a foreword by Brad Steiger. The town now holds a Van Meter Visitor Festival each year around the anniversary of the sightings, with walking tours of the sighting spots, talks and art.