I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.

We've found that so many of the stories we want to cover feature a sheriff or a patrolman who encounters the unexplainable and then has to face down a small town who can't quite

believe what they've experienced.

And today, we bring you just such a man.

You see, in 1973, one Jeff Greenhaw of Falkville, Alabama, had a very, very eventful October.

That year, he had an encounter with a being that some have argued was an alien, and others have posited might have been considered a cryptid. But really, we don't know if

this particular creature, shiny and metallic as it was, quite fits the bill.

Certainly, Jeff Greenhaw didn't think he'd run into any kind of animal, or humanoid for that matter.

In fact, what he saw that night would come to be known as the Metal Man.

According to the Birmingham Post Herald, Jeff Greenhall wasn't just a lawman.

He was the chief of police.

Of course, that was really by default.

He was the only police officer in town, technically speaking.

His patrol car was a truck, and he was responsible for approximately 3.8 square miles of town, and in 1973, just under 1,000 residents. He was young, too,

just 23 years old. But no matter the size of the jurisdiction, that was a fair amount of

responsibility to land on someone who in 2022 would pay a hefty penalty just to rent a car for the weekend.

The evening of October 17, 1973, started normally enough.

Jeff had just begun keeping a camera in his patrol vehicle, which sounds odd we know.

But he had a good reason.

There have been some reports of odd things in the southern skies that week, and Jeff Greenhal

thought that he'd better go out prepared. And prepared he was when, according to the Decatur

Daily, a call came in to the police station. It was from a woman who reported that she'd seen

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