Anthony Hill landing and the "hairy robot" occupant, Giles County, Tennessee

Autumn 1973. Tennessee was already watching the sky. On 25 September the Tennessean ran a report from Shelby County deputies, alongside other accounts from Lauderdale and Obion counties. Within weeks the wave would reach Pascagoula, Mississippi, and spread across the South.

Anthony Hill is a rural community in Giles County, roughly 10 km southwest of Pulaski, the county seat. A church. A cemetery. Wooded ground. It was here, on a Monday night, that the wave arrived in Giles County.

October 1, 1973. About 8:15 p.m. A thunderstorm was in progress.

Three teenagers saw an egg-shaped object. The top of it was illuminated by a white light. It flew over nearby trees and disappeared behind them.

Then they saw the occupant. One catalogue describes "a hairy robot like creature, with a large round head and its arms upraised in the air, which walked with a slow, rocking, mechanical motion." Another summary calls it huge. The witnesses watched. They had no interaction with it. No face was described, no eyes, no clothing. Just the hair, the head, the raised arms and that stiff, rocking walk.

The Pulaski Citizen reported the story on 3 October 1973. Imprints were later found at the site. Their size and shape do not survive in the summaries available today.

Who the witnesses were remains unsettled. The Nashville Scene, summarising the local paper decades later, described three teenage boys. The INTCAT catalogue names Becky Martin, a sister, and another youngster. Only the original clipping could settle it.

No police, sheriff or military inquiry is on record. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969, and the trail is civilian. W. Darbro and S. Ingram included the case in their 1974 book on UFOs over the Tennessee Valley. Ted Phillips listed it in his 1975 trace catalogue for the Center for UFO Studies, apparently twice, as cases 593 and 651. David Webb featured it in his 1976 CUFOS study 1973: Year of the Humanoids, and it entered the HUMCAT humanoid catalogue as case 1973-27. Webb named Giles County as one of the year's concentration areas for humanoid reports.

Patrick Gross's catalogue entry offers a short note: possible bear, insufficient data. A bear rearing onto its hind legs would be large, hairy and upright, with its forelimbs raised. Others point to the storm, the darkness, the flashes of lightning, and a region primed by a week of UFO headlines. None of this proves misperception. The egg-shaped object with its white light, and the imprints, belong to the same report.

In mid-October, near Berea in the same county area, a witness reported a being with a glowing white head crossing a highway. In 2013 Randy Fox revisited the whole season for the Nashville Scene, calling Anthony Hill the wave's first landfall in Giles County. Charles Lear retold it in 2020. The hairy robot of Anthony Hill remains one of the strangest figures of 1973, the year of the humanoids.