Case description
A fire broke out at the Sodder family home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, during the early hours of December 25, 1945. George and Jennie Sodder and four of their children escaped, but five siblings—Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie and Betty—were unaccounted for. Their father tried to reach the upstairs bedrooms, but the house was engulfed by the fire.
The children's mother had heard a noise on the roof before discovering the blaze. A bus driver later said he had seen people throwing balls of fire toward the house. The family's account of the night included a missing ladder and vehicles that would not start. No person was reported witnessing the children being taken into an aerial craft.
The children's parents came to believe that they might have been kidnapped and the house deliberately set on fire. They pursued reported sightings, commissioned further searches and maintained a roadside billboard seeking information. The public missing-person record for Louis Sodder identifies the location as West Virginia, rather than the North Carolina value in the inherited UFO catalogue.
