100+ witnesses report sightings
From November 1966 to Dec. 1967 at least 100 people witnessed the Mothman in and near Point Pleasant, WV. The first reported sighting was when five men were in a cemetery, preparing for a burial. Suddenly a strange and frightening creature flew off of nearby trees and flew right over their heads. They reported that it looked like a brown human with huge wings, that glided, not flapped. The creature was about 7 feet tall and had huge red eyes. The men’s stories all matched each other’s and they were all clearly distressed.
The following year was full of reported sightings. One night two married couples drove past an old abandoned TNT plant near Point Pleasant, WV, when they noticed something shaped like a man, but with wings. It stood about seven feet tall. It had it’s wings folded against it’s back. They sped away. A few moments later, they saw it again on a hillside along the road. They were panicking. It spread it’s wings and rose into the air, following their car. It followed them to Point Pleasant. Four more witnesses claimed to see the creature three different times that same evening.
The news of this creature spread all over the world very quickly, and the creepy man-bird was dubbed the Mothman.
John Keel, a paranormal investigator spent most of that year seeking out the Mothman. He wrote a book, The Mothman Prophecies, which was later adapted into a movie.
In Dec. 1967 the Silver Bridge collapsed killing forty-seven people. Keel stated he had been recieving mysterious and eerie phone calls, and had been warned about the bridge, but not knowing the truth behind it, he hadn’t wanted to start a panic. He was no where near the bridge when the tragedy happened. Many people blame the collapse on the strange sightings of that year. There is no real proof on this.
There were no Mothman reports in the immediate aftermath of the December 15, 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge, giving rise to legends that the Mothman sightings and the bridge collapse were connected.
Claims of later sightings
UFOlogist Jerome Clark writes that many years after the initial events, members of the Ohio UFO Investigators League re-interviewed several people who claimed to have seen Mothman, all of whom insisted their stories were accurate. Linda Scarberry claimed that she and her husband had seen Mothman “hundreds of times,” sometimes at close range, commenting, “It seems like it doesn’t want to hurt you. It just wants to communicate with you.”
Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman claims that sightings of Mothman continue, and told USA Today he re-interviewed witnesses described in Keel’s book who said Mothman was “a huge creature about 7 feet tall with huge wings and red eyes” and that “they could see the creature flapping right behind them” as they fled from it.
Often encountered, but never caught. This appears to be the legacy of Mothman, which has haunted us all long after its last sighting.
In April 1976, after Jerome Clark had returned home from his investigatory jaunt through the Rio Grande Valley, talking to eyewitnesses about the weird batman reports down there, he was interviewed by telephone by Vic Wheatman, who co-hosted with Loren Coleman for a fortean radio show on Boston’s WBUR-FM. The interview, taped for later broadcast (it eventually aired May 24), went without incident. It was only when Wheatman and Coleman had the technical staff play the tape back that they realised something extremely odd had occurred.
Midway through the conversation, Coleman asked Clark if he saw any similarity between the Texas Big Bird reports and the “Mothman” reports ten years earlier. “Very definite similarity,” Clark replied. “Now, John Keel, of course, is the man who did the research on Mothman. Keel claimed that there is a connection between these sightings and UFOs. if there’s any such connection with the Big Bird, I was unable to prove it… All I know is that this thing doesn’t have any business existing in the Rio Grande Valley or anywhere. This is really something out of the ordinary. I have no idea where it is coming from.”
As he spoke these lines, Clark heard nothing of the ordinary on his end. Neither did Wheatman and Coleman on theirs. Yet on the tape, immediately after the word “sightings” in the third sentence, there is a loud unmistakable and very startling EEPPP! sound – precisely the sound Mothman is supposed to have made. (“It squeaked like a big mouse,” one of the original Mothman witnesses had commented in 1966.)
When radio station presonnel heard the sound, they could offer no explanation, unless it originated with Clark, which it didn’t. It remains a spooky episode in our lives, and makes us wonder about the mechanisms of this phenomena.
For some critics, there is nothing in the original accounts of the “Mothman” sightings that cannot be explained by misidentifications of a few sandhill cranes or turkey vultures. After the initial November 1966 sightings of Mothman in the TNT area near Point Pleasant, Robert Smith of the biology department at West Virginia University was reported to have said he thought it was a sighting of a rare sandhill crane. Zoologists at Ohio University, however, pointed out that the crane would be a rare sight indeed in Ohio and West Virginia, since it lived on the plains of Canada.
Shown pictures of the sandhill crane, witness Roger Scarberry scoffed at the suggestion. Mary Mallette, who also saw it, said: “I just wish Dr. Smith could see the thing.”
The gathering of all reports under the umbrella term, “Mothman,” was unfortunate. John Keel’s interviews and later writings tend to lump all of the large, man-sized, gray-bodided, red-glowing eyed creature reports together. While any of us, with hindsight, can now clearly see that some of these reports were entirely mundane bird sightings, Keel was in the middle of a vortex. Separating the wheat from the chaff must have been difficult as he was bombarded with new reports and his own personal saga of troubles in Point Pleasant. But real birds were undoubtedly part of the mix.
In the midst of the flap, a snowy owl and a turkey vulture were “caught.” A detailed multiple witness sighting in Lowell, Ohio, near Cat’s Creek (70 miles north of Point Pleasant), on November 26, 1966, had four people seeing a flock of four large birds in some tree for two hours. Eyewitness Ewing Tilton said they appeared to be 4-5 feet tall with a 10 foot wingspan. “They had dark brown backs with some light flecks. Their breasts where gray and they had five-to six-inch bills, straight, not curved like those of hawks or vultures,” said Tilton. Another witness, Marvin Shock, reported the heads had a “reddish cast.” This sighting may have been a view of common birds, needless to say, perhaps sandhill cranes.
But clearly, other things were going on.
Cryptozoologist Mark A. Hall, the author of a thought-provoking article called “Bighoot – The Giant Owl” in Wonders Vol. 5, No. 3., September 1998, theorizes that Mothman may be a giant species of undiscovered owl.
Hall defines “Bighoot” as: “A bird of prey in the order of Strigiformes. In size larger than all other owls. Never scientifically described. Observed in the wild in the eastern U.S.A. in the states of Ohio and West Virginia. Folklore of similar birds is found elsewhere in the world.”
Hall’s treatment is the first clearly zoological and cryptozoological re-examination of the Mothman reports – separating the tangibles from the paranormal theories of John Keel. Hall lists evidence to link the Mothman sightings to a large unknown owl in the area.
Hall notes that these birds have been around Point Pleasant for a very long time, as their presence is noted in many Indian legends. The American Indians called them “Flying Heads” or “Big Head,” quoting the Iroquous, the Tuscarora, and the Wyandot Indians as saying, “They were huge, bodiless heads, covered in long hair from which protruded sharp nailed claws. With open mouths and fiery eyes the Big Heads flew about in storms, the wind keeping them up by their masses of hair.”
Researcher Hall uncovered this entry by William Connelly in this description among the Wyandots from Ohio: “The Flying Heads plagued the Wyandots. They were more dangerous and troublesome during rainy, foggy, or misty weather. They could enter a cloud of fog, or mist, or rime [ice], and in it approach a Wyandot village unseen. They were cruel and wicked hooh-kehs and cannibals. They caused sickness; they were vampires, and lay in wait for people, whom they caught and devoured. They carried away children; they blighted the tobacco and other crops; they stole and devoured the game after the hunter had killed it.”
One surprising tidbit that Hall discovered was a report of a large bird from the early 1900s at Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It certainly sounds like a precursor to the Mothman accounts of years later – in exactly the right area. In a book called Haunted Valley and More Folk Tales by James Gay Jones, an emeritus professor of history and Glenville State College, Hall found this gem:
In the early 1900’s at Pt. Pleasant, a large bird with the head of a man and a wingspan of at least 12 feet was seen. It appeared just prior to or immediately after the occurance of a tragic event… It was also seen by rural farm families in Mason, Jackson, Roane, Clay and Kanawha counties. By World War I, birdman was observed flying over Looneyville, up Johnson Creek, down Gabe in Roane County thence down Elk Valley into the Kanawha. Its monstrous size and dark reddish feathers which glistened in the sunlight cast fear in all who saw it. Parents kept children indoors after sightings. After World War II people said they were chased by a huge bird while traveling on the highways of Mason, Jackson, and Wood counties near the Ohio River.
In the post-World War II era Hall notes, people reported being chased by mysterious birds on the roads where Mothman would later be seen. “These birds, in common with the enormous Thunderbirds,” he writes, “seem at times to take advantage of the artificial air currents created by automobiles. The effect on humans in the vehicles is startling, but the birds are looking for a natural advantage. Soaring flight is important to large birds… It is their automobiles that have created this situation.”
Mark Hall senses that Mothman/Bighoot may have developed a protective mimicry that “has been utilized by the giant owls to disguise themselves as upright trees and logs lying on the ground… An example of this mimicry in action comes in a report from a woman in Ohio who observed something she could not understand. She saw this thing at Rocky Fork Lake in southern Ohio around August of 1982. About a year later she saw a similar sight at the same lake.”
The witness said that “…while fishing in Rocky Fork Lake in Ohio we drifted into a pristine cove on the SW side and noted with utter disbelief an old tall topless tree trunk approx 9-10 feet height, 112 inches around, move about 4 ft. sideline. (This was on shore about 20 ft. inland aming like-looking trees, with underbrush.) Again it moved, only this time there was a partial twisting or rotation from the top 18-24 inches. It slowly maneuvered backward (keeping erect like a tree) into the woods with NO NOISES from it or underbrush as graceful as a bird thru a tree. It stopped in the mid of a sunlight clearing…”
She then writes that “wings unfolded with a span greater than most small airplanes.” After awhile she reports it returned to its “tree appearance.” She saw the “semblence of two eyes” and thought it was watching them. The sun went down and the sight was lost to view. Then: “One year later, same lake and a half mile or so from that first cove this figure appeared near shoreline again. (It seemed taller or leaner.) This time [I] got a look at its legs and feet – yellowish grainy like chicken legs… they were so thin and short for its height. Three long slender toes with a hooked toe or nail on lower leg.”
For Hall, Bighoot, the North American giant owl, is the answer. Keeping an open mind, I see it as one option among many.
A hand full of researchers have made the connection between the Mothman and the Owlman, a ‘huge great thing with feathers, like a big man with flapping wings’ reported in Cornwall, Uk. Although some physical descriptions of the two seem to match up, the Mothman is thought to be a harbinger of doom whose appearance is preceded by a great disaster, however nothing that would be considered a disaster has occurred in the almost 30 years of Owlman sightings.
To this day the origins of the Mothman remain a mystery and the sightings of the creature remain unexplained.
Sources: Mothman and Other Curious Encounters By Loren Coleman
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman
christineritter.hubpages.com/hub/Does_The_Mothman_Exist
Top Illustration credit to Duncan Hopkins beyondbeyond.com
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