total defense squad

I wrote most of this post in 2021 and will probably not ever get around to really finishing it, because dumpster-diving the conspiracy theory Internet is depressing. Also, while I sometimes enjoy reading about Mothman or other cryptids, I am not here to write an investigation of how cryptid lore spreads and mutates on the internet. Which is where things were increasingly going, the longer I worked on this post.

A previous edition of this post linked to archived versions of the conspiracy websites I mention below. In this edited version, I've almost entirely moved to using screenshots, in order to avoid having my blog be a couple clicks away from upsetting, bigoted content. So this post is a little long.

This is a post about Maximum Ride. But it's also about the weird world of conspiracy theory websites in the 2000s.

Let's start with a brief note about James Patterson. Before he retired in 1996 and began to devote himself full-time to writing, he worked in advertising. He's used those skills in interesting ways over the years: in 1993, his first big book, Along Came a Spider, was promoted on television, when that was essentially unheard of for a book. I encourage you to read this article for a closer look into Patterson's general approach to writing.

Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment was Patterson's first young adult book, released in April 2005. What's important for you to know, if you don't already, is that it's about a group of children with wings. It was also heavily advertised.

Part of the marketing for the book was undertaken by a firm called the Concept Farm. They created a lot of stuff, but today we're interested in one specific thing: this website.

The site is kind of a riff on a type of site that existed then and exists now: “this weird cryptid is definitely real and I totally saw it”. In this case, the cryptid is the main characters. Believe me, we’ll circle back to this topic, so if you’re not familiar with this kind of website, don’t worry.

There’s not a whole lot to the site, so I’ll direct you right to the page I want to discuss. 

Get a good look at this photo.

Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing it again.

Now look at the right side of the site. You see those links? Just take a minute and appreciate that list. A couple of them are just someone’s Angelfire (free web hosting) site. We’ll be seeing Above Top Secret later on, but the other sites aren’t of special interest to us today.

wingkidsarereal is the earliest appearance of this image I was able to find. I didn’t look all that hard, but still -- it’s visible in a July 9th, 2005 archive of the site. This is before any other usage I was able to find, but I don't think that says anything more than "it's hard to find websites from 20 years ago". I suspect, but cannot prove, that this image was probably circulated via email forwards prior to appearing on the archived pages I was able to turn up -- and email forwards, naturally, don't show up on the Internet Archive.

Let’s take a quick tour of the conspiracy theory internet, and see where else this image shows up.

s8int.com is a real time capsule -- it’s a young-earth creationist conspiracy theory site. Here we find our image in November 2005. This is the uncropped version which preserves Steven Moran’s watermark at the bottom left corner. For the most part, when you see the image getting passed around, it’s been cropped to remove this watermark.

The overall look of this site is extremely archetypal of 2000s conspiracy theory internet. By today’s standards the formatting is relatively plain -- all the flavor is in the text. Not visible in this screenshot: a generally simple design with a big banner image at the top, and a row of icons for other pages along the left side of the screen. This is the general look that the designers of wingkidsarereal are imitating with their site.

s8int believe this photo shows a pterodactyl near the World Trade Center. At this point in time, the later consensus (which we will get to later) had not yet gelled.

This is also the first place we see a bit of text that pops up a few times later -- the alleged description by the photographer, Moran. I haven’t been able to track this text any further back in time than this page, but it makes sense to me that it would’ve been passed around as a chain email before its appearance here. It’s also possible that the person who wrote this text sent it in to s8int themselves, and that it became a chain email later on.

Worth noting: s8int also have the highest-resolution version of this image I’ve seen, which you can view here.

Next, in February 2006, the wonderfully trustworthy-sounding mothman.us is on the case… they think it’s Mothman. This website has a slightly more sophisticated, modern look than s8int.

In October 2006, a small-scale Blogspot blog made a post that also uses the Moran image. The formatting is actually too bad to screencap, so here's the text of the whole entry:

Spooky Story Four: The Mothman Returneth Last year, I did a spooky post on The Mothman. It's probably one of my best scary stories, and I get a lot of hits from people Googling The Mothman everyday. You can find my original post HERE. The question now is...have there been other Mothman sites lately? For those too lazy to read my first post, and for those who need a refresher, The Mothman is a winged creature, standing about 7 feet tall, and has bright red eyes. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of reports of encounters and sightings with this flying thing near Point Pleasant, West Virginia from 1966 - 1967. The reports made national news, as Mothman sightings kept coming in, along with sightings of UFOs all over the place. It is here in Point Pleasant where the infamous Men in Black first made their public appearance as well. Townspeople also reported that they were having psychic visions and dreams. Basically, it was a weird time for Mount Pleasant that eventually ended in disaster. The Silver Bridge collapsed on December 15, killing 46 people. And immediately after, sightings of The Mothman abruptly came to a hault. Since 1967, there have been worldwide reports of this Mothman appearing prior to major disasters: * People reported seeing the Mothman just days before the Mexico City earthquake in 1985. * There have been many interviews in Chernobyl from those that said they saw a winged man-creature, right before the nuclear reactor disaster in 1986. * Minutes after the Twin Towers' destruction on September 11th, 2001, observers reported seeing "winged, flying men" flying near both towers. The picture (at left and right) shows that the flying creature is much too big to be any kind of bird. * Newspapers in Tbilissi, Georgia wrote about how some guy said he got information from a "winged phantom" concerning the Church of St. David being in danger. Soon thereafter, there was a major earthquake striking Tbilissi on April 25, 2002. The church suffered massive damage. * Months after the Tbilissi quake, Chinese citizens reported seeing The Mothman. Shortly after reporters published their stories, a Chinese MD-82 in the northeastern part of China. There were further reports from people saying they knew the plane was going to crash because of information given to them by "a man that looked like a moth." * There are reports all over the world, even in Afghanistan and Iraq. So what is The Mothman and why does it seem to follow major disasters? Is it trying to warn us of impending doom? Or is there something sinister involved? Or perhaps, it's simply the human imagination trying to cope with tragedy. Although the tragedy of Mount Pleasant was 40 years ago, it seems the myth of The Mothman is still one that captures our attention and our imagination. Whatever you believe, catch Sci Fi investigates this Wednesday night, as the crew goes to Mount Pleasant, WV to investigate The Mothman (Sci Fi Channel). I was in Charleston, WV this summer and no one would take me on the hour drive to Mount Pleasant. As one local resident told me, "For us, it's all very realToo real." For those that live in the area, The Mothman represents a very scary and uncertain time in their town's history.

Let’s wrap up in February 2007 with an Above Top Secret thread.

Above Top Secret is a general conspiracy theory discussion forum, so getting a clear consensus on something is rare. This thread is no exception, and it’s not good reading. But forum member Raist did eventually go the extra mile to win an argument they were having, and emailed the photographer, Steven Moran.

…It was the wrong guy. This Moran did give his opinion of the photo – he thinks it’s a bird. Also, I must note: this screencap is from a 2015 archived version of the site -- in 2007, Above Top Secret had a black background with greenish text, and was much more like the other conspiracy sites I've shown in this post.

This is where I chose to stop poking around with all this stuff. Not because men in black suits showed up at my door, but because I just sort of lost interest. I had seen what I was interested in seeing: a widely-circulated photograph made the successful jump from "this photo of a recent event is crazy -- is it an angel? A demon? A pigeon?" to "this photo is part of conspiracy theory 'canon' and is definitely Mothman".

Along the way, it crossed through the small portion of the internet that I was reading in the mid-2000s. I'll pause to speculate on how I think it got there: someone working on wingkidsarereal needed some images to use for the site, and happened to see the Moran image somewhere. I don't think it's any deeper than that.

The Mothman angle was what dragged me into scrolling through these old conspiracy websites, because it seemed so odd to me. Worth mentioning: it is my opinion that The Mothman Prophecies, which came out in 2002, helped give Mothman a boost out of the world of weird nerds who like talking about cryptids and toward the mainstream, or at least toward people who had not yet heard about this specific weird phenomenon. (Here's a brief little 2001 IGN article I found, explaining what Mothman even is. Which you don't need to do if everyone already knows.)

Canonically, Mothman appeared during a specific period in the late 1960s in a very specific area of West Virginia, then was never seen again. But he just keeps showing up, "canonical" or not -- people really, really want to see Mothman, in the same way they want to see Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Seeing Mothman is cool, and gives you a link to a pre-existing bank of cryptid sightings. You're not just a person who saw something weird. You're a person who saw a known thing that's linked to a global pattern of sightings.

And so, now Mothman is no longer limited to Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966 - 1967. Mothman is in Mexico City in 1985. Mothman is in Ukraine in 1986. Mothman is in New York City in 2001.