Mothman
For a full year beginning in November 1966, more than a hundred people in the Ohio River Valley, most of them living in West Virginia, said they had sighted a winged, apparently armless man, roughly 5 to 7 feet (1.5 to 2.1m) tall, either flying in the air or standing on the ground with its wings folded. Many witnesses said that the beingâs eyes were red and unusually large and frightening, that its wingspan was approximately 10 feet (3m), and that its wings did not flap while it was flying. Some reported that it made a squeaking sound, but others said it was completely silent. Based on witness descriptions the day after the first sighting, the media dubbed the creature âMothmanâ for its resemblance to a villain that had recently appeared in an episode of a popular television show of the time, Batman.
Credible Witnesses
One possible explanation for sightings of Mothman is that people with very active imaginations were constructing memories based on the Batman episode. However, this creature might have been what was seen as early as 1960 or 1961 by a woman who reported the sighting years later. Furthermore, the 1966 to 1967 sightings were by credible witnessesâincluding National Guardsmen, firemen, and pilotsâwho were often in groups when the sightings took place. For example, five men in a cemetery near Clendenin, West Virginia, saw a brown, flying, humanlike figure on November 12, 1966, and four women saw a similar figure on Route 33 in Ohio on December 7, 1966.
The first sightings to attract media attention occurred on the night of November 15, 1966; the first of these involved building contractor Newell Partridge. Partridge later reported that he was inside his home in Salem, West Virginia, when, at around 10:30 P.M., his television screen suddenly went dark and then started displaying strange lines, after which the television set began making equally strange noises. His dog then began howling on the porch, and when he went outside he saw the glowing eyes of a strange beast. Newell ran back inside, and he never saw his dog again. Perhaps not coincidentally, a few hours later two couples, driving together in a car, spotted the body of a dog by the side of a road, and shortly thereafter they saw a winged creature standing near an abandoned explosives plant near Point Pleasant, West Virginia (roughly 90 miles [145km] from Salem). As they sped away from the scene, they noticed that the dog carcass had disappeared.
The two panicked couples drove immediately to the sheriffâs office, and Deputy Millard Halstead, who knew and trusted all four of the witnesses, went to the explosives factory to look for the creature. He failed to find it, but he did note that his car radio began screeching and making strange noises as soon as he approached the scene. The next day Halsteadâs boss, Sheriff George Johnson, held a press conference to address peopleâs concerns about the winged man, and local reporters shared the story with the world.
Keelâs Investigation
After hearing about Mothman, an investigator of anomalous phenomena, John A. Keel, went to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, to interview witnesses beginning in December 1966. He chronicled all of the sightings and subsequently wrote about his investigation in various articles and books, most notably The Mothman Prophecies, published in 1975. Keel reported that around the time of the Mothman sightings, UFOs were often seen near the factory, both at night and during the day. In fact, by Keelâs calculations, more than a thousand UFO sightings occurred between the fall of 1966 and the end of 1967, with the largest number occurring in March and April 1967. In addition, Keel noted that some phenomena associated with UFO sightings were also associated with the Mothman sightings. Specifically, appliances, radios, and cars often suddenly and inexplicably stopped working in places where sightings had occurred or just before they occurred, and some people claimed to have suffered from eye troubles and/or skin irritations as a result of looking at Mothman.
Local authorities, however, ignored any suggestions that Mothman sightings were connected to UFO sightings, though because so many credible people witnessed the creature, they did not consider the Mothman sightings to be a hoax. Instead, unwilling to accept the idea that a flying man was terrorizing the Ohio River Valley, they suggested that the witnesses had actually seen some ordinary animal and mistaken it for a flying man. For example, a biologist from West Virginia University, Robert Smith, said that the creature was probably a sandhill crane, a large bird with long legs and red colouring in the eye area. Other experts suggested that the witnesses had seen some other type of bird, such as an owl, or some kind of bear. The witnesses themselves, however, insisted that they had seen no ordinary animal, and Keel dismissed all of these theories. Instead, he theorized that whatever phenomenon was responsible for the presence of UFOs in the area was also responsible for the appearance of Mothman.
Keel also made a connection between the Mothman sightings and a disaster that occurred in the area right after the sightings stopped. At 5:05 P.M. on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge, which went from Point Pleasant across the Ohio River to Gallipolis, Ohio, suddenly collapsed, sending forty-six cars into the water and killing over thirty people. That same night twelve UFOs were spotted flying above some woods outside of Point Pleasant. While Keel does not blame the UFOs for collapsing the bridge, he says that UFO sightings and reports of strange events, unusual forces, and mysterious creatures often go hand in hand, and he suspects that they are all part of one experience, whether this experience is a real one or an otherworldly one.
In any case, after the bridge collapse, the creature was never again seen in the Point Pleasant area, though similar beings have occasionally been reported elsewhere throughout the world. The timing of Mothmanâs disappearance from West Virginia exactly a year after the sightings began has led some people to suggest that the creature is a harbinger of death. From this idea came the notion of the so-called Mothman death curse, whereby someone who sees the Mothman is destined to die within a year after sighting the creature. In fact, some people suspect that other mysterious creatures sighted in some places before a natural disaster, such as a bridge collapse, have been the Mothman in a different form.
SEE ALSO:
- John A.Keel
SOURCE:
The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena – written by Patricia D. Netzley © 2006 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning