Mothman

Mothman – Strangest Creature in Pleasant Area of West Virginia 

Mothman is said to be a strange creature probably the strangest creatures ever to grace the annals of weirdness in America. It is considered to be a moth like creature seen in the Point Pleasant area of West Virginia and the weird event began from November 15, 1966 to December 15, 1967 and its first report was published in the Point Pleasant Register on November 16, 1966, titled `Couples See Man-Sized Bird Creature – Something’.

The event occurred on November 12, 1966, when five men in the local cemetery were preparing a grave for the burial when some creature resembling a brown human being lifted off from some nearby trees and flew overhead. The men witnessing the scene were surprised and though it did not seemed to be a bird; it appeared like a man with wings.

Shortly thereafter two young couples from Point Pleasant, by the name Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette informed the police that they had seen a large white creature with glowing red eyes when the car headlights picked it up. The description given by them was `it was a large flying man with ten foot wings’ which followed their car while they were travelling in an area outside the town known as `TNT area’, the site of the former World War II munitions plant.

Large Bird with Red Eyes 

Few days after that, several other also reported regarding the same sights where two firemen volunteer reported stating that it was a `large bird with red eyes. According to one Mason County Sheriff George Johnson, was of the belief that the sighting was mainly due to an unusually large heron called `shitepoke’. Johnson was informed by Contractor Newell Partridge that when a flashlight was aimed at a creature in a nearby field, its eyes glowed like bicycle reflectors and blamed the noises coming from his television that led to the disappearance of his German Shepherd dog on the creature.

Wildlife biologist Dr Robert L. Smith at West Virginia University informed reporters that the sightings as well as the descriptions fitted the sandhill crane, which is a large American crane that is almost as high as a man with seven foot wingspan featuring circles of reddish colouring surrounding the eyes and that the bird could have wandered out of its migration space.

Mothman – An Alien 

Jerome Clark, ufologist reports that several years after the initial events, members of the Ohio UFO Investigators League interviewed the people once again who claimed to have seen Mothman and insisted their stories to be true.

Linda Scarberry claimed that she together with her husband had seen Mothman hundreds of times and sometimes at close range stating that `it seems like it does not want to hurt anyone but wants to communicate to you’. Some Ufologist, paranormal authors together with crypto zoologist are of the belief that Mothman seemed to be an alien, a kind of a supernatural manifestation or an unknown cryptid.

Author John Keel in his 1975 book – The Mothman Prophecies, narrates that the Point Pleasant locals experienced precognition which included premonitions of the collapse of the Silver Bridge, unidentified flying object sightings, visits from inhuman or threatening men in black with other bizarre phenomena. Mothman was seen a month prior to the destruction of the Twin Towers and 6 hours before the 1-35W bridge had collapsed. Keel, however is criticized for distorting established data and for cheating.