Glowing red eyes, a black leathery wingspan, seven feet tall.
It’s reported that this cryptid can chase cars at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, filling the occupants with feelings of dread and even disappearing at will into an unseen aether: the Mothman.
Steeped in “high strangeness,” the Mothman’s modern origination point comes from Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966. That’s when two gravediggers witnessed a large, black figure fly over their heads while they were shoveling a fresh grave.
From the depths of hell or an interdimensional rift, the Mothman tore itself into the nightmares of the Point Pleasant residents that year. After the initial sighting by the gravediggers, the bizarre phenomena ramped up, and many more encounters took place in an abandoned TNT factory on the outskirts of town.
Witnesses would see red eyes and a large, black body. It also appeared that the head was connected to the shoulders with no neck. This striking, ominous figure would stretch out its wings and float upward without a single flap of its wings, then tear through the sky—or tear after a car whose occupants immediately fled in terror.
Associated with strange UFO sightings, disembodied screeches in the night, and omens of disaster, the sense of pure, nightmarish dread with which the Mothman filled witnesses drew many investigators to the area. The legend became so strong that a movie was even made about it called The Mothman Prophecies staring Richard Gere, based on a book by the investigator John Keel.
From the first Mothman sighting to ones just a year later, suddenly, the unthinkable happened. US Route 35 traverses a suspension bridge across the Ohio River, spanning a length of 1760 feet. Just before Christmas, during rush hour traffic on December 15, 1967, witnesses reported hearing what sounded like gunshots.
Horrifyingly, this turned out to be the ominous sound of the suspension bridge collapsing under the weight of rush hour traffic. From there, it was described that the bridge “folded like a deck of cards.” 32 vehicles fell into the icy water, taking the lives of 46 people.
“What does this have to do with Mothman?” During John Keel’s investigations of the Point Pleasant Mothman sightings, he had become convinced that the sightings were pointing to an upcoming major disaster. Whether Mothman was responsible, an omen, or completely unrelated, the sightings indeed ceased when the bridge collapsed.
The Chicago Mothman
Beginning around 2011, the epicenter for sightings appeared to move to Chicago. Since that time, there have been countless sightings of the Chicago Mothman mostly around O’Hare International Airport and Lake Michigan.
Many of the witnesses have told of the Chicago Mothman peering at them, screeching, and in some cases chasing people in downtown Chicago neighborhoods. On one occasion at O’Hare, security reportedly closed off the area to search for the creature after multiple airport workers saw it.
To this day, the Chicago Mothman sightings continue and confound. Maybe there have been a spate of misinterpretations by witnesses perceiving something mundane. Or perhaps the Mothman is truly an omen of disaster.
Then again, maybe this is all real, but this cryptid has nothing to do with disaster; perhaps he is interested in something beyond our human understanding.
Want to hear which one it is? What’s the truth about Mothman? Tune into the Metaphysical podcast to hear remote viewer John Vivanco and investigative researcher Rob Counts discuss this topic of extreme high strangeness. In all the remote viewing data John collected, this one surprised even him.
