The Mothman is one of the strangest creatures to ever make an appearance in the UFO era. I say during the ufo era, for while the this winged monstrosity is only occasionally linked with UFO's, many of the most famous sightings to take place happened during a rash of UFO sightings and other strange occurrences, such as Men in Black visitations in the Ohio River Valley in 1966 and 1967. Late on night on November 15th, 1966, two young married couples were driving past the old abandoned TNT plant near Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Suddenly they spotted two large, round, red eyes two inches wide and six inches apart, attached to something that "was shaped like a man, but bigger. Maybe six or seven feet tall. And it had big wings that were folded against its back." The eyes were "hypnotic" the witnesses all agreed. When it began to amble towards the door to the plant the four got scared and ran off. As they sped away doing well over 100 miles per hour the creature kept right up with them, chasing them. "That bird kept right up with us," Roger Scarberry told investigator John Keel. "It wasn't even flapping its wings." The eyewitnesses told Deputy Sheriff Millard Halstead it made a noise like a " record player played at high speed or the squeek of a mouse." It followed them all the way down Highway 62 right to the Point Pleasant city limits. |
The four people were not the only ones to have claimed to have seen the monster that night. Another group of four claimed to have seen it three times. A third eyewitness report is rather interesting. At 10:30 p.m. the same night Newell Partidge, a building contractor from Salem, West Virginia, was watching television when the screen blanked out. A " fine herringbone pattern appeared on the tube, and at the same time the set started a loud whining noise, winding up to a high pitch, peaking and breaking off, as if you were on a musical scale and you went as high as you could and came back down and repeated it.... It sounded like a generator winding up." His dog soon began howling on the porch of the house, and continued even after the set was turned off. Partridge went outside where he found his dog facing the hay barn 150 yards away. "I shined a light in that direction,Partridge said later in an inter- |
-view with writer Gray Barker, "and it picked up two red circles, or eyes, which looked like bicycle reflectors," but for all intents and purposes much larger. Something about that experience scared him greatly (can't imagine what). They were not, he was sure, the eyes of any animal he had ever seen. His dog meanwhile, perhaps a little more foolhardy, ran after the Mothman, never to be seen again. Partridge ran inside his house, got his gun and barracaded himself inside, sleeping nary a wink with the weapon at his side. By morning he realized he had seen the last of his poor faithful dog, as two days later the dog had still not shown up when he read a newspaper report of the Point Pleasant sightings. One detail struck him horrifyingly enough, Roger Scarberry's statement that as they entered the Point Pleasant city limits the four occupants of the car had seen the body of a big dog on the side of the road. A few moments later, on their way back out of town the body was gone. Both they and Deputy Halstead, who was following them in a police car, had even stopped to look for the dogs body. Partridge immedietely thought of his own dog. All that remained of it were its tracks in the mud. " Those tracks were going in a circle as if the dog was casing its own tail" which it never had done before " There were no other tracks of any kind out there." In another interesting developement of that evening, Deputy Halstead encountered an odd type of interference on his police radio near the old TNT plant. It was loud and sounded like a record or a tape player being played at extremely high speed. He finally, in the end, had to turn his radio off. The following day a press conference was called by Sheriff George Johnson. A reporter immedietely named the monster the Mothman after a villain from the Batman television series, and the name stuck. From that time to November of 1967 the sightings continued. For example on the night of November 16, 1966 three adults, one carrying an infant, were walking back to their car after hanging out with some friends. Suddenly something appeared in front of them, slowly rising from the ground. Marcella Bennett was so frightened she dropped her baby!!!!!!! A " big gray thing, bigger than a man" it had no discernable head, but it did have two large glowing circles at the top of its torso. As its tremendous bat-like wings unfolded from behind it, Raymond Wamsley snatched up the helpless infant and herded the two woman back inside where they had just left. The creature chased them right up to the porch, and they could see it looking in the windows. By the time the police arrived the monster was gone. Mrs. Bennett was traumatized for weeks after and eventually sought psychiatric help. John Keel, the major Mothman investigator, wrote that at least 100 people saw the creature, he compiled a composite picture of it. According to the reports it stood between five and seven feet tall, was broader than any man, and walked in a shuffling manner on humanlike legs. It emitted a screaching squeeky sound. The eyes, Keel wrote "seemed to have been more terrifying than the creatures great size itself" were set high near the top of the trunk of the body. The wings were batlike but did not flap when the creature flew. It typically flew straight up, like a helicopter. Witnesses described the color as being dark grey or brown. After 1967 the Mothman disappeared, which coincided with the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge. Only one subsequent report is known, from Elma, New York, in October of 1974. Keel also found a woman who said she had encountered the creature in 1961, at the outskirts of Chief Cornstalk Hunting Grounds on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River. She told Keel "it was much larger than a man. A big gray figure. It stood in the middle of the road. Then a pair of wings unfolded from its back, and they practically filled up the whole road. It almost looked like a small airplane. Then it took off straight up....disappearing out of sight in seconds." Whatever the Mothman is or was, it was no hoax. Some of it may have been mass hysteria, such as misidentifying an owl in the dark. It has even been suggested that what the people saw were sandhill cranes flown down from Canada, a theory all of the witnesses reject. Whatever the case, the Mothman resists easy debunking, Unlike many improbable creatures this one has alot of eyewitnesses, including many multiple eyewitness encounters. |
