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Hidden History: West Virginia's Mothman [1]
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Date: 2023-08-29
The West Virginia Mothman is famous amongst cryptozoologists and also with the public, thanks to a bestselling 1975 book by UFOlogist John Keel titled The Mothman Prophecies and a 2002 Hollywood movie that was (very loosely) based on it.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
The reports began with a newspaper article in the November 16, 1966, edition of the Point Pleasant Register, which headlined “Couples See Man-Sized Bird … Creature … Something”. Steve Mallette, Roger Scarberry, and their wives Mary and Linda were parked in their car at around 11:30pm, in a spot known as “The TNT Area”. During World War Two there had been an explosives factory and a National Guard Armory here, and when it was abandoned after the war it became overgrown and collapsed. It was now a hangout for teens.
As the four sat in their car, they caught sight of what looked like a winged man, about 6-7 feet tall, with glowing red eyes and wings that stretched around 10 feet. “It was like a man with wings,” Mallette told the newspapers. Scarberry added, “Maybe what you would visualize as an angel”.
When they drove off, the creature flew along with them, passing over the roof of their car before veering off. The couples drove a short distance away, then turned around. Mallette said, “We went downtown, turned around, and went back and there it was again. It seemed to be waiting on us”. The creature then flew over a field and disappeared, making a sound they later described as like a “record played at a high speed or a squeak of a mouse”. The four of them later went back to the spot and, they say, found a single “hooflike” footprint.
After this newspaper story, more sightings poured in. Kenneth Duncan, from the town of Clendenin, reported that, a few days earlier, he had been digging a grave in the cemetery with four other men when a large winged figure jumped out of a nearby tree and flew over their heads. He said it “looked like a brown human being... It was gliding through the trees and was in sight for about a minute.” He said the four others with him didn’t see it.
A local contractor named Newell Partridge told the police that, on the same night as the first sightings by Mallette and Scarberry, he was in his home in Doddridge County, about 100 miles north of Point Pleasant, when his television set suddenly began sparking and malfunctioning—“it began acting like a generator”, he said—and his dog began barking wildly. Grabbing a flashlight and looking outside, he saw a “thing” with eyes like “red reflectors”. His dog ran outside and took off into the field after the creature, and they both disappeared in the dark. The dog never came back.
The newspaper stories of the creature, now dubbed “Mothman”, were picked up across the country, and hundreds of people began pouring into the tiny town hoping for a glimpse. One paper reported: “Police officials estimate more than 1,000 persons were searching the area prior to midnight.” Many of them had guns. “One officer heard an automatic rifle bark several times Thursday night behind one of the many buildings.”
There were dozens of new reports: one group of four teenagers said they had seen a giant bird with red eyes fly away from their car. Another witness, New Haven teen Connie Jo Carpenter, said she was driving along Route 33 when “an awful-looking creature... manlike with big wing span” flew towards her car. She sped away. That same night, two young girls were walking home from a store in Albans when they saw a flying creature: they said it had “big red pop-eyes and didn’t have a beak”. The scared girls ran to a neighbor’s house, who then saw the monster too. Another group of children told police they had seen what they thought was a man laying down behind a parked car—then it stood up and flew away.
Tom Ury said he had seen the creature while driving home: “It came up like a helicopter and then veered over my car. It began going around in circles about two or three telephone poles high and kept staying over my car... I tried to get away and was going 70 miles an hour, but it kept up with me easily.”
One of the last reported sightings was in January 1967, when Mabel McDaniel (the mother of previous witness Roger Scarberry) said she saw the Mothman flying along a road above her car.
UFOlogist John Keel arrived to interview witnesses. When the local Silver Bridge over the Ohio River collapsed in December 1967, killing 46 people, Keel decided that the Mothman had been some sort of prophetic warning that had been sent by the flying saucers to warn people about the impending disaster. Some UFOlogists have taken this theory and run with it, and have claimed that there were Mothman sightings in Ukraine before the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and in New York before the 9-11 attacks. Keel’s book, The Mothman Prophecies, was the basis for a Hollywood movie.
There was a brief revival of Mothman stories in 2016, after a local resident posted photos to the Internet of what he said was a Mothman flying from tree to tree. To most people, the photos looked like a bad photoshop, though some thought it was just an eagle or an owl.
Today, Mothman is celebrated in Point Pleasant with a 12-foot metal statue, the “World’s Only Mothman Museum”, and an annual Mothman Festival.
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