Is Mothman A Superhero?

Mothman: Angel of Conspiracy

by Andy Colvin, Mothman Photographer

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The story of the Mothman is one of the most baffling in the paranormal and conspiracy pantheons. Much has been written, and many documentaries have titillated us with questions about the flying creature seen in Charleston and Pt. Pleasant, WV, in 1966-67. As to its identity, the usual possibilities are given: 1) a genetic mutation, 2) a demonic harbinger of doom, or 3) just an undiscovered bird (that incongruously carries a supposed “death curse” for those who fail to investigate it in proper “cryptozoological” fashion). After working for many years on the Mothman question, I have come to realize that a fourth category is necessary, that of “guardian angel,” or “angel of conspiracy.”

To get a sense of how Mothman might be an angel of conspiracy, all one has to do is consider the encounter process in reverse. Instead of starting with spooky descriptions of the sightings as most TV shows do, look instead at the internal states of the witnesses long after their encounters. In doing so, one finds that witnesses seem plugged into an ongoing telepathic message board emanating from “the superspectrum” – once called the “ether” in the old days. While many of the Mothman’s “psi-mails” have to do with improving witnesses’ personal lives (by notifying them of situations to avoid), many involve more impersonal societal issues stemming from complex “conspiracies” foisted upon the poor by elites. The question of why Mothman sends messages beneficial to the proletariat is an intriguing one, as the answer may challenge the hegemony of established religions and explain why secret societies seem so bent on mastering paranormal forces. My research series, The Mothman’s Photographer, seeks to explore this question.

The Mothman’s Photographer presents narrative and non-narrative information in the form of videotaped interviews, photographs, drawings, songs, and a trilogy of books. This project was informed by my own personal experiences with the Mothman phenomenon. During the original Mothman flap, I lived on Pleasant Dell, in Mound, WV (now called North Charleston), which was once covered by sacred “Indian” mounds. Mothman was seen in Mound over Blaine Island, the site of Union Carbide’s Rare Chemicals Facility. My research kicked into high gear immediately following the fulfillment of one of Mothman’s major prophecies: the 9/11 tragedy. Immediately following the WTC attacks, I remembered that in 1967, my best friend at school had predicted that such an event would occur in the year 2001. This friend, Tommy Burnham, had also said it would be the start of “World War III.” Tommy stated that his knowledge had come from his personal visits with “space aliens” and a flying “birdman” seen in the area. To prove his claims, he dared me to stand in a certain spot near the shrine we had just built to the birdman, saying that I would see the vision myself – if I had the guts.

Never one to turn down a dare, I stood in the spot and indeed saw brief and terrifying visions of the future, some of which included buildings exploding in what seemed to be NYC. Since my father was from NY and we had visited Coney Island (where, by the way, a birdman was once seen), I had some inkling of what it looked like. The point of view of the vision seemed to be from the water level of the Hudson River, just west of the WTC complex. Interestingly, it seemed as if other information was relayed during the vision. In fact, it seemed as if a lifetime of information – some of it personal – had been packed into a few brief seconds. Stunned, I fell back in shock and fear. I immediately began trying to extricate myself from Tommy, who had been making the disturbing claim that he was both a “warlock” and a “vampire.” Despite having an IQ of 172, Tommy had to leave school after biting a student in the neck. It seemed that Tommy’s rumored therapy sessions with Dr. Alan Roberts – the same psychiatrist working with famous UFO contactee Woody Derenberger and his “spaceman” pal, Indrid Cold – had not gone well (or had they?). After turning down a Chinese language scholarship to Indiana Univ., Tommy and his mother (a former Miss West Virginia finalist, like Jon-Benet Ramsey’s mother, “Patsy”) both went on to work for NASA at Cape Canaveral – just as the “aliens” had predicted in 1967. Tommy’s father, an engineer at Union Carbide’s Tech Center in S. Charleston, WV, died of a “heart attack” not too long after the birdman flap. In the national media, “The Bird” was dubbed “Mothman.” As most are aware, the story of the Mothman sightings later became the focus of a motion picture and best-selling book called The Mothman Prophecies, by celebrated Fortean scholar John Keel.

Central to the tale told by Keel is that there appears to be shapeshifting creature – an “ultra-terrestrial” – that can communicate with people either telepathically, or through dreams and visions. The Mothman is an enigmatic subject that has confounded mainstream “cryptozoologists” and UFO researchers for decades, as it incorporates things that go far beyond typical creature sightings or UFO encounters. According to Keel, the Mothman was communicating with people about conspiratorial events completely unrelated to UFOs, such as political assassinations, energy blackouts, and industrial sabotage. Keel noticed an odd mix of seemingly natural phenomena (highly gifted children, “lightning-strike” victims, “intelligent” balls of light, and “Big Hairy Monsters” like Bigfoot and Mothman) as well as seemingly synthetic activities (fake military officers, fake clergy, fake photographers, fake spacemen, and fake NASA/Smithsonian vans). To top it off, the area simultaneously experienced a harrowing rash of cattle and human mutilations, missing teenagers, and threatening operatives like the Men in Black. Dozens of bodies were found in a nearby cave in 1975. It seemed as if someone was experimenting with how to terrorize a population.

Underneath all of this mysterious and disturbing behavior, researchers have found links to the military-industrial complex, international banking, terrorism, narcotics, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, atomic energy, biowarfare, and religious organizations. Interestingly the clues, correspondences, and synchronicities prevalent around Mothman seem to point to the occult wings of fascism and neo-Nazism, and to the notorious “World Bankers” – what today might be called the Illuminati, Eastern Establishment, or New World Order “internationalists.” Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that some very famous Manchurian candidates – all instrumental in killing the peace movement – grew up in Charleston: Charles Manson, Sara Jane Moore, and Larry Layton, Jr. Both Manson and Moore grew up on my street in Mound (Woodward Drive) and are said to have been very close. Moore was an FBI informant involved in the Patty Hearst kidnapping case and subsequent “food ransom” program, which also involved Jim Jones. Manson, arguably the most famous “killer” of all time, reportedly had his fingers in several cult pies including Scientology, the Process Church, and Son of Sam.

It was two of Manson’s girlfriends, Moore and Squeaky Fromme, who tried to shoot President Ford and usher an unelected Nelson Rockefeller into the presidency. Amazingly, Moore was released from prison on Dec. 31st, 2007, thus joining John Hinckley – a Bush family friend – in an extremely rare category: presidential assassins shown leniency by the U.S. government. Larry Layton was the only person imprisoned for the Jonestown massacre in Guyana. Layton, whose father was once head of the Army’s Biochemical Warfare Division, was also recently released from prison. A medical doctor from a family with major pharmaceutical investments, Layton had huge stores of psychotropic drugs at Jonestown, which happened to be located on land formerly owned by Carbide. Layton’s sisters are rumored to have helped hide the millions of dollars that disappeared after the massacre, where hundreds of people were injected with drugs and/or shot.

In recent years, fragments of evidence have arisen linking the Mothman events to JFK assassination players like Alvis Maddox (the Dallas sheriff present when fellow cop Buddy Walthers – who found the “extra” bullet at Dealey Plaza – mysteriously died on the job) and David Ferrie, cohort of CIA agent Clay Shaw, who was indicted by Jim Garrison. Ferrie, an amateur medical researcher suspected of injecting his enemies with cancer viruses, wore an ape-hair wig to cover his alopecia. He may have been the infamous “Frightwig man” terrorizing people in Pt. Pleasant during Mothman. John Keel once received an odd note implying that Pt. Pleasant’s Silver Bridge collapse may have actually been an attempt to kill “Maddox and his daughter.” To be fair, the note may not have referred to Alvis – who was, coincidentally, a famous UFO witness – but to Charles Manson, who was made to wear girl’s clothing in his youth by a mother whose real name was Maddox. Manson’s whereabouts at the time of the bridge collapse are tantalizingly hazy. Oddly, another JFK conspirator, Fred Crisman, came around to investigate the “contact” experiences of Woody Derenberger.

The Mothman thinks big when it comes to revealing conspiracies, as evidenced by the apparent connection between the Mothman events, the Philadelphia Experiment, and the Montauk “time travel” experiments. For example, my father, Andrew Colvin, Sr., was not only present at the Philadelphia Experiment – being stationed at the Norfolk Naval Yard – but was later stationed on Long Island near the controlling base for the Montauk experiments, Brookhaven Labs. He later served on the USS Roosevelt, which famously encountered UFOs in 1952. My father then worked for 25 years at Carbide’s Rare Chemicals Facility. During a major labor strike at Carbide that coincided with the Mothman events, my father told me that he knew the agitators who were threatening to blow up the plant. As dramatized in the film starring Richard Gere, Mothman witnesses saw visions of a chemical plant bombing. I believe experiencers were actually seeing Carbide’s 1984 Bhopal, India disaster, which killed thousands. As with 9/11, these prophecies can come years, or even decades, in advance. My father’s best friend, Neil Plumbrook, was an engineer on the Echelon eavesdropping station in Sugar Grove, WV, where the NSA reportedly downloads AT&T’s satellite traffic. While Neil survived two attempts on his life, my father did not. Dad hinted that he had been jabbed in the back, in the middle of the night, by someone wielding a needle loaded with cancer cells.

One night when I excitedly screamed that Mothman seemed to be flying behind our family car, my father sternly reprimanded me and muttered something about “the government.” The location of my sighting later turned out to be the same place where, as outlined in The Mothman Prophecies, Tad Jones saw a UFO land on Interstate 64. This was near Institute, WV, where Carbide once made the synthetic rubber shared with I.G. Farben, builder of the Nazi camps. One of the untold aspects of the Jones story is that it seems to point to a possible spy cell within Union Carbide, something hinted at in Philip Melanson’s study of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and RFK – two more of Mothman’s prophecies. Students of RFK know that there are odd links therein to the Manson Family, such as RFK’s last dinner, eaten with Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski at the home of John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate.

Mothman’s help is crucial in fighting conspirators knowing no bounds. Prior to my father’s death from an extremely rare form of cancer found almost exclusively in Carbide employees, my family was seemingly interrogated by MIBs while under the influence of hypnosis. This was not unlike the family of Jennings H. Frederick, a former NASA employee working in the vicinity of the secret AVRO saucer. Frederick’s case, which was investigated by local UFO researcher Gray Barker, involved a canister of immobilizing gas being thrown into his home. Frederick was forcibly given an injection in his arm by a SWAT team that quietly came in through the windows. The last thing Frederick remembered before blacking out was being asked questions about “UFOs, time, and the future.” These are the same Montaukian things I remember our family being asked about. For some reason – perhaps because I was so young – the hypnosis didn’t seem to work very well. I was able to fake my way through, pretending I was under the spell of the two MIBs querying us.

Mothman has quite a range. Over the years, my family experienced paranormal events ranging from a flying saucer in the front yard to “little green men,” black panthers, faceless “shadow” people, “tree” entities, “good” and “bad” angels, invisible and/or morphing entities, ghosts, poltergeists, stickmen, glowing Bigfoots, and goatlike satyrs. In 1973, my sister took a snapshot of me with something birdmanish looking in the window behind me. Most of us Colvins have psychic abilities ranging from a healthy sense of intuition to the ability to diagnose illnesses, to knowing details of strangers’ personal histories after a mere handshake. On Woodward Dr., neighbors experienced additional curiosities like cigar-shaped UFOs, the Virgin Mary, the Flatwoods Monster, and balls of light that seemed telepathic. One woman even claimed to have had a “Virgin Conception” that might have become a “Virgin Birth,” were it not for the fact that the fetus mysteriously disappeared well into the pregnancy.

Not long before 9/11, my sister, Loretta, and her daughter, Sharon Moore, both experienced Mothman hovering above their beds. In the late 1960s, this sort of bedroom visitation also happened to John Keel and to Jim Hawk, the nephew of Gray Barker. In Hawk’s case, the visit seemed to coincide with threatening phone calls from a German named “Heinrich,” who was obsessed – like some kind of oil executive – with keeping ufologists from investigating “free energy.” Another Mothman buff, Susan Wilcox of Columbus, OH, saw the “bedroom Mothman” in 2001. In the summer of 2005 when he was at a crossroads in his life, musician Emil Hach saw Mothman materialize and dematerialize in his parent’s house near Cleveland, in the same room where his sister had been visited years before. When he sought help, psychiatrists told Hach that seeing Mothman was common and not thought to be a real mental health issue. My father had a ghostly visit from an MIB on the night he died. Long after his death, I got a message from a friend I hadn’t seen in years, Harriet Plumbrook. Harriet had randomly visited a psychic in Columbus, OH for a class project. The 100-yr. old psychic, named “Medula,” had gotten a message from my father telling me that I had “a protector.”

Anyone can receive the Mothman’s call. My stepfather, Bill Walters, who married into the family long after the Mothman days, received his tap on the shoulder by seeing what may have been Mothman in one his alternative forms: the “black panther.” While working at DuPont’s Belle, WV plant, Bill and several other men were severely shaken up – on more than one occasion – by seeing mysterious men running on fire and then disappearing. It turns out that this is exactly what is supposed to have happened to veterans of the Philadelphia Experiment. From this we may deduce that certain sailors from the experiment were given jobs at chemical plants in the isolated Kanawha Valley. Any subsequent deaths from rare cancers would, of course, go relatively unnoticed in such an environment. Bill, who was raised in a Catholic orphanage near Charleston, succumbed to cancer himself in 1996. Prior to his passing, he revealed that he felt Manson might have been a product of Nazi/Jesuit programming in the orphanages.

Birdmen such as the Mothman are present in the lore of almost all cultures on earth, including the ancient Sumerians, Greeks, Hebrews, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and Native Americans. The Greek letter Psi – connoting psychic skill – is based on the Phoenix, a derivation of this winged being. There are obvious connections between ancient birdmen and symbols like the caduceus (now the logo of the American Medical Association) and the “eagle and ribbon” imagery so prevalent in government offices around the world. Some connections, like The Great Stone Owl of Moloch (the “sacrificer of children”) worshipped annually by elite Republicans at Bohemian Grove, CA, are less obvious, yet still quite intriguing. The Old and New Testaments connect flying beings with Ezekiel’s Wheel and the messianic Christ, whose symbolic cross – or “tree” on a “mound” – is eerily similar to the symbologies of the Thunderbird and the Garuda, the fearsome, crime-fighting protector deity of Asia. The Hindus and Buddhists believe that the Garuda’s role is to systematically root out those who commit heinous crimes. To them, the Mothman-Garuda’s prophecies are thought to be a naturally occurring social mechanism for tracking political crimes, harmful military and/or governmental operations, and predatory business behaviors – especially those that harm the young and innocent. The concept of a “messianic protector” or “crime-fighting deity” is an old one. Researchers have counted several messiahs prior to Christ. Each one seems to have utilized “prophecies” given to ordinary humans.

Once the 9/11 disaster occurred and I realized that my friend had been correct in his prediction, I began to look differently at everything that had transpired in my youth. The events started to have a real context. I went back to the Ohio and Kanawha Valleys several times, and interviewed witnesses from my childhood. I photographed the places where people had seen the creature, and familiarized myself with the energy of these places. Along the way the phenomenon seemed to interact with me, placing obvious synchronicities in my path as a kind of validation that I was going in the right direction. During the course of the investigation, I began to wonder if I had subconsciously been following a life-course influenced by my early interactions with the phenomenon. I also began to suspect that I had become an unwitting cipher for Mothman, and that my photos and artwork might contain pieces of “Mothman Code.”

After five years of highly synchronous activity too coincidental to be mere chance, the phenomenon ceased in 2007. I was 47 years old when the shift occurred – one of many synchronicities involving the number 47. There isn’t enough space here to list the many clues dropped into my lap regarding Mothman, such as the possible meaning of Indrid Cold’s name (“Garuda in human form”) or the name of his assistant, Demo Hassan (“terror assassin”). If the reader should take away anything, it would be that the Mothman phenomenon can be visualized as the hub of a wheel whose spokes represent each of the world’s religions. One could argue that the same earth-energy forces causing people to see Mothman also caused the enlightenment of Christ, Buddha, and Mohammed. It is not insignificant that the Garuda floats above the Buddha in many Buddhist paintings. An older spelling of the Garuda is “Guruda,” indicative of the close relationship between sages and the archetypal birdman. It is believed that some gurus can physically take the form of the Garuda and fly around, ministering to others. This is necessary because the Garuda is traditionally thought to be locked in a timeless battle with the Nagas, or “evil serpents.”

I have come to see the Mothman as a guardian angel, as have many other witnesses to his amazing feats of precognition – feats that may simply be leakage from mankind’s own collective unconscious. In 2002, at a “vortex” spot in Mound where many sightings of different entities occurred, my film team encountered an energy field. A misty curtain seemed to reflect shimmering images of ourselves back to us. Our minds seemed involved in the process somehow. Afterwards we all felt electrified, as if in the midst of a thunderstorm. I experienced something akin to kundalini, and had visions of a drowning which occurred three days later, at Magic Island on the Kanawha River. Subsequently I discovered that at Magic Island, on Dec. 15th, 1904, the Elk River Bridge had collapsed, killing some young children. Coincidentally, some children had also died at our vortex spot many years before – the result of a schoolhouse fire.

The Garuda represents the Void in Buddhist cosmology. He is the master of spaces, oscillations, frequencies, bridges, crossroads, and thunderous, lightning-like epiphanies. Perhaps this is why he shows up at critical points in the lives of humans, and why he was seen just prior to the collapse of the Silver Bridge on Dec. 15th, 1967 – the same day of the year as the Elk River Bridge collapse. On that bitterly cold day that “ended” the Mothman era, 46 people lost their lives. There was no 47th victim. This seems fittingly symbolic for there has, in reality, been no end to the Mothman sightings. The sighting reports keep pouring in. Like the battle between good and evil, there’s no finale to the struggle between the soaring figure Keel called “Big Bird” and the slithering snake of “human greed.” The “paranormal” will never stop exposing the “conspiracy.”

Andy Colvin’s Amazon.com page for his books