The Real Mothman Story !

On Nov. 15, 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant, Roger and Linda Scarberry, and Steve and Mary Mallette told police they saw a large white creature whose eyes “glowed red” when the car headlights picked it up. They described it as a “flying man with ten foot wings” following their car while they were driving in an area of town known as ‘the TNT area’, the site of a former World War II munitions plant.  

During the next few days, other people reported similar sightings. Two volunteer firemen who sighted it said it was a “large bird with red eyes”. Mason County Sheriff George Johnson commented that he believed the sightings were due to an unusually large heron he termed a “shitepoke”. Contractor Newell Partridge told Johnson that when he aimed a flashlight at a creature in a nearby field its eyes glowed “like bicycle reflectors”, and blamed buzzing noises from his television set and the disappearance of his German Shepherd dog on the creature. Wildlife biologist Dr. Robert L. Smith at West Virginia University told reporters that descriptions and sightings all fit the Sandhill Crane, a large American crane almost as high as a man with a seven foot wingspan featuring circles of reddish coloring around the eyes, and that the bird may have wandered out of its migration route.

There were no Mothman reports in the immediate aftermath of the December 15, 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge and the death of 46 people, giving rise to legends that the Mothman sightings and the bridge collapse were connected. Though many questions linger regarding the Point Pleasant events of 1966-1968, the one that most bothers me is why, given the undeniable amount of activity, these are not mentioned in the greater volume of published UFO/Paranormal literature.

 The collapse instigated new safety-inspection law, a damned good idea. Too little too late.

Anyone well-versed in the entire matter will know that a woman on the Ohio side reported seeing two men climbing on the superstructure the day before the tragedy. These appeared to be men in thick-soled (oft-reported in Men-in-Black encounters) shoes. Even without the extremely cold weather, why would anyone actually climb along the bridge?

It’s frankly suicidal, which doesn’t mean I doubt the witness. Though I hate saying so, this seems to have happened in order to establish human sabotage. Why? The wreckage was reassembled in a field in nearby Henderson, WV, a process John Keel describes as brutally hard. It must have been, given that divers were brought in to search for bodies, and to assist enormous cranes necessary to raise the rubble.

Anyone curious about this bleak operation can see actual film footage shown at the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant. There isn’t much, but what exists is haunting enough. The sort of thing—like 9/11—you might not want to see twice.