On Nov. 12, 1966, five men who were digging a grave at a cemetery near Clendenin, WV claimed to see a man-like figure fly low from the trees over their heads. This is often attributed as the first known sighting of what would become known as the Mothman.

Shortly thereafter, 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.

Claims of later sightings

UFOlogist Jerome Clark writes that many years after the initial events, members of the Ohio UFO Investigators League re-interviewed several people who claimed to have seen Mothman, all of whom insisted their stories were accurate. Linda Scarberry claimed that she and her husband had seen Mothman “hundreds of times, ” sometimes at close range, commenting, “It seems like it doesn’t want to hurt you. It just wants to communicate with you.

Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman claims that sightings of Mothman continue, and told USA Today he re-interviewed witnesses described in Keel’s book who said Mothman was “a huge creature about 7 feet tall with huge wings and red eyes” and that “they could see the creature flapping right behind them” as they fled from it

Category

Education

Books

• Barker, Gray The Silver Bridge (Saucerian Books, 1970). Reprinted in 2008 entitled The Silver Bridge: The Classic Mothman Tale (BookSurge Publishing). ISBN 1-4392-0427-6
• Coleman, L. Mothman and Other Curious Encounters. (2002). ISBN 978-1-931044-34-9 (or ISBN 1-931044-34-1)
• Colvin, Andrew The Mothman’s Photographer: The Work of an Artist Touched by the Prophecies of the Infamous Mothman (2007). ISBN 978-1-4196-5265-3
• Colvin, Andrew The Mothman’s Photographer II: Meetings With Remarkable Witnesses Touched by Paranormal Phenomena, UFOs, and the Prophecies of West Virginia’s Infamous Mothman(2007). ISBN 978-1-4196-5266-4
• Sergent, Jr., Donnie Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend (2001) ISBN 978-0-9667246-7-7
• Fear, Brad A Macabre Myth of a Moth-Man (2008) ISBN 978-1-4389-0263-0
• Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies (2007). ISBN 0-7653-4197-2 (Originally published in 1975 by Saturday Review Press)
• Keel, John A. The Eighth Tower (1977). ISBN 978-0-451-07460-7
• Myers, Bill. Angel of Wrath: A Novel (2009). ISBN 978-0-446-69800-9
• Ressel, Steve. Perverted Communion (2010). ISBN 978-0-9787483-5-7
• Rust, John J. Dark Wings (2011) ISBN 978-1-4658-4541-2

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