The mystery of mothman

I've always been very curious about mothmen. Ever since the story of point pleasant.. and all the eyewitness accounts coming from that town.. it really makes you wonder what really happened there?

I lived in pennsylvania, and I can tell you people on the east coast dont just randomly make up stories like that. They are staight-forward, honest people.

When I was young, my brother used to see a black figure standing on top of our house every night. And after we saw the movie, he said the figure he saw when he was little looked very similar to what they described the mothman as in the book and movie.

Has anyone ever seen one? Or experienced anything like those claimed in the book/movie?

umm mothman isnt real..in fact i am mothman,yep thats right folks i fly around in a big bird suit scaring people cause my wife left me.

reply to post by calihan123


My advice would be to pick up the book if you haven't. The movie distorts a lot of what actually happened. The only thing I can recall that is really the same in the movie is bridge collapse. It was one of the most electrifying and intense reads of my like. It is def. in my top 10.

I think you'd find the story of Indrid Cold much more fascinating then the actual "moth man".

reply to post by calihan123


It was most likely a misidentified Sandhill Crane. Mass hysteria and mis-identifications when people are looking for something strange happen very frequently.

We need more evidence to think it is anything else, as the Crane explanation works perfectly with the evidence we currently have.

reply to post by calihan123


I read the book and I hope I never come across a creature like that. It is not a crane or an owl. The people who witnessed it would have known the difference. There is a statue of what the creature looked like in Point Pleasant:

www.castlenottingham.com...

I am not so dismissive of this case. I don't know if it was an alien or crypto creature, but definitely the stuff of nightmares.

reply to post by kidflash2008


Well, actually, the people gave very vague (and varying) descriptions. That statue is an artist's impression. It's not a biological study of what was actually found, just a mish-mash of people's ideas of what it could look like, channeled through an artist.

Here's the actual eye-witness sketch of the 'mothman':


The cranes are the same height, have red heads, and eyes capable of reflecting light shone at them. They fly great distances without flapping, and were a problem in the area. It's folly to suggest it's anything else when such a plausible explanation exists. Sure, it's not as fun, but it's more rational.

Well, whether they saw a crane or not, how would that explain all of the strange stories people reported? It was just seeing the mothman that was weird, it was the stories they told about really strange things going on in the town.

reply to post by calihan123


Mass hysteria, or people on the look out for weird stuff - seeing things that are usually there, but because of the mothman flap, are attributed to it.

This stuff happens all the time during times of unexplained phenomena, regardless of whether a logical, mundane explanation exists.

Eye-witness accounts are notoriously unreliable, especially in times of panic. The accounts given during the event are of 'figures' and 'wings' and 'red eyes', all of which are adequately explained by the birds.

No, they speak of missing time, of strange visitors to their homes, of many things that are NOT a crane. I dont believe that an entire town would make up stories like that. Besides, the panic didnt start until after the bridge actually collapsed. Not everyone was telling eachother about the incidents before the bridge actually collapsed. So its not like there was mass hysteria in panic in the town beforehand.

reply to post by calihan123


First things first, it's not making anything up - it's honest misidentification in the midst of a panic.

Missing time happens to people all the time (no pun intended), but when it happens along side something 'unknown', it suddenly becomes more important to the person. The person visiting the home? Are you talking about the late-night visitor who peered in the window? Well, again, a crane is not out of the question there. Cranes do weird stuff all the time, especially when looking for food.

There was definitely panic in the town, which is why people were scouring near the old TNT works when the second sighting occured.

Yeah, it's not as cool as thinking some half-moth-half-man was running around scaring the bejeezus out of people, but unfortunately that's what the evidence is pointing to.

Hah it just seems a little silly that ever single person's accounts would be due to seeing a crane.

I think theres a little more to the story than that!

reply to post by calihan123


Not really, there were about 3 or 4 different eye-witness accounts, and they were all in an area near large woodland, where there had been an explosion of the numbers of this particular kind of Crane.

Plus eye-witness accounts are notoriously unreliable. They are anecdotal evidence, not actual evidence.

How tall is a Mothman supposed to be? The cranes have a very large wingspan, but the larger males are just under 4 ft tall, and weigh anywhere from 9-11 lbs. They are really skinny and the birds' eyes are much smaller than the mothman descriptions. I cant see how a person can mistake something smaller than 5 year old child for a "mothman". I am all for finding a logical explanation but its a stretch, imo. I

A male of G. c. canadensis averages 7.4 lbs (3.34 kg), 39 in (98 cm) in length and has a wingspan of 5.3 ft (1.6 m). A male of G. c. tabida averages 11 lbs (5 kg), 47 in (119 cm) in length and has a wingspan of 7 ft (2.12 m). The southern subspecies (along with G. c. rowani) are intermediate, roughly according to Bergmann's Rule.

Originally posted by dave420
reply to post by calihan123

 

Not really, there were about 3 or 4 different eye-witness accounts, and they were all in an area near large woodland, where there had been an explosion of the numbers of this particular kind of Crane.

Plus eye-witness accounts are notoriously unreliable. They are anecdotal evidence, not actual evidence.

Everyone should keep this in mind if they are ever passing Daves house, and he is dragged out the front door and shot by someone in his front yard.

"Sorry officer, I did get an excellent view of the assailant, however my eyewitness evidence is unreliable, and anecdotal at best."

Let me sum this up for you.

You werent there. You didnt see it. You dont know. Your "evidence" is only assumption far after the fact.

You want to whinge about "no serious" investigation on this site, but so far all you have done is wander from thread to thread implying people are wrong, deluded, stupid, or liars.

Just because an event doesnt fit your narrow view of probability, doesnt preclude it from possibility.

It looks like that owl on the one dollar bill and that owl that is at Bohemian Grove. It also looks like that owl of the upside down shield of the Monarchy poster here recently. Big old red eyes.

Reports of UFO's also came in around the time of the sighting at Point Pleasant. As if they are hunting it down.

I just don't see how a known bird can be mistaken for the terror of what was described as the mothman. Even the eyewitness sketches of that being is definitely not a crane. When something as terrifying as that creature is seen, I am sure the people will remember exactly what it looked like until the day they die. I know I would never get that image out of my mind.

reply to post by kidflash2008


The bird could certainly describe the winged beast. The red marks could be mistaken as eyes. However, it does not explain the alleged alien visitors within the book, MIB, etc.

I lived in West Virginia for a few years when I was a kid, and I had a dream once that stuck with me through the years. I thought it was just a weird dream, but it was creepy enough to linger. When I became a conspiracy nut many years later and got around to delving into the Mothman stories, I found some eyewitness descriptions that describe not just the appearance of what I dream about, but its behavior as well.

The dream concerned me getting a large crate in the mail, opening it up, and a bat flying out which turned into a giant bat creature. Hunched over, peering red eyes from between the shadows cast by leathery wings folded around it. I remember fur. It moved slowly, slow enough so that I ran inside and shut the door before it could get close to me.

All this would have been coincidence enough for me, but in my dream the creature came onto the porch, shuffled around it for a while, looked into a window, stalled at the door, and left. When I first read about the November 16th, 1966 mothman incident, I couldn't sleep for about two days afterwards, such was my state of fear after realizing the parallels. The image, the eyewitness drawing previously posted as a link here, was precisely what I saw as a child in my dream. The image is still extremely vivid, after more than a decade.

This is also important, I think: I had prior understanding of the mothman to my reading of the Point Pleasant circumstances. A kid's magazine published when I was still in WV (I left in 93, to give you a general timeframe) mentioned the mothman briefly as an urban legend, along with things like sasquatch and the jersey devil. It was a joke, to me and my friends at the time, mothman being a West Virginia monster, and I carried this knowledge of the creature until it was redefined. But I never, until that night I read about the encounter, thought my dream had anything to do with it.

I lived in a town about 3 hours from Point Pleasant. I don't have any speculation whatsoever about what this might mean regarding the creature or myself. Maybe spiritual overflow? A final, subconscious release, as modern age grappled and grounded our last wild mythologies in America.

Guess I DID have a speculation.