Audio Version Here

West Virginia, 1966. November 12th. A dreary yet familiar evening for a group of five men digging a grave for a recently deceased man. In the distance, they noticed an unnerving sighting of what seemed to be a man perched in a tree, and he began flying. In the darkness, all that they could ensure as they were scared off was that it was brown man . . . .

Three days later, two couples headed to the abandoned World War 2 TNT bunkers at night. The area was mostly forested but had a few "igloos" where gunpowder had been stored. These facilities had previously manufactured explosives and ammunition. In the 20 years following the war's end, many of the tunnels for transportation and processing between these bunkers had collapsed or flooded in. While the four were driving around the area, they spotted two large, glowing red eyes. They stopped for a few moments and distinguished it as no bird, but a nearly 7 foot tall man with arched wings. Sufficiently scared, they immediately started the car and went off, reaching 100 miles per hour.

It followed.

They managed to eventually disinterest the creature and agreed they had just been spooked by a bird. They returned towards where it had departed, and the headlights allowed them vision of the dreadful eyes once again. The man-sized "bird-creature-thing" lifted away and the two couples reported the event. Soon after there was investigation which found nothing. The news gathered up on this story and word spread. This began a collection of nearly 100 more sightings reported. Many also reported strange individuals, men in black, informing them to not talk about what they witnessed.

Tragically, on December 15th the following year, the Silver Bridge collapsed and killed almost 50 individuals. No further mass sightings of the creature continued after this.


Unfortunately, with such a large creature lacking any evidence either in the existence of photographs or expected physical aspects such as feces, corpses, or other leftovers - and the fact that a tragedy caused a stop in reports in the news, it seems likely that public hysteria conflated the events of witnessing owls with a dangerous creature. Some species of owl in the area, especially when perched on a fallen tree for example, can be found at head height and their eyes reflect with a red tone when shined upon. These birds also take to gliding, which matches the first few reports describing no flapping.

There is much more for you find out about this creature and the history around it, which I might touch on in a future discussion on the Men in Black, but this is easily one of the most popular cryptids out there with the novel and movie named after it, "The Mothman Prophecies." There's no reason to believe it existed at all, but is an interesting look into how deranged a population can become when they allow unreasoning fear to control their sight.

yeah it sounds like just people getting spooked at night by some kind of bird in the dark of night, an owl is a pretty believable story. and then of course people hear about it and think that they also ran into whatever it was even if it was something completely different

still fascinating to read these kinds of mass sightings stories cause sometimes there actually is something to them it's just almost not ever what people thought it was

I want to fuck the mothman

Please do not lewd the cryptids. :(