I am in the process of doing serious research on the appearances of the Mothman, a notorious figure whose appearances throughout the world precede disasters. He (if you can ascribe a “male” quality to a monster like this) is a tall humanoid with bat-like wings, glowing red eyes of huge proportions and a strange in-human head that is more characteristic of a moth than a person.
Several witnesses whose names figure later in this story have proven difficult to find and this author is seeking to make contact with them to dig further into the stories. We are also interested in first-hand or any stories about Mothman you may know about.
The mothman’s appearances begin in Point Pleasant, West Virginia i with this humanoid creature seen in the Point Pleasant area beginning November 15, 1966 and ending with the last report on December 15, 1967. The first newspaper reports were published in the Point Pleasant Register and the Athens Messenger in Ohio, dated November 16, 1966, titled “Couples See Man-Sized Bird … Creature … Something“.
The press picked up on the strange reports of this creature and spread the story across the United States and the world.
The story that splashed across the Point Pleasant Register reads as follows:
“It was a bird…or something. It definitely wasn’t a flying saucer.”
Two Point Pleasant couples said today they encountered a man-sized, bird-like creature in the TNT area about midnight.
Sheriff’s deputies and City Police went to the scene about two o’clock this morning but were unable to spot anything.
But the two young men telling their story this morning were dead serious, and asserted they hadn’t been drinking.
Steve Mallette of 3305 Jackson Avenue and Roger Scarberry of 809 30th Street described the thing as being about six or seven feet tall, having a wing span of 10 feet and red eyes about two inches in diameter and six inches apart.
“It was like a man with wings,” Mallette said. “It wasn’t like anything you’d see on TV or in a monster movie…”
The men and their wives were in Scarberry’s car between 11:30 p.m. and midnight when they spotted the creature near the old power plant adjacent to the old National Guard Armory buildings.
The creature was seen standing on three occasions and was described as being extremely fast (“it flew about 100 miles an hour”) in flight but was a clumsy runner.
Deputy Millard Halstead said he had seen dust in the vicinity of a coal field. But “it could have been” caused by the bird he said.
“I’m a hard guy to scare,” Scarberry said, “but last night I was for getting out of there.”
They did just that, but the “thing” followed them. They said it was hovering over the car, apparently gliding, until they reached the National Guard Armory on Route 62.
“We went downtown, turned around, and went back and there it was again,” Mallette said. “It seemed to be waiting on us.” He said the light-grey-like creature then scurried through a field. It also had flown across the top of the car.
“It apparently is afraid of light,” Mallette reasoned, “and maybe it thought it was scaring us off.”
The young men said they saw the creature’s eyes, which glowed red, only when their lights shined on it. And it seemed to want to get away from the lights.
They said it looked like a “man with wings” but its head was “not an outstanding characteristic.”
Both were slightly pale and tired from the lack of sleep during the night following their harrowing experience.
They speculated that the thing was living in the vacant power plant, possibly in one of the huge boilers. “There are pigeons in all the other buildings,” Mallette said, “but not in that one.”
“If I had seen it while by myself I wouldn’t have said anything,” Scarberry commented, “but there were four of us who saw it.”
They said it didn’t resemble a bat in any way, but “maybe what you would visualize as an angel.”
The last time they saw it was at the gate of the C.C. Lewis farm on Route 62.
They heard a sound like wings flapping and they said the bird rose straight up, like a helicopter.
“This doesn’t have an explanation to it,” Mallette said, “it was an animal but nothing like I’ve seen before.”
Are they going back to look for the creature?
“Yes,” Mallette said, “this afternoon and again tonight.”
“Today,” Scarberry said, “but tonight, I don’t know!”
The creature reportedly chased people and made terrifying appearances in Point Pleasant over a period of eighteen months without causing any substantial harm other than possibly killing a dog.
The creature or variations of it have been spotted at the sites of other disasters across the world and even in some places where no appreciable disaster has yet occurred. In 1986 the Mothman made appearances in front of terrified witnesses at the Chernobyl nuclear power station near Pripyat, Ukraine and caused no end of problems for the normally peaceful staff and citizens in the area. The locals christened the creature the “Blackbird of Chernobyl” and few made the connection that this creature was either the same as the one from West Virginia or another of it’s kind.
The problem became so bad that the KGB was reportedly harassing people in person and on the phone to quit talking about the creature and accused a number of them of faking illnesses and mental stress after having encountered the creature. A wave of terrible dreams featuring the creature and it’s striking red eyes plagued many people in the area in the days preceding the explosion of reactor number four after a botched safety test on April 26, 1986 at 1:23 A.M. local time.
Strangely, reports of a UFO arriving and firing a beam into the reactor ruins and the subsequent reduction of the radiation levels by a vast amount were also noted at the Chernobyl complex in the hours after the disaster struck.
After the explosion, crews on the ground and pilots in the air reported encountering the Mothman, some relating tales of incredibly close brushes with the the “Blackbird” as they took to calling it. One helicopter crew swerved to avoid it in mid-air while fighting the fires over the reactor. The move to avoid the creature angered a crewman dumping sacks of boron on the fire from the rear compartment of the helicopter. He came forward to find out why they swerved only to see the terrified looks on their faces and then saw the creature for himself. He later died of radiation poisoning.
The Mothman By Gary Gibeau
The aftermath of the disaster was terrifying, not only because of the meltdown and explosion of the reactor and subsequent regional disaster, but because of the fact that every person who had encountered the Blackbird of Chernobyl died from the effects of the radiation.
This marked a similar pattern to that of the presence of the Mothman in West Virginia twenty years earlier. In the sightings of the mothman in West Virginia, the creature was associated with the disappearance of a dog and making close approaches to people driving with the mothman reaching speeds of 100 miles per hour during a chase of two people in a car.
People had similar dreams of disaster ahead of the bridge collapse and, per author John A. Keel, a significant number of the people on the bridge who died had either seen the Mothman in person or had a connection to someone who did.
The “Bridge of Death’ near Chernobyl.
Another odd similarity is that the famous “Bridge of Death” near Chernobyl where people who would have been on the bridge irradiated with a fatal dose of radiation as they stood there to watch the spectacle of the nuclear power plant explosion.
The deaths mentioned in the HBO special on Chernobyl as a result of time spent on the bridge near Pripyat as the disaster played out remain as a highly contentious claim given the confusion and obvious interference from the Soviet government. To play it safe, if we toss out the claims of later radiation deaths of people who stood on the bridge then there is the remaining hard evidence that the bridge was EXTREMELY radioactive as a result of the reactor accident. However, if they, in fact, had stood there or if they really DID get irradiated, the bridge remains true to it’s reputation as a “Bridge of Death”.
Quoting Chernobylstory.com’s discussion on the Bridge of Death:
Right after the accident the level of radiation on the bridge went up to 5,000,000 μSv/hour or 5 Sv/hour. Normal atmospheric level goes up to 0.3 μSv/hour. Lethal amount of radiation can be absorbed with the level of 6-7 Sv/hour. As long as the wind continued to blow off the particles, the level of radiation continued to climb. Even after cleaning up process (which was made regularly there) the bridge remained contaminated.”
So, the Bridge was, in fact, capable of killing someone if they remained on it for more than an hour or so. At this late date, there is no way to know who spent a lot of time on the bridge and who may have not been on it for very long. My ultimate point thus is, we have two bridges associated with mass death and destruction associated with the Mothman.
The Mothman was thought to be a harbinger of doom for the bridge collapse at Point Pleasant that occurred on December 15, 1967. Many have speculated that the creature was a warning sent to but not understood by the population at the time. The parallels between the West Virginia sightings and paranormal phenomena and those around Chernobyl are striking.
Skeptics of course try to fit all kinds of creatures and mass hysteria theories to explain away Mothman, but He happily seems to ignore them and keeps turning up at disaster scenes, portending doom and scaring the living daylights out of ordinary people who do not prefer to see such extraordinary things. My favorite was the skeptic who tried to tell these witnesses that what they had seen was a stork.
I don’t know what it is with certain academics and U.S. Air Force public relations personnel and officers who try to float this BS to explain away unusual phenomena witnessed by credible members of the public or civil servants and pilots, but it is a tired record we ALL have had enough of. It’s clear these people are trying to cover up something and they think we’re gullible enough to swallow anything they toss our way.
The Chernobyl disaster brought a new dimension to the question of the Mothman. There he was knows as the “Blackbird” and made appearance to the locals in the days preceding, during and after the disaster at the power plant and the town of Pripyat outside of the reactor complex. Rather than only serve as a warning, the appearance of the Mothman was transformed into a mark of doom for those who saw it. All who saw the creature later died, much to the shock of the officials who realized this in the weeks that followed the disaster.
But these two disasters were not the only ones where the mothman made his grisly appearances. He turns up in March of 2011 at the Fukashima power plant in Japan just prior to the massive 9.1 magnitude earthquake.
A man by the name of Marcus Pules detailed his encounter with the Mothman at the Fukushima plant in March 2011 in the days immediately preceding the disaster. Marcus was with a friend at the power plant, inspecting a meteorological station his friend was tending and offered the following account of the sighting:
...when all of a sudden we heard a loud and distinct “WHOOSH” at first my mind thought it might be the sound of the distant waves crashing ashore when we heard it again, followed by a ear pitching screech that shook me down to the bone and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. We looked around for the cause of the noise, when we heard the sound again. The best way I can describe it is a city buses brakes when they are in need of service, Loud and ear splitting. We both continued to look around when my friend’s attention was drawn toward the plant by another nearby couple. A younger couple, out for a walk were staring toward the plant, arms outstretched and the obvious fear in their voice showing itself.
I looked toward the plant, and against the lights of the plant I thought I saw a figure silhouetted against the moonlit sky. The figure was large and black, from the distance I was at it looked to be sitting on top of one of the squared shape buildings. It sat there for about 5 seconds then it unfurled a large set of what I could only describe as large, black wings. The only reference I can compare them too are from the old John Travolta movie “Michael” where the main character unfurls his wings and spreads them out to their full length. To say that this creature was large was an understatement.
The creature then took flight and circled the plant at least 4-5 times, some circuits he took at a fast pace, some he seemed to slow down, all the while he kept his attention on the row of square shaped buildings that I later found out housed the reactors. The creature then came toward us, flying at least 25-30 feet off the ground. The younger couple who had noticed the creature first were now screaming and cowering, the man shielding the woman while shielding his head with a jacket. My friend and I looked in awe as this creature flew over us. That’s when I noticed the two large red eyes; they seemed to glow from within and with a blood red hue. They were unblinking in the 3-4 seconds we saw them, we knew they were looking straight at us, we knew this creature knew we could see it and it made no attempt to disguise itself. The sick, intense and overwhelming feeling of dread came over us. A feeling that we shouldn’t be there was to say the least, overwhelming.”
Marcus Pules testimony is quoted often in re-tellings and discussions of the Fukashima disaster and Mothman. In my research efforts, I tried to track him down only to be stonewalled time and again in my efforts to find him to conduct an interview. After some careful consideration, I’ve reached some conclusions about what might be the issue with reaching Marcus:
- Marcus is a fiction, likely invented to allow real testimony about the mothman sighting but without revealing his or her true name.
- Marcus is a fiction relating an equally fictional tale of the mothman for reasons as yet unknown.
- Marcus is a real person I have not been able to track down.
Thus, I appeal to Marcus himself, or the person behind him/her to come forward to get into contact with me. I would like to do a detailed interview to lock down aspects of the sighting and learn more from him/her.
A second tale of the sighting of the mothman comes from a Japanese person who remains anonymous but who author Brent Swancer interviewed. He called this person “Hiroshi” to give him an identity. Hiroshi was at Fukashimi the day prior to the earthquake and witnessed a giant flying humanoid matching the description of the Mothman flying around the reactor buildings and even landing on one of them. Hiroshi estimated the wingspan at between ten to fifteen feet and was understandably shocked at the sight of this creature at the nuclear power plant.
Thus, we have two potential witnesses who are unreachable with one likely an alias and the other preferring anonymity. I am betting that there are others who saw these things as well in the vicinity of the plant or surrounding area but who have remained quiet.
These people ARE out there and understandably would like to remain silent in many cases, but I would hazard the guess that some are ready to speak up, especially if they remain anonymous while getting their tale told. I would also love to hear from Hiroshi and Marcus Pules if possible to interview them in more detail about their sightings.
Anyone with further information relating to the mothman sightings at Chernobyl, the World Trade Centers on 9/11, the more recent Chicago area sightings or Fukashima is welcome to visit my contact link and send me an email detailing their experience.
Visit the CONTACT page to share your story.