Loren L. Coleman - Mothman and Other Curious Encounters

The wire service ticker was spitting out the bulletin

Location: Point Pleasant, West Virginia

Dateline: November 15, 1966

Two young couples reported to Mason County sheriffs department tonight they have had a curious encounter with a monster.

It was shaped like a man, but bigger. Maybe six and a half or seven feet tall. And it had big wings folded on its back, eyewitness Roger Scarberry told Deputy Millard Halstead.

Rogers wife, Linda finished his thought: But it was those eyes that got us. It had two big red eyes, like automobile reflectors.

The Scarberrys and another couple, Steve and Mary Mallete, had seen something strange at the abandoned World War II ammunition dump, known locally as the TNT area.

For a minute we could only stare at it. Then it just turned and sort of shuffled towards the open door of the old power plant. We didnt wait around. Roger continued.

Thus began Americas first notice of a series of sightings of a strange something that would be quickly named Mothman. A month after the publicity began, a journalist innocently showed up in town to live among the locals, hoping to understand what was happening. During the next thirteen months, he would make five trips to Point Pleasant, staying for many weeks scrutinizing the case. The investigators name is John A. Keel. His experiences appeared in a series of articles and in his book on the subject, The Mothman Prophecies .

Keel has been linked forever with Mothman, and he even told me recently that people cant think of him without thinking of Mothman, although his life is much more diverse than this single group of reports. This typecasting will continue, as a fictional contemporary version of John Keel appears as reporter John Klein, played by Richard Gere, in the new major motion picture from Screen Gems, also starring Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing, and directed by Mark Pellington.

The impact and timing of Mothman-related events continues to amaze. Take for example, David Grabias plans to interview John Keel in Point Pleasant for his 2002 documentary on Mothman. They were to fly Keel from his Manhattan home to West Virginia, to do the taping. But Keel never made it. His flight was cancelled. The date he was to fly to Mothman countrySeptember 11, 2001.

Keels book and Pellingtons movie help us move these events into context. But how can we understand them? How can we fit this entity into human consciousness, let alone Homo sapiens history and experience? Perhaps we should merely throw aside this weird wonder as a hoax, a lovers lane illusion, a misidentification, and go on with our lives. But we cant. The incidents in West Virginia, we begin to discover, do not live in a vacuum. As you will learn in this book, Mothman may have more to tell us than we could have ever imagined.

More about Mothman later, but first lets put some of this weirdness in perspective and examine some of Mothmans precursors.

Charles Fort, the early 20th century author and intellectual, skeptically viewed the final answers that modern Science had given for odd bits of data he found in its own official journals as only an indication of the silliness of blind faith. Today, to scrutinize the world the way Fort did is rather common, as questioning authority, critically looking at experts and governments, is in vogue. But being Fortean, in many ways, seems like a recent human development. Do not, however, confuse the Fortean view with an exercise in gullibility or believing in anything that comes along, as some debunkers who call themselves skeptics would have you feel. Indeed, Forteans, as real skeptics, do not accept as true, uncritically, anything. Instead, sensing that belief is the realm of religion, Forteans remain open-minded to all evidence, pro or con, in an effort at a deeper understanding. This books exploration of Mothman and related curious encounters will examine the underlying patterns, the oneness that shines through many weird moments along the way. They, nevertheless, are enigmas enmeshed in mysteries, and our minds have a hard time wrapping themselves around them.

At what seems like the edge of the fringe, with the most bizarre of the strange, one such story illustrates a couple points. In April 1966, sixteen-year-old Kathy Reeves of Newport, Oregon saw three tiny tree stumps walking across a meadow near her home. Well, now, that would seem unusual, in and of itself. She noted these walking stumps were orange, blue, white, yellow, and watermelon-colored. Soon a torrent of oddities broke loose around her hometown. UFOs were sighted. Newport residents started talking about how nearby Pioneer Mountain had always been weird. A local couple told officials they had seen a group of staring Cyclops. The Reeves family, who actually lived on the side of Pioneer Mountain, started experiencing waves of poltergeist activity. Objects in their home danced about and globes of bluish light bounced along their roof. Finally, the Reeves family did what most sane people have done in such situations; they moved.