The Thunder of Mighty Wings: The Mothman Cometh

"In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which
made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up: It stood still, but I
could not discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes, there was silence, and I heard a voice, saying . . .
'Behold, he put no trust in his servants; and his angels he charged with folly: How much less in them that dwell in
houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth?'"
-- Job 4:13-19

Since the time of Job, winged beings have brought torment and revelation in their wake -- sometimes at the same time.
These stormy petrels of primal chaos, these ravens of wisdom flown from ultraterrestrial battlefields, dart through the
dark skies of myth and history in every age. In our age, they came to West Virginia, taking the forms of our own
demons -- red-eyed monsters, mysterious strangers, and lights in the sky. And like all true monsters, the Mothman
serves only as the portent of something greater and more terrible still, which we can only glimpse in fragments around
his mighty wings and behind his unblinking eyes.

"'It was shaped like a man, but bigger,' Roger said later. 'Maybe six and a half or seven feet tall. And it had big wings
folded against its back.' 'But it was those eyes that got us,' Linda declared. 'It had two big eyes like automobile
reflectors.' 'They were hypnotic,' Roger continued. 'For a minute, we could only stare at it.'"
-- report of the first Mothman sighting, in The Mothman Prophecies, by John A. Keel

On November 15, 1966, two couples were out for a romantic evening parked in an abandoned ammunition plant near
Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Near an old building, they saw two enormous red glows, which they thought were
reflections of their headlights -- until the lights detached themselves from the doorway and began moving toward the
car. Panicked, the couples drove away -- only to find themselves followed by the red-eyed thing, which flapped above
them soundlessly at a speed of over 100 miles per hour! Over the next thirteen months, the eerie "Mothman" (as the
papers dubbed the entity) appeared at least 25 more times, with hundreds of reports coming from the surrounding area.
The Mothman sightings came on the heels of a UFO "flap" in the region, which had already attracted reporter John
Keel. Keel met the UFO contactees, and began to receive his own elusive "ultraterrestrial" contacts, calling themselves
"Mr. Apol" and "Indrid Cold," who delivered "prophecies" that were not so much inaccurate as they were malicious.
Meanwhile, all around Point Pleasant cattle and pets vanished only to turn up mutilated, phony "census workers" asked
about children's nightmares, and the Men In Black worked their curiously hapless efforts at extortion and silencing. An
entire mythology flew in on Mothman's wings, combining modern telephonic oracles with archetypal winged demons.

"The rain stopped, the temperature of the air remained low and the mist appeared over the water. It was then that I
saw the mark on the path that was very similar to a man's footprint. My dog Alpha bristled up, snarled, and then
something rushed about nearby trampling among the bushes. However, it didn't go away, but stopped nearby, standing
stock-still. We had been standing like that for some minutes . . . Then I stooped, picked up a stone and threw it towards
the unknown animal. Then something happened that was quite unexpected: I heard the beating of wings. Something
large and dark emerged from the fog and flew over the river. A moment later it disappeared in the dense mist. My dog,
badly frightened, pressed itself to my feet."
-- V.K. Arsenyev, on a sighting in eastern Siberia on July 11, 1908

A six-foot tall gray-brown entity with thick legs, immense (ten-foot) soundless wings, and red, glowing eyes appeared
in West Virginia in 1966. Another one appeared in New Jersey in 1909, the infamous "Jersey Devil" -- whose
resemblance to our old friend Spring-Heeled Jack bears emphasis here. A "winged man" appeared over Brooklyn in
1877, and a "headless angel" appeared in Portugal in 1915; on the other end of the celestial scale an eight-foot winged
"Satan" landed in a farmyard in Nebraska in 1922. Bat-winged "men" (with no visible arms, just like Mothman)
appeared in 1948 in the UFO-rich skies of Washington state, and on November 21, 1963 in Hythe, Kent. Reports of
evil cattle-mutilating "black birds" with red, glowing eyes abounded in Chile in the mid-1990s, related to the goat-
sucking Chupacabra of Puerto Rico -- which, itself, has its own uncanny similarities to the Beast of Gévaudan of ill
fame. Apparently, the Mothman is just one sample from of a cloud of cryptic witness, the myths blurring as the wings

file:///D|/To%20Update%20Torrents/GURPs%20to%20OCR/pyramid_2002/2002/0530.7.html[11/13/2008 16:04:06]
 beat too fast for terrestrial senses to follow.

"The government was fooling around with some experimental warfare technologies, testing the effects of various
radiations and electromagnetic fields on a guinea pig population in this sleepy WV town. They'd emit large doses of
whatever energy into the town, then sit back and observe pathology clusters, changes in crime rate, mortality, mental
illness, and whatever other measurable changes might result from said exposure. What the investigators didn't count
on was the attraction the EM activity might have for 'black dogs'."
-- from the unpublished notes of "Major Jack Downing," self-professed MIB

So, can we switch dimensions from the breadth of winged-entity reportage to some in-depth explanation of the
Mothman madness? At the time, a local professor speculated that Mothman might be a sandhill crane, which shares
color and size with the Mothman, and has two bright red spots on its forehead that might resemble eyes. Keel himself
speculated that some Mothman sightings might have been large owls, whose eyes shine red in reflected light (although
neither cranes nor owls chase cars).

For a slightly more Atomic Horror version, decaying chemicals poorly stored at the Point Pleasant TNT area might
have mutated owls or sandhill cranes. Alternatively, they might have leaked into the water supply and let susceptible
individuals hallucinate (or summon?) Mothmen and all the other phenomena of that bizarre year. The Men In Black
might even have released the chemicals themselves, or engaged in some other bizarre mind-control experiment, as
postulated in "Major Jack Downing's" note above. If the "Major's" explanation is correct, and experimental electro-
magnetic warfare techniques caused the Mothman panic, that presents an intriguing parallel with our 1908 Siberian
case -- reported only two weeks after a massive explosion (Tesla's proto-HAARP EM release?) in Tunguska. Could
the "bleed-off" of the Tunguska explosion have spawned Mothmen to haunt our century with ever-increasing chaos
and uncertainty?

"The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings."
-- John Bright, speech in the House of Commons (Feb. 23, 1855)

Some locals assumed the Mothman was only the most recent example of "Chief Cornstalk's Curse," leveled by the
dying Shawnee leader in 1774 after a battle on the site that would become Point Pleasant twenty years later. Point
Pleasant still boasts a striking obelisk as its "Cornstalk Monument," an acupressure needle bottling up the death energy
of the haunted West Virginia hillsides. But on December 15, 1967, exactly 13 months after the Mothman's first
manifestation, that death energy loosed, along with the number 13 eyebar on the Silver Bridge between Point Pleasant
and Kanauga, Ohio. The bridge gave way, dropping holiday shoppers and their cars into the freezing Ohio River,
killing 47 people in the tragedy. As though the disaster blew some ultraterrestrial "safety valve," the Mothman
vanished; Point Pleasant slowly returned to normal -- and to its mourning. The Mothman may have been a harbinger
of the bridge's collapse, just as moths bring death in Italian folklore. Conversely, the psychic shock of the tragedy may
have projected the Mothman back in time, a literal fore-shadowing of the trauma attendant on the breaking of the
Silver Bridge.

"The moths are the heralds, or better yet, the guardians of eternity. . . . The moths have been the intimate friends and
helpers of sorcerers from time immemorial . . . Moths are the givers of knowledge and the friends and helpers of
sorcerers."
-- "Don Juan," in Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda

Moths represent the spirits of the dead in Cornwall, and the soul in Greek legend. The Maya believed that moths were
ghosts of dead warriors, returning to earth for some purpose. (Interestingly, the Cherokee believed that moths caused
eye disease -- recalling the conjunctivitis epidemic that plagued Point Pleasant during the reign of the Mothman.) The
bat-winged demons and butterfly-winged angels of medieval iconography also represent the post-mortem world with
winged intruders; in areas as disparate as Scotland, Friesland, and Bosnia, moths are witches or faeries, or both. In
Westphalia, St. Peter's Day, February 22 (note the synchronistic date of John Bright's speech, above), is set aside for
driving moths out of the house with incantations and hammer-blows. The Blackfoot say the moth brings news or
knowledge from the afterworld, carried on its wings, while the Navaho and Yaqui know that the knowledge moths
bring can give only madness and insanity. This could be the key to the Mothman's prophecies, ultraterrestrial

file:///D|/To%20Update%20Torrents/GURPs%20to%20OCR/pyramid_2002/2002/0530.7.html[11/13/2008 16:04:06]
 communiqués from fractured realities unleashed into the "window area" by UFOs or mysterious Teslan magics stored
in abandoned Army plants. The messages the Mothman brings, like the prophecies of the Delphic oracles, are only
understood in hindsight, looking back from the disaster in the light of two glowing red eyes.

file:///D|/To%20Update%20Torrents/GURPs%20to%20OCR/pyramid_2002/2002/0530.7.html[11/13/2008 16:04:06]