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According to West Virginia legend, the Mothman is a monster said to have been sighted in the Point Pleasant region between November 15, 1966 and December 15, 1967. The initial newspaper storey, headlined “Couples See Man-Sized Bird… Creature… Something,” appeared in the Point Pleasant Register on November 16, 1966. The national press quickly picked up the reports, which helped disseminate the storey across the country.

Gray Barker popularised the Mothman in 1970, and John Keel popularised it in 1975 with his book The Mothman Prophecies, which claimed that there were supernatural occurrences connected to the sightings, including a link to the collapse of the Silver Bridge. The novel was made into a film starring Richard Gere in 2002.

The Mothman tale is the subject of an annual event in Point Pleasant.

When the car’s headlights picked up a huge grey monster whose eyes “glowed red,” two young couples from Point Pleasant—Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette—told police they saw it. It followed their automobile in a region outside of town known as “the TNT area,” the site of a former World War II munitions facility, and they described it as a “huge flying guy with ten-foot wings.”

Other people claimed similar sightings over the next few days. It was described as a “big bird with crimson eyes” by two volunteer firemen who observed it. Sheriff George Johnson of Mason County speculated that the sightings were caused by a “shitepoke,” an abnormally big heron. Newell Partridge, a contractor, told Johnson that when he pointed a spotlight at a monster in a neighbouring field, its eyes flashed “like bicycle reflectors,” and he blamed the thing for buzzing noises from his television set and the disappearance of his German Shepherd dog.

The descriptions and observations all suit the sandhill crane, a huge American crane almost as tall as a man with a seven-foot wingspan and reddish coloration around the eyes, according to wildlife researcher Robert L. Smith of West Virginia University. The bird may have strayed from its migration path and hence went unnoticed at first because it was not a native of the area.

The fictional superhero Batman and his rogue’s gallery were widely portrayed in the public eye due to the success of the Batman TV series at the time. While the villain Killer Moth did not appear in the programme, some think that his and Batman’s comic book influences inspired the local media’ use of the term “Mothman.”

Following the collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 15, 1967, which killed 46 people, the tragedy spawned a mythology linking Mothman sightings to the bridge collapse.

The Mothman Prophecies (2002) is a big film picture based on John Keel’s 1975 novel of the same title.

Russian UFOlogists say that Mothman sightings in Moscow predicted the 1999 Russian apartment bombings, according to the Georgian daily Svobodnaya Gruziya.

In 2016, WCHS-TV broadcasted a photo of Mothman purportedly shot by an unknown man while travelling on Route 2 in Mason County, West Virginia. Sharon A. Hill, a science writer, suggested that the photograph revealed “”There is zero reason to assume it is the Mothman as portrayed in folklore,” he wrote, “a bird, maybe an owl, taking a frog or snake away.” There are just too many other plausible possibilities.”

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