THE MOTHMAN FILE
The local headlines screamed: "Couples See Man-Sized Bird ... Creature ...
Something!" "Monster No Joke for Those Who Saw It," "Gigantic,
Fuzzy Bird Chases Auto in Storm."
No, this was not a Samuel Arkoff B-horror production.
This was real--or possibly real anyway.
The time was 1966 in Point Pleasant, W.Va., and something
very strange was happening. More than 100 people reported seeing a 9-foot-tall, black,
winged creature with glowing red eyes. Some said it spoke to them and forewarned
of an impending disaster in their town, a small farming community at the intersection
of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers. One year later, their worst fears were realized when
the bridge over the Ohio River, connecting Point Pleasant to Ohio, collapsed and
47 people died.
"Mothman"--as the beast was known by
locals--was never seen or heard from again.
"There are a lot of people who just don't want
to talk about it anymore, either because they are traumatized or they don't want
the press attention," said Jeff Wamsley, a Point Pleasant native and author
of "Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend." "People were pretty much
scared out of their wits."
The story of this strange season in Point Pleasant was chronicled by journalist
John A. Keel in his 1975 book "The Mothman Prophecies."
The book is now a movie.
"The Mothman Prophecies," a $42-million Sony
Screen Gems release that opens Friday, stars Richard Gere as a crusading Washington
Post journalist named John Klein who, through a personal tragedy, finds himself in
Point Pleasant. He gradually becomes embroiled in the town's strange sightings until
he reaches a point of obsession and near lunacy. Although the real story occurred
in the 1960s, the movie is set in contemporary times. The film also stars Laura Linney
(who was paired with Gere in the 1996 thriller "Primal Fear") and "Will
& Grace's" Debra Messing.
Screenwriter Richard Hatem ("Under Siege 2: Dark
Territory") had been fascinated by science fiction and the paranormal since
childhood. But it was not until one night in the spring of 1997 that he was pulled
into the Mothman world.
During a bout with insomnia, he found himself in a
Pasadena bookstore. He saw "The Mothman Prophecies" on the shelf, picked
it up and soon enough was sitting cross-legged on the floor reading the book. He
read through the night. By the next day, he was on the phone with author Keel and
began writing the screenplay.
Hatem based two characters on Keel. Gere plays the
younger, cockier journalist, while Alan Bates plays an older, wiser and spooked professor
who at one time also witnessed a paranormal event.
By 1998, Lakeshore Entertainment (producers of "The
Gift," "Runaway Bride") bought the rights to the script and began
a two-year development process. But Hatem's vision for the film remained intact.
"Most Hollywood movie ghosts make their presence
known to help us get back together with our girlfriends," said Hatem. "I
wanted to write a story that said you can ask questions about why things happen,
but they are the sort of things that we are never going to get an answer to. This
was a movie about dealing with something that human beings will never be equipped
Director Mark Pellington ("Arlington Road")
was not interested in making a "monster movie." Rather, he wanted a film
about the psychology of belief.
"Could this be a man? A voice? A light or a monster?"
Pellington said. "Many of these things we don't answer. That was the appeal
to me, the ambiguity and the unanswered questions. We wanted to play it straight
and strip out any melodrama or kookiness."
Keel, who has seen the movie, said he thought "Richard Gere does a great job
of gradually going nuts." Now 72 and still writing books and articles from his
home in New York City, he says: "I didn't go nuts, but I was very upset. When
the bridge collapsed, it was pretty distressing.... I was determined I was going
to find the answers to this. As it progressed, I became more and more baffled. It
took a long time for me to realize that I was dealing with something that the human
mind could not understand. There are many things that we will never know."
Indeed, nobody knows what those people saw on those
dark West Virginia nights. But for the folks who say they saw the strange, malevolent
creature--whatever it was--their lives were never the same.
It began in mid-November 1966, when two couples, parked
at an old World War II munitions dump site that the locals called TNT, say they were
chased by a large creature. They reported the incident to the police, and the sightings
continued from there. Some said the creature chased them to the ground. Others suffered
from bleeding eyes after reportedly seeing it. Many never slept well again. It did
not help to calm fears when the town's investigative reporter Mary Hyre, who had
devoted much ink to the Mothman, died suddenly.
One theory is that people saw a huge sandhill crane
that veered off course. Another is that it was a giant, mutated owl. And others say
the people in Point Pleasant succumbed to mass hysteria.
"I believe that some people saw something. It
was probably a bird," said Hilda Austin, 58, who lived through the Mothman sightings
and is currently the head of the Point Pleasant Chamber of Commerce. "Some of
it was just hoax. It could have been something spawned by the toxic ground from the
TNT area. Some of the eyewitnesses were on drugs. I thought it was a hoot [when this
happened]; everyone just sort of laughed at this. They just thought it was preposterous."
But others, like cryptozoologist and author Loren Coleman,
said there is a history of this kind of lore in the Ohio River Valley. The Native
American tribes of the area had a long history of chronicling stories about Thunderbirds--large
"bird-man" figures that were always harbingers of woe.
"A lot of people want to make fun of Mothman because
it's poor, white Appalachia people [talking about it], but I try to put it into context,"
said Coleman, who wrote the book "Mothman and Other Curious Encounters."
"The Iroquois and the Tuscarora and the Wyandot tribes called them flying heads
and big heads. They were exactly like the Mothman--headless creatures with big
David Grabias, who was hired by the studio to make
a Mothman documentary that will air on the FX channel today, said he was convinced
the locals saw something frightful.
"When I first heard about it, I thought, 'Oh,
it's West Virginia and these are a bunch of hicks drinking too much hooch in the
mountains,'" said Grabias, who produced the Emmy-nominated documentary "Why
Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry."
"But the more people we talked to, the more we
felt a sense that there was a feeling of something strange and to let sleeping dogs
lie. The people were very believable."
Pellington says that Mothman follows a pattern of the
unexplained, which makes rational, modern society ill at ease.
"I believe in things greater than us that are
unexplained," he said. "The mysteries of life are so profound; that is
why this legend and other kinds of mythology exist. I feel it keeps us human."
Many locals were upset that the movie was not filmed
in Point Pleasant itself. It was shot in Kittanning, Penn., because it was a large
enough town to accommodate cast and crew. In addition, Pellington needed to shut
down the local bridge for two months during filming--something the economy in
Point Pleasant could not sustain.
Instead of running from the Mothman legacy, Point Pleasant
locals are embracing it. A thriving port city at the turn of the century, Point Pleasant
has been suffering from a slow economy for many years. Without jobs, most of the
young people leave to find a better way of life.
Mothman, they are hoping, will bring them better fortunes.
The Chamber of Commerce sold Mothman Christmas ornaments
this year. Another local created Mothman beanbag toys, which sold like hotcakes,
according to Austin.
They don't seem to fear being placed in the pantheon
of strange places like Roswell, N.M., or Loch Ness, Scotland.
"We are hoping that it will do something that
will help our economy," said Austin.
"We don't understand what the fascination is.
This new popularity of the Mothman started before the movie.... We don't care, we
just hope it will help us out."
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
The Selling of Mothman
A Small Town Hopes to Make Big
Bucks Off a Winged Monster
By Buck Wolf
Jan. 22 ÷ Move over, Bigfoot. See ya, Sasquatch. America's new No. 1
monster this year is destined to be Mothman.
The flying, blood-eyed, 7-foot-tall monster that once terrorized Point Pleasant,
W.Va., chasing cars and mutilating animals, is making a comeback. He's out to fill
Bigfoot's big shoes ÷ especially at the cash register.
The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere, opens in theaters Jan. 25,
and that might be the best thing in the paranormal tourism business since the Loch
Ness Monster backstroked to Scotland.
Get ready for Mothman Beanie Babies, T-shirts and Christmas ornaments. One West Virginia
man has already sold Sony Pictures on a Mothman Internet game.
'He's Our Monster'
"He's our monster, so we want to make money off him," says Hilda
Austin, executive director of the Point Pleasant Chamber of Commerce. "We don't
want anyone stealing our thunder."
People used to run from ghosts. But these days, people run to ghosts. Monsters are
good for business, and if your hotel is haunted, all the better.
Only a few years ago, The Blair Witch Project had folks flocking to Burkittsville,
Md., where the hit horror film is set. Local officials complained that thrill-seekers
were snatching up road signs and vandalizing tombstones.
The obsession reached such heights that the mayor offered this exasperated message
on her voice mail: "This is the town office, Burkittsville, Maryland. ·
If this is in regards to The Blair Witch Project, it is fiction."
But Burkittsville, a tiny hamlet of 200 people, wised up to the fast-buck mentality.
Previously unemployed locals quickly found a place in a burgeoning tourist business,
selling "witch-chaser" bags filled with smooth stones, garlic cloves and
Now, Point Pleasant, an Appalachian town of 6,000 near the Ohio border, is looking
for an unlikely hero in the form of a huge, hideous moth. That's pretty amazing,
considering the legend.
Between 1966 and 1967, dozens of people came forward to claim they'd seen a giant
man-bird with red, hypnotic eyes.
The first reports were from two young couples. Almost immediately, others came forward.
Authorities found it harder to slough off each new monster sighting, and a media
sensation was born.
Batman Inspires Mothman
The Batman TV show inspired a local newspaper copy editor to dub
the creature "Mothman." Had this come a few years later, the creature may
have been called "Big Bird," although a flying Bigfoot spotted on Washington
state's Mount Rainier has been dubbed "Batsquatch" (not Batboy).
Writer John A. Keel later speculated that the sightings might even point to an alien
visitation. His book, upon which the movie is based, documents a rash of UFO reports,
alleged poltergeist activities, Men-in-Black harassments, unexplained animal
and other strange activity.
"There were so many unusual occurrences in a short, 13-month burst," says
Loren Coleman, author of Mothman and Other Curious Encounters (Paraview Press).
"What's amazing is, if you speak to the people today, their lives have changed.
Some changed jobs. Some moved. Some got divorced.
"Whatever happened to these people, they were terrified."
The last time people saw Mothman was when Point Pleasant's Silver Bridge collapsed
on Dec. 15, 1967, killing 46 people. Some even say the strange creature sounded a
rodent-like squeal to warn of the disaster.
Even today, Mothman isn't a joke in Point Pleasant.
But we all must come to terms with the past. And now, the monster is fodder for local
"Let's face it, if we don't do it, someone else will," says Austin. "We're
the home of Mothman, and we're proud."
Buck Wolf is entertainment producer at ABCNEWS.com.
The Wolf Files is published Tuesdays.
Copyright © 2001 ABC News Internet Ventures.
'Mothman' sightings will continue
By Stephen Schaefer, USA TODAY
Melissa Moseley, AP
Dan Callahan, left, and Richard Gere in The Mothman Prophecies, opening in
Until now, the Mothman has been known only to a devoted, cultlike few. That's certain
to change with The Mothman Prophecies, out Friday and starring Richard Gere.
The otherworldly 7-foot, red-eyed, winged apparition known as Mothman might even
become a pop-culture totem, like Big Foot.
John A. Keel's The Mothman Prophecies is based on paranormal events the author
experienced and studied in Point Pleasant, W.Va., in 1966-67, while writing about
UFOs for Playboy. It's not giving away too much to say the residents were
hearing and seeing things, culminating in a bridge collapse that cost 46 lives.
Because the thriller is advertised as "based on true events," Keel, Mothman
director Mark Pellington and Mothman expert Loren Coleman (featured at 10 ET/PT Wednesday
night on the FX channel documentary Searching for the Mothman) reveal the
"truths" behind the film.
"Maybe we should have said 'inspired by true events,' " a cheerful Pellington
Says Coleman, who has published a book on the "dark and sinister" subject:
"Pellington's made it a psychological thriller and not a monster movie. With
this movie, Point Pleasant will become like Roswell and explode with tourism."
In the film, Washington Post reporter John Klein, played by Gere, investigates
the strange goings-on.
"That's fiction," Pellington says.
But a few truths are out there:
* Frightened teens. "That came right out of the book," Pellington
says. "Keel describes two kids who had sex who felt this thing attack them."
Says Coleman, who interviewed one of them: "A huge creature about 7 feet tall
with huge wings and red eyes shuffled toward them, they ran to the car, and at 100
mph drove back to Point Pleasant. They could see the creature flapping right behind
* Sad sack. Will Patton (TV's The Agency) plays a man going nuts from
his encounters with the Mothman, who takes the form of Gere's Klein. "He's invented,
a composite of two of the major witnesses who had intense Mothman manifestations,"
Pellington says. "Like Alan Bates says to Klein in the film, 'It's perception,
John. They appear differently to everybody. A man, a voice, a light, a monster.'
That I wrote."
* The scientist. Bates (Gosford Park) plays Alexander Leek, driven
mad by his Mothman encounter. Leek is fictional, but the name is a clue: It's Keel
Says Keel, 72: "The book tells what happened to me. Alan Bates gives a Keel
speech, almost word for word, of what I've been saying for years."
* The tragedy. As for the Silver Bridge collapse, "that happened in 1967,"
Pellington says. "It was explained as metal fatigue. Once the bridge came down,
the phone calls and sightings stopped. That's why it became legendary and why people
blamed a force."
Coleman says that is fiction. "Sightings continue."
The real Keel, unlike Gere's Klein, was nowhere near the bridge that day. "I
knew the exact time it was going to happen, but you couldn't warn anyone because
it might cause a panic, and it might not be true."
He knew because "I was getting these damned mysterious phone calls, just like
in the movie."
The film has 36 people dying, not 46, but the studio didn't "want to kill too
many," Pellington says. "My father's football number was 36, and 40 was
|from Wireless Flash Weird News
West Virginia Town Buzzing About `Mothman'
January 22, 2002
POINT PLEASANT, W.V. (Wireless Flash) -- Local merchants in the town of
Point Pleasant, West Virginia, are seeing a rise in tourism thanks to the new Richard
Gere movie "The Mothman Prophecies" -- opening Friday (Jan. 25).
The town is home to the legendary Mothman, and Ruth Finley, owner of the Lowe Hotel,
says a lot more tourists are visiting specifically to search for the strange creature
that's haunted the town for centuries.
She says town leaders are selling Mothman beanie babies, and there are plans to erect
a Mothman museum and fudge shops.
But not everyone is thrilled about the Mothman tourist frenzy, according to Loren
Coleman, who documented Mothman sightings for his book "Mothman and Other Curious
Encounters" (Paraview Press).
Coleman claims many Mothman eyewitnesses who spoke out about the creature in the
past are now so afraid of being further ridiculed that they have either moved or
shut off phone service.
The Mothman Cometh!
by Florence U. Cardinal
January 20, 2002
Yes, the Mothman is coming - The Mothman movie, I mean. It will be out January 25,
2002, and I, for one, can hardly wait. "The Mothman Prophecies'
is loosely based on events that took place in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966.
Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman stated in an interview: "These two couples
saw two giant red eyes, and it very much scared them...they didn't know what to make
of it." The creature was tall, perhaps as tall as seven feet. It had no
head. The eyes shone from the breast of the creature and it sported huge wings. The
couples fled, but the creature followed them until they reached Point Pleasant.
The local sheriff investigated the area but found nothing. The media made light of
the account, but that wasn't the end of it. Over the next year, over 200 people reported
abnormal phenomena in and around the Point Pleasant area, and there were more sightings
of the weird, moth-like creature.
Then other strange events began to take place in the West Virginia town. It seemed
Point Pleasant had become a center for paranormal occurrences. As well as sightings
of the Mothman creature, people reported increased UFO activity. Others reported
finding the bodies of mutilated dogs. It was a strange time indeed for the residents
of the city.
Into the picture came news reporter John Keel. He became deeply involved with the
reports and the entire mysterious situation. He seemed to be receiving psychic messages,
prophecies, of dire events to come. He became positive that on December 15 the northeast
region of the United States would suffer a severe power outage and a total blackout.
This didn't occur, but something else did. A bridge collapsed - the Silver Bridge
between Kanauga, Ohio and Point Pleasant, West Virginia. 67 people plunged into the
icy waters; 46 people died. Was this the prophecy the psychic messages attempted
to send to John Keel? Was the Mothman a part of the message?
The result of all this was a book: "The Mothman Prophecies" published
in 1975 and now out-of-print, and, incidentally, worth a nice bit of cash if you
happen to won a copy. Amazon, as I write this, has one used book available for over
$100. EBay, however, has some for less than that.
And this brings us to the movie. "The Mothman Prophecies" starring
Richard Gere and Laura Linney, promises to be a real creeper. Director Mark Pellington
has attempted to recreate the town of Point Pleasant and the pervading atmosphere
that surrounded the town at the time of the Mothman Prophecies. Pellington states
that he wasn't interested in creating a "creature movie." He prefers to
call it a "psychological mystery with naturally surreal overtones."
Whatever you want to call it, it's a movie I want to see. If you enjoy thrills
and shivers in your movie fare, I'm sure you're just as eager for the release of
the movie as I am.
Who Is That Mothman Expert?
Sunday, January 20, 2002
By RAY ROUTHIER
Portland Press Herald Writer
Loren Coleman was just 12 when he was drawn to his life's work. It happened when
he saw a schlocky 1958 horror movie called "Half Human," about an abominable
snowman terrorizing the Japanese countryside.
The movie was a certified flop, but it started Coleman down a 40-year path of trying
to document and analyze the many human sightings of things as weird as, or weirder,
than abominable snowmen. While most of us scoff or snicker at such things, the premise
of "Half-Human" caused Coleman to make a serious study of such reported
creatures as the Loch Ness Monster, Sasquatch and Mothman.
So maybe it's appropriate that Coleman, who is 54 and lives in Portland, is getting
a heavy dose of national attention these days. It turns out that after years of studying
things that most of us laugh about, Coleman's expertise is being sought after by
the mainstream media including radio stations, magazines, documentary film crews
and movie producers.
"The Mothman Prophecies," a Sony/Screen Gems film starring Richard Gere
and set for national release Friday, is based on sightings of a 6 1/2 to 7-foot-high
winged creature in Point Pleasant, W. Va., in 1966 and 1967. The sightings came just
before a bridge collapse in that town, which killed 47 people and led to speculation
about paranormal activity.
The producers and the media have turned to Coleman repeatedly as one of the few experts
on Point Pleasant's Mothman and other Mothman-like sightings in recent history. It
helps that his latest book, "Mothman and Other Curious Encounters," (Paraview
Press, $14.95) was released earlier this month.
"In researching the subject, his was a name that kept coming up," said
David Grabias, the maker of the documentary "Search for Mothman," which
premieres Wednesday on the FX cable network, and will likely be shown again. "It's
a story where it's hard to find people who are authoritative and credible and somewhat
objective, and that's why I turned to Loren."
Coleman lives a sort of double life. He's known in Maine for his work as a consultant
to school systems and health care organizations in the areas of teen suicide and
youth violence. He did research in those areas for the Muskie School of Public Service
at the University of Southern Maine until recently, and now does his work as a private
consultant. It's this work that pays his bills.
But Coleman is also a nationally-known researcher and author in the field of cryptozoology,
the study of unknown or undiscovered animals. Outside of other people who are interested
in cryptozoology, not many people are familiar with Coleman's work, or cryptozoology
itself, for that matter.
Enter "The Mothman Prophecies," which has been advertised on TV, in magazines
and at the movie theaters. Because the media has a huge appetite for movie hype,
Coleman has gone from an investigator of fables (in the minds of many) to a bona
fide expert - all in a Hollywood minute.
Coleman, while not formally hired by Sony/Screen Gems, has done more than 40 radio
and magazine interviews as part of the current "Mothman" publicity frenzy.
He appeared at a news conference in Hollywood, and is featured prominently in the
documentary, which Sony helped to make.
The movie is actually based on a book of the same name by John Keel, a friend of
Coleman's who went to Point Pleasant shortly after the first Mothman sightings. Keel
has been interviewed as well for various "Mothman Prophecies" publicity
Coleman's book differs from Keel's in that Coleman is not as interested as Keel in
theories of UFOs or paranormal activity. Coleman says he he is first and foremost
a cryptozoologist, so his book is more about the earthly possibilities behind what
people saw, or might have seen, in Point Pleasant.
He has documented the facts of the sightings, and interviewed the people who saw
something, in a methodical, journalistic way.
"He's really the foremost expert on Mothman next to John Keel," said Marc
Weinstock, vice president of marketing for Sony/Screen Gems. "He knows the story
and he can speak to it well. Because of that, he's being sought out for interviews."
So what exactly is Mothman? Well, from talking to people who say they saw it in Point
Pleasant, it is a black creature with red eyes, the size of a large man, with wings.
The drawing on Coleman's "Mothman" book, made from witness descriptions,
looks like a giant black owl with cape-like wings.
Coleman says he had been working on a Mothman book for years, but decided to finish
it when the movie publicity started coming out. The book, "Mothman and Other
Curious Encounters" came out in early January and is available only by ordering
at book stores or online.
In the book, Coleman writes about the Point Pleasant sightings, which began in November
of 1966 and lasted for 13 months. Some people in the small town on the Ohio border
simply said they saw it, either standing still or flying. Others say they felt its
presence. Others reported premonitions of some impending disaster. In his book, Coleman
lists the details of 26 specific sightings of Mothman or a similar creature during
1966 and 1967 in the small town.
Then on Dec. 15, 1967, Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant collapsed during end of the
day rush-hour, and 47 people were killed. The bridge collapse happened at a time
when bridges were not inspected regularly, and Coleman said there were engineers
who explained structurally what had worn out inside the bridge (an eye-bar pin) and
why it had collapsed. So the bridge collapse itself isn't that mysterious, though
the Mothman sightings leading up to it are.
Coleman concentrated his book on putting Mothman in context, such as talking about
other sightings of giant winged creatures over the years. These so-called Mothman
sightings, Native American sightings of "thunderbirds" and other evidence
may point to some giant bird that hasn't been discovered yet, Coleman thinks.
What Coleman doesn't do in his book is to focus on the UFO and paranormal speculation
that plays a large part in the "Mothman" movie.
"In all my investigations over the years I've found that 80 percent of these
are misidentifications or hoaxes, but there are some with at least a kernel of truth,"
said Coleman, sitting in the work room of his apartment, just a few blocks from USM.
The room is filled with skulls, monster models and other creature clutter. "What
I try to do with any of these is present data, and if you present enough data, there
might be some acceptance of what happened."
As for Mothman, all Coleman can say for sure is that many people say they saw something
like a large winged creature. And that there are at least some similarities between
their descriptions and various descriptions of other sightings recorded in newspaper
accounts over the years, as well as descriptions from people Coleman has interviewed.
"This is only the second book on Mothman, and what I wanted to do is reclaim
him for cryptozoology," Coleman said.
That being said, Coleman lacks hard proof that Mothman exists, which is the basic
knock many scientists have on cryptozoology.
In the field of cryptozoology however, Coleman is well respected for his meticulous
research of sightings and for his analysis and perspective.
He has written several other books on the subject, including "Mysterious America"
(Paraview, 2001) and "Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters,
Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature" (Simon &
Schuster) 1999, with Jerome Clark.
"I think everyone has to read a Loren Coleman book if they are going to be involved
in cryptozoology. He's very well respected," said George Eberhart, senior editor
of American Libraries Magazine and the author of a forthcoming book on cryptozoology.
Coleman admits that he spends more time on cryptozoology, which doesn't exactly pay
much, than he does on his consulting work. Being regarded as a Mothman expert hasn't
made him richer, but it has gotten some publicity for his book.
It also has made his cryptozoology seem cooler to his sons - Malcolm, 15, and Caleb,
11. After all, their dad has now written a book about something that is being made
into a Hollywood movie.
But for Coleman, the best thing about the "Mothman Prophecies" movies is
that it may do for others what the horrible John Carradine movie "Half Human"
did for him.
"I hope that because of the movie and my book, Mothman will resurface as an
important cryptozoological subject," said Coleman. "Like Big Foot or Loch
Copyright © 2002 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
The Real Story of The Mothman Prophecies
IGN FilmForce talks with cryptozoologist Loren Coleman about the spooky true-life
events that inspired the upcoming Richard Gere film.
by Scott B.
If you've been following news on films to be released in 2002, you have probably
heard about a movie called The Mothman Prophecies
starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney, and directed by Mark Pellington (Arlington
Road). You might even have seen a poster or a trailer for the film, due out January
25, 2002, which comes with the ominous warning "Based on true events."
But what are those true events? And what the heck is a "Mothman,"
anyway? IGN FilmForce recently had the opportunity to talk with Loren Coleman, famed
"cryptozoologist" (literally "the study of unknown animals")
and author of fifteen books, including the upcoming Mothman
and Other Curious Encounters, about the whole Mothman story.
"On November 15, 1966, four individuals ö two married couples ö were
at what was essentially a lovers lane in Point Pleasant, West Virginia," explains
Coleman, who has been researching so-called "Fortean Phenomena" (from Charles
Fort) since 1960. "These two couples saw two giant red eyes, and it very much
scared them...they didn't know what to make of it."
This, then, was the first reported sighting of the "Mothman," which Coleman
goes on to say "was described as 6-to-7 feet tall with red eyes and no head,
as if the eyes were in the breast area, and with huge wings." The creature "came
toward them. They took off and the creature followed them right up to the city limits
of Point Pleasant." The incident was reported to the local sheriff, who went
to the lovers lane and "searches around, sees a puff of smoke in a nearby area
from possibly this creature taking off and landing again."
While Coleman reports that the account was "ridiculed in the local press,"
something very strange began to happen: "More and more people started seeing
this creature. For the next thirteen months, over 200 individuals had some interaction
with some strange phenomena ö and about a hundred of those said they actually
And why that bizarre name ö Mothman? Apparently, it was the work of "some
copyeditor at the local newspaper. At the time, the "Batman"
series was on TV, so they didn't want to call it 'Batman,' but it did have wings,
so the copyeditor called it 'Mothman.' We have no other information than that ö
I've been trying to track that copyeditor down for twenty years."
But the creepy events in Point Pleasant during 1966-67 weren't limited to appearances
of the Mothman. "There were [also] mutilated dogs, UFO sightings, and other
things going on," says Coleman. And that's where John Keel, a longtime friend
of Coleman's and author of the book The Mothman Prophecies, came in.
"About a month after [the initial sightings], John Keel got an assignment to
go there as a news reporter," explains Coleman. "He sort of showed up,
had a very low kind of profile; John was on a contract to write a book about UFOs."
As Keel began to talk to people and gather information, the journalist found himself
getting more deeply involved in the events, to the extent that "There were entities
that communicated with John by phone." Coleman explains that as Keel analyzed
the events, he found Point Pleasant to be "a vortex of phenomena, and couldn't
really tell one from the other. It was a scary situation for John."
Whatever one thinks of the validity of Keel's claims, there's no arguing the horror
of what happened next. Keel had begun to be given "prophecies" by the entities
he was dealing with in Point Pleasant, one in particular that said that "when
President Johnson turned on the Christmas lights at the White House, the whole northeast
was going to go into a blackout." However, by that point, Coleman says that
Keel had "started to get fooled by the phenomena.
"On December 15, John Keel is in his apartment in Manhattan," Coleman continues.
"[Waiting for the blackout] with his bottled water and his batteries, and nothing
happens. About six minutes later, on the TV set across the bottom: 'Bridge collapses
across Ohio River.' And he just freaks out."
Keel "freaked out" because the bridge in question was the Silver Bridge,
which crossed the Ohio River between Gallipolis, Ohio, and ö you guessed it
ö Point Pleasant, West Virginia. "67 people fell into the river. 46 died.
They found 44 bodies," says Coleman. "Several people who died were related
to witnesses of Mothman."
The collapse of the Silver Bridge has been seen as the climax of Keel's Mothman experience,
but Coleman is quick to say "I don't think it stopped. What I think is that
it has continued on but people did not report it. It never got to the fever pitch
of, say, a Roswell."
John Keel published his account of these events in 1975 ö interestingly, until
Coleman's upcoming book, "Keel's had been the only book. There have been chapters
and mentions, but there's never been a movie or a documentary. Mothman is a case
that has almost been too scary for people to get close to. At the time, everyone
knew about Mothman but it was so bizarre no one could characterize it."
And, apparently, neither does the upcoming film version, of which Coleman has seen
footage as well as consulting with the director. "My understanding is that Mothman
is described and talked about but not seen in the movie," he says. "But
I don't know ö it's 95% done and they could always change their mind."
As discussion turns to the movie, a natural question comes up: Does this kind of
exposure help or hurt the work done by Coleman, who considers himself "an investigative
reporter" who "comes into these things very skeptically." After all,
this relatively obscure story is about to become very famous due to the film. Does
Coleman worry that the movie will encourage a rash of "Mothman" sightings
or hoaxes? "I'm a professor of documentary film back in Portland, Maine, and
a lot of my work deals with Behavior Contagion and the media effect, so that's a
very interesting question to me," explains Coleman. "After Close Encounters
of the Third Kind came out, everybody was predicting that we'd have this rush
of fake UFO reports and all of that. It doesn't happen. What happens is that people
get more interested in the subject, dig up old reports, or ö if they have seen
things ö they talk about it."
For those interested in "Mothman" lore, the film's official
website is up and running, presenting a detailed chronology of the events in
Point Pleasant. Also, Coleman himself maintains the website The
Cryptozoologist, which has information on his own research into the Mothman
and other phenomena.
|from Wireless News Flash
2002: YEAR OF THE MOTHMAN?
28 December 2001
POINT PLEASANT, W.V. (Wireless Flash) -- A hideous creature called the
may soon be as well-known as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.
The Mothman is a 6-foot-tall creature with wings that haunts the town of Point Pleasant,
West Virginia -- usually appearing just before a major disaster, such as a bridge
collapse that killed 46 people in 1967.
Locals are afraid to discuss the Mothman, but they may not be able to avoid it starting
next month, when a new movie, "The Mothman Prophecies," opens in theaters.
Mothman expert Loren Coleman fears media attention will turn Point Pleasant into
a paranormal tourist trap "a la" Roswell, New Mexico, and create more myths
As a result, he's trying to get Point Pleasant locals to spill the beans about the
Mothman now, before tourism changes everything.
Mothman Interview: Loren Coleman,
by Smilin' Jack Ruby
Not too long ago on the Sony lot, the L.A. genre press (woo-hoo!)
were rounded up to meet with author Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist
who specializes in natural history and evolutionary anomalies such as Bigfoot, the
Loch Ness Monster, and...
This January, Screen Gems is releasing a new movie called The
Mothman Prophecies, a film about the mysterious goings-on in Point Pleasant,
West Virginia where a certain being dubbed "the Mothman" appeared to various
people and foretelling tragic events, including a major bridge collapse that killed
dozens of people.
Coleman, who has been a consultant for television shows like Unsolved Mysteries,
Ancient Mysteries, In Search Of... and In the Unknown, is a
college professor in Maine whose primary field is social anthropology, though he's
done a great deal of work into psychiatry as well. Coleman has just published a new
book entitled Mothman and Other Curious Encounters and spoke with
us about the truths behind the movie and what really happened back in 1966 in the
small town of Point Pleasant.
13th Street: Who did the artwork for the cover of the book?
Loren: A guy named Bill Rebsamen - he's an Arkansas
artist who is really good at this kind of stuff.
13th Street: How did he come up with that as the design for the Mothman?
Loren: I don't know if you've seen the drawings from the 1960's - actual
eyewitness drawings and then he used those as a base.
13th Street: How did you get into writing this kind of stuff? What interested
you to get into this field?
Loren: Well, believe it or not, a science fiction film. In 1960, I watched
a film called Half Human (Smilin' Jack Note: Full title: Half
Human: The Story of the Abominable Snowman from Toho) - it's
the same folks that brought you Rodan and all those other films.
I think the film came out in '56 in Japan and was shown on TV over here in the sixties.
It was a movie about the yeti in the Himalayas - wait, it wasn't the Himalayas, it
was in Japan - and I went to school at the time and asked my teachers, 'is there
a yeti?' and everybody said, 'no, no.' So, I started reading, I started digging,
and I started corresponding. By the end of the year, I had four hundred correspondents
around the world - even though I was twelve. I just started gathering all this information
and wrote my first article by the mid-sixties. One thing after another until I wrote
eight books on this subject.
13th Street: Is the yeti your fave still?
Loren: Yeah. The abominable snowman will always be the most important
We talked for a moment about how people can get in touch with Coleman as his e-mail
address is published prominently on his website: , and
yes, he will answer y'er questions.
Loren: I get about five hundred e-mails a day and I'm online all the
time. I'm on forty-three e-lists. I'm really out there exchanging information with
13th Street: What sort of creatures are you looking into right now?
Loren: Well, the Mothman is certainly consuming a lot of my time...
13th Street: What about "rods?"
Loren: I have not been convinced that rods are cryptozoological creatures.
13th Street: You think they're real and should be studied as such?
Loren: (laughs) No, I didn't say that either. All the (tapes)
I've seen have not been convincing thus far. So, I'm waiting for more convincing
13th Street: It's like the Loch Ness Monster, only better. When you go
look for it - you see it!
Loren: Well, I've gone to look for the Loch Ness Monster and I've never
seen it. (laughs)
13th Street: With depth sonar or what?
Loren: No, I mean, I understand what you're saying. In my experience
as a cryptozoologist and with cryptids in general is that the more you look for them
- it's almost only randomly that you see them. If you go looking for them, sometimes
you don't see them, because you're looking so hard you're actually putting out a
lot of energy. Some of the people going out trying to find Bigfoot right now are
so overwhelmed with trying to find him that they bring in large groups of people,
all this camera equipment with all the EM energy from the equipment. These cryptids
seem to work on different levels of perception. Human beings are so ethnocentric
in some ways that they forget that and they go in thinking they can take all the
equipment they want in and the creatures will reveal themselves. Actually, they're
working on different wave bands. People don't think about the perfumes that are all
over their body and how a lot of these creatures will naturally avoid different areas
where they sense human perfumes.
13th Street: What about the idea of olfactory bait and finding out what
draws a creature out?
Loren: That's true, but people have tried things like sides of beef and
sanitary napkins and things like that, but they forget how they're delivering those
baits to the area with their clothed, perfumed body. I'll be open-minded about (rods),
but so far all I've seen are flashes of light. The thing I'm interested in about
Mothman is that it seems to be something that just dropped in 1966, but there's a
long history there of Mothman-type creatures back to the 15th century. Any cryptid
that I look at, I look for native traditions, history, for rods, I haven't seen that.
Anglos were saying that about chupacabras - that chupacabras just kind of showed
up in 1995, but that's not true. If you go back to the native accounts, you'll find
stuff dating back to the 16th century that are chupacabra-like and you find chupacabra-like
creatures in other countries. So, if there's a source background, it gives me the
sense that this isn't just something aberrant. We have to be realistic and with my
graduate background in psychiatry, I know that people do have hallucinations - auditory
hallucinations are more often than visual, but you have to really look at where most
of these cases are coming from - they're coming from witnesses. Human beings have
psychological problems some times, so I look to see if there's a history that crosses
any kind of psychological diagnostic category.
13th Street: So, you're saying that mostly imbalanced people are witnesses?
Loren: Even imbalanced people see creatures, but if there's credible
people, the "credible housewife," etc., it's better.
13th Street: Maybe I'm on the outside, but what exactly are "rods?"
Loren: There are certain people that are taking these video cameras and
they're seeing these white lights that look like a rod - a white light that goes
through the air. So, a lot of people in the UFO field or the paranormal field are
trying to move these into cryptozoology and saying they're animals. I'm not convinced
At this point, we watched a video documentary about the Mothman that features
Coleman telling the story of the creature as well as some clips from the movie The
Mothman Prophecies. A lot of the people who claim to have seen the mysterious
red-eyed "Mothman" so long ago are still alive and added their testimony.
We were told that Sony is currently looking for a home for the documentary
and may have it air on 48 Hours, in fact.
Loren then showed us a small toy figure of the Mothman
Loren: This is the "entity" that John Klein saw
(the character played by Richard Gere in the film). These are all
very true events that are coming out in this movie. What happened right before the
Mothman sightings - this man Woodrow Derenberger, who became a contactee
- but Derenberger saw this entity, which he thought looked very strange and essentially
it was a man in black - five foot nine, very dark, and then right after - I think
it was five days later - the Mothman was seen and it got all the publicity.
13th Street: For those readers who know nothing about this whatsoever,
can you quickly summarize what this was all about?
Loren: I've been interested in unexplained phenomena, which is generally
called "Fortean" phenomena from Charles Fort since 1960
and have written quite a few books and about three hundred articles on the subject.
I've been interested in what I call "winged weirdies" for some time. So,
when I started hearing about the movie and talking to Sony, I had an idea in place
about a book for a long time. My new book, which is coming out in December is Mothman
and Other Curious Encounters. In 1966, the country was experiencing a lot of
UFO sightings, but not that many to create a major flap. On November 15th, four individuals
- four twenty-somethings, they were 17 to 24, two married couples - were going in
this TNT area, which is an old munitions area in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It
is essentially a lover's lane and a lot of us in Fortean phenomena investigations
know that trailers, lover's lane areas, rural areas - those places on the edge of
society gets a lot of interactions with these kinds of creatures. So, these two couples
were going around the TNT area and all of a sudden, they saw these two giant red
eyes. It very much scared them and they didn't know what to make of it. Then the
creature, as they described it, (was) six to seven feet tall, red eyes with no head
as if the eyes were more in the breast area and with huge wings - came towards them...and
they took off at a hundred miles an hour. This creature followed the back of their
car. They could see it out the back window almost not flapping almost as if riding
the draft of their car - right up to the city limits of Point Pleasant. They go into
town and describe to the local sheriff what was going on. The local sheriff comes
back, searches around, sees a puff of smoke in a nearby area possibly from this creature
landing and taking off again. They get ridiculed in the local press. I looked up
all the old articles, I've talked to the old people there. There's a lot of ridicule
in the beginning because people didn't believe this was real. But what started happening
was, more and more people started seeing this creature...
Dun dun DUH!!!
Figured that was a good place to end Part 1 of our two-part yakking with esteemed
cryptozoologist Loren Coleman as he explains to us the scientific and real-life backstory
to the upcoming Screen Gems movie, The Mothman Prophecies.
Tune back in tomorrow for more real-life-to-feature-film comparisons!
Mothman Interview: Loren Coleman, Part 2
by Smilin' Jack Ruby
Picking up RIGHT where we left off , author Loren Coleman, writer of Mothman
and other Curious Encounters as well as a large number of other books on
Fortean topics, was just about to start telling us all about the story behind the
Mothman, the mysterious creature that descended on Point Pleasant, West Virginia
in the 1960s that was investigated by a young reporter named John Keel. This
series of incidents is being dramatized (and updated) in a new film from Screen
Gems entitled The Mothman Prophecies, hitting theaters on January
Without further ado, back to Loren Coleman!
Loren: ...for the next thirteen months, over two hundred individuals
had some interactions with some strange phenomena. About a hundred of
those individuals said they actually saw Mothman. Now, I believe Because
I usually come into these things very skeptically C(at some mundane birds were seen
C(e sandhill crane for instance or turkey vultures. But that was in minority
of these reports because these reports tended to definitely show something that was
totally new to the area, unexplained, had a side to it that you don't find in a barn
owl - Skeptical Inquirer tried to explain this as a barn owl. A
lot of the skeptical debunkers try to put this aside and say this was local "hilllbilly
hysteria," and it doesn't seem to show that. John Keel, about a month
after this happened, got an assignment to go there as a regular news reporter. He
showed up and had a very low-level profile, which John Keel was on a big contract
to write a book about UFO's Cï he really was interested and he tells the story
that he was supposed to go to West Virginia to look into whether or not there was
a local freak of nature B`winged cat, because there have been these reports Bnd write
a newspaper article in Point Pleasant. So, he went over there, got in
touch with the newspaper editor, and found that he became a lightning rod. People
were finding that they were having interactions and paranormal situations and they
started talking to John about it. I've known John since 1968 and I talked
to him about Mothman then and I've been to New York and I've been on the phone with
him for an ungodly number of hours talking about Mothman and he became one with the
phenomenon, so I think the movie seems to be capturing that.
13th Street: What do you mean that he became one with the phenomenon?
Loren: Well, the phenomena C(is (Ingrid) Cole person
and there was another entity that would communicate with John Keel by phone and tell
him prophecies, tell him about the Pope going to be assassinated or a bridge collapsing
B% didn't tell him about the bridge collapsing, but he told him about other disasters. John
Keel also got fooled by the phenomenon. He started believing in these
prophecies so much that he was sitting in his apartment Bnd I talk about John a lot
in the book. John's book came out in '75, so there's this huge gap of
things that have happened since then, so my book really takes you up to date on what's
happened with John, movies, and all of that stuff.
13th Street: So, he went to Point Pleasant to investigate these winged
creatures and they started calling him on the telephone?
Loren: Well, the creature never talked. What happens whenever
you go to any area and you're an investigator, there's a thing called the "ridicule
curtain." The ridicule curtain is always up there and the normal,
societal status quo is to not believe in these things and not open yourself up. In
Point Pleasant, the curtain really parted and John Keel and other people Bven the
sheriff's department B¥came the point at which began to have contact in a very
real way. In addition to Mothman, there were "men in black"
sightings, there were mutilated dogs, there were UFO sightings, and on the phone
separate from that, which I don't think the movie...what the movie seems to have
done is there was an entity called "Apol" and Apol would call John Keel. I
think what it's trying to show there is a situation that happened to John Keel in
which Apol would give him predictions of disasters that were going to happen.
13th Street: Who was that person? Was it a person? An
Loren: An entity from outer space. That was the presentation.
13th Street: But Mothman and Apol aren't the same, right?
Loren: No. I think we as rational human beings say they're
not the same because we try to put everything in little categories. To
John Keel down there, it was a vortex of phenomena and he couldn't really tell one
from another. Mothman was sort of the personification of what was going
on and yet all these other things were going on so much he just didn't know what. I
think the movie's doing a pretty good job of that. It was a scary situation
for John and for those individuals. I know that Linda Scarberry who
is interviewed on there Bïnsider that she was seventeen at the time B5ring the
filming of this documentary, she started getting post-traumatic stress syndrome situations,
so she only allowed the taping to go on for ten minutes, because these people are
really right back there and they re-live it in a frighteningly scary way. And
that's the whole thing about Mothman. In terms of Fortean phenomena or
paranormal phenomena, if a case is almost too scary for people to get close to... I
mean, consider that since 1966, John Keel's book has been the only book. There's
been chapters, there's been mentions in my book, (but) there's never been a science
fiction movie before, there's never been a documentary really.
13th Street: When you think of how big Roswell became, why wasn't this
bigger in 1966?
Loren: Well, Roswell wasn't big in '47. Remember that. It's
only when Roswell was rediscovered by the Area 51 people and I find that at the time,
everybody knew about Mothman, but it was so bizarre C%ople couldn't categorize it. A
few of us know about and John Keel made a big deal out of it. His book
did very well...
13th Street: But it wasn't in the news all across the country...
Loren: It was, but it wasn't the kind of thing...it wasn't O.J.
13th Street: Going back to this, the thing culminated with a bridge collapse?
Loren: On December 15th, John Keel was waiting in his apartment in Manhattan
and the prophecy that he was given was that when President (Lyndon) Johnson turned
on the Christmas lights at the White House, the whole northwest would go into a black
out. So, here's John Keel with his bottled water and his batteries on
December 15, 1967...and nothing happens. The lights are turned on, nothing
happens, about six minutes later on the TV across the bottom B¢ridge collapses
across Ohio River." And he just freaks out. He's been
there for five different visits over the past thirteen months as recently as Thanksgiving
of 1967 he'd been there and so he starts trying to call Mary Bnd call her and call
her and call her and finally gets ahold of her and finds out that she was on the
edge of the road on the way to the bridge Bµt she didn't go across the bridge. The
bridge collapsed and sixty-seven people fell into the river. Forty-six
died. They found forty-four bodies. Several of the people that
died were related to witnesses of Mothman Cïme minor witnesses of Mothman that
never showed up in the book died. There's lots of names that overlap. And
then Mothman just sort of disappeared. It so frightened the people there
that really they repressed any reports that they saw and it got very quiet.
13th Street: And when did Keel's book come out?
13th Street: What do you think actually happened? If there
was this vortex of activity and it just suddenly stopped...
Loren: Well, I don't think it stopped. What I think is that
it continued on and people didn't report it. The media weren't interested
in reporting it and the local people were scared to death. It never got
to the fever pitch of a Roswell kind of thing to carry this on, but people still
see UFO's there. As my book looks at, this part of West Virginia has an
incredibly long history of strange phenomena. So, there's a lot of precursors
to Mothman and there's a lot of ones that continue up. In my book, I talk
about as recently as November 4th of this year there was a large bird-like creature,
mechanical sounds, the wings did flap. It was seen over the Beale Community
Center in Bristol, Connecticut. So, these kinds of Mothman-like cases
are still going on in a very real way.
13th Street: Do you believe in this stuff?
Loren: For myself, in the book and in my life really, I look at these
as different levels. I think that starting with any research or author,
you have to really understand what happens when they go into an area and they do
become the lightening rod. Or for John Keel, he became the anthropologist
there. And people came to him to become the informant and they were seeing
all kinds of bizarre things. So, is it an unknown, large giant owl like
some theorists think? Is it UFO's from outer space? I don't
get bogged down in this area. I'm a reporter like you and say, 'something
really happened here.' I've talked to witnesses in forty-eight states
that have talked to me about creatures like this from the bat-man type creatures
in Houston, Texas in '53 to 1990's Washington State where they've seen a new creature. They're
seeing these kinds of things all over.
So there you go. Author Loren Coleman, scribe of Mothman and other Curious
Encounters takes us through the story of the Mothman.
from The Scotsman
7 February 2002
Hit or myth?
The Mothman Prophecies, a stylish new psychological thriller starring Richard Gere,
has all the elements of a particularly sophisticated episode of The X-Files - a frightening
red-eyed monster, sinister telepaths, disturbing dreams, phantoms, paranoia and creeping
madness. Yet the film is based on real events that occurred over a 13-month period
in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, between 1966 and 1967. 'It was like a man, but
bigger. We were driving 100 miles per hour and it kept up with us. It wasn't even
flapping its wings. It sounded like a big mouse' West Virginia is a strange state.
According to colonists, Native Americans avoided settling in it because they believed
the "devil" lived there; consequently, it was reserved for hunting and
sacred rites. Perhaps the bizarre creatures that have been reported there over the
years, such as Bigfoot and the Flatwood monster, frightened them off. Even today,
according to Loren Coleman, author of a new book, Mothman and Other Curious Encounters,
"people feel very strange going there".
On the night of 15 November, 1966, Linda and Roger Scarberry, and Steve and Mary
Mallette, were driving their "57" Chevy through a disused TNT dump in Point
Pleasant, when they noticed a huge figure with large blood-red eyes lurking in the
shadows. Panic-stricken, Roger gunned the accelerator and tried to drive out of the
dump as quickly as possible.
The creature flew after them, revealing a 10ft wing-span. "It was shaped like
a man, but bigger," Roger later told investigators. "We were driving 100
miles per hour and that bird kept right up with us. It wasn't even flapping its wings."
It was, however, making a squeaking noise, he said, like "a big mouse".
Inspired by the popularity of the Batman TV series, a mischievous newspaper copywriter
dubbed the strange beast "Mothman". For 13 months, writer and investigator
John Keel (the model for Gere's Washington Post journalist, John Klein) repeatedly
visited Point Pleasant and spoke to many people who claimed to have encountered Mothman.
He chronicled his experiences in a book, The Mothman Prophecies (also published as
Visitors From Space: The Astonishing, True Story of the Mothman Prophecies), a headily
baroque mixture of the intriguing and the crackpot, in which the author appears to
be steadily losing his mind.
According to Keel, Mothman was an ultra-terrestrial - a transmogrification of paranormal
energy from a dimension outside the space-time continuum. So, too, he claims, were
the UFOs, the Men in Black, and the telepathic humanoids he also stumbled across
in Point Pleasant. By the end of the book, entities are contacting him directly,
reading his mind and prophesying doom in half-baked predictions, designed, Keel believes,
to madden and discredit the recipient. The paranoia level had truly shot up to 11.
What was going on? "I would never diagnose John psychiatrically," says
Coleman, who is also a close friend of the New York writer. "But I do know that
auditory hallucinations are more prominent than visual ones. But who's to say that
there wasn't some kind of phenomenal interaction with John?" he adds, with Fortean
open-mindedness. As well as a writer, Coleman is a Fortean and cryptozoologist -
a person who investigates the possible zoological existence of new animals.
One chilling prediction Keel received was of a disaster on the Ohio River - many
would die. On 15 December, 1967, the Silver Bridge into Point Pleasant collapsed,
killing 46 people and scarring the town forever. Mothman flew the coop, leaving some,
Keel included, to wonder whether Mothman had caused the disaster.
Playing up the gloomier underpinning of the Mothman saga, the website for the Mothman
Prophecies film also links the creature with other catastrophes, including the Mexico
City earthquake of 1985 and the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. Coleman, who
says he has never heard of a sighting before Chernobyl, is suspicious of - if not
closed to - claims that creatures of Mothman's ilk are harbingers of doom.
"People wrote to me saying there were creatures being seen after 11 September,"
he reveals. "With a little digging, I found that a black panther was seen in
Indiana before 11 September and a giant monkey was seen in New Hampshire before 11
September. Were they banshees trying to warn people about 11 September? No, I don't
think so. I think they were coincidences. I just think it's part of the human condition
that if something bizarre shakes our consciousness of reality or our safety, we try
to make these links. But I've never directly seen a connection."
Nevertheless, bad luck does seem to attach itself to people who delve into the Mothman
story, and Coleman concedes that he had more, personally and professionally, while
working on his latest book, than at any other time.
"I could be really depressed and commit suicide, if I didn't write about it
[his background is in suicide prevention], just because if anything could go bad
it will go bad right now around Mothman," he says candidly. "Right now,
I'm just holding my breath to get through this time and everything will be OK. But
if I was a different kind of personality, like John, I could see myself really going
into the doldrums. I do not blame Mothman, it's just the way people put these things
together in their head sometimes. If the economy goes down the drain, it's not because
the Mothman movie's coming out."
Keel went through a dramatic psychological change in Point Pleasant. He started out
by making daily telephone calls to the late Scottish zoologist, Ivan T Sanderson,
asking if Mothman could be this or that bird, and ended up formulating theories that
were more demonological than biological.
While director Mark Pellington's film does a chilling job of recreating Keel's inner
journey, Coleman's lucid Mothman and Other Curious Encounters takes a step backwards
and presents a sympathetic but critical overview of Keel's theories, as well as trying
to place Mothman in the context of sightings of other so-called "winged weirdies"
in West Virginia.
"I think that what was originally seen, and what is the core of what was going
on, is probably a large unknown bird," he suggests. "I'd be in favour of
some large owl that hasn't been identified yet." Hysteria, he adds, probably
played a large part in what happened.
"People really start jumping on the bandwagon, they start seeing lights in the
sky, they start seeing reflective light, they start seeing sandhill cranes ... it
is mundane explanations of regular birds and strange lights that are not really strange,
they're aeroplanes and other things, and that gets all whipped up into a vortex.
You then have someone like John Keel come in and it all gets inter-related in a way
that I don't think it's related."
Whatever it was that people saw, or think they saw, there is no doubt that Mothman
has left a lasting impression on witnesses. Linda Scarberry displayed signs of post-traumatic
stress when Coleman interviewed her about her experiences during a visit to Point
Pleasant recently. Meanwhile, many other witnesses have gone to ground, changing
their names, their addresses, and disconnecting their telephones, scared that the
movie will send a bunch of "crazies" in their direction.
Ironically, Mothman could eventually emerge as the town's saviour. Badly hit by economic
depression, and an outflow of young people who see no future for themselves if they
stay, Point Pleasant is dying. Now, with the imminent release of the Mothman film,
a documentary, a video game, a music CD and, of course, Coleman's book, Point Pleasant
has an opportunity to become the new Roswell. However, when Roswell opened its museum
about the alien craft that supposedly crashed there in 1947, it did not have the
associations with a local tragedy to contend with that Mothman has. And there's the
"I think that's part of why people have failed to take advantage of Mothman
in general," confirms Coleman. "So here you have a little town trying to
figure out how to capitalise on Mothman and still take into consideration the 46
people who died and their relatives. I think the connection is mostly in people's
minds. It isn't true that Mothman wasn't seen after the bridge collapsed, it was
just that people didn't talk about him. The town went into shock."
Time will tell if Mothman can save Point Pleasant. What is certain, however, is that
this curious creature, which was spotted as recently as last November, looks set
to make an impact like never before. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The Mothman Prophecies is released on 1 March.
from the North
Bay Bohemian [California]
February 7-13, 2002
Real-life monster hunter takes on 'The Mothman Prophecies'
By David Templeton
Loren Coleman wasn't all that frightened by The Mothman Prophecies, the freaky new
creep show starring Richard Gere as a journalist on the trail of an eerie supernatural
To Coleman, the fact that his 16-year-old son is getting his driver's license this
week is a whole lot scarier. Were he any other moviegoer, however, The Mothman Prophecies
might have had Coleman shaking in his well-worn boots. But Loren Coleman is a different
breed of man.
A professional cryptozoologist (that's a person who tracks and studies unknown critters),
Coleman has authored numerous books (Cryptozoology A to Z, Mysterious America) exploring
a plethora of hard-to-fathom phenomena, from Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster to
the goat-sucking chupacabra.
Then there's Mothman, described in detail in Coleman's popular book Mothman and Other
Curious Encounters. Mothman is a big, shadowy shape with giant wings and glowing
red eyes, supposedly sighted by dozens of folks near Point Pleasant, West Virginia,
over a 13-month period beginning in 1966. The sightings stopped after the mysterious
collapse of the Silver Bridge on the Ohio River, a tragedy that killed 46 people.
These events were also chronicled in John Keel's book The Mothman Prophecies, on
which the film is based.
In the movie, Gere plays a tense investigative reporter trying to connect the Mothman
sightings to his wife's death. With the help of a local sheriff (Laura Linney), Gere
talks to the locals, sees a bunch of supernatural things, and gets a lot of very
strange phone calls.
Coleman, who has studied the phenomenon for years, has a much less mystical view
of Mothman than does Keel. As a cryptozoologist, Coleman suspects that the so-called
Mothman--named, he says, by a newspaper copywriter with a fondness for Batman--was
a bird. Not the skinny sandhill crane that some theorists have pointed to, but a
very large, very secretive creature that may be a descendant of what some South American
Indians called the Thunderbird. Or maybe it was just a big owl.
"Either way," he says, "I think there might be some overlap between
the Mothman and these other big bird cryptids--'cryptid' means unknown--that are
talked about in Native American tradition."
Coleman, who lives in Maine, liked the movie. "When I go to things like The
Mothman Prophecies, where I know the book so well and know the phenomenon so well,"
he says, "I realize that it's a fictionalized version of the real story. So
I can just sit back and enjoy myself."
Sounds reasonable enough.
"What's interesting about Mothman," Coleman continues, "is that there
are so many peripheral phenomena around this story--more than just the creature itself--that
have impacted my own life."
"Really? What, for example?" I ask.
"Well, I was in Point Pleasant a month ago," he says. "While I was
there, I sat in my hotel room and talked to John Keel about what I was doing and
who I was interviewing, and while I was talking to him, I had telephone trouble.
"Then I go on these radio shows," Coleman continues. "I was doing
a phone interview on this one show in Toronto last Saturday night, and five times
throughout the interview the phone would start blasting and echoing, and then I'd
be thrown off the line. A couple seconds later the technician from the show would
call back and apologize, and he said, 'We've been having telephone problems ever
since we started talking about Mothman.' So that's kind of spooky, I suppose."
"It could be a coincidence," I suggest.
"Definitely. Sure, it could be a coincidence," Coleman replies. "The
fact that I then went upstairs and a light bulb blew out over my head could have
been a coincidence, too."
Hard to argue with that.
"It's just that when they're all happening so close to each other," he
goes on, "right around the time we're all talking about Mothman, people start
putting these events together and saying, 'Hmmmmm. This is pretty weird.'
"I mean, even the collapse of the Silver Bridge after 13 months of Mothman activity--for
all of those sightings to end in that way--it spooks people out enough that they
may start drawing conclusions where there are none."