Mothman Mythology (YES, MOTHMAN) with Jeff Wamsley

Red eyes. Ten-foot wings. And an absolute dumptruck. Let’s get to the bottom of the great American mythology of the world’s sexiest cryptid, Mothman. Haunting the hills of West Virginia in 1966-67, he vanished as fast as he flew. Point Pleasant-raised Jeff Wamsley is the owner/operator of the Mothman Museum and an expert in the legends of this creature. What’s the story? Who is telling it? Is Mothman real? What are some scientific explanations? Do other cultures see a Mothman? Is he even a moth? Is he even a man? Where did he go? Why do we want to see him? Who are the Men in Black? Also: why is he so caked up? (Content warning: we discuss an entity that likely is not real. I know that. Don’t email me.)

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey, it's the lady in a sweater that still smells like Tuesday's campfire, Ally Ward. We're wrapping up Spooktober. I'm taking you with me to my 50th state, West Virginia. We're gonna meet Mothman. Okay, I'm one mile out from the Mothman Museum. I think I'm officially in Point Pleasant. It is very pleasant, surrounded by trees and mountains. I'm on a two-lane road, passing some rusted old hauling trucks going underneath a rusty train trellis. Picture, if you will, these winding roads. There's dense trees, shady rocky creeks,

• 0:45Alie Ward?

  and rivers, and old barn here, a new Dollar Tree there, and among the landscape, a lot of lore. I just passed a sign, "The World's Only Mothman Museum."

• 0:59Speaker 01

  In half a mile, turn left onto Main Street.

• 1:01Alie Ward?

  And we'll arrive in a moment, but first, just a quick thanks to patrons who are signed up at patreon.com/ologies for a buck or more a month to support the show and who submit questions to the ologists. Thanks to everyone out there in Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. Smologies, by the way, are shorter, kid-friendly, and swear-free episodes. They're in their own podcast feed. Just look for Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S, wherever you get podcasts. Thanks, as always, to all of you who review the show. It helps so much. You'll never know. And I do read every single review, and I prove it by reading a newborn one, such as this from S. Tooth, who wrote, "Why? Why would I listen to it? Ologies, you've outdone yourself again. Why would I care about broomology? I gave

• 1:43Alie Ward?

  it a shot, and it's another instant classic." S. Tooth, you get it. Thanks for helping me convince people to go back and listen to the broom episodes if they skipped it. It's good. Also, thank you to sponsors of the show for making it possible for us to donate each week to a cause or two. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the

• 2:27Alie Ward?

  FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Ugh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy. We're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details.

• 3:09Alie Ward?

  So let's get right into the ology part of this, okay? So Anthrolepidoptero mythology, okay? Anthro, man, lepidoptera, moth, mythology is a story. This is the legend of the Mothman. But I talked it over with some of the other folks here at Ologies, and we think that Mothman mythology is just easier to Google. But in my heart, this episode is Anthrolepidoptero mythology. But what is the story of Mothman? And who's telling it? Is the Mothman real? Do other cultures see mothmen? Is he even a moth? Is he even a man? Where did he go? Why do we want to see him again? And what happens mentally if you do? Also, who are the men in black? Let's get into it as...

• 3:53Speaker 01

  The destination is on your left, Mothman Museum. Arrive.

• 3:57Alie Ward?

  I'm here. I see the statue. I see the front of the statue. I arrive in this cute little corner of a sweet little town, and as soon as I catch sight of a few dozen people wearing like horror shirts and hoodies clotted around the entrance, I know I have arrived at Point Pleasant, West Virginia's Mothman historical epicenter and retail marketplace. The Mothman Museum is both a storefront of apparel and stickers. They got books and patches and plushies and keychains. I got a sticker for my luggage. I love it. But it's also a historical archive of newspaper articles and film props

• 4:37Alie Ward?

  and full-scale Mothman replicas and plaques laying out the timeline of these 1966 and 1967 sightings, which ended abruptly as disaster struck the town. So venturing to the back of the Mothman Emporium, I find the world's foremost expert on the lore and the legends of his hometown's most famous resident. So let's celebrate the human need to share scary narratives and explore the possible scientific explanations about the cryptid that haunts us in our dreams and in our fantasies with Anthrolepidoptero mythologist or Mothman mythologist, Jeff Wamsley.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  My name is Jeff Wamsley.

• 5:48Alie Ward?

  And now, can you tell me, where exactly are you from? Are you from this area?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  I was born and raised here, in Point Pleasant. My family's basically lived here, you know, all their life. My mother still lives here, even though my wife and I live in Ohio now, just across the river, but we also stay over here a lot. So, yeah, Point Pleasant's my hometown.

• 6:10Alie Ward?

  And your family has lived here for a while as well?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. My grandparents, everybody.

• 6:16Alie Ward?

  So 1966, the Vietnam War is in full swing. The Beatles released their seventh album, Revolver. The Soviet Union has just soft-landed an empty spacecraft on the moon. And in the small West Virginia enclave of Point Pleasant, November 1966, people started seeing weird creatures in the night, in the trees, in the air. And I imagine you were not born before 1966?

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Yes, I was.

• 6:48Alie Ward?

  You were?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Thank you for that, yeah.

• 6:49Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 6:50Speaker 02

  I was born in 61.

• 6:52Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  I was five when all of it started.

• 6:55Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  So I have limited memories of it. You know what I'm saying?

• 7:00Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  My dad worked up in the TNT area where all this was going on, at the National Guard Armory. He was up there. So, you know, when I got a little bit older, you know, I talked to my mom about it and stuff, and she said, yeah, she remembered, you know, dad and my mother and me getting in the car and going up there looking for, you know, because everybody was up there looking for.

• 7:23Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  But I remember more about when the bridge fell than the Mothman stuff.

• 7:29Alie Ward?

  So just over a year after the first Mothman sighting, a local bridge collapsed in heavy rush hour traffic one December evening. A single chain link was off by one-tenth of an inch, less than three millimeters, and the continued strain finally plunged this 40-year-old silver bridge and over 30 cars into the freezing winter water below. Did your parents have friends or family that were involved in the, that were affected by the bridge collapse?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  My mother had an uncle.

• 8:01Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  And, you know, I barely remember him.

• 8:04Alie Ward?

  Are those, I believe, 47 victims?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Forty-six.

• 8:08Alie Ward?

  Forty-six?

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:09Alie Ward?

  Are they still commemorated as well?

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:11Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yep. Every year, they have a dedication memorial type thing. Now, next year will be 60 years, because it was in 67.

• 8:21Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  But every year, at the same time as, you know, when, sort of like the 9/11 stuff, the same time the bridge fell, they have a, the mayor and a lot of dignitaries have a thing to commemorate it and stuff.

• 8:33Alie Ward?

  But the Silver Bridge collapse is not the only annual gathering in Point Pleasant. The third weekend of September welcomes Mothman devotees from all over the world to celebrate his mystery. They don't do it on the anniversary in November because it's too cold. And when he was first spotted, the witnesses never mentioned anything about him wearing pants. But humans, we get, we get a little chilly in the fall, so September. Do you want to walk me through, I know that it's a, it's a long story with a lot of characters, but could you maybe walk me through a little bit to some first kind of paranormal sightings in early November, and then subsequently, a week or two later,

• 9:13Alie Ward?

  some of the first sightings of this cryptid? As you understand it, how do Woody's observations and encounters correlate with the Mothman sightings?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Woody Darrenberger?

• 9:27Alie Ward?

  Yes, yes. So in early November of 1966, also in West Virginia, there was this guy named Woody Darrenberger, and he claims to have been driving along the interstate when his car was blocked by a flying saucer. And out of it stepped this nice, smiling man who said he meant no harm. Woody and the dude chatted. This was all telepathically. And they kept in touch, apparently. Later, Woody said he visited this man's home planet. But in the mid-1970s, a writer kind of wove that flying saucer story in with the Mothman sightings?

• 10:05Alie Ward?

  West Virginia, what do you have going on here?

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that happened a few weeks before.

• 10:10Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  And that was about an hour from here in Mineral Wells. And of course, back then, you didn't have the internet and Facebook, so nobody really was aware of what was going on. But you had that, and you also had, on the 11th of November, there were four gravediggers in Clendenham, West Virginia, which, by the way, one of them is still living, and I have talked to him.

• 10:36Alie Ward?

  Oh, really?

• 10:37Speaker 02

  We met by chance. It was weird, but he came in the museum, and he confirmed it all, you know, but the rest of them are gone now. But they saw what they said looked like it just a flying man went over top of them into the trees. So that was the 11th.

• 10:51Alie Ward?

  Woody saw the flying saucer on November 1st, 1966. Then, the group of gravediggers saw a flying man on the 11th of November. Well, okay, according to a November 1966 local newspaper article titled, "Eight Witnesses Now Testifying to Seeing Flying Creature", it says, "Kenneth Duncan said he and some other men were digging his brother-in-law's grave on Saturday, when something that looked like a brown human being buzzed past. It was gliding through the trees and was in sight for about a minute, Duncan said." And I kept reading this article, and it does note at the end that the four other men helping dig the grave did not see it at all, according to the newspaper. So, okay.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  And then on the 14th, there was a Noel Partridge, which was in Salem, West Virginia. Heard a bunch of noise out back of the yard, went out, saw something out there. He told me, when I interviewed him, it was rotating red lights. But in John Keel's book, it said red eyes.

• 11:55Alie Ward?

  Yes, yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  So he told me what he saw was rotating red lights.

• 11:59Alie Ward?

  Noel Partridge was his contractor. He lived in the wooded area outside Point Pleasant, and he had just settled in for the evening with his German Shepherd, Bandit, when his TV turned off, this high-pitched mechanical sound began, and Bandit started howling. Bandit bolted into the yard toward a creature with rotating red lights for eyes. Noel was like, hell no. He high-tailed it back into the house, clutching a gun all night. But Bandit, who was repeatedly described in newspapers as a $350 German Shepherd, which is like three grand in today's money, Bandit fared worse.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  They had the dog that disappeared, Bandit. So, yeah, I'd interviewed him and talked to him. But then on the 15th here, it was a Tuesday evening around 11 o'clock, two young couples, which the one couple were our neighbors, Linda and Roger Scarberry.

• 12:57Alie Ward?

  So one of the couples were neighbors of yours, and they were, from what I understand, like, pretty good?

• 13:03Speaker 02

  They were good kids, yeah.

• 13:04Alie Ward?

  Yeah, upstanding.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Even my mom today, I always ask her, you know, what they were like back then, and she said none of them were in trouble or anything, you know?

• 13:11Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  It was more of a conservative time.

• 13:13Alie Ward?

  Yeah. So on November 15th, 1966, two couples on a double date, Steve and Mary Mallett and Roger and Linda Scarberry. They're parked in the woods near a decommissioned weapons plant. Probably making out, none of my business, but they saw something, someone.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Roger and Linda, they had just been married, and then Steve and Mary Mallett, who had just been married. Steve and Mary Mallett still live here, but they won't, they won't talk about it.

• 13:40Alie Ward?

  They won't talk about it, right?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  They admit that they saw it. That's about it. They won't talk about it.

• 13:45Alie Ward?

  As for Roger and Linda Scarberry?

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Roger lives in Tennessee. He's been to the last two or three festivals, but nobody knows him, except for me and a couple other people. But, you know, he's confirmed all of it. Linda passed away about 10 years ago or so. But anyways, they would go up to the TNT area and drag race, meet up with their friends. They, he had a old 57 Chevy Bel Air. It was a project car. But it was out of the city limits, and it was far enough to where the police wouldn't bother them if they were drag racing and stuff. And they were getting ready to come back into town. There was a little hamburger joint called Tiny's Drive-In, right at the end of our street. My mother still lives up there, and that's where everybody would hang out.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  So when they were leaving up there, Linda saw something standing in the middle of the road. She thought it was just a person, but she said as they got closer and the headlights hit it, she saw wings. And she saw the two red eyes. And when I talked to Roger, he told me that when he first saw the red, he thought they were brake lights on a car, but he said when they got closer that it wasn't a car.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  You've seen some kind of creature?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  And they got spooked and went out to the main highway. And as soon as they got on the highway, they come back into town on the straight stretch, and it came over top of the car. Several times, it would intermittently fly over the car and then go back and stuff like that.

• 15:11Alie Ward?

  And I understand they were going nearly 100 miles an hour.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  He did tell me that. Because I asked him, I said, "Could you see the wings? How big were the wings when you were looking out?" He said, "I wasn't looking out. I had my hands on the wheel." And he said, "We were doing at least 90, 95." And he said, "I seriously thought I was going to wreck." So when they got to the city limits, it flew off. It went away. When they got to the lights of the town, see, it sort of just, you know, went away. They stopped at Tiny's, and Linda and I think Mary both worked there as waitresses or whatever. The guy that owned that place's name was Gary Northup. And I spoke to him before he passed and everything, and he told me, he told me they wouldn't get out of the car. They were still, you know?

• 15:58Speaker 02

  And he said, "I'm the one that called the sheriff's department because they didn't want nobody to know. They were kind of scared." And, but that's what started it. But then for the next, actually, two years, you had over 100 reported sightings. Older people, professional people, teachers. It wasn't just kids, you know, or teenagers or whatever. They were seeing it in broad daylight, you know? Some people said it was just an enormous bird that people were seeing, but Linda told me that what they saw was more like a man.

• 16:31Alie Ward?

  Jeff's Mothman Museum is maybe 4,000-ish square feet. Housing, Mothman replicas, small dioramas of the TNT plant site, movie posters, a mannequin dressed as one of the men in black. And there's a sprawling glass display case with dozens of tattered and yellowing, but legit, actual newspaper clippings from the 1960s. And the headlines read, "Couples See Man-Sized Bird/Creature/Something." "Gigantic Fuzzy Bird Chases Auto in Storm." "Winged/Red-Eyed Thing Chases Point Couples Across Countryside." "Four Witnesses of the Bird Swear It's True." "Creature Seen Again Flying Over TNT Area."

• 17:17Alie Ward?

  "Eight Witnesses Now Testifying to Seeing Flying Creature." "Monster No Joke for Those Who Saw It." And "That Mothman, Would You Believe a Sandhill Crane?"

• 17:28Speaker 02

  It wasn't a sandhill crane, but, yeah, you had all kinds of witnesses after that. But that was only, you know, the ones that reported it. But there's a lot of people, even to this day, that I'll talk to that said, you know, "We saw it, but we never told anybody because we were just afraid and didn't want to be embarrassed and stuff," you know?

• 17:47Alie Ward?

  Were there any descriptions of its face? I know that its eyes have been described as reflectors.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:54Alie Ward?

  I'm thinking of a moth face, and I'm thinking of a proboscis and antennae, but was any descriptions of the head?

• 18:01Speaker 02

  The only person I ever talked to was Fay Leeport. She said, you know, the eyes were just kind of hypnotizing, but she thought it looked like it had, you know, facial features, like a nose or a hole or whatever for the nose and stuff. But most, all of them said you just were riveted to the eyes. That's what got their attention, and they weren't looking for any facial features. And the head was shrunken down into the shoulders. It's almost like it was way, way down in, and then the eyes were right there.

• 18:35Alie Ward?

  So now, you may remember from our lepidopterology episode with Phil Torres, a butterfly and a moth scientist, that moths have a head, a thorax, and an abdomen. And for the ones that do feed as adults, they may have this sippy straw tongue-like proboscis, and it can be up to the length of its whole body, but coiled up under the chin, kind of like a party horn. Now, male moths also tend to have large feathery antennae to hone in on the females who might want to have their children. And while moths do have beautiful wings, they have six puny legs and no buttocks. Can you describe a little bit of the flight patterns? I understand maybe a fluttering, hovering kind of motion, but

• 19:21Alie Ward?

  did others see it with like a big flap like a bird? How is it described?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, when Linda told me that it was over top of the car, I asked her how big the wingspan was, and she said the wings were so big when it flapped its wings every so often. It wasn't like a little bird trying to fly. She said you could hear the tips of the wings hitting the bottom of the car door, smacking off of the car door. So it had a big wingspan. And then I talked to, I interviewed another lady who saw it in broad daylight, but she said what she saw came and hovered and then just went away. So you've got different descriptions and stuff. But most of them, Marcella Bennett, who saw it, took off running back towards her house. She said, "I could hear the wings in the background flapping."

• 20:08Speaker 02

  And it was, you know, large wings. So it wasn't like a hummingbird or anything.

• 20:14Alie Ward?

  What is the mood like when you're interviewing these folks? Like, what are, what are their demeanors like even decades later?

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Well, you know, a few of them, just recently, you know, with Connie Carpenter, she had never talked about it since it happened.

• 20:27Alie Ward?

  So a guy named John Keel, side note, was an author and a paranormal investigator. He was based in New York, but he followed up and interviewed people in Point Pleasant about their sightings. And he wrote this seminal 1976 book, The Mothman Prophecies. And a passage in it about Connie Carpenter reads, quote, "According to her story, Connie, a shy, sensitive 18-year-old, was driving home from church at 10 o'clock on Sunday, November 27, 1966, when, as she passed the deserted greens of the Mason County Golf Course outside of New Haven, West Virginia, she suddenly saw a huge gray figure in broad daylight. It was shaped like a man, she said,

• 21:08Alie Ward?

  but it was at least seven feet tall and very broad. However, a real butterface, I think maybe no neck. But he says, "The thing that attracted her attention was not its size, but its eyes. It had," she said, "large, round, fiercely glowing red eyes that focused on her with hypnotic effect. 'It's a wonder I didn't run off the road and have a wreck,' she commented later." Now, John Keel's book continues, "As she slowed, her eyes fixed on the apparition, and a pair of wings unfolded from its back. They seemed to have a span of about 10 feet. It was definitely not an ordinary bird, but a man-shaped thing which rose slowly off the ground,

• 21:49Alie Ward?

  straight up like a helicopter silently. Its wings did not flap in flight. It headed straight towards Connie's car. Its horrible eyes fixed to her face, and then it swooped low over her head as she shoved the accelerator to the floorboards in utter hysteria. Over 100 people would see this bizarre creature that winter," he writes.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Connie, when she started talking about stuff like the Men in Black and all that, you know, I could tell she was a little antsy. And she told me, she said, "I, I get chills whenever I talk about this stuff." And, and then I've, I've had a few of them that backed out at the last minute.

• 22:26Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  And they would call and say, "Look, I, I just don't want to talk about it anymore. I got a funny vibe about the whole thing and just don't want to talk about it." But I was lucky enough to, to interview a lot of those people before they passed away. And still to this day, some of them just don't, they don't know what it was, you know, almost 60 years later.

• 22:45Alie Ward?

  And now that some time has passed and we have some different technologies and we have drones now, we have even the stealth bombers that are sort of a fixed wing, black silhouette, potentially with lights. Have any technologists or engineers sort of weighed in on maybe post-war or Cold War testing of military craft? Because we still have plenty of unidentified aerial phenomenon that we can't explain.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  That's a good question because John Keel

• 23:12Alie Ward?

  Yes, yeah.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  always thought at that time during Vietnam, that the terrain here in West Virginia along the rivers was a lot like it was in Vietnam.

• 23:21Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  He claims that they were experimenting with stealth technology, but they just didn't tell people.

• 23:28Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  When I interviewed Connie Carpenter and she saw it about 12 miles up the road at a golf course, and she said, "The, the lights almost blinded her." And when she looked at it, she said, "It came over, went down to the ground, hovered, and then went back up and then just went." That's stealth technology.

• 23:47Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  But her eyes were physically harmed when that happened. She had to spend a few days in the hospital.

• 23:55Alie Ward?

  So some say this watery swollen conjunctivitis could have been ectenic, meaning it was caused by radiation, like a sunburn. But it was also holiday season in the mid 1960s. Could this conjunctivitis have really been from a Jell-O salad ladle and garden variety pink eye? We may never know.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  That's documented in John Keel's book and everything. But I asked her, I said, "Well, what did you tell the doctor?" And she goes, "I didn't tell him anything." She said, "The only person I told was my mother."

• 24:28Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  So they're probably saying, "Well, what happened? What did you see?" But she, she said, "I, I told nobody." And then, of course, the Men in Black came around after that.

• 24:37Alie Ward?

  So John Keel, this writer and UFO chaser, responsible for the Mothman lore really becoming widespread. He never saw our winged Chad. Nevertheless, Mary Hyer had boots on the ground locally.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Because him and Mary Hyer, who was the local news reporter, they kind of joined forces to try to solve the mystery and stuff. Every time people would see it, they would call him. But, but he lived in New York city. And he told me, he said, "Every time I'd get home, they'd call back and they'd say, 'Hey, you know, we're seeing it again.'"

• 25:10Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  He would come back down. But he did have experiences with UFOs, you know, where they'd flashlights and they'd flash back.

• 25:17Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  The Men in Black stuff, you know, he, he was a firm believer in that. Mary Hyer, who had the office down the street, would tell John Keel, "Hey, you know, I had a dream and there were Christmas packages floating in the river."

• 25:30Alie Ward?

  Huh.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  And he told me when he got back to New York, he was watching the TV and a news wire come across and said, "You know, a bridge collapses in Point Pleasant, West Virginia."

• 25:39Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  That's kind of portrayed in the movie with Richard Gere.

• 25:42Alie Ward?

  Yes, yes. Mothman Prophecies.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  The past few months, people have been coming up to me and reporting strange things. Weird lights, strange phone calls.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Who is this? How do you do when someone comes into your office and tells you they saw this in their backyard?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  But Mary had all kinds of run-ins with these Men in Black because they were telling her that she had no reason to be putting the stuff in the newspapers and stuff.

• 26:09Alie Ward?

  Right. And I, I picture John and Mary kind of like Mulder and Scully.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Batman and Robin's what I always thought. And, you know, she died just three years later. She was only like 54. She had a heart attack. People thought that was weird. She still has a, a few family members, one niece that I talked to a lot. She was around 12 years old when all that happened. And she said, "It was all real. It all happened." The Men in Black, you know, sitting outside their house, looking at their car.

• 26:39Alie Ward?

  So John Keel's book recounts the details. And, okay, Connie Carpenter, the one with the supposed eye damage, was Mary Hyer's niece. But the 12-year-old Jeff's talking about is, according to Keel's book, 13-year-old Sheila Kane and her younger sister. They were walking home from the store when they saw an enormous something standing next to a local junkyard. It was gray and white with big red eyes, Sheila reported, and it must have been seven feet tall, taller than a man. And the two girls screamed and went home, which I probably would have done in the same order. But as the Mothman sightings increased, so did the broad daylight appearances of these duos of men

• 27:21Alie Ward?

  dressed in dark suits and black fedoras lurking around and asking questions. Imagine if Mormons on a mission asked you about UFOs, or if the Blues Brothers menaced you into staying quiet about a cryptid. Point Pleasant was ill-prepared for all of this weirdness.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  But Mary Hyer was just wanting the answers. She was trying to figure it out. And she said they would come in the office down there and just stare at her. She said they never blinked their eyes when they talked to her.

• 27:50Alie Ward?

  You know, I've just seen The Men in Black for the first time, the movie.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Now, you're talking about the one with

• 27:56Alie Ward?

  Tommy Lee Jones.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, but this, this was a little different, I think.

• 27:59Alie Ward?

  Yes. But I, you know, I feel like Men in Black, that movie, popularized the term of like, wait, what? So yeah, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones star as a paranormal police force apprehending and neutralizing the threats of alien life forms on Earth. So what emerged, according to data scientists who crunched the numbers, is that UFO and extraterrestrial sightings went up sharply in 1996 and 1997, the years that Will Smith starred in Independence Day, an alien movie, and Men in Black, an alien movie. They now call this the Will Smith Effect. So when we see aliens on our screens, we see them in the skies and in the bushes.

• 28:41Alie Ward?

  Like if someone tells you that the house is haunted, every creek and bump is going to be a ghost. That's how brains work. Now, the 2013 paper, "The Aliens in Us and the Aliens Out There: Science Fiction in the Movies, in the Journal Film, Television, and the Psychology of the Social Dream." This paper notes that aliens appear in human folklore because they're equipped by us with traits and characteristics we secretly desire, such as immortality and probably driving around in a car that doesn't need gas. But this paper says that movies like Men in Black are really mystery movies. And it continues that aliens hold the answer to this gnawing question that has always preyed on human minds, such as, "Are we alone in the universe?"

• 29:24Alie Ward?

  That is the ultimate mystery story, and that's what these alien movies do. But are the Men in Black real? Okay, kind of, maybe, yeah, I don't know. So there's this declassified report titled "A Die Hard Issue: CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947 through 1990." And it was written by a CIA staff historian, Gerald K. Haynes, for the CIA Journal Studies in Intelligence. And it reports on the House Armed Services Committee hearings on UFOs in 1966. And at that time, they asserted that most sightings were easily explained and that there was no evidence that strangers from outer space had been visiting Earth,

• 30:04Alie Ward?

  but the Air Force did pledge to keep an open mind and continue to investigate the UFO reports. So a few months later, in the fall of 1966, just before the Mothman sightings began, the Air Force announced that it was in talks with the University of Colorado to investigate UFOs more extensively. And because half of the UFO sightings were accounted for by these Blackbird or SR-71 planes and these U-2 aerial high-altitude reconnaissance flights, it led the Air Force to make these misleading and deceptive statements to the public, this CIA report says, "in order to allay fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."

• 30:48Alie Ward?

  So the paper goes on that while perhaps justified to lie to the public because they had to cover up what they were doing with military technology, this deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories and the cover-up controversy that continued in the 1970s. So to distract from the military tech, they'd blame it on something else that turned out to be implausible. Just kind of like when someone is throwing a surprise party and they make up all these weird excuses that only make you more suspicious. It's like, just, just tell us. And like, we can't. It's a spy plane. Men in Black seem Potentially scarier than Mothman, despite Mothman being potentially a bloodthirsty, you know, dog-eating entity.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:32Alie Ward?

  But Men in Black, can you tell me a little bit about what their vibe and appearance was? Are they always in duos? Or is it sometimes just one guy?

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Most of the time in pairs. What's really weird about that is, you know, I'd written two books about all the Mothman stuff and everything. And a few years ago, my mom came into the museum. She's almost 90. She remembers all of it. But she, she seen one of the mannequins, the Men in Black mannequins that we've got. She goes, I remember them. And I'm like, what? You never told me that. And she goes, yeah, they dressed just like that. And she said, people that lived here made fun of them because of the way they dressed. But she said, there are always two of them. And she said, they had the black hats, the glasses and everything. And then the real stumper was, I said, so where did you see them at all the time? And she said, they're always standing in front of Mary Hire's newspaper office.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and that, that told me right there that there was something to it. But Mary Hire described them as pale, in complexion. She said that they would stare, they would ask questions that really didn't make a lot of sense. And she said, one of them picked up a pencil. And she said, that guy stared at that pencil for five minutes, like he didn't know what it was.

• 32:48Alie Ward?

  What are some theories about who the Men in Black are?

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Well, at that time, some people thought they were military or government. Because, you know, they were here to kind of calm everybody and just get everybody's attention off of it, which, when the Silver Bridge fell, that's what happened. Everybody's attention went from that to that. John Keel told me that he, he thought they were from another realm. He said, they weren't human, you know, the way they, they were here for something or whatever. But they, you know, they scared a lot of people. I mean, people didn't know who they were. They didn't really identify themselves or whatever. But I've talked to several that's run into them. So just weird stuff like that.

• 33:30Alie Ward?

  Because remember, the Mothman sightings were between November of 66 and December of 1967. And the Silver Bridge disaster, again, killing 46 people, was on December 15th, 1967. And that marked the end of the Mothman sightings.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  You know, some people said they saw men in black climbing on the bridge before it fell or walking across the bridge. It's just real hard to validate all that. You know what I mean? The bridge fell because it was 40 years old and it was in ill repair. The bridge was built in 1928. And it was built for horses and buggies.

• 34:08Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Not coal trucks and semi trucks and all that. And back then, they didn't inspect those bridges like they do now. The reason they, they inspect the bridges now is because Lyndon B. Johnson enacted the day after the Silver Bridge fell, all of the laws to have bridges inspected.

• 34:26Alie Ward?

  And have you talked to anyone who has described seeing this entity perched on the bridge before it fell or it coming as sort of like a, an omen?

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Not directly. Marcella Bennett told me that her uncle or grandfather or somebody on his deathbed said, you know, I, I saw it going back and forth before the bridge fell and stuff. Again, the movie really pushed that warning, harbinger of doom and all that kind of stuff. That's where I think a lot of people get that, you know, the Mothman prophecies.

• 35:01Alie Ward?

  Yeah. So yeah, John Keel's book, The Mothman Prophecies, links all these sightings in Point Pleasant to the Silver Bridge collapse, naming this muscular winged cryptid as some kind of harbinger of doom. So there was a 2022 Richard Gere film of the same name. And it follows this story loosely. It changes a lot of facts and also adds some new romances, some characters, but it borrows the names like John and Mary and Connie. Now, in the Mothman Museum, there is this scratchy plaid textile and it sits on display with a placard identifying it as the blanket that came in contact with both Richard Gere

• 35:42Alie Ward?

  and Deborah Messing in the motel scenes from the movie The Mothman Prophecies. It's a holy relic. Now, the Mothman Prophecies film was received with a like, it's okay, it's fine, by critics. But it has become this creepy cheesy cult classic, ascending Mothman to ever increasing heights of fame and folkloric legend. But as one 1966 newspaper headline said, city getting the bird, wanted or not?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  I think when it really happened back then, people were just like, not real happy to be running into it.

• 36:16Alie Ward?

  Right, right. Have there been any older, pre-colonial stories or folklore about an entity of that size in the area?

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Well, John Keel talked a lot about the Native American Indians, you know, what they called a garuda. And that was an enormous bird, you know, you can Google it and stuff.

• 36:39Alie Ward?

  I Googled it. And garuda is indeed a god figure in the form of a man with giant wings. But it's a Hindu deity, so the other Indians. But several North American indigenous groups do feature a winged figure in their folklore, like the Hodenoshone creature known as Flying Head, which is a long-haired disembodied head that's ravenously hungry and has terrible eyes, razor sharp teeth, and sometimes bat or bird wings. And from what I imagine, a pretty chaotic vibe. But there's also the Thunderbird, which has been mythologized by several indigenous nations. Like, think of the winged person atop a Pacific Northwest totem pole.

• 37:23Alie Ward?

  And by some stories, it can make thunder with a wing flap and flash lightning through its eyes. And there have been petroglyphs found in Illinois and Wisconsin depicting humanoid burnt figures. There's this 2020 paper, The Thunderbird in Native American Rock Art: Anthropomorphic Images in Rock Art Paintings and Rock Carvings. And this paper notes that the Thunderbird tradition is likely one of the most ancient and widespread Native American traditions in all of North America. And stories of Thunderbirds are part of almost every tribe's mythology and have occurred as a rock art motif for thousands of years. The pecked and painted and incised images dating back at least 7,000 years or more.

• 38:04Alie Ward?

  And the paper continues that some forms are stick man-shaped figures or hybrid human bird images. Now, there was also a 2023 paper, Building Silver Bridges: Paranormal Apparitions, Settler Heritage, and Indigenous Erasure in the Ohio River Valley. And this was in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. And in it, archaeologist Dr. Paul Edward Montgomery Ramirez writes, "In pursuit of a mysterious figure, Mothman, in an equally mysterious landscape, the appeal of anti-indigenous pseudo-archaeology was all too strong." And Dr. Ramirez continues, "In Mothman as Thunderbird, a divine being adopts settlers and becomes their guardian.

• 38:47Alie Ward?

  And the people who directly benefit from the theft of indigenous lands and the massacre of countless indigenous people are absolved of the guilt of colonization and given divine protection by the spirits venerated by the very people who exist despite the colonial violence." It's a great paper. We'll link on our website. And as long as we are lifting and profiting from North American indigenous cultures, the other Thunderbird, the Ford one, has an equally chilling backstory. The Ford Thunderbird was almost named the Ford Beaver. Also in the running as names were Hepcat, Runabout, and El Tigre. But just in time, this young Ford designer submitted the suggestion Thunderbird because

• 39:32Alie Ward?

  he had lived in the Southwest. And now we have a sporty classic car that is not named Beaver. And according to a 20-year-old New Atlas article titled Ford's Historic Thunderbird Nameplate Returns, the guy who named the Thunderbird was awarded $95 and a pair of pants, which is more than Mothman has on both accounts.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  He said that that goes way back, you know, and, and paintings and stuff on the cave walls and all that kind of stuff. If it was a bird, it, it had a wingspan, you know, probably 12 feet or more.

• 40:05Alie Ward?

  I did an episode on condors, California condors. I'm not sure if you guys have species like it, but there's the Andean condor as well, whose wingspan can be nine, 10 feet.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:15Alie Ward?

  No condors in West Virginia. But the bald eagle, golden eagle, great blue heron, and yes, sandhill crane can all have wingspans of 80 inches, which is 2 meters or nearly 7 feet, all of which may be too large for some people to encounter at midnight in the woods. What do ornithologists say about the physiology of it compared to a cryptid? You know, any theories about maybe it was just a large vulture?

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, some people thought, you know, up there in the T and T area, when world, what that was during World War II is where they manufactured explosives and bombs and all that. It was like a big city up there, sort of like the AI centers are now.

• 40:59Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Which there's one up there now. Yeah. So anyways, that's where they manufactured all that stuff. But at that time, you didn't have the EPA. So when the war ended, they just left everything. And they contaminated all the soil. It's still an active EPA cleanup site.

• 41:19Alie Ward?

  So this episode is coming out on October 29th, 2026, also the day that I'm recording this, because yes, I do record up to the minute. And this week, The New York Times reported, Trump to loosen rules for oil firms on methane, a potent warming gas. And the article explains that the methane regulations being scaled back were also expected to cut other harmful pollutants, such as volatile organic compounds, which can form smog and benzene, which has been linked to cancer. So what's old is new again.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  So in the sixties, everybody's up there fishing and running around and everything, you know, not, no clue. And some people thought that maybe like a sandhill crane or a bird got into some of that waste and got deformed because, you know, a few of those witnesses said it just looked to them like something out of a science fiction movie.

• 42:08Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  You know, it didn't look real. They couldn't rationalize what it was, you know?

• 42:12Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  That was one of the theories and stuff. And then, of course, you know, you got your theories, oh, it was my grandpa that he was up there in a costume.

• 42:19Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Scaring people, which I'm sure after the fact, everybody was up there trying to scare people.

• 42:24Alie Ward?

  Right, right.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  You know?

• 42:26Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I've, I've heard a theory from another West Virginian that it was someone in a hang glider with a couple of flashlights.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  Heard that one, too.

• 42:35Alie Ward?

  I asked one of my friends, actually a crayfish scientist that I had met the day before, who said, my undergraduate advisor told me that everyone knew Mothman was a local who was a gifted hang glider. He would buzz people on the road with his glider and shine red flashlights at them while he did. He was very adamant that this was who the Mothman was. And David Clark's 2022 paper, The Mothman of West Virginia, A Case Study in Legendary Storytelling, notes that explanations have been proposed, including the activities of pranksters and misperceptions arising from media coverage of the phenomenon. Also, the TNT area is in fact butted up against the McClintock Wildlife Management Area, which

• 43:20Alie Ward?

  is a bird sanctuary. And in 1966, there was this huge snowy owl that had been seen in the area. It was shot by a guy named Ace Henry. I don't know why he shot it, but he did. And yeah, it had glowing red eyes. Ornithologists have long established that owl retinas look like big, bright circles in the dark as they reflect car lights and flashbulbs. They do it like a mirror. And these eyes, by the way, owl eyes, also shaped like hot dogs. Owl eyes are tubes. We have a two-part strigiformology episode about owls. I'm begging you to please enjoy. But that snowy owl in question is still in Point Pleasant, albeit dead and

• 44:03Alie Ward?

  mounted in Jeff's Mothman Museum, which you can visit for $4.99. Now, another theory is that Green Berets were testing a flight technique called HALO, which stands for High Altitude, Low Opening, Free Fall Parachuting. And that was done in the dark. They were testing it for military purposes, and it used glowing paints and potentially large tinted goggles for some parachuters. Or, yeah, it could have been a real silly naked guy on the forefront of the hang gliding trend that took off in the early 1970s. So in the 1960s, some aeronautics buffs developed a new type of flexible winged hang glider.

• 44:44Alie Ward?

  And I looked at images and patent drawings. It looks like a small, arched winged kite. Dang it, if it does really look like a bird or a cryptid. So imagine, it's 1966. You test new warfare in a sparsely populated wooded town. Hang gliding is not yet a well-recognized sport. A fresh winged contraption exists. You don't want people to know about it or what you're doing with it. In Vietnam, you test it at night. You freak people out. You pinky swear with the CIA not to say shit. Has anyone come forward to say, oh, yeah, that was my buddy who was a real prankster?

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Well, I hear that a lot.

• 45:26Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  You know, actually, the former mayor here back in the seventies claimed it was him and his buddies up there. And he showed me a picture of the costume that his mother had made him. But I'm like, did you fly over top of the car coming back in town? And he, he just, you know. I've read one article where it was a paratrooper said that they were doing maneuvers up there.

• 45:47Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  And they were just having fun. They were coming down and they had the goggles on and they'd hit the top of the car and go on and stuff like that. So a lot of different theories.

• 45:56Alie Ward?

  When you see wingsuits now and freebase jumpers, like, did those, I don't even-

• 46:01Speaker 02

  No.

• 46:02Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 46:03Alie Ward?

  I was gonna say.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  And plus, I don't know how you could do that up there.

• 46:06Alie Ward?

  Right, right.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  You have to be in a big canyon or something.

• 46:09Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  You know?

• 46:11Alie Ward?

  And interestingly, a major milestone in base jumping occurred in the summer of 1966, when two skydivers using this new wingsuit equipment jumped from Yosemite's El Capitan. They landed safely on a wing and a prayer in June of 1966. Hmm, interesting. Now, one of those jumpers died in 2024. At 84 years old, with his wife of 56 years by his side, the other one did not fare as well. While he continued to parachute into his mid-sixties, he was at this Bridge Day celebration for daredevil sports. He jumped from a bridge

• 46:52Alie Ward?

  and his chute failed to open. He perished on impact in front of 150,000 onlookers. Now, the Bridge Day Festival continues every October still at the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia, 100 miles from Point Pleasant. Also interesting. Now, okay, let's fast forward in time and space to 2011 to 2017, and 822 miles away in the windy city. What's in the sky? How about the resurgence of some sightings in Chicago? How did the community feel about that now that we have more digital surveillance and things like that?

• 47:31Speaker 02

  You know, I know what happened here, but I'm not going to debate and argue with people on Facebook about whether or not that's real or whatever and stuff. But, but you know, there's, there's, I get emails from all over the world, different places, you know?

• 47:44Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Russia, people seeing stuff, and would this be the same thing? It's real hard to say if it was or not, you know, because that was 60 years ago. But there was, you know, a lot of people that did see it.

• 47:57Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  It wasn't just two young couples.

• 47:59Alie Ward?

  Right, right.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Because it was a lot of, like respectable and prominent people, you know?

• 48:04Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  It wasn't just a bunch of kids up there and, you know, they're saying, oh, you know, they were up there and, you know, doing acid. Well, if they did their homework, this was in 66, acid really didn't hit till about 68 or 69.

• 48:18Alie Ward?

  Ah, yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Maybe pot, drinking cigarettes and, and, but.

• 48:24Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  They lived on our street. Like I said, you know, my mom would have said, oh, they were in trouble all the time.

• 48:28Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  She didn't. She said, you know, their parents would have busted them pretty good.

• 48:34Alie Ward?

  Okay, while recreational LSD continued to peak until the mid-1970s, it was certainly present and accounted for earlier. So an April 1966 Time Magazine article I found titled "The Dangers of LSD" details the story of the blonde, okay, Donna Wingenroth, who was no beatnik acid head looking for a trip into the fantastic with LSD. Still, they write, she ate a sugar cube laced with the hallucinogenic drug and had to be taken to the hospital, alternately laughing and screaming hysterically. And this 1966 Time article continues, "Bootleg LSD is relatively easy to manufacture. The stuff is made from lysuronic acid, which

• 49:19Alie Ward?

  is extracted from a fungus that grows on rye." And we did a great psychedeliology episode with UCLA psychiatrist and legend, Dr. Charles Grob, and also recently did a cannabinology episode with UCLA researcher, Dr. Ziva Cooper. And in the latter, I learned that today's weed, the devil's lettuce, is about 10 times stronger than your grandparents' reefer of the 1960s. So there were likely not 100 Mothman witnesses who were just real, real, real stoned. You'd have to really smoke a lot of hash.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they'd have to really be hallucinating pretty bad and stuff. But, you know, they came back and then went to the sheriff's department.

• 49:59Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  The sheriff's department set them down. They said, okay, we want you to write down everything that happened, everything that you saw. But they put them in separate rooms.

• 50:09Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  So in the museum, we have three of the four handwritten reports that they filled out, and they all match.

• 50:16Alie Ward?

  So these original handwritten notes are on display at the Mothman Museum. And oof, they're hard to read, you know, because they're in really ornate cursive, because people back then wrote with their hands. And Linda Scarborough's testimony, however, says, "I read in the paper that this thing has been seen in the daylight as well. I know people are laughing at us, but it is no laughing matter. We will never forget this thing." So it seems like this account was actually written after the word got out. Like, it, it was written days later. So, hmm, interesting.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  So they weren't in a room saying, hey, make sure you write this, because that's what I'm writing.

• 50:56Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  But they split them up for a reason.

• 50:58Alie Ward?

  And the notion that they don't want to talk about it all this time and don't want to extract fame or money from it necessarily is-

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Like I said, Roger, you would never, if he walked in here, which he did two years ago.

• 51:09Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  You know, I sat down with him for over an hour.

• 51:12Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  That interview will be in my third book if I can never find time to finish it.

• 51:15Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  But the first thing I asked him, I said, well, you know, I was five.

• 51:21Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  So I said, you know, I have to admit, I've always wanted to sit down and talk to you, but I've been apprehensive because I thought you would sit down and say- They blew this out of proportion. We made it all up. We just wanted attention.

• 51:34Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  And he looked right at me. He said, it scared the living hell out of me.

• 51:37Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  That's the first words out of his mouth. And then he said, it scared the living hell out of all of us that was in the car. And I've talked to people that were there at the time he's driving. And they said, when they pulled in that parking lot, he said, we thought there'd been an accident because they were white as a ghost.

• 51:55Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  And he said, I knew Roger. I went to school with him. He was a prankster. But he said, he was not in a joking mood that night.

• 52:04Alie Ward?

  Roger was a prankster. That's interesting. Also, Linda passed away at age 63. And from what I can gather from her obituary, she and Roger had split up. So maybe she knew more than we did. And only 17 and married. The Mothman drama may not have been good for their relationship, but it's great for their town. So this 2010 census revealed that 25% of Point Pleasant, West Virginia residents lived in poverty. And this tiny enclave's biggest industry is tourism to the tune of over $50 million a year. You can stay at the historic Lo Hotel across from the museum. You can pose with Mothman's front or back.

• 52:49Alie Ward?

  You can grab a frosted Mothman cookie at the bakery on the next block. And a 2025 River Cities Tribune and Register newspaper article titled, "Data Reveals That Visitation For Point Pleasant Surged In 2024", reveals that over a quarter million people per year visit downtown Point Pleasant, which is 66 people per resident of the town. So whether Mothman is real is up for debate, but the tourists are flesh and blood. And they want T-shirts and lattes.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  And the festival, it's a big boom for the economy here. I mean, whether you believe the story or not, the statue out here, Bob Roach made that statue. And, you know, it just brings people from all over the world all the time. And I always tell people, I've never really been in the business to try to convince anybody of anything. All I'm doing is getting what they're telling me, putting it in print form, and then you can decide, you know? Because I don't think anybody will ever be able to solve it.

• 53:51Alie Ward?

  Right. I wanted to ask about if I can ask you a couple of questions from listeners. But before we do, let's take a quick break and we'll donate to a cause of this. I'll just choosing. This week, we're also supporting Jeff's local business, which attracts visitors and tourism revenue that supports other local businesses and the community at large. So thank you, Jeff, for being on the show and feel free to follow the underscore Mothman underscore museum on Instagram to see more of Point Pleasant, including some famous sculptural landmarks we will discuss in a moment. Another donation is going to support the Save the Academy project, which is fighting to keep the Western Hemisphere's oldest natural history museum, the Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia, open. If you haven't heard, so the Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia, their operator, Drexel University,

• 54:35Alie Ward?

  abruptly closed this incredibly vital institution's doors with less than a month's notice in late September. And the decisions are currently being all made behind closed doors without the scientific community and the general public. And we need people to contact Drexel, Philly's mayor and the Pennsylvania governor and call on them to reopen the museum and appoint an interim commission of experts to govern the academy and to fundraise for its future. If we lose the academy, what's to stop other universities from trying to pull things like this? And now is a time when science needs as many people standing up for it as possible. So you can find out more at savetheacademy.org.

• 55:19Alie Ward?

  Also, check out local activists like Skype a Scientist with your favorite toothologist and squid expert, Dr. Sarah McInulty. They are also helping to stage vigils and rallies. And speaking of public hearings, to keep the academy open, again, that's savetheacademy.org. And for more info, we will link that in the show notes. Thank you to sponsors of the show who enable us to help out local people and causes and enable me to get myself to these locations to see in person the blanket from the Mothman prophecy. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all in one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need.

• 56:01Alie Ward?

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• 56:39Alie Ward?

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• 57:48Speaker 06

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• 58:08Speaker 07

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• 58:55Alie Ward?

  Okay, we're back and I must report, I made my pilgrimage to the Mothman statue. And this is my experience. It is like a 12 foot homage to the creature's form. It's rendered in shining polished steel, ripped abs, broad pecs, replete with tiny delicate curly metal hairs. It's got a face like a wasp's head with wide set red eyes. I would call its mouth open, fanged and lightly beaked. And it has tall wings. They look latticed almost. Also arms with long Nosferatu claws. So he's rocking the arms and the wings. He stands in kind of a crouched position as if he's about to bound skyward

• 59:38Alie Ward?

  on those muscular soccer player legs and the big chicken toes. Crouch like a Ken doll. Nothing to see here, but you round the back and you will witness Point Pleasant's pride. Buns of buffed gleaming steel, glutes for days, a crack so deep. Congregants have wedged a small handful of objects in it. The day I'm there, there are four $1 bills, a quarter and two business cards wedged in that crack. So many of you that it would irritate you to have me say all your names. Asked in first time question askers words, Saster site Courtney, Erin. Erin asked, why is Mothman all caked up? Ellen also wonders, why is the Mothman statue so caked up?

• 1:00:22Alie Ward?

  Mia said, why is he double cheeked up? Mindy Corker and Turley said supple butt cheeks. Jen Squirrel Alvarez just asked, dad ass. A lot of people wanted to know about Bob Roach's statue. And I know that it's, there's a lot of attention on it, especially on the internet.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Alie Ward?

  What an ass on that thing.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  That's what I think you want to say. And my daughter is partially responsible for all those posts. You know, she just does the shirts that says, you know, touch the shiny honey and all that. She's went completely another direction with all that stuff. So.

• 1:00:54Alie Ward?

  How do you feel about how he's depicted? I mean, honestly, it's pretty great. And I think it's probably inspired a lot of people to start doing squats and leg lunges.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Alie Ward?

  Do you remember if Bob was talking about anatomically, like what reports he was going from? Or did you just?

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  Well, what he did, he came to me and I remember he said, I need to contact all these witnesses because I want to get all of them's descriptions and everything.

• 1:01:20Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  And that's what he did. He talked to several of the witnesses and then pretty much came up with his own version. The wings probably are correct. The eyes, you know, the butt, I don't know. Nobody ever mentioned that, you know?

• 1:01:34Alie Ward?

  He's described as having very muscular legs, not bird like legs.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  Right, right. Now Linda told me that when it was over top of the car. She said, the first thing she noticed was a leg that came down and hit the windshield. And she said, it looked like a person's leg.

• 1:01:46Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  So, you know, that could be where he talked to her about it and everything. But yeah, he made probably 10 or 12 different.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Statues, like he did one of his daughter riding the horse. He did one of Jesus. He did all the Lord Dunstmore, the Chief Cornstalk, all the historical.

• 1:02:02Alie Ward?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Once he retired, he, he just, he had to have something to do. And, but they begged and begged and begged for him to do a Mothman one and stuff. He, he was a non believer, you know? He was like, I don't believe in this stuff, but he did it. And thank God he did.

• 1:02:16Alie Ward?

  A lot of people are like, why is Mothman so hot?

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Alie Ward?

  He's an attractive.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:02:22Alie Ward?

  An attractive looking creature.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:24Alie Ward?

  Right? This was a burning hot question on the minds of patrons Susan Singly, Badu Badu, Kate Danny, Anastasia Press, Jay Steinbacher, Emily Lamb, Ranger France, Sherkels, and Noels, who asked, does Mothman bang? Jessica Goyette, first time question asker, who has waited their whole life for this, said, how did Mothman become sexy? I'm into it. Shut up, I'm Sarah, said, why do so many people want to have his moth babies? Do you think that that's part of the lore? Is that, yeah, we've sort of decided that, in Aaron's words, um, first time question asker, you know, have we decided that Mothman should be our collective boyfriend? Why is he so enticing? Warlock wants to know, does he want to be my boyfriend? Do you think that there's something that's just alluring about the mystery?

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  I think it's pop culture now. You know what I mean? Um, you have a lot of different facets. And you have the, the hardcore purist, you know, that's the paranormal people and everything. And then you have the fun people that look at cryptids as cute and cuddly. That's not what Linda and them ran into was a furry little creature, but it's just morphed into all kinds of different pop culture. I mean, the video game, you know, the Fallout 76, which, you know, I had no clue that the museum was even going to be in that till one of my graphic design students stopped me after class and said, hey, here's a picture of the play map for the new Fallout game and Mothman Museum's in it. I'm like, what are

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  you talking about? It has taken on, you know, so many different directions.

• 1:03:57Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  And you know, you can't stop it. I mean, it's like, I just kind of just sat back and, and just let it happen. I mean, I, I can't control anything. I mean, I have copyrights on our stuff.

• 1:04:10Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  You know, T-shirt images and the museum and the festival and the root beer and the mini golf and all that.

• 1:04:17Alie Ward?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. They have a Mothman black light mini golf course on the roof. There are glowing aliens. There are choppers on the lookout, army guys, men in black, and of course, Mothman crouching like your high school football quarterback making eyes at you. I did not visit this trippy mini golf course oasis because I was headed quickly to the next stop on my road trip. And I was also alone. And I'm in a rage that I skipped it. Like, take me back. Jeff, take my money. I do feel like he's America's favorite cryptid.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  I think so. I mean, it's, it's getting that way. Bigfoot for a long time, you know, there was a article I was reading, there's a, and down in Texas, they opened up a cryptid monster museum or whatever.

• 1:05:00Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  And the guy said, he can't keep the Mothman stuff on the shelves. So, but it's everything. I mean, you know, the movies, the TV shows, the documentaries, the podcasts.

• 1:05:08Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Everything.

• 1:05:09Alie Ward?

  A few people asked too about other disasters. Bubry wanted to know, G Connolly wanted to know, can you tell us anything about the Mothman sightings around the power plant before Chernobyl disaster? There are claims about Mothman sightings pre nine 11.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Alie Ward?

  Anything about that that you've, you've heard of?

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  I just read the same things that they see. The pictures of Chernobyl and something flying over nine 11. Again, I think, you know, it's Keel's book, the movie they talk about, you know, it was here to warn people and stuff like that. So that's out there. There's all kinds of stuff, you know? And sometimes it's, it gets to the point around here, you know, it's either Chief Cornstalk's curse or Mothman.

• 1:05:52Alie Ward?

  Yes. And I understand that some people might relate those. They might maybe ascribe some mystical meaning because of that historical curse and betrayal to some kind of paranormal spiritual happenings here?

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  People do kind of connect the two once in a while.

• 1:06:10Alie Ward?

  If you're like, wait, who was Cornstalk? Let me help you out. So in the mid 1700s, colonists spread west to the Shawnee Territory of what is now West Virginia. And one well-respected orator and diplomat and a warrior, ultimately a peacekeeper named Hokalesqua, which means blade of corn in the Shawnee language, hence Cornstalk, had been defending his territory. And he was brokering a peace deal when he was taken hostage in a fort along with his young son and two other Shawnee peoples. And while he was detained, far inside the fort, an unrelated fight broke out between a guard and another indigenous person defending

• 1:06:51Alie Ward?

  their land. And the guard died. So the colonists at the fort stormed the cell of Hokalesqua, Cornstalk, and brutally killed those detained. Eight bullets were fired into Hokalesqua. And this was 1977. And local legends insist that as he lay dying, he uttered a 200-year curse on those colonizers, which would explain the many tragedies that befell the land, including the final bow of the Mothman sightings and the silver bridge collapse. Although those with a background in second grade arithmetic can note that the 1777 curse must have abruptly

• 1:07:32Alie Ward?

  stopped like 10 years shy of its statute of limitations. So then what is happening here? Once again, I point you toward the excellent 2023 academic paper, Building Silver Bridges: Paranormal Apparitions, Settler Heritage, and Indigenous Erasure in the Ohio River Valley, which cites the work of this religious scholar, Daryl Katerin, who highlights settler anxieties and guilt in the construction of these Indian curses, so-called, and hauntings and spiritualism, noting that when considering indigenous peoples, settler narratives often oscillate between the imagery of tragedy and of threat, and that the connection of

• 1:08:11Alie Ward?

  Mothman to disaster entangles it with this, quote, Indian curse settler myth. So recasting indigenous people into settler narratives is not uncommon, the paper notes. And the so-called Cornstalk curse provides this facade of antiquity and authenticity into the mythmaking of Mothman. And it authenticates the sightings of Mothman, and it ties it to this narrative of this series of events throughout time and brings the present and this supernatural vengeance by this betrayed Shawnee orator together. So what became of Hokalesqua or Chief Cornstalk? It continued to be tragic after his death. So as reported in the 1954

• 1:08:55Alie Ward?

  New York Times piece titled, Indian Chief Reburied: Betrayed Peacemaker Is Placed in His Third Grave. He was buried at first on the settler grounds at the fort. Then he was exhumed in 1840 and reburied on the lawn of the Point Pleasant Courthouse, then desecrated yet again and exhumed in 1954, when the courthouse moved to a new location, and a few remaining bone fragments and teeth are now interned in a metal box at a state park. Another memorial to this fallen peacekeeper betrayed by white men and muskets is the Chief Cornstalk Wildlife

• 1:09:36Alie Ward?

  Management Area. And its Wikipedia page is brief, but it notes that within the grounds, quote, "a shooting range is available for gun enthusiasts." The curse is coming from inside the house. Okay?

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  But you know, Cornstalk was, he was murdered and.

• 1:09:53Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  And he said, hey, I'm cursing this town for 200 years.

• 1:09:57Alie Ward?

  Um, a few people, Batty, Anna Taylor, Brooke Legg, wanted to know about the name Mothman. I know that it's, it's attributed to an unknown maybe reporter, but.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, um, they were having a press conference. At that time, I always heard that the Batman TV show, which I watched, and there was a villain in there, Mothman or something like that.

• 1:10:16Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  And they, people were describing as having moth-like wings. Or somebody just said Mothman. But if you talk to people around here, they, they call it the Birdman, you know, the big bird, all that kind of stuff.

• 1:10:35Alie Ward?

  Yeah. How do you feel about the, the term Mothman? Like?

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  That's what I've always looked at it, you know?

• 1:10:41Alie Ward?

  I understand too, appearance might've been gray, mottled brown.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:44Alie Ward?

  Which honestly, very moth-y.

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:47Alie Ward?

  You know, pretty good for camouflage during the day.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. Most of them described it as, as a gray shincolor, or maybe a light gray at times, you know, depending on what time, you know, the day.

• 1:10:58Alie Ward?

  Sandhill cranes, side note, giant wingspans, mottled gray plumage, and between their eyes is a patch of bright scarlet feathers. It's very interesting. Yeah. Any daytime sightings?

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were. There was a lady, an elderly lady that looked out her window. At that time and said it looked like an angel walking in her yard because she said the wings were wrapped up on the back of its head and it was just walking. But she was an older lady, you know, she didn't know what was going on and stuff. She reported it to the police and there was actually a police officer in Charleston, West Virginia that called it into the police department and said, hey, I'm in my house and I'm looking out on the roof and there's a thing sitting out there staring at me that looks like a giant bird.

• 1:11:49Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  So, yeah, you know.

• 1:11:51Alie Ward?

  And feathered or wings more like skin like a bat?

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  I've heard both.

• 1:11:55Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Most of them said it just, you know, they saw it's a quick or whatever, maybe like feathers and then some almost like a leathery bat type thing.

• 1:12:05Alie Ward?

  Ooh. Bat thing, bat man, bat woman. Patrons, emotional support human and first time question asker, Michaela G. wanted to know, how do we know it's a man and not a woman? And Quill Sloan asked, why man? No women or non-binary? Any idea why it's been called a man?

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Because it was shaped like a man.

• 1:12:25Alie Ward?

  Yeah, just more muscular.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, because they said it had arms, you know, legs and most people said it had arms. Other people just said, you know, the wings and but when Linda and them saw it first in the road up there, she said they spooked it and it hobbled through the grass into the big north power plant building, the vacant building. But she said it didn't run, it didn't fly, but she said it just kind of bounced through the grass and went in.

• 1:12:47Alie Ward?

  Like a raven, kind of.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:49Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Kind of like exactly how a bird might hop, for example. Now, a few patrons, Rachel Houston and Adam Weaver, no doubt familiar with the lore, asked me about this spooky TNT factory, also known as West Virginia Ordnance Works Munitions Plant. And Adam Weaver, a local, said that they hoped I could check out that TNT area, drive up to it, as well as go to a place known as Hillbilly Hot Dogs. Sadly, I saw neither. And the TNT factory up there, are there theories about maybe it, you know, like nesting there, living around there?

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  That's where a lot of the sightings were. Even when they got, the guys saw it at the airport, they said it went right back up the river and crossed right there where that was at.

• 1:13:31Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  You know, I've heard people talk about nests. The one I'm talking about is the north power plant. That's the three-story up on the top because a lot of people said, hey, we were driving by and we looked up there and we saw something on the top there.

• 1:13:43Alie Ward?

  Oh, like roosting, kind of?

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, or looking.

• 1:13:46Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  Bob Bosworth and his buddy were on mini bikes. They were going by and he said they looked up and they thought it was somebody with a two before with lights on it doing this.

• 1:13:56Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  And he said, ah, we'll just go in and scare them and tell them we got guns and all that. And there was nothing in there but concrete and glass and rubble. That's all there was. And he said that we went clear to the top and he said whatever it was, was about seven foot tall and it stood in that room, but it wouldn't come into the light.

• 1:14:12Alie Ward?

  And so just shadowy.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  He said that the light was coming through the moonlight. He said it walked right up to the light and stopped.

• 1:14:19Alie Ward?

  I love lamp.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  And he said, I looked at my buddy and I said, we're getting out of here.

• 1:14:23Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  But he said, you could hear it walking over the glass and everything. But he said, I literally could have retched out and touched it.

• 1:14:31Alie Ward?

  Woo.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  And of course he passed away and stuff, but his buddy's still around. I still talk to him.

• 1:14:36Alie Ward?

  Oof.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  And he told me every now and then when I see him, I said, did you, he said, I don't know what it was.

• 1:14:42Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  He said, I did a tour of Vietnam. He said, I seen everything over there. He said, that I don't know. He said, I seen some scary stuff over there in Vietnam. He said, but that scared me up here, he goes, but I just don't know what it was.

• 1:14:55Alie Ward?

  And from what I understand, a lot of people who saw it felt kind of like trance-like or?

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, most of them. Some of them, you know, like Roger was just sort of like, it is what it is. But others were really, you know, paranoid for years. Linda, she had some problems, you know, with hearing footsteps.

• 1:15:15Alie Ward?

  After his decade of investigating and writing about Mothman, John Keel was tragically the victim of one of America's deadliest killers, congestive heart failure, like 30 years after his book came out. In this spooky October, if you love to be scared, we have a cardiology episode with Dr. Herman Taylor, all about your most likely demise. I'm sorry. What do you think is more scary, the Mothman or the Men in Black?

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  Well, from what I've talked, the Mothman's what scared most of them.

• 1:15:44Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  But Men in Black didn't help the matter any of that because they were just, they spooked a lot of people and people just didn't know what they were, you know.

• 1:15:52Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  Well, Connie Carpenter, they tried to pull her into their car.

• 1:15:56Alie Ward?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  You know, they ripped the sleeve off of her shirt. She was still a senior in high school when that happened.

• 1:16:02Alie Ward?

  Jeez.

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  She was getting ready to go to school and pulled up and asked her about directions or anything. She said, I started telling them and one of them just opened that door and grabbed and pulled her shirt jacket off. She said, you know, she started yelling, I'm going to call the cops, I'm going to call the cops.

• 1:16:17Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  And she said they took off.

• 1:16:19Alie Ward?

  Well, a really popular question, Amanda Lask, Cici Goldstein, Bella Jensen Hill, Levine the Dream, Laurel, Gardener Gabby, Judy, Wegman Sushi, and Shannon Cody wanted to know, is there more than one, do you think?

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  That's a good question too, because Linda, when they first saw it and it went into the north power plant.

• 1:16:38Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  They took off in their car, they go back out to Route 62, they take a left and then she says, there it is again. And it was standing in front of a billboard.

• 1:16:47Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  And she said the wings went out straight down and she said it just shot up in the air like a rocket.

• 1:16:53Alie Ward?

  Woo.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  So she always thought, she said, I think there's more than one, you know?

• 1:16:58Alie Ward?

  Well, I can't say that these things play by the rules of physics.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:17:01Alie Ward?

  Or nature. So who's to say?

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:17:04Alie Ward?

  You know?

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  And for years after that, you know, she would imagine other, other things going on. But yeah, that is, that is one of the theories that there might have been more than one, but.

• 1:17:16Alie Ward?

  Do you have a particular theory that resonates the most with you of what this was?

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  People ask me that every interview I do, there's, what do you think it was? But that's all right. You know, I don't really, I know just by talking to those people that it wasn't a fluke and that they were just making it up for attention and, and all that. The reason I have been, you know, interested is because there were so many people.

• 1:17:37Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  Old people, younger people, professionals, and none of them really had anything to gain. I mean, you know, they still don't.

• 1:17:46Alie Ward?

  Like primary witnesses Roger and Linda, those good kids who are maybe also known to be pranksters. And now their names are forever in American folklore.

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  You don't see Roger Scarborough starring in any movies or anything, you know what I mean?

• 1:18:00Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  I think a lot, some of those people are just getting up in the age where they want to make sure that their story is told. And I'm just lucky enough that they come to me. Their kids will bring them in and say, you know, we wanted her to come in and at least tell you what happened and everything. It's a story that's just, it'll be here forever. That statue is going to be out there forever. But it just, the mystery just continues. It just continues to grow and stuff, you know?

• 1:18:28Alie Ward?

  Any big myth or correction that you want to address?

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  Well, you know, some people say, did it ever harm anybody, did it physically attack anybody? No, not around here.

• 1:18:39Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  They say, was there any physical evidence, droppings, feathers, whatever? The sheriff's deputies took, well, John Keel saw some footprints outside of that building, but nobody at that time thought, hey, we're not even going to be talking about this in another week, so let's just go.

• 1:18:57Alie Ward?

  Although in Linda Scarborough's handwritten account, again, taken several days after their first sighting, she writes that they returned to the area in the daylight and they saw some tracks that looked like two horseshoes put together, but they're smooth. Linda's account continues though, I am keeping going on nerve and sleeping pills. When it gets dark, I feel the fear creeping over me. When I go anyplace, I automatically look up and out the windows. I'm afraid to sleep at night, so I lay awake sometimes crying with fear. When I do sleep or go to bed, the lights burn all night. Even in the daylight, I'm afraid to be by myself. I walk around my own house expecting to see that thing. I close my eyes, day or night, and I can see those fiery red eyes staring at me.

• 1:19:40Alie Ward?

  Every little noise scares me to death.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  They always ask, you know, did it ever attack anybody? But I know that several of those people just had mental.

• 1:19:51Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  Issues afterwards. They were paranoid and Marcella Bennett.

• 1:19:55Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  She said, I wouldn't drive at night after that.

• 1:19:58Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  She said, I wouldn't, her husband worked the night shift or whatever. She said, I wouldn't drive. I'd always look in the backseat before I took off and stuff.

• 1:20:07Alie Ward?

  And remember, some witnesses really never wanted to talk about it. So was it a man with burning radiation eyes and a fantastic caboose? Was it a hang gliding prankster? Was it a lie? Was it a CIA cover up for Vietnam era war technology testing? A bird? A bird with genetic mutations from industrial runoff? Is anything real? Will your descendants, long after probably congestive heart failure reduces you to bones in a box, finally find out exactly what Mothman was? Does all of time happen at once? Perhaps what matters here really is how people tell stories, how we connect with them.

• 1:20:51Alie Ward?

  We engage with others. We continue to villainize victims of the past to justify the present. But let this be a lesson above all, that science is vital. The Mulders and the Scullies of the world, get out there. Wear a trench coat. Look hot. Find some stuff out. Maybe kiss, but you can keep that between yourselves.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  So there's different levels of the story. Some people really are into it. Other people just, they think it's cool. They think it's funny and stuff like that. But I mean, all the stuff that's coming out now with the government, with the UFOs and everything.

• 1:21:29Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  I mean, I've talked to airline pilots in there in the museum and they tell me, they said, you know, we used to have to document all that stuff. And when we'd see stuff, and he said, we don't even write it down now because we see it all the time. You know, he's like, everybody on the planes sees it. And he goes, it doesn't do any good to document it.

• 1:21:48Alie Ward?

  What is the hardest part about being, you know, a figure of information about this? What's the hardest part or the hardest part about the museum?

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's to the point now where it's just hard to, you know, we get a lot of emails and things like that, you know, wanting us to come on shows.

• 1:22:06Alie Ward?

  So it's this.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  It's hard, it's hard. No, no. I mean.

• 1:22:08Alie Ward?

  I'm kidding.

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  It's just hard to really say yes to everybody.

• 1:22:11Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah. Is there a favorite thing about what you do about this, about the lore, about?

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  Well, it's the meeting all the different people.

• 1:22:19Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  You know, we have the museum. My wife has the trading company. So I still haven't grown out of that. So it's, it's fun. I mean, you know, I get to do what I want to do and we make Mothman root beer here. And we have the escape room and the mini golf. I mean, it's, it's not a normal job.

• 1:22:39Alie Ward?

  Yeah, it's an entertainment empire.

• 1:22:41Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:22:41Alie Ward?

  You know?

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  It is. That's like, you know, I don't really think I've ever worked. I worked at Kmart for a few years. I didn't like that. But at the, at the time I was working there, I was taking notes.

• 1:22:51Alie Ward?

  Oh yeah, about merchandising and things like that?

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I wanted to open record stores, you know, because I played music and all that. I thought, man, I'll never get out of here. And one day, one of the assistant managers, at, at that time, they had, you know, CDs and cassettes and Kmart.

• 1:23:07Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:08Speaker 02

  And he came over to me and he goes, hey, he goes, they're going to be revamping that whole section over there. Do you want any of those fixtures? And right then I was like, okay, it's a sign. I said, I'll take them all. And that's how I opened the first one.

• 1:23:26Alie Ward?

  An entrepreneur at heart. Thank you for saying yes to this.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Okay, no problem.

• 1:23:30Alie Ward?

  I really appreciate it.

• 1:23:33Alie Ward?

  So what is Mothman? This is a good story. It's an American legend. Okay? It's a myth wrapped in a mystery and it's a source of income for a town that would otherwise be forgotten. So if you want to visit the Mothman Museum, go for it. Spend some money at the local businesses. Don't email me telling me that the Mothman isn't real because then it reveals that you didn't get past the title of the episode, which is Mothman Mythology. Now in the show notes, there are dozens of other Spooktober episodes we've done in the last many years. Also links to savetheacademy.org and Skype a Scientist. And we'll add more links at our website at aliwar.com/ologies/mothmanmythology.

• 1:24:16Alie Ward?

  And if you do need shorter, kid-friendly episodes, you can find them wherever you get podcasts. They are called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. Also, ologiesmerch.com has you literally covered with t-shirts and totes and bathing suits in case you need any upcoming holiday gifts. And you can join our Patreon and discuss the episode all together at patreon.com/ologies. Erin Talbert admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. Keeping her glowing red eyes on the calendar is scheduling producer Noel Dilworth. Overseeing from the trees is managing director Susan Hale. And pulling up the rear each week are our talented editors, Jake Chaffee and lead editor

• 1:25:00Alie Ward?

  Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn shrieked out the theme music with Spooktober edits courtesy of Dr. David Bash winner and our own Jake Chaffee. And if you stick around until the very end, you know, I may tell you a little secret. And this week it's that I'm still in the Catskills. Oh, it's so pretty. I literally am recording this looking out of a sunroom into something that looks like a screensaver of falling leaves. Everyone I love has been in this house, except for my mom who could make it, but high school girlfriends. My niece is on the porch reading a book right now. My sister is upstairs. We're making nianke. I had a shepherd's pie. Jared's here. My buddies are here. It's the best. Yesterday, oh, also, which is why this episode is like two days late.

• 1:25:46Alie Ward?

  I'm like, am I going to go hang out with the people I love the most in life? Or am I going to put out an episode like 48 hours sooner? Sometimes, sometimes you gotta live while you're on this side of the grass, as my dad used to say, who is now on the other side of the grass. You know what I'm saying? So here we go. I wanted to tell you though, yesterday, my friends and family went to a farm to get some pumpkins. They had a corn maze. We don't have a lot of corn mazes in Southern California, as I'm sure you can imagine. I'd never been in one. And it was dusk on a weekday. They were going to close in like a half an hour or something. And we had this corn maze all to ourselves. And like the sunlight is fading. It's like golden long rays through the corn. And we're just running around completely free, except that we're trapped in a corn maze.

• 1:26:31Alie Ward?

  And like 20 minutes go by of us goofing around and we really can't find our way out. We're like, I'm kind of starting to panic a little bit because I'm like, okay, like, can we get out of this corn maze now? And we had to just retrace our steps as best we could. I had to leave tufts of corn silk behind so I could tell where I had already been. And then we finally just exited out the entrance. Like it fully defeated us. We could not get ourselves out of this corn maze. And I was like, this is going to be so embarrassing if night falls and they have to send like a rescue team after us, just hollering from the depths of a corn maze. But I loved it. I loved every minute. And it was the revenge of the cornstalk, indeed. Was it the revenge of a cornstalk? Or was it a nightmare of our own making?

• 1:27:15Alie Ward?

  It was a nightmare of our own making. And that is the lesson of America. And on that note, election day is coming up. If you are hearing this and you can, please vote early and we'll see what other nightmares await us. Okay, bye bye.

• 1:27:57Speaker 05

  I was being chased by a moth.

• 1:28:01Speaker 05

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