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We had a variety of strange incidents that happened over and over again and never made any sense at all. One of my favorites is the phantom meter reader.
This is where a.
Man would knock at a door of a house in the suburbs and say he'd come to read the meter, the electric meter, the gas meter, and he would be dressed in the proper coveralls and all, and they would let him in. He'd go down into the basement. He wouldn't come out, and these people.
After about an hour.
They said, what the hell is he doing?
Down to my face?
And they would look and sometimes a man would be gone all together, never to be seen again, and even though there was no way out of his face at that basement. But the found of mena readers was one type of MiB that we had.
I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Rivals Episode nine. The monster in the.
Igloos what is Battleship Gray five to seven feet tall, has a pair of red eyes two inches in diameter, which blaze like two lasers, wings which extend to ten feet when spread, and loves to chase automobiles. Give up if it's any constellation. Nobody else seems to know what it is either, but over one hundred people in Ohio and West Virginia swear that they have seen such a creature since November nineteen sixty six.
These are the opening words to an article in the October nineteen sixty eight edition of Saga magazine titled Mothman Monster.
The subtitle was Is it a bizarre behemoth from the bowels of the Earth or is it some winged night maarish visitor from outer space? One thing is sure. It has terrorized hundreds of people in Ohio and West Virginia, and its nocturnal visits are becoming more frequent and frightening.
The author was an eccentric paranormal researcher named John Keel. Although he never saw the Mothman, he is the pivotal character in this story because, through his reporting and his book The Mothman Prophecies, he turned the story of a few sightings into a compelling tale that captured the public imagination. Because of Kiel's influence on how we have come to
understand the Mothman story. It's helpful to be clear about the actual sightings around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, beginning in late nineteen sixty six, and then the way Keel related those events to create the popular legend we now know the Mothman sightings really began around midnight on November fifteenth, nineteen sixty six. Two young married couples identified in the Saga article as mister and missus Roger Scarberry and mister
and missus Steve Molett. We're driving through a place known as the TNT area, about seven miles outside of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. This is John Keel from a fort Fest convention in the nineteen nineties.
In November of nineteen sixty six, forty young people in a car and we're driving past this building. And he saw what looked like a very large man six or seven feet twelve next to this color plant, and for some reason, they were all he scared to death. They were all scared to death.
Roger Scarberry told Kiel that quote. It was shaped like a man, but bigger, maybe six and a half or seven feet tall, and it had big wings folded against its back. Scarberry's wife added that it was those eyes that got us. It had two big red eyes like automobile tail light reflectors.
Suddenly, boy who was driving at the accelerator and they drove out of here in a high speed, and looking back, this thing rose up in the air and followed their car. And they were going over sixty miles an hour on these jared roads and this thing was flying right along with it. So they drove straight to the police station.
Roger told Keel quote, it followed us right to the city limits. Funny thing. We noticed a dead dog by the side of the road there, but when we came back a few minutes later, the dog was gone.
Now you have to realize in small towns, teenagers do not go to the police station voluntarily. And the police were so convinced by their behavior that they held a press conference the next day and reporters from the local newspapers from Charlotte another citizen around there, came to hear this very bizarre story of this flying man.
At that time, Batman was.
Very popular on television, so the newspapers labeled this creature Mothman, and that was at the beginning of the Mothman paper I guess you call it.
A deputy named Millard Halstead later remarked to Keel about the two young couples. I've known them all their lives. They've never been in any trouble. I took them seriously. They saw something. They were really scared. The TNT area where the two cups had seen the creature consisted of hundreds of acres of fields and forests that had been
a site for storing explosives during World War Two. The explosives were housed in what they called igloos, domed concrete bunkers covered with a thick layer of earth for camouflage. Here's John Keel again, this time from a meeting of Saucer News in the late nineteen sixties, describing the TNT area.
I said as twenty five hundred acres. There are hundreds of these igloes there. There are poor families living within this area, so it's very thinly populated. If the mark man wanted to live there not very many people with the batherin. I also discovered that during the Second World War, when they were building this ammunition dump, they built a whole network of tunnels in which to transport to high
explosives from the arsenal to the various big glues. No one in the whole region I knew the location of these tunnels. There were no maps available. There were some entrances to some of these tunnels, but when I went into them, I found them full of water. But it's very possible that there is a network of tunnels down there that it is not full of water. I wanted to explore them more fully, but the few companies that
I found I couldn't get anywhere. Perhaps it's just as well as I didn't, because I hate to be crawling through a tunnel. It needs something seven feet toll.
It was, in many ways the perfect spot for a mysterious creature, massive and creepy. It's also the perfect spot to spook yourself if you see something unexpected. It's been repurposed as a nature preserve. You can walk around and into these igloes, which are of course empty.
Now.
The next year there were over one hundred reports of this monner. Some of the people who before saying this time were not only adults, they were responsible adults, like bankers, locals.
Keel went to West Virginia to investigate, and it's here that the distinction between sightings of the creature and Kill's reporting on a broader paranormal context begins to complicate things.
Keel gets involved and goes down there and talks to the witnesses and establishes a relationship with this woman. Mary Hyer, who is a newspaper editor, reporter correspondent for the Athens, Ohio Newspaper, which is the closest major newspaper to Point Pleasant, West Virginia. I am Aaron Gullias. I am a historian and teacher and writer, and I have a podcast called
The Saucer Life. The way the story goes along is you've got these sightings in West Virginia of the Mothman, overlaid with UFO sidings, and Keel through correspondents and visits and phone calls, trying to keep up with the story and seeing how it develops.
Mary Hyer worked for the Athens Messenger, where she was both a reporter and the author of a column called Where the Waters Mingle. It became a kind of running clearing house of Mothman and UFO reports which were apparently happening with alarming frequency. After the initial sighting by the Scarberrys and molettes. Here's an example of her column from January twenty second, nineteen sixty seven, two months after the initial Mothman sighting.
It seems that West Virginia is seeing its share of strange objects. The latest was by Tad Jones of Dunbar, who said he came upon the unidentified flying object on Interstate sixty four. Its descriptions like that of many which have been reported in many areas of the United States and around the world. One woman in Point Pleasant reported several weeks ago about seeing something like that, but it
was in the air several hundred feet. There are, also, of course, the sightings of the monster and unidentified objects seen recently by people in Cheshire, Gallipolis, Eureka, and Addison.
In addition to her newspaper work, she kept up a correspondence with Keel, keeping him informed of paranormal reports during the times when he was not in West Virginia. The Mothman story began to incorporate strange elements that have now become part of our culture, but were not widely known at the time. The story of a young woman named Connie Carpenter is a good example of how this worked. John Keel kept a spiral notebook the size that could
fit into a shirt pocket. Under the date November twenty seventh, nineteen sixty six were the following notes.
Harri Joe Carpenter, eighteen, near New Haven. Later that night, two girls saw a UFO on Route sixty near Saint Albans, ran into neighbor's house. Neighbor confirmed sighting boyfriend Keith Gordon.
In his article for Saga magazine, Keel included Connie's story among many other stories of encounters with either the creature or UFOs.
He wrote, Miss Connie Carpenter, a shy, studious girl of eighteen from new Haven, West Virginia, allegedly had an identical encounter at ten thirty am Sunday, November twenty seventh. She was driving home from church. She told me. When she saw what she thought at first was a large man in gray standing on the deserted links of the Mason County Golf Course outside of Mason, West Virginia, those ten foot wings suddenly unfolded. The thing took off straight up and headed for her car.
The creature flew directly at her car before veering off and disappearing. Not Surprisingly, Connie was Upset by this counter, she didn't return to school for several days, and, according to Kiel, required medical attention. She claimed to get a look at the mothman's face, which she described as horrible, like something out of a science fiction movie.
The next morning, her eyes were reddened and swollen, shut and itched fiercely. This condition persisted for over two weeks. In fact, her eyes were still red and watery when I first interviewed her. I had seen this odd ailment several times before, but only on UFO witnesses who claimed to have gotten a close look at the luminous objects. Cottie Carpenter was the only Mothman witness to come down with this eyeburn.
This was the extent of Connie's experience with the Mothman, but she continued to experience strange events. In February of nineteen sixty seven, Connie married the Keith Gordon mentioned in Kills an Ope book. The newly weds moved across the river to a house in Middleport, Ohio. On the morning of February twenty second, Connie left the house to walk to school. As she walked, a large black buick pulled up beside her. The story was written up in an article and kills so called Mothman case book.
The occupant of the car opened the door and called to her, Thinking that he was seeking directions, she approached him. It was a clean cut young man of about twenty five, she told me later. It was wearing a colorful mod shirt, no jacket, and had neatly combed thick black hair and appeared to be sun tanned. He spoke with no noticeable accent. When she reached the car, the driver suddenly lunged and grabbed her arm and ordered her to get in with him.
He did not get out of the car. She fought back, and there was a brief struggle before she finally broke away.
The implication in this story is that this incident was connected to her Mothman sighting. He's not a kidnapper trolling the streets before school begins. He's there because of Connie's experience. While he isn't in the garb that we would come to expect, he seems to be performing the same function as what would come to be known as the Men
in Black. While Keel was not the first to write about the Men in Black, they play a prominent role in both the book The Mothman Prophecies and his narrative of the events around Point Pleasant, Connie herself would experience the more stereotypical man in black within the year. On December twenty second of nineteen sixty seven, Connie and Keith were visited by a person who Keel identified as a
man in black type. This man apparently talked with them for about two hours, but Connie was unable to remember anything about the conversation, just the man arriving and then leaving. Kiel continues, for the past year there have been repeated poltergeist manifestations in her home, strange noises, objects that have been in one place for years, suddenly falling off of shells, etc. She has also been receiving many odd phone calls. Later, he writes of Connie, like everyone in New Haven, she
has seen a number of UFOs in recent months. So in Connie's case as well as others, the mothman sighting is just one of a number of paranormal experiences that Kiel believes are linked. The book The Mothman Prophecies is full of Keel's drawing connections between different paranormal occurrences, and at least in one instance, an event that was tragically real. After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment. Why do some paranormal stories have staying power while others
fade from public consciousness. Sometimes events are just events until someone spins them into a narrative. For the Mothman events, there was John Keel, his book The Mothman Prophecies, and the movie that was made from the book, starring Richard Gear.
A few months, people have been coming up to me and reporting strange things.
Weird lines, strange phone calls.
Who is this?
How do you do when someone comes into your office and tells you they saw this in their backyard.
The Mothman Prophecies, published in nineteen seventy five, doesn't read like most books on the paranormal. In fact, its style is more along the lines of crime or maybe Philip K. Dick again Post of the Saucer Life Aaron Gaullias.
It's a fun book to read. It's very engaging. It's written in this first person investigative journalistic feel. He's a reporter, he's checking out the story. He's got his reporting contacts there in Athens, Ohio with Mary Hire and other people on the scene and the story of trying to uncover what's going on at the heart of these sightings that these young people and others have had of this flying creature with the giant red eyes that gets dubbed the Mothman.
In doing this, Keel widens the scope both geographically and as we heard earlier in the case of Connie Carpenter, to include other paranormal and mysterious phenomena.
It's a sort of weird, sprawling story that's hard to describe because it goes off on these little tangents. You've got the Mothman and stuff, but then you've got Keel talking about these men in black encounters that other people, not people in West Virginia have had, but these other people various places have had, and how it relates to similar encounters with strange men telling Mary Higher to stop looking into this story or telling witnesses to stop talking
about this. So Keel is telling the story of what happened in West Virginia, but tying in specific things that are happening in West Virginia to the wider world of UFOs and the paranormal. He's telling the story that he's trying to tell about a certain time and place, but giving it a lot of context. In the wider UFO scene.
This said times leads the reader far from West Virginia. For instance, there's a great scene of a man in black having difficulty figuring out how to eat at the legendary New York City club Max's Kansas City. This strange man is described as wearing an ill fitting suit and having bulging eyes what Keel calls thyroid eyes. He beckons the waitress over with long, tapering fingers. She offers him a menu that he looks at helplessly and then merely
says food. The waitress thinks that perhaps he can't read, and suggests a steak, which he then brings to his table.
She bought a mistake with all the trimmings. He stared at it for a long moment and then picked up his knife and fork, glancing around at the other diners. It was obvious he did not know how to handle the implements. The waitress watched him as he fumbled helplessly. Vitally. She showed him how to cut the steak and spirit with the fork, he sawed away at the meat. Clearly he really was hungry. Where are you from she asked gently.
Not from here where world boy? Another put on artist, she thought to herself.
But one of the novel's great conceits relates to an all two real tragedy that also marks the end of the Mothman sightings.
He crafts a narrative story that culminates in this deadly bridge collapse right before Christmas in West Virginia between West Virginia and Ohio, and he links and there's some debate about whether or not this was a factually correct thing to do, he links the Mothman with the bridge collapse. Maybe not explicitly, but there's this implicit notion that the Mothman was a warning, the Mothman was a harbinger, and he's able to, like I said, craft this narrative.
This is John Keel from his Fortfest lecture.
In the Christmas season of nineteen sixty seven, in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, there was a bridge called a Silver Bridge across the High River, and on December fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven, that bridge collapsed and it was loaded down with cars people who had been Christmas shopping for forty years.
The Silver Bridge spanned the Ohio River laking Point Pleasant, West Virginia, with Caanaga, Ohio, laking those two points until.
Five oh two yesterday afternoon. The Silver Bridge, so called because of the aluminum paint covering It was packed with rush hour traffic and holiday shoppers, all sitting and waiting on a red light. Then there was a loud cracking sound and one of the towers began to violently twist. Within minutes, three spans collapsed into the forty three degree river.
At least fifty seven automobiles and trucks were spilled into the icy waters of the Ohio. Eyewitnesses said the bridge seemed to shudder and then drop into the water. Some vehicles, those in the center of the span, fell eighty feet. The massive steel superstructure crashed down onto the automobiles. Passengers were trapped on the twisted wreckage.
I think that Harbinger connection is probably the weakest thing he does in the book. It's always has struck me as more of a narrative device that he thought would be good than anything else, Because you know, there's the Mothman doesn't talk, you know, so we don't have any indication from the Mothman that there's this thing coming. People have a sense of foreboding, but they're frightened by the Mothman things and all the other things that are going on at the time. I think the link is tenuous.
There have been other alleged Mothman sightings since then in various places, and people have tried to link them to various disasters, and it always seems like a bit of a stretch.
To me.
It seems like kil is taking advantage of the proximity of the Mothman flap with the bridge collapse and superimposing some kind of connection. It's not surprising that people who saw the moth Man would feel ill at ease. That would seem more connected to the sending itself than the perception of foreboding. But of course the connection does make for a more compelling story. So what was the moth Man? The fairly obvious idea that it could be a large bird was put forward early on here at the Saucer
News meeting. Keel makes the case that the bird hypothesis can't be right.
The moths Man has pursued automobiles on a number of occasions and has reached speeds up to one hundred miles an hour, scaring the daylights out of the drivers. There is only one bird that can go anywhere near that fast. It's a certain ego, and it can reach seventy or eighty miles in a steep dive straight down if it's diving at some prey on the ground. But we don't know if any bird that could do that thing is
a bird is see wordess bird. On Mothnam first appeared, a number of distinguished scientists hundreds of miles away decided that it was the sand hill crane. So I got some pictures of a sand hill crane, which is a large bird stands about this high, has very long neck. I took this picture around to all the witnesses of Mothman, showed it to them, and they said it wasn't a bird. It wasn't a sand hill crane.
Despite Keel's objection, the sandhill crane has continued to be a popular explanation for the Mothman, but a new theory has been proposed by a researcher who agrees that a large bird is likely responsible for the sightings, but not the sand hill crane. His story begins with an invitation from a friend.
One day. He said, Hey, let's go to point pleasant and check out the Mothman Museum. I said, sure, let's go. While we were there, we decided both of us independently had been to the Mothma Museum, but neither of us had been to the TNT area, So why don't we venture out there? And he said sure. My name's Daniel Reid. I've done a lot of things in my life. I've been interested in the strange and the utre and the
paranormal for most of my life. I've taught on the graduate and undergraduate level, psychology, sociology, different types of things. So we drove out. We hoped that we were headed in the right spot. I had directions pulled up on my cell. We pulled in and we got out and started walking. Well, the minute that we got there, I looked up and I saw a blue heron that was up in a tree, and the blue heron sort of took off and flew.
Great blue herons can be quite big, up to four and a half feet tall with a wingspan of nearly seven feet. As Reid and his friend explored the igloos at the TNT area, he thought about the sand Hill Crane explanation, and.
So I thought, huh, I wonder how prevalent a sand hill crane is this area, and so that led to the research.
It turns out that, while not unheard of, sandhill cranes are not common in this area. Great blue herons, on the other hand, are the sandhill crane and the great blue heron have similar physical attributes that make them plausible explanations for the Mothman sightings. Remember, the first sighting occurred at night in the Creepynt area, so a panicked misidentification was not surprising. After that story came out, people were conditioned to interpret any large flying thing as the Mothman.
But what about the shiny red eyes that witnesses mentioned. A different explanation may account for these encounters.
Joe Nickel has determined, and I agree that bard Ow's are probably some of the cases, but I think those are where eyeshine is seen. So Joe Nickel put forth that in cases where I shine that it was most likely people were seeing barn owls.
Nicol had published an article in The Skeptical Enquirer right as the Mothman Prophecies movie was being released, identifying the Mothman as a barn owl. He later corrected himself asserting that it was a barred owl that was responsible for the sightings that referenced red reflective eyes.
I once did a Mothman and rushed to print because there was a movie coming out. I made a big mistake and I identified it as the Barnell again, and then nobody caught anything. But I realized later with further research that I was wrong. It wasn't a barnell. It was a barred owl, and I knew for sure because it had crimson eye shine and that just tells you it's a barnell for sure. I even had a wildlife
expert take me out one evening. My wife and I wore moccasins and went with him out into the wilderness and he knew right where there was a big, tall, tall tree with bar dowls, and I got to shine a spotlight up and see those like bicycle reflectors. Turned out on further research where Mothman was first seen was a bird sanctuary wildlife sanctuary with known bar dowls right there.
And then in January somebody shot a large owl down there and so they which solved the mystery. It's an owl, and the owl of quested about this high it was a pretty big owl. But again the witnesses went around and looked at the aisle, and he said, no, that's not the moth man. The month man is from six to seven feet toll. He has two large red eyes two inches in diameter.
Keel ignores the idea that the barred owl and the crane or heron are responsible for different sightings or different parts of the same sighting. Again, people were primed to see the mothman. Any eerie encounter would be interpreted through that. Lens Keel maintained that zoological explanations for the mothman were inadequate. In fact, he questioned whether the mothman was actually flying in the way a bird or I guess a moth would.
Now all of the witnesses say the same thing. He has a wingspread of ten feet. And here's another little irony. And actually this size needs very large wings to support it. A human being, you or I, if we were going to make a glider that we could strap on ourselves and fly with that, we would need a wingspan of about thirty five feet. Now, mothman is bigger than we are, and he's got a ten foot wingspan, and he flies anyway,
like the bumblebee. Some of the witnesses down there, and I'll say that they have heard the sound of some kind of motor sounds the object passes over their head. So possibly this thing is propelled by something.
Now Kiel is speculating that the mothman might be wearing a kind of jetpack and not using his wings at all.
The wings do not move when it's in flight. When this creature is standing on the ground, his wings are pulled back, and then when he takes off, the wings spread. As I said last night, no one has seen any arms on a thing. The wings spread, the thing takes off straight out. Now, most large birds need a running start, and this thing doesn't do that. It just goes straight up in the air and then goes straight across and
pursues whatever it's pursuing. People or automombile are buying to his flying saucer to go away.
Here, Keel has directly connected the mothman to the UFO sightings. Again, Daniel Reid.
I think that there was a lot of well, I don't want to say hysteria, but there was a lot of imaginative people that were involved in looking for it, and so on and so forth. I think that a lot of the hype that came of this was a lot of imagination on a lot of different people's parts, and the stories conflated, many went into one and it ended up being what we have now.
It spawned numerous documentaries, and you can say, well, the Mathman story was out there before kil wrote it. It was in the late sixties. Keell's book came out in the mid seventies. So why does Kill get the credit for it, Because he's the one who put the story out there and packaged it in such a way that it grabbed the imagination.
But don't forget there's lots and lots of other equally baffling mysteries, UFO flaps and monster outbreaks that haven't had that sort of storytelling imput. You know that are being forgotten about. You know that there in the archives some way. You know they were reported in a local newspaper or something.
Folklorist and journalist David Clark we heard from him last season about his research into the Rendolsome Forest encounters.
But he needs someone like a proselytizer, like John Fuller with Betty Barney Hill, and like John Keele with the Mothman and like Arthur Shuppelwood for the Warmingster mystery in England in the nineteen sixties, to transform that into a legend. If you don't have that, then these stories fade away or become obscure mysteries that you know, turn up some
in a book, some wear a few lines. So I think it's important to have that storytelling element, and effectively, all the best stories live on because they are good stories. It's something inside us that we react emotionally to those stories. That's why the legend of King Arthur has lived on, and the legend of Robin Hood. Whereas you know, Robin Hood was this medieval outlaw, but there's tons of other
medieval outlaws who peoples have been long forgotten about. If I mentioned one of their names, that you'd say who.
John Keel took the events of nineteen sixty six in nineteen sixty seven around Point Pleasant, West Virginia and turned them into a story whose tentacles spread from the Mothman sightings to other parts of this country and other phenomena occurring around where the Mothman was seen. In this broadening of the tale, we can see signs of Keel's beliefs about paranormal phenomena, beliefs that can be seen behind the work being carried out by government funded UFO investigators today.
So what did John Keele really believe? Next time on Strange Arrivals.
Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by rima Il Kayali, Jesse Funk, and Noemi Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Mankey, and supervising producer Josh Thame, with voice
acting by Ben Bolin and Noemi Griffin. Learn more about the show at Grimminmild dot com, slash Strange Arrivals and find more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.