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The "Mothman'' episode is truly one of the strangest in Cryptozoology.  The star of this was a tall brown humanoid with large wings and red eyes that was sighted over a number of years around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, USA.

Mothman sightings started in the region in the early 1960's. With the appearance  of the Mothmen came a lot of other paranormal phenomena.  UFO's, poltergeists, MIB and other strange people were seen in Point Pleasant. Radio, telephone, and television suffered frequent disturbances as well.

On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River collapsed. Forty-six people were killed or lost. The really strange thing is that following the bridge collapse all the Mothman activity immediately stopped. A woman living near the bridge claims to have seen two Mothmen climbing around the bridge the night before the disaster.

Mothman has achieved international fame, following a book by John A. Keel. A movie was made in 1999.

The Sightings

One of the earliest recorded sightings was n the early 1960s. A West Virginia woman and her father were driving along Route 2 near the Ohio River. Near to the Chief Cornstalk hunting grounds, she saw what she initially thought was a man on the road. As she drove closer, she realized it was too tall to be a man. When she slowed down, and the figure spread two large wings and took off.

She did not report the incident; "Who would believe, us, anyway?"

In 1965, a woman living near the Ohio River said that her son had claimed to have seen "an angel" outside. A year later, in the same area, a doctor's wife said she had seen a six-foot "giant butterfly".

On November 12 five gravediggers saw "a brown human being" fly out of some trees near Clendenin. They watched the creature for about one minute.

On the evening of the 14th, building contractor Newell Partridge was watching television when suddenly the TV "blanked out" to "a real fine herringbone pattern". The speaker began to emit "a loud whining noise". Partridge's German Shepherd, a trained hunting dog named Bandit, began to howl from the front porch. Partridge grabbed a flashlight and ran outside. Bandit was staring at the hay barn 150 yards away. Partridge picked up two huge red eyes in the beam of his flashlight. He was a good night-hunter, and yet he had never seen anything like this before.

Bandit leaped off the porch and ran towards whatever had the eyes. Partridge was almost frozen with terror, and bolted back inside. He kept a loaded gun on his bedside table for the rest of the night.

The following morning, Partridge went looking for Bandit. He could easily follow the dog's footprints. But right where Partridge had seen the creature, the footprints stopped. They appeared to be going in circles, as if the dog had been chasing its tail, something Bandit had never done. Then, there was no trace of anything else. Bandit had vanished.

He was never seen again.

The next night, two young couples, the Scarberrys and the Mallettes, were parked in the TNT area when they were chased by the Mothman at speeds up to 120 miles per hour. A later investigation showed that a large dead dog was missing from the side of the road, which has also been connected with the Mothman and the abduction of Bandit.

The Explainations

Scientists scoffed at the idea of a "mothman", saying that it was probably a sandhill crane, a large, odd-looking bird with two red eye-like patches on its head. But sandhill cranes fly well under 120 miles per hour, have never been known to reach 6 1/2 feet tall, and could not account for the other paranormal accounts.

Other theories are that the Mothman is extraterrestrial, interdimensional, or the result of a chemical accident (ever seen that X-Files episode with "the flukeman"?)

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