Mothman
Animals are prominent in an intriguing subset of encounters. Witnesses have reported the unexpected presence of deer, wolves, ravens, owls, butterflies, and bees. Animals that roam well beyond their usual habitat, such as black panthers seen near certain North American UFO encounters, are not uncommon. Are these familiar creatures attracted to something in UFO technology? Do alien visitors communicate with animals?
Other accounts revolve around alien animals, sometimes the peculiarly oversized. In some instances, witnesses see anomalous mixed-species creatures, such as humanoid reptiles and the insect-human hybrid popularly known as Mothman. This celebrated case began near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the Mid-Ohio Valley, on November 5, 1966. As sewing machine salesman Woodward Derenberger drove his small truck on I-77 near Mineral Wells, his way was suddenly blocked by a curvilinear craft sitting across the road.
Although startled, Derenberger was able to have a conversation with one of the craft’s occupants, a man in an overcoat who identified himself as Indrid Cold.
Other UFO sightings in the Ohio River Valley (including a November 17 encounter that fueled the Mothman story) encouraged media interest in Derenberger, who later met another alien, named Carl Ardo.
By November 15, people in the Mid-Ohio Valley—an area that included Wood and Mason counties and the West Virginia towns of Mineral Wells, Parkersburg, Point Pleasant, and Huntington—had absorbed the ten-day-old accounts of Derenberger’s adventure. For the next week, local authorities fielded many reports of strange creatures, including a tale told by four teenage boys. They had been startled in the night, they said, by a large, birdlike humanoid that glared at them with red eyes before unfurling its wings and taking flight. A local biologist named Duane Pursley suggested that the boys had seen a Canadian goose.
Robert L. Smith, a wildlife biologist with West Virginia University, identified the creature as a sandhill crane, but the boys and people involved in other sightings insisted that the visitor was something unique—and frightening.
During the early morning of November 18, a pair of Point Pleasant volunteer firemen saw a “large bird of some kind.” This encounter took place just north of Point Pleasant, near abandoned TNT storage bunkers built for use during World War II. The TNT factory was long abandoned, and now the earth-covered concrete bunkers squatted on boggy ground amidst old-growth forest. Local kids and teenagers were naturally attracted to them, and hunters used them as reference points. Soon, speculation began that the creature—by now called “Mothman”—lived in one of the bunkers.
Within a week of the firemen’s report, an unidentified reporter with the Point Pleasant Register interviewed another witness, a store manager named Tom Ury, for the paper’s November 25 edition. Ury, who had his encounter in daylight, described the creature as humanoid, about six feet tall, with a modest bill and a wingspan of eight to ten feet. “It came up like a helicopter,” Ury said, “and then veered over my car.” Despite Ury opening his car up to seventy miles per hour, the flying creature kept pace.
Proper investigation of the various reports was difficult because the wooded areas that figured in the reports became overrun with curious hunters and other locals, who trampled the forest floor, damaged flora, and, inevitably, littered and vandalized the area. Near the end of the flurry of excitement, local and regional reporters arrived in the area, interviewing witnesses, neighbors, and the authorities, and generally putting local people on edge. (According to a U.S. Marine, the mysterious winged creature even showed up in South Vietnam.)