extraordinary%20encounters

178 Mothman
sand feet the occupants of a brilliantly illuminated
spacecraft would speak to the people of
Los Angeles.
The message electrified occultists and
saucerians in California and elsewhere. When
played in London in September, it had the
same effect on their British counterparts.
Newspaper coverage mocked the tape and
message, and conservative ufologists dismissed
the message as a silly hoax. On November 2,
the Los Angeles Mirror-News reported that
some months before, while living in Detroit,
Miller had been caught faking a radio message
from a spaceman. All this notwithstanding,
the Monka message spurred two mass rallies
in Los Angeles, and Monka enthusiast and
rally organizer Gabriel Green appeared on the
widely viewed House Party television show to
spread the word that friendly extraterrestrials
would be talking to southern California on
November 7.
As a publicity stunt, two area radio stations
went off the air for two minutes on the night
in question as hundreds of believers gathered
on rooftops. No UFO appeared, of course,
but Monka would live on in channeled messages
from hundreds of contactees up to the
present. No longer a Martian, he is now usually
taken as a close associate of the most
beloved and ubiquitous of interdimensional
channeling entities, Ashtar.
See Also: Ashtar; Contactees
Further Reading
Beckley, Timothy Green, 1981. Book of Space Con -
tacts. New York: Global Communications.
Garrison, Omar, 1956. “Time Flew by, but That Flying
Saucer Didn’t.” Los Angeles Mirror-News (November
8).
“Mon-Ka of Mars Gives Saucer Research a Black
Eye,” 1956. CSI News Letter 6 (December 15):
3–5.
Tuella [pseud. of Thelma B. Turrell], ed., 1989.
Ashtar: A Tribute. Third edition. Salt Lake City,
UT: Guardian Action Publications.
Mothman
Mothman, a monstrous cre a t u re re p o rted by
d o zens of witnesses in towns along the Oh i o
R i ver Va l l e y, got its name from a villain in the
then-popular Ba t m a n television series. T h o u g h
their stories re c e i ved little public attention, at
least one witness claimed to have had a kind of
communication with it.
Mothman first appeared in the local press
in November 1966, after two young couples
spotted it around 11:30 P.M. while driving
through an abandoned World War II munitions
complex known locally as the “TNT
area.” Gray in color with humanlike legs, the
creature had glowing red, “hypnotic” eyes
and, witness Roger Scarberry said, “was
shaped like a man, but bigger. Maybe six and
a half feet tall. And it had big wings against its
back” (Keel, 1975). Terrified, the witnesses
fled in their car only to spot the same or a
similar creature on a hill by the road. That
creature spread its batlike wings and pursued
the vehicle at speeds of up to one hundred
miles per hour. All the while, it made a
squeaking sound. As they sped toward Point
Pleasant, West Virginia, where they would tell
their story to a deputy sheriff, they noticed a
large, dead dog along the side of the road.
This last detail would seem significant to
later investigators after they learned of the
experience that had happened an hour before
to Newell Pa rtridge from rural Salem, We s t
Virginia. Pa rtridge had been watching television
when suddenly he saw an unfamiliar
kind of interf e rence on the screen. In the
meantime, he could hear his dog Ba n d i t
h owling strangely. When he picked up a
flashlight and stepped outside, he was
shocked to see—at one hundred fifty yard s’
distance—the dog circling a shadowy figure
with glowing red eyes that did not look like
an animal’s. Something about the scene
s t ruck Pa rtridge as deeply abnormal, and he
felt cold chills running down his back. Ju s t
as he was about to go inside, Bandit charged
the intru d e r, ignoring his master, who was
t rying to restrain him. Pa rtridge went inside
to get a gun but could not bring himself to
go outside again. He went to sleep. The next
morning he discove red that Bandit was missing.
Later, when he read a newspaper account
of the Point Pleasant incident, the re f-