extraordinary%20encounters

e rence to a dead dog struck him. Bandit was
n e ver seen again.
Other witnesses reported seeing “Mothman,”
as the press soon dubbed it, in the
TNT area and elsewhere. Sightings continued
from time to time for months afterward. Reports
consistently described a gray entity
larger than a man, who was headless and had
wings, legs, and glowing red eyes on its upper
chest. When in flight, its wings did not flap.
When it walked, it had a shambling gait. Observers
seemed especially terrified of the eyes.
Because of the witnesses’ manifest sincerity
and terror, no one argued that the sightings
were hoaxes. The most popular conventional
explanations held that they had seen owls or
sandhill cranes. The episode became the subject
of two books.
In May 1976, nearly a decade after the
s c a re had run its course, re p re s e n t a t i ves of the
Ohio UFO In vestigators League looked up
some of the witnesses. All stuck by their original
testimony and insisted that they had not
mistaken ord i n a ry birds for Mothman. T h e
most curious testimony came from early witness
Linda Scarberry (wife of Roger Scarb
e r ry), who said that she and her husband
had seen the cre a t u re “hundreds of times,”
one from as close as three or four feet. Sh e
went on,
It seems like it doesn’t want to hurt you. It just
wants to communicate with you. But you’re
too afraid when you see it to do anything. . . .
We rented an apartment down on Thirteenth
Street, and the bedroom window was right off
the roof. It was sitting on the roof one night,
looking in the window, and by then I was so
used to seeing it that I just pulled the blinds
and went on. I felt kind of sorry for it [because]
it gives you the feeling like it was sitting
there wishing it could come in and get warm
because it was cold out that night. (Raynes,
1976)
A Mothmanlike cre a t u re was also invo l ve d
in a close encounter of the third kind fro m
Sandling Pa rk, near Hyde, Kent, England, on
November 16, 1963. That evening a group of
Mount Lassen 179
young people saw a glowing oval, some fif t e e n
to twenty feet in diameter, hovering over a
field. A few seconds after the UFO disapp
e a red behind a clump of trees, witness Jo h n
Flaxton related, “a dark fig u re shambled out. It
was all black, about the size of a human but
without a head. It seemed to have wings like a
bat on either side and came stumbling tow a rd s
us. We didn’t wait to inve s t i g a t e” (“The Sa l twood
My s t e ry,” 1964). This is the only know n
re p o rt to link such a cre a t u re with a UFO.
Whatever Mothman may or may not have
been, no encounters with it have been reported
in recent years.
See Also: Close encounters of the third kind
Further Reading
Barker, Gray, 1970. The Silver Bridge. Clarksburg,
WV: Saucerian Books.
Keel, John A., 1970. Strange Creatures from Time and
Space. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Gold Medal.
———, 1975. The Mothman Prophecies. New York:
Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton and Company.
Raynes, Brent M., 1976. “West Virginia Revisited.”
Ohio Sky Watcher (January/February/March):
9–10.
“The Saltwood Mystery,” 1964. Flying Saucer Review
10, 2 (March/April): 11–12.
Mount Lassen
Mount Lassen, in California’s Tehama County,
houses good and evil beings who live deep inside
caves and engage in conflict with advanced
weapons, according to the testimony of
a man identified as Ralph B. Fi e l d s .
At some unspecified time, apparently, in
the latter twentieth century, Fields and a companion
named Joe (no last name offered) went
to the mountain in search of guano (bat
dung), which they hoped to market as fertilizer.
On their first night, the two slept at the
foot of the mountain. By the third day, they
were nearing the mountaintop when they decided
to make camp and prepare a meal. Joe
went off to collect dead scrub bush for the
fire. Suddenly, he returned in a state of high
excitement. He had found a big cave nearby,
and it looked like a promising place to search
for the object of their quest.