Just this past June 2018, bartender John Amitrano
was finishing his late-night shift at a local bar in Chicago when he stepped outside for
some fresh air.
Hearing a plane buzzing overhead, he looked up and was startled to find a second figure
closely following the plane from beneath.
"I saw a plane flying, but also something moving really awkwardly under it," Amitrano
said.
"It didn't look like a bat so much as what illustrations of pterodactyls look like, with
the slenderness of its head and its wing shape.”
While Amitrano's story is strange, dozens of other Chicago area natives have reported
the same figure throughout 2018.
Welcome to another special episode of The Infographics Show's Greatest Mysteries.
The legend of the Mothman.
Amitrano is far from alone in reporting sightings of what has been dubbed the Chicago Mothman.
To date, 55 other witnesses have come forward in 2017 alone, with descriptions of a large
flying humanoid.
What exactly is stalking the nighttime skies of Chicago, and could it be the legendary
Mothman, harbinger of pending disaster?
Though legends from all around the world tell of flying humanoids that portend disaster,
the entity that came to be known as Mothman originates from the area around Point Pleasant,
West Virginia, in 1966.
On November 16th of that year, the Point Pleasant Register ran a story with the headline “Couples
See Man-Sized Bird ... Creature ... Something”, marking the beginning of a rash of sightings
that would end in tragedy for the local community.
That first sighting of Mothman occurred a few nights prior.
Steve and Mary Mallette, along with Roger and Linda Scarberry, were driving on West
Virginia Route 62.
When they crested a hill, they came face-to-face with a seven-foot-tall (2.1 m) creature with
large red eyes and a 10-foot (3 m) wingspan.
Swerving around the creature, they drove away, but seconds later, the Mothman reappeared
in front of their car.
Hitting almost 100 mph (161 km/h), the two couples made for town as the creature continued
to chase them, soaring high up above the car and back down again.
Turning onto a farm road, the creature once again got out ahead of them and blocked their
path, lying down on the road as though hoping one of them would step out of the car to investigate.
Fearing the creature was laying a trap for them, the couples refused to step out of their
car and instead backed up onto the highway and finally made their way to town.
Later that night, the couples returned with a sheriff only to discover a “strange lump
of dust” where the creature had lain.
The news article encouraged others to come forward with their own stories.
Many others also saw the creature, but remained silent due to fear of being ridiculed.
A group of grave diggers came forward, telling the Point Pleasant Register that they too
had encountered a half-man, half-moth creature flying through the trees just above their
heads.
The reports continued to come in over the next year, with residents hearing strange
noises outside, and finding red glowing eyes staring back at them from the darkness.
Many skeptics have since concluded that the Mothman sightings were nothing more than a
misidentified sandhill crane or great horned owl, yet this does not explain why the sightings
suddenly stopped after the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 15, 1967.
With many of the eyewitnesses reporting that during Mothman's yearlong visit, they felt
a pending sense of doom and tragedy, it's curious that the creature would completely
disappear from the local area after the bridge collapse.
Another bridge collapse in 2007 would be linked to the Mothman.
Reports of Mothman sightings flooding in shortly before the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi
River bridge in Minnesota.
In an eerily similar manner to the Silver Bridge collapse, the I-35W Mississippi River
bridge buckled during the evening rush hour on August 1, 2007, killing 13 people and injuring
145.
After the collapse, eyewitnesses came forward to state that they had seen a large flying
humanoid in the area for months prior to the collapse, but, as usual, had remained silent
for fear of being ridiculed.
One woman claimed to have seen the creature while driving in the vicinity of the bridge.
She stated that the creature had large red eyes and a ten-foot (3 m) wingspan yet seemed
to fly incredibly fast while hardly flapping its wings.
But the Mothman is hardly just an American phenomenon.
Sightings of what was dubbed the Freiburg Shrieker occurred across the Atlantic in Germany.
On September 10, 1978, a group of miners prepared for a day's work in a coal mine near Freiburg,
Germany.
Approaching the mouth of the mine, they were startled to discover what they thought was
a tall man in a dark trench coat blocking access.
Approaching the figure to demand he move out of the way, the men were surprised to discover
that the figure was not a man at all, but rather an entity with large, bat-like wings
pinned to its sides.
Without warning, the figure began to let loose a series of shrieks that, according to the
miners, sounded like 50 men screaming at once combined with the sound of a train's emergency
brakes.
Terrified, the miners fled, but stayed near the area of the mine.
An hour later, the mine was rocked by an explosion that caused its collapse, and authorities
would later state that had the men been at their posts during the explosion, they would
all have died.
While the Freiburg Shrieker was credited with saving their lives, months later, nearly a
third of the miners would go on to develop serious mental disorders, a fate shared by
Mothman witnesses around the world.
The earthquake and resulting tsunami off the coast of Japan in 2011 is best remembered
for the subsequent Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, but here too Mothman seemed to play
a role in portending its doom.
Just days after the tsunami, reports began to spread across the internet from Japanese
and foreign nationals living on the island nation, of sightings of a Mothman-like creature
near or around the area of the Fukushima plant.
One report claims that while out checking on some scientific instruments studying the
effects of the nuclear power plant's waste heat on the nearby environment, a man and
his friend were startled by loud shrieking sounds.
They were similar to “a city bus' brakes when they are in need of service, loud and
ear-splitting.”
Looking around, two friends and another couple out for a walk in the area spotted a large
creature sitting atop one of the nuclear power plant's buildings, which were silhouetted
against the moonlit sky.
As the four witnesses watched, the creature spread its wings out to an estimated length
of ten feet (3 m) and took to the air.
It began to do circles around the buildings housing the reactors that would melt down
weeks later.
Suddenly and without warning, the creature turned towards the four, flying at them at
high speed about 25 feet (7.6 meters) off the ground.
The four witnesses cowered in fear as the creature flew straight over them.
One of the witnesses relayed that the creature had two large red eyes that seemed to glow
from within.
As it flew over and past them, all four were overwhelmed by a feeling of dread, a terrible
fear that they shouldn't be there.
Melting into the night sky, the creature was not seen again.
Just weeks later, disaster would strike the Fukushima plant, irradiating large portions
of the countryside and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee the area permanently.
Our ancestors believed that both angels and demons inhabited our world, bringing prophecies
of doom to those who didn't listen to their warnings.
Could these ancient stories of angels and demons have been the original Mothman sightings,
and could these legends be a mischaracterization of a very real and very mysterious creature
that science has yet to document?
Is Mothman a good entity trying to warn us, or is it merely a creature that feeds off
human tragedy?
Or is it none of these things and merely the result of an overactive imagination, misidentified
birds, and a desire to place the blame for senseless tragedy on something other than
random bad fortune?
We might never know.
So, do
you believe in the Mothman?
Have you ever seen one?
Know of any other monsters or legends you'd like to see us investigate?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video called What If You never Left The Bathtub!
Thanks for watching, and, as always, don't forget to like, share, and subscribe for more
great content!
See you next time!