IncidentThe Mothman of Point Pleasant (1966-1967)

On 15 November 1966 two young married couples - Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette - reported a grey winged figure ~7 ft tall with large reflective red eyes near the TNT area (a decommissioned WWII munitions site, now a wildlife management area) that pursued their car; they reported it the same night to a deputy, and a wave of similar sightings followed through 1967. Author John Keel folded in UFO reports, Men in Black, the entity ‘Indrid Cold,’ and premonitions in ‘The Mothman Prophecies’ (1975), framing the region as a paranormal ‘window area’ - elements largely single-source to Keel. The Silver Bridge collapse (15 December 1967, 46 deaths) is a documented engineering failure - the NTSB attributed it to a cleavage fracture in eyebar 330 from stress-corrosion and corrosion fatigue in a non-redundant design - with no causal link to Mothman; the connection is folklore. Skeptics (Joe Nickell; Benjamin Radford) argue a misidentified large bird - a barred owl with dramatic red eyeshine, or a sandhill crane / great blue heron - amplified by media contagion. It is the canonical cryptid-UAP crossover case, sitting exactly on the boundary the corpus’s cryptids-uap-hypothesis tracks.