Ongoing phenomenonMothman / Point Pleasant 1966–1967

From the night of 15 November 1966, when Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette reported encountering a winged figure with reflective red eyes at the TNT Area (the abandoned West Virginia Ordnance Works north of Point Pleasant), through 15 December 1967, when the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River collapsed during evening rush hour killing 46 people — the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, was the locus of approximately 100 reported encounters with a large winged humanoid figure. Mason County Sheriff George Johnson took initial reports and held a press conference; the Point Pleasant Register covered the cluster contemporaneously. New York journalist John Keel was on the ground in Point Pleasant repeatedly through 1967, conducting interviews, and his The Mothman Prophecies (Saturday Review Press, 1975) is the principal first-person investigative account. The prosaic explanation, advanced at the time by ornithologist Robert L. Smith of West Virginia University, was that the figure was a sandhill crane — a five-foot-tall migratory bird whose presence in West Virginia in November 1966 would have been unusual but not impossible, and whose eyes reflect red in light. The residual: Smith’s identification accounts for some reports but not for the cluster’s geographic concentration in and around the TNT Area (a site that included Quonset huts, ammunition igloos, and concrete bunkers that the witnesses described in detail), nor for the precise temporal coincidence of the cluster’s termination with the 5:04 PM bridge collapse on 15 December 1967. The Silver Bridge’s failure was determined by the National Transportation Safety Board to be due to a single fractured eyebar (eyebar 330) — a verified materials-fatigue cause that is fully prosaic. Mothman as a phenomenon ends with the bridge. Whatever one concludes, the temporal pattern is in the public record. The town now hosts the Mothman Museum (opened 2005) and an annual Mothman Festival (since 2002).