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Mothman as an Owl
Mothman as an owl has previously been discussed on Cryptid Chronicles with Mark A. Hall’s theory about “Bighoot” with his sense that Mothman/Bighoot may have developed a protective mimicry that has been utilized by the giant owls to disguise themselves as upright trees and logs lying on the ground.
While I don’t believe that all Mothman sightings can be misdiagnosed as an animal, I do think with specific qualities reported in some cases such as Mothman having no head but rather a set of eyes in its upper chest and accounts of “glowing” eyes lends credence to Mothman as an owl.
One of the original eyewitnesses, Linda Scarberry (1966), specifically stated that the effect was related to the car headlights. “There was no glowing about it until the lights hit it,” she said. Others echoed her statement. For example, one man, alerted by his dog, aimed his flashlight in the direction of his barn, “and it picked up two red circles, or eyes, which,” he said, “looked like bicycle reflectors” (Keel 1975, 56).
Eyeshine
The reflector-like nature of the creature’s eyes is revealing. As ornithologists well know, some birds’ eyes shine bright red at night when caught in a beam from auto headlights or a flashlight. “This ‘eyeshine’ is not the iris color,” explains an authority, “but that of the vascular membrane—the tapetum—showing through the translucent pigment layer on the surface of the retina” (Gill 1994).
The TNT area is surrounded by the McClintic Wildlife Management Area—then, as now, a bird sanctuary! Owls, which exhibit crimson eyeshine, populate the area. Indeed, Steve Warner (2002), who works for West Virginia Munitions to produce .50-caliber ammunition in the TNT compound, reported to Joe Nickell, Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, that there were “owls all over this place.” Conversely, neither he nor a coworker, Duane Chatworthy (2002), had ever seen Mothman, although Warner pointed out he had lived in the region all of his life.
Because of Mothman’s squeaky cry, “funny little face,” and other features, including its presence near barns and abandoned buildings, Joe Nickell identified it as the common barn owl (Nickell 2002). One Skeptical Inquirer reader (Long 2002) insisted it was instead a great horned owl which, although not matching certain features so well, does have the advantage of larger size. It seems likely that various owls and even other large birds played Mothman on occasion.
Here then is the question separating the mystifiers from the skeptics: Is it more likely that there has long been a previously undiscovered giant species among the order strigiformes (owls), or that some people suddenly encountering a “monster” at night have misjudged its size?
Could there be a super large owl living in the north-east at least - in the woods of West Virginian and the Appalachian Mountains which may be a genuine cryptid?
There has been evidence of super large owls found in the fossil records in that area dating back several hundreds of thousands of years ago - some with a wingspan of over 4 to 5 feet! That’s an owl large enough to easily pick up a large animal and carry it away to a giant nest to feed its young. It could possibly be 4 feet tall while standing with its wings closed! Could you imagine coming upon that thing in the woods at night?
So it is JUST possible that at least some reports of the MOTHMAN is not a monster or a demon or a extra-terrestrial after all - but a bonafide “cryptid” - a relic of evolution left over from prehistoric times which may have been living deep inside Appalachian mountain hollows for hundreds of thousands of years and has only rarely emerged to be seen by human eyes (and scare them shitless) due to some change or variability in its natural environment or food base. And if you’ll pardon the pun… Who (hoo) knows? Perhaps this giant owl has a giant brain that is telepathic and can indeed force you to stand paralyzed just with it’s piercing gaze. Maybe, as the Native Americans say, it’s even intelligent and has a memory of its history and a spirituality all it’s own.
There is at least one unconfirmed report of a GIANT OWL swooping down to pick up a small boy out playing in a farm yard in the Appalachian mountains back in the 1930’s. The giant owl screeched with such a terrifying sound at the boy’s struggling and biting at its feet that the boys father and brother and farm hand heard it from the barn and came out and threw rocks and sticks at it until it dropped the boy from a height of about 15 feet into a soft earthen livestock yard relatively unhurt except for a few scratches and bruises from the giant owl’s claws (and probably some hilacious nightmares!!!!).
However when the family reported the incident to the local authorities, they were ridiculed and laughed at and eventually came to wish they’d never made the report. But to further confirm their story, possibly the exact same giant owl was seen again about a hundred miles away not more than three months later by a well-respected and sober business man out on a solitary fishing and hunting trip up in the Appalachians. The shaken fellow who reported seeing the giant owl fly over head with the limp carcass of a dark brown horse dangling from it talons said it was the most terrifying moment of his entire life. He said every hair on his body stood on end when that giant bird flew over with a roaring whooosh and looked down at him for just a second with those large, piercing eyes… “I know exactly what a field mouse feels like now when he spots an owl swooping down from overhead… with those DAMNED EYES that cut right into ya and turn your blood to ice… and it ain’t a good feelin’ let me tell ya…”
Cow carcass found on telephone wire in Winslow N.J. in 1960’s
Deer up 22 Foot Pole in the Northeast U.S.: Source-Coast to Coast
Enormous prehistoric owls may have migrated from Cuba to a town near you
In the piney mountains and desert mesas of south central New Mexico, residents of the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation still share the legends of an enormous and evil bird: Big Owl.
The Jicarilla Apaches, along the state’s northern edge, also talk of Big Owl, beneath the slickrock canyons and gray bluffs of their reservation. But in their stories, Big Owl can paralyze humans just by staring at them, and after doing so, it swallows them whole, just as smaller owls swallow mice.
Such stories may actually have a basis in fact, citing accounts of an actual undocumented species of 3-to-5-foot-tall giant owl (Bighoot). Ornimegalonyx oteroi, or the Cuban giant owl, was an approximately 3-foot-tall owl that lived in what’s now western Cuba up until about 8,000 years ago. In the last few decades, three nearly intact skeletons of this bird have been found in Cuban caves, and their size and bone structure suggest this owl was similar to an oversized version of the common burrowing owl, with long legs and an ability to fly only short distances.
Perhaps some giant owls survived extinction, migrated, reproduced and became part of New Mexico’s Apache oral histories - and there are a number of intriguing points that support his case. Mentions of giant owls occur throughout the mythology of American- and Canadian-Indian tribes. Many Iroquois once feared what they called Flying Heads - man-sized, bodiless, open-mouthed heads covered in ragged hair - heads that could fly in a halting way, were armed with talons and craved humans which Mark A. Hall has theorized were actually giant owls.
Sightings of giant owls continued into the era of North America’s first European-American settlers. Hall said some settlers saw their livestock carried off by enormous birds they called booger owls, and such sightings have persisted into the present, across America and across the Southwest.
In a chapter of Cryptozoology and the Investigation of Lesser-Known Mystery Animals, New Mexico journalist Jerry A. Padilla recounted a Taos woman’s encounter with an owl she estimated to be at least 4 1/2 feet tall.
This incident reportedly took place in the 1950s, not far north of the New Mexico-Colorado state line, when Taos resident Rosa M. Lucero was a little girl. Lucero recalled the giant owl wandering silently from a cluster of willows, walking back and forth and just staring at her and her grandmother, Elena Bustos Lucero, as the two of them frantically gestured the sign of the cross.
“It just walked around in the garden by the willows,” Rosa M. Lucero said in the above-mentioned book. “My grandmother was convinced it was a nagual - someone taking the form of an owl - because she herself said that in all her long life she’d never encountered an owl so large and unafraid of people.”
Though generally described as making a hooting sound, owls are sometimes also said to hum. The Internet is studded with mentions of owls humming as coyotes howl, owls humming the sounds of the night and barn owls humming people to sleep. Taos Tales, by Elsie Clews Parsons, includes a northern New Mexico oral history of a coyote who “went singing and at the end of every song he said like the owl, hum! hum! (grunt).”
A much better-known hum in northern New Mexico is the notorious Taos Hum - a low, pulsing throb of a sound that torments about 2 percent of Taos’s population, causing anxiety, dizziness, headaches, nosebleeds and insomnia. Many people have suggested possible explanations - a government project, aliens, mass hysteria - but the Hum’s cause remains unknown.
Would it be ridiculous, though, to suggest that maybe, just maybe, the Taos Hum might be caused by man-sized owls - the Bighoot - humming throughout the New Mexico woods?
This evidence presents a somewhat rational explanation for the Mothman as some giant bastard owl. Whether a mutation or relic animal, one this for certain - happening upon one would be an unnerving encounter.
Sources csicop.org/sb/show/mothman_revisitedinvestigating_on_site, blogster.com/anaibendai/mothman-mystery-solved, s8int.com/eyewit12.html, dailylobo.com/index.php/article/2007/04/enormous_prehistoric_owls_may_have_migrated_from_cuba_to_a_town_near_you
Top illustration credit Copyright © Yasmin Foster
I would like to thank Yasmin Foster for her generous contribution of the gorgeous artwork, it’s a very neat interepretation of Mothman as an actual owl. Please check out more of her artwork at http://yasminfoster.blogspot.com
Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??
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Does The Mothman Exist?
100+ witnesses report sightings
From November 1966 to Dec. 1967 at least 100 people witnessed the Mothman in and near Point Pleasant, WV. The first reported sighting was when five men were in a cemetery, preparing for a burial. Suddenly a strange and frightening creature flew off of nearby trees and flew right over their heads. They reported that it looked like a brown human with huge wings, that glided, not flapped. The creature was about 7 feet tall and had huge red eyes. The men’s stories all matched each other’s and they were all clearly distressed.
The following year was full of reported sightings. One night two married couples drove past an old abandoned TNT plant near Point Pleasant, WV, when they noticed something shaped like a man, but with wings. It stood about seven feet tall. It had it’s wings folded against it’s back. They sped away. A few moments later, they saw it again on a hillside along the road. They were panicking. It spread it’s wings and rose into the air, following their car. It followed them to Point Pleasant. Four more witnesses claimed to see the creature three different times that same evening. 
The news of this creature spread all over the world very quickly, and the creepy man-bird was dubbed the Mothman.
John Keel, a paranormal investigator spent most of that year seeking out the Mothman. He wrote a book, The Mothman Prophecies, which was later adapted into a movie.
In Dec. 1967 the Silver Bridge collapsed killing forty-seven people. Keel stated he had been recieving mysterious and eerie phone calls, and had been warned about the bridge, but not knowing the truth behind it, he hadn’t wanted to start a panic. He was no where near the bridge when the tragedy happened. Many people blame the collapse on the strange sightings of that year. There is no real proof on this.
There were no Mothman reports in the immediate aftermath of the December 15, 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge, giving rise to legends that the Mothman sightings and the bridge collapse were connected.
Claims of later sightings
UFOlogist Jerome Clark writes that many years after the initial events, members of the Ohio UFO Investigators League re-interviewed several people who claimed to have seen Mothman, all of whom insisted their stories were accurate. Linda Scarberry claimed that she and her husband had seen Mothman “hundreds of times,” sometimes at close range, commenting, “It seems like it doesn’t want to hurt you. It just wants to communicate with you.”
Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman claims that sightings of Mothman continue, and told USA Today he re-interviewed witnesses described in Keel’s book who said Mothman was “a huge creature about 7 feet tall with huge wings and red eyes” and that “they could see the creature flapping right behind them” as they fled from it.
The Sound of a Monster
Often encountered, but never caught. This appears to be the legacy of Mothman, which has haunted us all long after its last sighting.
In April 1976, after Jerome Clark had returned home from his investigatory jaunt through the Rio Grande Valley, talking to eyewitnesses about the weird batman reports down there, he was interviewed by telephone by Vic Wheatman, who co-hosted with Loren Coleman for a fortean radio show on Boston’s WBUR-FM. The interview, taped for later broadcast (it eventually aired May 24), went without incident. It was only when Wheatman and Coleman had the technical staff play the tape back that they realised something extremely odd had occurred.
Midway through the conversation, Coleman asked Clark if he saw any similarity between the Texas Big Bird reports and the “Mothman” reports ten years earlier. “Very definite similarity,” Clark replied. “Now, John Keel, of course, is the man who did the research on Mothman. Keel claimed that there is a connection between these sightings and UFOs. if there’s any such connection with the Big Bird, I was unable to prove it… All I know is that this thing doesn’t have any business existing in the Rio Grande Valley or anywhere. This is really something out of the ordinary. I have no idea where it is coming from.”
As he spoke these lines, Clark heard nothing of the ordinary on his end. Neither did Wheatman and Coleman on theirs. Yet on the tape, immediately after the word “sightings” in the third sentence, there is a loud unmistakable and very startling EEPPP! sound — precisely the sound Mothman is supposed to have made. (“It squeaked like a big mouse,” one of the original Mothman witnesses had commented in 1966.)
When radio station presonnel heard the sound, they could offer no explanation, unless it originated with Clark, which it didn’t. It remains a spooky episode in our lives, and makes us wonder about the mechanisms of this phenomena.
Theories
For some critics, there is nothing in the original accounts of the “Mothman” sightings that cannot be explained by misidentifications of a few sandhill cranes or turkey vultures. After the initial November 1966 sightings of Mothman in the TNT area near Point Pleasant, Robert Smith of the biology department at West Virginia University was reported to have said he thought it was a sighting of a rare sandhill crane. Zoologists at Ohio University, however, pointed out that the crane would be a rare sight indeed in Ohio and West Virginia, since it lived on the plains of Canada.
Shown pictures of the sandhill crane, witness Roger Scarberry scoffed at the suggestion. Mary Mallette, who also saw it, said: “I just wish Dr. Smith could see the thing.”
The gathering of all reports under the umbrella term, “Mothman,” was unfortunate. John Keel’s interviews and later writings tend to lump all of the large, man-sized, gray-bodided, red-glowing eyed creature reports together. While any of us, with hindsight, can now clearly see that some of these reports were entirely mundane bird sightings, Keel was in the middle of a vortex. Separating the wheat from the chaff must have been difficult as he was bombarded with new reports and his own personal saga of troubles in Point Pleasant. But real birds were undoubtedly part of the mix.
In the midst of the flap, a snowy owl and a turkey vulture were “caught.” A detailed multiple witness sighting in Lowell, Ohio, near Cat’s Creek (70 miles north of Point Pleasant), on November 26, 1966, had four people seeing a flock of four large birds in some tree for two hours. Eyewitness Ewing Tilton said they appeared to be 4-5 feet tall with a 10 foot wingspan. “They had dark brown backs with some light flecks. Their breasts where gray and they had five-to six-inch bills, straight, not curved like those of hawks or vultures,” said Tilton. Another witness, Marvin Shock, reported the heads had a “reddish cast.” This sighting may have been a view of common birds, needless to say, perhaps sandhill cranes.
But clearly, other things were going on.
Giant Owls
Cryptozoologist Mark A. Hall, the author of a thought-provoking article called “Bighoot — The Giant Owl” in Wonders Vol. 5, No. 3., September 1998, theorizes that Mothman may be a giant species of undiscovered owl.
Hall defines “Bighoot” as: “A bird of prey in the order of Strigiformes. In size larger than all other owls. Never scientifically described. Observed in the wild in the eastern U.S.A. in the states of Ohio and West Virginia. Folklore of similar birds is found elsewhere in the world.”
Hall’s treatment is the first clearly zoological and cryptozoological re-examination of the Mothman reports — separating the tangibles from the paranormal theories of John Keel. Hall lists evidence to link the Mothman sightings to a large unknown owl in the area.
Hall notes that these birds have been around Point Pleasant for a very long time, as their presence is noted in many Indian legends. The American Indians called them “Flying Heads” or “Big Head,” quoting the Iroquous, the Tuscarora, and the Wyandot Indians as saying, “They were huge, bodiless heads, covered in long hair from which protruded sharp nailed claws. With open mouths and fiery eyes the Big Heads flew about in storms, the wind keeping them up by their masses of hair.”
Researcher Hall uncovered this entry by William Connelly in this description among the Wyandots from Ohio: “The Flying Heads plagued the Wyandots. They were more dangerous and troublesome during rainy, foggy, or misty weather. They could enter a cloud of fog, or mist, or rime [ice], and in it approach a Wyandot village unseen. They were cruel and wicked hooh-kehs and cannibals. They caused sickness; they were vampires, and lay in wait for people, whom they caught and devoured. They carried away children; they blighted the tobacco and other crops; they stole and devoured the game after the hunter had killed it.”
One surprising tidbit that Hall discovered was a report of a large bird from the early 1900s at Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It certainly sounds like a precursor to the Mothman accounts of years later — in exactly the right area. In a book called Haunted Valley and More Folk Tales by James Gay Jones, an emeritus professor of history and Glenville State College, Hall found this gem:
In the early 1900’s at Pt. Pleasant, a large bird with the head of a man and a wingspan of at least 12 feet was seen. It appeared just prior to or immediately after the occurance of a tragic event… It was also seen by rural farm families in Mason, Jackson, Roane, Clay and Kanawha counties. By World War I, birdman was observed flying over Looneyville, up Johnson Creek, down Gabe in Roane County thence down Elk Valley into the Kanawha. Its monstrous size and dark reddish feathers which glistened in the sunlight cast fear in all who saw it. Parents kept children indoors after sightings. After World War II people said they were chased by a huge bird while traveling on the highways of Mason, Jackson, and Wood counties near the Ohio River.
In the post-World War II era Hall notes, people reported being chased by mysterious birds on the roads where Mothman would later be seen. “These birds, in common with the enormous Thunderbirds,” he writes, “seem at times to take advantage of the artificial air currents created by automobiles. The effect on humans in the vehicles is startling, but the birds are looking for a natural advantage. Soaring flight is important to large birds… It is their automobiles that have created this situation.”
Mark Hall senses that Mothman/Bighoot may have developed a protective mimicry that “has been utilized by the giant owls to disguise themselves as upright trees and logs lying on the ground… An example of this mimicry in action comes in a report from a woman in Ohio who observed something she could not understand. She saw this thing at Rocky Fork Lake in southern Ohio around August of 1982. About a year later she saw a similar sight at the same lake.”
The witness said that “…while fishing in Rocky Fork Lake in Ohio we drifted into a pristine cove on the SW side and noted with utter disbelief an old tall topless tree trunk approx 9-10 feet height, 112 inches around, move about 4 ft. sideline. (This was on shore about 20 ft. inland aming like-looking trees, with underbrush.) Again it moved, only this time there was a partial twisting or rotation from the top 18-24 inches. It slowly maneuvered backward (keeping erect like a tree) into the woods with NO NOISES from it or underbrush as graceful as a bird thru a tree. It stopped in the mid of a sunlight clearing…”
She then writes that “wings unfolded with a span greater than most small airplanes.” After awhile she reports it returned to its “tree appearance.” She saw the “semblence of two eyes” and thought it was watching them. The sun went down and the sight was lost to view. Then: “One year later, same lake and a half mile or so from that first cove this figure appeared near shoreline again. (It seemed taller or leaner.) This time [I] got a look at its legs and feet — yellowish grainy like chicken legs… they were so thin and short for its height. Three long slender toes with a hooked toe or nail on lower leg.”
For Hall, Bighoot, the North American giant owl, is the answer. Keeping an open mind, I see it as one option among many.
A hand full of researchers have made the connection between the Mothman and the Owlman, a ‘huge great thing with feathers, like a big man with flapping wings’ reported in Cornwall, Uk. Although some physical descriptions of the two seem to match up, the Mothman is thought to be a harbinger of doom whose appearance is preceded by a great disaster, however nothing that would be considered a disaster has occurred in the almost 30 years of Owlman sightings.
To this day the origins of the Mothman remain a mystery and the sightings of the creature remain unexplained.
Sources: Mothman and Other Curious Encounters By Loren Coleman
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman
christineritter.hubpages.com/hub/Does_The_Mothman_Exist
Top Illustration credit to Duncan Hopkins beyondbeyond.com
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