The Mothman

Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette said they were driving near the abandoned munitions site when they saw the figure. Linda Scarberry described it as like a "slender, muscular man" about seven feet tall, with white wings.^[1] Retellings add that it followed their car at high speed; we have not found that detail in a contemporary source.

The Point Pleasant Register headline — "Couples See Man-Sized Bird … Creature … Something" — appeared on 16 November 1966.^[2] Other residents came forward in the following months, and John Keel later gathered many of the accounts for his book.^[1]

The eyebar-chain suspension bridge had opened in 1928. It failed at evening rush hour; STRUCTURE magazine’s account of the NTSB findings puts the toll at 64 people in 32 vehicles falling into the river, 46 of whom died.^[5]

The NTSB found that brittle fractures in eyebar No. 330 caused a joint in the north chain to separate. A small crack had grown to critical size through stress-corrosion cracking and corrosion fatigue; it was too small to detect with inspection methods of the time.^[5],[4] The disaster led to the first national bridge inspection standards in the United States.^[7]

Because the bridge fell during the period of sightings, later accounts — notably Keel’s book — present the Mothman as a warning of the disaster.^[1]

Witnesses quoted by WBEZ described the figure in different ways, from something like a large owl to a dark winged shape; one reported seeing it near Northerly Island during the August 2017 solar eclipse.^[6] Strickler counted 55 Chicago-area sightings in 2017.^[1]

WBEZ’s reporters considered misidentified birds such as barred owls and sandhill cranes, and pranks involving drones, and concluded that "we were unable to get to the bottom of this mystery".^[6]