FORBIDDEN HABITAT (Article #1)

THE MOTHMAN LEGEND

          This story maybe boring for you, but the legend really happened. This is a true story about a legendary monster or something else.

          In 1966, a small town in West Virginia became home to the Mothman legend – one of modern mythology’s most powerful and mysteries stories. Who or what this creature is or was can only be guessed, but proof of its existence is beyond any reasonable doubt.

          Situated on the Ohio River, Point Pleasant, West Virginia is a small town with a population of only about 5,000 people. Everyone knew each other well and back in the 1960’s residents of such a small, rural community did the best they could not to draw to much attention to themselves. So when Roger Scarberry’s car came screeching to a halt in front of the Mason County courthouse on November 15, 1966 Deputy Millard Halstead knew that something very real had just taken place.

         Roger Scarberry had just been driving down a road past the McClintic Wildlife Management Area, a nature preserve about seven miles from Point Pleasant, when one of the passengers – his wife Linda Scarberry, friends Steve and Mary Mallette, and their cousin, Lonnie Button – were familiar  with the area, as were many of the young people from the nearby towns. The McClintic Wildlife Management Area had housed the West Virginia Ordnance Works, a hidden TNT factory from World War II. The “TNT area” as it was called by the locals, had been long since abandoned as a military operation. Its distance from town and low-profile made the area a popular hangout for local youths, who could get away from the prying eyes of their small-town neighbors.

          Scarberry and his passengers stopped the car in front of the factory gate. Like the other youths in town, they hung out regularly in the area and noticed that something was unusual. A pair of glowing red lights had appeared near the gate. As they looked upon them, and they realized that these were not lights at all, but a pair of glowing red eyes attached to a dark figure. The creature stood nearly 7 feet tall with huge wings folded behind its back. Without hesitation, Scarberry hit the gas and fled the area as fast as he could. According to everyone in the car, the creature immediately took flight and followed the car down the road, keeping up with ease. Even as Scarberry pushed the car past 100 miles per hour, the glowing red eyes stayed just behind them. Finally, Scarberry reached the Mason County courthouse and the creature flew off into the darkness. This was the first, but not by any means the last sighting of the creature that would become known as “The Mothman”.

Actual Mothman Statue

          One would think that five young locals who came running into a courthouse hollering about a “flying man” would bring nothing but immediate doubt, but to his credit, Deputy Millard Halstead could tell that this was no hoax. “I’ve known these kids all their lives. They’d never been in any trouble and they were really scared that night. I took them seriously.” he would later say. Even in separate rooms, every witness told the exact same story, and the terror in their eyes told the Deputy that something had definitely happened to these kids. Halstead took them so seriously that he followed Scarberry back to the TNT area to look for the creature. They found nothing there, but it wouldn’t be long before the Mothman legend continued.

         It didn’t take long for word of the Mothman to spread. The very next night, on November 16^th, 1966, frightened townspeople took up arms and combed the TNT area for the creature. They wouldn’t find it, but at a nearby home someone who wasn’t looking for the Mothman would.

         That night a young woman named Marcella Bennett was visiting her friends, the Thomas family, who lived very close to the TNT area. As she approached her car, parked just outside the house, a large grey human-like creature with giant wings and glowing red eyes rose up from the ground nearby. Bennett was so terrified that she literally dropped her infant daughter Teena to the ground and fell on top f her. For minutes Bennett lay paralyzed in fear, staring into the hypnotic red eyes of the creature. She would later tell others that she was aware of what was happening but was quite literally unable to move her body.

          Finally, Bennett broke free of her paralysis, grabbed her daughter, and ran into the house. As they called the police, Bennett, along with the other witness in the house said that the Mothman walked up onto their porch and peered curiously through the windows. By the time the police arrived, it was gone.

         As more and more sightings of this creature became known, other townspeople would come forward with details to add to the Mothman legend. As small town residents many witness had stayed quiet, fearing that others would think they were lying – or worse – crazy. But as more witness began t come forward, it became very clear that the Mothman legend was no legend at all – it was very real indeed.

          Over the course of the next year, many of the locals would witness this creature. Over time, sketch artists were able to compile drawings of what the creature looked like. In very case, the intense red eyes were what captured everyone’s attention. In fact, even after dozens of descriptions, just about every detail of the Mothman could be identified, except for one. Nobody seemed to know what its face looked like. One after another, every witness described being so drawn into the creature’s eyes that not of them could recall the surrounding face. Even more strange, everyone who had witnessed this creature take off in flight described the same strange phenomenon. It seems that through the Mothman would spread his enormous wings before ascending into the air, he never flapped them, like any bird  would do. Instead, with wings extended, he seemed to simply rise effortlessly into the air, like a balloon.

         Several theories exist about this creature, and some of the least believable are claims that this was simply a very large bird that had been misidentified. Skeptics suggest that the Mothman legend can be explained by the Sandhill Crane, a large bird with red coloring around the eyes (the eyes themselves are not red). It’s interesting to note that this is the same bird that skeptics also claim to be the true identity of the Jersey Devil.

          Being a rural town, most of the witnesses are hunters and fisherman, which makes it hard to imagine that so many of them would mistake a bird for a seven-foot tall winged humanoid with glowing red eyes. Interestingly, though, the TNT area housed small semi-underground buildings called “igloos” that it was later discovered were leaking mutagenic toxic waste into the nearby Wildlife Preserve. Is it possible that the Mothman was some kind of mutant version of a Sandhill Crane or other creature?

The collapsed Silver Bridge where Mothman seen last.

         What is often left out of the retelling of the Mothman legend is that at the time of the sightings, here were simultaneously several sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) in the same area. Several witness of either the Mothman or UFOs reported being visited by strange men in all black suits, hats, and sunglass, who would threaten them to keep quiet about what they had witnessed. Were these government agents who already knew what these sightings were, or were these emissaries from the Mothman’s world trying to keep things quiet?

         Many believed that the Mothman was a prophetic creature, a herald of unknown tragedies to come. On December 15, 1967 that theory was put to the test. The Silver Bridge, a shiny steel bridge joining the states of Ohio and West Virginia, and a main route into Point Pleasant, collapsed, killing 46 people. Some witnesses claimed to have seen the Mothman on the bridge that same day, though a faulty eye-bar was found to be the cause of the collapse. A true tragedy for the small town, many wondered if the Mothman had been there to warn them of the disaster, though others wondered if the Mothman was part of a curse put on the town by an old Native American chieftain who had been famously murdered two hundred years earlier. Either way, after the collapse of the Silver Bridge, the Mothman legend was put to rest. It was never seen again.

Source: Somewhere in Internet

Script by: Pallab Nandi

"Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."

        Buddha