THE MOTHMAN FILE

The local headlines screamed: "Couples See Man-Sized Bird ... Creature ... Something!" "Monster No Joke for Those Who Saw It," "Gigantic, Fuzzy Bird Chases Auto in Storm."

     No, this was not a Samuel Arkoff B-horror production. This was real--or possibly real anyway.

     The time was 1966 in Point Pleasant, W.Va., and something very strange was happening. More than 100 people reported seeing a 9-foot-tall, black, winged creature with glowing red eyes. Some said it spoke to them and forewarned of an impending disaster in their town, a small farming community at the intersection of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers. One year later, their worst fears were realized when the bridge over the Ohio River, connecting Point Pleasant to Ohio, collapsed and 47 people died.

     "Mothman"--as the beast was known by locals--was never seen or heard from again.

     "There are a lot of people who just don't want to talk about it anymore, either because they are traumatized or they don't want the press attention," said Jeff Wamsley, a Point Pleasant native and author of "Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend." "People were pretty much scared out of their wits."

 The story of this strange season in Point Pleasant was chronicled by journalist John A. Keel in his 1975 book "The Mothman Prophecies."

     The book is now a movie.

     "The Mothman Prophecies," a $42-million Sony Screen Gems release that opens Friday, stars Richard Gere as a crusading Washington Post journalist named John Klein who, through a personal tragedy, finds himself in Point Pleasant. He gradually becomes embroiled in the town's strange sightings until he reaches a point of obsession and near lunacy. Although the real story occurred in the 1960s, the movie is set in contemporary times. The film also stars Laura Linney (who was paired with Gere in the 1996 thriller "Primal Fear") and "Will & Grace's" Debra Messing.

     Screenwriter Richard Hatem ("Under Siege 2: Dark Territory") had been fascinated by science fiction and the paranormal since childhood. But it was not until one night in the spring of 1997 that he was pulled into the Mothman world.

     During a bout with insomnia, he found himself in a Pasadena bookstore. He saw "The Mothman Prophecies" on the shelf, picked it up and soon enough was sitting cross-legged on the floor reading the book. He read through the night. By the next day, he was on the phone with author Keel and began writing the screenplay.

     Hatem based two characters on Keel. Gere plays the younger, cockier journalist, while Alan Bates plays an older, wiser and spooked professor who at one time also witnessed a paranormal event.

     By 1998, Lakeshore Entertainment (producers of "The Gift," "Runaway Bride") bought the rights to the script and began a two-year development process. But Hatem's vision for the film remained intact.

     "Most Hollywood movie ghosts make their presence known to help us get back together with our girlfriends," said Hatem. "I wanted to write a story that said you can ask questions about why things happen, but they are the sort of things that we are never going to get an answer to. This was a movie about dealing with something that human beings will never be equipped to understand."

     Director Mark Pellington ("Arlington Road") was not interested in making a "monster movie." Rather, he wanted a film about the psychology of belief.

     "Could this be a man? A voice? A light or a monster?" Pellington said. "Many of these things we don't answer. That was the appeal to me, the ambiguity and the unanswered questions. We wanted to play it straight and strip out any melodrama or kookiness."

Keel, who has seen the movie, said he thought "Richard Gere does a great job of gradually going nuts." Now 72 and still writing books and articles from his home in New York City, he says: "I didn't go nuts, but I was very upset. When the bridge collapsed, it was pretty distressing.... I was determined I was going to find the answers to this. As it progressed, I became more and more baffled. It took a long time for me to realize that I was dealing with something that the human mind could not understand. There are many things that we will never know."

     Indeed, nobody knows what those people saw on those dark West Virginia nights. But for the folks who say they saw the strange, malevolent creature--whatever it was--their lives were never the same.

     It began in mid-November 1966, when two couples, parked at an old World War II munitions dump site that the locals called TNT, say they were chased by a large creature. They reported the incident to the police, and the sightings continued from there. Some said the creature chased them to the ground. Others suffered from bleeding eyes after reportedly seeing it. Many never slept well again. It did not help to calm fears when the town's investigative reporter Mary Hyre, who had devoted much ink to the Mothman, died suddenly.

     One theory is that people saw a huge sandhill crane that veered off course. Another is that it was a giant, mutated owl. And others say the people in Point Pleasant succumbed to mass hysteria.

     "I believe that some people saw something. It was probably a bird," said Hilda Austin, 58, who lived through the Mothman sightings and is currently the head of the Point Pleasant Chamber of Commerce. "Some of it was just hoax. It could have been something spawned by the toxic ground from the TNT area. Some of the eyewitnesses were on drugs. I thought it was a hoot [when this happened]; everyone just sort of laughed at this. They just thought it was preposterous."

     But others, like cryptozoologist and author Loren Coleman, said there is a history of this kind of lore in the Ohio River Valley. The Native American tribes of the area had a long history of chronicling stories about Thunderbirds--large "bird-man" figures that were always harbingers of woe.

     "A lot of people want to make fun of Mothman because it's poor, white Appalachia people [talking about it], but I try to put it into context," said Coleman, who wrote the book "Mothman and Other Curious Encounters." "The Iroquois and the Tuscarora and the Wyandot tribes called them flying heads and big heads. They were exactly like the Mothman--headless creatures with big red eyes."

     David Grabias, who was hired by the studio to make a Mothman documentary that will air on the FX channel today, said he was convinced the locals saw something frightful.

     "When I first heard about it, I thought, 'Oh, it's West Virginia and these are a bunch of hicks drinking too much hooch in the mountains,'" said Grabias, who produced the Emmy-nominated documentary "Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry."

     "But the more people we talked to, the more we felt a sense that there was a feeling of something strange and to let sleeping dogs lie. The people were very believable."

     Pellington says that Mothman follows a pattern of the unexplained, which makes rational, modern society ill at ease.
     "I believe in things greater than us that are unexplained," he said. "The mysteries of life are so profound; that is why this legend and other kinds of mythology exist. I feel it keeps us human."

     Many locals were upset that the movie was not filmed in Point Pleasant itself. It was shot in Kittanning, Penn., because it was a large enough town to accommodate cast and crew. In addition, Pellington needed to shut down the local bridge for two months during filming--something the economy in Point Pleasant could not sustain.

     Instead of running from the Mothman legacy, Point Pleasant locals are embracing it. A thriving port city at the turn of the century, Point Pleasant has been suffering from a slow economy for many years. Without jobs, most of the young people leave to find a better way of life.

     Mothman, they are hoping, will bring them better fortunes.

     The Chamber of Commerce sold Mothman Christmas ornaments this year. Another local created Mothman beanbag toys, which sold like hotcakes, according to Austin.

     They don't seem to fear being placed in the pantheon of strange places like Roswell, N.M., or Loch Ness, Scotland.

     "We are hoping that it will do something that will help our economy," said Austin.

     "We don't understand what the fascination is. This new popularity of the Mothman started before the movie.... We don't care, we just hope it will help us out."

Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times

from ABCNews.com The Selling of Mothman A Small Town Hopes to Make Big Bucks Off a Winged Monster By Buck Wolf

Jan. 22 ÷ Move over, Bigfoot. See ya, Sasquatch. America's new No. 1 monster this year is destined to be Mothman.

The flying, blood-eyed, 7-foot-tall monster that once terrorized Point Pleasant, W.Va., chasing cars and mutilating animals, is making a comeback. He's out to fill Bigfoot's big shoes ÷ especially at the cash register.

The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere, opens in theaters Jan. 25, and that might be the best thing in the paranormal tourism business since the Loch Ness Monster backstroked to Scotland.

Get ready for Mothman Beanie Babies, T-shirts and Christmas ornaments. One West Virginia man has already sold Sony Pictures on a Mothman Internet game.

'He's Our Monster'

"He's our monster, so we want to make money off him," says Hilda Austin, executive director of the Point Pleasant Chamber of Commerce. "We don't want anyone stealing our thunder."

People used to run from ghosts. But these days, people run to ghosts. Monsters are good for business, and if your hotel is haunted, all the better.

Only a few years ago, The Blair Witch Project had folks flocking to Burkittsville, Md., where the hit horror film is set. Local officials complained that thrill-seekers were snatching up road signs and vandalizing tombstones.

The obsession reached such heights that the mayor offered this exasperated message on her voice mail: "This is the town office, Burkittsville, Maryland. · If this is in regards to The Blair Witch Project, it is fiction."

But Burkittsville, a tiny hamlet of 200 people, wised up to the fast-buck mentality. Previously unemployed locals quickly found a place in a burgeoning tourist business, selling "witch-chaser" bags filled with smooth stones, garlic cloves and lavender sprigs.

Now, Point Pleasant, an Appalachian town of 6,000 near the Ohio border, is looking for an unlikely hero in the form of a huge, hideous moth. That's pretty amazing, considering the legend.

Between 1966 and 1967, dozens of people came forward to claim they'd seen a giant man-bird with red, hypnotic eyes.

The first reports were from two young couples. Almost immediately, others came forward. Authorities found it harder to slough off each new monster sighting, and a media sensation was born.

Batman Inspires Mothman

The Batman TV show inspired a local newspaper copy editor to dub the creature "Mothman." Had this come a few years later, the creature may have been called "Big Bird," although a flying Bigfoot spotted on Washington state's Mount Rainier has been dubbed "Batsquatch" (not Batboy).

Writer John A. Keel later speculated that the sightings might even point to an alien visitation. His book, upon which the movie is based, documents a rash of UFO reports, alleged poltergeist activities, Men-in-Black harassments, unexplained animal slaughters, and other strange activity.

"There were so many unusual occurrences in a short, 13-month burst," says Loren Coleman, author of Mothman and Other Curious Encounters (Paraview Press). "What's amazing is, if you speak to the people today, their lives have changed. Some changed jobs. Some moved. Some got divorced.

"Whatever happened to these people, they were terrified."

The last time people saw Mothman was when Point Pleasant's Silver Bridge collapsed on Dec. 15, 1967, killing 46 people. Some even say the strange creature sounded a rodent-like squeal to warn of the disaster.

Even today, Mothman isn't a joke in Point Pleasant.

But we all must come to terms with the past. And now, the monster is fodder for local souvenirs.

"Let's face it, if we don't do it, someone else will," says Austin. "We're the home of Mothman, and we're proud."

Buck Wolf is entertainment producer at ABCNEWS.com. The Wolf Files is published Tuesdays.

Copyright © 2001 ABC News Internet Ventures.

from Portland Press Herald

Who Is That Mothman Expert?
Sunday, January 20, 2002

By RAY ROUTHIER
Portland Press Herald Writer  

Loren Coleman was just 12 when he was drawn to his life's work. It happened when he saw a schlocky 1958 horror movie called "Half Human," about an abominable snowman terrorizing the Japanese countryside.

The movie was a certified flop, but it started Coleman down a 40-year path of trying to document and analyze the many human sightings of things as weird as, or weirder, than abominable snowmen. While most of us scoff or snicker at such things, the premise of "Half-Human" caused Coleman to make a serious study of such reported creatures as the Loch Ness Monster, Sasquatch and Mothman.

So maybe it's appropriate that Coleman, who is 54 and lives in Portland, is getting a heavy dose of national attention these days. It turns out that after years of studying things that most of us laugh about, Coleman's expertise is being sought after by the mainstream media including radio stations, magazines, documentary film crews and movie producers.

"The Mothman Prophecies," a Sony/Screen Gems film starring Richard Gere and set for national release Friday, is based on sightings of a 6 1/2 to 7-foot-high winged creature in Point Pleasant, W. Va., in 1966 and 1967. The sightings came just before a bridge collapse in that town, which killed 47 people and led to speculation about paranormal activity.

The producers and the media have turned to Coleman repeatedly as one of the few experts on Point Pleasant's Mothman and other Mothman-like sightings in recent history. It helps that his latest book, "Mothman and Other Curious Encounters," (Paraview Press, $14.95) was released earlier this month.

"In researching the subject, his was a name that kept coming up," said David Grabias, the maker of the documentary "Search for Mothman," which premieres Wednesday on the FX cable network, and will likely be shown again. "It's a story where it's hard to find people who are authoritative and credible and somewhat objective, and that's why I turned to Loren."

Coleman lives a sort of double life. He's known in Maine for his work as a consultant to school systems and health care organizations in the areas of teen suicide and youth violence. He did research in those areas for the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine until recently, and now does his work as a private consultant. It's this work that pays his bills.

But Coleman is also a nationally-known researcher and author in the field of cryptozoology, the study of unknown or undiscovered animals. Outside of other people who are interested in cryptozoology, not many people are familiar with Coleman's work, or cryptozoology itself, for that matter.

Enter "The Mothman Prophecies," which has been advertised on TV, in magazines and at the movie theaters. Because the media has a huge appetite for movie hype, Coleman has gone from an investigator of fables (in the minds of many) to a bona fide expert - all in a Hollywood minute.

Coleman, while not formally hired by Sony/Screen Gems, has done more than 40 radio and magazine interviews as part of the current "Mothman" publicity frenzy. He appeared at a news conference in Hollywood, and is featured prominently in the documentary, which Sony helped to make.

The movie is actually based on a book of the same name by John Keel, a friend of Coleman's who went to Point Pleasant shortly after the first Mothman sightings. Keel has been interviewed as well for various "Mothman Prophecies" publicity pieces.

Coleman's book differs from Keel's in that Coleman is not as interested as Keel in theories of UFOs or paranormal activity. Coleman says he he is first and foremost a cryptozoologist, so his book is more about the earthly possibilities behind what people saw, or might have seen, in Point Pleasant.

He has documented the facts of the sightings, and interviewed the people who saw something, in a methodical, journalistic way.

"He's really the foremost expert on Mothman next to John Keel," said Marc Weinstock, vice president of marketing for Sony/Screen Gems. "He knows the story and he can speak to it well. Because of that, he's being sought out for interviews."

So what exactly is Mothman? Well, from talking to people who say they saw it in Point Pleasant, it is a black creature with red eyes, the size of a large man, with wings. The drawing on Coleman's "Mothman" book, made from witness descriptions, looks like a giant black owl with cape-like wings.

Coleman says he had been working on a Mothman book for years, but decided to finish it when the movie publicity started coming out. The book, "Mothman and Other Curious Encounters" came out in early January and is available only by ordering at book stores or online.

In the book, Coleman writes about the Point Pleasant sightings, which began in November of 1966 and lasted for 13 months. Some people in the small town on the Ohio border simply said they saw it, either standing still or flying. Others say they felt its presence. Others reported premonitions of some impending disaster. In his book, Coleman lists the details of 26 specific sightings of Mothman or a similar creature during 1966 and 1967 in the small town.

Then on Dec. 15, 1967, Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant collapsed during end of the day rush-hour, and 47 people were killed. The bridge collapse happened at a time when bridges were not inspected regularly, and Coleman said there were engineers who explained structurally what had worn out inside the bridge (an eye-bar pin) and why it had collapsed. So the bridge collapse itself isn't that mysterious, though the Mothman sightings leading up to it are.

Coleman concentrated his book on putting Mothman in context, such as talking about other sightings of giant winged creatures over the years. These so-called Mothman sightings, Native American sightings of "thunderbirds" and other evidence may point to some giant bird that hasn't been discovered yet, Coleman thinks.

What Coleman doesn't do in his book is to focus on the UFO and paranormal speculation that plays a large part in the "Mothman" movie.

"In all my investigations over the years I've found that 80 percent of these are misidentifications or hoaxes, but there are some with at least a kernel of truth," said Coleman, sitting in the work room of his apartment, just a few blocks from USM. The room is filled with skulls, monster models and other creature clutter. "What I try to do with any of these is present data, and if you present enough data, there might be some acceptance of what happened."

As for Mothman, all Coleman can say for sure is that many people say they saw something like a large winged creature. And that there are at least some similarities between their descriptions and various descriptions of other sightings recorded in newspaper accounts over the years, as well as descriptions from people Coleman has interviewed.

"This is only the second book on Mothman, and what I wanted to do is reclaim him for cryptozoology," Coleman said.

That being said, Coleman lacks hard proof that Mothman exists, which is the basic knock many scientists have on cryptozoology.

In the field of cryptozoology however, Coleman is well respected for his meticulous research of sightings and for his analysis and perspective.

He has written several other books on the subject, including "Mysterious America" (Paraview, 2001) and "Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature" (Simon & Schuster) 1999, with Jerome Clark.

"I think everyone has to read a Loren Coleman book if they are going to be involved in cryptozoology. He's very well respected," said George Eberhart, senior editor of American Libraries Magazine and the author of a forthcoming book on cryptozoology.

Coleman admits that he spends more time on cryptozoology, which doesn't exactly pay much, than he does on his consulting work. Being regarded as a Mothman expert hasn't made him richer, but it has gotten some publicity for his book.

It also has made his cryptozoology seem cooler to his sons - Malcolm, 15, and Caleb, 11. After all, their dad has now written a book about something that is being made into a Hollywood movie.

But for Coleman, the best thing about the "Mothman Prophecies" movies is that it may do for others what the horrible John Carradine movie "Half Human" did for him.

"I hope that because of the movie and my book, Mothman will resurface as an important cryptozoological subject," said Coleman. "Like Big Foot or Loch Ness."

Copyright © 2002 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

Not too long ago on the Sony lot, the L.A. genre press (woo-hoo!) were rounded up to meet with author Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist who specializes in natural history and evolutionary anomalies such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and...

The Mothman. 

This January, Screen Gems is releasing a new movie called The Mothman Prophecies, a film about the mysterious goings-on in Point Pleasant, West Virginia where a certain being dubbed "the Mothman" appeared to various people and foretelling tragic events, including a major bridge collapse that killed dozens of people. 

Coleman, who has been a consultant for television shows like Unsolved Mysteries, Ancient Mysteries, In Search Of... and In the Unknown, is a college professor in Maine whose primary field is social anthropology, though he's done a great deal of work into psychiatry as well. Coleman has just published a new book entitled Mothman and Other Curious Encounters and spoke with us about the truths behind the movie and what really happened back in 1966 in the small town of Point Pleasant. 

13th Street: Who did the artwork for the cover of the book? 

Loren: A guy named Bill Rebsamen - he's an Arkansas artist who is really good at this kind of stuff. 

13th Street: How did he come up with that as the design for the Mothman? 

Loren: I don't know if you've seen the drawings from the 1960's - actual eyewitness drawings and then he used those as a base. 

13th Street: How did you get into writing this kind of stuff? What interested you to get into this field? 

Loren: Well, believe it or not, a science fiction film. In 1960, I watched a film called Half Human (Smilin' Jack Note: Full title: Half Human: The Story of the Abominable Snowman from Toho) - it's the same folks that brought you Rodan and all those other films. I think the film came out in '56 in Japan and was shown on TV over here in the sixties. It was a movie about the yeti in the Himalayas - wait, it wasn't the Himalayas, it was in Japan - and I went to school at the time and asked my teachers, 'is there a yeti?' and everybody said, 'no, no.' So, I started reading, I started digging, and I started corresponding. By the end of the year, I had four hundred correspondents around the world - even though I was twelve. I just started gathering all this information and wrote my first article by the mid-sixties. One thing after another until I wrote eight books on this subject. 

13th Street: Is the yeti your fave still? 

Loren: Yeah. The abominable snowman will always be the most important thing. 

We talked for a moment about how people can get in touch with Coleman as his e-mail address is published prominently on his website: , and yes, he will answer y'er questions. 

Loren: I get about five hundred e-mails a day and I'm online all the time. I'm on forty-three e-lists. I'm really out there exchanging information with people. 

13th Street: What sort of creatures are you looking into right now? 

Loren: Well, the Mothman is certainly consuming a lot of my time... 

13th Street: What about "rods?" 

Loren: I have not been convinced that rods are cryptozoological creatures. 

13th Street: You think they're real and should be studied as such? 

Loren: (laughs) No, I didn't say that either. All the (tapes) I've seen have not been convincing thus far. So, I'm waiting for more convincing evidence. 

13th Street: It's like the Loch Ness Monster, only better. When you go look for it - you see it! 

Loren: Well, I've gone to look for the Loch Ness Monster and I've never seen it. (laughs) 

13th Street: With depth sonar or what? 

Loren: No, I mean, I understand what you're saying. In my experience as a cryptozoologist and with cryptids in general is that the more you look for them - it's almost only randomly that you see them. If you go looking for them, sometimes you don't see them, because you're looking so hard you're actually putting out a lot of energy. Some of the people going out trying to find Bigfoot right now are so overwhelmed with trying to find him that they bring in large groups of people, all this camera equipment with all the EM energy from the equipment. These cryptids seem to work on different levels of perception. Human beings are so ethnocentric in some ways that they forget that and they go in thinking they can take all the equipment they want in and the creatures will reveal themselves. Actually, they're working on different wave bands. People don't think about the perfumes that are all over their body and how a lot of these creatures will naturally avoid different areas where they sense human perfumes. 

13th Street: What about the idea of olfactory bait and finding out what draws a creature out? 

Loren: That's true, but people have tried things like sides of beef and sanitary napkins and things like that, but they forget how they're delivering those baits to the area with their clothed, perfumed body. I'll be open-minded about (rods), but so far all I've seen are flashes of light. The thing I'm interested in about Mothman is that it seems to be something that just dropped in 1966, but there's a long history there of Mothman-type creatures back to the 15th century. Any cryptid that I look at, I look for native traditions, history, for rods, I haven't seen that. Anglos were saying that about chupacabras - that chupacabras just kind of showed up in 1995, but that's not true. If you go back to the native accounts, you'll find stuff dating back to the 16th century that are chupacabra-like and you find chupacabra-like creatures in other countries. So, if there's a source background, it gives me the sense that this isn't just something aberrant. We have to be realistic and with my graduate background in psychiatry, I know that people do have hallucinations - auditory hallucinations are more often than visual, but you have to really look at where most of these cases are coming from - they're coming from witnesses. Human beings have psychological problems some times, so I look to see if there's a history that crosses any kind of psychological diagnostic category. 

13th Street: So, you're saying that mostly imbalanced people are witnesses? 

Loren: Even imbalanced people see creatures, but if there's credible people, the "credible housewife," etc., it's better. 

13th Street: Maybe I'm on the outside, but what exactly are "rods?" 

Loren: There are certain people that are taking these video cameras and they're seeing these white lights that look like a rod - a white light that goes through the air. So, a lot of people in the UFO field or the paranormal field are trying to move these into cryptozoology and saying they're animals. I'm not convinced yet. 

At this point, we watched a video documentary about the Mothman that features Coleman telling the story of the creature as well as some clips from the movie The Mothman Prophecies. A lot of the people who claim to have seen the mysterious red-eyed "Mothman" so long ago are still alive and added their testimony. We were told that Sony is currently looking for a home for the documentary and may have it air on 48 Hours, in fact. 

Loren then showed us a small toy figure of the Mothman 

Loren: This is the "entity" that John Klein saw (the character played by Richard Gere in the film). These are all very true events that are coming out in this movie. What happened right before the Mothman sightings - this man Woodrow Derenberger, who became a contactee - but Derenberger saw this entity, which he thought looked very strange and essentially it was a man in black - five foot nine, very dark, and then right after - I think it was five days later - the Mothman was seen and it got all the publicity. 

13th Street: For those readers who know nothing about this whatsoever, can you quickly summarize what this was all about? 

Loren: I've been interested in unexplained phenomena, which is generally called "Fortean" phenomena from Charles Fort since 1960 and have written quite a few books and about three hundred articles on the subject. I've been interested in what I call "winged weirdies" for some time. So, when I started hearing about the movie and talking to Sony, I had an idea in place about a book for a long time. My new book, which is coming out in December is Mothman and Other Curious Encounters. In 1966, the country was experiencing a lot of UFO sightings, but not that many to create a major flap. On November 15th, four individuals - four twenty-somethings, they were 17 to 24, two married couples - were going in this TNT area, which is an old munitions area in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It is essentially a lover's lane and a lot of us in Fortean phenomena investigations know that trailers, lover's lane areas, rural areas - those places on the edge of society gets a lot of interactions with these kinds of creatures. So, these two couples were going around the TNT area and all of a sudden, they saw these two giant red eyes. It very much scared them and they didn't know what to make of it. Then the creature, as they described it, (was) six to seven feet tall, red eyes with no head as if the eyes were more in the breast area and with huge wings - came towards them...and they took off at a hundred miles an hour. This creature followed the back of their car. They could see it out the back window almost not flapping almost as if riding the draft of their car - right up to the city limits of Point Pleasant. They go into town and describe to the local sheriff what was going on. The local sheriff comes back, searches around, sees a puff of smoke in a nearby area possibly from this creature landing and taking off again. They get ridiculed in the local press. I looked up all the old articles, I've talked to the old people there. There's a lot of ridicule in the beginning because people didn't believe this was real. But what started happening was, more and more people started seeing this creature... 

Dun dun DUH!!! 

Figured that was a good place to end Part 1 of our two-part yakking with esteemed cryptozoologist Loren Coleman as he explains to us the scientific and real-life backstory to the upcoming Screen Gems movie, The Mothman Prophecies. Tune back in tomorrow for more real-life-to-feature-film comparisons! 

Mothman Sight-Seeing Map from the Point Pleasant Chamber of Commerce Published Jan. 15, 2002

Paraview's Mothman Central