Episode 47: Missing the Point

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In September of 1952, something bright flashed across the dark West Virginia sky and came to rest on a nearby farm.

A trio of local boys saw it happen with their own eyes and ran home to report it.

The mother of one of the boys agreed that it was worth looking into, so she gathered a group of older boys and together they all walked over to find out whatever it was that had fallen to Earth.

When they arrived, they found what they described as a ball of fire, and the air was thick with a mist that burned burned their eyes and noses.

When one of the boys noticed a pair of red lights in the shadows nearby, he turned his light on it.

There, they say, stood a dark figure with bright eyes and a pointed head.

They couldn't see arms, but when it saw the light, the creature glided toward them and hissed.

Naturally, they all ran away.

They claimed it was an extraterrestrial, protecting the ship it had just crash-landed.

Now keep in mind, this was 1952.

The Roswell, New Mexico incident had just taken place five years before, and many people were expecting it to happen again.

A real-life UFO crash.

Later reports suggest something much less fantastical, though.

On that very same night, a meteor had been sighted crossing the skies over Maryland, Pennsylvania, and you guessed it, West Virginia.

And that mysterious, armless, pointy-headed figure that flew toward them?

Nothing more than a local owl.

Our world is full of things that are hard to explain, things that frighten us and cause us to doubt our safety.

It might happen less and less often in this connected, modern culture of ours, but it's still part of our legacy.

People have always seen things that are hard to believe.

Sometimes, though, people see what they want to see rather than reality.

The challenge lies in distinguishing between the two.

Fact or fiction, truth or lie, figment of the imagination, or something more.

But when dozens of people manage to see the same strange thing, our clarity has a way of falling apart.

I'm Erin Mankey, and this is Lore.

For as long as we've been looking up, humans have been seeing things they can't explain.

And every time it's happened, those experiences get framed within whatever worldview or experience people have at the time.

One of those common interpretations, for a very long time, was sky serpents.

The English county of Devon has played host to at least two sightings of a mysterious event that was recorded as a twisting serpent in the sky.

In both 1388 and 1762, something long and glowing appeared in the English skies, remaining visible for over six minutes by multiple witnesses.

In 1857, the crew of a steamboat on Nebraska's Missouri River saw something similar.

Witnesses later described it as resembling, and I quote, a great undulating serpent in and out of the lowering clouds, breathing fire.

16 years later, a number of farmers in the Texas town of Bonham saw something in the sky that defied all explanation.

They said it was twisting and writhing like a snake, but enormous and yellow.

Witnesses seemed to come from all walks of life.

In 1897, a Michigan paperboy named John Rosa stopped to chat with a local police officer while he was out on his 4 a.m.

delivery route.

Both Rosa and the officer looked up and saw an enormous, silvery serpent fly across the sky.

Similar events have been recorded in Brazil, South Carolina, Maryland, and Northern Europe, and those accounts spanned centuries.

Clearly, something was going on.

But most of those sightings are easy to explain away with a bit of knowledge about how meteorological events work and with a bit of an open mind.

Comets, meteors, northern lights, lights, all of these natural, regularly occurring events could explain the odd sightings of what people claimed were fiery serpents in the sky.

As is so often the case, when we see what we want to, it prevents us from seeing everything else.

But other sightings are harder to explain.

When they get closer to the Earth and even stand on solid ground, Our ability to filter the truth from fantasy starts to break down.

The mysterious creature witnessed multiple times in Cornwall, England, is a prime example of this and to this day, it hasn't been easily explained away.

In April of 1976, the Melling family from Lancaster was vacationing in Cornwall when something unusual took place.

On the 12th of April, Don Melling's two daughters, 12-year-old June and 9-year-old Vicki, were exploring the woods near a church in Marnon.

While they were there, they reported seeing a strange bird-like man in the air above the church.

It frightened them so much that they actually convinced their parents to pack up and end their vacation early.

Nearly three months later, in early July of that year, more sightings were reported near the church.

Again, two girls, this time Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry, heard a hissing sound in the night sky and looked up to see something unexplainable.

They described it as a big owl with pointed ears, as big as a man.

They also added a new detail, red, glowing eyes.

It was sighted again the following day by three other travelers and it's been seen off and on again for years ever since.

Back in the United States, similar creatures have been witnessed.

In December of 1975, two police officers in Texas saw something they would never be able to forget.

One morning, they were patrolling the city of Harlingen when something flew over their car.

According to the report, that something was a giant bird with a wingspan that measured measured over 10 feet across.

A few days later, a similar creature was sighted by two local teens.

When they reported it to their parents, everyone headed outside to have a look.

All they found were a set of enormous tracks in the dirt.

Tracks made by large, three-toed feet.

They even made the evening news for that discovery, and then the community erupted in hysteria.

Half a dozen more sightings were reported over the following month.

The officers in Harlingen later admitted that whatever it was that they'd seen could probably have been a pelican.

Maybe.

They weren't sure, really.

But others absolutely insisted it was an enormous bird of mysterious origins.

Heck, one man claimed he was even attacked by it.

That many sightings.

Well, it makes you wonder what was really going on.

And that's the trouble with all these stories, isn't it?

There are always loose ends.

Bits and pieces that can't be explained away, no matter how expertly we apply logic to them Which of course is why they're still told today

It seems that these stories always have two sides don't they the passionate eyewitness and the cold voice of reason and that's pretty much par for the course for humans We often refuse to believe the things that others claim to have seen just because those stories drift outside the realm of accepted reality Most of the details, along with the mystery itself, can be explained away with reasonable logic.

But sometimes there's more than one event, more than a handful of sightings, more detail or evidence than logic can explain away.

Sometimes the reports are so strong that they become hard to ignore.

When the unexplainable becomes the believable, that's when things truly become horrifying.

When World War II ended in 1945, a number of military-related factories around the U.S.

were closed up and either abandoned or converted into something more practical.

The Gopher Ordinance Works in Rosemont, Minnesota, for example, is now a concrete skeleton of what it once was.

The Dodge, Chicago plant was first transitioned into a shopping mall, and now they use a portion of it to manufacture candy.

About six miles north of the West Virginia town of Point Pleasant, they built a TNT plant and storage facility, but shut its doors after the war ended.

They built it on property that had originally been a game preserve.

But rather than transition it back when they were done, the manufacturing facilities were simply left to rot, including the dozens of concrete igloos that had been used for storage.

Today, it's a wildlife preserve, and homes have even been built nearby.

Still, it's probably safe to say that ever since the war ended, the old TNT factory property hasn't seen much action.

Not until the mid-60s, at least.

Because that's when something unusual began to take place.

On the night of November 15th, 1966, 50 years ago this week, in fact, a car entered the abandoned property.

Inside were two young couples, Steve and Mary Mallette and Roger and Linda Scarberry.

They were just out looking for some innocent fun and that search had led them onto one of the dirt roads that cut through the old factory grounds.

The car was full of laughter, conversation, and the beat of the radio, but all of that came to an end when the very edge of their headlights illuminated something odd.

Linda Scarberry later described it as an unnaturally large, man-shaped figure.

Most frightening, though, were the eyes, which glowed in the darkness with a red light.

Whatever they'd seen, the thing didn't appear to see them.

At least it didn't react to their presence.

I have a hard time understanding how the bright headlights of a car could fail to catch the attention of anything close to sentient in the middle of a dark wildlife preserve.

But according to all four witnesses, They just sort of waddled off away from the road at a slow, rambling pace.

The two couples didn't spend any time debating what they'd seen.

They didn't stop and get out and investigate.

They were too afraid to do anything other than turn the car around and head back toward the exit of the preserve as quickly as they could.

All they wanted to do was get away.

But that wasn't going to be as easy as they thought.

A minute or two later, as they were winding their way back through the dirt roads that led to the exit, They saw it again.

This time, the figure was more clear, and the four witnesses were able to get a better look at it.

They described the same tall, human-like shape and red eyes, but said this time they were able to see something else.

Wings.

They stuck out from the center of the creature's back, they said, like an angel.

They weren't able to see any arms, and the head was sort of indistinguishable from the body, but all that could have been a trick of the shadows and light.

It was something that seemed like a cross between a giant bird and an enormous man, which was, of course, impossible.

But that didn't mean it wasn't frightening.

And when the creature spread its wings and flew toward them, they were downright horrified.

So they sped up.

Roger Scarberry later told the police that he managed to coax his old Chevy up to 100 miles an hour.

But when they glanced behind the car, the flying thing was still there, still chasing them.

And over the roar of the engine, They could all hear a sound, a sort of high-pitched squeaking noise.

But all of it, the sight of the creature, the eerie noise, and the fast pursuit, it gave them all the incentive they needed to head back to town as quickly as they could.

It was only after the car had entered the city limits of Point Pleasant and was bathed in bright electric light that the creature or bird, whatever it had really been, finally gave up and turned around.

It quickly vanished into the night.

The two young couples were understandably terrified by what they'd seen, but they were also also unanimous in the details.

Something large, something that could fly and scream at them, had chased them all the way from the wildlife preserve into town.

So they decided to tell the police.

Roger turned the car toward the Mason County Courthouse, and before long they were reporting the events to an officer inside.

The deputy sheriff agreed to send a handful of officers out to the preserve immediately.

and the young couples bravely went with them.

Unfortunately, they found nothing definitive that proved the couple's story, but there were still some tense moments.

While searching the general area of the sighting, sounds could be heard in the darkness outside the glow of their flashlights.

One of the officers even claimed he saw movement and a cloud of dust that could have been made by someone walking down a path, but whatever caused it remained hidden from view.

Most chilling of all, though, was when one of the officers saw what he described as a shadow in the night sky overhead.

It seemed to be circling one of the abandoned buildings, slow and deliberate, like a large bird.

Everyone got back in their car, and they left as fast as they could.

Oddly enough, the events of November 15th weren't the first of their kind in the area.

They were just the first to be given anything close to a reasonable amount of attention by the authorities and the press.

Sightings of something large and unusual had actually been happening in the area for years.

According to historian and professor James Gay Jones, the first local sighting might have actually occurred in the early 1900s.

According to the tale, multiple families in the area witnessed a creature that they described as man-sized with a wingspan of over 12 feet.

They claimed that this man-bird had no discernible head, something that sounds oddly similar to the thing the two young couples witnessed in 1966.

In 1961, two people from Point Pleasant were driving south of town along the Ohio River when they saw something step out into the road in front of them.

They described it as a large man, covered in gray fur, or maybe feathers, and protruding from its back were wings.

A moment later, it launched itself into the air and flew away.

On November 1st, 1966, just two weeks before the frightening car chase and the police investigation, a number of National Guardsmen were outside at the Armory, a military facility east of town, when they saw something in the nearby trees.

It was perched on the branch of a tree in the distance, but all of the men agreed it was too large to be a bird.

It was man-sized, they said, maybe larger.

This time, though, it was brown.

Then, just three days before the two young couples had their experience in Point Pleasant, five men saw something in Clendennon, a town 80 miles to the southeast.

Ken Duncan and his co-workers were digging a grave in the local cemetery, getting it ready for a burial later that day, when a large bird took off from one of the trees at the edge of the property.

As it flew closer though, each of the men became convinced that it wasn't a bird at all.

It was as large as a man, but with wings.

After the events of November 15th, though, all of those disconnected, unreported sightings started to get pulled together into the larger story.

The local newspaper, the Point Pleasant Register, ran a headline the next day that declared, couples see man-size bird, creature, something.

It was an odd story, for sure.

The paper just didn't know what to do with it.

And I don't blame them.

The following evening, Raymond Walmsley drove north toward the wildlife preserve on his way to see a friend who lived in one of the homes built near the property there.

With him in the car were his wife and another friend, Marcella Bennett.

When they arrived at their friend's house, they parked in a shadowy dirt lot across the road and then got out and approached the front porch.

Unfortunately, their friend wasn't home, so they turned around and returned to their car.

It was on their way back that they saw something none of them would forget.

Just a few feet away from their car, further back from the road in the darkness, something large seemed to rise up from the ground.

It happened suddenly, and the sight of it horrified each of them.

Bennett later described it as an enormous figure, roughly the shape of a human, but with glowing red eyes.

They stood beside their car, paralyzed with fear, while they watched a pair of wings unfold from the back of the creature.

And then, it was gone.

They weren't the last in town to see something that fit such an unusual, almost unbelievable description.

On the morning of November 25th, Tom Urey was driving to work just a couple miles north of the Wildlife Preserve when he saw something on the side of the road.

Maybe he thought it was a hitchhiker or a local out for a walk.

Whatever he might have assumed though, the closer he got to it, the less sense it made.

It was an enormous man-shaped figure, and as he passed it, the creature spread huge wings and took flight.

Tom sped away, horrified by what he'd seen, but this thing, whatever it was, followed him.

Even when Tom reached 75 miles per hour, it kept up, even circling his car.

When it finally did disappear, Tom went straight home.

He said he was just too frightened to work after that.

There were others.

Connie Joe Carpenter saw something large on the 27th that flew toward her car.

On the 28th, Richard West called the police in a panic.

There was something on his neighbor's roof, he told them.

It was a man with wings.

And later, an elderly man from Point Pleasant claimed he looked out his window and saw a winged man with gray fur and bright red eyes just, well, standing there in his yard.

The sightings continued for months, sometimes in the area of Point Pleasant and sometimes farther away.

The Ohio River Valley seemed to be the focal point of many reported encounters with the creature.

The descriptions varied just enough to make that final assumption far from definitive.

Then, of course, there were the dreams.

A year after the 1966 sightings, multiple people claimed that they were having nightmares about death, and they blamed them on this mysterious creature.

One woman said of her dreams that they involved Christmas presents and drowning people.

Another woman dreamt of people dying in the nearby Ohio River.

And each of them believed that this bird man creature's appearance had something to do with it.

But, of course, these were just dreams, and as we all know, dreams don't come true.

Or do they?

On the evening of December 15th of 1967, the nearby Silver Bridge, which connected Point Pleasant with Ohio to the west, collapsed into the river.

When it did, it took 46 lives with it.

Cars full of people driving home from work, families returning from after-school programs, folks coming back from their holiday shopping, and floating in the water, they said, among the wreckage of cars and metal support beams, were tiny pops of color.

Christmas presents

There is a lot to be said for seeing what we want to see.

And when a whole community gets caught up in something as sensational as a man-sized bird thing,

well, it's easy to see how things can get out of control, and fast.

In the years since, there have even been stories in Point Pleasant of UFOs, of government cover-ups, and aliens.

The creature has even been given a sensational, mysterious name, the Mothman.

Others, though, take the more logical approach.

No one saw anything unusual at all.

In every instance, they say, it was just a large bird.

Nothing more than shadows and hysteria, convincing people that they were seeing something otherworldly.

Biologists have suggested it was just a sandhill crane, or, much like the events from 1952, it was just an owl, enlarged by adrenaline and an overactive imagination.

We see what we want to, whether we're a skeptic or a believer.

We wear our own pair of colored lenses and they tint the world that we see around us.

Sometimes that causes us to dismiss things that we should give more attention to.

Other times, it convinces us that the unexplainable is undeniable.

None of this, of course, sheds light on the odd connection between the sightings of these creatures and the tragedies that followed them.

The first recorded appearance of the Point Pleasant creature, way back in the early 1900s, was said to have occurred just prior to a tragic event.

And the collapse of the Silver Bridge in 1967 certainly deepened that possible connection.

Unlike the creature itself though, those are harder to explain away with simple wildlife biology.

Meanwhile, large man-bird creatures are still occasionally sighted and oftentimes very far from Point Pleasant.

Creatures matching the Mothman description have been sighted in Singapore, Argentina, England, Mexico, and Brazil, among many other locations.

Most witnesses describe the same glowing red eyes and human-like body with enormous wings.

In April of 1986, there were similar sightings in a small Ukrainian town located in a river valley just north of a wildlife preserve.

Witnesses claimed to see a large creature they described as a tall, headless man with enormous wings and eyes that glowed with a bright red light.

All of those details, from the location to the physical description, sound eerily familiar to the Point Pleasant incident.

These sightings in the Ukrainian town went on for over two weeks and the locals began to refer to it by name.

They called it the Blackbird.

And just as odd as the sightings themselves are the reports of eyewitnesses having nightmares later on.

What those dreams entailed, no one really knows.

We don't know because there's no one left in town to ask about those dreams or the sightings of the blackbird creature.

You see, all 14,000 residents were relocated about 30 years ago, shortly after a reactor at their nuclear power plant tragically failed.

The city, you see, was Chernobyl.

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This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marcette Crockett.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com/slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi i like it when people say hi

and as always thanks for listening

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