[unsettling music plays]
[woman 1] I saw it
with my own eyes.
I'm still afraid to go outside at night.
[man] I get scared
that behind the closed curtains,
there is a face staring at me.
[woman 2] I don't know how to explain it.
I just know… there's something out there.
[unsettling music continues]
[woman 3] There's only so many times
people can say the same story,
the same sightings,
the same creatures.
Eventually, you're gonna have to start believing.
[woman 4] I know what I saw.
It was the Mothman.
[unsettling music continues]
[music fades]
[insects chirrup]
[woman 1] It was about five o'clock in the morning.
[garage door creaks]
I started walking out to the curb
to take my garbage out.
And when I glanced up,
this creature just appeared out of nowhere
across the street from me.
Making noises the whole time, guttural noises.
[rasping]
It would have been about seven, eight feet tall.
It had normal-looking legs, human legs.
And it seemed to be covered in fur or feathers.
I couldn't shake the feeling that it knew that I saw it.
And I sensed that it was trying to get me to go over there.
I was so afraid.
[screeching]
[Paula] I started going back towards the house.
And I just kept thinking, "Please let me get in there."
I didn't turn around,
but I knew that it was coming towards me.
I could feel it.
I ran inside.
I looked out the front window,
and…
nothing. It was gone.
So, as quickly as that appeared,
it disappeared.
After the sighting, I told family.
I told just a couple of friends,
but even they didn't believe me.
I didn't blame them,
but I wish they would have believed me.
I wish someone else was with me that night.
So I did some research.
And I discovered there's a lot of people out there
that have seen very similar sightings.
I found out there was a name for this.
The Mothman.
[unsettling music plays]
My name is Tobias Wayland,
and my interest in the paranormal began at a very young age.
A series of strange phenomena
inspired me to actually investigate the… the paranormal myself.
When I was younger, I would sometimes see strange figures at night.
They were humanoid in shape, but appeared to be made out of shadow.
And as I grew up, those types of phenomena didn't go away.
In fact, they seem to intensify.
And so now I study the entire width and breadth of paranormal phenomena.
Everything from UFOs to ghosts and hauntings.
I investigate everything.
In the world of the paranormal,
Bigfoot and UFOs are the most commonly talked about and researched.
Close behind, you have winged humanoids.
Part human, part avian beings,
which have been witnessed for centuries.
Incredibly, present-day sightings of winged humanoids
are becoming more and more common.
In 2017, I noticed a number of winged creature sighting reports
from the Chicago area
coming through this website, Phantoms and Monsters.
This creature is something that they can't explain
and clearly scared them.
I got in touch with Lon Strickler, who manages the website,
and found out he'd been tracking these Mothman sightings
in the Chicago area since 2011.
I got involved with the paranormal back in the '70s.
This wasn't a time when paranormal investigation
was mainstream like it is now.
I started out of high school,
and then I had a Bigfoot encounter in 1981.
And I really didn't know what I was dealing with or what I was seeing,
but it inspired me
to start looking into all kinds of different phenomena.
Eventually, I was doing investigations all up and down the East Coast.
Tobias contacted me
after we had started reporting
some of these winged humanoid sightings in Chicago.
In the paranormal, we always believe that there are hotspots
because it does seem that certain areas
get more and more sightings of different phenomena.
And seeing what we've been getting the past 11 years,
there is something definitely going on all around the Chicago area.
The sightings in and around Chicago are very unique
because it's a huge city,
and you don't get winged humanoid sightings in urban areas.
It just does not happen.
Now, why is it happening?
I don't know.
[Tobias] Reports from the witnesses in Chicago
consistently describe encounters with this large, winged creature.
Somewhere between six and eight feet tall
with a wingspan between 12 and 15 feet.
The being was described as black in color, very emaciated looking,
shiny, like it was wet.
The creature looked more human than it did ape.
But people saw wings that looked like that of a bat.
Typically, these beings were seen at night,
but we've also had reports from witnesses who've seen them in the broad daylight.
When we started reporting on it,
we called it the Chicago Phantom,
because we didn't know what it was.
But the press in Chicago, they were calling it The Mothman,
making it sound
like it was something similar to what had happened at Point Pleasant.
[Robert Stack] These crumbling buildings are home to one of the most bizarre
and terrifying creatures ever to walk the earth.
They call it The Mothman.
[tense music plays]
[Tobias] Roger and Linda Scarberry, and Steve and Mary Mallette,
they were young couples at the time, and they were out at the old TNT area.
[Lon] It was an old World War II munitions factory,
and it was in an area called the West Virginia Ordnance Works.
It's been abandoned for many, many years. Even back in the '60s, it was abandoned.
What is that? Did you guys see that? What is that? Just…
And they saw this very dark, uh, humanoid figure with wings
and these piercing red eyes.
[screeching]
Go! Drive! Get out of here!
Go! Get out, get out! Just go!
[Tobias] And when they fled, it chased them.
And they said that it chased them at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour
as they fled back in town.
More than 100 people witnessed Mothman in the dead of night
and during daylight conditions.
[man 1] It looked like a helicopter coming over the trees at first.
But every time it would make a loop, it would get lower and lower,
and I'd get a scare.
[Robert Goerman] It was an enormous and frightening apparition
that terrified everyone that saw it.
[woman] I could feel the presence of it. I knew it was there.
But I could not move.
[growling]
[Marcella] I was petrified. I just froze.
[man 2] It was, uh, sheer pandemonium.
The world had focused its attention
on a small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
The press was everywhere,
and everyone just seemed to be on edge,
just waiting to see what the outcome of the sightings would be.
[Tobias] Those sightings in Point Pleasant
ostensibly concluded in December of 1967
with the famous and very tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge.
[reporter 1] Today marks 55 years
since the deadliest bridge disaster in modern history.
[reporter 2] There've been many claims that Mothman was seen
right before the Point Pleasant Silver Bridge collapse.
Many people tell us they believe
the winged, red-eyed creature is a bad omen,
only appearing when catastrophe's about to strike.
That event didn't actually signal any real ending
in the Mothman phenomenon itself.
There are people today throughout West Virginia
and the Ohio River Valley there
who continue to report winged humanoids.
[tense music plays]
And now the sightings in the greater Chicago metropolitan area
really began to come out in large numbers in the spring of 2017.
[tense music continues]
Lon created this live sighting map
to track all of the documented winged humanoid sightings to date.
It gives people a sense of the scope of these sightings.
And you can see, uh, just the… the sheer territory that's covered.
But also begin to see the general shape
of how they're clustered around Chicago and Lake Michigan.
[tense music continues]
[Lon] There's 161 sightings on there right now
within 250 miles of the city of Chicago.
Sightings we believe are viable sightings.
[unsettling music plays]
[Tobias] The credibility of a sighting
really comes down to the credibility of the witness.
It comes down to being able to verify the… the details of a witness's account,
like historical weather data and geographic data,
and look for any inconsistencies in their story
that don't match up with what they're… they're claiming.
If a person says they saw this creature in clear, perfect skies,
but the records show fog or rain on the day of their sighting,
I tend to question their credibility.
I've investigated a lot of different phenomena.
Sometimes you kinda get that feeling
when somebody's trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
But with the Mothman phenomena,
very few people will embellish on what they've seen.
We try to prod them to see if they will try to layer anything on top of it
to get you to believe their story,
but that just has not been the case.
People are very steadfast in what they've experienced, and they stick to it.
[eerie music plays]
[dog barks]
[Jonathan] It was around 10:20, 10:30 at night.
And it was outside my house.
All of a sudden…
[screeching]
…I hear an ear-piercing sound with a lot of screeching.
[screeching]
Like, so loud, I couldn't hear anything else.
It was coming from two giant trees in my front yard.
I knew where to look instantly because there's a big V in the center.
I saw giant red eyes.
They were so large and so deeply red.
And as soon as I made eye contact with it, it made the sound again.
[screeching]
So I just booked it for the front door.
I got there as fast as I could, almost stumbled trying to get to it.
[tense music plays]
[music fades]
Afterwards, I was really confused
because I knew it wasn't some kind of bird.
Being an avid bird-watcher,
I can confidently say that there's no bird in North America
that would resemble that.
I didn't understand what it was to begin with,
so I just tried to shrug it off, but it really stuck with me.
And then, around that time,
I was discovering some articles and things online
about sightings at the Chicago airport, which is pretty close to me.
We started getting sighting reports in the vicinity of O'Hare in October 2019.
[pilot 1] 75856 O'Hare, starting runway 2, 7 left overhead.
[Lon] O'Hare International is a massive facility.
[pilot 2] I've asked them to contact Chicago departure.
[Lon] Cargo workers, airline pilots, TSA security.
Many of these employees have seen these beings.
The first sighting was a pilot and his copilot
were taxiing back into the terminal.
[radio chatter]
[Lon] And as they were taxiing back,
this winged being flew right in front of the cockpit.
They didn't know what it was.
We had one encounter by an air traffic controller
who saw this thing in the light.
It seemed like it started near the tarmac,
but it moved closer to him.
It wasn't an aggressive move, but he saw it.
He didn't know what it was. Then he saw it fly away.
[Tobias] Another employee, who worked in cargo at O'Hare,
said he saw this large, dark, winged humanoid
standing in this field near that cargo area.
He was very reluctant to even come forward or have his first name used
because he was concerned that he might lose his job.
[Lon] Airline pilots and other professionals at O'Hare
didn't want any of this information going out into the public.
They have a lot to lose by making a report like this.
I think we had nine sightings at the airport.
And the neighborhoods around O'Hare, we probably received 60 sightings or so.
[Tobias] When news started to spread about the sightings at O'Hare Airport,
other witnesses came forward to tell us about their experiences.
[unsettling music plays]
[woman] The day began as just a family adventure.
I had, uh, two of my nieces and two of my nephews with us at the time.
All of us decided that we were gonna go play
in the puddles and the mud in the truck,
in an abandoned area that we have never been in before.
[Sandra] About right here,
I was looking out the front window of the truck,
and I saw a black figure, which I thought was a balloon.
But it appeared to be a human.
[unsettling music plays]
He was just floating.
And I told everybody to look up in the sky.
I saw the silhouette of what looked like Iron Man,
the shine, the sheen to him,
right above here, right where the clouds are now.
[unsettling music continues]
I could see the shape of the face, the pectoral muscles.
You could see the definition in the arms.
He just stayed straight. No movement, no nothing at all.
And soon as he hit the patch of white clouds…
[music stops]
…he disappeared.
He disappeared like a mist.
And then he was gone. There was nothing left afterwards.
-No markings, no smoke-- -Trails.
-No nothing. -No nothing.
-Right there. -[Stacey] Then he just went up.
[Sandra] Yes.
[Stacey] I knew it. Knew that we saw it.
There was just that… Almost that psychic connection
that it saw us and we saw it.
That's why I think it…
You know, it took off the way it did.
The kids pretty much knew…
From the area and from the stories,
they… they knew what they saw, which was the Mothman.
[tense music plays]
[Stacey] I told my mom, "I have to go to the store. I have to get sketch stuff."
Because every time I blinked or I thought of something,
it was burned in my mind.
So I had to get it out on paper.
I kept it hidden. I didn't want to say anything to anybody.
And that's when my mom said, "Well, I've got something to tell you."
"I had one done at work by a girlfriend."
I had the same feeling. That if I didn't get it out, it was gonna haunt me.
So me having it done on paper the way I asked her to do it
felt so much better.
Knowing that that's there and it's not up here anymore.
[Stacey] I flipped my sketchbook open, and she showed me hers.
We both looked at each other like, "That's exactly what we saw."
We didn't even talk.
Like, we didn't ask each other about definition, or what we saw, or anything.
We just both had the pictures drawn, and it was like, "Oh my God."
[unsettling music plays]
[Lon] Stacey and Sandy saw some type of supernatural being
that didn't have wings, but it seemed to fly without wings.
That did not surprise me.
We've had several people say they saw the Mothman glide
without the use of some type of wing.
So I believe what they saw was credible.
[unsettling music continues]
At the same time, a number of witnesses have seen unusual aerial phenomena
that don't represent something paranormal.
In May of 2018,
a man was bicycling to work.
And on his bicycle helmet, he had a GoPro camera.
He liked to record his rides.
He saw what he later described to me as a large, winged creature.
I was able to enlarge the frames on which this creature appeared
and make out that this was the silhouette of a bird,
like a great blue heron.
Over the past decade,
the number of, uh, of herons roosting in urban areas, specifically Chicago,
has exploded.
This is largely due to the, uh, destruction
of their natural wetland habitat
and climate change.
And so, that, under the right circumstances,
can be mistaken as a humanoid.
Every report that I've published, that I have received personally,
is one that I find credible.
In one recent sighting, we had two witnesses
who were able to provide a remarkable amount of detail.
[woman] It was mid-June.
It was real warm outside.
And we decided to make a McDonald's run.
We always sit and chitchat for a while
in the parking lot behind the apartment afterwards.
[Shana] I was sitting in the passenger seat. My mom was in the driver's seat.
Mid-conversation…
[screeching]
…I heard a very loud screeching noise.
[screeching]
It didn't sound like anything I've ever heard before.
It couldn't have been mistaken for a bird, or a fox, or a coyote.
[ominous music plays]
That's when I saw a really large, dark creature
crawling out of the canal and up the embankment.
He was crawling on all fours.
And it looked like it had hind legs.
[Barbera] I think I was more in shock than anything.
I was just startled and trying to figure out what we were seeing.
[Shana] My mom decided she wanted to take a closer look.
And I asked her not to.
And she wasn't listening,
so I followed my mother, looking out towards the canal.
[unsettling music plays]
[Barbera] As I looked over,
I saw him just taking flight from the ground.
You could hear the flapping of the wings.
[Shana] And then, all of a sudden, it just disappeared,
and we didn't see it again for that night.
But I do believe that the screech came from
what I now know as the Mothman.
I can't necessarily confirm if they really saw Mothman.
But I find Shana and Barb to be very credible witnesses.
There's really no discrepancies,
uh, between their accounts of… of what happened.
Any sighting that we receive
where more than one person or multiple people see it,
we take that into, uh, more consideration.
[wings flapping]
[Tobias] It's very difficult, if not impossible,
to discern the motivations of whatever this thing is,
because it… it is so alien.
And it certainly doesn't seem to want to communicate in any way.
And it also doesn't seem to want to have very much prolonged contact
with anyone that it, uh, encounters.
[Lon] One thing we do know is that the overall feeling witnesses get
is that of fear and dread.
And it can really affect their lives.
[Jonathan] Anytime I go outside and it's night,
it still sticks with me.
I'm still scared about it 'cause it just was so impactful.
[unsettling music plays]
[Paula] I have seen
evil in the flesh.
I'm still afraid to go outside at night.
[unsettling music continues]
[Lon] The witnesses of these beings go through a different series of emotions.
I've had 'em call me crying.
"What's gonna happen to me?"
"Is my family in danger?"
They're scared. They really are scared.
We had one witness who came forward 20 years after her sighting,
and I think it's probably one of the most compelling Mothman encounters on record.
[woman] Do I get nightmares from it?
Yeah, I do.
I've been frightened ever since then.
[uneasy music plays]
[woman] It was the first week of September.
It was right around Labor Day.
[uneasy music continues]
We had a barbecue in the backyard,
and it was about 9:30, ten o'clock at night.
I told my kids, "Get in the house and get ready for bed."
And they did.
So I'm cleaning up.
[uneasy music continues]
I was looking at the moonlight. It was beautiful.
And all of a sudden, I hear a "whoosh, whoosh, whoosh."
[wings flapping]
[Roxanne] That made me look up high in the sky.
And I see four giant figures.
[screeching]
[Roxanne] And I'm like, "Oh my God, what the hell is that?"
They had big bodies, and they were tall,
and they had, like, huge wings,
and they had red eyes.
[screeching]
[Roxanne] When they were flying, it wasn't like a bird. They weren't, like, tilted.
They were standing, and their wings were like bat wings, and they were huge.
We're talking massive.
And the third one,
he made eye contact with me.
I got so scared when I locked eyes with this thing.
You could tell it wasn't something good. You could feel it.
I dropped everything I was holding onto,
and I ran into my house.
I ran into the bathroom.
Threw water on my face.
[tense music plays]
Looked in the mirror and thought,
"Oh my God, what did you just see?"
I was shaking so bad, my teeth were chattering,
because I was in shock, complete shock.
Because I know what I just saw, but I don't believe what I just saw.
[Tobias] What's interesting about Roxanne's case
is that there were multiple entities described.
[Lon] Most of the sightings had been singular sightings,
but there had been a few reports of multiple beings.
Very few, but there had been.
[Tobias] Roxanne's experience is hard to dismiss,
because her observations were so specific,
and she was truly frightened.
I'm a strong woman from Chicago.
Chicago people don't scare easy.
But it scared the bejesus out of me. It really did.
And I was afraid to talk about it, so I've always kept it to myself.
But I'm talking now
because I don't want to live in fear, like I have for 20 years.
[Lon] I personally believe there have been thousands of eyewitnesses
to this phenomena.
You know, it's just a matter of them coming forward and telling us their story.
But there are a lot of people who don't wanna do that.
[Tobias] A very common narrative
is that witnesses will have this impossible experience,
and because we are a social species,
they want to share this with somebody.
A loved one. Could be a… a sibling, a spouse, a close friend, a parent.
Unfortunately, the most common response that they get
is to be laughed at, to not be taken seriously,
and, uh… and that can be very traumatic.
And often, it will lead to a witness not wanting to tell their story later.
[Jonathan] The very first person I told about it was my father.
He made fun of me and criticized me and made me feel silly about it.
Things like that are hard to understand for people,
so it's only natural, you know, to try to invalidate it.
So I wasn't too comfortable sharing with people afterwards.
[Paula] I told my sister, I told my boyfriend, other family members.
I could sense right away they weren't really interested,
or didn't believe me and kind of looked away,
so I would just stop.
[Roxanne] The fear of talking to anybody about it, it was enormous.
I didn't want nobody laughing at my children.
I didn't want nobody laughing at us. I didn't want people calling us names.
[Sandra] When you work for a school, like I did,
and then you have an employee that talks about this shadow person,
and it's not in their history books--
So you'd be known as crazy.
So I don't want to be labeled, you know.
So I just kept it to myself, basically.
[Lon] People don't want to be ridiculed. I get that. I understand it.
But this is something
that may have been the most profound thing that's happened in their lives,
and they don't understand it. They want answers.
People have all kinds of theories as to why these beings do show up.
Many people see the Mothman as a harbinger of… of doom.
A portent of disaster.
[Lon] There's a lot of bad incidents associated with the Mothman.
It has been seen in certain areas where there was a disaster.
Like Fukushima.
The Minneapolis bridge collapse over the river.
One of the atomic reactors at the Chernobyl atomic power plant
near the city of Kyiv was damaged,
and there is speculation in Moscow
that people were injured and may have died.
[Lon] Some people saw a huge avian-like being
before the Chernobyl incident
that people called "The Black Bird of Chernobyl."
And, of course, there was Point Pleasant.
The idea that the Mothman appears as some sort of prophet of doom
is popular in the paranormal community.
But there's no real consensus about it.
[growling]
[Lon] The biggest question I have is where they come from and why they're here.
I think all of us want to know that.
[Tobias] Some people think maybe they come from a parallel universe
or are extraterrestrials.
Some people like to think that, uh, maybe they are inter-dimensional creatures,
able to pop in and out of our three-dimensional perception
seemingly at will.
[Lon] Chicago has a very well-known paranormal history.
A lot of hauntings, a lot of UFO sightings.
Has it something to do with the lake itself?
Some people believe that.
[unsettling music plays]
[Tobias] Over the years, Lake Michigan has been at the center
of many strange and supernatural occurrences.
Hauntings, UFOs,
and even serpent creatures similar to the Loch Ness Monster
have been spotted in or around the lake.
There are many who believe the Mothman is just one more paranormal entity
that calls Lake Michigan home.
[Lon] I personally believe they may actually be inter-dimensional beings,
because there's so many instances where people will see it
and it'll just suddenly disappear.
One aspect about these sightings at O'Hare
is that there is a cemetery in that vicinity.
The Resthaven Cemetery.
There does seem to be a lot of Mothman activity around that cemetery.
We don't really know why.
Is this an access point for these beings?
That's hard to determine.
They're very fleeting sightings.
We haven't been able to get
a real decent photograph of one of these things.
[unsettling music plays]
Our objective is to put some real facts before the public
as to what is really going on.
[Tobias] Lon and I have a duty to continue to investigate reports
and seriously examine people's experiences.
The more of these reports that we're able to investigate,
the more attention drawn to this Mothman phenomenon.
Absolutely.
[Tobias] At the same time,
regardless of what you think the root phenomenon is,
if I can help somebody understand their experience,
that's what I wanna do.
[Roxanne] Talking to Tobias,
here is somebody that is listening to my story
and isn't making fun of me or double questioning me,
and letting me know it was okay to talk about it.
When I heard that other people had the same experience,
I felt like I actually belonged.
It was nice to talk to somebody that had knowledge about what I'd seen.
[Tobias] So you feel like this entity went out of its way to get your attention?
Yeah, it acknowledging me is what really freaked me out.
Interesting.
[Jonathan] It was nice validation to know that other people have seen this.
Here's this thing happening that no one's taking serious,
and, uh, more and more people are seeing it.
I think that people need to share their experiences.
They need to do it.
I mean, really need to do it, because there are people that will support you.
[Shana] You could see these two huge hind legs,
and you could see two perfect arms, elbows and all.
And you could see a short neck and a head.
It was very humanoid.
It's very concerning…
[Sandra] There's not one or two people that's making this up.
A lot of people saw this, so don't doubt.
Listen to other people.
Listen to what they have to say and believe it.
I think there's gonna be a lot of people that will open their eyes.
[Lon] We want the world to know that this is actually going on.
I think all paranormal investigators are seeking the truth.
That's what we want.
[Jonathan] Every time I look at the tree,
it still perplexes me.
Why did it want me to see it?
[Paula] If I saw it again, I would stare directly at it,
and I would say, "What are you? What do you want from me?"
[Roxanne] Were they here to warn somebody? Were they here to do destruction?
What are they really here for?
[Barbera] There's all these stories throughout the years
that we've read and seen about it,
but we know nothing about the Mothman.
[Lon] I don't know what it is, why it's happening.
Are they showing themselves to specific people?
What does it want from us?
To this point, we haven't figured it out.
[screeching]
[unsettling music plays]
[screeching]
[music fades]
[unsettling music plays]