Mothman: The Red-Eyed Thing of Point Pleasant (1966)

ARCHIVE FILE · Event year: 1966. This happened in 1966–67 and is not breaking news. It’s part of the Redacted Weekly evergreen archive.

What happened

On the night of 15 November 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, drove into the police station with a story. Near a former World War II munitions site that locals called “the TNT area,” they said, they had seen a large black creature with eyes that “glowed red” standing by the road. Local newspapers soon gave it a name. Point Pleasant has had a famous monster ever since, and later a stainless-steel statue of it.

The first newspaper story ran in the Point Pleasant Register on 16 November 1966, under the headline “Couples See Man-Sized Bird … Creature … Something.” The headline itself shows how unsure everyone was. According to e-WV, the West Virginia Encyclopedia, sightings “totaled 26 over a one-year span,” centered on the abandoned TNT plant.

!The Mothman statue in Point Pleasant, West Virginia

The Mothman statue by Bob Roach in downtown Point Pleasant. Photo: Csassen13, Wikimedia Commons, CC0. It shows the statue, not any witnessed creature.

The footage

No film or photograph of the 1966–67 sightings is known, so there’s no video evidence to embed. The record from that year is witness statements and newspaper coverage. The best-known later image is a still photo published by WCHS-TV in 2016, taken by an anonymous driver on Route 2 in Mason County. It is discussed under the research findings below.

Timeline

• 15 Nov 1966: Two couples report a red-eyed winged figure near the TNT area to police.
• 16 Nov 1966: The Point Pleasant Register runs “Couples See Man-Sized Bird … Creature … Something.”
• Late Nov 1966: More reports follow, including two volunteer firemen who visited the TNT area three nights after the first sighting.
• 1966–67: Sightings total 26 over a year, per e-WV.
• 15 Dec 1967: The Silver Bridge collapses at rush hour; 46 people die.
• 4 Oct 1968: The NTSB issues an interim report on the collapse.
• 16 Dec 1970: The NTSB adopts its final highway accident report.
• 1970: Gray Barker’s The Silver Bridge links the creature to the disaster in a “heavily fictionalized” way, per Wikipedia.
• 1975: John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies ties the sightings to UFOs, “men in black” and the bridge.
• 2002: The Richard Gere film comes out, and the first Mothman Festival is held. Joe Nickell publishes “‘Mothman’ Solved!” and then visits the site.
• Sept 2003: Bob Roach’s 12-foot metallic statue is installed downtown.
• 2006: The Mothman Museum and Research Center opens.
• 2016: WCHS-TV publishes an anonymous driver’s photo.
• 2017: An online compilation lists 55 Chicago “Mothman” reports.

What witnesses reported

The accounts below are the witnesses’ own words as later reported. None of them can be checked now.

According to the Wikipedia summary of the record, one of the first witnesses described a “slender, muscular man” about seven feet tall with white wings. The group said they sped away at up to 100 mph while the thing kept pace with their car, screeching, as far as the city limits. Quoting Keel’s book, Nickell records that the couples described it as “shaped like a man, but bigger,” that it “wasn’t even flapping its wings,” and that it “squeaked like a big mouse.”

Two volunteer firemen said it was a “large bird with red eyes.” In Keel’s telling, as quoted by Nickell, they were positive: “It was definitely a bird.” A local contractor said that when he aimed a flashlight at something in a field, its eyes glowed “like bicycle reflectors.” Many witnesses described the thing as headless, with shining eyes near the top of its body.

What the research found

The federal record on the bridge is unambiguous. The National Transportation Safety Board’s final report, HAR-71-01, adopted on 16 December 1970, is the primary document on the collapse. Its abstract, indexed by the Transportation Research Board’s TRID database, says 46 people died, nine were injured, and 31 of the 37 vehicles on the bridge fell with it. The board put the cause down to a cleavage fracture in eyebar 330 at joint C13N of the north suspension chain. A critical-size flaw had grown over the structure’s 40-year life through stress corrosion and corrosion fatigue. The flaw sat where inspectors had no way to see it. Copies of the report are also catalogued by HathiTrust. None of it involves anything supernatural.