I may be responsible for the whole Mothman hoakem.
Yeah, me.
In 1967, I was attending Ohio University(the Miskatonic of the Midwest), and from time to time, I hosted one of the first cable TV, local access programs, late at night.
This show was so lame it made Jerry's Kids look like the Olympic team, and since nobody ever knew when they might have to host the fool thing, there was no script.
It was aired on late Saturday night, mostly it ran old film clips for video and popular music for audio, but now and then, we who perpetrated the travesty felt moved to ad-lib some truly wretched comedy.
One night, having been roped into doing it yet again, and being stoked with several 3.2 Hudepohl lagers, I made a truly tasteless jape about the recent collapse of the Silver Bridge, and blamed the accident on the Point Pleasant Monster(which is what the creature was originally called.).
The monster had been reported months before, and had inspired groups of local teenagers to tromp about the woods, heavily armed and totally wasted on various brews and vegetable products.
It's a wonder nobody got killed.
Until I made that sick joke, the monster and the accident had never(to my knowledge) been associated.
A local outdoorsman, a Native American retired from the military and a sober, serious man, told me he suspected that what had been seen was a large crane, perhaps a sick or aged individual that dropped out of the flock as it migrated North for the Spring-he told me that these birds had red eyes and were close to five feet tall when standing erect(fear and the aforementioned fermented spirits and plant matter accounts for the discrepency in size).
A paranormal phenomena and UFO author produced the Mothman book many years later.
What have I done?

Hmmm, intresting if you are telling the truth
If not..shame on you.

Sad to say, it's true as far as nearly fifty year old memory can be.
The movie brought the whole thing back to mind- I loved it, by the way, grand bit of filmaking.
Then that despicable little skink tried his lame prank, and got me irked enough to own up.
I think I've posted parts of this story elsewhere(maybe even here), but never the whole shameful episode.
If I was part of this, at least I liked the film.

Yes the film was really good but back on topic here why dont you tell news agencies or something?

Although it might open a pandoras box, and make you unpopular, this does seem to be "the right thing to do" if indeed you are resposible.

one of the steps of the right thing to do actually, a full and common knowlegde confession if you will, is the right thing to do, just to finally clear up the uncertainty.

This is as far as I'm going with it.
Point Pleasant has invested a fair sum of money in their Mothman attraction, I have no idea how many people, if any, saw that crummy show, and it's the author of the book that bears the blame for making a magilla out of the whole thing.
Besides, I liked the movie, maybe it'll have legs.
America needs a new crypto-monster, Bigfoot is getting a little old, and the chupacapra is a joke already.
If I helped invent a new hobgoblin, it was not with evil intent and I see no sin upon me.
It'll be our little secret.

A thought crossed my foggy mind a while ago-how far back does this go?
I made my joke in 1967 or '68, can't quite remember, the bridge fell in'67, when did people begin to talk about the monster, and connect it with the bridge.
We can't trust the guy who wrote the book, for he hath a vested interest, and I'd basically forgotten the whole thing until the movie came out.
I recall quite clearly(for what that might be worth) that nobody called it the Mothman at the time, they called it the Monster, or perhaps, the Birdman(that's vague, may not be right.).
And darn it, it was a good movie.

Watch yer words. Chupacabra being a joke? Hmph. Tell that to Puerto Rico, and the rest of Latin America!

i hope your telling the truth now

Yea im pretty sure people are getting tired of hearing of the great yeti or something *sigh* these people are so hard to entertain

It's all true.
I never said I saw it, or even the crane, but I did make a joke about it.
And from such small seed do mighty monster legends grow.
But, I can't believe that someone else didn't think of it too, so mayhap I am Innocente!
Wierd turn of events.

Hmm..interesting if you are indeed telling the truth.

Why does everybody want to say I'm lying?
The sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster are real, but a guy couldn't have made a bad joke, and gotten someone thinking?
I don't beat myself up over this-it was an innocent act by a very young man-but I doubt my name would echo down the halls of fame because of it.
Does anyone here think the Mothman is real?
(Besides the despicable, pizza-faced skink boy, that is.)

Yes I have heard of this theory that the "Mothman" was responsible for the collapse of the bridge and maybe you were the one who fueled that idea, but you yourself said that sightings were being reported way before then...so I don't see how you could've put the entire Mothman legend into motion.

Wow. So Mothman's a hoax... i didnt even know about him till i came here. O well.

Hey could you tell us your adress ? so if you are lieing the hardcore mothman fans can rip you apart lol

Now if you are telling the truth i have to admit i am in total gratitude of you however this does not explain the photographic evidence clear us up on this

I'd like to know when it started being called the Mothman.
As I said, it was called the Point Pleasant Monster or maybe the Birdman(that's a foggy one, folks).
These things snowball, they take on a life of their own, and they never, ever, go away.
I like that.

OOOOH, you liked it did ya? tell the whole world you made a fake monster, years after it started? why didn't you start speaking when the books were made? the movies? the Point pleasent MUSUEM?!? I am a true, honest-to-goodness cryptozoologist, and I got the degree to prove it.....and you, sir, have done something that only weasels ands comic villians do.....you disgrace the society of cryptozoology with your lies!

There, I said it, and that's my opinoin, and if ya got a problem, then say so.
And as for the Mods, I have right of speech.....it's law, baby.

I don't know how responsible I might be-the whole thing snowballed some twenty years after I made my joke.
As for cryptozooology, well, show me some results, your results.
Blame the guy who wrote the book, he never talked to me, nor should he.
It was a good movie, and the town needed a boost.
So untwist yer knickers, nobody here tried to fool anyone.
Blame Boonee's Farm and Hudepohl for the original reports, I never said I saw the thing, then or now.
Why is it that everybody on the web thinks they're so important, arbiters of morals and custodians of knowledge?
So I say, a fig, sir, a fig for you!
There.

Anger Managment, man. He admited his greatest secret.

If that was my greatest secret, well, I'd be a pretty sad sack.
The Mothman is fiction, but not my fiction, it was a hysterical craze in the '60's.
Funny, these things are forgotten for decades, then everybody saw it all.
Cryptozooology and Parapsycology are psuedosciences, this character Chupacapra King is an uncouth barbarian who failed to read my posts.
But at least he can spell, and he uses punctuation, so I won't invoke Yog-Sothoth and cause his underwear drawer to hold only odd sox.
That's a bad one!

Mors,

Sadly I have a copy of the Keel book I think you discredit it earlier in one of your posts. I'm just re-reading the first few chapters for some info for you to get a fix on when it started being called 'Mothman' by Keel's accounting in case you can't find anything more accurate. I'll type a few sections, pretty much contiguous, that gives a dating structure at least from that book. I hope it helps ya

The .... indicates my editing out portions.


At 11:30 P.M. on the night of November 15, 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant, Mr. and Mrs. Roger Scarberry and Mr. and Mrs. Steve Mallette, were driving through the TNT area in the Scarberrys' 1957 Chevy. They were looking for friends but no one seemed to be out that night. All of the twisting back roads were deserted. The few homes scattered among the igloos were dark.
.... 
Roger slammed on his brakes.
.... 
The lights bobbed away from the building and the startled foursome saw they were attached to some huge animal.
.... 
"It was shaped like a man, but bigger," Roger said later. "Maybe six and a half or seven feet tall And it had big wings folded against its back." "But it was those eyes that got us," Linda declared. "It had two big eyes like automobile reflectors." "They were hypnotic," Roger continued. "For a minute we could only stare at it. I couldn't take my eyes off it."
....
The next morning Sheriff George Johnson called a press conference. Local reporters interviewed the four witnesses. Mrs. Mary Hyre sent the story out on the AP wire and that evening the "Bird" was the chief topic at supper tables throughout the Ohio valley. Some anonymous copy editor gave it a name, spun off from the Batman comic character who was then the subject of a popular TV series. He tagged the creature Mothman.

Darn good research, and I thank you.
All I ever heard was the Birdman, or the Monster.
I still think Hudepohl Laager, Boone's Farm and thai stick had a lot to do with it.
Franly, I hadn't thought about it for years, but the movie jogged my memory.
Point Pleasant is happy, so, let the mortals have their simple pleasures!

I hope you didn't make up the "Skunky Monkey" who lives near the New Gorge Bridge or on Apple Pie Knob outside of New Salem. I knew a guy who saw him. One of the guys who was a craftsman and painter at the Fort New Salem Appalachian Folklore Preservation Project.

You hosted a cable program in 1967???


Lapi'che

Guys the first Mothman ighting was in 1966 in Point Pleasant so at best you started rumor of it being associated with silver bridge
not mothan himself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman

This old freedom of speech thing never gets old. It makes me giggle everytime I read someone post it.

I remember Boone's Farm as well At the least, you might have helped spread the 'mystery' of the Mothman legend. If Penn and Teller do a Cryptozoology 2 episode of BS, maybe contact them, they might use your story!

Point Pleasant can use the cash I'm sure from the movie's spotlight on them, I mean it must cost thousands alone in town revenue buying mothballs to keep Mothman away!




Yep thanks, the @#$@# wiki knows all! I was trying to get a more precise date of when the term 'Mothman' was used rather then a first sighting for Mors. Had I used the Wiki it would haved saved me some typing!

Hi I found another article on mothman.

Hopes this helps further narrow the date I doubt if we will ever know who first coined the term "Mothman".
http://www.prairieghosts.com/moth.html

Very interesting...

I have a question does anyone else think mothman seem very similar man bat creature from batman comics and cartoons?

Some fast recap, then I'm done with this-due respect, but it's being beaten to death.
1. I NEVER saw the frackin Mothperson
2.the program was very crude, Athens, Ohio had a community antenna system because there was no TV reception there except for EVP! The studio was a sort of cabin by the main tower.
3. I forgot all about this for years.
4. I feel no more guilt about the monster story, because I didn't have anything to do with it.
5. The whole point I made was that I may have begun the association of the bridge with the monster, or not, l feel very bad about making that joke-people died.
6. Somebody would have had the idea at some point.
7. This Mothman thing started some 20 years after the fact, just like Roswell-thus does folklore sprout, blossom(seeds grow in piles of crap, y'know)and come to flower, tended by the authors of sensational stories.
8. I think the thing may have been a crane, things look bigger in the dark, when you're frightened, remember, the eyes of many creatures glow red in the night when exposed to light, it's called the tapetum.
9. The monster is a crock-the bridge fell from a design flaw, and the monster was a crock!
That's it, fini, thank everyone for all the help, but we put another one to rest, kids.
The movie bombed, the museum is a sideshow and the book is a farrago of lies.
I confessed, you excoriated, it's done!