An Update on the Legendary Chicago Mothman
Winged humanoid and harbinger of death? Or a large bird? You be the judge.
The Mothman is the stuff of urban legend, with the first well-known sighting occurring in a small town in West Virginia in the 1960s. Since then, the Mothman has sometimes been called a “harbinger of cataclysmic events.”
The legend of the Mothman hit the mainstream when writer John Keel, wrote The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story about a bridge collapse that killed 46 people in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Keel believed a rash of sightings prior to the bridge collapse of a “winged humanoid” was meant as a warning. The movie, The Mothman Prophesies, was made in 2002 and based on Keel’s book.
Mothman in Chicago
But the Mothman has not been seen only around West Virginia. The Singular Fortean society is a website dedicated to exploring unusual phenomena, and their team has created a timeline of Mothman sightings in the greater Chicago area, mainly around Lake Michigan.
It should be noted, the occurrence of the Chicago Mothman sightings is not only being noticed by a website that tracks strange stuff. Chicago NPR station, WBEZ did an in-depth report about the Chicago Mothman in 2019.
There is also a documentary, On the Trail of the Lake Michigan Mothman currently streaming on Amazon Prime, that covers a string of sightings that occurred in Chicago, Michigan, and Indiana in 2017.
I wrote about the Chicago Mothman at the beginning of this year. Since my writing, the Singular Fortean Society has tracked additional sightings.
Latest sightings of the Mothman in Northern Illinois
The timeline begins with a sighting from 1957 in Braidwood, Illinois where a man out hunting reported seeing a “winged creature” with “the body of a large man.”
According to the timeline, in 2021 there were five instances of people reporting seeing some kind of winged humanoid figure flying above them around Lake Michigan.
The most recent sighting around Chicago was over the summer when three people reported a “security response to the appearance of a red-eyed winged humanoid at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.”
Could it be Sandhill Cranes?
I hate to spoil the fun, but sandhill cranes are present in large numbers around Lake Michigan. They are large birds with great wingspans. And their loud screeching squawk could explain why some people have reported the Mothman “screaming” at them.
In 1966, a wildlife biologist, Dr. Robert L. Smith and associate professor of wildlife biology at West Virginia University told a local newspaper, The Herald Dispatch, that it was his belief the many Mothman sightings were merely sandhill cranes, “From all the descriptions I have read about this ‘thing’ it perfectly matches the sandhill cranes,” he said. “I definitely believe that’s what these people are seeing.”
Other explanations have included owls and even unidentified airplanes or drones.
It’s hard to know what the people reporting Mothman sightings have actually seen. I can bet that a large bird with a wingspan of over five feet squawking loudly and heading straight for you in the dark might make a person think they are seeing something otherworldly.
However, it’s a lot more fun to think something more enigmatic is occurring.
