Since my first blog post, I have now decided to firmly stick with looking into the Mothman, though for now, I haven’t settled on what specific aspect of this phenomenon I want to focus on. When looking for more info, I found the best key terms were the rather obvious ones: “Mothman” and “point pleasant, West Virginia”. Using these searches, I mostly turned up various articles on supposed sightings, a page for the Mothman Museum, the Mothman Festival, and several Wikipedia pages relating to it. Wikipedia gave a lot of good preliminary information on Mothman that could help guide me into a more specific lens to look into. According to Wikipedia, the Mothman was reportedly seen from November 15, 1966, to December 15, 1967, in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Mothman was popularized by John Keel’s book, The Mothman Prophecies, released in 1975, which was later adapted into a movie of the same name, released in 2002. Also in 2002, Point Pleasant held its first Mothman Festival, which was created after a community planning session on how to increase tourism to the city. It also gave basic details on several alleged Mothman accounts in other cities, as well several potential explanations for what people saw, such as owls or cranes. The most controversial part of the Mothman discussion is whether or not the Mothman was a real entity. From there, people tend to either argue about what Mothman “really” was and why it appeared, or what people actually saw and why they thought it was Mothman.
Looking through the various Google databases, I found mostly the same stuff as preliminary searches, though I also found a book called, Mothman: Evil Incarnate, written by Lauren Coleman and released in 2017. Lauren Coleman is described as one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, and his book is intended as a companion to Keel’s book, where Coleman goes into more details of what compromised Keel’s book as well as compiling the most up to date information on Mothman. Searching through Amazon mostly revealed various episodes of TV shows where people search for Mothman and or other paranormal encounters, as well as people selling a wide variety of Mothman themed clothes and stickers and whatnot.
The best resources I found were the aforementioned book by John Keel, which I managed to procure a copy of. It goes into his investigation into alleged Mothman sightings of near Point Pleasant from 1966 and 1967, and combines this with his own theories on UFOs and other supernatural things, leading up to his connection between the Mothman and the infamous collapse of the Silver Bridge. The other useful site I found was Keelian.org, which compiled alleged Mothman encounters from 1966 to 1967 with added sources as to where they got the report from. These reports are complete with a description of what went down, as well as a summary of the description of what the being seen was.
This looks like some great stuff. It's only by reading through the material that you can start to see the angle that would most appeal to you.
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