Have you ever heard of the Mothman? This enigmatic creature, first spotted in 1966, is widely rumored to be an ultra-terrestrial being capable of traversing other dimensions. Join us as we walk through the misty streets of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, the Mothman's reputed stomping grounds and take a closer look at the red-eyed humanoid that continues to captivate imaginations worldwide. We will recount John Keel's seminal work, The Mothman Prophecies, and probe deeper into the uncanny correlation between these mysterious sightings and nearby military facilities.
Stay hooked as we delve into theories that claims these sightings could be nothing more than elaborate hoaxes or publicity stunts. Experience a fascinating exploration of apophenia, a psychological phenomenon that could potentially explain our obsession with cryptids. But it doesn't end with the Mothman. We'll also venture into the realm of the infamous Chupacabra, a blood-sucking creature eerily similar to our red-eyed friend. Rounding off with an intellectually stimulating discourse on the chilling instances of animal mutilations linked to these elusive creatures, we aim to offer a fresh perspective on the mysteries of our cosmos.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Alien Talk Podcast. This is where we discuss all things about aliens and UFOs and where we always push the limits of our understanding. We are your host, Joe Landry and Laurie Oldford, here again to bring you a fascinating show out across the worldwide web as we continue exploring the manifold topics surrounding the idea of extraterrestrial beings, the mystery of UFO encounters, the studies of paranormal occurrences and other perplexing enigmas that seem to be happening on a regular basis in this world of ours. We're very glad to have you here with us for yet another great discussion, and, with Halloween just around the corner, there really isn't a better topic to discuss than the idea of ultra-terrestrial monsters, and if you're wondering what that is, well then, I guess the place you need to go is Point Pleasant, West Virginia, isn't that right, Laurie?
Laurie:
Yeah, just like how Roswell, New Mexico, has all kinds of attractions and memorabilia surrounding the 1947 year of full crash, point Pleasant, west Virginia, exhibits the same kind of folklore and publicity, with events devoted to something known as the Mothman, and it's a big deal. Up in that neck of the woods there's an actual festival about Mothman. It's held on the third weekend of September every year and, from what I can tell, it's on par with Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, with people dressing up, and doing little rituals, and playing games and, of course, drinking a lot.
Joe:
Well, for sure it wouldn't be legit as a Mothman Day if there wasn't any beer to go around. That, and pie- eating contests, right?
Laurie:
Yeah, right, so yeah. The Mothman is often described as a humanoid creature that was first witnessed on several incidents between November 15, 1966, to December 15, 1967. The first sighting was written about in the Point Pleasant Register under the title "Couple Sea Man-sized Bird Creature something, and after this story was published, other newspapers began carrying it and it soon spread like wildfires throughout the United States.
Joe:
Yeah, so in our previous episode we looked at the enigma of the Skinwalkers from Native American legends, which has recently become popularized in the entertaining documentaries on television about the ranch that goes by that name.
Joe:
Skinwalker Ranch has been recognized as a place with a strange energy, in which all kinds of bizarre paranormal activity have been reported, some of it even sinister and harmful, and we alluded to how it could be attributed to the existence of portals in which entities are able to pass from one dimension into another, such that it instantaneously jumps across space and time, and this being like wormholes.
Joe:
Wormholes are windows, or like tunnels, that connect different points throughout the cosmos, like little shortcuts that get you from one point in space-time to another without actually having to travel between those two points. It's like instantaneous, and, of course, the question to be asked is if such a phenomenon is real. Could intelligence that originates outside of our spectrum of energy, that is manifested in the form of beings that appear different from having traversed from other points in space-time, even from other points throughout the multiverse? If there is such a thing, what would such a thing look like? What would such a creature or being look like that would come from another dimension? Would it look like a monster that someone in our world that exists within our energy spectrum might call it a mothman.
Laurie:
Yeah, right., Now,t his tale about the Mothman began when there are two couples from the area of Point Pleasant, near the state line of West Virginia and Ohio, reported that they saw a large white creature whose eyes glowed red and that it was standing on the side of the road near an old, World War II munitions plant. It looked like a big moth Now, hence the word "moth man. Now remember the story I told you in our last episode about my friend's family member who said he witnessed a creature standing alongside the road with red eyes that ran with his car keeping up with him. Well, in this situation they described a creature as a cylinder, muscular man about seven feet tall with white wings, and said that it wasn't possible to discern its face because of the focusing in on its eyes. The couples were so stressed that they spit off at a high rate of speed, just like my friend's friend, but the creature flew after their car, making a screeching sound as it chased after them.
Laurie:
Again, like I said in the previous episode, it sounds as though the movie Jeepers Creepers was inspired by the Mothman, but the very fact that it was supposedly seen there in old military installation brings up the whole idea of it being tied to some kind of government research project? Possibly, and just like the urban myths about Skinwalker Ranch having something to do with top secret ET research and reverse engineering, we get the same guess there here, with some otherworldly and unrecognizable beast being spotted near a place where there was, or at least at one time, a military operation going on. Now, that's not to say that there is a connection between the Mothman and a munitions plant, but there is almost always an odd coincidence of strange and mysterious things like it being reported near some military facility.
Joe:
Yeah, and then this was all later documented by John Keel in his 1975 book, the Mothman Prophecies, stating that there were some paranormal type occurrences connected with some sightings and contributed to the collapse of the Silver Bridge, which an incident that happened here, point pleasant, not too long after this Mothman sighting in the mid-60s Now, over 40 people died in this collapse of the Silver Bridge and the book later became a movie in 2002 with Richard Geer and called the Mothman Prophecies. If you haven't seen this movie, it's about a reporter who investigates the story of the Mothman. The main character is upset about his wife's death two years prior to the time. He's doing this in coverage and investigation and he's sent to look into the story and this leads him to Point Pleasant, west Virginia. There he is made aware of sightings surrounding a strange creature, that being the Mothman. He gets caught up in strange and mysterious occurrences at his work. This is bizarre things, you know, ghostly things. It causes him to have hope and the connection with his deceased wife, and that's kind of in a nutshell. I don't want to give the whole movie away.
Joe:
So Keel was a paranormal investigator who later claimed that the Mothman and other aberrations may be a manifestation of what he coined ultra terrestrial intelligence, which originates outside of our spectrum of the energy that we have thus far been able to measure and detect with our senses. This is to say that it possesses the capacity to transcend dimensions in ways that we cannot. When we think about something as ultra terrestrial, we're implying that it is not only from beyond our earth, without having traveled through space and time to get here, but from beyond what our senses can detect within the parameters of our reality on earth. So this includes sightings which would be considered as spiritual encounters, visions, miracles, things that happen here or are seen here but didn't travel here. They just sort of popped up here.
Laurie:
Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting and you know that movie,
Laurie:
It's actually a pretty good movie. But what I was saying about the movie Jeepers Creepers and that there may have been influences from the story that drew on maybe the winged demon idea, but one thing is for certain is that the opening of that movie is actually based on somewhat of a true story. It's very similar to the killer in 1990 named Dennis DePew, who murdered his wife and placed her body behind a schoolhouse after shooting her in the head. He was never charged with the murder because he killed himself after an intense gun battle with police. So, just like in Jeepers Creepers, when DePue was attempting to get rid of his wife's body on a lonely road, ray and Marie Thornton witnessed him unloading the body from the van. And, just like in the movie, they were playing the license plate game. When they noticed the van behind a church, Mary Thornton described the body covered in a bloodstained sheet, and that's when DePew chased after them but broke off the chase, which is much like the beginning to the movie Jeepers Creepers.
Joe:
Right, and so this is what Keel was kind of alluding to when he talked about this interdimensional ultra intelligence, or being, if you want to call it, in this case, they're actually the ideas that they're just sort of floating around. For quite some time, and even before UFO sightings became a big thing, this idea of interdimensional travel has been around, it was labeled as the parallel universe hypothesis and in modern day astrophysics this is alluded to as to the multiverse.
Laurie:
Yeah, well, and what this states is that the methodological creatures, the aliens, the flying saucers and all the other strange paranormal phenomena that has been observed throughout human history, like the Mothman and the Skinwalkers, are the result of beings traveling interdimensionally. So, Joe, like you brought up, the reason that they seem to come and go without any kind of detection is because they're not traveling in the way that we see, you know, like a ship coming toward you on the sea, like a car coming towards you in the opposite direction on the highway, or a person walking towards you from a distance. They enter our universe through interdimensional travel from a different universe or from galaxy to galaxy, possibly through something like a wormhole or a stargate portal.
Joe:
Yeah, and this notion of interdimensionality or ultra- terrestrial intelligence, like I said, it was actually an idea I've been floating around for quite some time, and it was actually discussed among the theosophists, the occultists, the psychics and the spiritualists of the Victorian era, that being notable figures like Helena Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce. So even back then they talked about things called metaphysical planes and etheric bodies that exist above the plateau of matter, that being a reference to our universe, and could be moved as a result of energy that is, above that of electromagnetic waves, that being the energy that we are able to sense within our physical environments. So, many researchers who have studied the Mothman narrative attest that it is not based on any real creature that exists out there. Now, most of the data suggests that the story is a hoax or else part of some form of mass hysteria, like that often displayed with the Loch Ness Monster, the Jersey Devil, the Birdman, the Yeti and the Chupacabra.
Joe:
So now consider English professor Jan Harold Brunvand from University of Utah, who speculated that many of the testimonies given by people who saw the Mothman and also claimed to have had experienced UFO sightings as well.
Joe:
He also noted that recounting of the Mothman reports that had taken place from 1966 to 1967, usually stated that at least 100 people claimed to have seen this thing, but then later he deduced that reports given by them actually paralleled stories that were found to be consistent with children's books or comics, and actually that almost all of the sensationalized accounts about Mothman had failed to be connected with identifiable people. Brunvand found elements in common among the Mothman reports and much older folk tales, suggesting that something real may have triggered repressed memories that had become interwoven within existing folklore. In other words, he's saying people are making it up based off of fictional stories that they read about or heard about long before they made the reports. The notion and the image was already in their mind before the experience they had, and that, of course, is always an investigative problem to get around, which is the realization that many of these sightings are described in ways that they're right out of novels and movies, right.
Laurie:
Yeah right. Well then there is also a paranormal researcher, Joe Nickell, who has studied many claims of unusual sightings, one of them being the famous Barney and Betty Hill case, and he has said that he thinks the Mothman might involve actual pranks and that a number of hoaxes followed were for publicity generated by the original reports, such as a group of construction workers who tied flashlights to helium balloons. Now Nicol attributes the Mothman stories to sightings of owls as a likely hypothesis associated with the. You know it is. You know, at the time of the original sightings there was a flock of sandhill crane, due primarily to the size of the bird as well as the British flesh around the crane's eyes. So, to me this seems a little too simplistic. Of course, you know, people can misperceive things, but a man sized bird with glowing red eyes doesn't seem to match up with what should be easily recognizable as an owl, or a crane for that matter.
Joe:
Yes, indeed, and just like how we mentioned last time, you know, with the process called apophenia, where an observer, the mind of the observer, finds patterns within a random assortment of objects, such as a phantom image forms. And this is evident when we think we see the shape of something in the shadows, or with how a piece of large furniture seen in the corner of our eyes in a room, might be perceived, as for brief seconds, as being a person or an animal or some kind of anomalous entity. So, Laurie, you brought up the Chupacabra a few times, and this is another cryptid type creature and its name is derived from the Spanish words for sucks goats, and that's because they are believed to suck the blood from goats, just like a vampire, and in some ways it is like a Skinwalker, and in some ways it's also like the Mothman, and you have to wonder if these aren't all depictions of the same thing.
Laurie:
Yeah, you're right. Well, you know, the most common description we get about the chupacabra is that it is not a bird but of a reptile like this, about four feet tall and said to have leathery or you know, scales and greenish, gray skin with pointed quills down its back. It has also been said to be a humanoid creature, like the skinwalker, yet have the body of a canine. The most reports about the chupacabra that come from Latin America was the most reported in 1995 by Puerto Rican citizens, also in Chile and also in Argentina, where the descriptions are similar to reptilian and alien, like beings around the size of a small bear with spines on the neck to the down throughout the, I guess to the end of the tail or to the top of the tail. So with these kinds of descriptions, it is also easy to see the similarity of the Reptilian ET. Now some of you may be thinking that, well, it can't be because reptilians are so much taller than four feet. Well, if these sightings are legitimate and authentic and you have to take into consideration the similarities of these sightings between cultures, you know, could these be children reptilians? Especially when you know, when you read stories like that of 1975, where a series of livestock killings and mocha.
Laurie:
Puerto Rico were blamed on the Vampire of Moca. People first thought that these killings were committed by Satanists. Well, more killings were reported later on that year, in which the carcasses were said to have been bled dry. They've been bled out with other small circular incisions on the body. The locals blamed the chupacabra once again for the unexplained deaths of the eight sheep, all with three punctured wounds in their chest from which the blood was drained. A few months later, an eyewitness reported that about 150 farm animals and pits were killed, and the circumstances surrounding it sound very much like what has been found in the cases of the mysterious cattle mutilations that we talked about in one episode from a while back.
Joe:
So, the chupacabra lore that we have today is pretty recent. You know that 1975 story from Puerto Rico is really the point where it all starts. However, it may merely be the retelling of much older legends you know, like that of the Skinwalkers or some other kind of dark spirits. So, could the same be said of the Mothman? Is that, too, a retelling of an older story?
Joe:
We all know that tales of blood being drained or sucked from something, or ones that are centuries old, right the legends of vampires that are undead and live off the blood of a living person or a living animal, popularized by the Eastern European version, you know, like with Dracula from Transylvania, but it is found in many other cultures as well. The Asanbosam is a vampire-like creature talked about in many places in Africa and in the Caribbean, and it has the ability to disappear and reappear, and it also cannot be killed by ordinary means. So, are vampires also entities that you could call interdimensional, or all of these different stories connected in such a way that they are really referring to the same thing, that being beings that are able to traverse space and time by crossing interdimensionally?
Laurie:
That could be. Well, I think that is quite possible actually.
Laurie:
I mean, if there is any validity to the idea of interdimensional ultra-terrestrial beings, then the way our own senses would pick it up would be confusing to us. So it's funny how you should mention cattle mutilations because in an article by Rachel Monroe in the New Yorker titled" Enduring Panic About Cow Mutilations, dated May 8th of this year, this is still going on quite a bit. On April 19th, only six months ago, the Madison County Sheriff's Department in Texas, they put out a Facebook post mentioning the death and mutilation of six cows, and it happened in a community that was north of Houston, where within a week, this post had gone international and the cows were found in six locations with their tongues and part of their flesh around the cheeks precisely removed, with no signs of struggle. No predators or birds would scavenge the remains for several weeks after death, per the Sheriff's Department. A seventh cow was found not long after in a similar way. So Facebook commentators or commenters blamed some cults or Satanic rituals and even the chupacabras, possibly even a serial killer or aliens.
Joe:
Maybe all of the above,
Laurie:
Yeah, all of the above exactly, but this cow story caught the attention of paranormal investigator Chuck Zuchowski in Colorado Springs.
Laurie:
He specializes in mutilation investigations, much like how Linda Moulton Howe does. So the removed and missing tongues of the animals have been found in reports of what seemed like silent cases dating back all the way to 1869. And it wasn't until the 1970s, when there seemed to be a surge of them, that public attention became more attuned to it. There was almost a panic among the ranchers back then, and it was then that the phenomenon took hold, to be carried by the media in its most well known form, that being cows drained of their blood and their body parts, typically the eyes, tongues, cheeks and sex organs removed with surgical precision. And some of these mutilations were accompanied by other strange and seemingly inexplicable signs circular depressions in the surrounding grass, animals with broken legs, as if they've been dropped from great heights, predators that keep away from the carcass, perhaps sensing that something is wrong. And the thing is it is still going on. Even if there has been less press coverage over the years, it's still going on.
Joe:
So, we have to ask if these accounts of a Chupacabra attacking animals are related to other cases of animal mutilation, and could interdimensional creatures be killing them for food and feeding their young, or is it for some other reason that we don't know about Now? As far-fetched and outlandish as that may sound, it is important to point out that the direct evidence actually does support it, in that there is none. What I mean is that these mutilations happen with stealth as well as with precision, with no sign of anything being around to cause it. The perpetrators of it know exactly how to remove all the blood and all the organs, often with just a fuse and incisions, and then they're gone without a trace and with no one to witness it. If they are seen from a distance or at night, whatever they may be doing dissecting perhaps, may be perceived as though the thing it looks like about four feet in height, maybe it's hunched over performing the incisions, the dissection, but usually it's like whatever it did, it vanishes in the thin air with no one to see it and really no trace of evidence of anything being there. In this case, it's almost like the lack of evidence of a physical evidence suggests the possibility of movement through another dimension in which evidence wouldn't be seen by our own physical techniques of finding it.
Joe:
So, there's a good book that I really think does a thorough job of examining these creatures, not only in regard to the sort of mental processes that are involved in shaping people's perception when they claim to see them, but also in the symbolic importance they play in the storytelling of a particular culture. It is titled The Compendium of Magical Beasts: An Anatomical Study of Cryptozoology's Most Elusive Beings, by Veronica Wigberht- Blackwater and Melissa Brinks. So, it's important to understand the psychological importance of these things like the Mothman, and that it brings to surface those deepest images that have been sublimated into our unconscious. Now, Carl Jung believed that such monsters come out of the archetypes of the mind to be reflective of some aspect of our collective memory. In this way, they are symbols that are just as significant as our beliefs about the spiritual world, and also in the way that we think about something as supernatural.
Laurie:
Right, well, sometimes these creatures are believed to be benevolent, who make their appearances to help someone by bringing good luck or sharing an important secret, or performing some magic trick that bestow blessings. We're all familiar with such fairy tale figures like sprites, elves and leprechauns, but sometimes they are evil and want to bring about mischief and mayhem. Our mythologies are full of such imagery, but what if the strange aberrations that people have been seeing, that appear here one minute and then completely gone the next, are a result of beings who have instantaneously transitioned into our point in space and time from another place far away in the cosmos, or from another dimension altogether? Could they not only be extraterrestrial but also interdimensional? With that said, this reminds me of an eerie story a friend of mine once told me about when we were young.
Laurie:
In our church going days.
Laurie:
He told us that his cousin was awakened one night around midnight to about 1 am by a thump.
Laurie:
He set up in his bed and looked out into the hallway and saw a hairy black creature passing by his bedroom door, pulling what looked like to be a naked body of a man with a rope.
Laurie:
It was walking slowly and groaning as it walked by. My friend's cousin, of course, was terrified after this and took forever to get back to sleep that night. I can't believe he actually went back to sleep, but eventually he was able to, and when he awoke the next morning he assumed it was all a nightmare, of course, until he walked out of his room and then he saw that the hallway rug that runner that runs along the hallway was messed up, like someone had dragged somebody over it. Shortly thereafter, a phone rang at his house and he overheard I believe it was either his father or his mother talking to someone about his uncle who had died earlier in the morning. Needless to say, he was scared to death after this, because now he wasn't believing it was a nightmare anymore, but this was some sort of omen, or even something real that crossed a dimension through his home. According to my friend, this uncle was a sinful man.
Joe:
That's creepy.
Joe:
That is definitely a scary anecdote.
Joe:
Stories like these are everywhere and Christian churches and a lot of Christian congregations, Christian circles, and religious circles make them up to scare you into the straight, narrow road of righteous living, to repent, so you don't become a victim of Hell. This is like that story you told me about a female preacher who came to your church to give a sermon, and she gave a story about a fellow who refused to repent. He just refused to convert to Christianity and accept Jesus in his heart as his savior, and then died in his sins. Then, before he died, which was in a hospital bed, I remember you telling me that he was yelling about this big, black, hairy creature trying to take him away that he could see, and I guess nobody else could see it. Then he died in a hospital bed and then, as the staff and the nurses were trying to pry his hands open from, I guess they were clenched on the bed, that they found these long, greasy strains of black hair, as if pulled from a black bear, which was not in the hospital room.
Laurie:
Right, yeah, when I first heard that story in church, a bunch of us church guys getting around talking about these things scared to crap out of me. Well then, not too long ago after that, that same preacher lady fell in love with some married man or something and had an affair. I was like, well, if that story had any truth to it I don't think she would have sinned. But yeah, I mean, I would have been scared to death, to go into hell or seeing these things. But yeah, like you said, preachers and pastors use stories like this to scare people into repentance. So is the moth man a real being or is it a demonic entity? Or, like we said, is it an alien or all the above?
Joe:
Yes. So, you know, we have to remember, you know, like in the case with this lady preacher and her life, and you know what she told and trying to scare people into repentance and then, of course, going down a what call a backslidden life of, you know, sinful living. Always remember. It's easy to tell stories, anybody can tell a story. It's much more difficult to be able to prove it, to substantiate the story as fact. And the human imagination is a very powerful thing. We can think of anything, and we do.
Joe:
Look at all the great fiction stories that we have and the millions of books and movies that have been published and produced. You know they're endless. Ancient civilizations and peoples of ancient civilizations had the same kind of thoughts, same kind of imaginations that we do, and they created their own stories and tales, perhaps even to the point of intermingling them into religious dogmas. And there may very well be fiction in many of our religious teachings that have been intertwined with with the doctrines. So did someone see a real moth man or was their imagination just running wild? It could have been a hoax by someone dressing up to prank unsuspecting travelers. We don't know because we don't have enough evidence to make those claims. So we do encourage everyone who listens to our program. You know to be curious, but we also ask that you be critical and really scrutinize the facts. There are plenty of information sources out there, so look these topics up on your own and determine which ones are reliable and accurate and which ones are not. And like always, you, the audience, must decide.
Laurie:
Right, exactly, it's like we always tell people do your own research, read these books, read the Bible, look up these sites on the internet, check out everything that we reference. Don't just take our word for it, or anyone else's for that matter. Make your own assessment of these things and about these things and definitely do your own research, would say. Only time will tell, but these stories may continue on down throughout our history with many more added sensationalized details. But anyway, that's going to do it for today. But for the next episode, we will discuss our take on what is occurring in the Middle East right now, and some of you are wanting to know what we think about the whole situation and would like to hear our thoughts on how all of this may or may not fall into the whole end time scenario that has been put out there Well, for quite a while now.
Joe:
Yeah, and we also want to announce that our second video is now up and ready on YouTube under the label Ancient Reptilians: Menace from the Stars. Please check it out. It does tie in a little bit with what we discussed here today. You know, mainly with how humans perceive what they encounter and try to understand it when it falls outside of our empirical realm of knowledge. You know, how do we describe something when we don't know what it is.
Joe:
And yes, our next podcast show will deal with the subject that we brought up several times before, but with a little more focus on the events happening at this point in time, with the Gaza crisis in Israel, the war in Ukraine and just the entire dystopian way that the world seems to be going these days. We all know it's nothing new. This kind of stuff has been going on for ages and ages. Yet we hear many evangelical preachers say that we are in the end of times and that Jesus is coming soon, like really, really soon. We all know people, friends and family, who believe that and base it almost exclusively on what is written in the Bible.
Laurie:
Right and that Jesus is coming soon. Jesus has been coming soon, according to the Book of Revelation for over 2,000 years now, but we'll discuss some of these prophecies mostly the books of Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation and we were going to analyze their meanings to see if it really fits in with anything going on at all. If so, if we truly are in the end of days, then what can we learn about it? From the ancient astronaut theory, even though many passages from Scripture seem to say things that are similar to what is going on in our world right now, we must ask if it actually has any real relevance. So, we hope you join us for that in about 2 weeks, but in the meantime, visit our YouTube channel and watch this most recent. If you enjoyed a reptilian anything about the reptilians I think you would enjoy this last episode and our website. Go visit our website at www. alientalkpodcast. com, and we look forward to joining you again.
Joe:
And we want to thank all of you for your support that you've shown. Please subscribe to our program and give it a "like, and also send us your comments and questions that we love to hear from you. So until next time, everyone, stay curious.