This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on I Heart Radio. I wanted to get a couple of these emails. One person emailed and said, they believe Mothman is an all-man that appears when death is near. Any indication that sometimes unrelated things are happening behind the scenes of a sighting, maybe when you're talking about this, there's certain tidbits that come out that you recognize as patterns. Yeah, I mean, the first thing I would love to say, Ryan, is that when it comes to Mothman or any kind of subject like this, there are no real experts, right? So my opinion is just an opinion and it doesn't invalidate that of any of your listeners that are checking out the show. So that being said, one of the big things I wanted to challenge with the book and my co-authored it too, is the idea that Mothman is a harbinger of doom and disaster. And a lot of that comes down to the link with the Silver Bridge Collapse, which happened in Point Pleasant. I believe it was 44 or 45 lives and was an absolute disaster that changed the way we inspect and construct bridges in the United States ever since. It was tragic, but the Mothman sightings had actually ended before the Silver Bridge Collapse. So if you saw the movie and if you read the book's Mothman Prophecies and the Silver Bridge by Greg Barker, they kind of tied the idea in that Mothman was turning up as either a warning or in some cases, some people interpreted as Mothman is to blame for that disaster. So I did, when I went to Point Pleasant, the first thing I wanted to do was pay respects to the victims of that tragedy and the town has done a beautiful job in memorializing them and investigate this a little further. And again, primary sources in the town told me that prior to the release of those books, nobody in Point Pleasant tied the Mothman sightings in with the Bridge Collapse. Nobody linked them. And what I say if it's controversial, then so be it. But I believe that if you remove the Silver Bridge narrative that you really don't have an ending to the story is told in those books. And if you see the movie, the Mothman Prophecies, Richard Gailor-Aleni, it's a great movie. However, the big action scene in that movie is the Bridge Collapse scene. It's a very Hollywood thing, I hate to say it. In reality, there's no evidence to suggest that Mothman sightings have anything to do with that particular disaster. What's fascinating is there were Mothman sightings connected with number one, the Fukushima Power Station, melt down Post-Sunami in Japan. And also the Chernobyl or Blackbird, sorry, a Blackbird of Chernobyl, which was believed to be a Mothman sighting as well. Here's the thing though, it's a great story, right? But when you dig into the Blackbird of Chernobyl, you realize that every single mention of that post dates the movie release of the Mothman Prophecies. Wow, okay. Let's, something else you bring up there. So maybe it's not a giant event around some of the different sightings, but like we'll use Bigfoot for example, because you said that's something you're researching at the moment. And I have also a friend in Australia who talks about the Yahweh, you know, the Bigfoot stories in Australia. Yeah, and some of the background stories is that when Bigfoot's around, the birds go quiet. So are there any other of those type of things that stand out to you when it comes to Mothman sightings, something like, well, you mentioned the feel of fear. Like the, it predates the, or predates the moment of the sighting, the fear that people get. Are there any natural things like birds going quiets when a Mothman's around? Not that I'm aware of, although that isn't to say that there aren't any, but there are none that I identified as part of my research. Stepping into the unnatural realm though, there is definitely a correlation between some of the Mothman sightings and UFO sightings. One of the busiest airports in the world, Chicago, Ohio, the airport and its environs have Mothman sightings. And also one of the most infamous 21st century UFO sightings took place over here as well. Before the Mothman sightings took place in West Virginia and Point Pleasant, you had this rash of lights in the sky. And during the sightings too, people were seeing these weird disc shapes. They were seeing these floating UFOs in the skies over Point Pleasant and the TNT area before and at the same time as the Mothman sightings. It's definitely an unnatural link, I think, with the UFO phenomenon. What would you say the most recent sighting is, did we have sightings like last year, for example? Mothman? Mothman? Yeah, there have been a bunch in Mexico and they do still continue to come in. So researchers like Tobias Waland and Lonstrickler are being very diligent about cataloging them. Again, I'm wary about putting the label specifically Mothman on it. I much prefer flying humanoid sightings, you know, winged humanoid sightings. Those come in annually, repeatedly, multiple times from across the US and elsewhere. Okay. In fact, you know, he went, sorry, apologize. When you open the lines, coast to coast listeners are night owls. I'm willing to bet at least one of them will have one that calls in. I hope so. I hope there's someone listening right now. And I think one of the things that you mentioned before is very important where they're afraid to tell the story because of the company that they're in may not find it acceptable or they might find it a little bit too wacky. So out of the fear of them being taken as not credible or crazy, they decide to keep it to themselves. That's a whole different thing when we're talking about coast to coast AM. There's a lot of people listening here right now that would love to hear your story if you saw something like that. So we are going to take calls next hour. I'm hoping we can get a few. But going back to the whole AI thing, is it difficult to look at social media when you're researching this sort of thing when you're flooded with fake AI videos that people are creating? It is an absolute nightmare and that is true of being a paranormal investigator or journalist or writer in any aspect, whether it's ghosts, UFOs, cryptids or whatever. When I began in the mid 90s, I don't want to wax tune a stouture kit. Ryan, but somebody had a ghost photograph for me. I thought that was great because I had a negative I can examine. I could send that negative to the codec labs or to a photographic analyst who would look at it and say, you know, this has been tampered with. It's a double exposure. There's a fault on the film or what I ideally wanted to hear was, yeah, I got no idea what was photographed here, but nobody has messed with this. Well, we now live in the age not just a Photoshop, but $3 apps that will insert ghosts, cryptids and UFOs into your photographs so that you can scare and major friends. And people have been having a great time whenever there are disasters of inserting mothman in. People have done it, I think, in horrifically bad taste with 9-11. People have done it with ships hitting bridges. You know, these are cases in which people lose their lives and they're pushing this narrative of mothman as a harbinger of doom or a creature of evil. And a simple Google reverse image search will dispel a lot of these myths right away. They'll show you the base photograph before it was altered. But yeah, it just muddies the waters and it whenever somebody cries wolf if they have a genuine genuine sighting, nobody's going to believe them. Have you visited skin walker ranch? I was very fortunate to go to skin walker ranch. I was going to say last year, but it's the year before now when I was speaking at Phenomenon in Utah. And I got as far as the gate escorted with permission by the staff from skin walker ranch. I heard some great stories there and this was actually right before one of my mothman trips. And what was interesting was that I got on a plane and headed to point pleasant to West Virginia right afterwards. And midway between Chicago and West Virginia, the plane sprung a broken seal, air started hissing out of the pressurized cabin. Pilot had to do an emergency descent and turn us back to Chicago. And I've had so many stories about things happening to people after skin walker ranch. They call it this hitchhiker Phenomenon, which I know has been very well covered on coast to coast in the past. I could not help but wonder if there was a connection between my visit to that strange, strange place and what happened on that plane. In Chicago, it seems like Chicago comes up a lot when you're even this conversation here tonight. And I don't know what it is about Lake Michigan or the Great Lakes or that region, but there's a lot of things like, for example, I'm here in Michigan now. I live in the Detroit area. And last year, one of the big exciting things from the DNR is that they had a Cougar Cub sighting. And it was the first time in decades that anyone seen a Cougar Cub that was in the Upper Peninsula, so up there in Michigan, Wisconsin, or that area. And I think about things like that because I know they're out there. We don't see them. We know they exist. It's I feel the same way about things like Bigfoot or Mothman. We know that something is happening if we've got a photograph of it or not. And sometimes it just takes a long time before you find the evidence. You are right on the money of Chicago and also Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. Either a couple of friends that are Upers, they run the Upers Paranormal Research Society of fact, Brad Blair, Tim Ellis. And you should have them on the show sometime. But something about these guys are paranormal investigators that can't just do ghosts. They have to do UFOs. They have to do Lake monsters. They have to do all of this stuff because the Upper Peninsula and Michigan is so active. But yeah, around the Great Lakes, you name it. There are sightings of it. You know, it's I would say there are probably more sightings per capita in that part of the country than most others. Did you mention Canada, are there sightings there too? Canada has sightings north of the border. Mexico has sightings south of the border. Yeah. It's hard to find places where they aren't wind humanoid sightings to some degree. Now, as you get to other continents, they are perhaps less well documented, but they certainly do have them. And is again, hesitate to use the word mothman, but there are enough similarities humanoid beings winged scene flying through the air. Right. And this more of an encompassing type of terminology that people understand. And though you may try to narrow it down into something that's more accurate of a description, it's kind of that umbrella description that people can get behind, right. It makes it a little bit easier to describe it would just say in mothman, even though it might be technically a little bit different. Absolutely. And the reason I make that distinction is simply because mothman is a kind of 1966. You know, that's that's where we the term originates. But then you go back to another case we investigated for the book, the van meter visitor, which took place in Iowa in 1903. You have the small town in rural Iowa, not that far from Des Moines now, but it was pretty rural back then. And this is one of those towns where one day this winged creature, like a teradactyl kinder, comes into town, start shooting a laser beam from the horn on top of the Ted into various buildings. The entire town does exactly what you would expect them to do. They are extremely heavily armed. They all take pot shots at this thing. And it's either bulletproof or nobody hits it. And I lean more towards the former explanation than the latter, I think. And for several nights, this thing holds a reign of terror over the entire town. And to this day, van meter has annually, it's van meter visitor festival where people come in and they talk about the story. There is a mine shaft, which is boarded up and covered with earth in which the creature is supposed to still be either hibernating or something or lurking in some way. But again, you've got if it's not mothman, it's mothman adjacent, you know, and this predates the mothman sightings by six decades. Right. Yeah, it's in 1903. So you're investigating it for the next thing bigfoot. And I know there's a lot of universal sightings for that as well, much like mothman. Do you think that there are what's I guess the stronger evidence if you just I know you're still working on bigfoot, but do you think there's stronger evidence one or the other? Do you think it's about equal when it comes to things like mothman and bigfoot. Oh, I see. I think bigfoot again, if you're willing to look at, you know, you mentioned the yowee, which I think is a is a I'm glad you brought that up. I've been writing about the yowee for an upcoming book. In fact, the characteristics are so similar to bigfoot, right. These you want to talk about remote areas. It's hard to touch the Australian outback in terms of sheer square footage and you get all of these sightings coming from that part of the world. I think it's absolutely conceivable that there is something walking around out there that we as a species have not yet been able to pigeonhole, you know, to pin down and prove that it exists is getting a little bit harder in North America. But I've also started seeing many bigfoot sightings that take place closer to the population centers. In fact, when I was out in a deadwood in the vicinity of deadwood, a while back and sturgis, you know, the biggest motorcycle rally in the continent. The continent and sturgis and they have bigfoot sightings in the area here in Colorado. In the Rockies, we have them up in Bailey. In fact, there's a a sasquatch outpost up here that the sightings are so common that there is a sasquatch museum and those kind of museums are popping up in multiple states. So I think probably the physical evidence is more compelling for bigfoot as opposed to mouth man. My fellow author to bias made a great point. He said, you know, we may have the occasional footprint of mouth man as we as we encountered in our book research, but nobody talks about mouth man poop. You know, you're not you're not finding that kind of biological matter. And I know it's funny by the same token, physical traces, right. But there are plenty of signs of bigfoot interacting with the environment, whether it is bending, you know, tree limbs and tree branch of trunks themselves into these weird structures and shapes, whether it is hair, elements of carcasses, things of that nature. There's more stuff to actually be examined when it comes to bigfoot than there ever was for mouth man. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at 1 a.m. Eastern and go to coast to coastam.com for more.
