Mothman Arrives in a City That Was Not Expecting It
Mothman is one of the best-known American cryptids, primarily because of its association with Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where a wave of sightings in 1966 and 1967 preceded the collapse of the Silver Bridge and the deaths of 46 people. The Point Pleasant case was documented extensively by journalist John Keel in his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies, which established the creature’s reputation as a harbinger of disaster.
What surprised researchers and investigators in 2017 was the emergence of a concentrated cluster of Mothman-type sightings in Chicago, a dense urban environment with no obvious ecological relationship to the rural West Virginia setting of the original reports. Between April 2017 and the end of 2018, more than 55 reports of a large, winged, humanoid figure were collected from across the Chicago metropolitan area, primarily by researcher Lon Strickler through his Phantoms and Monsters website.
The 2017 to 2018 Chicago Wave: What Was Reported
The Chicago sightings described a large creature, typically estimated at six to eight feet tall, with a wingspan of between ten and fifteen feet. Witnesses described it as humanoid in form with wings like a bat or large bird, dark or black in coloring, and often with glowing red eyes. Unlike some cryptid reports, the Chicago witnesses were diverse in background: security personnel, professionals, couples, and individuals reporting from different parts of the city including the lakefront, O’Hare Airport vicinity, and the North Side.
A notable feature of the Chicago reports was the witnesses’ consistent description of the creature as appearing to watch them, rather than fleeing or acting aggressively. Several witnesses described the encounter as deeply unsettling in a way that went beyond simple surprise at seeing an unusual animal.
Proposed Explanations
Misidentified Birds
The most straightforward explanation is misidentification of large birds. The Great Blue Heron has a wingspan of up to six feet and can appear alarming when encountered at close range at night. The Black-crowned Night Heron is common in the Chicago lakefront area and is nocturnal. Owls, particularly Great Horned Owls seen from unusual angles, can produce large, dark, humanoid silhouettes. Investigators have found this explanation credible for some but not all of the reported encounters.
Mass Suggestion and Social Contagion
Once the first reports were published, the possibility of social contagion increases: people primed to look for something unusual are more likely to interpret ambiguous sightings as matching the described creature. This is a genuine confounding factor in any clustering of anomalous reports, and honest researchers acknowledge it.
The Harbinger Interpretation
Following the Point Pleasant precedent, some investigators have asked whether the Chicago wave preceded any significant event. Proponents of this viewpoint to various subsequent incidents, though the causal and correlational challenges in this line of reasoning are significant: a city of three million people generates significant events continuously, making post-hoc pattern matching straightforward.
What Makes the Chicago Case Interesting
Setting aside the question of what the witnesses saw, the Chicago Mothman wave is a useful case study in how anomalous report clusters develop and propagate in the social media era. The combination of a compelling prior narrative (Point Pleasant), an active researcher collecting reports (Strickler), and the viral spread of individual accounts created conditions in which both genuine unusual encounters and socially influenced ones are nearly impossible to separate after the fact. That methodological challenge is itself a significant contribution to the study of unexplained phenomena.
References & Further Reading
• Strickler, L.: Phantoms and Monsters: Chicago Mothman Reports
