Rockford Resident Reports Sighting of "Giant, Shapeless, Black Thing" with "Two Very Large Red Eyes"

*(Emily Wayland / Singular Fortean Society)*

21-year-old Rockford, Illinois resident Jonathan Lane contacted the Singular Fortean Society’s lead investigator Tobias Wayland last week to report a sighting of what Lane would later describe as a “giant, shapeless, black thing” with “two very large red eyes.”

According to Lane, the sighting took place between 10:20 and 10:30 pm on an August night in 2016, sometime “before school had started that year.”

It was very late at night—my mother works nights because she’s a nurse—so I walk her to her car every night. I walked her out to her car, and she got in it and left. Then, as I’m walking up to the house, I hear a noise that’s like screeching brakes or something and I instantly look up. There’s a big tree in our yard and I see this giant, shapeless, black thing—and it has two very large red eyes. As soon as I made eye contact with it, it made that sound again. Instantly, it fills me with fear and intimidation, and I run in the house and start freaking out. The sound was so weird. I can still hear it clearly in my head. Like a large bird’s caw. Reminds me of the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, like the velociraptors.
The next day or so, when it was light, I went outside and I looked where the branch was and tried to see where I’d seen the top of it and where the blackness was compared to the tree. It was pretty substantial. It would have to be nine feet tall. It was a large space. The wingspan just faded into the darkness around it.
It was shapeless, but where the eyes were, I did see a little notch above its head where I could see sky. What really bothered me was the red eyes and how far apart they were. It showed just how large it was.

Like many witnesses, Lane was met with ridicule when he initially shared his story and kept it quiet for years afterward, at least until he saw the Small Town Monsters documentary Terror in the Skies.

"My father was there, and I told him about it and he started laughing and making fun of me," he explained. "So, since then I’ve just kept [my experience] very private, [although] I told my sister about it once. I’ve just never really forgotten about it. I never knew what it was. I saw the documentary [Terror in the Skies] and it was just mind-blowing to see you guys talk about stuff like that. I just wanted to reach out somehow."

A photo taken by Lane, showing the area of his sighting and the being’s approximate height.

Approximately a year after his sighting of the red-eyed entity, Lane said he saw an unidentified flying object in the same area.

I was driving home with a friend of mine from work, and we were almost to my house. [We were] in the same [area as the winged entity sighting]—there are a lot of trees and there’s only a little section of the sky that’s open right by my house, and that’s where the big tree is where the [previous] incident happened. It was the same part of the sky. I'm not claiming it was anything specific, but I saw a very prominent UFO. Very large, very prominent. I had my friend stop the car and we got out. I just don’t know what it was. It was clear enough where I could see panels, like windows. It was very scary. My friend, she’s a bit younger than me, she got very scared, so we had to leave.
Whatever that was, it was not normal. It was shaped like a pear. It had probably a hundred windows all over it. It was lit up. It was very weird how it was lit up. The whole thing was illuminated, but it had lines of light—almost like waves of light going through it. It’s hard to explain. It almost looked like it had white light stripes through it but it was an undulating movement. The very top of it was black, and the very bottom of it was black, but the center was illuminated. I could see where it was being lit up and it was like miniature squares making up the whole object.

Whatever he saw, Lane’s sightings have definitely had an effect on him.

"Both of those things very much bothered me," he said. "We have a huge picture window in our living room and it’s a huge pet peeve of mine to make sure those curtains are closed, overlapping, so nothing shows at night. I had a room in the corner of the house nearby that tree, and eventually I had to move rooms."

He added that, despite his fear of doing so, it felt refreshing to express his experiences to someone, and that his "main motivation for sharing [them was] to add credibility and make it easier for other people to come forward."

Lane isn’t the first witness to report seeing anomalous aerial phenomena in the same spot as a strange winged creature. The Singular Fortean Society has been contacted by at least two other witnesses who have reported similar experiences: Paula, who said her 2016 sighting of a hulking, winged creature in Wauconda, Illinois, was preceded by her sighting of a strange beam of light two years prior, and Gerald, whose encounter with a weird, winged creature near Braidwood, Illinois, in 1957 was followed by a UFO sighting while on guard duty "at a U.S. Army station at a Nike Hercules missile site in Northfield, Illinois” in 1963. Several other anonymous sightings have also been reported to the sites Phantoms & Monsters and UFO Clearinghouse.

This report constitutes the latest news in a string of ‘Mothman’ sightings from within a few hundred mile radius surrounding Lake Michigan, including every state bordering the great lake. These sightings ostensibly began in the spring of 2017, but more historical accounts are being reported as more people become aware of the phenomenon. They generally take place in the evening or at night, often in or near a park or natural area, and around water. Witnesses consistently describe a large, gray or black, bat or bird-like creature—although in a small number of cases the creature was described as insect-like—sometimes with glowing or reflective red, yellow, green, or orange eyes, and humanoid features such as arms and legs are often reported. Some witnesses have reported feeling intense fear and an aura of evil emanating from the creature they encountered. Many of the sightings are also of something seen only briefly or are described only as a flying creature with few details, which leaves open the possibility that a misidentified large bird—such as a heron or crane—or some type of anomalous avian species could explain some, although certainly not all, of the encounters. A number of associated high strangeness incidents have also occurred alongside the creature sightings; including reports of UFOs, other anomalous flying creatures and mysterious humanoids, parapsychological phenomena, and bizarre events experienced by those investigating the sightings.

To report a sighting reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

You can view a timeline of the sightings so far here.

To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

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