"Bulky Person" with "Absolutely Huge Wings" Reported near Oregon, Wisconsin

The intersection of Sand Hill Road and Rutland Dunn Town Line Road. (Emily Wayland / Singular Fortean Society)

Jesse Durdel of the National Cryptid Society recently put the Singular Fortean Society in contact with two young women who said that they’d seen a large flying humanoid on Thanksgiving night.

The women’s names have been changed to protect their identities.

Claire and Ashley, both of whom are 18-year-old women from Oregon, Wisconsin, said in a phone interview with investigator Tobias Wayland that they’d seen an eight-to-nine-foot-tall creature with a wingspan of 10 to 15 feet while driving outside of town last November 26th.

Ashley said that she had initially seen something unusual while driving between Oregon and Stoughton on Highway 138 at around 10 pm that evening.

"I was on that road because I was going to Stoughton for some stuff," she said. "I was driving my car. I noticed this thing—I couldn’t tell how big it was, it just looked like a black shadow—just start across the road, but it was probably a football field ahead of me. At first, I thought it was my windshield, because I have cracks in my windshield, but that doesn’t make sense because I’ve driven that road hundreds of times and I’ve never seen my windshield do anything like that. It was insanely fast. I was like ‘I think I just saw something, but I’m not going to say anything because I’ll sound crazy.’"

Later, at around 10:30 pm, both women were going for a drive together when they said they saw a flying humanoid swoop across the road in front of them at the intersection of Sand Hill Road and Rutland Dunn Town Line Road.

"There was a possum in the road, and we stopped because we didn’t want to hit it. We were driving around it, and then we looked up, and it was huge, like nine feet long," Claire said. "It was flying, and it swooped down across the road, and out of our sight. We were both like ‘You saw that too, right?’"

"[The creature] was like a quarter of a football field ahead of us. It was really close. It was way too big to be a deer," Ashley continued. “It was kind of reddish brown in color, I want to say, but it was darker. If we hadn’t stopped for that possum, it would have hit our car. That thing was huge. My first thought was ‘Dear Lord, it’s a pterodactyl.’”

A lamppost positioned at the intersection partially illuminated the being from underneath, they said, allowing them to determine its approximate color and dimensions.

According to the two women, the creature was headed north.

"It was too high up to be illuminated by the car’s headlights. The very bottom was illuminated, but we couldn’t see the top of it. It wasn’t fully illuminated, but light was cast on the underside," Claire said. "Since it was at the intersection that we normally turned at—we normally turn at that intersection because we make loops around town—it swooped from the south towards the north. When you get to the intersection you have to turn north, and I was terrified to turn north. I didn’t want to turn north."

Claire described the creature as looking “like Mothman,” and said “It looked like a very bulky person. Its limbs were a lot thicker than a human’s would be—a lot bigger around. It had these absolutely huge wings. There were arms on its side; actually, I didn’t know if they were arms, there were appendages on its sides, and the wings were on its shoulders or back, but I couldn’t really tell. I didn’t see its head when it swooped down in front of us. I didn’t see any head or neck when it swooped down."

They decided to continue their drive, eventually working up the courage to revisit the location of their sighting. At around 11 pm, as they drove by the area again, Claire spotted something unusual in a nearby field.

Although the creature had first been seen heading north, when they returned, "it was standing on the south side [in a plowed down corn field]."

“We were at that point where we thought it would be gone, but then it wasn’t,” said Ashley.

Ashley, who was driving, didn’t see the creature standing in the field. Claire, however, said she saw a strange creature with “very pronounced red eyes.”

I looked out the back window and [the creature] was standing in the field. It was almost a full moon, so it was pretty illuminated. Its head didn’t look like it had a neck, it looked like it was just an extension of its body. It looked like a human had tucked their head into their shoulders.
It had very pronounced red eyes. We didn’t have any headlights in the back, and the only thing that would have reflected would have been the lamppost, so they were either reflecting really brightly or literally glowing. We go by that field all the time and I’ve never seen anything like that before or since.

The women described the creature as “super fast,” especially for its size.

"It was very fast, and the wings were very, very large," Claire said. "The body was so stocky. The silhouette was similar to how I would describe bigfoot, which I know, I’m using other known cryptids to describe this one, but that’s really what it looked like. There was no pronounced neck, but it looked very stocky. It had very large, birdlike wings. I couldn’t tell if it had feathers."

Ashley said that she thought that "the part illuminated by my headlights looked like reddish brown fur."

"It was either very fine feathers or fur," Claire agreed. "I didn’t really see a texture. There weren’t large feathers on the body—that I would have been able to see. The only thing I can say, is that when I saw the silhouette of it in the field, I could see jutting off points from the wings that I would call feathers, but I don’t really know. It could just have wings shaped like that."

Both women said that they screamed after seeing the creature fly over the road, and Claire added that she “froze with fear” in response to the sighting.

"[I felt] fear, yeah, there was also the element of ‘that’s not supposed to be here,'" Ashley said. "You just know that, whatever that is, it’s not from around here. It’s not supposed to be here."

"Yeah, like wrongness," added Claire. “We passed that place a couple more times, and the rest of the night we just got a weird there's-something-that-shouldn't-be-here feeling every time we were in that area.”

They both also noticed other unusual phenomena happening that same evening, such as deer moving away from the spot where they had seen the creature and unusual interference on the car’s radio.

"This was the weirdest thing that I noticed, it was way earlier, but it counts for the whole night basically. We kept seeing deer crossing the road," Ashley said. "I almost ran into two different deer on two different sides of town. Usually, if I see a deer at all, it’s one deer a night. Oregon does not get a lot of deer, and I saw over seven deer that night. And we saw a whole herd running away from that spot."

"They were freaked out, they were running away. They were panicky," added Claire.

The radio, said Claire, “kept glitching like crazy, and it hasn’t really done that before. It was cutting in and out, getting staticky, and then picking up another channel that was some gospel program. I know what channel that is and it’s very far away from the channel we were on.”

She added that the radio would glitch "only when we drove by that spot."

Only a few days later, on the evening of November 29th, Claire said she had another unusual sighting in “literally the same place.”

"I saw a shadow on the road, because we drive the same route every time we drive," she said. "I saw a shadow that looked like it, and then something run into the trees, but it was...all I could really tell was that it was winged and very, very big, but I couldn’t give you a definite shape."

Similarly to the sighting reported by Claire and Ashley, a man in Woodstock, Illinois, reported a sighting of an eight-to-nine-foot-tall being “covered in dark fur” with large wings on February 22nd, 2019. That witness said he thought the creature “may have been a bigfoot initially, but then noticed that it had a large set of membrane wings attached to the back, extending over the top of its head.”

Investigators Tobias and Emily Wayland visited both the Woodstock sighting area in 2019, and the area in which Clair and Ashley said they had their encounter only a few weeks ago.

The investigators went to the site of Claire and Ashley’s encounter twice, the first time at approximately 10:30 pm and again at around 2 pm about a week later.

They didn’t notice any radio interference either time, however, upon review of the footage they recorded during their initial visit, they did notice some very unusual audio interference on both cameras used during the investigation. The same interference was present upon review of the footage taken on their second trip, although it was much lighter. Strangely, the interference was only recorded in the immediate area of the sighting.

That footage is slated to be released through the Singular Fortean Society’s Patreon page later this month.

The investigators were unable to find any signs of large satellite dishes, ham radio towers, or other equipment in the area that might be responsible for the interference.

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, brown, 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; these include 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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