Flight of the Mothman

The enigmatic creature known as the Mothman is strange even in his manner of flight. Witnesses say that he takes off straight up into the air "like a helicopter," and that he uses his large, bat-like wings to glide more often than fly; although at least one witness claims to have heard the sound of his wings flapping.

"I would think I could hear the wings flapping and noise on top of the roof. I kept feeling that this thing had followed us home." said Marcella Bennett after encountering the creature outside of a relative's house near the TNT area by Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966.

Her sighting took place just one night after that of the Scarberry and Mallette encounter.  Two young couples from Point Pleasant, Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette, told police they saw a large black creature with glowing red eyes in their car headlights while visiting the nearby abandoned TNT depot.  They took off in their car and the creature gave chase, following them at speeds estimated to be up to 100 mph.  

There aren't any animals in the area that could perform as described by eyewitnesses, despite the attempts by skeptics to dismiss the sightings as sandhill cranes or large owls--neither of whom are capable of simply taking off into the air without flapping their wings, or flying 100 mph.  Perhaps the Mothman has some way of defying our laws of physics, or maybe he's just a particularly impressive physical specimen; without more information we may never know.