Mothman and Burial Mounds
“UFO activity is concentrated in the same areas year after year. In the Ohio valley, they show a penchant for the ancient Indian mounds which stand through the area. Could some UFO’s be mere tulpas created by a long forgotten people and doomed forever to seneless maneuvers in the might skies? ”
This is just a series of thoughts; nothing too developed.
Just the result of having been reading about five or six books all at the same time, and having ideas swirling all around in my brain simultaneously.
So, we all know what happened (in a general sense) during the years 1966-1967 in Point Pleasant.
Mothman happened.
To recap: a dark, winged creature with red eyes and uncanny abilities was seen repeatedly in the general vicinity of Point Pleasant, West Virginia by a great many (a hundred or slightly more) witnesses, some of them in groups of four or more. The being could fly, though it didn’t seem to bother flapping its wings to do so, which pretty much lets out it being a misplaced, misunderstood natural bird, because even if birds soar habitually and ride air currents without flapping their wings, they -must- flap their wings in order to take off from the ground.
That’s just how aerodynamics work when we’re talking about living, breathing, physical birds. They don’t come with fixed wings and jet engines. They can’t just leap up into the air and commence to gliding swiftly the way Mothman was reported as doing, over and over by a multitude of witnesses.
And then the Silver Bridge fell and Mothman went away from Point Pleasant, never to be seen again.
Except, that isn’t really how it happened.
First of all, it was sighted in places other than the immediate area of Point Pleasant.
It was seen as far afield as Mason, West Virginia—the town immediately across the Ohio River from Pomeroy, Ohio. It was also seen in St. Albans, West Virginia far from the Ohio River, up in the Kanawha River valley, and it was seen in the capitol city of Charleston, West Virginia, even further up the Kanawha River.
It was also seen in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania during the same time period, up the Ohio River.
And then, after the bridge fell, it was seen elsewhere, farther afield. I know of two sightings, both decades after the Point Pleasant sightings, both in Ohio. One was in the Ohio River Valley, the other in the Hocking River Valley. There’s another sighting of a very similar creature from the 20th century in the Susquehanna River Valley from Pennsylvania.
And then, it started being seen in Indiana and Illinois, particularly around Chicago. These sightings started long before the flap of sightings in 2017 that got dubbed “The Chicago Mothman,” These sightings didn’t stop in 2017; they are still ongoing. These sightings tended to happen along the shoreline of Lake Michigan or near the Calumet River.
What am I getting at?
Well, a couple of things. One—you notice how Mothman sightings tend to happen in or near river valleys or near bodies of water?
Yeah, I noticed that, too.
What else is prevalent in these river valleys?
Ancient burial mounds and earthworks. (As noted in the quote above, John Keel noticed that, too.)
Hartman Mound, Wolf Plains Mound Group, Athens County, Ohio. Photo by Barbara Fisher
Dating as far back as 8,000 BCE, the remaining burial mounds commonly found throughout the river valleys east of the Mississippi are impressive in number and scale. Created by pre-Columbian Native American cultural groups that have been dubbed the Adena (That’s my middle name, by the way), the Hopewell, and the Mississippians, among others, these mounds are most often circular in shape. Sometimes they were built in representative shapes like birds, snakes and alligators. They were used for community burials; with the ashes of cremated people mixed in with the bodies of apparently important tribal members.
There’s more known about the cultures of the people who built these mounds now than when Keel was writing, but he did make note that these earthworks were common up and down the river valleys where UFO and Mothman sightings were prevalent. He even mentioned that like the barrow mounds, earthworks and stone circles of Europe and the British Isles, that these mound sometimes mark spots of anomalous magnetic energy readings, which he thought may be connected to paranormal activity.
One of the most famous of the representational mounds, the great Serpent Mound, in Peebles, Ohio, does mark a spot of unusual magnetic activity. It is now thought that a meteor strike from long before the mound was built is responsible for the anomalous magnetic readings recorded there.
What I discovered in my recent readings, that Keel doesn’t mention, however, is that there is also a figure that appears over and over again in the art of the mound builders that may relate to the Mothman phenomena. The “Bird Man,” a winged human, is found depicted in various media, from copper plates, sandstone plaques and etched stones that have been excavated from these ancient sites. The being, whether it depicts a spirit or a shamanic human, appears in various different time periods and seems to be quite important to the cosmology of these ancient peoples.
Could the “Bird Man” and the “Mothman” be related? Are they the same spirit? Are they a tulpa—an energy being brought to life by the power of repeated human activity such as meditation or ritual? Were they created by the mound builders, or were the mound builders’ art depicting a creature that they had seen and experienced before building the mounds. Did they choose to erect the mounds near where the Bird Man was seen? And, which came first—the Bird Man/Mothman, or the mounds?
Or, are the resemblances between the Bird Man and Mothman simply coincidental, and they have nothing to do with each other?
As I said, these are just a series of thoughts roiling around in my head all at the same time—not a developed idea, much less a hypothesis. Such development requires more research and rumination.
But it does give me fodder for pondering.
