The terror happened on Thursday September 24, 2020. At 11 PM a post office employee left her job to go home. These are her words: “I had just left the Sorting Facility at O’Hare Airport and was walking out to my car when I saw something standing at the far end of the lot where I usually park. At first I thought it was a very tall person with a long coat. I unlocked my car, which caused my headlights to come on. My headlights hit the person standing about 20 to 25 feet away causing it to turn and look right at me. I saw that this was not some person, but some red-eyed [creature], and what appeared to be a coat were actually wings which it spread out as it turned to look at me.”
It was a terrifying experience in that O’Hare Parking lot. The woman’s statement continues: “At first I thought it was some kind of very, very large bird, but I’ve never seen any bird that stood almost seven feet tall. I’m 5’4 and this thing looked taller than me by at least two feet. This thing then started making some type of chirping sound, almost a half chirp and half click like someone was clicking their tongue but much, much faster. It then made some type of screeching sound and took off running toward me, it got to within 10 feet of me and took off into the air and flew above me. I was screaming hysterically as I crouched down behind my car’s open door and I dived into my car head first. I was in a near panic as I tried to start the car, close and lock the doors and turn on my interior lights. I started my car and took off out of the parking lot and flew down the road till I hit the main road. I got home and told my husband who also works at the same facility and he was the one who told me about the sightings of this thing. I was scared out of my mind and hope I never see this thing again. This thing is roaming around the area, scaring people half to death.”
This sighting of what is called the Moth Man was at the end of 2021 and it was also at O’Hare. You have to ask, what is going on at that airport? Now, anyone who has traveled through O’Hare knows that it can be a vortex of darkness and despair with masses of angry people standing for hours in long lines? Is Mothman drawn to misery or does he just like planes? Here is the statement from an airline maintenance worker and I quote, “I was working on Thursday 12/30/2021 at the American Airlines aircraft hangar at about 11:30 at night. I was outside with about three other individuals. We were in the process of bringing an aircraft into the hangar to get some maintenance done on one of the engines. As we were hooking up the plane I looked up and saw three large black creatures over by the parking lot. They were about 7 feet tall and they were just staring right at us. I yelled out to Carlos and he tells Robert and all three of us are looking straight at these things when one of them opens what look like large black wings and shoots off into the sky followed by the others, all three making a sort of screeching sound as they take off. A few seconds later a security vehicle comes screaming up through the driveway and a security person runs out with his flashlight and starts checking the area. He’s joined by three other trucks and a couple of supervisors. I looked over and Robert is doing the same thing I am doing, recording this on our phones. One of the supervisors came up to us and told us to stop recording and to put our phones away or she would report us. We were told to go into the breakroom and remain in there and not talk to anyone. They came in and said that we were not to talk to anyone in regards to what we saw and that they were requiring us to send them the video we had shot on our phones and then delete the video off our phones or we would be immediately terminated. I did not want to lose my job after 8 years, so I sent my video to the supervisor’s phone and in front of her and the others deleted the video. We were told that we were to keep this to ourselves and not allowed to speak to anyone or we could lose our jobs.” Obviously, this man chose to disobey.
Before we look deeper into this weird phenomenon we should ask a question. Have hideous winged beings appeared in the past that terrified people? Well, they are everywhere in ancient mythology. We could spend hours listing them. Here are just a few. First, we should mention Pazuzu. In Mesopotamia, he was king of the wind demons. Pazuzu actually made it into a Hollywood film as the evil spirit confronted in The Exorcist. Some have believed that he is the Mothman flying around Chicago. Then there is the winged Egyptian goddess Nut with her flying snake goddesses. Snake worship was very popular in ancient Egypt. In fact, snake deities have been found around the world. How about the flying, snake-footed monster Typhon of Greek mythology, one of the most evil and powerful of all the false deities. For those who like batman we have Camazotz, the Mayan bat god of evil and death who lives, where else, in a bat cave, I’m sure with a lot of supernatural guano. Jump to Finland and we find Loviatar winged goddess of death and disease. I wonder what sacrifices you had to make to keep her away from your family. Of course, we can’t leave out Kukulkan vile, feathered, flying serpent of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. Several years ago my family and I stood at the foot of his hideous temple where thousands of humans were sacrificed. Rivers of blood poured down the steps. We could go on and on. I want propose that what has been called Mothman is nothing but a lesser manifestation of those ancient monster deities. Imagine that the creature we call Mothman appeared to vulnerable, primitive people. What would they do? In their terror, they would worship him. In our day, we build tourist trinket shops.
I have said that one of the patterns of supernatural phenomena is that manifestations reappear over and over restructured for a particular cultural environment. So what forms might such beings take in 21 st century America? We live in a culture of cheesy horror movies and comic book super villains. In light of those obsessions, what phenomena might we expect to see? The first researcher to write about the Mothman monsters was John Keel in his best-selling book, The Mothman Prophecies. I recommend it. Out of it came a feature film of the same name starring Richard Gere. Keel writes about one of the first sightings of these hellish creatures. It took place on November 27 of 1966 and the witness was an 18-year-old young woman named Connie. At 10:30 on a Sunday morning, she was driving home from church when she passed the Mason County Golf Course near New Haven, West Virginia. No one was playing that morning. As she was driving past, suddenly, she saw a strange shape not far away on the course. She said that it looked like a man, but it was much taller, at least seven feet. What locked her attention were the creature’s eyes. She described them as large and round and they glowed red with a terrifying ferocity. In them was hypnotic power. She slowed down. As she stared at it, huge, ten-foot wings unfolded from its back. Silently, it rose straight into the air, but its wings did not flap. With its glowing eyes staring at her, it swooped right over her car. Terrified, she slammed on the accelerator and raced away. For the following two weeks, she had conjunctivitis that she believed came from those glowing eyes. Keel reports that in that area of West Virginia over 100 people would see this hellish monster during the winter of 1966. Of course, all manner of foolish explanations for the creature started to arise. Some claimed it was the result of a weird government experiment gone slightly south. In Chicago, what I call the Swamp Gas theorists tell us the sightings are just sand hill cranes.
Among his many eye-witness accounts, Keel relates one that hits close to home for me. I spent almost all of 1968 in a front-line infantry battalion in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. As I have mentioned, as a first lieutenant, I led a rifle platoon in combat. Many nights, my guys and I spent out in the open on rice paddy dykes, which means we slept soaking wet from mud and monsoon rains. Keeping watch during those nights was eerie. For me, those were times of serious prayer, so I relate strongly to the next account.
In 1969, a marine PFC named Earl Morrison and two of his friends were sitting on a bunker near Da Nang. They were watching for the enemy, when something unexpected happened. These are Morrison’s words as recorded by Keel: “All of a sudden, I don’t know why, we all three looked out in the sky and we saw this figure coming toward us. It had kind of a glow and we couldn’t make out what it was at first. It started coming toward us real slowly. All of a sudden we saw what looked like wings, like a bat’s only it was gigantic compared to what a regular bat would be. After it got close enough so we could see what it was, it looked like a woman. A naked woman. She was black, her skin was black, her body was black, the wings were black, everything was black, but it glowed. We saw her arms and they looked like regular molded arms, each with a hand and fingers and everything, but they had skin from the wings going over them. And when she flapped her wings there was no noise at first. It looked like her arms didn’t have any bones in them. Finally, she was right above us and when she got over the top of our heads she was maybe six or seven feet up. We couldn’t do anything. We didn’t know what to do. We just froze. She got ten feet or so away and we started hearing her wings flap. She just started flying off and we watched her for quite a while. The total time we saw her was between three and four minutes. End of quote. It is interesting that this apparition took a female form. Knowing combat soldiers, if it had been male, they would have shot at it. At least, that’s what my guys would have done.
Wherever they have appeared in the United States, these beings make sure they are seen many times throughout a specific geographical area. Such as my hometown of Chicago. In his 2019 book, The Lake Michigan Moth Man, researcher Tobias Wayland records dozens of eye-witness accounts of winged horrors with hypnotic, glowing eyes. To his credit, Wayland has done his best to research each account to determine its veracity. I recommend his book. All of his accounts, covering a span of years, are virtually the same. Here is one that took place a block from the University of Illinois, Chicago campus on September 30th of 2011.
It was a Friday night. Two young women, university students who shared an apartment, were getting ready to go out with their boyfriends to a local bar. While she was in her room getting dressed, suddenly one of the women heard her friend shriek in terror. Running to her room, she found her huddled in a corner, shaking and babbling hysterically. She said something was looking at her through the window. That seemed impossible. They were in a third floor apartment. Outside was a 30 foot drop into a courtyard. But clearly, something had terrified her into hysteria. It took half an hour, but finally she calmed down enough to describe what she had experienced. While getting dressed, she had turned to look in a mirror. That’s when she had seen two fiery, orange eyes staring at her from outside in the dark. They were in the head of a horrible creature. Shrieking hysterically, she had dropped down and huddled in a corner. Without knowing how, she knew that the thing was a hunter and she was its prey.
What do you do with a story like that? Her friend tried to convince her that it must have been an optical illusion, but she would have none of it. She knew what she had seen. At that moment, the friend got a cell phone call from her boyfriend. As she took the call, she walked past her roommate’s bedroom door. Glancing into the room, she saw it. Staring straight at her from outside the window were the two glowing eyes. Then they vanished. Instantly, she was just as hysterical as her roommate. Shrieking in terror, she rushed into the living room. Her boyfriend was still on the phone. In a couple of minutes, he and his friend were pounding on the door of their apartment. The women told them what they had seen and the young men believed them. Why? Because on their way over to pick them up for the evening, they had witnessed what they called a large bat with fiery, glowing eyes. The monster was sitting on a basketball hoop in the neighborhood park. They had watched it fly into the air. And they weren’t the only ones. There were six other people in the park who had seen it. They described the creature as six to seven feet tall and dark grey to black with terrifying eyes. Later, they heard from other students at the university who had seen a giant “bat” that Friday night. No one forgets such a devastating experience. The young women said that they didn’t think they would ever be the same again. Though it was only for a moment, real fear had taken control of their lives. Have you ever experienced real fear? If so, you know what it does to you. It is shattering.
There is an interesting side note in Wayland’s book. News reports about Mothman sightings entered the Chicago area press. Many of the sightings had been around Lake Michigan. A woman contacted the researcher with a strange story. She said that she was a witch. One night early in the sightings, she and a partner were on a Lake Michigan beach doing rituals to open portals into other dimensions. She believed that during the rituals they had seen dark beings enter the world out of a portal. Of course, she was certain that they weren’t dangerous, they were just poor beings in need. In need of what? Of humans as food? Do they eat our fear? No one knows whether her actions had anything to do with the manifestations. But it brings up a topic that we are going to explore in the future. Do these beings enter in because in some way they feel they have the right to do so? Is it possible that we give them permission? Is this a pattern of behavior? Interesting questions that we’re going to explore in the future.
There are hundreds of stories about the Moth Man like the ones I have told you. I view it as dangerously foolish to discount them all. I have said before that we humans are living in a supernatural war zone. Great powers of unseen evil are all around us. In the past, these evil beings presented themselves as terrifying gods and demanded worship. But here is an important question: What drove them out from so much of the world? What destroyed their power to terrorize? It was the message of Jesus Christ and God’s love, carried by His church down through the centuries that overcame them. Years ago, Carel and I spent several weeks in New Zealand. We heard Maori Christians talk about the coming of Jesus’ message that took them out of great darkness, fear and cannibalism. It freed them from slavery to false gods.
Now I’m going to make an amazing statement. Every single, human value that we hold so dear in the western world as foundational to modern society has come from one source and one source only. Historic Christianity. Those values didn’t come from ancient Greece. They didn’t come from the Enlightenment. In spite of all the evil and violence that encrusted the true message of Jesus through false leaders and corrupt churches, that message transformed the world. That stunning idea is not mine. It is made by a British historian and self-avowed atheist, Dr. Tom Holland in his classic book, Dominion – How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. He makes his startling case in over 600 pages of historical evidence. As it reached into the world carried by humble people, the power of Jesus Christ overcame the false deities that were enslaving humanity. My ancient ancestors are the Celts who lived in tribes across Europe. For eons, they were lost in darkness and fear even sacrificing people to their gods. But then came an amazing moment. Jesus’ message of love, hope and freedom was brought to them. I will thank Him forever for His brave followers who brought it, sometimes at the cost of their lives. But all of this begs some disturbing questions. What happens when the Christian church in all of her forms, utterly loses her way, forgets her purpose and message and vanishes from the nations as a force that stands against evil and injustice. What happens when she becomes enslaved, worshiping false gods of greed, power and worldly success? What happens when the church walks away from Jesus and worships the burning deity of selfishness? What happens when she gives her allegiance to powerful wolves? These questions must be asked because that is exactly what has been going on across the western world. In Luke 18:8 Jesus asks a haunting question. When the Son of Man returns will he find faith on the earth? Wait a minute, Jesus? What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see our mega-churches with their fiery electronic worship storms, our TV preachers in their Lear jets shrieking about faith and money? Can’t you see our Holy War for the Promised Land of America? He saw all of it and infinitely more. Out of what He saw came that awful question. What happens when the true message of Jesus is corrupted and removed from the world? The brutal gods of the past will return in powerful new forms. And I believe there is strong evidence in our skies, our governments, our boardrooms and our bedrooms that that is exactly what’s happening.
Consequently, we can expect to see all manner of terrifying phenomena in the years ahead. Which brings us to a final question. Are you the slave of these false gods? Have you sacrificed your life to them through pride, greed, lust, addiction, hate, rage, self-pity and lack of forgiveness? If so, Jesus has the power to set you free just as he set free my ancient ancestors. Just as he set me free. But is that what you want? There are slaves who refuse freedom. As an old saying goes, you may live in hell, but at least you know the street signs. So what street do you live on?
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