User:GhostRiver/mothman

History
On the night of November 15, 1996, two young couples from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, described seeing a "man-sized, bird-like creature" in what is now the McClintic Wildlife Management Area. The unidentified creature was described as being 6 to 7 feet tall, with a 10 ft wingspan, and red eyes. It was described as clumsy while running, but capable of rapid flight, and that when it took off in flight, it "rose straight up, like a helicopter". That same night, a man in nearby Doddridge County described seeing another red-eyed creature the night that his German Shepherd dog disappeared, and the Raleigh Register speculated that the two incidents were related. Within three days, eight people in the greater Point Pleasant area described seeing the "thing", which George Johnson, the sheriff of Mason County, West Virginia, dismissed as a heron. Robert Smith, a professor of wildlife biology at West Virginia University, said that the creature, now described by local newspapers as a "moth man", was likely a sandhill crane.

Analysis
Smith was the first to propose a particular mundane explanation for the Mothman sightings, linking the cryptid to the sandhill crane. Although not native to the area, there have been sightings of sandhill cranes in West Virginia both before and after the Mothman sightings. The physical appearance of the sandhill crane, however, does not align with descriptions of the Mothman: the crane is about half the size of the Mothman, and the long neck of the crane is discrepant with the Mothman, who was described as having no neck. In 2002, Joe Nickell of the Skeptical Inquirer proposed that the Mothman was a type of owl, potentially a barred owl: it was native to the region, larger than a great horned owl, and exhibited "strong" eyeshine, which was consistent with Mothman descriptions that highlighted the creature's glowing red eyes. Asher Elbein of the National Audubon Society suggested in 2018 that Nickell's barred owl theory was consistent with both the bird and descriptions of the Mothman, and that the large size of the spotted creature was due to the inability of most people to correctly discern the size of something spotted in the dark.