Three separate witnesses in the Chicago area reportedly sighted a massive flying creature that some have compared to the legendary Mothman entity. According to MUFON’s Roger Marsh received reports of many sightings that occurred over a four hour period on one night in mid-April and later in August which reached its peak of 30 sightings.
CHICAGO, IL – For nearly a decade Chicago has been a stand-in for fictional Gotham City thanks to Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. So it makes some sense that reports of a winged bat-like creature would be popping up across the city and even the suburbs.
In the second week of August, there were nearly 30 sightings of a “large flying humanoid” in the Chicago area according to Lon Stickler who tracked these reports on his website Phantoms and Monsters, and for Singular. Fortean society.
The dream that Batman is in Chicago fighting crime aside, sightings of this sort – a dark, winged humanoid with glowing red eyes – have been reported for decades across the country. The most famous sightings of the so-called “Mothman” happened in 1966 in Point Pleasant, West Virginia and are said to be connected to a bridge collapse that killed 46 people a year after the first reports. The creature’s appearance and meaning have inspired a film, a movie, and countless pop culture references.
Stickler who told the Chicago Reader that he encountered a Mothman as a child in Pennsylvania started hearing stories about a winged creature in Chicago in 2011 when he received three reports. Last year only one report came out, but Stickler has tracked 29 sightings so far in 2017, most of them occurring near Lake Michigan.
The last sighting Stickler received was on Wednesday, August 9th along North Lake Shore Drive, according to his website. A wife and husband were walking in that area around 9:20 pm when they saw a winged form descend from the sky and finally fly towards them:
“Then, all of a sudden, the large winged being slowly descended in front of them no more than 25 feet away. It hovered about 5 feet above the pavement with its wing open as it looked at the couple with large red glowing eyes that slowly changed back and forth in intensity. Several people across the street, including a delivery van driver, reacted with startled screams and yelps. The winged being hovered for 10 seconds then quickly pulled the wings onto its body and quickly fired at the night sky.”
The woman who contacted Stickler described the 5- to 6-foot “winged being” she and her husband saw as “‘human-like’ with a small head that tapers at the top” with blue-green skin. “wet” that looked shiny. The wings resembled those of a butterfly and fanged along the body. He also had long, tapered feet.
Earlier this summer, Stickler received a report from another couple who claim they accidentally photographed a winged humanoid while taking a picture of the Eye Car Muffler Man at 6254 S. Pulaski Road. He posted the photo in a YouTube video in June.
Other Stickler sightings listed on the Singular Fortean Society website include:
May 19: Two “giant bats” are seen performing “air maneuvers” near the Adler Planetarium.
June 29: Two police officers, an “aspiring journalist” and a group of witnesses see a “black shadow with wings” flying and standing on top of a building in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood.
August 2: A woman and her child reported seeing a “tall, dark humanoid” making a “sucking, drooling sound” in Indian Boundary Park in suburban Bolingbrook.
August 4: Similar sightings are reported on the same day, one in Melrose Park and one in River Forest.
Stickler doesn’t think the current Mothman sightings in Chicago are prophesying bad times for the city the way some people believe they did in West Virginia. But he also can’t explain the sightings he told the Chicago Reader were the most reports he’s seen in a single area in such a short period of time.
