Image source: still from Eyes of the Mothman

I just finished watching the documentary Eyes of the Mothman. It was 2 hours and 30 minutes of a concerted effort to make the legend of the Mothman just as boring as humanly possible. 

That’s probably a tad mean, as there were indications throughout of the kind of paranormal documentary it could have been. The eye for composing even talking head interview shots was excellent and the music was often perfectly suited to the subject matter. But overall it was a decent 45-minute documentary stretched to a mind-numbing 2.5 hours. It even began with a slow-paced recap of who Chief Cornstalk was and what happened to him to make him lay the curse that supposedly haunts Point Pleasant, WV (earthly home of the Mothman) to this very day. It’s available on Netflix Instant and I wouldn’t go so far as to say don’t bother, but I will say if you do bother, have some coffee to keep yourself awake and don’t watch it on your iPhone, as I did. The best thing about it is the camera work and editing and I’m sure my phone didn’t do those elements much justice. Otherwise I would have cut the length drastically, eliminating 95% of the digressions about Chief Cornstalk, farmed out the narration to a writer who really knows how to write, and asked the narrator to not sound so damned much like Dan Rather. (Seriously, he just sounded like he was doing Dan Rather. A good Dan Rather but still, an imitation Dan Rather.)

The documentary mostly ignored John Keel’s seminal book about the Mothman, as well, which struck me as perverse, more than anything. Unless there were legalities involved in mentioning that book it seems ridiculous to act almost as if it didn’t exist. 

Footnote: Noted cryptozoologist Loren Coleman discusses the weirdness that surrounded the making of the documentary here—it included (tangentially) no less than the stalking of Ivanka Trump. I am not even kidding. But what do you expect from a guy who calls himself Cloud Starchaser? 

[CLICK TO EMBIGGEN]

Mothman: Hey, Bigfoot, what do you wanna do tonight?

Bigfoot: Same thing we do every night, Mothman: listen to Dr. Dre while I shoot out the windows of the offices for The Weekly World News with my Bigfoot gun.

Mothman: Dude, that’s a really unimaginative name for your dick.

Cryptozoological action figures. The Occultist wants this SO BAD.

John Keel’s March 16, 1966 lecture on the Mothman.

At the time of this lecture, Fortean author John A. Keel was still actively investigating events in Point Pleasant, WV and working on a book about them. The book that would become The Mothman Prophecies would be published almost 2 years later.

The lecture is just under 30 minutes in length and just like the Long John Nebel (Keel actually references guesting on Nebel’s radio show the night before in this lecture) posts I made earlier, it’s a fascinating window into a particular time and place.

One thing that strikes me in particular: how little the paranoid nature of any dialog regarding UFOs has changed over the years. Much of Keel’s rhetoric in this talk can be found parroted by others in hardcore believer blogs and forums on the Internet today.