If Google Maps kept track of cryptids (mental note: new website idea), a search on “Mothman” would go first to Point Pleasant, West Virginia – home of the original and most famous sightings in 1966-67. What location would be #2? A strong case could be made for Chicago, Illinois, which has had a steady stream of winged humanoid reports since 2011, with peak activity in 2017, in both urban and suburban areas, including O’Hare International Airport. (Lon Strickler at the Phantoms & Monsters website has done an excellent job over the years of tracking the sightings both on the site and in books.) The latest at O’Hare illustrate how serious these sightings are being taken – the witness, an airline employee, claims he was threatened with termination if he went public with it.
Date of Sighting: December 30, 2021
Time of Sighting: Approximately 2330
Location of Sighting: American Airlines Hangar – O’Hare International Airport- Chicago, IL
Summary: Maintenance Crew has sighting of three winged humanoids
Uh-oh.
This particular report was submitted to Manuel Navarette’s UFO Clearinghouse site by an anonymous worker at the American Airlines aircraft hangar who claimed to be one of four people who witnessed “three large black creatures over by the parking lot, they were about 7 feet tall each and they were just staring right at us.” That was followed by “one of them opens what look like large black wings and shoots off onto the sky followed by the others, all three making a sort of screeching sound as they take off.” And THAT was followed by this:
“A few seconds later a security vehicle comes screaming up through the driveway and stops and some white chubby security person runs out with his flashlight and starts checking the area.”
“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 to our supervisors.”
“They came in after 10 minutes 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 of our phones or we would be immediately terminated. When we demanded that we see our union steward first, we were told this was a matter of internal security and that this superseded the authority of the union.”
According to the report to UFO Clearinghouse (read the full account here), the four workers complied to avoid losing their jobs, but that wasn’t the end of this incident.
“These people ain’t playing around, they have checked in on us at least twice and I have also heard from others that have seen the same thing that they were told to stay quiet or risk losing their jobs. So many people have been threatened with being fired if they told their story. What you hear reported are just a small piece of these things.”
Before you toss this in your “No video – didn’t happen” circular receptacle, UFO Clearinghouse did due diligence – it talked to the witness and found the person to be credible. The witness also revealed that the airline (assumed to be American) has covered up other similar incidents:
“… many witnesses have either been terminated, laid off or reassigned to other workstations in order to keep these sightings under wraps.”
Specifically, the witness recounted another winged humanoid incident on July 22, 2021, as one that resulted in firings, relocations and cover-ups. UFO Clearinghouse forwarded its report to Phantoms & Monsters, which had this addendum:
“This situation is similar to other sightings and attempted recordings by O’Hare employees. My informant has relayed other previous incidents. The airport supervisors and TSA, as well as the carrier managements, are doing all they can to suppress sighting disclosure.”
The Singular Fortean Society, another group which has reported on past Chicago Mothman incidents, points out that O’Hare International Airport has over a dozen sightings coming since August of 2019, and that similar winged humanoid reports “have come from every state bordering Lake Michigan and date back to 1957” and have often been accompanied by “reports of UFOs, other anomalous flying creatures and mysterious humanoids, parapsychological phenomena, and bizarre events” seen by both witnesses and investigators.
Should we believe the latest witnesses of a Mothman at Chicago’s O’Hare airport? It’s always tough when there is no photographic evidence, but the investigators on this case show the account is very similar to many others. Do O’Hare and American have reasons to cover up the existence of an unexplained creature roaming their grounds? Of course they do – no carrier wants terrified passengers or cancellations based on rumors of monsters. In fact, if the alleged creatures are actually just large birds, the airport doesn’t want passengers worrying about planes flying into them either.
Do I look like a Mothman?
The big moth in the ointment is the phone videos. If there are indeed so many sightings of something strange at the airport, it should be possible that one witness could catch in on a smartphone and slip out before “security” shows up to confiscate it. Unless this ‘creature’ is the one in control.
Maybe that’s why Google Maps doesn’t track them.
(Kudos to all of the investigators for their accounts on these incidents.)