Regular Episode
#154 – THE CHICAGO MOTHMAN—SITE SEEING
The primary clearinghouse for these reports is Lon Strickler‘s website Phantoms and Monsters and his accompanying book on the Chicago sightings. MonsterTalk reached out to Lon for an interview; he declined. The creature being reported — typically described as seven to eight feet tall, dark, with a roughly ten-foot wingspan, a crested or pointed head, and glowing red eyes — has accumulated at least 67 reports as of recording. Blake and Allison note that in a metro area of some ten million people, 67 reports is statistically negligible, and raises its own uncomfortable questions about why more people haven’t seen it.
🗺️ Boots on the Ground: Site Investigation
Allison’s method is straightforward: she visits every pinned location on Strickler’s Google Map of Chicago phantom sightings, records a Facebook Live video on-site, then uploads it to her YouTube playlist (bit.ly/ChicagoMothman). The exercise has been instructive — not for monster sightings, but for the steady accumulation of discrepancies between the written reports and physical reality.
The Melrose Park sighting, notable because it came with a photograph, proved to be a turning point. The witness reported emerging from a Best Buy and immediately photographing a swooping creature. On-site, Allison found the photograph was taken from the middle of a busy parking lot, well away from the store entrance. More tellingly, Melrose Park sits directly under the flight path for O’Hare International Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world. Photographs she took of passing airliners closely matched the blurry silhouette offered as evidence of a winged humanoid.
A second account described the creature perching on a basketball hoop in a neighborhood park, near a five-story building. When Allison located the correct park, she found a small toddler playground with no basketball hoop — and no five-story structures anywhere in the surrounding blocks, the neighborhood’s buildings topping out at three stories.
🚩 Red Flags: IP Addresses, Fabricated Details, and Rewritten Accounts
Sam Maranto, the Illinois state director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), cross-referenced reports submitted to both MUFON and Phantoms and Monsters. Of seven reports filed with both outlets, five originated from only two IP addresses — a strong technical indicator of a single submitter filing multiple claims under different identities. Blake walks through the basics of IP addressing and DHCP for listeners unfamiliar with the concept: a static IP address reappearing across multiple supposedly independent reports is about as close to a smoking gun as digital forensics gets in this context. Maranto also checked verifiable environmental details cited in the reports — claimed full moons, rain, and weather conditions — and found several that did not match historical records for those dates.
One report claimed the witness was a police officer who had filed an official police report. Allison pursued this through her own Freedom of Information Act channels and could find no matching report. Fellow members of the Chicago Phantom Task Force (a group Allison belonged to before being asked to leave for raising skeptical questions) privately acknowledged the police report detail was fabricated. Strickler’s own book addresses the case and offers the justification that anyone willing to lay down their life for Chicago deserves to be believed — a position Allison finds difficult to reconcile with the absence of any documentary corroboration.
Additionally, a contact of Allison’s who interviewed Strickler learned that he routinely rewrites witness submissions to make them “sound more interesting.” Maranto’s linguistic analysis had flagged unusual commonalities in phrasing across reports; that editorial intervention complicates any attempt to determine whether multiple accounts genuinely originate from multiple people.
🦇 Comparing Chicago to Point Pleasant
The original Mothman sightings in Point Pleasant, West Virginia ran from 1966 to 1967 and culminated in the collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 15, 1967 — killing 46 people who were returning from Christmas shopping. The 50th anniversary of that disaster fell in December 2017, squarely within the Chicago sighting window. Allison notes the original Point Pleasant witnesses went directly to local newspapers and remained contactable for decades; the Chicago witnesses are largely anonymous, funneled through a single gatekeeper, and effectively inaccessible to independent researchers. The insularity of the current case makes it structurally very different from the West Virginia flap, whatever one concludes about the latter.
🌍 A Brief Detour: Kent (1963) and the Owlman
While visiting Kent, England on a research trip, Allison investigated a lesser-known 1963 winged-humanoid sighting that predates the Point Pleasant events by three years. John Keel, whose 📚 The Mothman Prophecies 💵 (1975) remains the foundational text for Mothman lore, examined the Kent case and framed it in Mothman terms; local people at the time speculated it was the ghost of a prominent landowner named William Turney. The creature in the Kent account shared the standard dark-winged tall figure with red lights — except it reportedly had webbed feet, prompting Allison to coin the taxonomically distinct category of “bat duck.”
The conversation also touches on the Cornish Owlman sightings of the 1970s. Allison recalls a Fortean Times special issue tied to the 2002 🎬 The Mothman Prophecies 💵 film that concluded the Owlman was likely an art-student hoax.
🔬 Skeptics, Believers, and the Value of Rigor
Allison makes a point the hosts find congenial: paranormal research that wants to be taken seriously has to verify everything that can be verified, disclose what doesn’t match up, and not mistake enthusiasm for methodology. The Chicago case, she argues, is actively harmful to the field because fraudulent or embellished reports contaminate the dataset and make it impossible to identify anything genuinely anomalous that might be buried in the noise. She draws a comparison to the kind of sting operations James Randi and others have run to expose lax paranormal investigation, and calls on the paranormal community to hold its own sources to a higher standard.
Blake notes that MonsterTalk occupies a niche within a niche — skeptics who actually care about the phenomena and are willing to go look — and that the conversation with Allison is exactly the kind of cross-aisle collaboration that could improve the quality of investigation on both sides.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Mothman Dynasty: Chicago’s Winged Humanoids 💵 by Lon Strickler
– 📚 The Mothman Prophecies 💵 by John Keel
– 📚 Mothman and Other Curious Encounters 💵 by Loren Coleman
– 📚 Mothman: Evil Incarnate 💵 by Loren Coleman
– 🎬 The Mothman Prophecies 💵 (2002 film)
🔗 Related Links
– Mothman – Wikipedia
– Point Pleasant, West Virginia
– Silver Bridge collapse (1967)
– Cornish Owlman
– John Keel
– Mutual UFO Network (MUFON)
– Fortean Times
– Mackenzie Poltergeist, Greyfriars Kirkyard
– Allison Jornlin’s See You on the Other Side podcast
– milwaukeeghost.com
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
Allison Jornlin is a paranormal researcher and host of The Otherside podcast. She’s been diligently researching the recent (2017–present) Chicago Mothman sightings as popularized on Lon Strickler’s Phantoms and Monsters website and book. You can find all of Allison’s on-site video recordings from her Mothman research on YouTube.
Of Interest
- Melrose Park Photo
- Two Red Lights
- Miller Park (2nd account on the page) — No basketball hoop / No 5 story bldg
- Police Report?
- Really Big Bug?
- UFO?
- And just for fun: Bat Duck
Per Allison, as regards our discussion of duplicate IP addresses used in some of the claims:
According to Sam Maranto from IL MUFON, of the 7 reports which were reported to MUFON as well as P&M (on the following dates: April 18, 2017; April 20, 2017; April 24, 2017, May 21st, 2017; May 30, 2017; August 4, 2017; and August 5, 2017) 2 of the first 3 came from the same IP and 3 of the last 4 came from the same IP. So 5 out of 7. Of the 7, “six had no reliable contact information) as it was either fictitious, missing, or returned. This raised flags because not many of the reports they usually receive include false contact info.
Lon was invited onto MonsterTalk to discuss the sightings, but he declined.
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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