On November 15, 1966, a pair of young couples took an evening drive down a lonely road on the outskirts of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Their route took them through overgrown bunkers of the “TNT Area,” the remnants of a WW2 munitions plant. There the headlights glanced off something in the dark: a six-foot-tall, man-shaped thing. Shining red eyes stared back at them from a body without an obvious head or neck. Spooked, the couples sped away, only to see the thing following them on silent, unmoving wings. The encounter in Point Pleasant was the first sighting of what local news dubbed “the Mothman," one of America’s most enduring cryptids. Throughout the following year the town was rocked with a welter of sightings—some honest, some the product of likely hoaxes. Even after the local frenzy subsided, Mothman proved popular with the UFO and cryptozoology set, and hit the mainstream with the 2002 film The Mothman Prophecies. Its partisans maintain that it is an alien, a...