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On the June 9th 2019 episode of the Mexican paranormal YouTube show “Insólita Experiencia,” or “Unusual Experience,” in English, host Yohanan Vargas played an interesting audio track recorded in the wilderness outside of Mexicali.
The sounds were taped by paranormal investigator Stalin Valle Osuna while he and others were searching for a creature spotted in the remote areas of northern Mexico. In an interview, Osuna told Vargas that he had several testimonials from people all over the borderlands of gigantic flying humanoids that have striking similarities to the Mothman, a mysterious winged creature that first appeared in West Virginia in the mid-1960s. Roger and Linda Scarberry, and Steve and Mary Mallette, were some of the first people to see the Mothman in West Virginia in November of 1966. The local news published the two couples’ account:
“(It is) a large grey creature whose eyes ‘glowed red’ when the car’s headlights picked it up. They described it as a ‘large flying man with ten-foot wings,’ following their car while they were driving in an area outside of town known as ‘the TNT area,’ the site of a former World War II munitions plant.”
Other people in West Virginia reported sightings of the creature coincidental to a whole host of bad things happening around them from missing dogs to bad television reception. Locals blamed the Mothman for the December 15, 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge which caused the deaths of 46 people. The creature was immortalized in the 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies by author John Keel. In the year 2002 a movie came out based loosely on the book starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney. Some have argued that the West Virginia Mothman was really a gigantic crane, a bird that somehow went off its migratory route. Other researchers believe it is a true cryptid, or legendary creature previously unknown and undescribed by science. Others point to a more otherworldly or supernatural explanation for the creature. Could it be a creature from another world or another dimension?
Stories of a Mothman-type creature in Mexico apparently date back several decades. Sightings of creatures like the one described in West Virginia have been occurring in the northern part of the country for quite some time. Some stories of the Mexican Mothman – also known in Spanish as El Hombre Polilla – have even been carried by the mainstream Mexican media.
On January 8, 2017, ABC Radio out of Mexicali, Baja California, “La Voz de la Frontera,” or, in English, “The voice of the borderlands,” interviewed Ernesto Campa who had several encounters with the Mexican Mothman dating back over 20 years. When he was a boy living in the Colonia Orizaba neighborhood of Mexicali, Campa saw a large winged creature fly over him at night and land a short distance from him. The being was about two meters tall with very long legs and a wingspan of about 4 meters across. It was covered with fur, not feathers, and had red eyes. The fur was either dark gray or black. The young Ernesto Campa could tell from the anatomy of the creature that it was male. It was also slender but very muscular. He saw the same Mothman-type creature many years later in the Santa Barbara neighborhood of Mexicali just north of his boyhood home. The creature appeared very late at night, when only the gas station and a pharmacy were open and there were very few people out and about. Campa and eight other witnesses saw the flying humanoid pass over their area and then land upright near the neighborhood primary school. The description was the same: dark fur, red eyes, tall, athletic body and a massive wingspan.
Another encounter found in the local press happened in the Pacific coastal city of Ensenada in the Mexican state of Baja California in the spring of 2016. Yesenia Bustos Brown was working late at a bar and was closing for the night. She heard a rustling or flapping sound and looked out the window to see a large winged figure standing on top of a small shed located behind the bar. The creature had glowing red eyes and looked squarely at her before it spread its wings and flew away, off into the direction of the desert. To an interviewer Yesenia said:
“At first, I thought it was a very large bird, like a pelican, but it was too big and looked too human. It had dark brown or gray fur covering its whole body and it had gigantic wings, about 4 meters across. It had legs and feet like a human. It had hair all over its face, but it had a bald forehead. I was alone at the bar and no one else saw it. This was not a bird. I thought it was the Devil.”
Yesenia called her mother the next day to tell her of her encounter. Yesenia’s mom told her that when she was a little girl living on a small rancho in the state of Sonora that a similar creature was reported there and even allegedly attacked a young girl. This happened either in the 1960s or 1970s in the northwest corner of the state, Yesenia’s mother recalled.
Paranormal investigator Stalin Valle Osuna has tracked the Mexican Mothman for the past few years and said on the “Insólita Experiencia,” show that it is not uncommon for the creature to attack children or to carry away dogs or small livestock, like baby sheep. Many sightings of this being occur in rural areas and are connected to missing livestock, the investigator claimed. Valle presented the taped testimony of two more witnesses, two men known as Alejandro and Javier, who worked as ranch hands at a place called Cerro la Mesa just outside of Tijuana near the Mexican border with the United States. The two ranch hands described the creature as being three to four meters tall and having the body of a human but covered in fur and with the mane of a lion. When the creature landed, it crouched on the ground and moved like a crab from side to side. Nothing seemed to bother it and even though it had made eye contact with Alejandro and Javier, the creature was not afraid of the presence of humans. The two spoke to the local police and a police artist drew a small sketch of what the two saw on a piece of yellow lined notebook paper. Its head looked more like a bat’s but with a human’s body and large feet. In Osuna’s compilations of various Mothman sightings, he claims that it is not uncommon for witnesses to dream about the creature before seeing it in real life.
According to several researchers, the Ejido of San Lorenzo, near the town of San Pedro in the state of Coahuila has been plagued by Mothman sightings for at least two generations. The locals believe that families of these creatures live in the remote desert hills nearby. According to San Lorenzo resident Sinuea Valenzuela, she describes the creature as,
“A species that is 1.8 meters tall, which instead of feathers has fur. Its face is semi-human and, at the moment you see it, it paralyzes you. It has consciousness. It has some mental power that makes you feel what it wants you to feel.”
It’s interesting to note that Sinuea Valenzuela’s first encounter with this Mexican version of the Mothman occurred at 4:00 in the afternoon in broad daylight and she was not the only witness. In one encounter, according to Valenzuela, someone shot at the creature while it was flying away, but missed. To date, no body of the Mexican Mothman has ever been recovered. Additionally, no fur or other physical evidence has been left behind by the creature for scientists to study. All that exists are eyewitness testimonies, some blurry photographs and the sound recorded by one paranormal investigator which may or may not have come from this mysterious flying humanoid.
On his show about the Mexican Mothman, Yohanan Vargas noted that it seems like the range of the creature is limited to the northern states of Mexico as there have been few sightings outside the 7 Mexican states that border the United States. These sightings seem to cover the same geographical areas as two other gigantic flying Mexican cryptids, the “Man Bat,” and the “Lechuza.” For more information about the “Man-Bat of Northern Mexico” please see Mexico Unexplained episode number 51: https://mexicounexplained.com//man-bat-northern-mexico/ For more information about the sinister owl-like creature known as the Lechuza, please see Mexico Unexplained episode number 22: https://mexicounexplained.com//the-lechuza/ Perhaps the territories of these creatures really don’t overlap. Could the Mothman, the Man-Bat and the Lechuza be the same cryptid? Could they be variations in the same unknown and previously undescribed species? Perhaps time will tell.
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Gracias a Yohanan Diaz Vargas y a Stalin Valle Osuna.