Mothman

The idea of objective truth is contained entirely within the subjective minds of human beings. The scientific method posits that whatever is observable and repeatable under the same circumstances must be Truth. It has no means of validating an event that occurs once.

This is useful. The human mind rewards itself with dopamine hits for recognizing patterns. Medicine and technology work because we fuck around and find patterns. However, practicality and application are not Truth. No matter how much they seem like they must be. Science is a tool. It is an application of a way of thinking. It is not self-evident Truth. For hundreds of years, priest-philosophers were the closest things to scientists. Their base assumption was that the Christian God was real, and all their thinking was framed by this basic truth. And these were not dumb people. The smartest people alive had this rubric framing their thoughts.There were many brilliant people who thought that sometimes your blood just went bad, and you had to bleed all that bad blood out. But you actually had typhoid or something.

The modes of assuming reality change. They evolve. They apply themselves to the zeitgeist. This is working for now, so it must be golden.

Anyway, enough about that fucking shit, I want to talk about Mothman.

West Virginia. Blue ridge mountains. Shenandoah River.

On November 15, 1966,in the cultural backwater of West Virginia, a young couple was driving around by an old World War II munitions plant, and they found themselves pursued by a giant monster. A creature, humanoid in shape, with great grey wings of shadow, eyes glowing red. A terrifying, otherworldly creature. Chasing them. Maybe an overly elaborate cover story for a guy who didn’t get his girlfriend back home before curfew, you think.

However, other people kept seeing this shit. A pair of firemen saw a creature in a field whose eyes glowed bright red when they put a light on him.

The Mothman supposedly landed on the Silver Bridge, which connected West Virginia to Ohio. Eyewitnesses said he landed on a high point on the bridge, and then, in real life, it collapsed. 46 people died, plunging from their cars into the shrapnel and cold December river water. Now, there is a statue of Mothman in that town. I imagine getting stuck in traffic on a bridge, looking up to the steel lattice supporting me, and a grey humanoid with glowing red eyes watching me, deep dark doom filling my stomach, and the bottom of everything falling out from under me. Steel and rebar and concrete batter me as I sink into ice water, and primal panic forces me to suck death into my lungs.

Science says Mothman is not provable, probably. Probable. The people dying bloody in a river saw him. A grotesque mounting the instrument of mass death. The impossible happens. It happens all the time.