September 15, 2024 • 16 mins
Guest host George Knapp and author Greg Lawson discuss decoding acts of the mysterious Mothman.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Mothman, I think is a great vehicle for sort of
conveying you what you want to share with us in
your book Messages from Mathman. A lot of books have
been written about the circumstances around that event in West
Virginia back in the sixties. Here your book looks at
it from a different angle. I mean, a lot of
people had premonitions and dreams, but they really didn't need
the warnings walk us through it. What the message from
(00:25):
Mathman is.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Well, the message from Mathman would definitely be individual interpretation, right.
And that's the thing about clairvoyance or mediumship or premonition
kind of stuff is so often even the different different
people that are bringing forth premonition or information about the
(00:51):
future are often very different. And it has a lot
to do with, in my opinion, how the individual that
it is getting this information is interpreting it. But not
only that, is how the information that the receiver is getting,
the person that's supposed to get the message is also
(01:14):
interpreting it. You know, no one said, at least not
in what I've read and what other people have written
on math man. No one said or front loaded that
movement was there to warn us about the Silver Bridge collapse.
(01:36):
You know, that was that interpretation much later. And that's
what's interesting about a lot of these pre cognitive or
premonition type interpretations is they don't often become there's not
a lot of clarity until after the event occurs. You know,
(01:57):
everybody has been or not everybody, but a lot of
people of them studying Nurse Damas for you know, decades,
if not a century or more, and oftentimes his quadrains
and and the the way he writes about the future
is so cryptic that, you know, the the cynics and
(02:20):
I say the cynics, not the skeptics, But these cynics
will come in and say, well, you can turn this
into any kind of uh message that you want. It's
just all about the interpretation. And I believe that at
that point there is a little faith or a little
internal guidance that that we have to rely on whenever
(02:43):
we get information like that.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Well, I can see what you mean is that people
are seeing a giant mothman flying around in the sky.
It's a terrible, terrifying experience, but it doesn't necessarily tell
you don't drive on the on the bridge on this night, right, sure?
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Right? And it works the whole thing, especially with mav Man.
Is I mean when you whenever I do an investigation,
I look at it from a cold case standpoint when
I do a paranormal investigation, because typically it's a cold
case kind of thing, so I will boil down a
(03:19):
lot of the superfluous information. When I wrote Roswell the
after Action Report. To do that, I had to look
at the nineteen ninety four release that the Air Force
conducted their own investigation on their own agency and came
out with an almost one thousand page document that was
(03:41):
nothing but a bunch of gibbers. It was a whole
bunch of fluff that some kernels could say, we did
a whole bunch of work. We reviewed millions of documents
and this is what we came up with. Do you agree?
And that's not how you do an investigation. You know,
you don't front load and prep your witnesses and the
(04:02):
folks that are providing that testimony. So that's the real
hard thing about Monckman and Mockman. If I wrote a report,
a comprehensive, chronological, complete police report on Mockman, it would
probably be twe pages long maybe, so a lot of
(04:24):
what happened with Makman is very impactful, but it was sparse,
There was no lot, and it was it wasn't a
wide widespread phenomena at the time. But as books are written,
as more articles are written, more people are looking at
(04:47):
it and of course coming forward with those little things
that I remember one time when I was driving down
the start road, there was this dark thing that flew
out and so then they jump on the bandwagon with
the with the witnesses. So when I went in to
do this book, that was the thing that I really
looked at, was it took me down so many different
(05:09):
rabbit trails and rabbit holes that it kind of turned
into something else. Because this is not an isolated from
online in West Virginia.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
At least one of those witnesses that you write about,
the female newspaper reporter, her dream, her premonition was really
pretty specific. I mean, it's got people drowning in water,
you know, right, that's.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Right, yeah, And that was the thing about her. She worked,
I remember ran she worked for anyway, it was it
was the point pleasant register, if I remember ring and
(05:55):
often you know, being a professional investigative reporter, you know
that you don't want to include yourself and your reports. Yeah,
in this case, she did. Once she spoke with Lauren Coleman,
and Lauren Coleman was writing a book about it, and
she shared her very pretty intense dream that she had
(06:22):
about her experience as far as what she saw. And
that was something really interesting because, like I said before,
that normally reporters don't do that.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah, I guess it would have been hard for anybody
who had any of those experiences, either seeing Mothman or
having the dreams of people drowning or indrid colder than
men in black things that also happened in and around
the Mothman phenomena, it'd be hard pressed to figure, Ah, well,
here's what's going to happen. That bridge is going to collapse.
But there is an example you have in your book
(06:54):
that it did seem to be a more specific kind
of a warning, and that's about Chernobyl share with us
be kind of things that people were thinking and feeling
and imagining leading up to the Chernobyl disaster. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
So, and that's one of those other things I threw
in there a while ago. As far as the difference
between skeptic and cynic, so I kind of always use
a continuum way. For the far left is a true believer.
No matter what you tell this person, they're going to
believe the magnificent event, whatever that is, the supernatural event,
(07:28):
you can't talk about it. Then on the other side,
you had the cynic that doesn't believe in anything and
rolls their eyes as soon as you bring it up. Well,
a skeptic is going to float around there in the
middle of someplace based on the evidence provided, based on
the experience provided, and contemporary psychologists and psychiatrists and most
(07:52):
people that study human behavior are going to say, in
a case like Chernobyl, most of those people were very
scared working there. You know, it was a pretty scary place,
thinking about what you're dealing with, the heat that you're
dealing with, and the fact that this equipment didn't always
(08:13):
function the way it did. But in the back of
their mind, like in the Aberfin coal disaster, everybody knew
that there was some there was problems, and so you
could say contemporarily that when these people would go to sleep,
they would have dreams about these things that they were
worrying about all day long. But with Chernobyl, the thing
(08:37):
that was interesting is much like Makman, there's a large
black creature. In some cases they talk about having red
eyes being in around that area and very prominent in
the plume once the reactor actually exploded, and so that
(09:00):
was fascinating. There's several incidents like that, but you're right,
the Turnover one's probably the closest.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
If I were to see a giant mock looking thing
with red eyes, dark black, you know, flying around to
the sky over me, you know, I'm not sure how
to react. My my reaction might be I'm staying home
for a couple of days. I'm not going anywhere, and
my luck would be a plane crashes into my house.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Sure, yeah, And in this case, I have to think
about it in both cases.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
All right.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
So in the case of the Silver Bridge, you're sitting
there and the traffic is completely backed up on this
bridge that was never made to hold this amount of
cars that you know, it's almost a forty year old bridge,
so cars have changed, the weight of cars have changed.
And then it's Christmas and everybody's trying to get get
(09:51):
home and traffic lights aren't working. As efficiently as they
should be, sort of backs traffic up all the way
across the bridgedge. And the design of the bridge was
bad to begin with the cable because I mean, I mean,
it spans two thousand feet over two thousand feet across there,
and it's not put together by you know, solid cables.
(10:14):
It's put together basically like chain links. They're not chained,
but they're a type of couple that is designed to flex,
and it basically has a pivot point on that and
one of the pivot points under that weight snapped and
that's that was a really unfortunate thing about the design
(10:35):
of this bridge is any one thing would have brought
that bridge down. Most of the most bridges the way
they'll go, you know, just one failure point that's not
going to bring the whole thing down. But in this
case it did. And when this is happening is when
some people said that they saw mofman kind of hovering
around out there watching, so they kind of leave me
(11:00):
away from that he was trying to warn us. Because
he was trying to warn us, he just swoop around
get everybody's attention. But in this case, the way it
was described as he's kind of back off of a
little bit up in the air and watching and as
a witness seeing all this happen, probably the last thing
you're thinking of is paying more attention to him, right,
(11:21):
you know, people falling in in the water and just
all of that just horrible.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
There's an example you use in the book what you
call divine intervention, which sort of the flip side of
these terrible things happening. Maybe it's coincidence, synchronicity, but there's
an example you use from March nineteen fifty and Beatrice, Nebraska,
at a church, the choir is supposed to get together
and have a practice session share that story of what happened.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Yeah, so that's one of the really really interesting ones.
And like I said, from a real side from somebody
that I try to put my cases together, write my
cases in a way that would be presentable to a
grand jury. So whenever I do a paranormal case, that's
my goal is would I be embarrassed to walk into
(12:16):
a grand jury and share this information with them. In
this particular case nineteen fifties, and that was the West
End Baptist Church in Beatrice, Nebraskan, and that night the
choir of the church was supposed to practice at seven
point fifteen. So I can't remember what his name was.
(12:39):
The preacher of the church around four o'clock or so
fires up the furnace and then locks up the church
and heads home. He wants to heat heat the furnace up,
eat the church up, so the when the choir is
there that you know they'd be comfortable, and they're supposed
to be there seven to fifteen. Well, nobody show us.
(13:00):
Not a single one of the people in the choir
showed up, and they had afterward they were asked later.
Everybody had different reasons why, you know, some people were
late making dinner, some people just didn't feel like it.
Some people were watching a TV program and they it
went long. But they were supposed to be there seven fifteen.
(13:23):
At seven five, the entire church exploded. And the odds
and that's what I look at. A lot of times
people say, well, that's miraculous. Well they kind of the
definition of miraculous is one in a million. So if
it was a one in a million thing, that was
a miraculous thing, and you could interpret it as you know,
(13:47):
a divine intervention thing. And for the fact that not
a single person from the choir showed up when they
were supposed to, and that the whole church was leveled
due to the natural gas explosion. That everybody in town
heard every I mean, it was, it was, it was,
It was serious news at the time. It was just
(14:10):
it's a miraculous, miraculous case.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yeah, you just think that they must have been stunned
when they realized what had happened, and that all of
them had a different reason for not being there. It's
not really an inner voice that told them not to be.
There were a circumstance and.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
All of us have experienced that kind of thing where
you know, let's say a car collision happens in front
of us or behind us, and you start thinking, Wow,
if I had not had that conversation, you know, longer
than what I wanted it to be before I got
into my car, I would have been right at that spote.
(14:46):
I would have been in the middle of that collision
or vice versa. You know, the could be light later
and we we have that happened, But to have it
happened to multiple people of one single incident, is it
just makes you like I said that those two words,
what if.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Well, maybe Reverend Walter Klymple was a slave driver, cracking
the whip, making his choir practice too much, and everybody
just got tired of it and didn't show up.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
I'm just kidding, right, could have been you know, you
don't know what the mechanism of this thing is.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
You do get into the butterfly effect in the book,
and I think it's a good fit because you know,
as you're saying there, you know, a car accident, you
could have been in it if you hadn't left the
house one minute earlier or later. The butterfly effect can
have profound effects. Something very simple and tiny and little
has profound effects all over the world. I mean that's
(15:42):
not an exaggeration. It can be that way, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
And you know, with the popularity of The Twister, the
movie that just came out a couple of months ago,
and when people are looking, you don't know what effects
that came. They came out of a meteorologist, uh uh.
(16:08):
And Edward lorenz Uh coined that back in that team
the seventies, and you know, his whole thing was any
kind of disturbance in the air, sims ripples just like
a pebble in a pond. It is going to affect someplace.
We just don't know what the magnitude of that effect
(16:29):
is going to be.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Mothman, I think is a great vehicle for sort of
conveying you what you want to share with us in
your book Messages from Mathman. A lot of books have
been written about the circumstances around that event in West
Virginia back in the sixties. Here your book looks at
it from a different angle. I mean, a lot of
people had premonitions and dreams, but they really didn't need
the warnings walk us through it. What the message from
(00:25):
Mathman is.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Well, the message from Mathman would definitely be individual interpretation, right.
And that's the thing about clairvoyance or mediumship or premonition
kind of stuff is so often even the different different
people that are bringing forth premonition or information about the
(00:51):
future are often very different. And it has a lot
to do with, in my opinion, how the individual that
it is getting this information is interpreting it. But not
only that, is how the information that the receiver is getting,
the person that's supposed to get the message is also
(01:14):
interpreting it. You know, no one said, at least not
in what I've read and what other people have written
on math man. No one said or front loaded that
movement was there to warn us about the Silver Bridge collapse.
(01:36):
You know, that was that interpretation much later. And that's
what's interesting about a lot of these pre cognitive or
premonition type interpretations is they don't often become there's not
a lot of clarity until after the event occurs. You know,
(01:57):
everybody has been or not everybody, but a lot of
people of them studying Nurse Damas for you know, decades,
if not a century or more, and oftentimes his quadrains
and and the the way he writes about the future
is so cryptic that, you know, the the cynics and
(02:20):
I say the cynics, not the skeptics, But these cynics
will come in and say, well, you can turn this
into any kind of uh message that you want. It's
just all about the interpretation. And I believe that at
that point there is a little faith or a little
internal guidance that that we have to rely on whenever
(02:43):
we get information like that.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Well, I can see what you mean is that people
are seeing a giant mothman flying around in the sky.
It's a terrible, terrifying experience, but it doesn't necessarily tell
you don't drive on the on the bridge on this night, right, sure?
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Right? And it works the whole thing, especially with mav Man.
Is I mean when you whenever I do an investigation,
I look at it from a cold case standpoint when
I do a paranormal investigation, because typically it's a cold
case kind of thing, so I will boil down a
(03:19):
lot of the superfluous information. When I wrote Roswell the
after Action Report. To do that, I had to look
at the nineteen ninety four release that the Air Force
conducted their own investigation on their own agency and came
out with an almost one thousand page document that was
(03:41):
nothing but a bunch of gibbers. It was a whole
bunch of fluff that some kernels could say, we did
a whole bunch of work. We reviewed millions of documents
and this is what we came up with. Do you agree?
And that's not how you do an investigation. You know,
you don't front load and prep your witnesses and the
(04:02):
folks that are providing that testimony. So that's the real
hard thing about Monckman and Mockman. If I wrote a report,
a comprehensive, chronological, complete police report on Mockman, it would
probably be twe pages long maybe, so a lot of
(04:24):
what happened with Makman is very impactful, but it was sparse,
There was no lot, and it was it wasn't a
wide widespread phenomena at the time. But as books are written,
as more articles are written, more people are looking at
(04:47):
it and of course coming forward with those little things
that I remember one time when I was driving down
the start road, there was this dark thing that flew
out and so then they jump on the bandwagon with
the with the witnesses. So when I went in to
do this book, that was the thing that I really
looked at, was it took me down so many different
(05:09):
rabbit trails and rabbit holes that it kind of turned
into something else. Because this is not an isolated from
online in West Virginia.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
At least one of those witnesses that you write about,
the female newspaper reporter, her dream, her premonition was really
pretty specific. I mean, it's got people drowning in water,
you know, right, that's.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Right, yeah, And that was the thing about her. She worked,
I remember ran she worked for anyway, it was it
was the point pleasant register, if I remember ring and
(05:55):
often you know, being a professional investigative reporter, you know
that you don't want to include yourself and your reports. Yeah,
in this case, she did. Once she spoke with Lauren Coleman,
and Lauren Coleman was writing a book about it, and
she shared her very pretty intense dream that she had
(06:22):
about her experience as far as what she saw. And
that was something really interesting because, like I said before,
that normally reporters don't do that.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah, I guess it would have been hard for anybody
who had any of those experiences, either seeing Mothman or
having the dreams of people drowning or indrid colder than
men in black things that also happened in and around
the Mothman phenomena, it'd be hard pressed to figure, Ah, well,
here's what's going to happen. That bridge is going to collapse.
But there is an example you have in your book
(06:54):
that it did seem to be a more specific kind
of a warning, and that's about Chernobyl share with us
be kind of things that people were thinking and feeling
and imagining leading up to the Chernobyl disaster. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
So, and that's one of those other things I threw
in there a while ago. As far as the difference
between skeptic and cynic, so I kind of always use
a continuum way. For the far left is a true believer.
No matter what you tell this person, they're going to
believe the magnificent event, whatever that is, the supernatural event,
(07:28):
you can't talk about it. Then on the other side,
you had the cynic that doesn't believe in anything and
rolls their eyes as soon as you bring it up. Well,
a skeptic is going to float around there in the
middle of someplace based on the evidence provided, based on
the experience provided, and contemporary psychologists and psychiatrists and most
(07:52):
people that study human behavior are going to say, in
a case like Chernobyl, most of those people were very
scared working there. You know, it was a pretty scary place,
thinking about what you're dealing with, the heat that you're
dealing with, and the fact that this equipment didn't always
(08:13):
function the way it did. But in the back of
their mind, like in the Aberfin coal disaster, everybody knew
that there was some there was problems, and so you
could say contemporarily that when these people would go to sleep,
they would have dreams about these things that they were
worrying about all day long. But with Chernobyl, the thing
(08:37):
that was interesting is much like Makman, there's a large
black creature. In some cases they talk about having red
eyes being in around that area and very prominent in
the plume once the reactor actually exploded, and so that
(09:00):
was fascinating. There's several incidents like that, but you're right,
the Turnover one's probably the closest.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
If I were to see a giant mock looking thing
with red eyes, dark black, you know, flying around to
the sky over me, you know, I'm not sure how
to react. My my reaction might be I'm staying home
for a couple of days. I'm not going anywhere, and
my luck would be a plane crashes into my house.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Sure, yeah, And in this case, I have to think
about it in both cases.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
All right.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
So in the case of the Silver Bridge, you're sitting
there and the traffic is completely backed up on this
bridge that was never made to hold this amount of
cars that you know, it's almost a forty year old bridge,
so cars have changed, the weight of cars have changed.
And then it's Christmas and everybody's trying to get get
(09:51):
home and traffic lights aren't working. As efficiently as they
should be, sort of backs traffic up all the way
across the bridgedge. And the design of the bridge was
bad to begin with the cable because I mean, I mean,
it spans two thousand feet over two thousand feet across there,
and it's not put together by you know, solid cables.
(10:14):
It's put together basically like chain links. They're not chained,
but they're a type of couple that is designed to flex,
and it basically has a pivot point on that and
one of the pivot points under that weight snapped and
that's that was a really unfortunate thing about the design
(10:35):
of this bridge is any one thing would have brought
that bridge down. Most of the most bridges the way
they'll go, you know, just one failure point that's not
going to bring the whole thing down. But in this
case it did. And when this is happening is when
some people said that they saw mofman kind of hovering
around out there watching, so they kind of leave me
(11:00):
away from that he was trying to warn us. Because
he was trying to warn us, he just swoop around
get everybody's attention. But in this case, the way it
was described as he's kind of back off of a
little bit up in the air and watching and as
a witness seeing all this happen, probably the last thing
you're thinking of is paying more attention to him, right,
(11:21):
you know, people falling in in the water and just
all of that just horrible.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
There's an example you use in the book what you
call divine intervention, which sort of the flip side of
these terrible things happening. Maybe it's coincidence, synchronicity, but there's
an example you use from March nineteen fifty and Beatrice, Nebraska,
at a church, the choir is supposed to get together
and have a practice session share that story of what happened.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Yeah, so that's one of the really really interesting ones.
And like I said, from a real side from somebody
that I try to put my cases together, write my
cases in a way that would be presentable to a
grand jury. So whenever I do a paranormal case, that's
my goal is would I be embarrassed to walk into
(12:16):
a grand jury and share this information with them. In
this particular case nineteen fifties, and that was the West
End Baptist Church in Beatrice, Nebraskan, and that night the
choir of the church was supposed to practice at seven
point fifteen. So I can't remember what his name was.
(12:39):
The preacher of the church around four o'clock or so
fires up the furnace and then locks up the church
and heads home. He wants to heat heat the furnace up,
eat the church up, so the when the choir is
there that you know they'd be comfortable, and they're supposed
to be there seven to fifteen. Well, nobody show us.
(13:00):
Not a single one of the people in the choir
showed up, and they had afterward they were asked later.
Everybody had different reasons why, you know, some people were
late making dinner, some people just didn't feel like it.
Some people were watching a TV program and they it
went long. But they were supposed to be there seven fifteen.
(13:23):
At seven five, the entire church exploded. And the odds
and that's what I look at. A lot of times
people say, well, that's miraculous. Well they kind of the
definition of miraculous is one in a million. So if
it was a one in a million thing, that was
a miraculous thing, and you could interpret it as you know,
(13:47):
a divine intervention thing. And for the fact that not
a single person from the choir showed up when they
were supposed to, and that the whole church was leveled
due to the natural gas explosion. That everybody in town
heard every I mean, it was, it was, it was,
It was serious news at the time. It was just
(14:10):
it's a miraculous, miraculous case.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yeah, you just think that they must have been stunned
when they realized what had happened, and that all of
them had a different reason for not being there. It's
not really an inner voice that told them not to be.
There were a circumstance and.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
All of us have experienced that kind of thing where
you know, let's say a car collision happens in front
of us or behind us, and you start thinking, Wow,
if I had not had that conversation, you know, longer
than what I wanted it to be before I got
into my car, I would have been right at that spote.
(14:46):
I would have been in the middle of that collision
or vice versa. You know, the could be light later
and we we have that happened, But to have it
happened to multiple people of one single incident, is it
just makes you like I said that those two words,
what if.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Well, maybe Reverend Walter Klymple was a slave driver, cracking
the whip, making his choir practice too much, and everybody
just got tired of it and didn't show up.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
I'm just kidding, right, could have been you know, you
don't know what the mechanism of this thing is.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
You do get into the butterfly effect in the book,
and I think it's a good fit because you know,
as you're saying there, you know, a car accident, you
could have been in it if you hadn't left the
house one minute earlier or later. The butterfly effect can
have profound effects. Something very simple and tiny and little
has profound effects all over the world. I mean that's
(15:42):
not an exaggeration. It can be that way, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
And you know, with the popularity of The Twister, the
movie that just came out a couple of months ago,
and when people are looking, you don't know what effects
that came. They came out of a meteorologist, uh uh.
(16:08):
And Edward lorenz Uh coined that back in that team
the seventies, and you know, his whole thing was any
kind of disturbance in the air, sims ripples just like
a pebble in a pond. It is going to affect someplace.
We just don't know what the magnitude of that effect
(16:29):
is going to be.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
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