THE CHICAGO MOTHMAN
PART TWO RED-EYED CREATURES & GREEN-EYED MONSTERS
In 2011, reports started to come in from the American Midwest about a weird winged entity that resembled the West Virginia Mothman famously documented by John Keel in the 1960s and 1970s. There were plenty of terrified witnesses, but was it all the work of a serial hoaxer? TEA KRULOS concludes his look at the at the Chicago Mothman investigation and hears from the researchers involved how it descended into bitter rivalry and mutual recrimination.
Last issue we saw how in October 2011 Sam Maranto, the Illinois State Director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), received a report with a photograph showing a flying entity that recalled the Mothman that had terrorised Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 196667, immortalised by paranormal author John Keel in his book The Mothman Prophecies. The photo wasn’t a one-off: by 2017, numerous reports were coming in from around Chicago of a red-eyed, bat-winged entity stalking the city, and soon various groups and individual researchers were investigating the sightings of the ‘Chicago Mothman’. But disagreements about methodology and evidence were about to break out...
THE LECHUZA OF LITTLE VILLAGE
Over at UFO Clearinghouse, Manuel Navarette (above right) began to receive a number of strange sighting reports from the Little Village area.
“Little Village is called a villalita, which means ‘little village.’ It’s an area on the southside of Chicago. It’s a heavily Hispanic area, so a lot of the stores sell Mexican items. It’s basically just a slice of Mexico in Chicago,” Navarette says. “Dulcelandias – they sell Mexican candy. There are a lot of stores that sell homemade remedies, a lot of botanicas, which is a metaphysical shop, is about as close as I can say. They also sell ingredients that are used in brujeria or in curandero. The difference is brujeria is more like deep, black magic, grey magic, whereas curandero is more of the healing type.”
These reports from Little Village weren’t of a “Mothman” but of an entity from Hispanic folklore: la lechuza.
“My grandmother used to warn us about the lechuza. If you hear a lechuza, don’t go outside because it’s there to steal your soul or to put a curse on you,” Navarette says. “She would always tell us ‘la bruja se cambian en la lechuza’, meaning ‘a witch can turn herself into an owl.’ We grew up with stories about how the lechuza would sit outside of your house and call your name, and it would sound like it was in distress and people would go outside, and that is when the lechuza would get you. Or it would sit outside as an omen of something that would happen to you. We always just thought of it as one of those tales that our grandmother would tell us to scare us into behaving or into staying in the house at night.”
Navarette says he began to hang up flyers in the Little Village area, printed in Spanish, encouraging people who had seen this lechuza to contact him. He says one reason the flyers were useful is that many from the area might have been hesitant to report anything at all.
“The reason that a lot of people won’t talk or won’t contact us is because a lot of people are here illegally and they are afraid,” Navarette says, but being able to speak to someone in Spanish gave some of the witnesses sufficient reassurance to share their experiences. Navarette says he told them, “I’m not going to turn you into ICE, I’m not going to report you to any government agency, I’m just here to get information about what is happening with your sightings. It put them at ease and allowed them to be able to open up and talk.”
Stories followed. He heard from a brother and sister who saw a “winged entity” sitting on a corner in front of them as they left a small store. The creature flew over them and landed in front of them as they tried to run away, but was scared off by an approaching car. Another report alleged that a couple were sitting in their car when a creature landed on top of it and scratched at the windshield before taking off.
“Another one was a lady who was coming home from church with her sons, and they saw the entity. She described it as either a lechuza or a duende, which is like a goblin kind of entity,” Navarette says (for more on duendes and their cousins the chaneques, see FT253:24, 316:36-40, 331:16-17, 339:42-46).
“She said it was like a demonio, a demon, but it wasn’t paying attention to them, it was looking at a house. It was sitting outside of somebody’s house, and they were like ‘Oh, there is a bruja after that person’.”
Navarette says the creature sightings have inspired real fear in Little Village.
“They’re frightened, because like I said, growing up in a Hispanic household, they were probably told the same stories about the lechuza that I was,” Navarette says. “How it is a demonic creature that can drag you to Hell or take your soul or that it is there to hurt you for wronging somebody. A lot of these people take these stories to heart.”
INFINITE MONKEYS ON INFINITE TYPEWRITERS
Lon Strickler says that he found many of the witnesses that he talked to in the Chicago Mothman sightings to be credible.
“They never changed their story, never embellished their story, which is unusual,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’ve talked to a lot of different people that have reported different things, and very rarely do they not change to some degree, but these witnesses weren’t doing that. All in all, most of the encounters and sightings were very credible and they had no problem talking with us or meeting investigators. We’ve been getting a lot of criticism about what is going on, but frankly these people are very credible.”
“I WAS IN IT BECAUSE IT WAS FASCINATING TO ME – THE SECOND COMING OF THE MOTHMAN”
As Strickler suggests, when the reports started to come in, the cases and their credibility began to receive criticism from other investigators. Several details didn’t seem to add up. One of the first people to bring this up was Allison Jornlin, who began travelling to Chicago on a regular basis to share alleged sighting locations and her observations via her YouTube channel.
“I was not out to discredit, no matter what anyone else might say,” Jornlin explains. “I was trying to show them what’s there, and in the process of doing that I made some 60 videos. It’s a lot of work to drive back and forth to Chicago, to pay for tolls, incidentals, and all the gas. I’m not being paid for this. I’ve never been in this for profit. I was in it because it was fascinating to me – the second coming of the Mothman. I went to all of these locations and, unfortunately, the case started falling apart. There were discrepancies. They would happen to mention that they have a five-storey building and then you would try to triangulate it and there would be no five-storey buildings.”
Then there was a case where the witness claimed there was a police report. Here, at last, was something tangible. Mike Huberty, who is Allison Jornlin’s brother and co-host of the podcast See You On The Other Side, said he had a friend who could help track the police report down.
“He goes to school for criminal justice, and now he’s a private detective that mostly
works for insurance companies – he follows people around, and he has to collect police reports,” Huberty says. “He used to be interested in the paranormal, not so much anymore, but he still had a bunch of contacts from the Chicago Police Department, so he’s like ‘You know what? If there is a police report, I’ll find it.’ And... nothing.”
“He came back and said there is nothing in the database that resembles this in the slightest – no mysterious person, animal reports, anything,” Jornlin adds. “Why should we believe anything that this person says if they say there is a police report and there isn’t? That police report thing just bothers me because it’s just so representative of the problem, of things being brushed under the rug, so I kept bringing it up. I just can’t stand the smell of bullshit, and I smell bullshit on this whole thing.”
“And that’s when I start thinking okay, we have an agenda or a narrative to push because it is going to help sell a book or something,” Huberty says. “And I get it – it’s hard to make money in the paranormal field. If all of these things you said were untrue and you have to take them back, that’s going to be hard. The more and more we see, it’s like ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ – and the Emperor is buck naked, walking down Lake Shore Drive.”
Another criticism concerns the consistent writing structure of the various reports, which Jack Chavez says, “read like fiction.”
“I definitely think that there is hoaxing in a lot of these reports, unfortunately. Not all of them, but I do think there are hoaxes,” he says. “A lot of these reports for the Mothman sightings in 2017 and the beginning of 2018, they have the same voice. They use the same analogies, similar vocabulary, and there is always some information that has nothing to do with the sightings. I don’t know who is creating it; if it was just one person or more than one person, I’m not sure.”
Sam Maranto agrees. “Read the narratives and it will hit you right away – the use of certain words that are out in left field. “Unfurled is not a common word, except for someone who is into sci-fi or horror, yet it shows up I don’t know how many times,” Maranto says. “Alighted? How many times have you ever heard the word ‘alighted?’ And it was actually used incorrectly, it means to come down from, not ascend.”
Maranto says the reports came across like a creative writing project: “The (MUFON) Director of Communications told me, ‘Sam, I have read over 20,000 reports and I have never seen such consistency in this type of writing. Never. And I have never seen this many reports come in without proper contact information. Never.’ And I said, ‘Well, I have not gone through 20,000 reports, but I probably have been through 5,000, and neither have I.’ My Assistant State Director is in charge of the CMS (Case Management System), and he said the same thing: he had never seen anything like this. And that is when he decided to run the IPs.”
Maranto and MUFON found that the
“IT MORPHED FROM A HUMANOID TO A BIRDLIKE CREATURE AND THEN LIKE A GIANT INSECT”
original three 2011 Mothman reports, the ones that started everything, all came from the same IP address.
“When Sam told me that, it really disheartened me, because it sets into motion the idea that the original reports are all from someone who is trying to create a hoax,” Mike Huberty says. “The chances of the Internet provider giving the same IP address to three different people that have all seen this mythical winged beast aren’t good – but, hey, infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters, anything can happen, right? That led me to immediately question the quality of investigation that we are going to get out of these things.”
Another suspicious point was the lack of photo or video evidence, despite the sightings occurring in the third most populated city in the US. Chicago has tens of thousands of security cameras, one of the most “extensive and integrated” camera networks in the country, according to former US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
“One of the main objections that I had was that if these were urban sightings, and I think at some point it got up to 60 or 70 sightings, why hadn’t somebody talked to police or law enforcement agencies there?” Loren Coleman asks. “Why haven’t they gone and looked for the security camera footage? Why had nobody taken pictures?”
Investigator Jack Chavez was also running into hoaxes. He found a report where someone claimed to have seen the Chicago Mothman jumping off the iconic Willis Tower (still often called by its former name, the Sears Tower) and tracked down the witness.
“He told me that he was on a cigarette break, and he watched what he thought was somebody jumping from the Sears Tower and that it morphed from a humanoid into a bird-like creature and then kind of like a giant insect-like creature and then it flew away, and that was the extent of the sighting. I have to admit I am sceptical.” Chavez’s scepticism started when he discovered he and the witness had a mutual friend.
“They said, ‘You know he is a practical joker?’ And I said, ‘Well no, I didn’t know that.’ They go, ‘Yeah, he is known for going into these elaborate stories and kind of running with it’,” Chavez says. “So, then I talked to the witness some more. We talked from time to time, and he said, yeah, he might have seen something maybe not normal. Eventually, as time went on, it was moving away from what he originally claimed, so I don’t know if it was a hoax or a misidentification.”
RED-EYED CREATURES
As accusations of hoaxing or poor investigation skills began to fly, several investigators seemed to fall into two rival camps – the Chicago Phantom Task Force members like Lon Strickler, Tobias Wayland, and Manuel Navarette, and on the opposing side, the coalition of Allison Jornlin, her brother Mike, Sam Maranto, and others. The rivalry became heated.
“I told Sam that this whole Chicago Mothman craze has been historic in the paranormal field, because not only has it created so many rifts between people, but it has inspired so many debates on how witnesses need to be questioned, and anonymity, and how to go about investigations,” says Jack Chavez. “It has created so many questions and chaos and debates, which is good in a way, but unfortunately made so many people... not friends anymore. I just think that there are people in Lon’s camp that think
that people like me, Sam, and Allison formed this little camp that is out to get them, and that truly is not the case.”
Chavez says there are things that have been misinterpreted. He cites a MUFON event where he, Jornlin, Maranto and others were invited to give an impromptu panel discussion on the Mothman sightings.
“This was during the height of it. We didn’t know we were going to be asked to talk about it,” he says. “It was recorded, and we talked about our experiences and how we got into it. It was uploaded online and then, unfortunately, there were people in Lon’s camp who said, ‘Hey, look at you guys working together and not even telling us about it!’ and ‘It wasn’t fair for you guys not to include us,’ and ‘That says a lot about you guys.’ And it was like – whoa, wait a minute, first of all I’m not even a member of MUFON. This was a MUFON event I was just invited to and also this is not like some kind of conspiracy or something – we didn’t even know that this was going to take place.”
Allison Jornlin says she was kicked out of the Chicago Phantom Task Force after the group heard a podcast that she and Sam Maranto were guests on.
“(Lon) listened to it, apparently, and he kicked me out of the group at that point,” Jornlin says, adding that he also messaged a radio show she was set to appear on to try to discredit her. “He didn’t care – he just kicked me out. I was like, ‘Isn’t there room for different opinions?’ Nope. He wanted to rip me a new one before he kicked me out, publicly. I didn’t know that was going to happen. I just knew that I got kicked out and did not have access to the group. On his website he’s got ‘Be careful who you help’ – and he’s got my full name on there.”
According to Mike Huberty, Strickler and company were also “going online and saying that Allison is harassing witnesses and they start really badmouthing her online. This whole thing starts becoming a farce. I’m thinking, well, maybe we can try to salvage everyone’s relationships here. I’m like, we could make it like a rap beef and have interesting blog articles trying to debunk each other about these things.”
But things just got uglier.
“They didn’t like the fact that Allison was disproving the stuff that they were saying by actually going to some of these places,” Huberty says. “One of them said ‘I think we should bitch slap her’ or something like that, and this is what got me upset about it. And I try to leave my personal feelings out of it, but when someone says violent things about my sister, I’m like, ‘Oh no, come on.’”
On the other side, Lon Strickler says he doesn’t know if he was facing “criticism or just jealousy”.
“There have been a lot of investigators in the area, some of them working with us. One in particular is Allison Jornlin. She is a piece of work,” Strickler says. “She came into the group, and was going to the locations and videotaping them, and then on video she would read my report. So, because she was taking the time to go out to these locations, I went ahead and brought her into our group. But as time went on, she wanted me to start releasing personal information to her so she could go and talk to these people, and I frankly just didn’t know her that well. Allison got a little pushy and I kicked her out of the group. Well, after that happened, she kind of went out on her own and started causing problems for us.”
Strickler is also critical of Sam Maranto: “He wasn’t interested in any of these reports until we were looking into them, and then he started getting interested. So, he called me and said, ‘Why don’t we work together on this?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we can do that, but this is a two-way street, man. You know – you get reports, you guys share information with me.’ Well, that wasn’t going to happen. He didn’t do it, so I just cut ties with him. Well, he hooked up with Allison.”
Strickler also says he had problems with Loren Coleman.
“Loren Coleman got involved with Allison, and he and I don’t see eye-to-eye on many things anyway. So that was just perfect for me. He kind of criticised the whole investigation and just out of hand said that we were faking the sightings and this and that,” Strickler says. “It was like a cabal of these people trying to discredit us and being super-critical and sceptical of what we were investigating. You know, for the most part it didn’t really come to anything, but occasionally something will come up and I have to explain what happened.”
“Lon was really putting up barriers around all of the witnesses, like they were his own property,” Coleman says. “I was reading some of the stuff from some of his associates and they sound like fanboys, they just – Strickler could do no wrong. It turned out some of them were the eyewitnesses, and on and on.”
Tobias Wayland agrees with Strickler that conflict arose from “certain people that wanted to make the investigation about themselves rather than focusing on the phenomenon.”
“That’s unfortunately resulted in people going behind other people’s backs to disparage the investigation, and as a result of that, there was a falling out,” Wayland says. “And the same people, I guess, who were trying to make it about themselves are still, even after I published all of this information as openly and honestly as possible, disparaging this investigation.”
Wayland says he feels people “got into this because they wanted to be celebrities. That is a really shitty lesson I had to learn and am still learning. That is my view, and I tried very hard at the time to reconcile everybody, going back and forth between parties: ‘Hey, maybe you could have done this differently. Maybe we could be a little bit more forgiving about that. Is there really no way that we can
work together?’ And I was not able to rebuild those bridges. I don’t have any regrets about that, because I know that I tried as hard as I could. What I have now is really just sort of a deep sadness that people let their search for attention or celebrity get in the way of an incredible investigation.”
More drama flamed when several of the investigators decided to pen books on the subject. Strickler’s book Mothman Dynasty: Chicago’s Winged Humanoids and Coleman’s book Mothman: Evil Incarnate both came out in 2017. Tobias Wayland’s book Lake Michigan Mothman: High Strangeness in the Midwest and Shetan Noir’s book Mothman and Other Flying Creatures of the Midwest, were both published in 2019.
“I think that Lon Strickler was angry that I wrote a chapter in my book where I talked about the Chicago Mothman,” Loren Coleman says. “I talked about him. I didn’t do it necessarily negatively, but I tried to open people’s minds to some critical thinking about some of these reports in regards to kites, and red balloons, and all kinds of stuff. I got the feeling that he felt the Chicago Mothman was his and it was sort of like he owned that property.”
“Coleman put a book out and he started to copy some of my investigations into his book,” Strickler says. “But I just don’t associate with him. I don’t have time to be going with people that are just trying to look out for themselves. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I have run into a lot of people like that over the years. There’s a lot of backstabbing.”
Shetan Noir says that when her publisher posted cover art on social media for her book, they received messages from Strickler and Wayland asking if their information had been used. “To me, it seemed like they were trying to sabotage my book before it even got published,” Noir says. She and her editor carefully made sure that references in the book were from sources other than Strickler and Wayland’s works.
Seth Breedlove explored the Chicago Mothman case as part of his 2019 documentary Terror in the Skies (and again in 2020’s The Mothman Legacy) and found he was hearing the drama from both sides.
“I wasn’t caught in the middle of it, but I’m friends with people on both sides, so I didn’t... well, to be frank, I didn’t care. I tried to keep out of all the drama stuff, and I had my own opinions, which have changed,” Breedlove says. “At the time, I thought there really wasn’t anything to the Chicago Mothman stuff. I thought it was almost entirely misidentification and hoax and I think I’ve come around somewhat on that. From the one side I was hearing that it was all a hoax, it’s all aimed at making money for book sales, and then from the other side I was hearing that the they should keep their mouths shut because they were not really looking into the cases for themselves.”
Breedlove says he believes the conflict stems from professional jealousy: “I think there are a lot of people vying for fame in the paranormal investigation realm, and I think what it comes down to, honestly, is that these people want to be on a TV show and if they are not the go-to, then they perceive the person that is the go-to as a threat to their potential stab at television and superstardom. That’s been my read on it for a while. I think there is an element, too, of ‘this is my territory – I have put all of this work into this case.’”
Investigator Jack Chavez agrees with this assessment. “I think that people want to be included in this because it is such a unique phenomenon. It’s a big deal in the paranormal world and it seems like everybody wants a piece of it, which is totally understandable,” he says. “They want to flock to Chicago and do their research and interview people, and that is great. I’m up for collaborating with everyone, but there are people in the field that want the story all to themselves. I get it, but that’s just not the reality of how things work out. Everybody is going to take a piece of it.”
HOAX OR GENUINE ENCOUNTERS?
So, what was haunting Chicago a decade ago? Investigators like Lon Strickler, Manuel Navarette, and Tobias Wayland maintain that there is a real paranormal case behind the reported experiences. But as to what it actually is, they’re unsure.
“One of the things that I hear from people is that they will feel afraid before they actually have their sighting,” Tobias Wayland says. “They start feeling this fear and that’s when they look around and see this thing – they are feeling the fear even before they know that anything is going on. That fear stays with them, so people aren’t wanting to talk about their sighting – because of the social stigma, sure – but also because they are afraid to talk about it because of this fear of reprisal. People report feeling that palpable sense of evil from this thing, so there are these seemingly paranormal elements. I don’t know what that means exactly, but it suggests that whatever we are dealing with is much weirder than any sort of mundane biological animal.”
Tobias and Emily Wayland, Strickler, Maranto, and Chavez were all featured in a Small Town Monsters documentary directed by Seth Breedlove titled On the Trail of the Lake Michigan Mothman, which was released in 2021.
“I personally believe that it is an interdimensional being,” says Lon Strickler. He followed up his Mothman Dynasty book with one titled Winged Cryptids: Humanoids, Monsters, & Anomalous Creatures Casebook in 2020. “I believe there are several of these beings that were coming through – and when I say coming through, I do believe that they were summoned or came through some type of portal, because I have had witnesses that actually described to me that they’ve seen these things suddenly vanish, like they went
through a doorway.”
“It could be extraterrestrial, it could be interdimensional – that’s one of the theories we have about why we’re seeing it all over the place,” says Manuel Navarette. In 2020, he reported a series of Mothman sightings in and around O’Hare International Airport, including his own sighting of a creature with bat-like wings perched on top of an abandoned rental car centre near the airport in March 2020. “If it is able to open up another dimension, a door between dimensions, it could basically hop in and out of wherever it goes. But as far as trying to classify what people are seeing, I can’t.”
Another possibility, according to flying humanoid researcher Ken Gerhard, is a tulpa or thought form entity.
“I think one of the interesting perspectives on this is that these creatures could be thought projections – that they are essentially channelled or projected onto the fabric of our reality by us, particularly in the case of something like the Chicago Mothman or the original Mothman in Point Pleasant,” Gerhard says. “When you have all of these sightings coming out in newspapers or websites, it kind of feeds the fire, and it might cause people to project these beings from the deep recesses of our unconscious minds.”
Loren Coleman points to the many theories about what the Point Pleasant Mothman could have been – unknown animal, government experiment, extraterrestrial or interdimensional being, or something paranormal or demonic. “I think that of all of the creatures that I have ever studied, Mothman is one that could be explained by all of those,” he says. “It could be that the military took advantage of the reports and did some experimentation; there could be some kind of giant creatures that are actually living in the TNT area; it could be people that are demonically involved or hallucinating. So I don’t get really sidetracked. Every time I’ve been there speaking at a conference, talking to eyewitnesses, talking to Keel – it was just most important to me to hear the reports, to gather them, to write them down. The Lake Michigan ones are just very different. I have really negative feelings about those cases.”
Coleman, and other investigators, feel that many or most of the reports are misidentifications at best, active hoaxing at worst.
“It just seemed like it was kites, bats, birds, fantasies, hallucinations, that somebody wants to put all together to make the ‘Chicago Mothman’,” he says. “Like it was some fad that needed to be created. Any little thing that was a bit anomalous in the sky became a ‘Mothman’, and I just thought it was really pretty dubious from the beginning. I was never able to talk to an eyewitness. I probably emailed back and forth to some of those people who were involved, but they seemed very cultish about it and protective.”
Some of the sightings might have a more mundane, earthly explanation.
“The reflections of the red eyes may well have been of a long-eared owl, which have been moving into the city of Chicago,” Sam Maranto says about the reports of glowing eyes. “In fact, in 2017 an article was written in Audubon that there was something of an infestation of long-eared owls.” MUFON, unlike Phantoms & Monsters, UFO Clearinghouse, and Singular Fortean Society, has received only three or four reports since 2017, and none of these had contact information.
As the Chicago Mothman sightings have continued – with more reports from O’Hare airport and Wisconsin State Fair, among others – so has the conflict. It became evident the animosity towards Allison Jornlin was still strong when screenshots of her rivals from a private group surfaced in June 2020, which showed Jornlin being insulted. The incident spotlighted how a genuinely interesting fortean case in America’s heartland had devolved into a bitter mess of human drama that’s lasted for over four years.
“I did this in the first place because I thought that there might be the possibility of a monster,” Jornlin says of her investigation into the Chicago Mothman. “I found a monster, but not the one that I was seeking.”
In the case of the Chicago Mothman, it seems that perhaps the “Mothman Curse” might not have been a portent of a disaster like the Silver Bridge collapse in Point Pleasant, but the green-eyed monsters it unleashed instead.
✑ is a journalist and author from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His books include Monster Hunters and American Madness. You can find more info and his “Tea’s Weird Week” column at teakrulos.com.
COLEMAN FEELS THAT MANY OF THE REPORTS ARE MISIDENTIFICATIONS OR ACTIVE HOAXING