Connie Carpenter's Daylight Mothman Sighting

In November 1966, Mason County, West Virginia, was in the middle of a wave of reports of a winged creature. The founding report came on 15 November, when the Scarberrys and the Mallettes described a creature in the TNT area outside Point Pleasant. The Point Pleasant Register carried it the next day.

Connie Carpenter lived in New Haven, a small Ohio River town in the north of the county. She was 18. Keel would call her "a shy, sensitive eighteen-year-old." Her aunt was Mary Hyre, the Athens Messenger correspondent in Point Pleasant, who wrote 10 columns on the monster in 1966.

Sunday, 27 November 1966. 10:30 A.M. Connie was driving home from church. Her road passed the deserted greens of the Mason County Golf Course outside of New Haven. Something stood there. A huge gray figure. It was shaped like a man, she said, but was much larger. At least seven feet tall and very broad. Its eyes were large, round and fiercely glowing red, and they focused on her with hypnotic effect.

Then a pair of wings unfolded from its back. They seemed to have a span of about ten feet. The figure rose slowly off the ground, straight up like a helicopter. Silently. Its wings did not flap in flight. It headed straight toward her car, its horrible eyes fixed to her face. She was one of few who actually saw the creature's face. All she would say was: "It was horrible."

She drove off in utter hysteria. "It's a wonder I didn't run off the road and have a wreck," she said.

Almost everything known about the encounter comes through John A. Keel, who interviewed her within about two weeks. He wrote that the moment he met her, he knew she was telling the truth, because her eyes were reddened. Her conjunctivitis, he said, lasted over two weeks. He blamed those glowing red eyes. Later writers compared it to photokeratitis, or arc-eye.

Around 7 December, Keel took Connie and her fiancé Keith Gordon into a building in the TNT area. Inside, she looked back and screamed. "Those eyes!" She said she had seen two big red eyes by the wall in the back. Keel searched. The back wall was blank.

After marrying Keith Gordon in early February 1967, she lived across the river in Middleport, Ohio. On 22 February, at 8:15 a.m., a large black car pulled up alongside her, a car she identified as a 1949 Buick. A clean-cut young man of about twenty-five suddenly lunged, grabbed her arm and ordered her to get in with him, but she broke away. The next day a note was slipped under her door: "Be careful girl," it read, "I can get you yet." Officer Raymond Manly took the note and later lost it, and the couple soon moved back to West Virginia.

No explanation was ever aimed at her report alone, and the theories offered for the wave fit a morning sighting unevenly. Joe Nickell's barred owl relies on eyeshine, which needs a light source at night. WVU wildlife biologist Robert L. Smith proposed a sandhill crane, a tall gray bird with red bare skin around its eyes. Sheriff George Johnson suggested a large heron. Benjamin Radford said the only glowing red eyes report he found was secondhand, and her account, via Keel, is often set against that claim.

In a later chapter of The Mothman Prophecies, Keel wrote that she could not describe the thing beyond the fact that it was gray, huge, and flew. Still, her account remains one of the very few Mothman reports made in daylight. Connie herself has stayed quiet. A museum guide quoted in later coverage says she is "infamous for not wanting to speak about it at all."