The Point Pleasant "Giant Owl" Shooting

November 15, 1966. The first Mothman sighting was reported near Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The next day the Point Pleasant Register carried the story. Linda Scarberry described something "about seven feet tall" with white wings. Newell Partridge said its eyes glowed "like bicycle reflectors."

Experts reached for birds almost at once. Robert L. Smith, a wildlife biologist at WVU, said "the descriptions [of the creature] all fitted the sandhill crane." Sheriff George Johnson suggested an unusually large green heron.

Gallipolis Ferry. A small community on the Ohio River in Mason County. Ace Henry saw a large bird perched on his barn Tuesday night. It was sitting on top of the barn. Henry, thinking it was a hawk, shot it with a 20-gauge shotgun.

Then he looked at what he had killed. It was "a large owl uncommon to this area." Henry was perplexed to know its true identity. He found it identical to a picture he had of a snowy owl.

December 22, 1966. The story ran under two headlines, "Giant Owl Killed On Area Farm" and "Not Mason Mothman, Is It An Owl?" The Register's editorial staff concluded that it was a snowy owl, 2 ft. tall with a wing spread of 5 ft. A photograph from that week shows three boys, Rocky Sturgeon, Barry Henry and Kim Henry, holding the dead bird. Jeff Wamsley's book Mothman: Behind the Red Eyes describes the same owl.

The owl was mounted, and it stayed in Point Pleasant. Exactly where is disputed. Some accounts place it in the Mothman Museum, others in the Point Pleasant River Museum. On July 1, 2018, a fire damaged the River Museum's second and third floors. Whether the owl survived is not recorded.

April 2002. Joe Nickell came to Point Pleasant and viewed the mounted specimen. He gives the farmer's name as Asa Henry and calls the identification tentative. "Although only about two feet tall, a newspaper dubbed it a 'giant owl' due to its wingspan of nearly five feet." On April 12, 2002, he spoke with David Pyles, Henry's grandson and a taxidermist, who called himself "very skeptical of Mothman." Pyles said his grandfather always maintained that the Mothman flap ended after he had shot the bird.

Nickell concluded that "it seems very likely that the Mothman sightings were mostly caused by owls," with eyeshine explaining the glowing eyes. In 2018 Audubon told of how "a local man shot a large Snowy Owl, which he maintained had been the source of the trouble." Others favoured a great blue heron. Benjamin Radford noted that the only "red eyes" report was secondhand.

The chronology pushes back. Sightings are generally said to have continued until the Silver Bridge collapsed on December 15, 1967. Connie Carpenter's reported sighting, on November 27, 1966, came before the shot was fired. One owl cannot carry every report.

The snowy owl of Gallipolis Ferry remains the only physical evidence in the Mothman story. A carcass, a photograph, a mount. For sceptics it is the closest thing to an answer. For everyone else, it is a glimpse of how a frightened town looked at its own sky that winter.