At 5:00 p.m. on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge which connected Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed. Being rush hour in mid-December, the bridge was full of commuters on their way home from work and holiday shopping trips. The collapse sent 32 vehicles into the frigid waters of the Ohio river and 46 people lost their lives, with 2 bodies never to be found. The cause was as prosaic and understandable as it was tragic - a minute defect causing stress corrosion in a suspension eye-bar. However, what we may never understand is a connection some claim between the collapse and the first sightings of the Mothman, widely thought to be 13 months previously, to the day. Was there a warning that no one could comprehend? Even if a warning could be interpreted by someone who was starting to put all these strange puzzle pieces together, would their findings even be believed? Could this tragedy have been prevented, or was it inevitable? It might behoove us all to start taking notice, as correlations to sightings of bizarre creatures and catastrophes around the world continue to this day.
Tonight's Quote:
They’ve done it again. Those lousy bastards have done it again. They knew this was going to happen...and when. And they gave me all that bilge about a power failure. They knew. They just didn’t want me to be able to warn anyone.
— John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies
Show Links:
We've found that some sites are not showing these links as clickable unless they are URLs, so until those outlets improve their show notes section, we are providing actual URLs next to the clickable description of each link to make things easier for our listeners!
Ben Folds - Rockin' the Suburbs http://bit.ly/1lTtPgh Search for the Mothman documentary http://bit.ly/2fzoaPa Aperture hatch on the Millennium Falcon http://bit.ly/2fDuho9 NBC News article on Infrasound http://nbcnews.to/2g0fdkW Vic Tandy and infrasound on Wikipedia http://bit.ly/2fzhEYP Vladimir Gavreau and his infrasound experiments http://bit.ly/2fEtCiO The Haunted Hum (infrasound) on Mythbusters http://bit.ly/2eMp1xr Adam Savage's Indiana Jones Sankara Stone stolen! http://bit.ly/2eE2vmM NICAP's The 1967 UFO Chronology - The Mother of All Sighting Waves http://bit.ly/2eUVIpL The Silver Bridge disaster - the collapse rendered in computer animation http://bit.ly/2eMl1gq Report on the Silver Bridge collapse by the West Virginia DOT http://bit.ly/2fExe4f Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse http://bit.ly/1VFh2T2 Colorized footage of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse http://bit.ly/2fExTma Radiolab episode on Dreams http://bit.ly/2eUWQK4 Wake Up and Dream on Radiolab - confronting your fears with Lucid Dreaming http://bit.ly/11CdB5C Project MKUltra http://bit.ly/1ihJLqO Could a sonic weapon make your head explode? http://bit.ly/1un5Uty "Gaslighting" on Wikipedia http://bit.ly/1sUQyvs Gaslight the movie (1944) http://imdb.to/2fDurvM Origin of the "Time exists" quote http://bit.ly/2g0gDfA Weather report for the day of Mrs. Roy Grose’s 4:45 a.m. UFO sighting http://bit.ly/2fcSyCx Linda Scarberry's obituary on Cryptomundo, one of the 4 original teenagers to see Mothman http://bit.ly/2eW9DwQ Silver Bridge http://bit.ly/2flwFjC Riverside Golf Club where Connie Carpenter saw the Mothman, formerly the Mason Co. Golf Course http://bit.ly/2eMpLDl I Love Lucy entertains the cosmos http://n.pr/2eh2I0c How far have human radio broadcasts reached into our galaxy? http://bit.ly/1qAd9iI Can our TV signals be picked up by other planets? http://bbc.in/2eW80PC Actinic Conjunctivitis http://bit.ly/2dRkXIu Defense Logistics Agency website http://www.dla.mil/ Defense Logistics Agency on Wikipedia http://bit.ly/2dRmAWv Chief Cornstalk http://bit.ly/2eMmVhW Chief Cornstalk's curse http://bit.ly/2dRmDl2 Lord Dunmore's War http://bit.ly/2eXAs2l Fort Randolph, West Virginia http://bit.ly/2fcSDGp The late Beau Shertzer, whose Bloodmobile was almost carried off http://bit.ly/2eBAQqh Men In Black in a Niagra Falls hotel lobby? http://bit.ly/2eBCIiR The 1966 Cadillac De Ville http://bit.ly/2dRoxSM Gallipolis Ferry, West Virginia http://bit.ly/2eXF6NS Gallipolis, Ohio http://www.cityofgallipolis.com/ Morse Code, for when you want to communicate with a UFO using your flashlight http://bit.ly/1zxQZNV Mothman and Other Curious Encounters by Loren Coleman https://amzn.com/B00AWBQF88 The Mothman Prophecies - A True Story by John A. Keel https://amzn.com/0765334984 The Mothman Prophecies - The Movie https://amzn.com/B0000648X0 The Woodrow Derenberger interview with Ronald Maines, Gen. Mgr. of WTAP https://youtu.be/5HxY4suVjSo Point Pleasant, West Virginia http://bit.ly/2euHGdZ Gallipolis, Ohio basecamp for John Keel and the Mothman Prophecies movie crew http://bit.ly/2e3aZpU Visit the Mothman Museum! http://bit.ly/2enKY4d Attend the Mothman Festival in beautiful Point Pleasant, WV! http://bit.ly/1pjsSMO Scott always stays at the Lowe Hotel when searching for Mothman! http://www.thelowehotel.com/ Point Pleasant's "TNT Area" where the Mothman dwells http://n.pr/2drLM5A Explosion and munitions risk at the "TNT Area" http://bit.ly/2eIfuJD Inside the Eerie TNT Storage Bunkers of West Virginia on Wired http://bit.ly/2e8qeyV The Mothman and Indrid Cold story on WeekInWeird.com http://bit.ly/2eI4OuC Mothman on Wikipedia http://bit.ly/2dQ3dhn 1st sighting of the Mothman according to the WV Dept. of Commerce http://bit.ly/2drIzTK The Grinning Man on TheNightSky.org http://bit.ly/2ej1G76 The Case of Indrid Cold on Forteania http://bit.ly/2ej0hNV Assessing Wikipedia's Accuracy on NPR http://n.pr/2elZZaH
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Credits:
Episode 052 - "Mothman Part 3" Produced by Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess; Edited by Sarah Vorhees, Ryan McCullough Sound Design; Research Assistance by Tess Pfeifle and the astonishing League of Astonishing Researchers, a,k.a. The Astonishing Research Corps, or "A.R.C." for short. Special thanks to Adam McCutcheon, Jess Corbin, and Chris Saunders. Copyright 2016 Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess. All Rights Reserved.