Joe Nickell

For a brief period from 1966 to 1967, people in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, were plagued by sightings of a scary creature, a winged man that came to be called Mothman. Mothman has also been reported sporadically there and in other places since that time. Although many people claim to have seen Mothman, skeptics are convinced that there is a normal explanation for the appearances of the seemingly abnormal creature. Skeptic Joe Nickell, a senior research fellow for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), explains in the following article why he believes that witnesses who thought they saw Mothman actually saw the common barn owl.

Nickell also mentions the "Men in Black." Often, Mothman witnesses and witnesses to other strange phenomena, such as UFOs, claim to have been contacted and sometimes threatened by...