“So . . . I think I may have seen that flying thing or whatever,” Jeff said sheepishly before taking an extra-long drag from his cigarette.
So I admittedly wasn’t very alarmed when I read about the “record number of reports of flying humanoids” that Aimee Levitt blogged about for the Reader this summer. I browsed the website sourced in the piece, Lon Strickland’s Phantoms and Monsters, an unofficial archive of stories about the Chicago Mothman (or Chicago Phantom, or Lake Michigan Bat Creature, or whatever), and read of the alleged eyewitness accounts. Turns out, it’s pretty easy to dismiss wild tales about seven-foot-tall winged figures staring at you with glowing red eyes while flying over Lake Michigan when the authors are anonymous, the stories come accompanied by grainy and indecipherable pictures, and the website where they’re posted is hilariously out-of-date. (Seriously, why do websites making claims about the paranormal always look like they’re from 1997?)
He also texted his girlfriend Megan about the incident, and she replied with a link to Aimee’s Reader story about the flying humanoid sightings. It rang a bell in his head. A couple weeks prior, one of his coworkers at the bookstore where he’s assistant manager mentioned the Mothman trend, but Jeff dismissed it by jokingly quoting a line from Tim Burton’s Batman movie: “Listen! There ain’t no bat!”
Maybe some mass hysterias just aren’t worth getting hysterical about, even when they seem to touch you personally.
