New Minnesota Mothman Sighting

George Noory, during the “Coast to Coast AM” program last night, August 10, 2007, took various calls from individuals who reported many kinds of cryptids. The C2C link is here.

The link serves as a way to hear a replay of the entire program, to conduct a mp3 download, or to read a summary.

Some talk was of the overlap between the Mothman banshee mythos and the 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge (pictured below). (You can read about the “I-35W Blues” elsewhere at Cryptomundo.) But most of the callers specifically shared their firsthand stories.

Folks telephoned in and told their own eyewitness accounts for hours. Here are two examples:

Please note, the “Mothman” (or large bird, Thunderbird) was reported to have been seen on June 27th, over a month before the August 1, 2007, collapse of the I-35W Bridge. That this is only being reported now, after all the talk of Mothman and the Silver Bridge collapse, must be held as suspect. So the question must be asked: Are there newspaper records of big bird sightings from SE Minnesota for the months before the bridge collapse, or is this myth-making occurring now?

“Stewartville is a city in Olmsted County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 5,411 at the 2000 census. Stewartville has experienced growth as a result of its location just south of Rochester.” – Wikipedia.

Rochester, Minnesota, will be recalled as the site of Bigfoot sightings in 1968. For example, Larry Hawkins reported he saw a hairy hominoid when he was going south on Highway 52, during that year, according to a report from Brad Steiger. Steiger, writing in The Allende Letters also mentioned he collected a Stewartville sighting of aerial phenomena from Warren Anding, for October 24, 1968.

This area of Minnesota apparently has a special strangeness about it. Jim Brandon in Weird America writes that at Chatfield, 16 miles southeast of Rochester on U.S. 52, excavations in the 1880s recovered six skeletons of “enormous size.”

U.S. Highway 52 is the main road north from the Driftless Area of the southeastern corner of Minnesota, and anyone traveling that route will find they will intersect with I-35W in Minneapolis.

Well, in general, that is. Photoguy writes in to specifically tell me: “Hwy 52 becomes Hwy 50 in Hampton, MN and then splits northwest becoming Hwy 55 and to the Northeast once again becoming Hwy 52. That part of Hwy 52 eventually meets up with I 35E in St. Paul. It is Hwy 55 that eventually meets with I 35W in Minneapolis.”

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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