Will Mothman Deaths Return?

According to a listing of TV Movies for June 11 – 17, 2006, a sinister banshee is on the horizon. The Mothman flies again:

The Mothman Prophecies ’02. Richard Gere. A reporter investigates the sightings of a strange creature and other strange phenomena in a small town. (PG-13) (2:30) TNT: Jun 17, 2006, Sat. 2 P.M., 11:15 P.M. (CC)

June 20th is the fourth anniversary of the date when Mothman investigator Jim Keith’s former partner Sherry Marie Yearsley’s body was dumped along eastbound I-80 at Sparks, Nevada, near the railroad tracks. The partially clad body of Yearsley, 47, was found on June 21, 2002. Passengers on a passing Amtrak train spotted the body and notified authorities. Police said Yearsley was a murder victim and her body had been left there the previous day. Her homicide remains unsolved, as far as I know.

Yearsley and author Jim Keith were partners for several years in the 1980s, and parented two daughters. They separated around 1990, and engaged in a disruptive custody battle over their girls. Yearsley lost the custody case when Judge Mills Lane (later to become famous due to his court television show), discovered Yearsley had been lying to him. Today, the children live with Jim’s sister.

Author Jim Keith, at the age of 50, died mysteriously, on September 7, 1999, during knee surgery, after falling off the stage at the annual Burning Man pagan arts festival in Nevada. Jim Keith was responsible for first writing about a CIA-Men-in-Black connection to the initial Mothman events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. He held the notion that Point Pleasant was being used as a "test tube."

Two years ago, the mysterious death in Los Angeles on July 30, 2004, of Jennifer Barrett-Pellington, 42, wife of The Mothman Prophecies director Mark Pellington shocked Hollywood. It is one year since the surprisingly early death on July 16, 2005, of Mark Chorvinsky, 51, of Rockville, Maryland, who saw himself in later years as a Mothman-Owlman debunker as well as Bigfoot one. Chorvinsky’s "Potomac Mothman" investigations of a July 27, 1944 sighting were one of his last active research efforts.

Forty years ago, on July 18, 1966, a Mothman-like creature circled Salt Lake City. Perhaps something strange will happen out West, in Utah or Nevada, again?

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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