STUDY
IN 1966 AND 1967, more than a hundred eyewitnesses reported seeing a “large flying man” in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia. While the creature did not attack anyone, it was spotted at the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge that claimed forty-six lives. Authorities attributed the disaster to a faulty link in one of the bridge’s support chains. A cover up, perhaps?
Skeptics have attempted to debunk the mothman as myth for years. “I interviewed dozens of witnesses in Point Pleasant. I was convinced the sightings around the time of the bridge collapse were cases of mistaken identity—a large barn owl or stork,” University of Virginia adjunct professor of paranormal psychology and Point Pleasant resident Dr. Sheri Grant says. “Maybe even a mass hallucination—it was the sixties, after all.”
She changed her mind in 2010. “I was on a hike with my daughter, who was six at the time,” Dr. Grant says. “In broad daylight, this creature comes out of nowhere and picks her up. Carried her off. Did it know who I was? Was this in retaliation for my investigations into the mothman stories? I’ll never know.” After an intense, week-long manhunt, her daughter was found in her bedroom, with no memory of the kidnapping.
Dr. Grant refuses to be intimidated by the mothman. She continues her investigations unabated. She’s learned that the Point Pleasant mothman could be just one of dozens of flying humanoids reported around the world (often called angels or faeries). Sightings date back hundreds of years. “They may even have inspired Leonardo da Vinci’s quest to design a flying machine,” she says.
How to Survive a High Fall into Water
If the mothman carries you over a lake or river, provoke him into dropping you. Poke his glowing red eyes or kick him in the mothballs.
1. Position your body so that you enter the water feet first. Point your toes straight down like a ballerina.
2. Angle your body slightly backward. When you hit the water, you want your body to bend forward due to the impact. If you’re leaning forward, the water will fold you back, snapping your spine. Bet you wish you were back in the mothman’s arms, huh?
3. Hold your breath as you hit the water. Pray you fell from less than a hundred and fifty feet. Any more than that, and your chances of survival drop dramatically.
AVOID
WHILE DR. GRANT doesn’t know where the mothman will appear next, she has a few suggestions for minimizing your risk of encountering the creature.
1. Avoid Point Pleasant. For some unknown reason, the mothman seems to return repeatedly to this picturesque community along the West Virginia–Ohio border.
2. If your GPS is routing you through Point Pleasant, find an alternate route. To the south, Interstate 64 runs east and west. To the east, Interstate 77 runs north and south. To the north— You know what? Just buy one of those old-school paper “maps” and chart your own course.
The Mothman Festival
Point Pleasant now holds an annual Mothman Festival, featuring a twelve-foot-tall metallic mothman statue, hayride tours through town, and a mothman pancake-eating contest. The celebration occurs annually on the third weekend of every September. The community seems to treat the creature with a certain irreverence—or is it affection? Here’s a rundown of festival events from recent years:
• Ghosts of Point Pleasant Walking Tours
• All-ages Mothman Ball and Costume Contest
• Hayride through the “TNT Area” where the mothman was most active
• The Riverside Cloggers
• The “World’s Only Miss Mothman Festival Pageant,” sponsored by Tudor’s Biscuit World
“Everyone treats the mothman like a joke, like a cartoon character,” Dr. Grant says. “When he strikes again, mark my words—no one is going to laugh.”
SURVIVE
WHILE THE MOTHMAN probably won’t kill you, it could kidnap you. That wouldn’t be pleasant at all.
• Plead for forgiveness. If it’s advancing toward you with ill intent, you must have done something to irritate it. Have you been asking questions about the mothman? Tsk, tsk. Ask it to forgive you—it loves the feeling of superiority. Kneel and make a big show of it. Grovel.
• If it lifts you into the air, don’t fight back. What do you think is going to happen if you punch the mothman in the face? If you said, “Drop me seventy feet to the ground and turn me into a street pizza,” you’re right. If it carries you over a body of water, you might have a fighting chance (see the sidebar “How to Survive a High Fall into Water”).
• Prepare for the worst. Even if the creature leaves you alone, its appearance may signal a disaster on the horizon. This would be a good time to review your unnatural disaster supplies, evacuation routes, and other preparedness measures.
PREHISTORIC CAVE BEAR
VITALS
ALSO KNOWN AS: Yeti • FIRST OBSERVED: Lhotse Mountain Range, Nepal • EST. MAX. SPEED: 30 mph • HIGH-RISK GROUPS: Plane Crash Survivors, Mountain Climbers, Cavemen • LOOK OUT FOR IT IN: The Himalayas • THREAT TO HUMANITY: • RISK OF ENCOUNTER: • FIN’S WTF FACTOR:
ACCORDING TO THE FOSSIL RECORD, CAVE BEARS went extinct nearly 28,000 years ago in Europe. Eyewitnesses place cave bears in Asia more recently—this century, in fact. They’re more than eight feet tall when on all fours, and nearly triple that when standing on their hind legs. An adult is estimated to weigh about two tons. They subsist on deer, coyotes, and other bear species. If you encroach upon their territory, however, they won’t hesitate to vary their diet.
MISTAKEN IDENTITIES
Cave bears and Himalayan brown bears are quite similar in appearance—both have a prominent shoulder hump and rounded ears—which is one reason they may have gone unnoticed as separate species for so long. Additionally, many cryptozoologists believe the newly discovered cave bears are the source of the legend of the yeti.
STUDY
IN 2008, BANGLADESH-BOUND flight Abrams 4815 crashed in the Himalayas. Six passengers survived.
“We set up camp inside the fuselage,” Damon Carlton, a professional foosball player, says. “We soon realized we weren’t alone in the mountains. We found footprints in the snow. They were three times the size of Shaq’s feet.”
While Carlton and his brother Jacob were hunting for food, they found the creature that left the footprints. And it was no basketball player. “This bear would have made a grizzly look like a teddy bear,” he says. “When I saw drawings of cave bears online, I couldn’t believe it. The creature I saw had supposedly been dead for thousands of years. But I know what I saw.”
The cave bear attacked, mauling Jacob. Carlton escaped by seeking refuge in a hatch buried in the snow. “Someone had built this little bunker up there in the mountains,” he says. “It was like I was saved by the hand of God.”
Carlton found a stash of dynamite in the bunker. As he returned to the fuselage to warn the other survivors about the cave bear, the creature cornered him. He lit a stick of dynamite and threw it. The dynamite missed the cave bear, but triggered an avalanche that buried the monster.
The Number One Threat Facing America
Conservationists claim few animals are as misunderstood as the bear. “Bears have more to fear from us than we have to fear from them,” reads a pamphlet from the Defenders of Wildlife organization.
If the reports of cave bear attacks are proven true, however, our collective fear of bears will have been justified many times over. And one man will be there to say, in a voice saturated with snark, “I told you so.” That man’s name is Stephen Colbert.
“Bears are mindless killing machines. They smell our fear. They feed on our weakness. They are public enemy number one,” Colbert has said on his nightly talk show, The Colbert Report. “I believe all God’s creatures have a soul—except bears. Bears are actually Satan’s children.”
AVOID
WHILE WE STILL don’t have conclusive evidence that cave bears are living amongst us, use caution the next time you try to scale Mount Everest.
• Going to
the Himalayas? Take some friends with you. Cave bears may be less inclined to attack people who are in groups. Even if cave bears still descend upon you, life is more enjoyable with friends.
• Stay on the beaten path. Robert Frost famously wrote, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Taking the less-traveled path in cave bear country could make all the difference for you—the difference between life and death.
How to Survive a Plane Crash, by Damon Carlton
Your plane went down in a ball of flames and you miraculously survived. Don’t celebrate just yet. If you crashed in the Himalayas, your adventure is just beginning.
1. Don’t leave the crash site. When a rescue crew arrives, you’ll be easier to find near the wreckage than on your own miles away. Don’t wander off in search of help. Let help find you.
2. Turn the fuselage into a base camp. Remove the bodies of the passengers who didn’t make it. Tack up some posters on the windows to make it feel like home.
3. Search the luggage for useful items. Blankets, clothing, food, and beverages are all helpful. You can survive up to three weeks without food. You can only survive for three days without water. No one knows how many days you can survive without caffeine.
4. If the food supply runs out, try trapping or hunting animals. For most people, this won’t be easy.
5. If you can’t catch any animals, it’s time to throw a Donner party.
SURVIVE
TO SURVIVE A cave bear encounter, try these tips. If they don’t work, let us know so we can update future editions of this guide.
1. Make your body seem bigger by spreading your arms and legs. When you spot a cave bear, don’t run. Stand your ground. Open your jacket and spread it like a cape with your arms. While this is how Batman intimidates criminals, it also works against most wild animals. Bears are lazy. If they have to exert too much energy taking you down, they’ll move on to other prey.
2. Shine a flashlight or cell phone in its eyes. Back away slowly. Seek shelter if possible. A cabin won’t provide permanent protection, but it should give you time to warm up before you’re eaten.
ROCK MONSTER
VITALS
ALSO KNOWN AS: Wizard Rock • FIRST OBSERVED: Ivanovo, Bulgaria (2008) • EST. MAX. SPEED: 6 mph • HIGH-RISK GROUPS: Anyone Who Dares Wake It, Descendants of Yavic Lazar • LOOK OUT FOR IT IN: Bulgaria • THREAT TO HUMANITY: • RISK OF ENCOUNTER: • FIN’S WTF FACTOR:
THIS SUPERNATURAL BRUTE IS COMPOSED OF (WHAT else?) rocks. Animated by an evil spirit, the rock monster requires no sustenance. It kills to feed only its ego. Relentlessly wicked, the rock monster will tenderize you before ripping you from limb to limb. Try to run, and the creature will hurl its powerful fists at you like giant fastballs. Even when materially destroyed, the rock monster isn’t down for the count—the evil spirit will begin the slow process of rebuilding itself using nearby stones.
STUDY
WHILE TRAVELING THROUGH rural Bulgaria, a group of Cal Poly students stumbled across a sword sticking out of a pile of rocks. It was foretold the sword could only be removed by a descendant of Yavic Lazar, a brave knight who once defeated an evil wizard using the same sword.
One of the students—Jason Laws—happened to be in the Lazar bloodline. Laws pulled the sword from the stone, and—well, you’ve seen the rest, right?
BuzzFeed proclaimed “14 Reasons This EPIC Excalibur Prank WINS Spring Break!” above captioned stills from the viral video.* It certainly looked like a prank. That shaky cell phone footage of some bro waving around a broadsword while shouting “Winter is coming”? The pile of rocks chasing helpless “villagers” around and bashing their brains in?
Dozens of eyewitnesses eventually confirmed the videos as authentic. A wannabe wizard named Dimitar had set Laws up, inviting him to Bulgaria under false pretenses. Dimitar hoped to harness the rock monster’s spirit for his own nefarious purposes. Instead, he ended up dead at the hands of the rock monster, which didn’t take too kindly to being made a pawn. Laws then snapped the magical keystone jewel into the sword’s handle and thrust the blade into the ground at the rock monster’s feet, banishing the creature below the Earth’s surface. The sword disappeared into the ground as well. “Next year I’m going on spring break in Miami,” Laws told a GNN reporter.
* * *
* We want to point out that the sword was not Excalibur. The “sword in the stone” and Excalibur are separate swords. We’ll let it slide, however, since both were wielded at one point by King Arthur.
AVOID
THE CHANCES THAT you or your friends are descendants of the brave knight Lazar are slim, but it’s possible. Something like one out of five Americans is descended from the Mayflower colonizers. Hearing stats like that makes us wonder if there isn’t a little Lazar blood in everyone these days. With that in mind…
• If you and your friends are walking through the woods and happen across a broadsword sticking out of a boulder, don’t take turns trying to pull it out. Don’t tempt fate—leave the sword in the stone.
• Better yet, don’t walk through the woods. Stick to sidewalks, where you’re less likely to run into swords sticking out of stones. You should go check out that new trail the city put in near your place. They spent a lot of money on that trail. Someone should use it.
Who Said It? Evil Wizard Dimitar or Kanye West?
One has a shaved head and leather trench coat. The other has a shaved head and leather kilt.
1. “What do I want? Eternal life? Unbelievable power? I want it all.”
2. “I will be a GOD TO YOU ALL!”
3. “It feels good, man, to be able to really live the dream.”
4. “It shall be released from its stony prison and live in my flesh.”
5. “At the end of the day, I’m going down as a legend, whether you like me or not.”
6. “I am a god.”
7. “I shall walk the Earth for a thousand years.”
8. “I have decided to become the best rapper of all time!”
ANSWERS: 1. Dimitar, 2. Dimitar, 3. Kanye, 4. Dimitar, 5. Kanye, 6. Kanye, 7. Dimitar, 8. Kanye
SURVIVE
DID YOU REMOVE the sword from the stone, even after we warned you not to? Do you also have the red keystone jewel? If you answered yes to both questions, then you’re the only one who can stop the rock monster. It’s not just your job to survive—it’s your job to put it back in the ground. Here’s what you need to do:
1. Suit up for battle. While some legends state that the wielder of the sword is immune to physical injury, it can be knocked out of your hands quite easily—especially if you’re not trained to handle a broadsword. In the Middle Ages when Yavic Lazar fought the wizard, everybody had body armor. These days, you might be lucky to find an athletic cup at your local Walmart. Take the time to invest in high-end armor, like a good flak jacket. A shield wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
2. Use the sword to break the ground at the rock monster’s feet. Don’t make the mistake of trying to “stab” the monster—you’re not trying to crack the shell, like you would with a rock lobster. You want to plunge the sword into the ground, which will swallow the monster into the Earth. Be sure the keystone jewel is snapped into the sword’s handle. Without it, the sword is just a sword. Cool to carry around, but worthless when fighting the rock monster.
3. Don’t have the sword? You’re at a serious disadvantage. The only way to defeat the rock monster is with the sword. Even if you “blast it to hell” with a nuclear weapon, the spirit will reanimate using whatever rubble it can find. Then you have a shambling, radioactive rock monster to deal with. Your top priority—besides staying out of its way—should be to find whoever has the sword.
WEIRD SCIENCE
How do we reconcile “evil wizards” and “magical swords” with the world we live in? While skepticism is healthy, it would be foolish to discount the threat the rock monster poses. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke
, magic is just science or technology we have yet to understand.
SABER-TOOTHED TIGER
VITALS
ALSO KNOWN AS: Ice Rage Tiger • FIRST OBSERVED: New York City, New York (2013) • EST. MAX. SPEED: 75 mph • HIGH-RISK GROUPS: Mammoths, TV Producers • LOOK OUT FOR IT IN: All Environments • THREAT TO HUMANITY: • RISK OF ENCOUNTER: • FIN’S WTF FACTOR:
THIS GENETICALLY ENGINEERED SABER-TOOTHED tiger is twice the size of an African lion. For those keeping track, that’s even larger than the Ice Age saber-toothed tiger. Don’t try to pet this kitty—it’s almost certainly not declawed. This big cat will take you down with its thick, muscular arms and then slash your throat with its foot-long, serrated canine teeth.
How to Survive a Sharknado and Other Unnatural Disasters Page 8