A Brief History
On December 15, 1967, the “Mothman” prophecy came true when the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River collapsed tumbling cars into the cold water!
Digging Deeper
Digging deeper, we find a bridge disaster that claimed 46 lives that may have been predicted by a supernatural or alien entity!
Connecting Point Pleasant, West Virginia and Kanauga, Ohio the Silver Bridge was built in 1928 and crossed the Ohio River. It was a suspension bridge of the eye-bar chain design and was later found to have failed due to a chain link breaking and the design not allowing for the other chains to make up for the loss of even one chain resulting in the other now overloaded chains to break.
The supernatural aspect of this disaster is recounted in the books by John Keel, Operation Trojan Horse (1970) and The Mothman Prophecies (1975). In the first book, Keel claimed to have received a phone call from an alien that he called “a UFO entity” warning of the coming disaster, and in the second, he attributed the prophetic warning to an entity known as the Mothman.
A major motion picture of the event starring Richard Gere was released in 2002, titled The Mothman Prophecies. This creepy thriller chronicles the events from a year prior to the collapse until the rush hour disaster including encounters with the Mothman.
The Silver Bridge was replaced in 1969 by the Silver Memorial Bridge, a much stronger cantilever structure carrying US Route 35 traffic across the river. A museum about the bridge and a memorial to the 46 lives lost in the collapse are located in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
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Historical Evidence
To read the original books about the incident and watch the cinematic adaption, please click on the below listed links:
Keel, John A. Mothman Prophecies. Tor Trade, 2013.
Keel, John A. Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs. Anomalist Books, 2013.
Pellington, Mark, dir. The Mothman Prophecies (Special Edition). Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Katherine Bowman of Mothman Museum Point Pleasant, WV, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. This image was originally posted to Flickr by Mo Kaiwen 莫楷文 at https://flickr.com/photos/23282118@N05/3757057690 (archive). It was reviewed on by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.
You can also watch a video version of this article on YouTube.
