The Chicago Mothman Sightings of 2017: What Was Seen Over the City
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The Chicago Mothman: When the Winged Figure Came to the City
Cities are not supposed to have monsters.
That is the unspoken agreement between urban life and the people who choose it. You trade the dark woods and the lonely roads and the things that move at the edges of rural darkness for concrete and streetlight and the permanent noise of other people nearby. The bargain is supposed to hold. Monsters belong to the countryside, to the fog over West Virginia hollows and the tree lines of Mason County and the abandoned industrial complexes where wartime infrastructure rusts quietly back into the earth.
In 2017, something decided not to honor that agreement.
Between April and December of that year, more than fifty people across the city of Chicago reported seeing a massive winged figure, humanoid in shape, black in color, with large glowing red or orange eyes. The sightings occurred in neighborhoods spread across the metropolitan area, from the lakefront to the South Side, from the Loop to the suburbs beyond. The witnesses included security guards and students and construction workers and families out for evening walks. Some saw the figure in full light. Some saw it against the city skyline. Some watched it rise from the ground and ascend without the mechanical effort that any known bird requires.
None of them had any obvious connection to each other. None of them had any apparent reason to fabricate what they described. And what they described, with a consistency that investigators found difficult to dismiss, bore a striking resemblance to something that had last been reliably documented in a small West Virginia town fifty years before.
Chicago had a Mothman problem. And the city was not quite prepared for what that meant.
Chicago in 2017: The Stage
Understanding the Chicago sighting wave requires understanding the city itself and the specific conditions of 2017, because context shapes how events are received and how witnesses interpret and report what they experience.
Chicago is the third largest city in the United States, a place of extraordinary density and diversity spread along the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. It is a city of neighborhoods, dozens of them, each with its own character and demographics and relationship to the broader metropolitan fabric. It is also a city with a rich tradition of urban folklore, of stories that move through communities and attach themselves to specific locations, and with a waterfront geography that creates its own particular atmosphere, the lake pressing against the eastern edge of the city like a dark inland sea, enormous and unpredictable, generating weather and mood in equal measure.
The year 2017 was not a calm one. Nationally, the political and social atmosphere was unusually tense, and Chicago itself was dealing with elevated rates of violent crime that had drawn national attention and generated significant community anxiety. The city's residents were, in ways both conscious and unconscious, living at a higher pitch of alertness than normal. Whether that atmospheric tension contributed in any way to what was being seen and reported is a question worth holding without answering too quickly.
The spring came early that year, and it was into the warming evenings of April that the first reports began to arrive.
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The First Reports: April 2017
The sighting wave is generally understood to have begun in mid-April 2017, though the precise sequencing of the earliest reports is complicated by the fact that many witnesses did not come forward immediately. The first reports to reach paranormal researchers came through the website Phantoms and Monsters, operated by researcher Lon Strickler, who became the primary collector and investigator of the Chicago accounts throughout the year.
One of the earliest documented sightings placed the figure near the Lakefront, the long stretch of parkland and recreational space running along the shore of Lake Michigan that serves as one of Chicago's most frequented public areas. A witness described seeing a large, dark winged shape rise from near the water and ascend almost vertically into the night sky, moving with a speed and directness that no bird of any species the witness could think of would be capable of. The figure was described as humanoid in its proportions, with a body and limbs visible beneath the enormous wings, and with eyes that reflected or generated a reddish orange glow.
The witness had been walking alone and had not immediately reported the encounter, uncertain what to do with it, how to describe it, who would take it seriously. That hesitation, that period between the experience and the report, was characteristic of many of the 2017 accounts, and it is worth noting because it runs directly counter to the pattern you would expect if the sightings were fabrications. People inventing stories for attention do not generally sit on those stories for days or weeks before reluctantly contacting a paranormal researcher. People who have seen something they cannot explain and are uncertain whether anyone will believe them do exactly that.
By late April, Strickler had received multiple independent reports from different locations across the city, and he had begun to suspect that something systematic was occurring.
The Timeline: Fifty-Five Sightings Across Eight Months
Between April and December 2017, Lon Strickler and his research associate Manuel Navarette of the UFO Clearinghouse documented approximately 55 sightings of the winged figure across the Chicago metropolitan area. This is the number that became widely cited in media coverage of the phenomenon, though Strickler himself was careful to note that it represented only the reports that had been voluntarily submitted to paranormal research channels and almost certainly undercounted the actual number of people who had experiences during this period.
The sightings were not evenly distributed across the calendar. They intensified through May and June, reached a peak of frequency during the summer months, and then continued into the autumn before tapering off toward the end of the year. The concentration of reports during the summer is consistent with the fact that more people are outdoors after dark during warm weather, which increases the potential witness pool, but it also means that the peak of the phenomenon coincided with the period of maximum urban outdoor activity in Chicago, when the lakefront and the parks and the neighborhood streets are at their most populated.
The distribution across the city was one of the aspects of the 2017 wave that most impressed investigators. The sightings came from locations that had no obvious connection to each other, spread across dozens of miles of urban geography. The Near North Side. Pilsen. Wicker Park. The South Side lakefront. The western suburbs. Millennium Park and the area around Grant Park. The O'Hare corridor. Logan Square. The sightings came from locations that would take forty minutes to drive between, from neighborhoods with entirely different characters and demographics, from witnesses who had no apparent way of knowing about each other's experiences at the time they made their own reports.
This geographic spread was significant to investigators because it argued against the most obvious social explanation for a cluster of unusual sightings, which is that a story circulates within a community and generates additional reports through suggestion and social contagion. If all fifty-five sightings had come from the same neighborhood, that explanation would have considerable force. Spread across the metropolitan area in the pattern that they were, it demanded a more careful examination.
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What the Witnesses Saw: The Descriptions
The consistency of the Chicago witness descriptions across fifty-five independent reports from dozens of locations is the single most compelling aspect of the 2017 sighting wave, and it is the element that most closely echoes the Point Pleasant experience of 1966 and 1967.
The figure was consistently described as large, very large, significantly exceeding human height and build. Estimates of height ranged from six to eight feet, with many witnesses emphasizing that the scale of the creature was the first thing that registered, before any other detail, because nothing they had ever seen in an urban environment prepared them for a living thing of that size moving through the air above them.
The body was humanoid. Witnesses described a figure with a discernible torso, with limbs, with a basic structural architecture that was recognizably closer to a human being than to any bird or bat. Several witnesses described what appeared to be legs, held beneath the body in flight in the way that a bird carries its feet, but proportioned like human legs rather than bird feet. The overall impression was not of an animal that happened to be large but of something that had a human structural logic while also having wings.
The wings were enormous and dark, described variously as feathered or leathery or simply as large and black without the witnesses being certain of their specific texture. Wingspan estimates ranged from ten to fifteen feet across, dimensions that put the figure well beyond any bird species native to or commonly found in North America. The largest birds regularly encountered in Illinois, herons and eagles and turkey vultures, have wingspans in the range of six to seven feet at maximum. What the Chicago witnesses were describing was half again as large as the biggest bird they might plausibly have encountered, and it was moving in ways that no bird moves.
The eyes were the detail that recurred most insistently across the accounts. Red or orange, glowing, large, visible from distances at which no animal's eyes would be perceptible in the ambient light of a city at night. Several witnesses described the eyes as the first thing they noticed, before the wings or the body, two points of reddish light moving at altitude before the full shape of the figure became apparent. Others described making eye contact with the figure and feeling a pull, a difficulty in looking away, a quality to the gaze that went beyond simple visual engagement.
Multiple witnesses described the figure as completely silent. In a city that never stops generating noise, this detail was particularly striking. Birds of significant size are audible in flight. The figure, even at close range, produced no sound that any witness could detect above the ambient noise of the city. It moved through the air silently, which is a characteristic that runs through Mothman accounts across every documented sighting wave and that no known bird of comparable size replicates.
Several witnesses described the figure rising vertically from the ground or from a low surface, ascending without the running start or the wing-assisted launch that birds require to achieve flight. It simply rose, as though lift was not something it had to negotiate. This detail appears in the original Point Pleasant accounts, in the description of the creature ascending like a helicopter from the ground near the power plant when Roger Scarberry turned his car around and fled.
A small number of witnesses described a facial structure, something that suggested features beneath or above the eyes, though most accounts left the face ambiguous, the eyes dominant and the rest of the head or face uncertain. Linda Scarberry in 1966 had described being unable to make out a face because the eyes were too compelling to look away from. Several Chicago witnesses described something similar, a figure where the eyes were so arresting that the surrounding details receded.
Lon Strickler and the Investigation
Lon Strickler had been operating Phantoms and Monsters, one of the longest-running and most substantive paranormal reporting websites in the United States, for years before the Chicago sightings began arriving in his inbox in April 2017. His approach to paranormal investigation was methodical and skeptical in the productive sense, meaning he took witness reports seriously without accepting them uncritically, cross-referenced accounts for consistency, looked for explanations before reaching for extraordinary ones, and documented what he found with a care that set his work apart from the more sensational end of the paranormal media landscape.
When the Chicago reports began to accumulate through the spring of 2017, Strickler recognized fairly quickly that he was dealing with something unusual. The geographic spread was the first flag. The consistency of the descriptions was the second. The third, and perhaps the most telling, was the character of the witnesses themselves, the proportion of the fifty-five who had professional backgrounds, steady employment, no history of paranormal interest or reporting, and no apparent motivation to fabricate the accounts they were submitting.
Strickler partnered with Manuel Navarette of the UFO Clearinghouse to expand the investigation, and together they conducted interviews with as many of the Chicago witnesses as were willing to speak in detail. They looked for connections between witnesses, for shared social networks or media exposure that might explain the consistency of descriptions through social rather than observational means. They found very little. The witnesses did not, for the most part, know each other. Many had no prior interest in cryptids or paranormal phenomena. Several actively resisted the interpretation that what they had seen was anything other than a very large, very strange bird, and came to paranormal researchers only because no other channel seemed equipped to take their accounts seriously.
Strickler published the reports as they came in through the Phantoms and Monsters website, which meant that the Chicago sighting wave was documented in something close to real time rather than reconstructed after the fact. This gave the eventual record a quality of contemporaneous testimony that strengthened its credibility. The reports were not shaped by knowledge of how the story ended, because while the sightings were occurring nobody knew how the story would end or whether it would end at all.
By summer 2017 the story had moved beyond paranormal research circles. Local Chicago media picked it up, and from there it moved to national outlets. The coverage varied considerably in tone and seriousness, with some journalists treating it as a curious human interest story about urban folklore and others engaging more substantively with the actual witness accounts and the investigation being conducted by Strickler and Navarette. The story reached international audiences through wire services and online distribution, and for a period in the summer and autumn of 2017 the Chicago Mothman was being discussed in media around the world.
The attention brought additional witnesses forward. Some people who had seen the figure in the spring and had not reported it came forward after reading the media coverage, which complicated the statistical picture but also strengthened the cumulative case for something genuinely unusual having been present over Chicago during this period.
Chicago and Point Pleasant: The Comparison
For anyone familiar with the Point Pleasant sightings of 1966 and 1967, the Chicago accounts of 2017 carried an immediate and uncomfortable resonance. The similarities between the two events were not subtle, and they were not lost on the researchers and journalists covering the Chicago wave.
The physical descriptions were the most obvious point of overlap. The height, the grey or black humanoid body, the vast dark wings, the glowing red or orange eyes, the silence in flight, the capacity for vertical ascent without a running start, the hypnotic quality of the eyes that witnesses across fifty years and a thousand miles described in almost identical terms. These are not generic elements that could be assembled from any stock image of a flying creature. They are specific, unusual, and consistent in ways that demand either a shared original source or a shared original experience.
The character of the witnesses was another parallel. In both Point Pleasant and Chicago, the people who came forward were predominantly ordinary individuals without profiles that suggested either credulity or attention-seeking. Both sighting waves produced witnesses from professional backgrounds, from law enforcement adjacent roles, from employment that required steady judgment and reliable observation. Both waves produced witnesses who were reluctant to report, who sat on their experiences for days or weeks before finding a channel through which to describe them, and who maintained their accounts under follow-up questioning without significant revision.
The geographic concentration of sightings, while expressed very differently in a city of three million versus a town of a few thousand, followed a similar logic in both cases. Point Pleasant sightings clustered around the TNT area and the Ohio River corridor. Chicago sightings showed a notable concentration near Lake Michigan, particularly along the lakefront and in neighborhoods adjacent to it, as though the figure, whatever it was, had a relationship with large bodies of water that manifested across both sighting events.
The differences between the two waves are also real and worth noting. Point Pleasant's thirteen months of activity included far more than Mothman sightings alone. The UFO activity, the men in black encounters, the electromagnetic anomalies, the poltergeist cases, the precognitive experiences, the sustained atmosphere of interconnected strangeness, all of that formed a context around the creature sightings that gave the Point Pleasant phenomenon a density and complexity that the Chicago wave did not replicate. Chicago in 2017 had the creature. It did not have the full apparatus of associated phenomena that made Point Pleasant so distinctive.
The Point Pleasant sightings were also followed by the catastrophic Silver Bridge collapse, which gave the entire phenomenon a retrospective shape and meaning that the Chicago wave has not acquired, at least not yet. No comparable disaster followed the 2017 sightings in Chicago, which either argues against the harbinger interpretation or argues that whatever the figure was, Chicago in 2017 did not have the kind of disaster waiting for it that Point Pleasant had in December 1967. The absence of a subsequent catastrophe does not disprove the harbinger theory, but it complicates any simple application of it.
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The Theories: What Could It Have Been
The Chicago sightings generated a significant range of explanatory theories, from the rigorously mundane to the genuinely extraordinary, and examining those theories honestly requires engaging with both their strengths and their limits.
The Misidentified Bird Theory
The most immediately available conventional explanation for the Chicago sightings is that witnesses were misidentifying large birds, most likely great horned owls or great blue herons, both of which are present in the Chicago area and both of which can achieve significant apparent size in low light conditions or at distance. Great horned owls in particular have eyes that reflect light in ways that can appear reddish in certain conditions, they are completely silent in flight, and they are large enough that a sudden encounter at close range could be genuinely startling.
The misidentified bird explanation accounts for some features of the Chicago reports. It accounts for the silence. It accounts for the reddish eyeshine. It accounts for the general impression of a large dark flying thing.
It does not account for a wingspan of ten to fifteen feet, which exceeds any bird species present in Illinois by a significant margin. It does not account for witnesses who described a humanoid body with visible limbs. It does not account for vertical ascent without a running start or wing-assisted launch. It does not account for the figure appearing to be at least six feet tall while standing, which several witnesses described. And it does not account for the consistency of descriptions across fifty-five independent reports from witnesses who had no apparent connection to each other, because while mass misidentification of a great horned owl is theoretically possible, it is not possible across dozens of miles of urban geography over eight months without a single witness getting close enough to resolve the figure into something identifiable as a bird.
The misidentified bird theory is not nothing. It is a reasonable starting point. But it does not go far enough to cover the full range of what was reported in Chicago in 2017.
The Mass Hysteria and Social Contagion Theory
A more sophisticated conventional explanation is that the Chicago sightings represent a form of social contagion, in which an initial report, whether of a genuine unusual sighting or of a fabrication, creates a template that subsequent observers apply to ambiguous visual experiences. On this reading, the first few sightings in April 2017 were reported through paranormal research channels, and as awareness of those reports spread, more people began to interpret large birds or other aerial phenomena through the lens of the described figure.
This theory has genuine explanatory force in the context of paranormal sighting clusters generally, and there is substantial psychological research supporting the idea that prior expectation shapes perception. The human visual system is interpretive rather than purely receptive, and what we have been primed to look for influences what we see, particularly in conditions of low light, brief exposure, or unexpected context.
However, the social contagion model runs into the same geographic problem as the misidentified bird theory. The reports in April and early May 2017 predated significant media coverage. The witnesses who came forward during that initial period were not drawing on a publicly available template because the template had not yet been publicly established. And the witnesses who reported in the later months, after media coverage had made the figure widely known, maintained their reports under follow-up questioning with enough specific detail and personal conviction to resist easy dismissal as suggestion-driven.
The social contagion theory also does not fully address the cases in which multiple witnesses at the same location reported the same figure simultaneously, without any time for social influence to operate between them. Independent simultaneous corroboration of a specific unusual sighting is the hardest class of report to explain through psychological mechanisms alone.
The Undiscovered or Escaped Cryptid Theory
The third broad category of explanation is that the figure seen in Chicago in 2017 was a genuine biological entity of unknown or disputed species, either an undiscovered cryptid similar to the Point Pleasant Mothman, an escaped exotic creature from a private collection, or a surviving representative of a species presumed extinct.
Researchers who take this position point to the consistency of the descriptions as evidence that witnesses were responding to a real external stimulus rather than to suggestion or misidentification. They note that the physical characteristics described, the humanoid body plan, the vast wingspan, the silent flight, the glowing eyes, are consistent across witnesses in ways that internal psychological processes do not reliably produce.
The objections to this theory are substantial. A creature with the dimensions described by Chicago witnesses, standing six to eight feet tall with a wingspan of ten to fifteen feet, would represent a biological entity for which there is no credible precedent in the known fauna of North America or anywhere else. The square cube law, the physical principle that governs how size and mass scale relative to structural strength, creates serious problems for a winged creature of the described dimensions that is also capable of the behavior witnesses described. Whether those physical constraints can be satisfied by any conceivable biological design is a question that has not been satisfactorily answered.
The Paranormal or Interdimensional Theory
The fourth category, the one that connects most directly to the broader Mothman literature and to John Keel's interpretation of the Point Pleasant events, is that the figure seen in Chicago, like the figure seen in Point Pleasant, is not a biological creature in the conventional sense but something that exists at the intersection of the physical and the paranormal, an entity whose behavior follows rules that do not map cleanly onto either biology or physics as currently understood.
Keel argued in The Mothman Prophecies that the Mothman and related phenomena were manifestations of something he called ultraterrestrials, entities that occupy the same physical space as human beings but in a different mode of existence, capable of entering the perceptible world under certain conditions and for purposes that may include warning or communication. This framework is not one that mainstream science recognizes or can currently test, but it has the advantage of being able to account for elements of the Mothman phenomenon that purely physical explanations cannot, including the apparent precognitive dimension of the Point Pleasant events and the precise timing of the creature's disappearance after the Silver Bridge collapse.
Whether Chicago in 2017 fits this framework is a question that the absence of a subsequent disaster makes harder to resolve. The harbinger logic requires a disaster to complete the pattern. Chicago's pattern, so far, remains incomplete.
The Investigation Closes, the Questions Remain
By late 2017, the Chicago sightings had tapered off significantly. The last reports came in during the autumn months, and by December the wave appeared to have ended in the way the Point Pleasant wave had ended, not with an explanation but with a cessation. The figure that had been seen across fifty-five accounts over eight months simply stopped being reported.
Lon Strickler published a comprehensive summary of the investigation and its findings in late 2017. His conclusions were careful and honest. The investigation had documented a genuine cluster of unusual sightings that could not be satisfactorily explained by any single conventional theory. The consistency of the descriptions across independent witnesses from disparate locations argued against social contagion as the primary driver. The dimensions of the figure reported by witnesses exceeded those of any known bird species. The behavior described, particularly the vertical ascent and the silent flight, was not consistent with known birds of comparable or smaller size.
What the investigation could not determine was what the figure actually was. That conclusion was not a failure of the investigation. It was an honest accounting of what the evidence permitted. The figure that crossed the Chicago sky in 2017 remains unidentified in the fullest sense of that word, not merely unnamed but genuinely unexplained, an entry in the record of things that happened to credible people in a major American city and that have not been resolved into anything the known world can cleanly accommodate.
For the full documented history of the creature that started it all, from the first sighting in the TNT area outside Point Pleasant to the complete record of what John Keel found in West Virginia and what it may mean, the complete Mothman guide at Strange and Twisted goes deeper than anywhere else in the archive.
And if you want to understand where the Chicago sightings sit in the longer history of the phenomenon, the place to start is the original encounter, the night four young people drove into the dark north of Point Pleasant and met something that followed their car at a hundred miles an hour on the way back to town. That story is documented in full in the Strange and Twisted article on the first Mothman sighting of November 15, 1966.
The pattern did not begin in Chicago. It is not clear that it ended there either.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Chicago Mothman Sightings
When did the Chicago Mothman sightings happen?
The Chicago Mothman sighting wave occurred primarily between April and December 2017, with the first reports arriving in mid-April and the sightings tapering off toward the end of the year. The peak period of activity was during the summer months, roughly June through August, when the frequency of reports was highest. In total, approximately 55 sightings were documented by researchers Lon Strickler of Phantoms and Monsters and Manuel Navarette of the UFO Clearinghouse, though this figure is considered a likely undercount of the actual number of people who had experiences during the period.
What did the Chicago Mothman look like?
Witnesses consistently described a large, dark, humanoid figure with enormous wings. The body was described as human in its basic proportions, standing between six and eight feet tall, with a wingspread estimated at ten to fifteen feet. The figure was black or very dark in color. The eyes were described as glowing red or orange, large, and visible at distances at which normal animal eyeshine would not be perceptible. Multiple witnesses described the figure as completely silent in flight. Several described its capacity to ascend vertically without the running start or wing-assisted launch that birds require.
Who investigated the Chicago Mothman sightings?
The primary investigator was Lon Strickler, who operates the paranormal research website Phantoms and Monsters and who collected and published the Chicago reports as they arrived through 2017. Strickler worked alongside Manuel Navarette of the UFO Clearinghouse to interview witnesses, cross-reference accounts, and document the full scope of the sighting wave. Their investigation produced the most comprehensive record of the Chicago events and formed the basis for subsequent media coverage and analysis.
How many people reported seeing the Chicago Mothman?
Approximately 55 sightings were formally documented by researchers during the 2017 wave. Lon Strickler noted that this figure represented only those witnesses who voluntarily came forward to paranormal research channels and that the actual number of people who had experiences during this period was almost certainly higher. Some additional witnesses came forward after media coverage of the sightings became widespread, having seen the figure earlier in the year but not initially reported it.
Where in Chicago were the sightings reported?
The sightings were reported from locations spread across the entire Chicago metropolitan area, including the Near North Side, the South Side lakefront, Wicker Park, Pilsen, Logan Square, the area around Millennium Park and Grant Park, and suburban areas including the O'Hare corridor. A notable concentration of reports came from locations near Lake Michigan, suggesting a possible association between the figure and the lakefront geography. The geographic spread of the sightings across dozens of miles of urban territory was one of the aspects of the wave that investigators found most difficult to explain through social contagion alone.
How do the Chicago sightings compare to the Point Pleasant Mothman sightings?
The physical descriptions are strikingly consistent between the two events, separated by fifty years and roughly eight hundred miles. Both sets of witnesses described a large dark humanoid figure with enormous wings, glowing red or orange eyes, silent flight, and the capacity for vertical ascent. Both sighting waves produced witnesses from professional or otherwise credible backgrounds who maintained their accounts under follow-up questioning. The primary differences are that the Point Pleasant phenomenon included a much broader range of associated paranormal activity alongside the creature sightings, and that it was followed by the catastrophic Silver Bridge collapse, which gave the Point Pleasant events a retrospective shape and meaning that the Chicago wave has not acquired.
Was there any disaster connected to the Chicago Mothman sightings?
No major disaster comparable to the Silver Bridge collapse followed the 2017 Chicago sighting wave. The absence of a subsequent catastrophe is one of the significant differences between the Chicago and Point Pleasant events. Some researchers argue that this undermines the harbinger theory as applied to the Chicago sightings. Others suggest that the harbinger connection may not apply to every Mothman sighting wave, or that the relevant disaster may not yet have occurred, or that the figure's presence served some other purpose in Chicago that does not fit the simple harbinger framework established by the Point Pleasant case.
Could the Chicago Mothman have been a misidentified bird?
The misidentified bird explanation, most often proposing great horned owls or great blue herons as the actual source of the sightings, accounts for some features of the Chicago reports, particularly the silence in flight and the reddish eyeshine. However, it does not account for the wingspan estimates of ten to fifteen feet reported by witnesses, which significantly exceed those of any bird species present in Illinois. It does not account for the humanoid body described by multiple witnesses. And it does not account for the consistency of detailed descriptions across fifty-five independent reports from witnesses with no apparent connection to each other, spread across many miles of urban geography over eight months.
Did the Chicago sightings stop the same way the Point Pleasant sightings stopped?
The Chicago sightings tapered off through the autumn of 2017 and appear to have ended by December of that year, roughly eight months after they began. The cessation was not as abrupt or as precisely timed as the Point Pleasant sightings, which stopped entirely immediately after the Silver Bridge collapse. The Chicago wave ended gradually rather than all at once, which gives it a different character. However, both waves ended without explanation, without any confirmed identification of what had been seen, and without any subsequent reappearance of the figure at the same intensity.
Has the Mothman been seen in Chicago since 2017?
Sporadic reports of a large winged figure have continued to emerge from the Chicago area in the years since 2017, though not at the density or consistency of the 2017 wave. Lon Strickler and other researchers have continued to document occasional accounts that match the description from the sighting wave. Whether these represent a continuation of the same phenomenon at reduced intensity, unrelated misidentifications, or something else entirely has not been determined. The 2017 wave remains the most densely documented period of Mothman-type activity in any American urban setting on record.
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