The Mothman in Chicago

I’m a sucker for skylines. I’ve lived in big cities all my life from the time I left home. Recently I started spending half my time in Chicago. The apartment here in Chicago has an amazing view of the skyline and specifically Willis Tower. Folks who are actually from Chicago still call it the Sears Tower, but there’s no doubt that it dominates the skyline. No matter where you are downtown, your eye is drawn to it.

This was most certainly the case on July 24th, 2017 when a guy outside a local bar smoking a cigarette looked up and saw humanoid figure with wings standing on the top of the tower. It must have looked like an insect from the ground, and this effect must have been doubly enhanced when the wings spread and this humanoid creature leapt off the tower, flapped its wings, and headed out towards Lake Michigan.

Hearing this story piqued my curiosity. I have a loose interest in cryptozoology — the study of animals for which science has no recognition but there is anecdotal evidence of. There are some cryptids (the term for one of these creatures) that might be real. For a long time, nobody believed giant squid actually lived to the enormous sizes that we now know of. There are cryptids that are seared into our cultural memory because we seriously want them to be real, such as…