Skagit River Bridge Collapses

The Curse Continues ©Charles Berlin 2007 = Yes, that's Loren Coleman in the vehicle.

Memories of the collapse of bridges of bygone days - the Silver Bridge (at Rt. 35) at Point Pleasant, WVA and the I-35 W Bridge in Minneapolis - come to mind when a new bridge falls. Popular culture has associated Mothman sightings with such collapses. The falling of tonight's bridge on I-5 out West is not linked to any reports of winged creatures being seen in the area.

 The I-35W Bridge collapse, 2007.

The Rt. 35 Silver Bridge collapse, 1967.

Historically, Washington State had some rather significant weird flying men sighting in 1948. In that year, there were two unusual sightings in Washington State (hundreds of miles south of Mt. Vernon, please note). 

On January 6, 1948, on a farm just outside the small town of Chehalis, 61-year-old Bernice Zaikowski saw a man flying with some sort of wings strapped to his back. Only a few months after Zaikowski’s sighting, on April 9, 1948, three flying men were seen above Longview, Washington state. Viola Johnson, a laundry worker, and the eyewitnesses told reporters she had seen what looked like “three men in flying suits flying through the air. They wore dark drab flying suits...circling the city."

The Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River at Mount Vernon, Washington State did collapse Thursday evening, May 23, 2013, dumping vehicles and people into the water shortly after 7 p.m.

One individual was pulled from the water, one was seen on the top of a car, and an unknown number of people were missing in the water.

State Patrol Trooper Mark Francis said it was not clear how many were in the water or the extent the injuries. Photos showed one man sitting on the top of his red car waiting to be rescued.

Rita Miller, who works at the Riverbend RV Park, said a Navy rescue team was on the site with a helicopter with dozens of first responders. A crowd of about 1,000 people gathered at the bridge. A hovercraft was near the fifth bridge span to the north and was fighting the strong Skagit River current on the west side of the bridge during the rescue effort.

It was not clear what caused the collapse.

The four-lane north and southbound bridge, built in 1955, was used by 70,000 vehicles daily, according to 2010 statistics.

Skagit is named after the Salishan tribal group that use to live in the area. Skagit tribal elders today define the name Skagit as “a place of refuge” or “a place to hide ourselves.”

VA Tech's Garuda Again?

This was the week of a powerful lunar eclipse on December 10, 2011 (beginning at 6:06 am PST) followed by the deadly Mexico City to Acapulco 6.5-6.7 earthquake, which struck almost exactly twelve hours after the eclipse. Added to those events, the previous week's wave of WV, CA, MA, FL and other multiple shootings, plus the NH mall attack, and one has a general uneasy sense that it was, indeed, a weird and stressful time. 

Now in the midst of all of this, the links to Garuda and VA Tech present themselves again into our consciousness. Let's take a quick connect-the-dots detour around this landscape.

An Indonesian student activist died late Saturday (December 10, 2011) after setting himself ablaze in a political protest, according to news sources: "Police say an Indonesian student activist has died after setting himself on fire in front of the presidential palace. Sondang Hutagalung, 22, set himself ablaze across from the palace in downtown Jakarta….The activist was last seen joining a Sept. 7 protest demanding justice for Munir Thalib, a prominent activist who died in 2004 of arsenic poisoning during a flight with national carrier Garuda."

National carrier Garuda?

How was Munir Thalib assassinated?

"Munir was poisoned with arsenic on a flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam on September 7, 2004. He was travelling on state-owned airline Garuda Indonesia. It was concluded from Munir's autopsy and eye witnesses during the trial, that he had died two hours before arrival in Schiphol, Amsterdam. He took the arsenic during his flight transit in Singapore, or sometime near that time." Source.

Garuda Indonesia? 

"PT Garuda Indonesia..., publicly known as Garuda Indonesia, is the flag carrier of Indonesia. It is named after the mystical giant bird Garuda of Hinduism and Buddhist mythology." Source.

Garuda?

"The Garuda (Sanskrit/Javanese/Balinese/Indonesian: गरुड garuḍa, 'eagle'; Pāli garuḷa; Tamil: கருடன் karutan; Thai/Lao: ครุฑ khrut; Malay: geroda; Mongolian: гарьд garid) is a large mythical bird or bird-like creature that appears in both Hindu and Buddhist mythology." Source.

I have previously discussed the overlap between this airline, a tragic crash (on March 7, 2007), Garuda, and Mothman here. 

Following the Garuda Airlines crash, less than a month later, the April 16, 2007 massacre at VA Tech, which left 33 dead, occurred. As the events of that day unfolded, I was struck to learn that in local lore at VA Tech, the school's mascot, the Hokie Bird is referred to as "Blacksburg's own Garuda." I wrote of my thoughts about that strange coincidence in "VA Tech's Garuda."

VA Tech seemed to be a pivotal touchstone to notice when the world seemed to have gone a little haywire. It will be recalled that on Wednesday, January 21, 2009, police reported a woman was beheaded on the Virginia Tech campus, when she was decapitated while calmly eating. Xin Yang, 22, was killed only a couple weeks after arriving at the campus from Beijing on January 8 to begin studying accounting, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said.

Now again, the VA Tech's Garuda has appeared, above, in news articles about a new tragedy. On December 8, 2011 (the anniversary date of John Lennon's assassination), "Ross Truett Ashley, a 22-year-old part-time business student at Radford University, about 10 miles from the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg" went to VA Tech, "walked up to officer Deriek W. Crouse (39) after noon and shot him to death as the patrolman sat in his unmarked cruiser during a traffic stop. Ashley was not involved in the stop and did not know the driver, who is cooperating with police, they said. Authorities said Ashley then took off for the campus greenhouses, ditching his pullover, wool cap and backpack as police quickly sent out a campus-wide alert that a gunman was on the loose. Officials said the alert system put in place after the nation's worst mass slaying in recent memory worked well, but it nevertheless rattled a community still coping with the day a student gunman killed 32 people and then himself. A deputy sheriff on patrol noticed a man acting suspiciously in a parking lot about a half-mile from the shooting. The deputy drove up and down the rows of the sprawling Cage parking lot and lost sight of the man for a moment, then found Ashley shot to death on the pavement, a handgun nearby." Sources 1 & 2.

I must remind my readers, John A. Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies was initially to be entitled The Year of the Garuda. Keel preserved some notion of what he was feeling with his subtitle, An Investigation into the Mysterious American Visits of the Infamous Feathery Garuda.

The disaster that ends Keel's book is the collapse of the Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio River, between Kanauga, Ohio, and Point Pleasant, West Virginia. That event took 46 lives, occurring 45 years ago, on December 15, 1966.

Mothman's "First Eyewitness" Dies

 

 

 

In February, Linda Scarberry, one of the earliest eyewitnesses (November 15, 1966) to Mothman, was admitted to a Point Pleasant-area hospital, in critical condition. Unfortunately, it was been learned, from John Frick, that after a brief battle with cancer, Linda Scarberry died on Sunday morning, March 6th, 2011.  


Our condolences to the McDaniel and Scarberry families. Linda's maiden name, let us not forget, is the significant cryptoname McDaniel. John A. Keel pointed out that the name "McDaniel" was an important twilight language moniker. 

 

First eyewitnesses: Roger and Linda Scarberry (right) and Steve and Mary Mallette (left).  

Mothman phenomena began in mid-November 1966, when the two couples pictured above, including Linda Scarberry, drove through and parked at an old World War II munitions dump site that the locals called TNT. They saw and said they were chased by a large winged creature. They reported the incident to the police, and the sightings continued from there. The rest is cryptozoological history.

 

On November 15, 1966, the world was introduced to the Scarberry-Mallette sightings of a creature that would become known as Mothman. After this first encounter incident, as reported by the press in the papers of the day, soon a copyeditor in Ohio, a fan of the “Batman” series then on television, would coin the word “Mothman” since the word fit the headline space better. The sightings of a “Big Bird” had become a “big insect” with one copyeditor’s action. 

 

Linda Scarberry said the William Rebsamen-drawn depiction of the Mothman on the cover of my book was the one that looked the most like the Mothman she saw. Her earliest drawings (one of which is below) showed the red eyes, wings, legs, but no arms (which did appear in sketches done years later after the imagery had changed in the retelling, demonizing and theorizing).  

 

A sketch of Mothman (above), made by an eyewitness [Linda Scarberry] in rural West Virginia. In all, more than 100 people reported seeing the creature.--Courtesy Linda Scarberry, in Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend, from the Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2002. 

 

 

William Rebsamen's painting, she said, was in contrast to the image used as a cover on a later edition of John Keel's book. It was that cover art that would serve as the insect-like model of the statue in present-day Point Pleasant. 

 

Linda Scarberry and Loren Coleman, in Linda's home, 2001, during happier times, just weeks before the release of the movie, The Mothman Prophecies. I presented Linda with one of the first copies of my book, Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, which was produced in complete cooperation with Sony/Screen Gems, to appear right before the movie's opening day. The studio was interested in reinforcing the "based on true story" tagline of their feature film.  Linda and I would appear together in the movie's concurrent David Grabias documentary Search For The Mothman, which is in the Deluxe DVD of The Mothman Prophecies.

 

In the 2002 movie, the first sighting involving Linda Scarberry and her three companions was fictionally re-created in dramatic fashion. Above is a screen capture of the incident from The Mothman Prophecies. 




See also John A. Keel's obituary.

Woman In Red Attacks Pope

As Pope Benedict XVI was making his way down the long aisle in St. Peter's Basilica to give the Christmas Eve Mass (24 Dec 2009), a woman in red leaped over the barrier to get closer to him. But in doing so she lunged at him and pulled him down to the marble floor. The Pope was shaken but not injured.

Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, 87, however was hurt. He was wheeled off to hospital with a broken hip after falling during the incident. He'll be operated on in the coming days.

A statement released by the Vatican identified the woman as Susanna Maiolo, a 25-year-old Italian Swiss national. The statement said she was not armed but shows signs of mental instability, and has since been admitted to a health facility for compulsory treatment.

Maiolo is the same woman who tried to reach Pope Benedict XVI at Midnight Mass last year. Vatican officials speaking on condition of anonymity said Maiolo was involved in a similar incident last year in which she jumped the barricade as the pope processed. In that case, however, Maiolo never managed to reach the pope and was quietly tackled to the ground by security.

In both cases she wore a red sweatshirt.

Meanwhile, on Christmas Day, (25 Dec 2009), the FBI is questioning a suspect believed to have tried to ignite a powdery substance on Detroit-bound airliner. Delta Flight 253 [2 (2+3) 3], an Airbus 330 carrying 278 passengers, was arriving in Detroit from Amsterdam on Friday afternoon when the explosives went off. Minor injuries occurred. The passenger was immediately subdued and was not named (yet). It has been declared an act of terrorist.

It will be recalled that John A. Keel, who died this year, wrote of entities (being channeled through individuals he knew) telling of prophecies and predictions. The information to Keel told of the threat of an assassination of a pope.

An assassination attempt of a pope was to be followed by "days of darkness," and would trigger Armageddon. So wrote Keel in The Mothman Prophecies. Often it is forgotten that in Operation Trojon Horse and Haunted Planet, Keel also penned some passages on the "messages" he was receiving and on St. Malachy's Prophecy, which states that the final pope before Peter will be assassinated.

For those who speculate, there is general agreement that Pope Benedict XVI is Gloria Olivae, the last pope in St. Malachy's Prophecy before the final pope, Petrus Romanus. Peter of Rome (or Peter II?) will see the times when the "city of seven hills will be destroyed" (the Vatican? Rome?).

Will 2010 be a year of wondering what it all means?