With the battle over the budget, funds being severely cut, and no new monies allotted for anything, one has to wonder about America’s aging infrastructure. Electric power grids are needlessly convoluted at this point, over-worked, and in need of repair and updating. Interstate highways which are now old enough to require considerable maintenance are in poor shape and growing worse. Risky overpasses and entrance/exits ramps often need repair. However, bridges and tunnels offer the most dramatic potential for disaster when their aging components finally collapse, having had little or no comprehensive repair their entire lifetimes.

If the Silver Bridge collapse of December 1, 1967, and the Skyway Bridge collapse of May 9, 1980, are any indication, our aging infrastructure today should have Mothman hovering overhead, UFOs zooming from one potential bridge disaster to another, and paranormal activity beeping, popping, and swirling. Yes, perhaps a silly idea, but there are numerous accounts of UFOs near disasters, including the footage taken of them near the 2011 Japanese 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunamis.

Mothman was so prevalent in the year before the Silver Bridge collapsed, that he established his identity at that point to the paranormal investigative world. Silver Bridge was for Mothman, like the first mega-hit for a celebrity singer.

Super-natural happenings and UFO sightings also abounded near Silver Bridge in that year before the collapse,which killed 46 people. That collapse unfolded like a disaster film with cars which seconds before had been crawling along in Christmas rush hour traffic, now hung on fragments of the bridge before plunging, filled with passengers, into the frigid Ohio River.

In 1975, John Keel wrote ”Mothman Prophecies,” which documented the paranormal events which various people around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, experienced leading up to the bridge collapse. Point Pleasant had also had an abundance of UFO sightings during that time. After the demise of the bridge, the super-natural events and UFO activity lessened and soon were nearly non-existent, according to Keel’s careful research.

Mothman himself (could he actually be Mothwoman?), was reported to be a huge, semi-human winged creature with glowing red eyes, sighted in and around Point Pleasant in 1966 and 1967. Between 6.5 and 7 feet tall, with a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, this shadowy creature was said to fly great distances at speeds up to 100 miles per hour.

Even though I respect John Keel’s work and consider him one of my favorite Fortean writers, I might be a bit skeptical if I had not had paranormal events in and around my house, UFO sightings near my house, and, yes, a Mothman sighting, right before the Skyway Bridge plunged into Tampa Bay on May 9, 1980, as I got ready for another day of teaching school. Strange things had been happening at and near my house, since 1979; they eased off after the Skyway disaster in 1980.

The most spectacular UFO sighting of my life thus far, at least which I remember consciously, was over a small park at the end of the street on which I lived.  I lived one block from Tampa Bay and the dual-bridge Sunshine Skyway could be seen from this park. It was a summer night in 1979, when my daughter and I walked our dog Bailey to the park. I was a field investigator for MUFON and APRO at the time, and so the two huge glowing white orbs which were hanging in the dark sky over Tampa Bay, were absolutely thrilling!

We took the dog home, and raced back to the park. A small group of people had gathered to watch the orbs, which had not moved. Unlike weather balloons, there was absolutely no drifting in the breeze. Perhaps this was rocket fuel from a military test at MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa? Then this phenomenon should have slowly disappeared.

Instead, as I looked down for just a second, one of the two dazzling white orbs, just disappeared. Not a trace of it was left. Oddly, it was the one with which I felt I was in communication,or trying to establish communication.

The other orb stayed there, not budging an inch, until I gave up and went home at 2:30 a.m. I had to teach school in the morning but I have kicked myself ever since, for leaving. No weather balloon, rocket fuel debris, helicopter, or Chinese lantern hoax, would have stayed stationery for all those hours.

In the year before 35 people in cars and a Greyhound Bus, plunged off the Skyway Bridge when the Summit Venture barge hit it, my small house, one block from Tampa Bay, which I shared with my parents and daughter, was full of paranormal activity. The walls beeped. The television beeped, at first at set intervals, and then randomly. Lamps beeped. Ok, maybe the house was on the path of some kind of waves from MacDill Air Force Base, so I took a cassette recorder on batteries, about half a block away from the house, and it beeped too. My daughter and I recorded “the beeps” but when we re-played the tapes, the beeps were always gone.

1979 was also my time of awakening as a UFO abductee and subsequent cosmic citizen. In 1980, I underwent hypnosis with Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle and remembered a UFO encounter when I was a child in Iowa, in which I met Tibus, my lifelong (as it turns out), guide.

After the Skyway fell down, and after I embraced my own UFO connection, the beeps eased off and then stopped entirely.

But, back to the morning of the Skyway disaster:

May 9, 1980, at 7:33 in the morning, I was hurriedly getting myself and my daughter ready for school, when our smoke alarm started to beep. Of course I raced around to check for fire, and then realized it was not the fire warning, but also not the “battery low” signal. It sounded exactly like Morse Code, but I don’t know Morse Code. My dad was trying to get his brain going to remember what he knew of Morse Code, when we heard on the tv news that a barge had just rammed into the Skyway Bridge at 7:35 a.m.

The smoke alarm had stopped. And it never did that again.

Was this a desperate call for help from the energy-bodies of those who had just left their physical form?  The Skyway Bridge was/is a tall structure and to plunge off it, there would be a few seconds of falling, falling, falling in sheer panic, through the air in your vehicle.

Or, had whatever been beeping at me all those months, finally arrived at the awaited hour, and madly sent its message?

It was several months after the Skyway disaster that it struck me: I had been outdoors by myself in the summer of 1979, and the stars had suddenly been blotted out by something very large and dark, but outlined in blood red. It had whooshed over, giving me the impression of a giant wingspan or, a giant cape, all spread out. It swooped low overhead, going faster than a large bird would fly (and too big for a large bird anyway!), and then the stars re-emerged.

Mothman, I presume?