Last issue we saw how in October 2011 Sam Maranto, the Illinois State Director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), received a report with a photograph showing a flying entity that recalled the Mothman that had terrorised Point Pleasant, WestVirginia, in 1966-67, immortalised by paranormal author John Keel in his book The Mothman Prophecies. The photo wasn’t a one-off: by 2017, numerous reports were coming in from around Chicago of a red-eyed, bat-winged entity stalking the city, and soon various groups and individual researchers were investigating the sightings of the ‘Chicago Mothman’. But disagreements about methodology and evidence were about to break out…
THE LECHUZA OF LITTLE VILLAGE
Over at UFO Clearinghouse, Manuel Navarette (above right) began to receive a number of strange sighting reports from the Little Village area.
“Little Village is called a villalita, which means ‘little village.’ It’s an area on the south-side of Chicago. It’s a heavily Hispanic area, so a lot of the stores sell Mexican items. It’s basically just a slice of Mexico in Chicago,” Navarette says. “Dulcelandias – they sell Mexican candy. There are a lot of stores that sell homemade remedies, a lot of botanicas, which is a metaphysical shop, is about as close as I can say. They also sell ingredients that are used in brujeria or in curandero. The difference is brujeria is more like deep, black magic, grey magic, whereas curandero is more of the healing type.”
These reports from LittleVillage weren’t of a “Mothman” but of an entity from Hispanic folklore: la lechuza.
“My grandmother used to warn us about the lechuza. If you hear a lechuza, don’t go outside because it’s there to steal your soul or to put a curse on you,” Navarette says. “She would always tell us ‘la bruja se cambian en la lechuza’, meaning ‘a witch can turn herself into an owl.’ We grew up with stories about how the lechuza would sit outside of your house and call your name, and it would sound like it was in distress and people would go outside, and that is when the lechuza would get you. Or it would sit outside as an omen of something that would happen to you. We always just thought of it as one of those tales that our grandmother would tell us to scare us into behaving or into staying in the house at night.”
Navarette says he began to hang up flyers in the LittleVillage area, printed in Spanish, encouraging people who had seen this lechuza to contact him. He says one reason the flyers were useful is that many from the area might have been hesitant to report anything at all.
“The reason that a lot of people won’t talk or won’t contact us is because a lot of people are here illegally and they are afraid,” Navarette says, but being able to speak to someone in Spanish gave some of the witnesses sufficient reassurance to share their experiences. Navarette says he told them, “I’m not going to turn you into ICE, I’m not
