Point Pleasant, West Virginia becomes the center of this account of the Mothman, a winged creature first reported there in the 1960s. Locals who claim direct encounters describe a tall, man-like shape with a wingspan wide enough to blot out the road and red eyes that glow in headlights, often paired with strange mechanical noises and equipment failures. Researchers who have logged decades of sightings lay out the competing explanations: an undiscovered animal, an extraterrestrial or interdimensional visitor, or something closer to an omen. The film's darkest thread is the 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge, which killed 46 people; several witnesses reported seeing the creature in Point Pleasant in the days before the bridge went down, and that timing has fueled the case for a connection ever since. Eyewitnesses and investigators do most of the talking, and the film does not settle on one theory, leaving the sightings, the noises, and the bridge disaster on the table for viewers to weigh themselves.