This moth is a forbearer or omen of what is to come, the great Messenger of the afterworld - Osiris, the Egyptian God of the Dead. We want so much to put have an answer or explanation for the tragedies that befall us. So when the lead character John Klein's (played by Richard Gere) wife, Mary, (Debra Messing) suffers a nasty head contusion when she crashes their BMW as the two return home from happy house hunting. Mary sees a giant, red=-eyed cloaked figure flying to the front windshield and grill of the car and swerves to avoid it. John does not see this Mothman (our first real sighting) and is somewhat mystified about the car accident.

Everything is soon explained in logical terms when Mary's subsequent hospitalization leads to the discovery of a temporal lobe brain tumor, remarkably and actually shaped like a butterfly (I checked on this and such tumors do exist and when I checked my own MRI, I noticed remarkably similar butterfly patterns repeated in the brain, but particularly in the temporal lobe). The moth and butterfly, interestingly, have also been the symbol for "bridge" at various points in history, and of course, most revelatory, the moth is the symbol for the human soul.

Lying in her hospital bed, injured and scared, Mary says to John, "You didn't see it ... did you?" asking about the red-eyed thing that came screaming at their BMW as they were rushing home from their newly bought house to their old house for celebratory love-making. Such happiness ruined in a moment. The tumor of course, is too convenient, but it's natural that we seek something logical, scientific on which to pin these odd happenings. The tumor is real, and we watch as Mary goes through various MRIs and tests, but the thing that she says she saw defies logic.

The temporal lobe is the seat of memory and artistic vision, so this is an interesting place for Mary's tumor to appear, for it would affect everything, especially what Mary perceives. It is also the area of the brain that helps form the bedrock of character, determining who we will be, and governing everything from our emotions, memory, and consciousness- acting as a sort of sifter...receiving and expressing emotional feeling, the lobes function as a computer. (Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and Social and Psychological Considerations ) As such, Mary's temporal lobe tumor is used as a device to appeal to our logical sense and as such, can logically account for the many weird visions and sounds that Mary begins to experience after the accident and according to Mary (and to the viewer, for we too have seen Mothman now), things before — the very thing which caused the accident: our red-eyed entity that was, yes, moth like, but also very much like a figment of what an injured brain would summon up. Are we perceiving something that is real and actual then, or are we simply seeing what Mary's injured brain hallucinates for us?