The Department of Truth #15

The interview and Dalton Hynes

The first pages identify the document as “Deviation Four: Point Pleasant.” The subject is Dalton Hynes, who says he goes by Doc and works as a junior archivist for the Department of Truth. He is seated beneath the Department seal, isolated against a dark table while an unseen interrogator asks him to state his name. The setting suggests discipline and evidence, but the redactions conceal the questioner’s identity, rank, and reason for reopening the case. Hynes is not being interviewed as a neutral historian. He is being asked to explain why an operation that was supposed to test a theory produced a creature, a disaster, and a hostile visitor.

Hynes begins nervously. He says he is not good at relaxing and that he never got in trouble in school. The remark sounds childish beside the Department’s seal and the locked-room atmosphere, but it establishes his emotional position. He is a researcher who expected to work with records and instead became part of the evidence. His later insistence that he wants to stay in the archives is not a preference for comfort alone. It is a demand to understand the effect the Department has on the world before being sent back into the field.

The interview format also turns the issue into a document about memory. Hynes speaks in paragraphs, photographs, newspaper clippings, maps, and drawings. Each new piece of evidence appears to make the story more precise while opening another question. The reader is asked to follow the record without assuming that a typed transcript is more truthful than a frightened witness.

The theory of manifestations

Hynes explains that the Department had been focused on messaging since its foundation. The organization believed that there was a tipping point of belief at which enough people accepting a story could materially change the world. If the Department could bring the majority to believe in a stable version of America, it could manage consensus. Hynes and Lee pushed the idea to its extreme: instead of waiting for a Wild Fiction to emerge, they would create one deliberately and capture it.

When the interrogator asks Hynes to define a manifestation, he calls it an unreal thing made real by collective belief. He uses the Department’s term “Wild Fiction” for UFOs, Mothman, and other beings that express what people expect rather than what an independent creature intends. A Wild Fiction can look alive, move through a landscape, and obey some physical rules, but its identity remains assembled from stories. The more consistent the stories become, the more the figure can act as though it has always existed.

Hynes’s account is a theory inside the comic, though later scenes provide disturbing evidence for it. He admits that he is developing his own explanations and that the ideas are unwieldy. The Department’s doctrine is not presented as settled science. It is a working model built by people who have watched reality distort under pressure and are trying to make the distortions predictable.

Planting “strange flying objects”

The operation begins with language. Hynes says that the Department planted stories in newspapers throughout the country describing “strange flying objects.” The phrase is intentionally broad. It can describe a saucer, a bird, a reflection, or an impossible shape, but it gives witnesses a common sentence to repeat. The stories create an expectation without specifying what the public should see.

For a time, the plan appears to work. In 1966, mass sightings are reported across the United States, and the Department notices an unusual concentration in West Virginia along the Ohio River Valley. Rather than disperse the reports, Lee and Hynes narrow the language and focus their efforts on Point Pleasant. The operation turns a regional cluster into a laboratory. Hynes later says they realized their phrase was not specific enough only after the first reports began arriving with common details.

The issue’s documents show the reports as accumulating layers. A witness sees a giant bird. Another describes a thing with bright red eyes. A third remembers wings that rose into the air without flapping. The details do not originate from one confirmed body. They echo from witness to newspaper to conversation, and each echo makes the next sighting easier to describe. The Department is not merely observing folklore. It is selecting the words that will give the folklore a body.

The first Mothman reports

The case files identify early sightings in Point Pleasant and neighboring communities. One report describes a dark figure that followed a car at high speed, rose into the air, and glided over the road. Another witness hears wings flapping and sees red eyes above the trees. A later account places the figure near a power plant and describes a squeaking sound, a shadow moving across a building, and dust rising from the ground. The accounts are written in the clipped language of police records, but the images surrounding them are diffuse, as if the creature cannot be held still by the page.

Hynes says the creature did not begin as Mothman. It began as strange sightings of giant birds. The name arrived later, through a play on Batman and the idea of a man-shaped thing with wings. The interrogator points out that the description does not resemble an actual moth. Hynes answers that the papers wanted a name that would stick in the public mind. Once the name became common, witnesses began to see the figure through it.

This naming process is a central part of the case. Mothman’s body is not a stable anatomical object. It is a bundle of recurring traits—red eyes, wings, a head that seems absent or unfinished, a silent rise into the air, and the sound of flapping when the witness expects an animal. The figure becomes more coherent as the reports become more alike. Its coherence is a public achievement, but the consequences are physical.

Point Pleasant and the omen

The witnesses begin to treat the sightings as a message. The creature is not merely an animal hiding near a road. It is understood as an omen of something terrible on the horizon. Hynes says that belief spread and focused until it made something happen. He later tells the interrogator that he wanted the operation to stop, but Lee had already decided that the Department should lean into Point Pleasant and see whether the figure could be driven into manifestation.

The case becomes entangled with a growing sense of communal dread. Families watch windows at night. Drivers scan fields and power plants. The local papers repeat the same traits until the creature’s appearance is recognizable even when no witness can give a complete description. The comic does not portray the residents as foolish. It shows people trying to make sense of events that the Department has deliberately made more likely, while the Department’s agents interpret their fear as data.

Hynes’s guilt begins here. He knows that the public did not invent Mothman alone. The Department supplied the vocabulary and the focus. Yet the witnesses’ belief is not simply manipulated from outside; it becomes an active force. By the time the operation reaches its climax, no one can say where the Department’s intention ends and Point Pleasant’s expectation begins.

The Silver Bridge collapse

The Silver Bridge crosses the Ohio River between Point Pleasant and Gallipolis. In the issue’s account, drivers see something bright in the sky at around five in the afternoon. The bridge then collapses. Thirty-two vehicles fall into the river, and forty people die. The transcript records the deaths without spectacle, which makes Hynes’s reaction more severe: he says Lee did not appear shaken by the loss of life.

Hynes believes the sightings had become an omen and that the focused belief produced the disaster. The issue does not establish a mechanical link between Mothman and the bridge’s structural failure. It establishes that the Department’s experiment placed a community in a state where every catastrophe could be read as confirmation. If the bridge fell because of ordinary engineering failure, the omen narrative still altered the meaning of the deaths. If consensus reality contributed to the collapse, the Department’s responsibility becomes even greater. The story leaves both possibilities active.

Lee’s response is the moral break between the two men. Hynes wants to stop. Lee calls in a ranger from out west who has been tracking Mothman and sets a trap. He wants to get something—proof, a specimen, or a body that can be examined. Hynes sees the dead and understands the operation as a crime. Lee sees the dead and treats the event as evidence that the theory is correct.

Capturing the Wild Fiction

Hynes and Lee follow the ranger into the woods. Their map is marked with circles, Xs, and coordinates around the Ohio River Valley. Photographs show red eyes in trees, an indistinct wing, and a shape that seems to be made from leaves and faces. Hynes describes the smell as beyond awful. The creature is both in their sight and in the sensory field around them, an impossible thing whose presence causes a headache before it can be clearly seen.

The agents use elephant tranquilizers. Hynes believes the drugs worked because the public’s belief gave the creature enough of the rules of living things to respond to them. The sentence is one of the issue’s clearest demonstrations of the Wild Fiction model. Mothman is not entirely alive, but it is not entirely unreal. It can be made unconscious because people have collectively treated it as an animal with a body, a metabolism, and a vulnerability to chemical restraint.

The capture is not a victory. The image of the unconscious creature shows a dense mass of feathers, faces, and red eyes, as though every witness has added a layer to its skin. The Department has obtained a specimen, but the specimen is also a record of the public’s imagination. Studying it risks creating new descriptions that will change what it is.

Indrid Cold arrives

The next event begins with a ship landing in a clearing. Lee is excited. He believes they may capture a UFO and a Mothman at the same time. The door opens, and a smiling man steps out. Hynes describes him as wearing a dark topcoat over a strange green metallic garment. His skin is tan, his hair is slicked back, and his smile is too wide. As he walks away from the craft, he rises fifty feet into the air.

The man identifies himself as Cold. He tells Woodrow “Woody” Derenberger, in a separate account reproduced in the file, that he comes from a country much less powerful than Earth’s and that people on his world call cities “Gatherings.” The vehicle resembles a kerosene-lamp chimney, floats over the road, blocks traffic, and then lowers itself so Cold can enter. Derenberger says Cold communicates through his mind and promises that they will meet again.

Hynes does not hear a voice from Cold. He feels intent. The encounter is not like the Wild Fiction that Mothman represents. Mothman has no independent purpose beyond the intentions people assign to it. Cold appears to possess a will that precedes the witnesses. Hynes calls these beings “figures,” a tentative category for entities that may exploit the distortions created by collective expectation rather than being created by expectation themselves.

The men in black and the public record

After the Cold encounter, reports of strange men in black suits begin spreading. Hynes says he became one of the Department’s own Men in Black after Lee and Barker were named in the operation. He had removed his foil hat before attending a meeting of Point Pleasant witnesses and tried to pose as a young ufologist. The disguise failed because his anxiety made him appear stranger than the people he was interviewing.

The public notices the Department’s agents. Stories begin to circulate about mysterious men who know more about UFOs and Mothmen. Hynes warns that there is a difference between a story about a Wild Fiction and a story about the people managing it. When the public believes the men in black have secret knowledge, the belief can affect what those men are able to do. The agents become part of the myth they were trying to contain.

Hynes admits that he and Lee disobeyed orders and misappropriated Department resources. He was frightened by the way strangeness begat strangeness. Ufologists such as Gray Barker and John Keel began appearing around the case, and their attention made the operation harder to control. The names belong to real-world UFO culture, but the comic turns them into witnesses orbiting a fictional Department experiment.

Lee’s obsession and the two monsters

Hynes says Lee became increasingly desperate to capture the UFO he had set out to catch. He did not want the newspaper stories to stop. He wanted to lean into Point Pleasant until the phenomenon manifested completely. The plan worked, but success only increased Lee’s appetite. The existence of a living Mothman seemed to him like a vindication of the Department’s theory and a chance to obtain a weapon or a source of knowledge.

When the ship opens and Cold walks out, Lee goes silent and white. Hynes cannot hear what Cold tells him, but he can see that the encounter reaches deeper into Lee than the Mothman capture. Hynes later says the figure might simply have been observing the consequences of Lee’s idea, or it might have understood the world well enough to recognize that Lee’s intention set the operation in motion. Either explanation frightens him.

Hynes’s final thought is that he was looking at two American monsters. Mothman is made from secrets the public speculates about in order to make sense of its life. Lee is also made from secrets, because the world has built competing stories around the man called Lee Harvey Oswald. Hynes realizes that the two may be more alike than different: both are beings whose identities have been assembled by a country trying to explain what it cannot accept.

The Department’s limit

The interrogator tells Hynes that the field office was excited to learn the tranquilizers worked. The Department has been dissecting Bigfoot manifestations out west for a decade, but it has never taken a creature like Mothman alive. The Soviet Union and the Nazis tried similar projects and failed. The senior agent says that the Department has avoided looking directly at the strangest things and that this is a limit it needs to move beyond.

Hynes hears the statement as a warning. The Department is proud of the capture, but the capture is also the proof that its old boundaries are gone. Once a Wild Fiction can be drugged, transported, and placed in a basement, the organization has crossed from managing stories into manufacturing specimens. The same logic that justified the newspaper plants now justifies a laboratory.

Hynes asks to leave field work and remain in the archives. He wants to understand the Department’s impact on the world before being asked to produce another anomaly. The interrogator says that he tried to make Lee grapple with the same question, but Hynes may be capable of doing so. The exchange suggests that the Department’s internal debate is not between believers and skeptics. It is between people who want to control belief and people who fear what control produces.

Indrid Cold and intentional figures

The interview returns to Hynes’s category of figures. He says that UFOs, Mothman, and dragons are expressions of people and do not possess intent of their own. They have only the intent that people want them to have. Indrid Cold is different. Hynes believes Cold has intent, and he suspects that the figure may be connected to the Men in Black stories that follow his arrival.

When the interrogator asks whether Cold could be the person Lee saw in Dallas in 1963, Hynes gives a heavily redacted answer. He confirms that Lee told him something about the event but does not reveal the content. The redaction makes the connection more dangerous, not less. Cold may have been an observer of the Kennedy case, an entity attracted to the same distortions that produced Lee’s public identity, or a separate figure who recognized Lee as a useful participant.

Hynes’s theory remains provisional. He says the strange figures may be connected somehow and that the Men in Black could all be connected to Cold. The Department has no taxonomy that can make the relationships safe. The only stable fact is that Cold’s appearance changes the behavior of Lee and Hynes and leaves the captured Mothman as a silent witness between them.

Continuity significance

Issue #15 gives the Wild Fiction concept its clearest operational example. The Department does not merely observe a story that becomes real. It deliberately plants a phrase, concentrates witnesses, encourages repeated traits, and waits for the public to finish the construction. Mothman is therefore both an entity and an experiment. The creature’s physical existence does not erase its fictional origin; it demonstrates how fiction can acquire physical consequences.

The chapter also separates Wild Fictions from figures with intent. The distinction is not guaranteed to remain correct. Hynes admits that he is building a theory while terrified. Still, the difference helps explain why the Department treats Mothman as a specimen and Indrid Cold as a threat. A Wild Fiction can be redirected by changing the story around it. A figure who has independent purpose may be able to use the story without being controlled by it.

For Lee, the operation marks a turning point. He has watched a manufactured narrative kill people, produce a living creature, and draw an outsider from a floating vehicle. Rather than retreat, he becomes more determined to capture the next proof. Hynes leaves the field, but his testimony remains inside the Department’s files. The record preserves both the official success and the fear that success created.

Real-world context

The comic adapts the 1966 Point Pleasant, West Virginia, Mothman reports, including accounts associated with the Scarberry and Mallett families and later collections of witness testimony. The Silver Bridge collapse occurred in December 1967 and killed forty-six people in the documented historical record; the issue’s transcript gives the fictional operation a direct relationship to the disaster while the real-world cause remains an engineering failure investigated outside the comic’s continuity.

The name Indrid Cold comes from UFO lore associated with Woodrow Derenberger, who described an encounter with a smiling figure called Cold. The issue reproduces a fictionalized Department record of Derenberger’s account, including the floating vehicle and mental communication. Men in Black stories are likewise a real folklore tradition involving threatening or uncanny visitors who appear after UFO sightings. The comic turns that folklore into an encounter with a figure whose intent may be independent of collective belief.

The historical materials are not presented as proof that Mothman, flying saucers, or Indrid Cold exist outside the series. They are the cultural ingredients from which the fictional Department builds its case. The issue’s central claim—that newspapers and focused belief can make an invented creature real—is a canon rule, not a statement about the documented world.

Visual and publication notes

David Romero draws the issue as a dossier that keeps dissolving into the forest. Typed pages are layered over photographs, maps, children’s drawings, and images of red eyes emerging from wet darkness. The Department seal appears behind Hynes in the interview room, but the testimony repeatedly escapes the geometry of the table. The more Hynes explains the operation, the more the page fills with blurred wings, faces, and lights.

Mothman’s visual design is deliberately unstable. The figure has glowing red eyes, a black or gray body, wings that spread without a clear head, and a texture built from branches, hair, feathers, and the faces of witnesses. When the tranquilizers take effect, the creature becomes a heap of overlapping impressions. Indrid Cold is drawn differently: his smile is clean, his clothes are recognizable, and his body stands apart from the forest. The threat comes from his composure and from the fact that he can communicate without speaking.

The indicia identifies The Department of Truth #15 as a January 2022 Image Comics publication. James Tynion IV is credited as writer, David Romero as artist, Aditya Bidikar as letterer, Dylan Todd as designer, and Steve Fox as editor. The cover’s red-eyed winged figure establishes the case before the transcript names it.

Unresolved questions

The issue does not confirm whether the Silver Bridge collapse was caused by Mothman, by the belief surrounding Mothman, by an ordinary structural failure, or by several factors at once. It does not establish whether Mothman survived captivity, whether the Department dissected it, or whether the creature’s body changed after the public stopped seeing it. The transcript ends before Hynes explains the full content of Cold’s message to Lee.

The identity of the interrogator is also concealed. The speaker may be a senior Department officer, the organization’s director, or a later investigator trying to understand why Lee disappeared. Hynes’s fear of returning to the field suggests that the interview is not merely historical. It may be part of an attempt to determine whether Indrid Cold is still connected to the Department’s work. The record ends with Hynes saying that he has not seen Lee since the encounter, leaving the case open at the moment when one monster has been captured and the other has walked away.