John Keel in The Mothman Prophecies focuses significant attention on the Mothman's 'red eyes:'
(1) "On November 24, four people, two adults and two children, were driving past the TNT area when they saw a giant flying creature with red eyes."
(2) "According to her story, Connie, a shy, sensitive eighteen-year-old, was driving home from church at 10:30 A.M. on Sunday, November 27, 1966, when, as she passed the deserted greens of the Mason County Golf Course outside of New Haven, West Virginia, she suddenly saw a huge gray figure. It was shaped like a man, she said, but was much larger. It was at least seven feet tall and very broad. The thing that attracted her attention was not its size but its eyes. It had, she said, large, round, fiercely glowing red eyes that focused on her with hypnotic effect. “It’s a wonder I didn’t run off the road and have a wreck,” she commented later."
(3) "On the evening of November 26, a housewife in St. Albans, a suburb of Charleston, West Virginia, found Mothman standing on her front lawn. Mrs. Ruth Foster was one of the very few witnesses who claimed to see a face on the creature.
“It was standing on the lawn beside the porch,” Mrs. Foster said. “It was tall with big red eyes that popped out of its face. My husband is six feet one and this bird looked about the same height or a little shorter, maybe.
“It had a funny little face. I didn’t see any beak. All I saw were those big red poppy eyes. I screamed and ran back into the house. My brother-in-law went out to look, but it was gone.”"
Barney Hill in his 1961 sighting reported wings protruding from a pancake-shaped craft, with red lights on the wing tips. From Betty Hill's letter to Major Keyhoe:
"As it approached our car, we stopped again. As it hovered in the air in front of us, it appeared to be pancake in shape, ringed with windows in the front through which we could see bright blue-white lights. Suddenly, two red lights appeared on each side. By this time my husband was standing in the road, watching closely. He saw wings protrude on each side and the red lights were on the wing tips" (from The Interrupted Journey).
Under hypnosis, Barney Hill recalled that the wings seemed organic in nature:
"[T]he wings that slid out were not like the wings of a plane, but they were like a military bat-type of wing. It slid out" (from The Interrupted Journey).
An officer at Pease Air Force Base apparently only took interest in the Hill's account after red lights were mentioned:
"She [Betty] gave him the facts in bare outline because the officer’s attitude was cynical and uncommunicative. Out of embarrassment or shyness, she skipped the details of seeing the double row of windows, feeling that this might make her the target for further cynicism. She did, however, report the fins apparently separating at the sides of the craft, with the two red lights on either side. The officer grew more interested in this, and when Betty explained that her husband had a better look at this part of the craft than she did, the officer asked to speak with Barney" (from The Interrupted Journey).