Why Did People Ever Think Bats Were Blind?

The phrase "blind as a bat" is centuries old — but where did it actually come from? Not from science. Not from observation. It came from fear, darkness, and a very human tendency to assume that what we don't understand must be defective.

For hundreds of years, people watched bats emerge only after sunset and vanish before sunrise, never once seeing them active in daylight. Their eyes are small. Their faces are strange. Their movements seem erratic. And they disappeared into dark caves that most people had no intention of following them into. The logical conclusion, for a pre-scientific mind, was obvious — these creatures must not be able to see.

As Nadeem Ashraf of Weird & Amazing Facts — a platform built around replacing centuries of myth with verified, sourced science — explains, even Shakespeare's era portrayed bats as symbols of darkness and witchcraft, reinforcing the blind bat belief across generations of storytelling until it became accepted as fact.

The reality, of course, is that every bat species has fully functioning eyes, many with exceptional low-light vision. The myth survived not because of evidence but because nobody bothered to look closely enough to disprove it.

For the complete story on why people think bats are blind and the real science behind bat vision, Nadeem Ashraf's research at Weird & Amazing Facts traces the full history from myth to modern truth.