I was about eleven when I first checked a dog-eared copy of The Mothman Prophecies out at the local library, attracted perhaps by the unusual title and nifty-looking cover art.  What I found inside only engrossed me further.  I couldn't imagine why no one had told me about all of the flying monsters, flying saucers, and phantom black Cadillac's whizzing about in broad daylight with total impunity.  If I saw a UFO would the Men In Black come knocking at my door the next day asking for glasses of water to wash down their space-pills?  If I ran away to West Virginia would I find legions of Mothmen blotting out the sky and obligingly posing for photographs?

Was I dying to find out?  You bet your ass!  But, to my disappointment, I could easily identify every flying object that caught my eye, and West Virginia seemed like a pretty long walk.  Certainly too far to make it back for dinner.  Worst of all my fifth-grade teacher, who I forced the book upon after I'd read it the second time, found the whole thing to be just a bit far-fetched.  He didn't buy a word of it.

What?  Was Mothman just a grotesque fraud, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?  Was my favorite writer just a big, rotton fibber?

Well, not exactly.  I didn't recognize it at the time, but Keel really doesn't advocate the bizarre premise of TMP, so much as record improbable events for entertainment purposes, and document a murky chapter of the America Mythologica for historical perspective.  He laughs when first told about the Mothman business and doesn't bother to print the vast majority of the sightings he compiled, far less than one needs to write a book of any substance about Mothman by itself.

But it was a hook- something Keel needed to sell his product.  Something different than the endless spew of UFO books already clogging the bargain-bins worldwide in the seventies. In that he apparantly succeeded, though I think his later, lesser-known tome The Eighth Tower might be a better book overall.

---

 

The Mothman Prophecies

I. Beelzebub Visits West Virginia
A bearded John Keel is mistaken for Beelzebub * The Shadow's Ghost * Tulpas

"Fingers of lightning tore holes in the black skies as an angry cloud-burst drenched the surrealist landscape.  It was 3AM on a cold, wet morning in late November 1967, and the little houses scattered along the dirt road winding through the hills of West Virginia were all dark.  Some seemed unoccupied and in the final stages of decay.  Others were unpainted, neglected, forlorn.  The whole setting was like the opening scene of a Grade B horror film from the 1930's"

 

II. The Creep Who Came in from the Cold
Mary Hyre *  Crashed UFO in Texas *  MIB's * John Keel at the Pentagon

 

III. The Flutter of Black Wings

"We are dealing with three types of phenomena in these cases.  The first is the winged man; the second is a giant bird, so huge it's a biological impossibility; third, we have a monstrous demon with red eyes, bat-wings, and a body closely human in form.  All three are probably interrelated."

 

IV. Take the Train
The Xenophanes Principle and UFO's

"A dark force was closing over a little town I had never heard of.  In a matter of months, I would be arriving there like some black-suited exorcist, lugging my tatterd briefcase, waving the golden cross of science."

 

V. The Cold Who Came Down in the Rain
Indrid Cold * Chief Cornstalk * Dog gone

"The West Virginia area is fertile, heavily wooded, rich in game.  Why did the Indians avoid it?  Was it filled with hairy monsters and frightful apparitions way back when?"

 

VI. Mothman!

"Roger stepped on the gas and they shot through the gates, spun onto the exit road, and headed for Route 62.  Suddenly, they saw it...standing on a small hill near the road.  As they hurtled past it, it spread it's batlike wings and took off straight up into the air."

"Everyone was now seeing Mothman or the "Bird," or so it seemed...People were traveling for hundreds of miles to sit in the cold TNT area all night, hoping to glimpse the creature."

 

VII. The Night of the Bleeding Ear
Heavy breathers * John Keel arrives * The zone of fear

 

VIII. Procession of the Damned
MIB and the CIA

 

"IX. "Wake Up Down There"
Sex and UFO's *  The Phone Conspiracy * Woody goes to Planet Lanulos * Dognappers * Alien blood-drive

"It does seem that many UFO and monster sightings are staged as distractions, luring crowds of people to places like the TNT area while animal mutilations and disappearances are taking place almost unnoticed only a few miles away."

 

X. Purple Lights and April Foolishness

"As my eyes became acclimated to the night I began to distinguish a number of vague purple shapes hovering over a woods on Rolfe Lee's property.  At first I thought they might be stars low in the sky, gleaming through the natural haze.  But when I flashed my six-celled light at one of these purple blobs it suddenly and jerkily moved to one side, as if it were jumping out of my light beam."

 

XI. If this is Wednesday, It Must Be a Venusian
The Wednesday Phenomenon

 

XII. Games Nonpeople Play
Wrong # *  Contactee Syndrome * Hypnosis

"Throughout history people have been straying through Alice's looking glass, seeing things that don't exist, visiting places that spill off the maps into some hallucinatory other dimenstion."

 

XIII. Phantom Photographers
MIB disinformation * Haunted witnesses * UFO paparazzi

"The air force and CIA did not have to try to disrupt the ufological movement.  It is by it's very nature a self-disrupting network of disoriented people."

 

XIV. Sideways In Time
Flashing lights and lost time * The shuttle to Lanulos

"Our own Fear of nuclear annihilation was epidemic in the 1950's and early 1960's.  So many of the UFO messages of that period were stern warnings about our misuse of atomic energy.  As our own paranoia subsided, so did these threats from outer space."

 

XV. Misery on the Mount
The men in black coveralls * Princess Moon Owl

"...The contactees would be manipulated, used as robots to propagate beliefs and false frames of reference, and then be discarded to sit in the darkness and wonder why the world was not as they had imagined it, why the wonderful space people had abondoned them."

 

XVI. Paranoiacs Are Made, Not Born
Contactee Psychic Phone Network

 

XVII. "Even the Bedouins hate their telephone company"
Phonophobia continued

"...The entities now began to tell me about a terrible forthcoming disaster on the Ohio river.  Many people would die."

 

XVIII. "Something Awful Is Going to Happen..."
Bad dreams and bad connections

 

XIX. "Where the Birds Gather..."

"Steel screamed.  The seven hundred-foot suspension bridge twisted and the main span split from it's moorings at either end.  Electric cables strung across the bridge snapped in a blaze of sparks.  Fifty vehicles crashed into the black waters of the Ohio, tons of steel smashing down on top of them."

 

Message Board