A key inspiration for the X-Files, John Keel's book The Mothman Prophecies is, fittingly, a rather obscure text, difficult to find before the burgeoning presence of online bookstores recently and veritably unknown to anyone without a keen interest in the paranormal.  Whether you choose to take this cult classic as supernatural mystery or laughable hillbilly humbug is a matter of  predisposition, but if nothing else, Keel's colorful recounting of the Point Pleasant Mothman wave of 1966-67 makes a compelling yarn.

Interestingly, only a fraction of  The Mothman Prophecies actually deals with the titular entity.  It is part Fortean reference as well, recalling incidents the world over that were weird even before John Keel wrote about them.  The legendary Men In Black play a prominent role in this noir docudrama teeming with UFOs and paranoia.  Contactees describe their trips aboard UFOs and channel alien entities, prophesizing disasters and assassinations.  The author himself contends with strange phone calls at unlisted numbers, mysterious impersonators trying to silence his witnesses, "cold spots" in the road and other bad vibrations.

Keel himself claims to have seen several UFO's during his investigations though he openly scoffs at the idea that they represent proof of visitations from extraterrestrials*.  In his estimation phenomenon such as Mothman and Flying saucers are  purely visual manifestations, perhaps glimpses into a spectral void by people with heightened perception, but more likely into the human unconscious.

Keel prepares the dubious reader for his oddly-named main attraction in chapter 3 The Flutter of Black Wings with a Hitchcockian onslaught of bird-man stories from days gone by.  Anomalous avians from the bird-man who did aerial acrobatics over Coney Island for sunbathers in 1900 to the black-skinned black, nude bat-winged woman seen by American soldiers in Vietnam.  And there are the first clear predecessors of what would eventually be West Virginia's infamous Mothman:

Mothman was alleged to have been sighted by a prominent Point Pleasant woman and her elderly father in 1961**, but this went unreported until the initial flap arose five years later.   In 1963, in faraway-from-Point-Pleasant England, four teenagers saw a UFO landing followed by an encounter with an apparent passenger, said E.T. described as a headless man with big bat-wings,which shuffled toward the youths out of the UFO-illuminated woods.  It came to be called Springheeled Jack, after a much older British legend, though there was another sighting of the peculiar entity.

The book breaks away from winged humanoids for a few chapters as we learn about Woodrow Derenberger's first contact with a UFOnaut named Indrid Cold, about Point Pleasant's shrouded history and it's curious isolation. Here Keel portrays the citizens of Point Pleasant as upstanding, and largely credulous, factory workers and proffesionals***,and describes the old TNT area**** that seemed to be the focus of the Mothman invasion.  In chapter 6, titled simply Mothman!, the winged phantom finally explodes onto the scene.

 

• November 14th, 1966.  Newell Partridge steps out on his porch at 10:30 PM after his TV signal breaks up into a strange, "herring-bone" pattern and his dog , Bandit, starts barking furiously at some unseen trespasser out in the night.  Bandit, he finds, is addressing a pair of huge, red, glowing eyes off in the distance.  The dog boldly runs into the night to face the intruder and is never seen again by his master who, not quite so heroic, sleeps with a shotgun next to his bed that evening.  Now this is interesting, in that the first supposed Mothman sighting***** is merely a sighting of "glowing eyes" suspended in the dark.  In spite of Newell's insistence that the eyes were too big to be a wild animals it seems infinitely more likely than a 7-foot, winged dognapper from Hell.  And yet this is attributed as the first Mothman sighting of significance.

 

• November 15th.  Two young couples- the Scarberrys and the Mallettes- become the first witnesses to describe a menacing, glowing-eyed bat-man, and the first to find themselves under pursuit.  Cruising around the abandoned TNT area, a notorious hangout near Point Pleasant, they see a pair of red, luminous eyes in the shadows of the abandoned generator plant.  They dimly perceive the huge eyes (which they found disturbingly hypnotic) as belonging to a gray, manlike, winged creature, which appeared to turn and waddle into the deserted building.  Perturbed by the incident, driver Roger Scarberry decided they should haul ass out of there and along the way they see another creature standing by the side of the road.  This Mothan takes flight and gives chase to the four startled cruisers at speeds of up to 100 MPH without ever flapping it's wings, and reportedly "squeaking like a mouse".  Clearly, if their story is to be believed, this was not merely a large-bird encounter.  Birds do not chase after cars, don't fly at night, and can't glide at 100 MPH.  Just as the creature breaks pursuit, as the speeding car reached the city limits, the couples happens to spot a dead dog at the side of the road.  The insinuation, of course, is that this is the mutilated corpse of Bandit.  But the fact that the bored foursome had undoubtedly heard about the incident of the night before, the mention of the dog only casts doubt on the story's veracity.  It seems like an amazing coincidence.  Police following up on the report never find the body of the dog.

 

• By the following night, Mothman had received it's colorful moniker****** and the TNT area was being over-run by townspeople, some aiming to put a stuffed Mothman over their fireplace.  Amid this growing chaos,  Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Wamsley, and Mrs. Marcella Bennett are surprised by a Mothman who had been lurking behind Bennett's parked car, just minutes after the three had seen a strange light hovering over the TNT area.  Again, we have a man-sized, gray figure with blazing RGE's (red, glowing eyes) set in it's chest and sporting huge wings.  Mrs. Bennett, seemingly mezmerized by the RGE's, absently drops her toddler on the ground.  The Wamsleys rushed the helpless mother and her battered infant into the safety of the house but the Mothman persisted in it's intrusion, rudely peering into the window at the terrified inhabitants from the porch.  Surely this point-blank encounter rules out a big-bird.  This creature was seen rising up from a laying position.  Birds don't lie down and don't typically peer into houses.  Mr. Wamsley called the police but the creature has evidently scurried into hiding before they arrived.  The appearance of a distant UFO previous to the encounter seems to recall the Kent, England "Springheeled Jack" sighting.

 

• On the 18th of the same spooky November, two firemen met observed a "giant bird" with RGE's, but only a bird just the same.  The creature would frequently be referred to as "the bird" following similar, mundane sightings.

 

• There had been several more sightings by November 26th, when a family in nearby Lowell, Ohio witnessed a whole flock of the winged wonders perched in the trees.  The normally aggressive Mothmen timidly scattered to the air when the family approached for a closer look.

 

• Eighteen-year-old Connie Carpenter was afflicted by conjunctivitis (red, burning eyes) for over two weeks, following an eye-to-eye encounter with bright-eyed Mothman which also pursued her car at high-speed.

 

On December 7th, 1966, paranormal investigator John Keel finally arrives in Point Pleasant.  He would interview over a hundred Mothman eye-witness before that winter was over, but he would never personally see Mothman.  He nonetheless compiles the swarm of Mothman stories, and a lot of Fortean filler, into the most complete account of the the strange events of '66 and '67 in the flatwoods of West Virginia.

Just over a year after Keel's appearance in this Twin Peaks of the rural East, on December 15th, 1967, Point Pleasant's aging Silver Bridge collapses suddenly, sending about fifty motorists who were stuck in Christmas traffic upon it's span to their watery doom in the Ohio River.  The tragic event struck Mothman from the news, as well as the local consciousness, and the legend of Mothman came to an abrupt end.  Though there were reports of aerial lights above the bridge before it went down, they were explained by the authorities to be a result of power-lines over the bridge being snapped by the strain that eventually felled it.  The Mothman Prophecies hit bookstores in 1975.

*Most contactees give our cosmic guests names from Greek mythology and pass on their rather predictable warnings to mankind about atomic power.  Mothman, though rather large and bulky, is seen to take off vertically from a standing position.  Men In Black reports seem to reflect the cold-war atmosphere of suspicion of the time.  All suggest, in their respective cases, hallucination and confabulation on the part of witnesses.  No case ever sheds new light on the overall mystery.

**Driving through the Chief Cornstalk Hunting Grounds they come upon the characteristic, large, man-like, gray creature standing in the road.  It unfolded a pair of  wings that "practically filled the whole road", and made an abrupt vertical ascent out of sight.

***However the first chapter has a couple of these credulous citizens mistaking Keel for the Devil, and he later stares down the shotgun barrel of another.

****The TNT Area is a wooded expanse festooned with concrete "igloos" where TNT explosives were produced and stored during WW2.  In the years after The Mothman Prophecies was published it was learned that nuclear waste had been stored in the area, as well.  By 1967 the TNT area was overgrown and dilapidated, and the land had been turned into a bird-sanctuary (which might have a connection to all of the "bird" sightings).

*****There was a sighting of a winged man the night before, but it was by a young boy who describes an "angel".  So to be fair, Newell didn't have the first reported sighting.

******By an unidentified journalist.  Supposedly, the name was inspired by the campy, '60's TV show Batman, although I can't figure out why they didn't call the beast Batman in the first place since it supposedly flew on bat-like wings, and "Mothman" sounds utterly absurd.

 

The Mothman Prophecies: In Depth