The Mothman Prophecies

by John A. Keel

  Three people in Overland, Illinois, viewed the creature on April 10. At first they thought it was an airplane, then it began to flap its wings.

  By late April the Garuda was buzzing the city of St. Louis. Dr. Kristine Dolezal saw it on the twenty-sixth. A group of instructors at the Mississippi School of Aeronautics observed “an awfully big bird” at 1,200 feet the next day. A salesman named Harry Bradford complained, “I’ve seen it three times in the last four days and that’s too much tomfoolery for a man of fifty to take.”

  “I thought people who reported seeing the thing were ‘bugs’ until I looked into the sky last night,” Charles Dunn, an inspector for U.S. Steel, declared on April 30. “It was flapping its wings and moving quite fast at about 3,000 feet altitude and it appeared to be illuminated by a dull glow. It looked about the size of a Piper Cub plane but there was no engine sound and it was not a plane. I could hardly believe my eyes.”

  Although the plane-sized bird was seen sporadically during the next decade, the flying saucers stole the limelight. The air force and the amateur investigators chose to pursue the more exciting Martians and Venusians.

  But the figure of a man with “wings like a bat,” dressed in tight-fitting black clothes and surrounded by an eerie glow startled three people in Houston, Texas, on June 18, 1953.

  “I could see him plain and could see he had big wings folded at his shoulders,” Mrs. Hilda Walker said. He was about six and a half feet tall and was perched on the limb of a pecan tree. His halo of light slowly faded out and he vanished. “Immediately afterward,” Mrs. Walker continued, “we heard a loud swoosh over the housetops across the street. It was like the white flash of a torpedo-shaped object.”

  “I may be nuts, but I saw it, whatever it was,” Howard Phillips, another witness, declared.

  The next big year for our phantom fliers was 1961. Residents along Florida’s Tamiami Trail began seeing what one woman described as “a big vulture … with a wingspread of about fifty-five feet. Isn’t that sorta unusual?” In May 1961, a New York pilot was buzzed by “a damned big bird, bigger than an eagle. For a moment I doubted my sanity because it looked more like a pterodactyl out of the prehistoric past.” The thing had swooped at his plane as he cruised up the Hudson River valley.

  Far away, in the Ohio River valley, another startled pair had an even more breathtaking experience. A woman prominent in civic affairs in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, was driving on Route 2 along the Ohio River with her elderly father. As they passed through a sector on the edge of a park known as the Chief Cornstalk Hunting Grounds, a tall manlike figure suddenly appeared on the road in front of them.

  “I slowed down,” she told me years later, “and as we got closer we could see that it was much larger than a man. A big gray figure. It stood in the middle of the road. Then a pair of wings unfolded from its back and they practically filled the whole road. It almost looked like a small airplane. Then it took off straight up … disappearing out of sight in seconds. We were both terrified. I stepped on the gas and raced out of there.

  “We talked it over and decided not to tell anybody about it. Who would believe us anyway?”

  Dr. Jacques Vallee, French statistician and computer expert, was given access to the air force’s UFO files and he came across a curious report from an air force colonel who was driving alone along a road in Illinois one night (no date is given) when he became aware of something flying above his car. It was, he said, a huge bird the size of a small airplane. It flapped its wings and soared away.

  There are shaggy bird stories by the pound. A businessman in Arlington, Virginia, wrote to me recently, describing an experience he and three friends had in the winter of 1968–69. They were at a farm near Haymarket when they heard a strange rushing sound near a small lake. Intrigued, they set out with flashlights and a couple of dogs to investigate. Suddenly the dogs howled, turned tail, and ran. There, standing by a tree was a huge dark shadow between eight and twelve feet tall. The quartet scurried back to their car, turned on their lights, and swung toward the shadow. “All we saw,” he reported, “was this huge thing with large red-orange eyeballs and winglike arms. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

  We even have a naked woman with wings in our collection. The case was investigated by Don Worley, an experienced student of the unknown, who interviewed the witness in depth. “He is a reliable observer,” Worley notes, “and he swears that this event is well beyond the capacity of his imagination.”

  Earl Morrison, the witness, was serving as a private, first class in the marine corps in Vietnam in the summer of 1969. He and two buddies were sitting on top of a bunker near Da Nang on a warm summer evening.

  All of a sudden—I don’t know why—we all three looked out there in the sky and we saw this figure coming toward us,” he told Mr. Worley. “It had a kind of glow and we couldn’t make out what it was at first. It started coming toward us, real slowly. All of a sudden we saw what looked like wings, like a bat’s, only it was gigantic compared to what a regular bat would be. After it got close enough so we could see what it was, it looked like a woman. A naked woman. She was black. Her skin was black, her body was black, the wings were black, everything was black. But it glowed. It glowed in the night—kind of a greenish cast to it.

  There was a glow on her and around her. Everything glowed. Looked like she glowed and threw off a radiance. We saw her arms toward the wings and they looked like regular molded arms, each with a hand, and fingers and everything, but they had skin from the wings going over them. And when she flapped her wings, there was no noise at first. It looked like her arms didn’t have any bones in them, because they were limber just like a bat.

  She started going over us, and we still didn’t hear anything. She was right above us, and when she got over the top of our heads she was maybe six or seven feet up.

  We couldn’t do anything. We didn’t know what to do. We just froze. We just watched what was going over because we couldn’t believe our eyes.… So we watched her go straight over the top of us, and still she didn’t make any noise flapping her wings. She blotted out the moon once—that’s how close she was to us … As we watched her—she got about ten feet or so away from us—we started hearing her wings flap. And it sounded, you know, like regular wings flapping. And she just started flying off and we watched her for quite a while. The total time when we first saw her and could almost define her until we lost sight of her and were unable to define her was between three or four minutes.3

  Vietnam had a big UFO wave in 1968–69, which included an epidemic of phantom helicopters. On several occasions the military forces on both sides fired at the objects without effect.

  Pfc. Morrison’s account stands as one of the best close-up sightings of a winged entity.

  IV.

  A bright “star” appeared over the trees of Sandling Park, Hythe, in Kent, England, on the night of November 16, 1963, and so began one of the classics in ufology. Four teen-agers were strolling along a country road near the park, going home from a dance, when the movements of the “star” caught their eyes. It dipped out of the sky and headed straight for them, finally dropping down behind some nearby trees.

  John Flaxton, seventeen, said he suddenly felt very cold, and a sense of overpowering fear engulfed the group. They started to run. The light, now a golden oval-shaped object, reappeared from behind the trees and seemed to move along with them from a distance of about two hundred feet. When they stopped, the light stopped. Then it was lost from sight behind the trees. The four youngsters slowed down, catching their breath.

  Suddenly a tall, dark figure emerged from the woods and waddled toward them. It was completely black and had no discernible head. Mervyn Hutchinson, eighteen, described it as looking like a human-sized bat, with big bat wings on its back. All four took off as fast as they could go.

  More strange lights were seen in Sandling Woods in the days that followed. Investigators found three giant footprints, an inch deep, two feet long
, and nine inches across. Three weeks later a group of people, including two newspaper reporters, visited the site and found the whole forest illuminated by a strange pulsating light. They watched it from a distance for half an hour, afraid to go closer.4

  These great Garudas and winged beings are closely associated with luminous phenomena. They tend to appear in areas where UFOs have been active and, like UFOs, they tend to linger for days or even weeks in the same specific area. The big luminous bird of the Illinois-St. Louis region in 1948 was visiting an area of the Mississippi valley that would see continuous UFO and hairy monster activity thereafter.

  In many instances the witnesses have clearly seen the objects in the process of materialization or dematerialization. A glow is observed first, usually a reddish glow marking the emergence of the object from the invisible band of the spectrum into infrared and then into the narrow band of visible light. Or, if the object is passing through the visible band to the higher frequencies it is cyan (bluish-green) before it fades into blue (hard to see at night) and then enters the ultraviolet range. The chills experienced by John Flaxton and his group were probably caused by microwaves above the infrared (which produces heat), just as the very cold atmosphere accompanying ghosts is a radiation effect.

  The absence of any overpowering odor, either sickly sweet like violets or roses or nauseous like hydrogen sulfide, in these bird and batman cases puzzles me, however. This could indicate some subtle difference in the basic structure of these creatures; a difference in the energy components or molecular structure.

  People are still seeing flying freaks. On May 21, 1973, a group of men in a woods near Kristianstad, Sweden, reported an incredibly huge black bird which passed within one hundred feet of them. One witness had a camera with a telephoto lens and attempted to take a picture, but his film jammed. Camera malfunctions are remarkably common among would-be UFO photographers, and even those who try to take pictures of the serpent at Loch Ness. It almost seems as if some outside force fouls up cameras when monsters and UFOs are around.

  4:

  Take the Train

  I.

  “From Bad. Axe to Bethesda the happy news comes in,” wrote an anonymous “Talk of the Town” contributor in The New Yorker, April 9, 1966. “Flying saucers!… We read the official explanations with sheer delight, marveling at their stupendous inadequacy. Marsh gas, indeed!… Our theory is that flying saucers are not of this earth. The beings who control them are attempting to make contact with man in the gentlest possible fashion.…”

  Dr. Isaac Asimov, dean of science writers, commented: “I am told, though, that so many people have seen objects that looked like spaceships that ‘there must be something in it’.… Maybe there is, but think of all the people in the history of the world who have seen ghosts and spirits and angels. It’s not what you see that is suspect, but how you interpret what you see.”

  At a scientific convention held in Baltimore in 1966, Dr. Edward C. Walsh, executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, remarked: “So many airline pilots report seeing them, that’s why I take the train.”

  Wherever you were in the year 1966, you must have heard about the coming of the flying saucers. The news media beat the story into a froth of ennui. The newsstands were glutted with one-shot UFO magazines and quickie paperbacks rehashing the reported sightings from previous flap years. Everywhere great crowds of people gathered on hilltops, in swamps and cemeteries, and around reservoirs and gravel pits, their eyes turned heavenward. Saucer-hunting became a national sport, rallying to the excited cry, “There goes one!”

  That year I stood on hilltops and beaches with those crowds, watching funny lights bob around in the night. But an uneasiness was overtaking me; a dark suspicion that Dr. Asimov’s tongue-in-cheek observation may have contained more truth than even he knew.

  The Year of the Garuda was at hand. A dark force was closing over a little town I had never even heard of: Point Pleasant, West Virginia. In a matter of months I would be arriving there like some black-suited exorcist, lugging my tattered briefcase, waving the golden cross of science. My life would become intertwined with the lives of the people of the Ohio valley.

  In March 1966, a shapely housewife, whom I will call Mrs. Kelly because she asked that her name be withheld, was waiting in her car for her children near the Point Pleasant school when she saw an unbelievable apparition low in the sky. It looked like a glistening metal disk and was hovering directly above the school playground. A doorlike aperture was open at its rim and there was a man standing outside. He was not standing in the doorway, he was standing outside the object in midair! He wore a silvery skin-tight costume and had very long silvery hair. He was looking down into the schoolyard intently. She watched him for a long moment until her children bounded up to the car. When she looked again, the man and object were gone. She decided not to tell anyone about this strange vision, attaching religious significance to it.

  That summer, Mrs. Mary Hyre was driving along the Ohio side of the river when a sudden glint in the sky attracted her attention. “At first I thought it was a plane,” she recalled. “Then I got a better look at it. It was perfectly round. I couldn’t make out what it was but I didn’t give it any thought at the time.”

  Another round object chose to hover above Tiny’s restaurant just outside Point Pleasant that summer, where it was seen by a number of customers including the wife of a local police officer. Tiny’s stands on the corner of the street where the McDaniels live. The McDaniel family would later serve as the focus for many of the strange manifestations.

  Not one person bothered to report a UFO sighting to the law or press in Point Pleasant, although there were many such sightings all summer long.

  People in distant Salt Lake City, Utah, weren’t so squeamish, however. When a bird “about as big as a Piper Cub airplane” circled that Mormon community on July 18, 1966, some people ran for cover while others ran for their telephones.

  Shortly after 2 P.M. on September 1, Mrs. James Ikart of Scott, Mississippi, grabbed her phone to call the Delta Democrat Times (Greenville). She and her neighbors were watching a whitish man-shaped flying object. “It got down pretty low and then would go up,” Mrs. Ikart said. “I never saw anything like it.”

  John Hursh, a local meteorologist, whipped out Standard Explanation No. 425. “It’s apparently somebody’s research balloon that’s gotten away,” he announced.

  Whatever it was, it bounced around Scott most of the afternoon.

  II.

  Three thousand years ago a small group of brilliant men investigated and solved the mystery of unidentified flying objects. Since then a great many others have approached the same mystery from different perspectives and solved it over and over again. Unfortunately, their staggering solutions were obfuscated by intellectual extrapolations and the ponderous terminology of philosophy and theology. Few modern UFO enthusiasts have the educational background to understand such literature. They choose, as an alternative, to deal with the phenomenon on a materialistic level, assuming that the presence of unlikely objects and entities in our atmosphere is evidence of some extraterrestrial civilization.

  Xenophanes, one of the first great philosophers (sixth century B.C.), observed that the Ethiopians thought their gods were black and snub-nosed like themselves. Today many of us no longer believe in direct visits with our God, so we have shaped a new mythology based upon the belief in spacemen carved in our own image. When the ancients sighted giant, shambling bipeds covered with hair, their eyes blazing like fierce coals, they assumed they were confronting demons. Early investigators eventually concluded that such demons did not really exist, even though they often left footprints behind and caused physical damage. They coined the word khimaira (chimera) to describe them. Others noted that the eerie aerial lights changed colors up and down the visual spectrum and the word specter was born. Several times each year tall, hairy creatures with red eyes are still seen throughout the United States and, in fact, throu
ghout the world. Like many forms of chimeras, they are usually accompanied by the smell of rotten eggs—hydrogen sulfide. The “fire and brimstone” of the ancients. The same odor frequently surrounds the fabled flying saucers and their space-suited pilots.

  Seeing a spaceman disembark from a flying saucer is no more remarkable than seeing an angel descend in a luminous cloud (and angels are still reported hundreds of times each year). The report of a nine-foot-tall humanoid strolling down the main street of Buffalo Mills, Pennsylvania, on August 19, 1973, was no more outlandish than the dinosaurs who appear from time to time to terrify witnesses and baffle police posses. In 1969 there were dinosaur reports in Texas. In 1970 the police in Italy scoured a mountain range after several witnesses reported seeing a saurian.

  To the regret of the true believers, the majority of the witnesses to chimerical events were alone at the time of their experience. While the amateur investigators tend to concentrate on the very subjective descriptions of the observers, I probed deeper and studied the witnesses themselves. Many, I found, suffered certain medical symptoms such as temporary amnesia, severe headaches, muscular spasms, excessive thirst and other effects, all of which have been observed throughout history in religious miracles (the appearances of religious apparitions), demonology, occult phenomena, and contacts with fairies. All of these manifestations clearly share a common source or cause.

  While chimeras can come in all sizes and shapes, ranging from twenty-foot giants to animated tin cans only a few inches in height, the most fascinating type is one who has appeared in almost every country on earth. In other ages he was regarded as the devil incarnate. He dressed in black and rode a black horse. Later he arrived in black horsedrawn carriages, even in hearses. Today he steps out of flying saucers in remote farm fields. He is built exactly like us, stands from five feet six inches to six feet tall, looks very human but has high cheekbones, unusually long fingers, and an Oriental cast to his features. His complexion is olive or reddish. He speaks every language, sometimes mechanically as if he is reciting a memorized speech, sometimes fluently. He has trouble breathing, often wheezing and gasping between words. Like our dinosaurs and hairy bipeds, he often leaves a few footprints behind … footprints which suddenly end as if he had vanished into thin air.