The Mothman Prophecies

by John A. Keel

  Sightings in the Northeast were keeping me busy at that time. But I talked with Mary Hyre frequently. She was receiving more UFO reports than she could print and some other strange things were happening in Point Pleasant. Three very tall, dark-complexioned (not Negroid) men were causing the local police some consternation. These men knocked on doors late at night, purportedly selling magazines though we couldn’t find anyone who had ordered subscriptions from them. They spoke fluent, unaccented English and were described as “good-looking” with heavily tanned skin. Their height and broadness impressed the witnesses the most. Although these men continued to appear throughout the region for a month, Mrs. Hyre and the police could not find out where they were staying. They were always on foot. Apparently they did not have a car.

  Mrs. Mabel McDaniel worked in the local unemployment office on Main Street in Point Pleasant and during the second week in March a strange man blundered into the office. He wore a black coat and black cap and behaved in a most peculiar manner.

  “He didn’t look like a colored person, but still was very dark,” Mrs. McDaniel said, “and his English was so poor I never did really figure out what he wanted. His eyes were funny-looking, kind of starey and glassy. From what I could get from him, he was looking for an insurance company, only he kept saying he wanted ‘trip insurance.’”

  He told her he had also visited the office of the Messenger (he did not, according to Mary). He spoke in the garbled, singsong manner of so many of our weirdo visitors and moved in an unsteady, almost drunken way.

  It seemed to me that something phenomenal was building up in the Point Pleasant area. I decided to shelve my other projects and return to the Ohio valley. This time I was accompanied by Daniel Drasin, a young movie producer who was planning to do a UFO special for the Public Broadcasting Laboratories (PBL) of the educational television network. Don Estrella also asked to go along. Both men knew very little about the UFO situation at that time, and in keeping with my habit I told them nothing. I wanted them to see for themselves the incredible scope and complexity of the thing.

  So late that March our little entourage hopped into rented cars and took off on an eight-hundred-mile journey into the twilight zone.

  10:

  Purple Lights and April Foolishness

  I.

  “My phones have gone crazy,” Mary Hyre noted, “even my unlisted numbers. Strangers call me at all hours of the day and night. Sometimes I get funny beeping sounds. Did you ever hear about anything like that?”

  I had to admit I had. However, it had become my policy to say very little about these matters to anyone, even close friends. After Mary and I had concluded our interview with Charles Hern and his wife in Ohio, Mr. Hern had escorted us to the door and remarked, “You know, we’ve told you about everything we’ve seen … and you haven’t told us a damned thing!”

  I was so taciturn that the UFO buffs had surrounded me with an aura of mystery (they tend to surround everything with mystery). James Moseley, editor of Saucer News (now defunct), once told Gray Barker, “He gives you the impression of not only knowing as much as we about flying saucers—but actually knowing a lot more—a lot that he is not telling.”

  The truth was more mundane than mysterious. I was keeping many of my findings a secret to prevent pranksters from setting up hoaxes (many of those findings are being revealed here for the first time). I maintained a “low profile” to curb rumors and prevent possible panic in the areas I was visiting. I avoided personal publicity, unlike most of the other self-styled UFO investigators who spent most of their time staging press conferences and building up scrapbooks. Finally, some of the things I was studying seemed so absurd on the surface—especially to the hardcore believers in extraterrestrial visitants—that revealing them would only produce more gossip, controversy, and nonsense.

  Dan Drasin and Don Estrella expressed growing amazement—and some fear—as they traveled with me up and down the valley, listening to my strange questions and the even stranger answers we were getting from witnesses. A young woman in Point Pleasant was having telephone problems. Every night when she returned home from work at 5 o’clock her phone would ring and a man’s voice would speak to her in a rapid-fire language she could not understand. “It sounds something like Spanish … yet I don’t think it is Spanish,” she complained. She protested to the phone company, but they insisted they could find nothing wrong with her line.

  We visited her home and I examined her phone in a manner that had become routine for me. I took it apart. Drasin and Estrella watched me silently with a “he’s really gone bananas” expression. What did telephones have to do with flying saucers?

  When you unscrew modern telephone earpieces you will often find a small piece of cotton which serves as a cushion for the magnet and diaphragm. You shouldn’t find anything else. But when I opened this woman’s handset I was startled to find a tiny sliver of wood. She said no one, not even the repairmen, had ever opened up her phone before. The wooden object looked like a piece of a matchstick, sharpened at one end and lightly coated with a substance that looked like graphite. Later I showed it to telephone engineers and they said they’d never seen anything like it before. I put it in a plastic box and stored it away. Years later while visiting a magic store in New York (sleight of hand is one of my hobbies), I glanced at a display of practical jokes and discovered a cellophane package filled with similar sticks. Cigarette loads! Somehow an explosive cigarette load had gotten into that Point Pleasant telephone! Who put it there, when, how, and why must remain mysteries.

  Soon after my investigation, the woman’s phone calls ceased. Maybe I exorcised the phone by removing the stick.

  Another family was having telephone problems, and many other troubles besides, on the Camp Conley Road on the southern edge of the TNT area. The woman in Point Pleasant who suffered the calls from a bizarre metallic voice speaking in an incomprehensible language was their daughter-in-law.

  “It didn’t take us long to learn that when our TV started acting up it was a sure sign that one of those lights was passing over,” James Lilly, a no-nonsense riverboat captain, told us. “I didn’t think much of all the flying saucer talk until I started seeing them myself. You’ve got to believe your own eyes.”

  At first the Lillys kept their sightings to themselves. But gradually rumors began to circulate and carloads of people gathered on Camp Conley Road every night to watch the space people fly by.

  “We’ve seen all kinds of things,” Mrs. Lilly said. “Blue lights, green ones, red ones, things that change color. Some of them have been so low that we thought we could see diamond-shaped windows in them. And none of them make any noise at all.”

  Automobiles near the Lilly home began to stall inexplicably. And the Lillys’ little ranch house became haunted soon after the lights started their nightly fly-overs. Kitchen cabinet doors slammed in the middle of the night. Once their living room door, which they locked with both a chain and snaplock at night, was standing ajar when they got up in the morning. They heard loud metallic sounds, “like a pan falling,” and Mrs. Lilly heard “a baby crying.” “It sounded so plain,” she said, “that I looked around the house even though I knew there was no baby here. It seemed to come from the living room … only a few feet away from me.”

  One of my sillier-sounding questions is: “Did you ever dream there was a stranger in the house in the middle of the night?” When I directed this question at the Lillys, Jackie Lilly urged her quiet sixteen-year-old daughter, Linda, to tell about the “nightmare” she had had that March. She was reluctant to discuss it, but with a little coaching from the sidelines she explained how she woke up one night and saw a large figure towering over her bed.

  “It was a man,” she said. “A big man. Very broad. I couldn’t see his face very well but I could see that he was grinning at me.”

  “Jim was working on the river that night,” Mrs. Lilly added. “And Linda woke me up with a terrible scream. She cried out there was a man in her r
oom. I told her she was dreaming. But she screamed again.”

  “He walked around the bed and stood right over me,” Linda declared. “I screamed again and hid under the covers. When I looked up again, he was gone.”

  “She came running into my room,” Mrs. Lilly said. “She cried, ‘There is a man in my room! There is!’ She’s refused to sleep alone ever since.”

  When I asked for a description of the stranger, Linda said she thought he had been wearing a “checkered shirt.”

  Bedroom phantoms in checkered shirts are old hat to investigators of psychic phenomena. I have come upon this again and again. So often that I have written long articles about it. In some cases these ghosts-in-plaid are accompanied by the odor of hydrogen sulfide and sudden chills or sudden blasts of heat, while other episodes are probably purely hypnopompic. That is, they are the residue of dreams which overlap briefly into the waking state … a phenomenon well-known in psychiatry and parapsychology.

  I once enjoyed a hypnopompic experience myself. In the winter of 1960–61 I contracted walking pneumonia … and I walked with it until I dropped. Early one morning while I was still quite sick and my system was laden with antibiotics and drugs I woke up and saw a large black form hovering at the foot of my bed. It wasn’t a man in a checkered shirt but was roughly the shape of a Cocoa Cola bottle.

  “What do you know? I’m having an hallucination,” I told myself as I lifted my head and studied the apparition. The blob slowly receded, growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared. The experience was never repeated.

  II.

  Drasin and Estrella returned to New York City in late March while I decided to remain on in Point Pleasant. Dan was convinced that something exceptional was happening in the Ohio valley and he planned to collect a camera crew and return. We had seen a number of odd aerial lights but the oddest of all was so bewildering I didn’t even bother to take notes.

  We were standing on a hilltop outside of Point Pleasant one night when Mrs. Hyre called our attention to a bright red light slowly moving toward us. It had the shimmering, prismatic appearance of the classic UFO light and Dan, who was a student pilot, agreed it wasn’t a plane. No normal wing lights or taillights were visible. The sky was crystal-clear and there was only one small cloud overhead. The light moved very slowly and appeared to be at a low altitude. There was no sound whatsoever.

  We watched as the light slowly approached the little cloud and disappeared into it, or over it. Then we waited for it to reappear. Seconds ticked into minutes. The light did not come out from behind the cloud. “Maybe it went straight up,” Mary suggested.

  Suddenly there was the distinctive drone of an airplane engine and the obvious silhouette of a small plane emerged from the cloud, wing and taillights flashing. It buzzed off at an altitude of three or four thousand feet. And we laughed at ourselves, momentarily convinced that our UFO had just been an airplane.

  However, the more I thought about the incident the more incredible it seemed. We should have been able to see the plane’s silhouette clearly before it entered the cloud, and it should not have taken so long to pass through such a small cloud. Something was definitely out of kilter.

  Later, I began to study the mystery airplanes and phantom helicopters that have appeared all over the world, and several reports of UFOs that seemingly turned into conventional airplane configurations surfaced. One of the most recent comes from Canada where a group of outdoorsmen on the Cowichan River in British Columbia watched a low-flying object in October 1973.1

  “It didn’t make a sound and it was something we had never seen before,” one of the witnesses reported. “There were three red lights rotating around the top part and there were blinking red lights going in the opposite direction around the middle part. There was another light at the very top—a red flashing one.

  “Then, from the bottom, a white light shone out like a spotlight. It moved its beam up the river as if it was looking for something. By this time we were all pretty scared. We thought sure the others at the camp must have seen it, too, but afterward they said they hadn’t seen a thing. There was a bend in the river between us so I couldn’t say for sure whether they did or not.”

  The witnesses claimed they got a good look at the thing, that it was circular, about eighty feet in diameter, hovering about two hundred feet in the air, and had been in view for a full fifteen minutes.

  How did it depart?

  “Well, if we told people about this, they’d think we were crazy,” the witness said. “But all of a sudden it looked as if it had turned into an airplane. It made a noise like a plane and it looked like a plane, only all the lights went out except for a little red one. It went right past us and disappeared over the trees.”

  Throughout West Virginia I had heard stories of large, gray, unmarked airplanes hedgehopping the treacherous hills. I knew the air national guard kept some cargo planes at the Charleston airport and that some training flights involved hedgehopping to keep below radar beams. But none of the flights reported to me proved to be the work of the national guard.

  Drasin and Estrella had hardly started out for New York when all hell began to break loose. Late on the afternoon of March 31, a workman in the Point Pleasant lumber yard saw a glowing object hovering over the home of Mrs. Doris Deweese. Shortly afterward, Mrs. Deweese watched a luminous object zip across the sky and crash into a small shack on a neighboring hillside. The shack housed the transmitter for Sheriff Johnson’s police radio. It started to burn.

  What followed was straight out of the Keystone Kops. The police and fire department rushed to the snow-covered hill and bogged down on the mushy dirt road. There was much frantic scurrying and cursing as the men battled the blaze. Part of the hillside was badly scorched. The transmitter inside the shack was not affected by the fire but it was burned out, as if it had been struck by lightning. So in the critical days that followed, the sheriff’s department was without its main transmitter.

  I was disenchanted with the TNT area because of the crowds that were now streaming back there nightly to watch for the newest sensation—flying saucers. I started searching for a private place where I could carry out my observations quietly. Don, Dan, Mary, and myself had interviewed a number of people in the little community of Gallipolis Ferry, a couple of miles south of Point Pleasant on Route 2, and I had been impressed by their testimony. House lights frequently dimmed there and television sets often acted up late at night. Great blobs of light had been seen on top of the wooded hills in the sparsely settled animal preserve called the Chief Cornstalk Hunting Grounds just south of the village. One resident was having trouble with poltergeist phenomenon … lights moving through his house, rappings on the doors and windows, the sounds of babies crying and “women screaming,” telephones malfunctioning—the works. Rolfe Lee, a farmer with a big spread in the area, confessed that he had seen so many UFOs over his land that he didn’t pay attention to them anymore.

  Officer Harold Harmon and I slipped away to Gallipolis Ferry on the night of March 31 while nearly everyone else headed for the TNT area. We soon saw a number of bright starlike objects which flitted about the sky with rapid zigzag movements. Two local teen-agers were sitting on a nearby hilltop next to a roaring bonfire, hoping to lure the UFOs down. I called up to them and asked them to put the fire out, knowing that bright lights tended to repel rather than attract the objects.

  Harmon fiddled vainly with his police radio. He could get nothing but static. Later I learned that all the police forces for miles in both directions had constant trouble with their radios that week. Heavy magnetic interference totally disrupted communications among law authorities while the UFOs carried out their mysterious missions. The destruction of Sheriff Johnson’s transmitter was just one small part of the scenario. Telephones, too, went bonkers that week. It seemed as if half the phones in the valley were either out of order altogether, or were clogged with crazy beeps and buzzes.

  Accompanied by the two teen-agers, I left Harmon and h
iked into the nearby hills in the total blackness. 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. Fascinated, I repeated the experiment several times. Then I tried flashing the light at obvious stars to see if this wasn’t just some trick of my eyesight. The stars didn’t move, naturally.

  We sat on the hilltop studying the purple blobs for several minutes when suddenly the whole forest in the valley below lit up and glowed with a bright, eerie purple light. There were no houses or roads down there. It would have been a long hike in the dark and the boys were reluctant to join me, so we just sat and stared at the glowing forest until the light faded.

  III.

  The next night, Saturday, April 1, Mary Hyre and I drove up Five Mile Creek Road below Gallipolis Ferry until we reached a hilltop which commanded a view of the hills and valleys I had visited the night before. There was a single farmhouse on the hill and the people who lived there went to bed at 9:30 each night, being early risers. So the whole area was silent, deserted, and without lights throughout the night.

  A few minutes after we arrived, Mary pointed out a small reddish light low on a steep wooded hill south of our position. It appeared to be blinking on and off, and bobbing up and down in a manner quite different from any of the stars on the horizon. While we watched breathlessly, barely speaking, it slowly circled the distant fields and woods and crossed in front of us, edging closer and closer. The farmhouse was about seventy-five feet in front of us. The object now appeared to be square or rectangular. It could not be mistaken for a star. It vanished momentarily behind some trees north of the farmhouse and when it reappeared it was much closer. Now we could make out a dark form. The red glow seemed to be a window. It hovered about fifty feet off the ground. I thought I could see a shadowy human figure in the “window” but Mary thought it was some kind of partition. This was the only point on which we disagreed.