by John A. Keel
On December 13 I visited the main office of my telephone exchange a few blocks from my apartment building. A technician and a young “Special Agent” met me at the door and escorted me through the entire building. The security measures were impressive. Every floor consisted of a series of locked rooms. My escorts were constantly fiddling with keys.
My line passed through the walls of my apartment building to the telephone room in the basement. The lines were built into the walls when the building was constructed so there was no way they could be tapped in the house itself. The basement room was always locked. There my line was hooked to a line which traveled in a tube under the city streets to the exchange building. Here again, a tap was impossible. If any tap existed, it had to be in the basement telephone room or in the exchange building.
Inside the exchange, the tube came out in a locked room and my line was separated from the others and soldered to a set of terminals which were connected to wires leading to the dialing mechanism. I had studied books on the telephone system and I knew exactly how all this machinery worked. The only thing that impressed me was the age of all the equipment. Most of it had been built and installed in the 1920s. It would be a compliment to call it junk. It was all antique. Some rooms contained apparatus so old it looked like young Tom Edison’s laboratory. There were coils, meters, switches, and rheostats that were outdated when Marconi was sending his first signals across the Atlantic.
However, all this rickety debris appeared to be in good working condition.
In another locked room a group of people were working with a device called a “pen register.” This was a gadget that could be patched into any telephone line to record every number dialed on that phone. A moving pen wrote the number on a strip of paper. Thus the telephone company could obtain a record of every local call made on a given phone (long-distance calls are automatically recorded on another, more elaborate device).
If anyone was tapping my phone, they had to do it from the two terminals at the tube outlet. Or a connection had to be made at that point and the wires strung to another room. The locked doors and tight security meant that only authorized snoops could connect such a tap. And, as I learned later, the New York Telephone Company was very uncooperative; even the FBI was refused access. Police tappers usually had to figure out a way to do it themselves without the help of the phone company.
I must admit I was impressed by the tour. It seemed impossible for anyone to tap my phone.
Three months later, however, I accidentally discovered what was probably the answer to many of my problems. A friend dialed my number and her finger slipped. Instead of dialing the last two digits—four eight—correctly, she dialed four zero. She realized instantly what she had done and was about to hang up and redial when I answered the phone! She told me what she had done and I suggested we hang up and try four zero again. Again my phone rang. I had two phone numbers and never knew it! I asked other friends to try the four zero number. Sometimes my phone would ring and I would answer. Other times my phone would remain silent but someone else would answer and would offer to “take a message for Mr. Keel.” I called the four zero number from a pay phone and someone picked it up.
“Hi, this is John Keel,” I said cheerily. “Any messages for me?”
There was an audible gasp on the other end and they slammed the receiver down.
Obviously I was getting four zero’s phone bills. I asked my friendly telephone representative to track down the owner of that other phone. But, of course, she could not “give out that information.”
So I went to the FBI to lodge a formal complaint. When you visit the New York FBI office you are ushered into one of several small cubicles where a polite young man hears you out sympathetically. You can imagine the loonies and weirdos who must pester the FBI day after day. But after hearing a summary of my story, my man escorted me to another room where I was interviewed by a group of older agents who were obviously extremely interested in my problems. They expressed surprise that I had been given a tour of the exchange building. This was unheard of. The FBI and CIA hate each other, and they both hate the telephone company. The telephone company, in turn, seems to hate everybody.
In April 1968, my outrageous phone bills were unpaid so my service was cut off, both incoming and outgoing. I simply told everyone to use the four zero number. Although my line was supposedly disconnected at the main exchange, I continued to receive phone calls. The line should have been totally dead … but there was power coming through on it from somewhere. Technically this should have been impossible unless—unless the New York Telephone Company was the one who was tapping my phone!
Phones in the country are much easier to tap. Lines strung across the countryside offer easy access. It is even possible to mount a small induction coil next to the telephone box on the subject’s house. Modern technology is so sophisticated that a physical tap is not necessary. A panel truck containing the necessary equipment can simply park near the telephone line and pick up all the conversations like a radio signal.
In the 1960s there were many mysterious panel trucks cruising around flap areas and sometimes they went to great pains to focus attention on telephones and telephone lines. One tactic was what I call the “silver tape gambit.” Lengths of silver tape are strung rather meaninglessly on the telephone poles close to the subject’s home. I came across this several times and collected some samples of the tape. It was not electrical tape such as might be used by telephone repairmen but was a common weather insulating tape available in almost any hardware store.
“There was also evidence at this time that [the witnesses’s] phone had been tampered with,” Jennifer Stevens reported from Albany, New York, in 1968. “She observed two ‘light Negroid types’ with completely expressionless faces, stringing ‘silver tape’ on the wires near her home. Since they did not have an official telephone company car, she called the police. The men left before the officers arrived and the only comment made by police was: ‘Oh, the silver tape again.’”
In March 1968, a large four-engined plane with no visible markings skirted the treetops over Henderson, West Virginia, just south of Point Pleasant, and discharged a large quantity of silver tape over the trees in the area. Sheriff George Johnson collected some of it and passed samples on to me. Matching samples I had collected from Ohio, Florida, and several other places, it was identical to the stuff being used by our mystery men. Since the tapes are extremely sticky (the glue is about equal to the glue on contac paper) one wonders how a fast-moving plane was able to discharge it in a stream and what was the point of the exercise?
III.
The U.S. Air Force had lied to me. The telephone company lied to me. The UFO entities lied to me. My own senses had, on occasion, lied to me. As December 15 drew closer I kept my mouth shut and told no one that I expected a major blackout. After all, Pope Paul had escaped assassination in Turkey. None of the chemical factories along the Ohio had exploded. Maybe this was just another mischievous error of prophecy, or a description of something in the past or far in the future.
A security officer for the Transit Authority and an old friend of mine, Joe Woodvine, happened to drop by my apartment late on the afternoon of the fifteenth. I hadn’t seen him in a long time and he knew nothing about UFOs and my capers. I didn’t mention the blackout until Dan Drasin stopped in. Joe listened in open-mouthed amazement as I explained to Dan that I expected the nation to blow a fuse the moment President Johnson pulled that switch. Dan was as far gone as I was. He glanced nervously at his watch and decided that if there was going to be a blackout he preferred to be in his own apartment. Joe became very silent, probably wondering if we were dangerous.
Dan left about 5 P.M. I switched on the television. At 5:45 the brief White House ceremony began. I broke out my candles and flashlights. Joe watched me worriedly. President Johnson delivered the customary little speech to the crowd on the White House lawn, reached for the switch, and the Christmas tree blazed with light. The crowd oooed a
nd ahhed as if they had never seen a Christmas tree before. My lights did not go out. Joe studied me silently.
Suddenly an announcer’s voice came over the crowd noises.
“We interrupt this program,” he announced flatly,” for a special bulletin. A bridge laden with rush-hour traffic has just collapsed at Gallipolis, Ohio. Further details as soon as they are available.”
I fell back in my chair. There was no bridge at Gallipolis, Ohio. The only bridge on that stretch of the river was the seven hundred-foot Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant. The bridge I had crossed a thousand times.
“They’ve done it again,” I finally muttered softly. “Those lousy bastards have done it again. They knew this was going to happen … and when. And they gave me all that bilge about a power failure. They knew. They just didn’t want me to be able to warn anyone.”
“They … who’s ‘they,’ John?” Joe asked gently.
The phone rang. It was Dan.
“Did you hear?”
“I heard. I guess that’s what it was all about, Dan. That’s what it was all about.”
19:
“Where the Birds Gather…”*
I.
Thirteen months to the day (November 15, 1966–December 15, 1967) the year of the Garuda came to an end. Like some evil specter of death, Mothman and the UFOs had focused national attention on quiet little Point Pleasant and lured scores of reporters and investigators like myself to the Ohio River valley. When the Silver Bridge died of old age many of these same reporters returned once again to the village to revisit old friends and to share the pain of that tragic Christmas. Wherever you were, you watched the agonized aftermath on national television and read about Point Pleasant on the front pages of your local newspapers.
The Silver Bridge was constructed in 1928 and was an engineering marvel in its day. It became a main artery from West Virginia to Ohio, but had not been designed for the heavy traffic of the 1960s. Huge trucks lumbered across it continuously. People on both sides of the river crossed it daily to shop, go to work, visit friends. The next nearest bridge was almost fifty miles upriver.
On the Ohio side of the river, at the little cluster of shops and dwellings called Kanauga, the stoplight at the mouth of the bridge was malfunctioning that afternoon. It was stuck on green and the rush-hour traffic along Route 7 was creeping past in confusion. Traffic was backing up in both directions and at 5 P.M. the bridge was laden with slow-moving lines of cars and trucks in both directions. The light on the Point Pleasant side had always been recalcitrant, remaining red for so long that many regular bridge users had learned to ignore it. Running the light was a common practice.
Frank Wamsley, a twenty-eight-year-old truck driver, was on his way home to Point Pleasant, riding in a gravel truck with a friend. They found the traffic backed up on the Ohio side. It was to be a black day for the Wamsley family.
On the West Virginia side, Frank’s cousin Barbara and her husband, Paul Hayman, were starting across the bridge in their 1955 Pontiac. And his uncle, Marvin Wamsley, was also on the bridge with two friends in a 1956 Ford convertible.
Bill Needham, twenty-seven, of Ashboro, North Carolina, was muttering under his breath because he had been caught in the 5 o’clock rush hour. He inched his loaded tractor-trailer forward in a low gear. His partner, R. E. Towe, sat beside him in patient silence.
“The old bridge is sure bouncing around today,” Howard Boggs, twenty-four, commented to his wife, Marjorie, nineteen. She was holding their eighteen-month-old daughter, Christie. There were several small children on the bridge, riding with their Christmas-shopping mothers.
“The bridge was shaking, but then it always shook,” William Edmondson, thirty-eight, of King, North Carolina, said later. His partner, Harold Cundiff, was sound asleep in their tractor-trailer.
The traffic jam worsened. The streams of cars and trucks ground to a halt. The old bridge shuddered and squirmed under the weight.
Frank Wamsley spotted his cousin Barbara and her husband and waved to them. Just ahead, he saw Marvin and his two friends. Suddenly the whole bridge convulsed.
The time was 5:04 P.M.
Steel screamed. The seven hundred-foot suspension bridge twisted and the main span split from its 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.
“It sounded like someone moving furniture upstairs, and then the lights went out,” State Trooper R. E. O’Dell said. He was in an insurance office a block from the bridge. “When the lights went out, I guess they really just flickered for a minute, I knew something was wrong. I thought maybe it was a wreck, so I ran outside.”
Mrs. Mary Hyre was in a drugstore on the Main Street, waiting for the traffic to ease so she could cross the bridge and pick up the daily notes from the Gallipolis Hospital.
“There was a sound like a jet plane or a plane going through the sound barrier,” she said afterward. “A rumbling roar that hurt your eardrums. Then the lights flickered. My first thought was that something had blown up. I thought, ‘My God, John was right! Something is exploding!’ I ran outside and someone yelled, ‘The bridge went down!’”
A Christmas tree salesman in Kanauga, H. L. Whobrey, dropped the tree he was holding. “The bridge just keeled over, starting slowly on the Ohio side, then following like a deck of cards to the West Virginia side. It was fantastic. There was a big flash and a puff of smoke when the last of the bridge caved in, I guess the power line snapped.
“I saw three or four people swimming around in the water screaming. I couldn’t do anything. I just stood there and watched. Then I saw a City Ice and Fuel boat come and pick them up.”
Frank Wamsley saw the bridge in front of him tilt sharply and suddenly there was water all around him. “I went all the way to the bottom with the truck. For a minute I didn’t think I was going to get out. Finally I got out and came to the surface and I caught hold of something and held on and was soon picked up.” When a boat pulled alongside he found he could not move his legs and had to be helped aboard. His back was fractured.
Howard Boggs found himself on the bottom of the river, outside his car. “I don’t know how I got out of the car, or how I got to the surface. But all at once I was on top and caught hold of something, like a big cotton ball.”
His wife and child didn’t make it.
Bill Needham’s truck also sank to the bottom but he somehow managed to force a window and reach the surface.
“You could see and hear people screaming for help,” Mary Hyre described the scene. “I saw a tractor-trailer that floated a little before it sank, and a car and merchandise floating on the water. People on the West Virginia side of the river were so upset they could hardly realize what was going on.
“You could hear people saying, This can’t be true … you read about things like this in the papers, but it can’t be happening here…’”
Like Howard Boggs, William Edmundson suddenly found himself on the surface of the water, clinging to a truck seat. He had no idea how he’d escaped from his vehicle. His partner didn’t surface.
“When I got there I could see this truck floating in the water,” Trooper O’Dell explained “There was a fellow hanging on the side of it. Then they sank. I don’t know if he got out.”
People came running from all directions, silent, ashened-faced, knowing their friends and relatives could be out there in the icy water now covered with debris and soggy, gaily wrapped Christmas packages. Boats of all kinds crisscrossed the river picking up survivors.
On both sides of the river people who had been waiting in the lines to drive over the bridge were crying. Some had to be treated for shock.
Night was closing in quickly. Boats with searchlights turned their beams onto the bridge and the surrounding water. A horrible silence fell over Point Pleasant. Sheriff Johnson’s tall, spare figure stood on the water’s edge.
“
Put out a general call for rescue units,” he told a deputy softly. “And get everyone here. Block all the roads. Don’t let anyone but rescue units into town.”
Mary Hyre pulled her coat around her pudgy frame and walked slowly to her office, tears running down her face, her years of experience overriding her emotions. She pushed open the door and walked to her phones. They were dead. She switched on the Teletype machine and started to peck away with two fingers.
“At 5:04 P.M. this afternoon…”
Sirens wailed outside and the crowds grew. A girl was screaming hysterically in front of the office. “I almost got killed … I could have been on there … all those people dead … I could have been killed.”
II.
Two miles north of the bridge, Mrs. Jackie Lilly was in a grocery store waiting for her teen-aged children. They were planning to go bowling in the alleys on the other side of the river that night. Her husband, Jim, was away, working on his boat.
At 5:20 Gary and Johnny Lilly rushed breathlessly into the store.
“The bridge just fell in the river,” Johnny declared.
“That’s not very funny,” his mother replied.
“It’s true. The old bridge just collapsed,” Gary said grimly. “And it was full of cars.”
Johnny, who was married, drove them home to their little house on Camp Conley Road. Mrs. Lilly headed for a phone. It was dead. As Johnny drove off, dashing back to Point Pleasant to be with his wife, Gary, eighteen, turned on the television set and searched for a news program.
A few minutes later Gary glanced out of the picture window in the living room and gasped.
“There’s something out there!” he exclaimed.
