Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel

by Keel, John A.

  Nebraska was reportedly visited next, in 1922, when two different witnesses in different locales described essentially the same thing. One, a hunter named William C. Lamb, said he observed the landing of a strange circular flying craft, and hid behind a tree. A giant 8-foot tall creature with wings disembarked, and flew off. (There were thousands of UFO sightings throughout the world in 1922, although the newspapers of the period usually referred to them as “mystery aircraft” and “ghost ships.”)

  At 2:30 a.m. on a hot morning in June 1953, Mrs. Hilda Walker, 23, Howard Phillips, 33, and Judy Meyers, 14, were sitting on their porch on E. 3rd St. in Houston, TX when, as Mrs. Walker told it, “I saw a huge shadow across the lawn. I thought at first that it was a magnified reflection of a big moth caught in the nearby streetlight. Then the shadow seemed to bound upward into a pecan tree. We all looked up.”

  According to The Houston Chronicle, they saw a 6 to 7-ft. tall man in gray, fitted with wings like a bat. He was surrounded by a dim gray light. Judy Meyers screamed, and the light died out.

  “Immediately afterwards,” Mrs. Walker said, “we heard a loud ‘swoosh’ over the housetops across the street. It was like a white flash of a torpedo-shaped object.”

  Almost ten years passed before the unearthly “Bird” was reported again, back in West Virginia (in 1962, in South Charleston and Pt. Pleasant – both uninvestigated at the time).

  Then, late on the evening of Nov. 21, 1963, four teenagers were walking home from a dance when they saw what they described as an oval of bright light descend from the sky and land in a thicket close to their path. “It seemed like we were being watched,” John Flaxton, 17, told authorities later. “I felt cold all over. Then suddenly we saw a huge, dark figure shambling out of the bushes toward us.”

  The four youngsters didn’t wait another second. They fled. Under close interrogation, they all told the same story. And they all agreed that the creature had wings like a bat, and no visible head. Giant footprints were found in the area later. They were an inch deep, two feet long, and nine inches across.

  That incident occurred near Sandling Park, Hythe, Kent, in England.

  It’s a long ways from Kent, England, to Scott, Mississippi, a little town of 300 just north of Greenville. But at 2 p.m. on Sept. 1, 1966, Mrs. James Ikart of Scott phoned the Delta Democrat Times in Greenville and reported “a man with wings” was circling over the town. Photographers and reporters rushed to the scene, but the odd aerial object was gone. There were, however, a number of people who admitted having seen it.

  “It got down pretty low, and then would go up,” Mrs. Ikart said. “I had never seen anything like it.”

  A local meteorologist, John Hursh, suggested that it was just “somebody’s research balloon that got away.”

  A few weeks later that “research balloon” turned up hundreds of miles northeast of Scott, Mississippi. This time the “balloon” landed within short driving distance from monster-ridden Braxton County in West Virginia. Five gravediggers near Clendenin, WV were among the first to glimpse “The Bird.” Kenneth Duncan of Blue Creek, WV, claimed that he and the others were baffled when something that “looked like a brown human being” performed an aerial reconnaissance of the grave site in broad daylight on Saturday, Nov. 12, 1966. “It was gliding through the trees and was in sight for about a minute,” Duncan stated.

  The real saga of Mothman did not begin until three days later, however. Around midnight on Nov. 15, 1966, two young married couples, Mr. and Mrs. Roger Scarberry and Mr. and Mrs. Steve Mallette, were driving through an abandoned WWII ammunition dump known as the TNT Area, seven miles outside of Pt. Pleasant, WV, when they unwittingly entered the Twilight Zone. As they passed an old deserted power plant, they saw a weird figure standing beside the road staring at them.

  “It was shaped like a man, but bigger,” Roger Scarberry told me. “Maybe six-and-a-half or seven feet tall. And it had big wings folded against its back.”

  “But it was those eyes that got us,” Mrs. Scarberry declared with a shudder. “It had two big, red eyes, like automobile tail-light reflectors.”

  “For a minute we could only stare at it,” Roger said. “Then it just turned and sort of shuffled toward the open door of the old power plant. We didn’t wait around.”

  Roger, a strapping but soft-spoken and introspective 19-yr. old, stepped on the gas pedal of his souped-up jalopy and headed out of the TNT Area for Rt. 62, which leads into Pt. Pleasant. As they shot down the highway, his wife cried out, “It’s following us!”

  “We were doing better than 100 miles per hour,” Roger said.

  All four swore that “The Bird” was low overhead, its wings spread out to about 10 feet. It seemed to keep up with the car effortlessly, even though its wings weren’t flapping.

  “I could hear it making a sound,” Mrs. Mallette declared. “It squeaked, like a big mouse.”

  “It followed us right up to the city limits,” Roger said. “Funny thing, we noticed a dead dog by the side of the road there. When we came back a few minutes later, the dog was gone.”

  They drove directly to the office of the Mason County sheriff and excitedly poured out their story to Deputy Millard Halstead.

  “I’ve known them all their lives,” Halstead told me later. “They’ve never been in any trouble. I took them seriously. They saw something. They were really scared.”

  Deputy Halstead returned to the TNT Area with the excited quartet. As he parked outside the abandoned power plant, the police radio in his car suddenly emitted a strange sound like a speeded up phonograph record. He shut the radio off. “The Bird,” however, was nowhere to be found.

  The next day, a press conference was held in the County Courthouse and the four young people repeated their story. One of the reporters there, Mrs. Mary Hyre, Pt. Pleasant correspondent for the Athens, OH Messenger and a local stringer for the Associated Press, later told me, “I’ve heard them repeat their story a hundred times now to reporters from all over, and none of them have ever changed it or added a word.”

  News of the Scarberry-Mallette sighting was flashed around the world. It even appeared in the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes. Television camera crews from Huntington and Charleston invaded Pt. Pleasant. That night, the normally deserted TNT Area resembled Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Thousands of people from Ohio and West Virginia descended in hopes of getting a glimpse of the new sensation, even though Steve Mallette had announced, “I’ve seen it once. I hope I never see it again.”

  The TNT Area was to become the “home ground” of the Bird in the months ahead, and it couldn’t have picked a better base. The area consists of several hundred acres of woods and open fields filled with large concrete domes known as “igloos.” During World War II, these igloos were used to store the high explosives manufactured in nearby plants. A network of tunnels laced throughout the area, but most of these are now sealed off and are filled with water. Immediately adjoining the area is the McClintic Wildlife Station, a 2,500-acre animal preserve and bird sanctuary. Both places are filled with artificial ponds and dense woodlands. Steep, heavily forested, almost inaccessible hills rise in the background. The entire area is thrown open to hunters and fishermen every year, and nearly every male in the county knows every inch of the place. Its winding, poorly kept roads are also popular as “lover’s lanes.”

  Only a few homes are scattered throughout the sector. One of these is the residence of the Ralph Thomas family. Their little house stands on a slight rise surrounded by woods and “igloos.” It was here that the next act of the Mothman drama was enacted. At 9 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 1966, Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Wamsley and Mrs. Marcella Bennett and her daughter, Tina, drove out to visit with the Thomases.

  “On the way to the house, we were watching a big, funny red light in the sky,” Mrs. Bennett told me sometime later. “It seemed to be moving around over the TNT Area. It wasn’t an airplane, but we couldn’t figure out what it was.”

  Like everyo
ne else, they had heard of the “monster” sighting of the night before, and Raymond Wamsley decided he would play a prank on the Thomases by tapping surreptitiously on their window. However, he never had the chance to play the joke.

  They parked in front of the Thomas home and Mrs. Bennett climbed out of the car, gathering up her sleepy 2-yr. old, Tina, in her arms. Suddenly, a figure stirred behind the parked car.

  “It seemed as if it had been laying down,” Mrs. Bennett said. “It rose up slowly from the ground. A big gray thing... Bigger than a man, with terrible, glowing red eyes.”

  Mrs. Bennett was so horrified that she dropped Tina to the ground, stumbled, and fell. She remained on the ground for a long moment, transfixed.

  “It was if the thing had her in some kind of trance,” Raymond Wamsley said. “She couldn’t move.”

  Panic engulfed the group. The Wamsleys ran for the house as Mrs.Bennett pulled herself together, grabbed up her bruised child, and followed. They locked themselves in. Ralph and Virginia Thomas were not home, but three of their children, Rickie, Connie, and Vickie, were. Hysteria swept over them as the strange creature shuffled onto the porch and peered into the windows. Raymond Wamsley grabbed the phone and called the police. But by the time help arrived, the thing had disappeared once more.

  Mrs. Bennett would not fully recover fully from this horrifying experience for many weeks. Months passed before she was able to discuss what she had seen with anyone, even her own family. Her trauma was so real that she had to start seeing a doctor on a weekly basis.

  Now Mothman started to cut crazy capers all over West Virginia. Sightings were reported in Mason, Lincoln, Logan, Kanawha, and Nicholas Counties. Most of the population remained skeptical, but the near-hysteria of the rapidly multiplying witnesses was very real. Police in the city of Charleston, WV received an excited phone call from one Richard West at 10:15 p.m., Monday, Nov. 21st. Patrolman D.L. Tucker handled the call. West insisted that a “Batman” was sitting on a roof next to his home. “It looks just like a man. It’s about 6 feet tall, and has a wingspread of 6 or 8 feet. It has great big red eyes.”

  “Did it fly? Tucker asked.

  “Straight up, just like a helicopter,” West replied.

  In St. Albans, WV, just outside of Charleston, Mrs. Ruth Foster claimed Mothman appeared on her front lawn on the evening of November 26th.

  “It was standing on the lawn beside the porch,” she told reporters. “It was tall with big red eyes that popped out of its face. My husband is six-feet-one and the bird looked about the same height or a little shorter, maybe. It had a funny little face. I didn’t see any beak. All I saw were those red, poppy eyes. I screamed and ran back into the house. My brother-in-law went out to look, but it was gone.”

  Sheila Cain, 13, and her younger sister were walking home from the store in St. Albans on the following evening, when they saw an enormous “something” standing next to a local junkyard.

  “It was gray and white with big red eyes,” Sheila said, “and it must have been seven feet tall – taller than a man. I screamed, and we ran home.”

  The creature is supposed to have taken wing and flown low over the running girls.

  By this time, the Bird’s peculiar characteristics were becoming apparent. Whatever it was, most witnesses described it as man-sized or bigger, yet all agreed that it had a wingspan of only 8-10 feet. Such a wingspread would have been inadequate for such a large creature. If you were to attach wings to a normal-sized man so he could glide, you would have to make the wings at least 35 feet long. Like the bumblebee, Mothman’s flight seemed scientifically impossible. In addition, most large birds require a running start and a lot of wing flapping before they can become airborne. But all of the Mothman witnesses swore that he, or it, took off straight up and flew without flapping the wings at all. Only a few birds in the hawk and eagle families can exceed 40 to 50 miles per hour in level flight, yet Mothman repeatedly demonstrated an ability to pursue speeding autos effortlessly and swiftly.

  On November 17th, Steve Farrell, 17, claimed that a “giant gray bird” chased his automobile on Rt. 7, near Cheshire, OH, just across the river from the TNT Area. And a Clarksburg, WV shoe salesman, Thomas Ury, 25, reported a hair-raising encounter on Rt. 62, a mile or so north of the TNT Area. He was driving past the Homer Smith farm at 7:15 a.m. on Nov. 25th, Ury testified, when he sighted a large flying figure...

  “It veered over my convertible and began going in circles, three telephone poles high,” the frightened young man later told Sheriff George Johnson. “It kept flying right over my car, even though I was doing about 75 mph.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he confided to reporter Mary Hyre. “I was so scared I just couldn’t go to work that day. This thing had a wingspan every bit of 10 feet. It could just be a large bird, but I certainly have never seen one like it.”

  Miss Connie Carpenter, a shy, studious girl of 18 from New Haven, WV, allegedly had an identical encounter at 10:30 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 27th. She was driving home from church, she told me, when she saw what she thought at first was a large man in gray, standing on the deserted links of the Mason County Golf Course outside of Mason, WV, on Rt. 33. Those 10-foot wings suddenly unfolded, and the thing took off, straight up, and headed for her car.

  “Those eyes! They were a fiery red and, once they were fixed on me, I couldn’t take my eyes off them,” she declared. “It’s a wonder I didn’t have a wreck.”

  She said the creature flew directly at her windshield, then veered off and disappeared. Connie stepped on the gas and raced home. She was so upset that she was unable to go to school for several days after her experience, and she required medical attention.

  She was also one of the few to claim a close look at the Mothman’s face. “It was horrible – like something out of a science-fiction movie.”

  The next morning, her eyes were reddened and swollen shut, and itched fiercely. This condition persisted for over two weeks. In fact, her eyes were still red and watery when I first interviewed her. I had seen this odd ailment several times before, but only on UFO witnesses who claimed to have gotten a close look at the luminous objects. Connie Carpenter was the only Mothman witness to come down with “eye burn.”

  I myself suffered from this phenomenon when, at 1:30 a.m. on April 3rd, 1967, an eerie circle of green and red light swooped down to within 60 feet of my car on a hilltop outside of Gallipolis Ferry, WV. My eyes were swollen and itchy for about five days afterwards. The next day, I returned to the site with Sheriff George Johnson and Deputy Millard Halstead. We scoured the area with a Geiger counter with negative results. One odd thing did happen, however. As Sheriff Johnson’s car neared the spot, his police radio suddenly sprang to life with strange sounds, like a speeded up phonograph record. The startling thing was that his police radio had to be turned on and off with a key; the radio was not only turned off at the time, but the key wasn’t even in it!

  The first wave of Mothman sightings in the TNT Area created a crisis for Sheriff Johnson and his small force. Thousands of people, many of them armed with rifles and revolvers, poured into the area nightly, hoping to see the monster and maybe get a shot at it. Swarms of teenagers clambered around the stripped-down old power plant with its many high, dangerous catwalks, and crumbling staircases. The gate leading to the plant was closed, and the place was ruled off-limits. For a time, Johnson and his men banned firearms in the area, fearing that the men might start shooting each other.

  Somehow, Mothman always seemed to turn up where he was not wanted. Clandestine lovers, necking in parked cars on the isolated, unlit backroads of the TNT Area reported that the giant gray thing with glowing red eyes lumbered up to their autos. In November 1967, I cruised around the area for the last time and noted that there was not a single car parked anywhere. The local lovers seem to have abandoned the place.

  Shortly after the first Mothman stories hit the local papers, a wide variety of explanations were expressed by assorted experts. Dr. R
obert Smith of the West Virginia University biology department declared that everyone was obviously seeing a rare Sandhill crane, a bird whose long neck and long legs give it a height of six feet (and it has red patches around the eyes). Yet no hunter in the area has ever reported seeing such a crane. Members of the zoology department at nearby Ohio University pointed out that the crane inhabits the plains of Canada, and had never been seen in the West Virginia-Ohio region.

  For a time, I carried a photo of a Sandhill crane in my briefcase, and showed it to Mothman witnesses. “That’s not the thing we saw,” Roger Scarberry scoffed. “This crane could never chase us like [Mothman] did.”

  “I just wish Dr. Smith could see the thing,” Mary Mallette added.

  All those who reported having seen Mothman sneered at the crane theory, but the skeptics quickly accepted it and dismissed the mystery. Three groups of witnesses contributed to the confusion by declaring that they were absolutely convinced the “Bird” was really some kind of giant ornithological oddity and not a “monster from outer space,” as some were beginning to imply.

  Capt. Paul Yoder and Benjamin Enochs, both volunteer firemen from Pt. Pleasant, revealed that they had seen a very large bird in the TNT Area on Nov. 18, 1966. “It was definitely a bird,” they stated flatly, “with big red eyes. But it was huge. We’d never seen anything like it.”

  Seventy miles north of Pt. Pleasant, as the “Bird” flies, four people outside of Lowell, OH, spent a fascinating Saturday afternoon watching a group of gigantic birds flutter about the trees near Cat’s Creek. They saw no red eyes, witness Marvin Shock offered, but they did see four very strange winged creatures, and kept them in view for two hours on Nov. 26, 1966. Shock, who was accompanied by his two children, Marlene, 14, and Phillip, 11, first noticed the birds in some tree branches.

  “They looked about as big as a man would look moving around in the trees,” Shock said later. “When we started walking toward them for a closer look – we were about 100 yards from them – they took off and flew up the ridge.”