The Mothman Prophecies

by John A. Keel

  The light traveled on to the ravine that passed behind North Park Road, then it dipped down and moved low along the bottom of the ravine. Betty Kelly, thirteen, looked out the kitchen window of the Kelly house and screamed.

  “Ma … it’s back!”

  The glowing thing was appearing nightly behind the Kelly home. It seemed to settle in their backyard at times and the glow faded slightly so they could see a definite object. They even thought they saw a triangular doorway in it and what appeared to be frosted glass windows. Their neighbors had all been watching, too, but had wisely avoided publicity. They didn’t want their street to become another Camp Conley Road or TNT area.

  When Betty cried out, Bill Kelly, her father, grumbled in the living room. He was an electronics engineer and he had just taken the back off the family’s brand-new color TV set. The set had blown out the night before when the object had paid a visit. “Somebody should do something about these things,” he complained.

  The object began to glow more intensely and then it vanished.

  “Where did it go?” Mrs. Kelly asked her daughter.

  “I don’t know—it—it just went.” She started to cry. She would be so nervous and upset that she wouldn’t go to school the next day.

  The phone rang. Bill Kelly looked at it as if it were a snake. He picked it up slowly, listened and scowled, then replaced the receiver. His wife glanced at him expectantly.

  “Another one of those calls … beeep, beep, beep,” he nodded.

  On top of a hill east of Point Pleasant Mary Hyre and I stood by our cars looking down at the village.

  “Where did it go, John?”

  I was straining my eyesight through a cheap telescope.

  “I think it went down that ravine by North Park. But I can’t see it now.”

  “At least it was right on schedule.”

  Flickering red and green lights suddenly appeared.

  “A plane,” I noted.

  “Probably Doctor Shaw. He told me he’s been spooking the people at the TNT area.”

  “It’s hard to mistake an airplane for one of those UFO lights.”

  “Look!” she called out sharply. “Something is following that plane.”

  A few hundred feet behind the plane I could see a large black object, almost as big as the plane itself but completely without lights.

  “Mothman! Is it Mothman?”

  I fumbled with my telescope. It’s very difficult to zero in on an object in the night sky with a handheld telescope. I couldn’t even locate the plane.

  The plane crossed the river and headed for the Gallipolis airport. The thing following him was quickly lost in the black sky.

  We returned to Mary’s office and found all the phones ringing. People were seeing flying objects all up and down the valley. Some had probably just seen the good doctor’s nocturnal sortie, but others described what sounded like genuine UFOs.

  That was April 5, 1967, a Wednesday. I had collected and analyzed some seven hundred UFO reports from 1966 and discovered that the greatest number of sightings, 20 percent, took place on Wednesdays. I called this “the Wednesday phenomenon.” The events of 1967 conformed to this curious pattern, as have the sightings of later flaps. The major events of October 1973 were concentrated around Wednesdays, particularly Wednesday, October 17.

  So here was another curious contradiction. The entities professed to be ignorant of our time frame; yet the objects managed to fly to a rigid schedule that could be measured by our clocks and calendars.

  When I interviewed attorney Robert Wright in Sistersville, West Virginia, he told me the things have turned up every Wednesday throughout the summer of 1966, “like clockwork.”

  No one except the U.S. Air Force had attempted even a superficial statistical analysis of UFO sightings before, so my findings were greeted with howls of derision by the scientists who posed as experts on the phenomenon. Then Dr. David Saunders of Colorado University fed several thousand sightings into a computer and found the Wednesday phenomenon remained stable. That day produced the largest number of sightings, well beyond the laws of chance and averages.

  In March 1967, Ralph Jarrett talked me into violating my “low-profile” policy and I appeared with him on the Jackie Oberlinger show on WCHS-TV in Charleston. In the course of our discussion I mentioned that the best time to see a UFO was 10 P.M. on a Wednesday. Mrs. Oberlinger, a vivacious blond lady and very much a local celebrity, took me at my word. On Wednesday, March 29, she and a group of her friends gathered in her backyard in Charleston and, sure enough, at exactly 10 P.M. three globes of brilliant white light passed directly overhead in a V-formation.

  The Wednesday phenomenon works. I’ve been studying it for years and I still can’t say why it works. Researchers in other parts of the world have now followed my example and found similar time patterns in the sightings in their own countries. The table below is a breakdown of sightings recorded in 1950, as analyzed by Saunders, United States; Ballester-Orlando, Spain; Bonabot, Belgium.

  II.

  Soon after arriving in Point Pleasant and getting a handle on the scope of the situation, I phoned the Lockburn Air Force Base in Ohio and outlined what was happening to a Lieutenant Hoffman, the base UFO officer. He was very polite, but he was also disinterested and it was clear the air force was not going to launch any kind of investigation.

  Perhaps an investigation was already underway. As I wandered around Main Street in early April I noticed a surprising number of strangers who just didn’t seem to fit in. They had the indelible look of federal officers … conservative ties, square clothes, recent haircuts. There must have been fifteen or twenty of them. I saw them in the local restaurants and drugstores, everywhere.

  “Is there a convention in town?” I asked Mary Hyre.

  “So you noticed them, too?” She smiled. “Everybody’s been asking me about them. But so far I haven’t found out a thing.”

  I decided to trap one of them into a conversation, but they all vanished before I could do so.

  One night Roger Scarberry, Steve Mallette, and myself were driving around the TNT area when we came upon a large black Cadillac parked in the shadows. I slammed on the brakes, got out of our car, and walked over to the other vehicle. A well-dressed, distinguished-looking man was sitting behind the wheel holding a microphone in his hand. I tried to engage him in a conversation but he would only grunt. Obviously he wanted to be left alone. I never saw him again.

  My days were spent tracking down witnesses and in early evening I would cruise through the TNT area before going to Five Mile Creek Road for skywatches that usually lasted until 3 or 4 A.M. Then I would drive back to Point Pleasant, cross the rickety old Silver Bridge into Ohio, and grab a few hours sleep at the Blue Fountain.

  Three or four miles south of my secret hilltop there was a heavily forested ridge. The object with the reddish “window” which Mary and I had seen on our first night seemed to have come from there. Each night at exactly 10 P.M. a bright red glow would appear on that ridge, as if someone had just turned on a powerful light. Thinking there might be a house there, or a road (and we were watching auto taillights), I returned in daylight but found it would have been a very long hike to reach it. No buildings were visible there. I drove through the roads in the Chief Cornstalk Hunting Grounds, hoping to find a road up that particular ridge but apparently it was inaccessible.

  On Thursday, April 6, Mrs. Hyre accompanied me to Five Mile Creek Road and we watched as the light came on, right on schedule. Suddenly we saw an identical-type light behind the trees north of our position in the very spot where I had seen the glowing disc descend. I knew there were no houses or roads in that direction. We divided our attention between the two lights. Both seemed to be moving through the trees very slowly. I got out of the car with my flashlight and flashed it three times in the direction of the southern ridge. An instant later there were three extremely bright flashes. Mary nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “They answered you!”
she declared.

  The red light rose upward until it was a hundred feet or so above the trees. Then it went out, as if someone had turned off a switch. The light in the north dipped down behind the trees and disappeared.

  AFFIDAVIT

  To whom it may concern:

  I, Mrs. Mary Hyre of 219-Sixth Street, Point Pleasant, W. Va., a reporter for the Athens (Ohio) Messenger, hereby swear that I was present at the following event and personally witnessed it as described.

  On the evening of April 6, 1967, I accompanied Mr. John A. Keel of New York City to an isolated hilltop on Five Mile Creek Road south of Gallipolis Ferry, W. Va. Shortly after 11 p.m. I observed a pale red object of undetermined size moving in a controlled manner slightly above tree-top level over a hill about 500 yards south of our position. There are no houses or roads on that hill. The object appeared to move cautiously and slowly through the sky to the far end of the sloping field, the light flickering on and off in an irregular pattern.

  As the object drew closer, Mr. Keel got out of the car and flashed a powerful flashlight directly at it three times. The object immediately returned the signal by flashing a brilliant white light three times. Then it rose upwards and the pale red light went completely out.

  This day personally appeared before me in my office, county and state, Mary Hyre, known to me personally, and acknowledged the above statement to be true and that she personally signed her signature in my presence.

  Given under my hand this 21 day of June 1967.

  My commission expires June 12 1977

  Howard Schultz Notary Public

  Mrs. Mabel McDaniel and two other women went to the hill with me the following night. About 10:15 the usual reddish glow appeared on the southern hill. Then a second one popped up a short distance from the first. I flashed my light at them but nothing happened. So I climbed a fence and walked into a field to try to get a closer look. The two objects slowly came together. As I crossed the field I suddenly noticed something new … a pale bluish ball of light hovering high in the trees of an orchard behind the nearby farmhouse. The light moved about from tree to tree as though it were following my movements. I flashed my light at it and it flared with dazzling brilliance, dimmed, and vanished. Simultaneously, the lights on the southern ridge grew brighter for a moment and then also went out. I slowly made my way back across the field in the dark, climbed the fence, and returned to Mrs. McDaniel’s car. I was surprised to find all three women in a very frightened state.

  “I think we’d better leave,” Mrs. McDaniel said nervously. They drove off quickly.

  Five minutes later, as I sat alone in my car, the reddish glow flared up again on the ridge. For the first time, it changed color from red to a glaring white and rose slowly upward, bobbing like a Yo-Yo toward the river in the west. Apparently some boatmen on the river saw the object also, for a bright searchlight suddenly shot up from behind the hills, aimed directly at the luminous thing. When the searchlight appeared, the object halted in mid-flight, dropped downward, and went out. The searchlight continued to scan the sky.

  The next day I talked with Mrs. McDaniel and told her what I had seen.

  “Too bad you didn’t stick around,” I remarked.

  “We were pretty scared,” she began. “We … oh, you’ll probably think we were being silly.”

  “Did that blue light frighten you?”

  “It wasn’t the light,” she said hesitantly. “We saw that. And then we saw a tall man in the field. We all saw him climb over the fence and cross behind our car. We thought it was you coming back. Then your flashlight went on way out in the field and we knew it wasn’t you. We ran the windows up and locked the doors and waited for you to come back.”

  I had certainly not seen anyone else in that field. Had their eyes been playing tricks? Or were there phantoms on that hilltop?

  That weekend I drove into Ohio to check out some of the many weird events happening there. One of my all-time favorites happened in the little village of Duncan Falls. Here is the verbatim entry from my journal:

  Sometime in late October 1966 (witness does not remember exact date) Mr. Leonard “Shy” Elmore, 72, of Duncan Falls, Ohio, was taking a stroll around 4 A.M. when he encountered a strange “building” which frightened him badly. Like many elderly people, Mr. Elmore does not sleep well and often takes long walks late at night. On this particular morning, he was walking along a road two blocks from his home when he saw a strange “L-shaped building that looked like a galvanized iron shed” sitting in the middle of a large field. Since he had never noticed this “shed” before he walked closer to take a better look. Something about it frightened him … later he could not explain why it had scared him … and he turned and started to hurry away. Although it was dark and he could see no windows or doors in the “shed,” he claims that he distinctly heard a normal male voice come from it. “Don’t run … don’t run,” the voice called. “I didn’t ’sactly run,” Mr. Elmore told me, “but I walked pretty fast.”

  He hurried home and got his rifle and returned to the site. To his astonishment, the “shed” was gone. This incident upset him very much and, according to his wife, he was a nervous wreck for several days afterwards. He decided to call the sheriff and report what he’d seen. The sheriff promised to come out and take a look … but never did. Mr. Elmore told me his story in a direct manner without embellishments or wandering speculations.

  No Men in Black came around to bother Mr. Elmore. I was the first reporter to talk to him. When he showed me the field I was perturbed to find that it was right next to the Duncan Falls Elementary School. An unusual number of sightings and Fortean* events seem to be concentrated around schools and the largest percentage of witnesses consists of children between the ages of seven and eighteen. Another statistical oddity is that the majority of the adults who claim their autos were pursued by UFOs or monsters are schoolteachers, especially teachers specializing in abnormal children—the very bright or the mentally deficient. This is why I was so interested in the West Virginia “census takers” who were mainly concerned with the numbers and ages of the children living in the Ohio valley.

  12:

  Games Nonpeople Play

  I.

  “Woodrow Derenberger is pregnant!”

  The word flashed up and down the Ohio valley, and many people took the absurd rumor seriously. The space people had selected Woody for a unique experiment, so the story went, and he had gone into hiding to nurture his rapidly swelling stomach. He would soon be giving birth to a very special baby; part earthling, part extraterrestrial. The child was slated to grow into a great leader.

  The events of 1966–67 had fractured everyone’s sense of credulity. Almost anything now seemed possible. A pregnant man was no more absurd than the winged behemoth, or the gigantic illuminated forms that cruised up and down the Ohio nightly. A fantastic new world was taking shape, populated by spacemen who drove Cadillacs and Volkswagens, psychiatrists who heard bodiless voices in the night, and things that ate dogs and cattle while everyone was looking in the wrong direction.

  Like everyone else, I was caught up in the games, mystery piling upon mystery. Someone somewhere obviously knew every move I was making, or so it seemed. I became very secretive, not even telling my closest friends where I was going or where I had been. Nevertheless, something seemed to be following me. I would drop in unannounced on a remote farm and soon after I settled down to chat with the residents their phone would ring and there would be no one on the line, or a series of loud beeps would ring out. The farmer would act astonished.

  “We’ve never had a call like that before!”

  The phone would ring repeatedly until I left.

  This happened several different times in several different places.

  I used a system of “spot checks,” visiting homes in flap areas and talking with people who had never reported anything. Mrs. Hyre accompanied me on a number of these spot checks and was amazed at how much had been going on. Her name and fa
ce were familiar to everyone in the area and her reputation as a fair, objective reporter was impeccable. People automatically loosened up when they saw her and talked freely. In the hills surrounding Point Pleasant we heard many stories about footsteps on the roof, strange metallic clangings (the most common being the sound of a car door slamming outside the house when there were no cars in sight). One family showed us how the flap covering the entrance to their attic had been mysteriously moved. It was a hole in the ceiling of a bedroom and could only be reached with a high ladder. Others complained of “Gypsies” marching across their property late at night; men in bright reflective clothing and women in ankle-length dresses, all with long hair and dark Oriental faces. (This was well before the hippie explosion of the late 1960s.)

  North of Gallipolis, Ohio, I impulsively stopped at an isolated farmhouse one afternoon and when I knocked at the door a grim-faced man answered with a shotgun in his hands. I started to show my credentials and explain who I was but he cut me short.

  “I know who you are,” he growled. “We don’t want anything to do with you. Get out of here.”

  Puzzled, I reported back to Mary and suggested that she visit the farm to see if she could find out the reason for the man’s strange behavior.

  The next day we went back. I remained in the car while she talked with him for several minutes. Finally they both came out to the car laughing.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” the farmer began apologetically, “but ten minutes before you arrived here yesterday I got a phone call. It sounded like a neighbor of mine and he said he was calling to warn me about a crazy man … a real dangerous type … with a beard … that had just been to see him. Said I shouldn’t have anything to do with him. Ten minutes later you showed up. After you left, I called him back. He was out in the fields. Had been all day. His wife had to go get him. He said he hadn’t made that call.”

  I looked sternly at Mary.

  “Is this some kind of a put-on?”

  “Absolutely not,” she answered, turning to the farmer. “Tell him the rest of it.”