The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story

When you look at the latest cover of John A. Keel's The Mothman Prophecies - the book for which the movie, staring Richard Gere is based upon - you see the words: "a true story." Those three words could repel you, cause you to repudiate the book's claims. It might make you laugh, though not likely. The third reaction is to be engrossed, to take everything at face value. While this can be dangerous, The Mothman Prophecies is just the kind of book to challenge your way of thinking as a vessel into a belief that is frightening and incredible. I'm of the belief that American folklore is haunted folklore. You can't flip on the television without seeing a reality based program where strangers invade a home or "haunted" location, poke around, and gather evidence. The term "Squatchin'," a word that essentially means to go out into the woods and hunt for bigfoot, is part of the American lexicon of words. America's folklore is populated by ghosts, hairy ape men, lake monsters, and many other legends. Among them lives the Mothman, a six foot tall humanoid, covered with brown hair, and with wings that span ten feet, on average. The most stunning feature though are those glowing red eyes. Even to those who have never seen such a creature, they know those eyes, as if through telepathic means. This creature haunts the psyche of a collective body. The Mothman hasn't been sighted often in our modern era, if you can believe the reports. Some say he was seen flying over the ruins of The Twin Towers, and there are others that believe the creature has been sighted all over the world. It was 1966-67, though, when this creature became celebrity, and with it, one of the most consistent and incredible sightings of UFOs, MIB, and aliens of all kinds, even of the strange human variety. The first official sighting of the creature occurred on November 15th 1966 in Point Pleasant, WV; a town as vital to the legend as IT was to Derry, Maine. In and around Point Pleasant, sightings of UFOs occurred as regularly, if not more than Mothman. More terrifying than those sightings were that of the Men in Black. The way Keel describes them in his book, it's as if they're aliens in human disguise, except they don't know how to act human. The simplest things, such as ballpoint pens and Jell-o seemed to confuse them. They all looked relatively the same; short, oriental features, unnatural skin color, large eyes, and erratic behavior. Likewise were the encounters that some people had with alien beings. Woodrow Derenberger's encounters with the being named Indrid Cold are widely publicized, but Keel goes into great depth on Woody's encounters with the man, including time in a space craft and visits to a planet called Lanulos. Keel's style of storytelling relies less on the chronological, though the overall focus of the book is kept in a tidy nature, in the larger scope of the Silver Bridge Collapse. He focuses on certain events, beings, or phenomena as the subjects of his chapters. As a journalist, his writing is top notch; investigative reporting about strange phenomena has never been more brilliantly told. Keel also does a phenomenal job introducing theories to account for some of the "goings on" during the time period, including explanations on hypnosis, names and shared Greek characteristics, and theories about ley lines and UFO phenomena. He does his best to play the skeptic, but having experienced many of these events himself, he explains them as any person would, faced with the unknown, through human context. If you've seen the faux documentary, Mermaids: The Body Found - the purpose of such a documentary, aside from telling a compelling story, is to make you think, challenge your world view. The Mothman Prophecies, is the original Mermaids, only, to hundreds of people, the events surrounding 1966-67 in West Virginia were real. This is a book first published in the 1970's and today it is still haunting, fascinating, and a frightening display of what the unknown is capable of. At the end of the book, like the end of West Virginia's 13 months of terror, you're left with questions, and an explanation that is altogether hard to believe. If you're looking for an acceptable answer though, that's up to you, the reader, in that last fateful chapter. If all you've ever known of The Mothman is from the Richard Gere film, grab this book and let it grab and hold you; this book doesn't let go easy.

THE MOTHMAN PROPHESIES - Although I am a great fan of the movie, I only recently learned that the source for that film was John Keel's original book also entitled THE MOTHMAN PROPHESIES, a very interesting and enjoyable read. Until reading this book I had no idea that the legend of the Mothman was in any way related to UFO sightings as these were not emphasized in the film. Since I am a 63 year old amateur astronomer and have spent many evening hours while living in Florida, Connecticut, New Jersey as well as upstate New York scanning the night skies with my telescopes and binoculars, I am definitely not a believer in UFO stories. It is nice to hear another theory from John Keel based more on possible other dimensions, world lines and the spirit realm rather than space hardware from other planets. However, I remain more than skeptical. If we can believe John Keel's book, something very strange is going on which clearly undermines our world view of reality. Until I see an impressive UFO (or a Mothman or two) for myself I will remain a very interested skeptic, always open to hearing the latest "eyewitness" accounts. A very learned friend of mine who has passed away was a lifelong UFO researcher and believer in the hardware theory of UFO's. His great passion for the subject, intelligence, charm and professional standing as a lawyer made it possible for him to have worked with many names in the field including: Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Larry Bryant, Dr. Stanton Friedman, Ray Fowler, Whitley Strieber, and Bud Hopkins to name a few. His interest in the subject, field research and numerous public speaking engagements lasted his entire life. He was also one of MUFON' s public relations officials and always kept me up to date with the latest developments. He provided me copies of the MJ-12 documents when they were first "leaked" to the public and kept me on his mailing list for years. As a close friend, I did not have the heart to tell him that I could not buy into the hardware theory though I probably let him conclude that I did. However, my interest went as far as reading the latest "eyewitness" reports and wondering what on earth was responsible for them. This well respected individual was also very interested at one time in Dr. J. Allan Heinick, chief astronomical consultant to the US Air Force Project Blue Book. When I asked my friend what Dr. Heinick's latest findings were he reported to me that Heinick (in his senior years) was starting to believe in alternate dimensions, world lines, and possibly even spirit world theories and for that reason this friend had stopped tracking his work. He also kept me generally up to date but never mentioned John Keel's work, which I now conclude was likely because of Keel's theory in the "non-hardware" explanation of UFO's. My friend was clearly a believer in the "space hardware from out there theory" which I was not. But I always kept my ear to the ground regarding new reports of daylight disks, nocturnal lights and close encounter reports (as dubious as these may sound). As an amateur astronomer and over 50 years of carefully searching the skies in more than four states both with and without the aid of optical instruments in isolated locations, I have never observed anything which couldn't be explained in the sky. That is not to say that others have not, but I can't understand why others have been able to witness strange sights where I have not, and believe it may have something to do with "who is doing the looking", (a statement from the film taken out of context). The top rated reviewer has already said this book is almost as strange as the actual Mothman stories. Also, the fact that apparently related sightings of the Mothman, menacing MIB, numerous telephone problems, scads of prophesies from the void, as well as possible CIA escapades all read like the writings of a true paranoid. All these elements add up to make this book one of the strangest I have ever read. Mind you, I couldn't put it down for several hours a read. The chapter heading by John Keel entitled "Paranoiacs are made, not born" is also an interesting observation, causing one to question which is the cause and which the effect for any given individual. In John Keel's case I am certain his writings could be the basis of a lively sanity hearing were he a less known and less respected individual. Since his book was on the New York Times bestseller list we Mothman lovers are in good company.

John A. Keel's The Mothman Prophecies, as a book, is just as intriguing and mysterious as the topics he is writing about. In a nutshell, the book reads as if Keel kept a loose-leaf journal about paranormal events, both reported to and experienced by him, over the course of many years, then decided to throw all of the individual pages in the air, let them land as they might, stuck a couple hundred of them in a notebook and sent them off to his publisher. There is no novel-like narrative in The Mothman Prophecies, and it's not in chronological order-instead it choppily bounces back and forth and for its entire length. The funny thing is that it works for the most part. I'm hesitant to say that the atemporally schizophrenic nature of the journal entries was an intentional, clever move on Keel's part, but it just may have been. The net effect is to mirror the inexplicability, seeming pointlessness, and skewered nature of the phenomena that Keel is talking about, but unfortunately, sometimes the attention-deficit-disorder-ladenness of the book is just aggravating. The primary thing to remember, if the book sounds interesting enough to you to tackle it (not that it's longer than your average pulp novel), is not to expect anything like a normal plot. There's an endless parade of names and events, many of which are only mentioned in one section, and it takes awhile to stop thinking that you're going to have to remember them to understand the story later. There really is no story. But once you stop waiting for a story to begin, The Mothman Prophecies should be more enjoyable to you. There are plenty of reasons you might be interested in this book. Of course, there's the surface topic-a series of paranormal events ranging from UFO's to flying "birdmen" (the Mothman) to misbehaving telephones. If you're at all a student of the paranormal, you'll want to read this. Or, you probably already have. For me, I was initially intrigued by the film and the claim that it was based on true events (although publisher Tor calls it fiction on the copyright/catalog data page). But once I started reading, I quickly forgot about the film and instead was fascinated with the realization that The Mothman Prophecies must have been one of Chris Carter's primary sources for various plots of The X-Files. If you're an X-Files fan, The Mothman Prophecies will tie the show together for you in an unprecedented way. After you read this book, the "mytharc" shows (all the alien conspiracy stuff) will no longer seem disconnected from the monster shows. And you'll frequently find yourself reminded of specific episodes correlated to specific journal entries in the book. Undoubtedly, you'll find yourself wondering at some point how much of The Mothman Prophecies is fact and how much is fiction. Tor calling the book "fiction" doesn't help towards taking it too seriously, and neither does Keel's frequent references to UFO-monger Gray Barker, who was exposed as making up at least some of the things he wrote about--see, for instance, John C. Sherwood's May/June 1998 article in Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Joe Nickell has also prepared a "debunking" of the Mothman for Skeptical Inquirer's March/April 2002 issue. I'm nothing if not a skeptic, but Nickell doesn't actually debunk much. He suggests that Mothman sightings were actually sightings of owls, and that's about all there is to his article. Keel's book, and the film that prompted Nickell's article, is about much more than can be explained by sighting an owl and mistaking it for something else. From my standpoint as a philosopher, there's something even more interesting about Keel's book. It's a wonderful example of instrumentalism. Instrumentalism, briefly, is the idea that theories about phenomena, insofar as they depart from simply recounting the phenomena in a dry manner, are interchangeable. That is, there are a multitude of possible theories for the metaphysics "behind" any observed event, and even allowing Occam's Razor (which is just a convention, not a fact, so we need not allow it-it could be misleading), any of them that accounts for the observed event is just as good as any other. Of course Keel sometimes leads us on by simple juxtaposition of easily explainable events-even going so far as implying that there could have been something paranormal about the missing minutes on the Watergate tapes-and he could be making up a sizable percentage of the anecdotes to entertain us, but that's ultimately why you should read this book anyway-for entertainment. It's also, even if fiction, a fascinating psychological artifact, and even as fiction with plenty of structural quirks, an entertaining read.

Think flying saucers are real? Lie awake nights listening to Art Bell? Do you get an eerie feeling that something significant is happening when spooning mashed potatoes onto your plate? This book will either set your mind at rest or scare your socks off, possibly a little of both. Yes, we've been visited, but not by creatures from Venus trying to warn us about nuclear proliferation, though you may be abducted, and an anal probe is not completely out of the question. This is an investigation of sightings, in the vicinity of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, during 1966 and 1967, of UFOs and many other strange things, including a ten-foot-tall, black, winged devil-bat creature with glowing red eyes that terrorized people in lonely farmhouses ("Mothman"). Not to mention Men in Black who showed up next day to warn witnesses to keep quiet. The string of incidents culminated with a bridge collapse (depicted melodramatically in the movie of the same name), after which the visitations stopped. Keel's account of his stay in Point Pleasant, his interviews of witnesses, and his own encounters is all too credible. To make any sense of this, the only thing I can conclude is, there is a semi-intelligent force on our planet that has been manifesting as "lights in the sky" and making mischief, some of it lethal, for millenia. In each age humans fasten on the explanation that most closely parallels current superstition, science, or popular culture, whether it be flying saucers and Roswell, witches riding broomsticks lighting their way with lanterns, or gods, pans and centaurs flitting through forests. The forces or intelligences (OK, call them demons) seem willing to play their part, adapting to the zeitgeist. Periodically an individual is singled out for "illumination," usually at a lonely crossroads. That lucky person founds a cult, gathers followers, and the whole thing ends with a bunch of people on a mountain top waiting for the mothership, which never shows up, unlike that Spielberg movie. Studying these phenomena is exactly what can attract these demonic creatures to you, so the best advice is, ignore the whole thing, and for heavens sake don't read this book. Just kidding. I've read it several times over the years, as well as Keel's "Our Haunted Planet", which I also found fascinating, and recommend to you.

This was, for me, more of an interesting insider look at the sort of people that are drawn to study paranormal activity. Keel seems to think much of himself, that he is a superior investigator to others, being more objective and less biased. His reasoning is that he does not believe the extra-terrestrial view for UFOs, his pet theory. While this is an interesting take on it, and he seems to truly want to gather evidence about his theory, he is also quite clearly biased. At times it was hard to know if he was being tongue in cheek to make a joke and a good story to read, or being serious. He makes quit a few assumptions based on no facts whatsoever, in the sort of 'as everyone knows' style, while also contending that the 'off planet' view of UFOs had no evidence. Most of the book is about UFOs and his experiences with his cadre of people who had experiences with UFOs and friendly media contacts, Mothman being relegated to a related phenomena (and he finds many related phenomena to add to UFO sightings). It also includes a great deal about his concerns about 'men in black' and strange premonitions and channeled messages. Being an unreliable narrator, it is hard to know, even as he questions himself, what is going on. In part, this is what makes it interesting to read. As others have noted, the book itself is disjointed, and attempts to relate through stories, attempting to make patterns that may or may not be real. It is also interesting to see paranormal events and tales, the kind of paranoia about the government, that have become part of the myths and urban lore and seen in shows like X-files and Twin Peaks. In this way it is a classic. Like many classics it is a flawed product of it's time while also revealing much about the era, and the questions that some people still think and wonder about today.

John Keel was a reporter and he writes like it is the best fiction ever. Or is it fact? The movie was okay, but it is better to read the book first. And his other books too. Even Jadoo, his first before he delved into this thing much deeper. He does not want to believe, no one should. Hard nosed search for the truth of it. This isn't a small subject, and it is quite complex. When asked about the whole thing Keel would say "read about demonology" or even "angelology" but in a circle you can start anywhere within it or on its edge. It is vast, it is layered and it covers many areas from human behavior to mythology. Whatever this is it can generate solid matter temporarily then vanish without a trace like those Men In Black with dark pointed "Oriental" faces and abnormally long fingers in cars that look out of place and license plates that are not listed anywhere. Though they can change over time and be any size from short to abnormally tall and broad. They or it seems to be able to read minds and is a mimic. It might even have a kind of sense of humor to it. This is the book for you if you really are interested in this.

I finished this book in less than three days. If I hadn't had to go to work I would have finished it in one. This book is amazing. If you're even the least bit into the paranormal/cryptids/UFOs then you probably think you know the full story of Point Pleasant, West Virginia from November 1966 - December 1967. But if you haven't read this book, then you don't and never will until you do. No matter what else can be said about John A. Keel, he knows how to tell a story. Let's say you're a complete skeptic and don't believe a single thing about towering winged humanoids with glowing eyes, Men In Black, UFO abductions, prophecy, time travel, or anything of that sort. If that's the case then that just makes this one of the most bizarre and imaginative horror novels of all time and you should read it anyway for that purpose. But if you are willing to believe even a tenth of what Keel reports from that bizarre year of his life, then this book is terrifying. I'm not exaggerating. This is a genuinely scary book whether you're a full-throated paranormal zealot or just someone who appreciates a good campfire story. In his writing John A. Keel frequently cites the adage "belief is the enemy of truth." That's unfortunate for him, because the way he relates the events that he witnessed over those harrowing thirteen months will make you want to believe.

Make no mistake, this is a scary and challenging book. At first I found myself wondering where the Mothman was, because although there is quite a bit about that phenomenon at the beginning of the book the author then wanders all over the landscape. He talks about all sorts of UFO encounters all over the USA and only intermittently returns to Mothman. At several points I found myself wondering whether he was padding out his Mothman reporting with outright fiction and whether this ought to be called a novel! Well, he knows where he is heading and it's a very scary place! As he weaves his web of UFO, men in black and Mothman encounters, we begin to see a pattern emerge, a very frightening pattern with all sorts of implications. I ended the book feeling really spooked and challenged to imagine an explanation for it all. I also ended with the feeling that the author must have been a very strong person to have kept his sanity through such experiences; many people apparently didn't. I would recommend that people read this book along with the book, "Hunt For The Skinwalker" by Colm Kelleher. The strange patterns of encounters seem to have a lot in common and both books challenge the reader to imagine what could possibly be at the root of it.

Jamais traduit en français, "The Mothman prophecies" reste d'un anglais facile à lire et accessible. Cette enquête sur les "contactés" (individus affirmant être en relation avec des extra-terrestres ou des entités invisibles) est extrêmement bien écrite et menée de façon tellement consciencieuse et détaillée qu'elle garde constamment un très haut niveau de crédibilité du début jusqu'à la fin. Elle démontre comment de nombreux individus, de bonne foi et contre leur gré, sont contactés par des entités invisibles qui les convainquent de leur pouvoir par une série de prophéties, les fait ensuite basculer dans l'absurde (par exemple, en leur demandant à l'un d'entre eux de sauver le monde en amenant des sacs de sel à minuit au sommet d'une colline), dans la souffrance, les persécutions (les visites d'hommes en noir au physique étrange sont évoquées) et bien souvent dans la mort (une très grande majorité des contactés semble mourir dans les années qui suivent). John A. Keel montre parfaitement la réalité du phénomène tout en mettant en exergue son absurdité et sa dangerosité. Il a inspiré le film "La prophécie des ombres" avec Richard Gere, film qui omet néanmoins l'un des thèmes centraux de "Mothman Prophecies" : les OVNIS et les contacts extra-terrestres. Ce livre m'a fait penser également à l'excellent film de Pierre Jolivet sur le même sujet : "Simple mortel" (1991). John A. Keel n'aborde pas l'hypothèse démoniaque, d'après laquelle ces puissance invisibles, hostiles et dangereuses ne seraient pas extra-terrestres, mais d'une autre nature, que nos anciens avaient parfaitement cernés.

Era un regalo para mi hija y le ha encantado

Comprei o livro por causa do filme (que é muito bom!). Porém, infelizmente, esse é um dos poucos casos em que o filme é melhor que o livro. O livro é péssimo. São dezenas e dezenas de relatos bem curtos de centenas de pessoas que dizem terem visto isso ou aquilo. Claramente, não há nenhum tipo de investigação séria, documentação ou comprovação deste monte de estórias aleatórias. Achei que se trataria de um trabalho investigativo sério. Não tem nada de ciência e não tem nada de investigação séria, muito menos menção a quaisquer formas de comprovações e, além disso, o grau de detalhes das conversas mencionadas é absolutamente impossível. Não tem como o autor saber exatamente o que centenas de pessoas falaram para citar literalmente. Ele não entrevistou a maioria. Além disso, tem pontos em que o autor é bastante irônico e, assim, tira ainda mais a seriedade das supostas “investigações“. Enrolação total e perda de tempo. Tendo o livro sido escrito e publicado em plena Guerra Fria, o autor também encheu as páginas com teorias conspiratórias sem qualquer comprovação. Realmente muito ruim. O livro seria ruim mesmo se tivesse sido escrito como uma ficção.

Tutto ok

I got interested in Mothman after seeing the movie years ago. I stumbled upon this book by the same name and bought it on a whim. John A. Keel is a master of the writing craft, a self confessed funny farm candidate who provides a brilliant portrayal of what he calls the truth. I don't doubt any of it though we all ask ourselves questions. How can you not stay curious with stories of strange men dressed in oddly fitting suits with thick soled shoes seemingly troubled by ordering and consuming food with ordinary culinary utensil, MIB tales and brilliant winged creatures ordering the conscious of otherwise ordinary people into complete unbounded fear? I really enjoyed this book. I will now read everything I get my hands on with the name JohnA. Keel. Excellent!