The Mothman Prophecies (18 page)

I.

James Lilly stood on his lawn surrounded by reporters from Charleston and Huntington newspapers, Sheriff George Johnson and his wife, and a host of others. Hundreds of automobiles lined the Camp Conley Road, dark and silent except for the glows of cigarettes. Other cars cruised in slow streams along the rutted roads of the TNT area to the north.

“It's just about that time,” Jim Lilly announced, glancing at his watch. It was exactly 8:30
P.M.
“They come over every night right about now.”

Horns suddenly began to bleat and excited shouts echoed through the trees.

“Right on time,” Lilly chuckled. “You can set your watch by 'em.”

“My God! What is it?” A reporter and novice UFO-watcher cried out as a brilliant white light slowly glided into view. It arched gracefully overhead about one hundred feet above the trees. Car doors slammed up and down the road as families scrambled out of their vehicles to watch. Newsmen floundered with their expensive cameras.

“What in hell is the matter with this? The shutter didn't trip!”

The light passed slowly toward Point Pleasant, the ground below lighting up in its glow as it passed.

“Where's that guy Keel?” someone asked.

“He's probably up there riding in that damned thing,” someone else answered.

A light plane suddenly circled over the TNT area, all its lights ablaze.

“Here comes Doc Shaw again,” Jim Lilly laughed. “Who does he think he's fooling.”

But voices were crying out in the dark, “There goes another one!”

The plane cut its engine for a moment and glided.

George Johnson turned to his wife. “Well, you wanted to see a UFO.”

“It was like seeing a ghost,” she shuddered.

The air was filled with the sounds of auto engines grinding away impotently and drivers snarling and cursing because their cars wouldn't start.

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.