The Mothman Prophecies (2 page)

Readers of occult literature know there are innumerable cases of ghosts haunting a particular site year after year, century after century, carrying out the same mindless activities endlessly. Build a house on such a site and the ghost will leave locked doors ajar as it marches through to carry out its programed activity. Could these ghosts really be
tulpas,
residues of powerful minds like the phantom in the broad-brimmed hat?

Next, consider this. UFO activity is concentrated in the same areas year after year. In the Ohio valley, they show a penchant for the ancient Indian mounds which stand throughout the area. Could some UFOs be mere
tulpas
created by a long forgotten people and doomed forever to senseless maneuvers in the night skies?

There are archaeological sites in the Mississippi valley which have been dated to 8,000 years ago … long before the Indians are supposed to have arrived. Some of the Indian mounds (there are hundreds of them scattered throughout North America) are laid out and constructed with the same kind of mathematical precision found in the pyramids of Egypt. While it is known that the Indians were still adding to some of the mounds in the south when the Europeans first arrived, other mounds seem to be considerably older. Some are built in the form of elephants. What did the builders use for a model? Others are in the shape of sea serpents. These forms can only be seen from the air. To plan and build such mountains of shaped earth required technical skills beyond the simple nomadic woods Indians.

Currently there is a revival in diffusionism, a popular scientific concept of the 1920s which asserted that many of the puzzling artifacts and ancient constructions found throughout the world were the products of a single worldwide culture. The cult of believers in Atlantis were the principal advocates of this idea, so sober scientists naturally turned away from it for a theory that is almost impossible to support. This was the notion that many inventions and ideas simply occurred simultaneously to widespread, isolated cultures.

The flying saucer entities have allegedly contacted many people in almost every country and have immodestly claimed credit for everything from the building of the pyramids to the sinking of Atlantis. Erich Von Däniken, a Swiss author, has popularized the concept that members of an extraterrestrial civilization did contact early earthlings, basing his theories on expansive misinterpretations—and in several instances, deliberate misrepresentations—of archaeological curiosities. Von Däniken seems to be totally ignorant of the work of European scholars such as Brinsley Trench, Paul Misraki, and W. Raymond Drake, who have examined the same curiosities very carefully in the past ten years and developed elaborate philosophical hypotheses about the intrusion and effect of alien beings on mankind since the beginning. Their concepts are wider in scope and significance, and far better documented than Von Däniken's simplistic efforts.

That unidentified flying objects have been present since the dawn of man is an undeniable fact. They are not only described repeatedly in the Bible, but were also the subject of cave paintings made thousands of years before the Bible was written. And a strange procession of weird entities and frightening creatures have been with us just as long. When you review the ancient references you are obliged to conclude that the presence of these objects and beings
is a normal condition for this planet
These things, these other intelligencies or OINTs as Ivan Sanderson labeled them, either reside here but somehow remain concealed from us, or they do not exist at all and are actually special aberrations of the human mind—
tulpas
, hallucinations, psychological constructs, momentary materializations of energy from that dimension beyond the reach of our senses and even beyond the reaches of our scientific instruments. They are not from outer space. There is no need for them to be. They have always been here. Perhaps they were here long before we started bashing each other over the head with clubs. If so, they will undoubtedly still be here long after we have incinerated our cities, polluted all the waters, and rendered the very atmosphere unbreathable. Of course, their lives—if they have lives in the usual sense—will be much duller after we have gone. But if they wait around long enough another form of so-called intelligent life will crawl out from under a rock and they can begin their games again.

IV.

Back in the 1920s, Charles Fort, the first writer to explore inexplicable events, observed you can measure a circle by beginning anywhere. Paranormal phenomena are so widespread, so diversified, and so sporadic yet so persistent that separating and studying any single element is not only a waste of time but also will automatically lead to the development of belief. Once you have established a belief, the phenomenon adjusts its manifestations to support that belief and thereby escalate it. If you believe in the devil he will surely come striding down your road one rainy night and ask to use your phone. If you believe that flying saucers are astronauts from another planet they will begin landing and collecting rocks from your garden.

Many—most—of the manifestations accompanying the UFO phenomenon simply did not fit into the enthusiasts' concept of how a superior intelligence from another galaxy would behave. So the flying saucer clubs carefully ignored, even suppressed, the details of those manifestations for many years. When a black-suited man in a Cadillac turned up, he couldn't possibly be one of the endearing space people so he had to be a rotten, sneaky government agent. It was inconceivable to the hardcore UFO believers that the flying saucers could be a permanent part of our environment and that these men in black were residents of this planet associated with the UFOs.

But this is a fact; the “truth” the UFO fans have sought for so long. And as Daniel Webster put it, “There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.”

You can't learn the truth by chasing UFOs helter-skelter through the skies in planes. The air forces of several governments tried that for years. It is vain to hire astronomers. They are not trained in the kind of disciplines needed to investigate earthly phenomena, or even to interview earthly witnesses. Interviewing is an advanced art, the province of journalists and psychologists. One does not hire a parachutist to go spelunking in a cave or a balloonist to go diving for treasure. If you need a brain surgeon you don't hire a horticulturist who has spent his life trimming plants. Yet this is the approach our government has taken to the UFO phenomenon.

I realized the folly of trying to measure the circle from some distant point, so I picked a microcosm on the edge of the circle—a place where many strange manifestations were occurring simultaneously. And I hit the jackpot immediately, rather like the opening of an old Max Schulman novel: “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life.”

2:

The Creep Who Came in from the Cold

I.

Friday, December 22, 1967, was bitter cold and the frayed Christmas decorations strung across the main street of the little West Virginian town of Point Pleasant seemed to hang limply, sadly, as if to match the grim, ashen faces of the townspeople who shuffled about their business, their eyes averted from the gaping hole where the Silver Bridge had stood only a week before. Now the seven-hundred-foot span was gone. Clusters of workmen, police officers, and assorted officials stood along the banks of the Ohio, watching silently as divers continued to bob into the black waters. Occasionally ropes would jerk and a bloated, whitened body would be hauled to the surface. It was not going to be a merry Christmas in Point Pleasant.

A few yards from the place where the bridge had been, Mrs. Mary Hyre sat in her office revising a list of the missing and the known dead. A stout woman in her early fifties, her normally cheerful, alert face was blurred with fatigue. She had had almost no sleep in the past seven days. After twenty years as the local stringer for the
Messenger,
recording all the births, marriages, and deaths in the little town, Mrs. Hyre suddenly found herself at the center of the universe. Camera teams from as far away as New York were perched outside her door. The swarms of newsmen who had descended on Point Pleasant to record the tragedy had quickly learned what everyone in the Ohio valley already knew. If you wanted to find out anything about the area and its people, the quickest way to do it was to “ask Mary Hyre.”

For seven days now her office had been filled with strangers, relatives of the missing, and weary rescue workers. So she hardly looked up that afternoon when two men entered. They seemed almost like twins, she recalled later. Both were short and wore black overcoats. Their complexions were dark, somewhat Oriental, she thought.

“We hear there's been a lot of flying saucer activity around here,” one of them remarked. She was taken aback. The bridge disaster had dominated everyone's thoughts for the last week. Flying saucers were the furthest thing from her mind at that moment.

“We have had quite a few sightings here,” she responded, turning in her chair to pull open a filing cabinet. She hauled out a bulging folder filled with clippings of sighting reports and handed it to one of the men.

He flipped it open, gave the pile of clippings a cursory glance, and handed it back.

“Has anyone told you not to publish these reports?”

She shook her head as she shoved the folder back into the drawer.

“What would you do if someone did order you to stop writing about flying saucers?”

“I'd tell them to go to hell,” she smiled wanly.

The two men glanced at each other. She went back to her lists and when she looked up again they were gone.

II.

Later that same afternoon another stranger walked into Mrs. Hyre's office. He was slightly built, about five feet seven inches tall, with black, piercing eyes and unruly black hair, as if he had had a brush cut and it was just growing back in. His complexion was even darker than that of the two previous visitors and he looked like a Korean or Oriental of some kind. His hands were especially unusual, she thought, with unduly long, tapering fingers. He wore a cheap-looking, ill-fitting black suit, slightly out of fashion, and his tie was knotted in an odd old-fashioned way. Strangely, he was not wearing an overcoat despite the fierce cold outside.

“My name is Jack Brown,” he announced in a hesitant manner. “I'm a UFO researcher.”

“Oh,” Mary pushed aside the pile of papers on her desk and studied him. The day was ending and she was ready to go home and try to get some sleep at last.

After a brief, almost incoherent struggle to discuss UFO sightings Brown stammered, “What—would—what would you do—if someone ordered—ordered you to stop? To stop printing UFO stories?”

“Say, are you with those two men who were here earlier?” she asked, surprised to hear the same weird question twice in one day.

“No. No—I'm alone. I'm a friend of Gray—Gray Barker.”

Gray Barker of Clarksburg was West Virginia's best-known UFO investigator. He had published a number of books on the subject and was a frequent visitor to Point Pleasant.

“Do you know John Keel?”

His face tightened. “I—I used to think—think the world of K—K—Keel. Then a few minutes ago I bought a—a magazine. He has an article in it. He says he's seen UFOs himself. He's—he's a liar.”

“I
know
he's seen things,” Mary flared. “I've been with him when he saw them!”

Brown smiled weakly at the success of his simple gambit.

“Could you—take me out—t—t—take me where you—you and K—K—Keel saw—saw things?”

“I'm not going to do anything except go home to bed,” Mary declared flatly.

“Is K—K—Keel in P—P—Point Pleasant?”

“No. He lives in New York.”

“I—I think he m—m—makes up all these stories.”

“Look, I can give you the names of some of the people here who have seen things,” Mary said wearily. “You can talk to them and decide for yourself. But I just can't escort you around.”

“I'm a friend of G—G—Gray Barker,” he repeated lamely.

Outside the office a massive crane creaked and rumbled, dragging a huge hunk of twisted steel out of the river.

III.

On April 22, 1897, an oblong machine with wings and lights “which appeared much brighter than electric lights” dropped out of the sky and landed on the farm near Rockland, Texas, owned by John M. Barclay. Barclay grabbed his rifle and headed for the machine. He was met by an ordinary-looking man who handed him a ten-dollar bill and asked him to buy some oil and tools for the aircraft.

“Who are you?” Barclay asked.

“Never mind about my name; call it Smith,” the man answered.

The UFO lore is populated with mysterious visitors claiming inordinately common names like Smith, Jones, Kelly, Allen, and Brown. In 1897, they often claimed to come from known villages and cities and were even able to name prominent citizens in those places. But when reporters checked, they could find no record of the visitors and the named citizens disavowed any knowledge of them.

One of the proved hoaxes of 1897 (there were many hoaxes, largely the work of mischievous newspapermen) concerned an object which is supposed to have crashed into Judge Proctor's windmill in Aurora, Texas. The remains of a tiny pilot were supposedly found in the wreckage and buried in the local cemetery by the townspeople. The story was published in the
Dallas Evening News.
From time to time, Aurora was visited by self-styled investigators who sifted the dirt on the old Proctor farm and marched through the cemetery reading tombstones, always without finding anything.

The story was revived in 1972, and in 1973 a man identifying himself as Frank N. Kelley of Corpus Christi arrived in Aurora. He said he was a treasure hunter of long experience. He set to work with his metal detectors and instruments and quickly unearthed several fragments of metal near the windmill site. They appeared to be something like the skin of modern aircraft, he announced. He kept some of the pieces and turned the rest over to a reporter named Bill Case. Analysis showed the pieces were 98 percent aluminum.