The Mothman Prophecies (25 page)

My problems were minor compared to Dan's, however. He was seeing plenty of aerial lights but his battery powered cameras malfunctioned when he tried to photograph them. Finally, he thought he had managed to get some footage. Then the precious films were later accidently ruined in a processing lab back in New York. Members of his crew began to have troubles with their telephones, and a female production assistant was awakened one night in her apartment in Brooklyn by a loud beeping noise. She got up, looked out the window, and saw a large luminous sphere hovering directly outside her building.

During his second visit to Point Pleasant Dan uncovered some Mothman witnesses I had missed. And he also came across some more baffling Men-in-Black-type reports. People up in the back hills had been seeing mysterious unmarked panel trucks which sometimes parked for hours in remote spots. There seemed to be several of these trucks in the area and the rumor was that they belonged to the air force. Men in neat coveralls were seen monkeying with telephone and power lines but no one questioned them.

A woman living alone on an isolated island north of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, had two curious encounters with the same kind of beings. She had moved into a tiny one-room cabin on Keats Island in October 1967 and was soon seeing UFO lights nightly. On January 29, 1968, following a close sighting of “a long dark body with dim red and yellow lights at both ends,” she was surprised by two visitors. Both wore “neat, dark coveralls” and claimed to be employees of the hydroelectric company. They offered to help her put up a stovepipe. The younger of the two climbed on the roof of her cabin while the other handed him the pipes. “I could hear the man on the ground directing him and the one on the roof would answer, ‘Yes, Master.'”

After the pipe was installed, the pair joined her for tea. They seemed “a little stiff.” When they left she wondered how they had known she was there because “the cabin couldn't be seen from the road [and] the stove was out when they arrived, so there was no smoke from the chimney.”

On May 2, she again encountered two men. “One was the ‘boss' Hydro man in his neat coveralls,” she reported.
1
“The other was a different, younger man of about 19–20. As I entered the path, the boss man indicated with his hand for the young man to get behind him. They got well off the path and waited for me, the young man a little behind his boss. The fellow stared at me as if I was some kind of freak.…”

This time she didn't invite them for tea. One odd thing she noticed during both meetings was their slow, careful way of walking. They looked at their feet and stepped very uncertainly.

The next day a jeep came along the road, containing four men inspecting lines … “carelessly dressed, workaday men, none in coveralls. The boss wasn't obviously so. They expressed no surprise at seeing me there, no concern or any particular interest. I told them two of their men already had been around the day before, inspecting the lines. They assured me yesterday's men weren't Hydro men, that somebody had been ‘pulling my leg.'”

Somebody was also pulling a lot of legs on cosmopolitan Long Island. In West Virginia I had heard some stories about three men who looked “like Indians” and were accompanied by a fourth man, more normal-looking and very shabbily dressed in contrast to the other three. So I was nonplused when I heard identical descriptions from people on Long Island.

An elderly woman who lived alone in a house near the summit of Mount Misery, the highest point on Long Island, had received a visit from this quartet in early April 1967, immediately after a severe rainstorm.

“They had high cheekbones and very red faces, like a bad sunburn,” she told me. “They were very polite but they said my land belonged to their tribe and they were going to get it back. What frightened me was their feet. They didn't have a car … they must have walked up that muddy hill … but their shoes were spotlessly clean. There was no trace of mud or water where they walked in my house.”

That same week another visitor came to Mount Misery. This was a woman with striking white hair who claimed to represent a local newspaper. She carried a book “like a big ledger” and asked the witness a number of personal questions about her family background. When I later checked with the newspaper I found they employed no one of that description.

The local Mount Misery expert was Miss Jaye P. Paro, a radio personality then with station WBAB in Babylon, New York. Miss Paro is a dark-haired, dark-eyed young lady with a soft, haunting voice. At that time she conducted an interview show, largely devoted to the historical and psychic lore of the region. Soon after she reported some UFO sightings around Mount Misery she began to receive all manner of crank calls, both at the station and on her unlisted home phone. Metallic voices ordered her to meet them on “the Mount” (she didn't go).

Through Miss Paro I met several local UFO witnesses and contactees. Long Island, I discovered, was crawling with contactees of all ages and both sexes. One of these was a lovely young blonde, whom I will call Jane, who lived near Mount Misery with her family. Jane was not illiterate, but she seldom read anything other than the comic strips and “Dear Abby.” She knew nothing about UFOs and cared less. She was a “fallen Catholic,” having abandoned religion when she reached adulthood. She was a very sensitive woman, more ethereal than sensual. There was almost something mystical about her appearance and grace.

Mount Misery is a heavily wooded hill with a few narrow dirt roads slicing through it and a number of large mansions set back among the trees. The late Henry Stimson, secretary of war during World War II, maintained a lavish estate on the summit. For decades the Mount was known as a haunted place, the site of a number of mysterious deaths and disappearances. In the spring of 1967, young couples necking on the back roads began to see low-flying UFOs, particularly around a field that was used as a junkyard for old cars. Others claimed to see a giant hairy monster with gleaming red eyes.

After Miss Paro began to broadcast reports of what was happening on Mount Misery, the usual mobs started to cruise the area nightly to the consternation of the scattered and snobbish residents. Jane and her boyfriend Richard joined the stream of cars one night in early May and eventually found themselves alone on a back road near High Hold, the old Stimson place.

Richard, who was driving, suddenly complained of feeling unwell. He stopped the car and a moment later slumped over the wheel unconscious. Jane was terrified. But before she could focus her attention on him, a brilliant beam of light shot out of the woods next to the road “like a floodlight.” It dazzled her and she fell back in her seat unable to move.

The next thing they knew, they were driving along Old Country Road at the base of Mount Misery.

“How did we get here?” Richard asked her, baffled. “What happened?”

“Let's go home,” Jane choked. They never discussed the incident again until I arrived on the scene.

A few days later, on May 17, Jane answered the phone (she had her own phone in her room) and a strange metallic voice addressed her. “Listen carefully,” it said. “I cannot hear you.” It instructed her to go to a small public library nearby and look up a certain book on Indian history.

She did as she was instructed. On May 18 she went to the library at 10:30
A.M.
The place was deserted except for the librarian, who struck Jane as being unusual. The woman was “dressed in an old-fashioned suit like something out of the 1940s, with a long skirt, broad shoulders, and flat old-looking shoes.” (Remember, this was in 1967, long before the 1940s styles became popular again.) She had a dark complexion, with a fine bone structure, and very black eyes and hair. When Jane entered, the woman seemed to be expecting her and produced the book instantly from under her desk.

Jane sat down at a table and began to riffle through the book, pausing on page forty-two. Her caller had told her to read that page.

“You won't believe this,” she told me, “but the print became smaller and smaller, then larger and larger. It changed into a message and I can remember every word of it.

“‘Good morning, friend,' it began. ‘You have been selected for many reasons. One is that you are advanced in autosuggestion. Through this science we will make contact. I have messages concerning Earth and its people. The time is set. Fear not … I am a friend. For reasons best known to ourselves you must make your contacts known to one reliable person. To break this code is to break contact. Proof shall be given. Notes must be kept of the suggestion state. Be in peace. [signed] A Pal.'

“The print became very small again, and then the normal text reappeared.”

As soon as Jane left the library she became quite ill and vomited several times during the next two days. She approached Miss Paro with her story and was advised to get in touch with me. Her experience on the Mount, her phone call, and the remark about “autosuggestion” all stirred my interest. In those days none of the UFO enthusiasts knew anything about these factors and a hoax seemed very unlikely. And, unknown to Miss Paro and Jane, I was in touch with a distant contactee who was communicating with “Apholes.” The signature “A Pal” seemed close enough to Apholes to take seriously. I suspected that Jane had been programed for a set of special experiences and I kept in constant touch with her in the months which followed, maintaining an extensive record of her experiences.

In early June, Jane began to see the “librarian” wherever she went. On June 6, while wandering through a local department store, the woman appeared behind a dress rack. She wore the same old-fashioned clothes and tried to speak to Jane in “broken English.” There was something wrong about her speech and movements. “It was as if … she were dead,” Jane said. When asked if she lived around Babylon, the woman laughed in a strange hysterical way, “like an emotionally disturbed person.” (This weird laugh has been described by many contactees.)

“Is there any A-U here?” the woman asked. Jane didn't know what she meant. Just that week I had been pondering the significance of gold in UFO and religious lore. Gold is the seventy-ninth element and the chemical symbol for it is AU.

Jane offered to give the woman a lift but she declined and wandered off.

Unable to sleep that night, Jane got up at the crack of dawn the following morning and went for a walk on an impulse. The dark-skinned woman stepped out of an alley and approached her shyly. “Peter is coming,” she announced.

This statement shook Jane. She remembered that Catholic lore predicts that the final pope will be named Peter.

“Why are you interested in our Mount?” the woman continued, then repeated, “Peter is coming very soon.”

Next a large black Cadillac came down the street and stopped next to them. It was “brand-new, very shiny and polished,” Jane recalled. The driver was an olive-skinned man wearing wraparound sunglasses and dressed in a neat gray suit, apparently of the same material as the woman's clothes. The rear door opened and a man climbed out with a big grin on his face. He was about five feet eight inches tall, with dark skin and Oriental eyes. Jane thought he looked like a Hawaiian. He had the air of someone very important and was dressed in a well-cut, expensive-looking suit of the same gray material that was shiny like silk but was not silk.

He solemnly shook hands with the girl, “his hand was as cold as ice,” and stared at her steadily with his jet-black eyes, grinning all the while.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked. “I am Apol [pronounced Apple].”

The Cadillac pulled away and drove off, leaving the three of them standing on the street. Apol produced a piece of folded paper and handed it to Jane.

“Wear this always,” he told her. “So ‘they' will know who you are.”

“Who's they?” she asked.

“They are the very good people,” he answered.

The paper, a piece of very old parchment, contained a small metal disc about the size of a quarter. As they talked they walked slowly toward the center of town until they stood in front of the post office. Jane impulsively announced she was going to mail the disc to someone. She went into the post office, got an envelope, and sent the disc and parchment to me special delivery. The two strangers smiled broadly at each other.

When she came out of the post office, Apol told her a number of things about her childhood that no one could have known and advised her to avoid iodine. (She had a minor health problem which required her to avoid iodine in her diet.)

The car reappeared and the two people got into it and drove off. “I felt very strange while I was talking to them,” she recalled. “I was whoozy … like I was in a daze or something.”

If it hadn't been for the metal disc I would have classified the entire episode as hallucinatory. The next day I received the special delivery envelope and was very disappointed by the contents. The disc looked like a blank identification tag similar to those that come with flea collars. The parchment seemed to be the remnants of a very old envelope. After examining it, I put the disc back into the paper exactly as I had received it, then placed the whole thing in a small envelope which I sealed with Scotch tape. I put this into a larger manila envelope and mailed it back to Jane special delivery.

She phoned me the next day.

“Why did you bend the disc and tear up the paper?” She demanded.

She had just received the envelope and found that the parchment in the sealed inner envelope had been ripped into three pieces. The metal disc was bent, as if it had been folded double and then unfolded again. It had also turned charcoal black and smelled like “rotten eggs.”

The implication was clear. Someone had the ability to intercept the U.S. mails and tamper with things in sealed envelopes!

II.

While Jane was holding clandestine meetings with Mr. Apol and his mysterious lady friend, Jaye P. Paro was being entertained by the redoubtable Princess Moon Owl, a character who would become a legend on Long Island by the end of 1967. At 3:30
P.M.
on June 11, 1967, Jaye entered the studios of WBAB and found a very weird woman waiting for her. She was at least six feet tall, was very dark (Negroid), with large, glassy eyes, and wore a costume largely made up of feathers. She was gasping and wheezing, having great difficulty breathing. Jaye thought she was having a heart attack.