The Mothman Prophecies (27 page)

Paranoiacs Are Made, Not Born

I.

“The U.S. government is being taken over by the space people!”

This rumor spread throughout the country in 1967, an updated version of the old devil theory. Actually it got its start in 1949 when James V. Forrestal, the brilliant secretary of defense in the Truman cabinet, went bananas and raced through the corridors of the Pentagon screaming, “We're being invaded and we can't stop them!” He was convinced that his phones were being tapped and some enormous conspiracy was underway. Soon after he was placed in a hospital he leaped out a window to his death. While the press blamed his paranoia on the tensions of the cold war, the UFO enthusiasts knew better. Air force Intelligence had compiled a
Top Secret Estimate of the Situation
following their UFO investigations in 1947–48. Their conclusion, according to the late Capt. Edward Ruppelt, was that flying saucers were extraterrestrial. Forrestal, so the story went, was one of the few to read that report before Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg ordered all copies destroyed, and it blew his mind.

Two other top military men, Gen. George C. Marshall and Gen. Douglas MacArthur were obsessed with the flying saucer phenomenon. MacArthur made several public statements declaring that the next war would be fought against “evil beings from outer space.” A fabled “think tank,” the Rand Corporation, was assigned to feed UFO data into a computer and fight an imaginary war with those evil beings. Since we wouldn't know where they were from, what their technology was, or how to attack their bases, the computer advised us to surrender.

Contactees adrift in the hallucinatory worlds were convinced the space people were walking among us unnoticed. Los Angeles alone had a space population of ten thousand. Actually this was just a tiresome repetition of the earlier beliefs that devils and angels were everywhere in human guise. Early in the Age of the Flying Saucers (1947–69), air force and CIA agents undoubtedly came across MIB cases similar to the ones outlined here and, being human, some of those early investigators leapfrogged to UFO cultistlike conclusions. Paranoia gripped the upper echelons of government. Millions of tax dollars were sunk into UFO research. (In 1952, Captain Ruppelt said the air force was spending one million dollars a year on the subject. Gen. Nathan Twining declared “the best brains” in science and the military were trying to solve the mystery.) Cold war hysteria added to the atmosphere of fear and loathing. A 1953 CIA document, kept classified for over twenty years, noted that the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) “should be watched” as a potential propaganda menace. APRO had been founded the year before by a Wisconsin housewife and circulated a mimeographed UFO newsletter to a few dozen scattered buffs. Apparently more thousands of tax dollars were expended in “watching” APRO's Coral Lorenzen over the years, according to evidence she published in a series of paperback books in the 1960s. The only propaganda she ever distrubuted was anti-air force, and she never sold any of our flying saucer secrets to the Soviet Union.

Military men—and the UFO enthusiasts—had no knowledge of or interest in psychic phenomena. Their materialistic, pseudo-scientific approach to the sightings and attendent manifestations merely increased the lore and intensified the mystery. The age-old changeling concept, for example, must have caused many gray hairs in official circles when it was introduced into the UFO lore. Were the space people really switching human beings? Many of the contactees and their open-mouthed followers believed this was the case. Were humans being dragged aboard spaceships and examined like cattle? The contactees' tales indicated this and their stories gave impetus to the expanded devil theory; that government officials were being kidnapped and replaced by clever androids obeying the dictates of the sinister leaders of some other planet. Idiocy was piled upon idiocy over the past twenty-eight years. The paranoia once isolated to the very small lunatic fringe grew until it swallowed up a large part of the world's population.

I was concerned not with the sincere but falsified memories of the contactees, but with a more worrisome question. What, I wondered, happened to the bodies of these people while their minds were taking trips? Trips that often lasted for hours, even for days. A young college professor in New York State was haunted by the same question in 1967. After investigating a UFO-related poltergeist case he suffered possession and was led to believe that he had committed a daring jewel robbery while he was in a trance or possessed state. He abandoned ufology and nearly suffered a total nervous breakdown in the aftermath.

Were our contactees being used by exterior intelligences to carry out crimes, even murder? The answer is a disturbing yes. If you review the history of political assassinations you will find that many were performed by so-called religious fanatics who were obeying the “voice of God” or were in an obvious state of possession when they committed their crime. Even the ten co-conspirators in the assassination of President Lincoln were in this category. And the soldier who shot and killed John Wilkes Booth against the orders of his superiors claimed he pulled the trigger because a voice told him to do so.

The madness that grips crowds and produces violent riots, some of which have changed history, seems little different from the madness that produced the widespread dancing mania of the Middle Ages when thousands of people danced in the streets until they dropped dead from exhaustion. The mania spread from Italy to Turkey. Survivors claimed they believed they were knee-deep in blood and were prancing to get out of it. This was a collective or mass hallucination. Even today there are annual incidents in which whole towns are seized by hallucinations, usually in obscure parts of South America and Asia. Such events are traditionally explained as being caused by tainted bread despite the fact that people who have not eaten the local bread are also affected.

In contactee parlance, persons who perform involuntary acts are said to be “used.” Apparently a relatively small part of the population have auras or biological radiations which attract elements of the superspectrum. Such people are prone to controlled hallucinations and possession. Since the entities probably exist as energy in a field outside our space-time continuum they can only see, and be seen, by these special people. (In innumerable UFO reports the ufonauts apparently could not see the witnesses.) Derenberger's Cold identified himself as “a searcher.” Searching for what? For biological oddities like Woody, no doubt.

A contactee may feel a sudden impulse to go for a pointless late-night walk or drive. During that drive he encounters, he thinks, the space people and has a fine visit with them. Actually his body proceeds on to, say, Point A where he picks up a letter or object left there by another contactee. He carries the letter or object to Point B and deposits it. Later he has no memory of these actions. Meanwhile some poor slob with the wrong aura, like myself, receives a phone call advising him to proceed to Point B where he will find something left for him by the space people. In short, all physical evidence and manifestations are produced by human beings. They dig holes in fields, rifle mailboxes, and who knows what else.

These games have been going on since ever.

*   *   *

I have received thousands of letters from contactees since 1967, many of them filled with glowing praise for their contacters, others pathetic and touched with terror. One of the first letters arrived unexpectedly in the summer of 1967 from an elderly man in New England.

“I found your name and address on a slip of paper dropped onto my kitchen floor by an ‘Indian-like' friend,” he wrote. “If this letter is not returned to me I will no [sic] you received it … I wish I could tell you how my life has been taken over & what condition our country & government are in. If you have been through the ‘misery' you no [
sic
] you are not alone. I am not a nut. I am sincere. I am concerned for you.…

“P.S. I have been ‘used'!”

This letter, and others like them, helped to convince me that my own investigations could be manipulated. I was being led to people and cases to support whatever theory I was working on at the time. I tested this by inventing some rather outlandish ideas. Within days I would receive phone calls, reports, and mail describing elements of those ideas. This was the feedback or reflective effect. Other investigators concerned with solving problems such as how flying saucers are propelled have automatically been fed, or led into, cases in which the witnesses supposedly viewed the interiors of the objects and saw things which confirmed the investigators' theories.

If the phenomenon can produce any effect through hallucination, it can easily support any theory. It took me a long time to realize that many of my Men in Black reports were just feedback. It is even possible that affairs like Tiny's visit to the Christiansens were somehow arranged for my benefit, even though I didn't know them at the time. I came across the Christiansens during an investigation far from Cape May. They were almost dumped in my lap, just as the letter from the man in Massachussetts came at a time when I was involved in cases with “Indian-like” entities on Mount Misery. (Note he put “misery” in quotes.)

My thoroughness led to the discovery of coincidences that seemed significant at the time. Two of my silent contactees shared the same birth date—September 6. As soon as I realized this, circumstances added several new contactees to my stable—all women and all born on September 6!

During one of her almost-daily conversations with Apol and Lia, Jane was told that a number of women were being selected for artificial insemination! They would be bearing very special children for the space people. This led to a whole new game in which I found myself trying to cope with pregnant women, though I eventually figured out they were victims of pseudocyesis—false or “hysterical” pregnancies. This was probably feedback from my concern over Derenberger's statement that if the truth were known, women the world over would panic, throw their babies out the window, and commit suicide.

By mid-July I was in indirect contact with the entities through three different systems. First, contactees would relay my questions to them and relay their answers back to me. I was still extremely skeptical, so many of my questions were complicated and beyond the abilities of the individual contactees to answer … even if they spent hours in a library trying to research the answers. Second, I was able to communicate
by mail
by sending letters through the U.S. Post Office to addresses which I later discovered were nonexistent. I would receive replies by mail, often the very next day, written in block letters. Some of these replies covered several pages. Third, I was sometimes able to speak to the entities by telephone! A contactee would call me and inform me that an entity was present in his or her house and wished to speak to me. Sometimes I just asked questions and the alleged entity whispered the answer to the contactee who relayed it to me. Sometimes a strange voice would come on the line and speak to me directly. In some, if not all, of these instances the contactee probably entered a trance state and the voice came from their own vocal chords just as “spirits” speak through mediums at séances.

As soon as I entered this communication phase my problems with the mails and telephone intenstified. Important letters of a non-UFO nature went astray … or arrived days late and had obviously been opened by someone en route. My telephone rang at all hours of the day and night with beeping calls, eerie electronic sounds, and, most interesting of all, frantic calls from people who were superb actors and who described UFO incidents containing those secret details in cases I was working on, but when I tried to check out these people I found the addresses they had given me were nonexistent and the phone numbers they gave were false.

Someone somewhere was just trying to prove that they knew every move I was making, listened to all my phone calls, and could even control my mail! And they were succeeding.

II.

On July 20, 1967, the Vatican announced that the pope was planning a trip to Turkey. He would be flying to Istanbul where he would be greeted by a huge mob at the airport. Several of my contactees had been gravely concerned with the prediction of the pope's impending death and the three days of darkness that would follow. The accuracy of earlier predictions led me to take this one seriously. Very seriously.

The assassination was supposed to take place on July 26. It would be preceded by a violent earthquake.

On July 22 more than one thousand people were killed in an earthquake in Adapazari, Turkey, one hundred miles southeast of Istanbul. The news really shook me up. The whole prophesied scenario was being carried out to the letter!

The night before the quake, there were a rash of telephone hoaxes throughout the Northeast. These calls consisted of two people talking indistinctly for the most part, but certain names were clearly audible. Ivan Sanderson received such a call on his unlisted phone in the mountains of New Jersey at midnight. My call came through at 11:40. A UFO buff on Long Island received one at 1
A.M.
He heard, “Hang up, John … and I'll turn off the recorder.” On my call the name “Jim” was used.

These calls were part of a broader nationwide pattern which had successfully disrupted, even destroyed, many local UFO groups. The receiver heard the name of a fellow UFO enthusiast and regarded it as proof that the other person was responsible for all the hoax calls he or she was receiving. The very same ploy was used against the civilians quietly investigating the Kennedy assassination! Penn Jones, a Texas newspaper editor who has been investigating the death of JFK for years, received similar calls, including the playing of a tape of his phone conversations with other investigators … proof positive that his phone was being tapped by someone and they wanted him to know it. This playback of taped conversations also happened on my phone. The object of such gimmicks is clearly to incite paranoia. Since many of the UFO enthusiasts are very unstable to begin with, the device has been very effective.