The Mothman Prophecies (28 page)

I was now receiving many messages phrased in biblical terms. Some came from unknown elderly ladies who phoned me late at night claiming to be from Western Union. Then they would read long bible quotations that were supposedly telegrams. But Western Union disavowed any knowledge of these messages. I had hooked up a tape recorder to my own phone so I could keep track of all these things.

“If it is the days of darkness,” said a message received on July 23, “behold there will be voices, thunder and earthquakes and disturbances upon the earth. And at their cry all nations shall fight one against the other. And fear shall fall upon the earth and the sky shall be darkened except for the illuminating round lights that will be the only sparks of light. And rain shall come at the end of the happening.

“John: Do not trouble yourself over trivial matters such as strange calls. We're in greater danger than you can imagine. Not only is your world involved, but many others too.”

I am an amateur herpetologist and once kept three-fanged cobras in my New York apartment … until my concerned neighbors squealed to the Board of Health. Some of the descriptions of the entities impressed me as resembling some kind of reptile rather than human mammals. I didn't mention this reptile notion to anyone. But on July 24, Lia visited Jane and refused to talk about anything but eggs. She took some eggs from Jane's refrigerator and sucked out the contents like a reptile! Jane was perplexed by this exhibition and called me soon afterward.

That evening I received a phone call from Harold Salkin, a Washington, D.C., UFO researcher. He wanted to tell me that people all over Washington had been receiving strange phone calls during the past week. We had a perfect connection until I started to ask him if he had heard any rumors about Pope Paul. We were instantly drowned out by heavy static. As soon as I changed the subject, the static went away. Later in the conversation I tried again. The moment I named the pope the static resumed. When I again dropped the subject, the line cleared instantly.

Now they were even controlling my phone conversations!

Convinced that Pope Paul was about to be knifed to death at the Istanbul airport, I rented a car, loaded it with flashlights, candles, food, and bottled water, and drove out to the Mount Misery area to await the blackout. On the way I stopped to see one of my contactees and he informed me that a spaceman had just been to see him and had left a silly message.

“Tell John we'll meet with him later and help him drink all that water.”

The contactee had no idea that I had several quarts of spring water in the trunk of the car.

Near Mount Misery I picked out a motel at random (I thought). The motel clerk asked to see my identification (very unusual).

“We've got a lot of messages here for you, Mr. Keel,” she said, pulling out a sheaf of message slips. I started to protest since I had not even known I was going to stay at that motel until minutes before. The messages were all nonsensical, meant only to prove once more that my movements were being anticipated.

The pope landed in Istanbul safely. There was no three-day blackout. The whole episode served no purpose other than to demonstrate to me how and why so many contactees and prophets go and sit on hilltops to await the end of the world.

Three years later, on November 27, 1970, Pope Paul VI arrived at the Manila International Airport in the Phillipines and the scene described to me in 1967 suddenly became a reality. A man dressed in the black garments of a priest came out of the crowd and sprang at the pope with a long black knife in his hands. Fortunately, security guards wrestled him to the ground and the pontiff was unhurt. The would-be assassin was a Bolivian painter named Benjamin Mendoza who allegedly practiced black magic and witchcraft. Witnesses said that he had glassy eyes and seemed to be in some kind of trance during the attack.

The entities had correctly described the general circumstances of the attempt, but their dates were all wrong, and it took place in the Far East rather than the Middle East.

(In January 1968, I received a phone call informing me that the Reverend Martin Luther King would be murdered on February 4. He would be shot in the throat, I was told, while standing on a balcony in Memphis. I took the prediction seriously and spent some frantic hours trying to contact King by phone to warn him. I never got through. He was not assassinated on February 4, but on April 4, exactly as described to me four months earlier.)

III.

August 3, 1967. Jaye P. Paro was awakened at 3
A.M.
by the sound of a baby crying. There were no babies in her house. She got out of bed and searched for the source of the sound without success.

Reports of telephone hoaxes, beeping and electronic sounds, tapes being played back, etc., reached me from as far away as Seattle, Washington. Flying saucer enthusiasts from coast to coast were suddenly having identical problems. Obviously this was not the work of a few random pranksters. It was more like a well-organized, well-financed campaign. On the night of July 21 between the hours of 10
P.M.
and 1
A.M.
hoax calls were received in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Massachussetts, California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington, and probably many other places that I never learned about. Unlisted phones were no protection. Were these calls the work of the CIA, as so many of the UFO enthusiasts believed? They seemed too pointless and expensive to be the work of the government.

After the UFO convention in June, Princess Moon Owl faded away, just as I had suspected she would. Aside from the single interview on WBAB, she had not been given any publicity. But in late August she was phoning UFO enthusiasts again, showering them with predictions … all largely silly. Then, unexpectedly, she became respectable. She traveled around Long Island handing out money, usually less than twenty-five dollars, to people in need. The entertainment editor of the Long Island newspaper
Newsday,
Bob Nickland, told me he received “over twenty-five phone calls” in September describing the Princess's good deeds. Long John Nebel phoned me to see if I knew how I could get in touch with her so he could interview her on his radio show. I told both men that I smelled a large rat … a blatant bid for publicity.

The noble princess was the least of my worries. I was like a general advising a dozen deeply troubled contactees and trying to guide them through the games they were caught up in. One woman in Brooklyn was searching for a mysterious crucifix that seemed to have special meaning to the entities. It was like the search for the Holy Grail. A man on Long Island was frantically making preparations for the big evacuation. He even traveled to a secret underground flying saucer base, in a black Cadillac with a dashboard festooned with flashing colored lights, where he participated in a “dry run.” Other normal human beings were present, he said, and manned various kinds of equipment to communicate with the rescue spaceships somewhere overhead. “Funny thing, John,” he mused, “all the equipment was manufactured by Western Electric, Hallicrafters, and other U.S. companies.”

One woman told me she had been flown to another planet where she was placed in a huge glass hospital and examined by a great eyelike machine. Her hosts told her they were “copying” her insides.

I knew from my lengthy interviews and examinations that none of these people were run-of-the-mill kooks or schizophrenics. And I was impressed that many of their experiences were interrelated even though they were scattered geographically and not one of them knew any of the others. The entities adopted a system of code names, giving each contactee a biblical name. I was the only one who knew which name applied to which contactee. They would tell Contactee A in New Jersey to give me a message or piece of advice about Contactee B who lived in Connecticut. Contactee A wouldn't have the faintest notion of what they were talking about.

Another trick was to use certain key phrases. When a contactee whispered to me, “Do you know that cancer is contagious?,” I knew he or she had been talking to this one set of entities.

Then there were those damned synchronized events.

The contactees stopped talking about the pope's fate. They were concerned now about an “EM effect” scheduled for sometime in December. All of them said it would happen in the middle of the month and would affect a large part of the United States. It was going to be a massive power failure.

On September 24, Jaye P. Paro received a phone call from a man claiming to be on the city desk at
Newsday.
He told her that Princess Moon Owl was going to visit WBAB that afternoon and he was sending a photographer to get a picture of the two of them together. Miss Paro went to the radio station and waited all afternoon but neither the princess nor the photographer showed up.

But, curiously, a photographer did turn up in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, at the home of Linda Scarberry. He was very tall, wore a black suit, had a heavy “sunburn,” and wanted to take pictures of Linda's “family.” She and Roger had no children but she was very pregnant at the time. She refused his offer and phoned her mother in a panic after he left. Something about the man just hadn't seemed right …

The next morning Linda woke up to find one of her eyes was swollen shut.

All of the madness of this period came together in a single case revolving around a young woman whom I shall call Shirley. She lived in Seaford, Long Island, a town that enjoyed a brief moment of fame several years ago when it became the center of a widely publicized poltergeist case. Shirley and her husband were separated and she lived alone with her small child.

At 3
P.M.
on the afternoon of September 26, she heard a loud humming sound outside her house, which was in an isolated, wooded area. She looked out the window and saw a silver disc-shaped object hovering about one hundred feet in the air. It seemed to be perfectly smooth with no visible windows or doors. While she was staring at it her doorbell rang. When she answered she found “an Indian woman” standing there. This woman was about five foot nine inches, dark-skinned “but not Negro,” dressed in a long gray gown that reached her feet and was made from some shimmering material.

“Hello, Pat,” the woman said.

“You must have the wrong house, my name isn't Pat,” Shirley replied. Unknown to Shirley, Pat was another of my long list of silent contactees.

“I'm sorry … I meant Shirley,” the woman corrected herself, a reassuring grin fixed on her dark, pointed face. “Could I have some salt? I must take a pill.”

Shirley thought this was very peculiar. She had no idea that another contactee was involved in a game which required her to buy large quantities of salt, transport it to Mount Misery, and leave it in a field for the space people in the belief that salt was an essential part of their diet.

She went and got a box of salt and handed it to the woman who took a large handful and swallowed it. Then she thanked Shirley and walked away into the bushes. There was a loud humming sound, louder than before, and Shirley saw the silver disc rise up and shoot off into the sky. An hour or so later Shirley had an attack of nausea.

When I interviewed her I found her to be a sweet, if somewhat homely, young lady, not very bright, and certainly not imaginative enough to manufacture the things that were to happen later.

A lonely woman living in a lonely place, separated from her husband, perfect fodder for the games the nonpeople loved to play.

Her birthday was September 6.

Following that first visit, Shirley repeatedly heard a baby crying when her own child was sleeping peacefully. The woman returned on September 30, asking for more salt. She identified herself as Cloe (the name of a character in one of my uncelebrated novels) and warned Shirley to lock all her doors and windows that night This time no UFO was visible.

Later that evening, Jaye P. Paro phoned me to tell me that she had just had a narrow escape. While she was walking along a road near Mount Misery, a black Cadillac had roared out of the darkness and come within inches of running her down. All its lights were out and it disappeared quickly into the darkness. She was very upset.

Shortly after Jaye hung up, Shirley called in a very nervous state. A large black car was parked outside her house, she said, and two men completely dressed in black, with broad-brimmed black hats and turtleneck sweaters, were setting up a camera. At first she thought they were priests.

“They're taking pictures of my house!” she exclaimed. “Now why would anyone want to do that? At night yet!”

The camera they were using had a large bright red light attached to it.

“Don't look at that light,” I advised sternly.

“Do you think I should call the police?”

“I'm afraid taking a picture is no crime. They'd probably laugh at you.”

“They're getting back in the car. You know, its headlights are out. I don't know how they can see. They're driving off.”

While I was talking to Shirley, Mary Hyre was trying to call me from West Virginia. She finally called Dan Drasin and asked him to get in touch with me as soon as my line was free. I called her back and she told me she had just had a frightening encounter with a black Cadillac. While she was walking down the deserted Main Street (the sidewalks roll up about 7
P.M.
), a car driven “by a very large man” pulled away from the curb and slowly followed her. She walked to her own car and the Cadillac slowly went around a corner. She got into her car and went looking for the stranger.

“I was heading out to Route 62 when I saw it again,” she said. “It headed straight for me. I pulled over as far as I could and it almost ran right into me. It was the same car … but now there were three men in it. I could see that one of them was wearing glasses … like those sunglasses that wrap around your head. I've never seen any of them in Point Pleasant before. What do you suppose they were trying to prove?”