The Mothman Prophecies (4 page)

After he hung up we resumed our argument. He had clearly gone through this many times before. It was all an act. His moods changed abruptly from rage to politeness to chumminess. Finally he escorted me down the hall to a library and dumped me.

Jacks told me several times that the air force did not have any kind of a UFO photo file. A year later, however, a science writer named Lloyd Mallan was given over one hundred pictures from that nonexistent file. Jacks also informed me that no UFO reports were stored in the Pentagon. They were all at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. I didn't visit Wright-Patterson but Mort Young of the now-defunct New York
Journal-American
did. I asked Mort to write his experience for this book.

“Records of UFO reports, I was told at the Pentagon, are all kept at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio,” Mort explains.

So I went to Dayton. There I was told that UFO reports are filed at the Pentagon, and I could have seen them in Washington. I later learned that not only are UFO reports filed at the Pentagon and at Project Blue Book headquarters in Dayton, but are also forwarded to at least two other addresses where, presumably, they are also filed. One might hope that at these other places, the files are in better order than at Blue Book, where individual sightings are incomplete. Files I asked for were either handed to me with pages missing, entire parts missing, or the file itself was missing: the air force having “no information” on the sighting in question. Some files were in disreputable state: page upon page jammed into brown folders. The information that was there would have to be sorted chronologically, at least, before one could sit down, read it through and come out the wiser. I would rather try to explain a UFO than make sense out of an air force UFO report.

Some of the allegations of the UFO believers had merit. The air force was struggling to keep the issues confused. They did lie, and on occasion they lied outrageously, to reporters. Photographs sent to them by well-meaning citizens often disappeared forever into the maw at Wright-Patterson.

But from my own investigations I could not honestly accuse them of having a wing of Oriental officers whose assignment was to squelch witnesses. Other writers such as Lloyd Mallan were reaching similar conclusions. By 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Jacks had retired and been replaced by Lt. Col. George P. Freeman. Freeman was a kinder, more tactful soul and gave our reports serious consideration. On February 15, 1967, a confidential letter went out from the Pentagon to all commands.

Information has reached headquarters USAF that persons claiming to represent the air force or other defense establishments have contacted citizens who have sighted unidentified flying objects. In one reported case, an individual in civilian clothes, who represented himself as a member of NORAD, demanded and received photos belonging to a private citizen. In another, a person in an air force uniform approached local police and other citizens who had sighted a UFO, assembled them in a schoolroom and told them that they did not see what they thought they saw and that they should not talk to anyone about the sighting. All military and civilian personnel and particularly information officers and UFO investigating officers who hear of such reports should immediately notify their local OSI [Office of Special Investigations] offices.

(Signed)

Hewitt T. Wheless, Lt. Gen. USAF

Asst. Vice Chief of Staff

Project Blue Book was formally shut down in December 1969. But the “Men in Black” have not retired. They were busy again in the wake of the October 1973 UFO wave. And in January 1974 they even appeared in Sweden, using the same tactics that were so effective here. Even the gasoline shortage failed to deter those black Cadillacs from their mysterious rounds.

3:

The Flutter of Black Wings

I.

Another kind of Man in Black haunted Brooklyn, New York, in 1877–80. He had wings and performed aerial acrobatics over the heads of the crowds of sunbathers at Coney Island. A Mr. W. H. Smith first reported these strange flights in a letter to the
New York Sun,
September 18, 1877. The creature was not a bird, but “a winged human form.”

This flying man became a local sensation and, according to the
New York Times,
September 12, 1880, “many reputable persons” saw him as he was “engaged in flying toward New Jersey.” He maneuvered at an altitude of about one thousand feet, sporting “bat's wings” and making swimminglike movements. Witnesses claimed to have seen his face clearly. He “wore a cruel and determined expression.” The entire figure was black, standing out sharply against the clear blue sky. Since he wasn't towing an advertising sign behind him, and since the primitive gliders of experimenters during that period rarely traveled far, and then usually downhill, the incidents are without explanation.

Leonardo da Vinci studied the flights of birds in the fifteenth century and tried to build a man-powered ornithopter without success. Thousands of other basement inventors have worked on the idea since, constructing canvas wings that were moved by the muscles of the optimistic pilots. Most of these weird-looking machines became instant junk on their first test flights. And several overconfident types went crashing to their deaths when they leaped off cliffs and high buildings in their homemade wings. It was not until May 2, 1962, that a man really succeeded in flying under his own power. Mr. John C. Wimpenny flew 993 yards at an altitude of five feet in a contraption with rigid wings and a pedal-driven propeller at Hatfield, Hertfordshire, in England.

The principle of the ornithopter—propulsion through the birdlike movement of wings—has been known for centuries but no one has been able to make it work. No human, that is. Machines flying through the air with moving wings have frequently been sighted during UFO waves. But the UFO enthusiasts tend to ignore any reports which describe things other than disks or cigar-shaped objects.

In 1905 “a titanic white bird” fluttered around California. One witness, J. A. Jackson, “a well-known resident of Silshee,” was paying a visit to his outhouse at 1:30
A.M.
on August 2 when he saw a brilliant light in the sky. It seemed to be attached to a seventy-foot “airship” with wings. “The mysterious machine appeared to be propelled by the wings alone and rose and fell as the wings flapped like a gigantic bird,” the Brawley, California,
News
reported, August 4, 1905. Others in the area reported seeing the same thing.

Winged beings are an essential part of the folklore of every culture. From the times of Babylonia and the Pharaohs, sculptors were preoccupied with putting wings on lions and unidentifiable beasts. Although the angels of biblical times were never described as being winged, painters and sculptors have always persisted in giving them feathered appendages. (Actually, the old-time angels appeared like ordinary human beings. They even had supper with Lot.) When demons overran the planet during the Dark Ages they were also recorded as monstrous entities with bats' wings.

Remote areas of the world are still said to be inhabited by harpies and winged humans. On July 11, 1908, the famous Russian traveler V. K. Arsenyev was trekking along the Gobilli River when he had this encounter:
*

… I saw the mark on the path that was very similar to a man's footprint. My dog Alpha bristled up, snarled and then something rushed about nearby trampling among the bushes. However, it didn't go away, but stopped nearby, standing stock-still. We had been standing like that for some minutes … then I stooped, picked up a stone and threw it towards the unknown animal. Then something happened that was quite unexpected: I heard the beating of wings. Something large and dark emerged from the fog and flew over the river. A moment later it disappeared into the dense mist. My dog, badly frightened, pressed itself to my feet.

After supper I told the Udehe-men about this incident. They broke into a vivid story about a man who could fly in the air. Hunters often saw his tracks, tracks that appeared suddenly and vanished suddenly, in such a way that they could only be possible if the “man” alighted on the ground, then took off again into the air.

In Mexico there are stories of the
ikals,
tiny black men endowed with the power of flight who live in caves and kidnap humans. In India the giant bird known as the Garuda is an important part of the mythology. The gods Vishnu and Krishna traveled around the heavens on the back of a great Garuda. North American Indians have extensive legends about the Thunderbird, a huge bird said to carry off children and old people. It was accompanied by loud noises, hums, buzzes and, apparently, rumbles from the infrasonic and ultrasonic levels. Known as
Piasa
to the Indians of the Dakotas, it was supposed to have terrifying red eyes and a long tail.

We are dealing with three types of phenomena in these cases. The first is the winged man; the second is a giant bird, so huge it is a biological impossibility; third, we have a monstrous demon with red eyes, bat's wings, and a body closely human in form. All three are probably interrelated.

Research is still fragmentary but there is journalistic evidence that the winged man of 1880 was not confined to Coney Island. His activities there were just a publicity gambit, attracting the notice of the staid
New York Times
and thus attaining a measure of respectability so that when anyone anywhere else saw him they had a frame of reference.

According to the Louisville, Kentucky,
Courier-Journal,
July 29, 1880, the winged man was busy in that area. Two men, C. A. Youngman and Bob Flexner, reported seeing “a man surrounded by machinery which he seemed to be working with his hands.” He had wings or fans on his back which he was flapping rather desperately to keep aloft. The startled men watched him flutter unsteadily out of view.

But he would be back.

II.

A year before the first flying saucer “scare” erupted in the state of Washington in 1947, a group of sixteen people in San Diego, California, witnessed a strange phenomenon. They were gathered on a rooftop to watch a meteor shower on the night of October 9, 1946, when a bluish-white winged object appeared in the sky. It looked like an extremely long airplane carrying two reddish lights and it left a luminous contrail.

“The strange object was certainly no airplane,” one witness told Harold T. Wilkins.
1
“The wings, which moved, were too wide for any bird. Indeed, they were rather like the wings of a butterfly. The whole object emitted a red glow.”

The object was especially conspicuous as it crossed the face of the moon. Some of the witnesses thought it resembled a gigantic bat.

Astronomers have also reported similar objects. In
Popular Astronomy,
1912, Dr. F. B. Harris stated: “In the evening of January 27, 1912, I saw an intensely black object, like a crow, poised upon the moon. I estimated it at 250 miles long by 50 miles wide. I cannot but think that a very interesting phenomenon happened.”

In that crazy year 1880, an Italian astronomer named Ricco, of the observatory at Palermo, Sicily, was studying the sun at 8
A.M.
, November 30, when he saw “winged bodies in two long parallel lines slowly traveling, apparently across the disk of the sun. They looked like large birds or cranes.”

Cranes on the sun? Crows 250 miles long on the moon? Black-garbed men swimming through the skies over Coney Island? Ornithopters over Kentucky and San Diego?

On December 30, 1946, Ella Young, an American writer, saw one of our bats at dusk near Morrow Bay, California. “On the golden sky it looked very black,” she reported. “It came forward head on, and had a batlike appearance, owing to the curvature of its wings. I am not sure if there were motions at the extreme tip of the wings; but the strange machine seemed to stand still for several minutes, and its form was very distinct. Suddenly, it either lowered itself toward the horizon, or the bank of cloud-mist made an upward movement—maybe, both movements occurred—for the machine passed behind the cloud and did not reappear. Immediately afterward, a great flush of color spread over the sea.”

May through August 1947 saw the first modern UFO wave in the United States. Odd lights, glistening circular machines, and reddish flying cigars captured the American imagination. Tiffany Thayer, the eccentric novelist and founder of the Fortean Society, named after Charles Fort, chortled over the air force explanations in the society's journal,
Doubt
Obviously the government was determined to cover up the true facts in this new situation. Mystics and cranks quickly appeared, explaining the phenomenon as the work of people from outer space. The press gave the sensation a two-week run, then went back to the intricacies of the cold war. No one, not even the beady-eyed Forteans, paid much attention to the giant birds and machines with flapping wings that returned to our skies in 1948.

Early in January 1948, Mrs. Bernard Zaikowski reported seeing a “sizzing and whizzing” man with silver wings maneuvering about 200 feet above her barn in Chehalis, Washington. The air force scoffed. Four months later, two laundry workers in Longview, Washington, about forty miles south of Chehalis, claimed to see a trio of “birdmen” circling the city at an altitude of 250 feet.

“When they first came into sight, I thought they looked like gulls, but as they got closer I could make out that they weren't gulls and I knew they were men,” Mrs. Viola Johnson told reporters. “I could see plainly that they were men.… They wore dark, drab flying suits. I couldn't make out their arms but I could see their legs dangling down and they kept moving their heads like they were looking around. I couldn't tell if they had goggles on but their heads looked like they had helmets on. I couldn't see their faces.”

That happened on April 9, 1948. That same day, a couple in Caledonia, Illinois, reported seeing “a monster bird … bigger than an airplane.” Researchers Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman dug into Illinois newspapers and discovered that state had an epidemic of funny birds in 1948.
2