The Mothman Prophecies (9 page)

All of the witnesses got out of the car to watch. Traffic was light but several cars did speed past them. As they watched, the object began to move and they realized it was not a fire but was some kind of flying sphere. It executed a sharp turn and came toward the witnesses, passing directly over their heads. It was completely silent. As it approached their position, three powerful “headlights” became visible on the front of the object. These lights appeared to be elongated and passed from the top of the craft to the underside. The object disappeared northward and the witnesses experienced a strong emotional reaction. Mrs. Arline Christiansen and her sister Gwendoline Martino became hysterical, alarming their four children. Two of the youngsters began to cry. They all returned to the car and drove home to Wildwood Crest.

Edward Christiansen, forty, a hard-nosed businessman, refused to believe in flying saucers and tried to assure the women that there had to be a natural explanation. His sister-in-law Gwendoline decided to call the local air force base at Palmero. She spoke to an officer there and he seemed quite interested in her story and asked several questions. An hour later the family received a long-distance phone call from another air force base (none of them could remember the name of the base or the names of the officers when I interviewed them several months later). Each one of them was interviewed at great length by “three or four officers.” They were told that their conversation was being taped, and the questions followed a pattern which suggested the officers were filling out detailed forms on the other end of the line. However, all of them were disappointed to find the air force would not give them any information or answer their own questions.

Something extraordinary seems to have happened that night. Instead of simply filing a report through normal channels, the officer at the Palmero base may have called Wright-Patterson in Ohio immediately. Officers from Project Blue Book then called the Christiansens for additional details. However, it is puzzling that “three or four different officers” would participate in the questioning. Incidently, these witnesses are above average in income and intelligence and their overall reliability is unquestioned.

Later that evening as Mrs. Martino, who was spending the night at the Christiansens, was preparing for bed she suddenly heard a loud radio signal … a series of dots and dashes. She knew her brother-in-law had a portable CB (Citizen's Band) radio and she assumed he had accidentally left it turned on. He and his wife were already in bed and asleep but she didn't understand the radio and didn't want to tamper with it. She continued to hear the signals as she entered their bedroom and awakened them.
They were unable to hear the signals
 … and the radio was turned off and in its case.

The signals faded and Mrs. Martino went to bed baffled. A beautiful, lithe divorcee, Mrs. Martino had not had any unusual psychic experiences before.

VI.

Roger and Linda Scarberry were living in a house trailer at the time of their Mothman sighting. In the week that followed they were suddenly plagued by strange sounds around the trailer late at night. Beeps and loud garbled noises like a speeded-up phonograph record. They could not locate the source of the sounds outside or inside the trailer. Worried and frightened, they finally moved out of the trailer and settled in the basement apartment in the home of Linda's parents, Parke and Mabel McDaniel.

VII.

On November 24, four people, two adults and two children, were driving past the TNT area when they saw a giant flying creature with red eyes. Their report added to the growing chaos. Now thousands of people were pouring into the old munitions site nightly, some traveling from hundreds of miles away. Television crews and newsmen from other states hovered around the old generator plant, hoping to glimpse the monster. Some visitors divided their time between the TNT area and Woodrow Derenberger's farm in Mineral Wells.

Mothman was not to be outsmarted, however. He staged his appearances with clever showmanship, popping up in unexpected places in front of witnesses who had previously been skeptical.

At 7:15
A.M.
on November 25, a young shoe salesman named Thomas Ury was driving along Route 62 just north of the TNT area when he noticed a tall, gray manlike figure standing in a field by the road. “Suddenly it spread a pair of wings,” Ury said, “and took off straight up, like a helicopter.

“It veered over my convertible and began going in circles three telephone poles high.”

He stepped on the gas as the creature zoomed down over his vehicle. “It kept flying right over my car even though I was doing about seventy-five.”

Mr. Ury sped into Point Pleasant and went straight to the sheriff's office thoroughly panicked. “I never saw anything like it,” he confided to Mrs. Hyre later. “I was so scared I just couldn't go to work that day. This thing had a wingspan every bit of ten feet. It could be a bird, but I certainly never saw one like it. I was afraid it was going to come down right on top of me.”

The old familiar symptom, unreasonable terror, took hold of him. “I've never had that feeling before. A weird kind of fear,” he said. “That fear gripped you and held you. Somehow, the best way to explain it would be to say that the whole thing just wasn't right. I know that may not make sense, but that's the only way I can put into words what I felt.”

That same week some very freakish birds appeared in Ohio and Pennsylvania, far north of Point Pleasant. George Wolfe, Jr., twenty-three, of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, was out hunting when he came across a “seven-foot-tall bird that looked something like an ostrich” in a cornfield.

“I could see it dodging in and out among the trees,” he said. “It didn't leap over the brush like a deer would do, but just zig-zagged through the trees, in a strange sidewise motion.

“I was so startled I didn't take a shot at it. It had a long neck and a round body with a plumed tail that reached high above its body.

“It was a grayish color and looked about seven feet tall. It was about fifty feet from me when it stood up and began to run. My dog ran after it, but when Old Ringo caught up with it, he let out a howl. He ran back to me with his tail between his legs and he was howling and whimpering.”

In Lowell, Ohio, about seventy miles north of Point Pleasant, Marvin Shock and his family watched a group of gigantic birds for about two hours on November 26. “They looked about as big as a man would look moving around in the trees,” Shock reported. “When we started walking toward them for a closer look—we were about one hundred yards from them—they took off and flew up the ridge.”

Shock, his two children, and Ewing Tilton, a neighbor, watched the creatures from a distance. They were from four to five feet tall and had a wingspread of at least ten feet. There was “a reddish cast” to their heads, but the witnesses did not see the famous glowing red eyes.

“They had dark brown backs with some light flecks,” Ewing Tilton noted. “Their breasts were gray and they had five-or-six-inch bills, straight, not curved like those of hawks or vultures.”

These reports indicate that some very unusual birds were in the general region at the time of the Mothman fracas, even though a systematic search of ornithological literature has failed to identify the creatures seen by Wolfe, Shock, and Ewing. One Ohio college professor insisted it was a rare sandhill crane, so I carried a picture of the sandhill crane in my briefcase and not a single witness recognized it or thought it resembled what he or she had seen.

Altogether, more than one hundred adults would see this winged impossibility in 1966–67. Those who got a close look at it all agreed on the basic points. It was gray, apparently featherless, as large—or larger—than a big man, had a wingspread of about ten feet, took off straight up like a helicopter, and did not flap its wings in flight. Its face was a puzzle. No one could describe it. The two red eyes dominated it. (In a majority of the reports of angels, demons, and saucer spacemen the faces are also either covered in some manner or are nonexistent.)

The “ostrich” in Pennsylvania and the big birds in Ohio did not seem to fit into the picture. If they were real birds of some kind, where did they go? Why weren't they seen again?

On the evening of November 26, a housewife in St. Albans, a suburb of Charleston, West Virginia, found Mothman standing on her front lawn. Mrs. Ruth Foster was one of the very few witnesses who claimed to see a face on the creature.

“It was standing on the lawn beside the porch,” Mrs. Foster said. “It was tall with big red eyes that popped out of its face. My husband is six feet one and this bird looked about the same height or a little shorter, maybe.

“It had a funny little face. I didn't see any beak. All I saw were those big red poppy eyes. I screamed and ran back into the house. My brother-in-law went out to look, but it was gone.”

The next morning the winged phantom pursued young Connie Carpenter near the Mason, West Virginia, golf course (Chapter Two). That evening, it encored in St. Albans. Sheila Cain, thirteen, and her younger sister were walking home from the store when they saw an enormous “something” standing next to a local junk yard.
*

“It was gray and white with big red eyes,” Sheila reported, “and it must have been seven feet tall—taller than a man. I screamed and we ran home. It flew up in the air and followed us part of the way.”

Aerodynamically, Mothman was ill-suited for flight. A creature larger than a big man, and therefore weighing in excess of two hundred pounds, would require more than a ten-foot wingspan to get aloft. And large birds take off by running along the ground and flapping their wings frantically. My favorite, the gooney bird of the Pacific, runs back and forth desperately trying to build up airspeed and then, more often than not, falls flat on his face.

Mothman, with his helicopterlike takeoffs, was impossible.

I was in Washington, D.C., that November, harassing the air force in my black suit, when I spoke to Gray Barker on the phone. Despite the furor then taking place in West Virginia, I had not heard or read a thing about the “Bird's” arrival.

When Gray brought the matter up, I thought he was joking. A red-eyed bird with a ten-foot wingspan who loved to chase speeding automobiles seemed utterly ridiculous. Now if it had been a ten-foot tall hair-covered monster with a terrible smell I might have taken it seriously.

But Gray convinced me it was no joke. I looked Point Pleasant up on the map … it was about eight hundred miles from New York … oiled my fourteen-foot monster traps, got into my car, and headed for the Ohio valley.

7:

The Night of the Bleeding Ear

I.

Gwendoline Martino was back in her apartment in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, early in December 1966, packing her things for a trip to Europe. Her unlisted phone rang. A female voice with a slight foreign accent came on the line.

“Hello, Gwen?”

“Yes, this is Gwen…”

“Gwen Stevens?”

“No, this is Gwen Martino.”

“You're not Gwen Stevens?”

“No … you've got the wrong Gwen.”

This same woman called back again on two successive nights. The conversation was always the same. Mrs. Martino was mildly irritated that the woman would call her three times in a row but she thought nothing of it until I met her a few months later and asked my routine questions about unusual phone calls.

Because of the woman's accent, it is possible she was asking for “Jen Stevens.” Mrs. Martino had never heard of anyone named either Gwen or Jen Stevens. But at that time a woman named Jennifer (“Jen”) Stevens was very active in UFO research in the Albany-Schenectady area of New York State. Mrs. Stevens experienced a wide range of problems with her unlisted phone and a personal tragedy which seemed to be related to her UFO investigations.

In February 1968, Mrs. Stevens reported the following:

[One] night when my husband, Peter, and I returned home we found Jenny, our fifteen-year-old daughter, in a highly nervous state. She said the phone had been ringing all evening. She would answer it and hear nothing at the other end but heavy breathing. When her boyfriend called they were interrupted several times by high-pitched beeping noises and were also cut off twice. The next day the calls continued. Sometimes there would be mechanical sounds, and others, the high-pitched whining, beeping sound that sent sharp pains through the mastoid bones. Our number is unlisted so I knew no one could have gotten it out of the phone book or through the operator. We had long since screened all calls through another number in order to avoid cranks. I called the telephone company and they gave our line a complete check with NO findings. The service man offered his personal opinion that the line “could have been tapped.”

Several days after our telephone problems began, my husband, who is a building contractor, was in a large downtown Schenectady store inspecting some work and dropped into the snack bar for a cup of coffee. A few moments after he seated himself, a tall, tan, “saturnine”-looking man, whom my husband had never seen before, sat down next to him and started a conversation. He began with, “There have been people watching the sky every night down by the river in Scotia.” Since Peter was one of “those people,” he was shocked … but kept cool and said, “I beg your pardon?”

The man proceeded to talk about UFOs. Peter tried to draw him out and asked his name, and so on. All his questions were either parried or avoided. My husband was beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable when the stranger finally excused himself after noting, “People who look for UFOs should be very, very careful.”

At my request, Peter Stevens made two sketches of the “saturnine”-looking man. They sent me one copy and kept the other. A few weeks later their home was broken into and thoroughly ransacked. But nothing was stolen …
except their copy of the sketch.
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