The Mothman Prophecies Read online

  I realized the folly of trying to measure the circle from some distant point, so I picked a microcosm on the edge of the circle—a place where many strange manifestations were occurring simultaneously. And I hit the jackpot immediately, rather like the opening of an old Max Schulman novel: “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life.”

  2:

  The Creep Who Came in from the Cold

  I.

  Friday, December 22, 1967, was bitter cold and the frayed Christmas decorations strung across the main street of the little West Virginian town of Point Pleasant seemed to hang limply, sadly, as if to match the grim, ashen faces of the townspeople who shuffled about their business, their eyes averted from the gaping hole where the Silver Bridge had stood only a week before. Now the seven-hundred-foot span was gone. Clusters of workmen, police officers, and assorted officials stood along the banks of the Ohio, watching silently as divers continued to bob into the black waters. Occasionally ropes would jerk and a bloated, whitened body would be hauled to the surface. It was not going to be a merry Christmas in Point Pleasant.

  A few yards from the place where the bridge had been, Mrs. Mary Hyre sat in her office revising a list of the missing and the known dead. A stout woman in her early fifties, her normally cheerful, alert face was blurred with fatigue. She had had almost no sleep in the past seven days. After twenty years as the local stringer for the Messenger, recording all the births, marriages, and deaths in the little town, Mrs. Hyre suddenly found herself at the center of the universe. Camera teams from as far away as New York were perched outside her door. The swarms of newsmen who had descended on Point Pleasant to record the tragedy had quickly learned what everyone in the Ohio valley already knew. If you wanted to find out anything about the area and its people, the quickest way to do it was to “ask Mary Hyre.”

  For seven days now her office had been filled with strangers, relatives of the missing, and weary rescue workers. So she hardly looked up that afternoon when two men entered. They seemed almost like twins, she recalled later. Both were short and wore black overcoats. Their complexions were dark, somewhat Oriental, she thought.

  “We hear there’s been a lot of flying saucer activity around here,” one of them remarked. She was taken aback. The bridge disaster had dominated everyone’s thoughts for the last week. Flying saucers were the furthest thing from her mind at that moment.

  “We have had quite a few sightings here,” she responded, turning in her chair to pull open a filing cabinet. She hauled out a bulging folder filled with clippings of sighting reports and handed it to one of the men.

  He flipped it open, gave the pile of clippings a cursory glance, and handed it back.

  “Has anyone told you not to publish these reports?”

  She shook her head as she shoved the folder back into the drawer.

  “What would you do if someone did order you to stop writing about flying saucers?”

  “I’d tell them to go to hell,” she smiled wanly.

  The two men glanced at each other. She went back to her lists and when she looked up again they were gone.

  II.

  Later that same afternoon another stranger walked into Mrs. Hyre’s office. He was slightly built, about five feet seven inches tall, with black, piercing eyes and unruly black hair, as if he had had a brush cut and it was just growing back in. His complexion was even darker than that of the two previous visitors and he looked like a Korean or Oriental of some kind. His hands were especially unusual, she thought, with unduly long, tapering fingers. He wore a cheap-looking, ill-fitting black suit, slightly out of fashion, and his tie was knotted in an odd old-fashioned way. Strangely, he was not wearing an overcoat despite the fierce cold outside.

  “My name is Jack Brown,” he announced in a hesitant manner. “I’m a UFO researcher.”

  “Oh,” Mary pushed aside the pile of papers on her desk and studied him. The day was ending and she was ready to go home and try to get some sleep at last.

  After a brief, almost incoherent struggle to discuss UFO sightings Brown stammered, “What—would—what would you do—if someone ordered—ordered you to stop? To stop printing UFO stories?”

  “Say, are you with those two men who were here earlier?” she asked, surprised to hear the same weird question twice in one day.

  “No. No—I’m alone. I’m a friend of Gray—Gray Barker.”

  Gray Barker of Clarksburg was West Virginia’s best-known UFO investigator. He had published a number of books on the subject and was a frequent visitor to Point Pleasant.

  “Do you know John Keel?”

  His face tightened. “I—I used to think—think the world of K—K—Keel. Then a few minutes ago I bought a—a magazine. He has an article in it. He says he’s seen UFOs himself. He’s—he’s a liar.”

  “I know he’s seen things,” Mary flared. “I’ve been with him when he saw them!”

  Brown smiled weakly at the success of his simple gambit.

  “Could you—take me out—t—t—take me where you—you and K—K—Keel saw—saw things?”

  “I’m not going to do anything except go home to bed,” Mary declared flatly.

  “Is K—K—Keel in P—P—Point Pleasant?”

  “No. He lives in New York.”

  “I—I think he m—m—makes up all these stories.”

  “Look, I can give you the names of some of the people here who have seen things,” Mary said wearily. “You can talk to them and decide for yourself. But I just can’t escort you around.”

  “I’m a friend of G—G—Gray Barker,” he repeated lamely.

  Outside the office a massive crane creaked and rumbled, dragging a huge hunk of twisted steel out of the river.

  III.

  On April 22, 1897, an oblong machine with wings and lights “which appeared much brighter than electric lights” dropped out of the sky and landed on the farm near Rockland, Texas, owned by John M. Barclay. Barclay grabbed his rifle and headed for the machine. He was met by an ordinary-looking man who handed him a ten-dollar bill and asked him to buy some oil and tools for the aircraft.

  “Who are you?” Barclay asked.

  “Never mind about my name; call it Smith,” the man answered.

  The UFO lore is populated with mysterious visitors claiming inordinately common names like Smith, Jones, Kelly, Allen, and Brown. In 1897, they often claimed to come from known villages and cities and were even able to name prominent citizens in those places. But when reporters checked, they could find no record of the visitors and the named citizens disavowed any knowledge of them.

  One of the proved hoaxes of 1897 (there were many hoaxes, largely the work of mischievous newspapermen) concerned an object which is supposed to have crashed into Judge Proctor’s windmill in Aurora, Texas. The remains of a tiny pilot were supposedly found in the wreckage and buried in the local cemetery by the townspeople. The story was published in the Dallas Evening News. From time to time, Aurora was visited by self-styled investigators who sifted the dirt on the old Proctor farm and marched through the cemetery reading tombstones, always without finding anything.

  The story was revived in 1972, and in 1973 a man identifying himself as Frank N. Kelley of Corpus Christi arrived in Aurora. He said he was a treasure hunter of long experience. He set to work with his metal detectors and instruments and quickly unearthed several fragments of metal near the windmill site. They appeared to be something like the skin of modern aircraft, he announced. He kept some of the pieces and turned the rest over to a reporter named Bill Case. Analysis showed the pieces were 98 percent aluminum.

  Kelley’s alleged discovery created a stampede to Aurora. UFO investigators descended from as far away as Illinois and battled for permission to dig up graves in the cemetery. The story received wide play in the national press in the summer of 1973.

  When efforts were made to find Frank Kelley in Corpus Christi it was found that he had given a phony addre
ss and phone number, and that no one in treasure-hunting circles had ever heard of him. Mr. Kelley was apparently another one of the impressive but elusive hoaxsters who haunt the UFO field. The joke was pointless, expensive, and, sadly, very successful.

  IV.

  The moment I met Mrs. Hyre’s niece Connie Carpenter in 1966, I knew she was telling the truth because her eyes were reddened, watery, and almost swollen shut. I had seen these symptoms many times in my treks around the country investigating UFO reports. Witnesses who were unlucky enough to have a close encounter with an unidentified flying object, usually a dazzlingly brilliant aerial light, are exposed to actinic rays … ultraviolet rays … which can cause “eyeburn,” medically known as klieg conjunctivitis. These are the same kind of rays that tan your hide at the beach. If you lay in the bright sun without protecting your eyes you can get conjunctivitis. Whatever they are, UFOs radiate intense actinic rays. There are now thousands of cases in which the witnesses suffered eyeburns and temporary eye damage … even temporary blindness … after viewing a strange flying light in the night sky.

  One of the more extreme cases of UFO blindness occurred on the night of Wednesday, October 3, 1973 in southeastern Missouri. Eddie Webb, forty-five, of Greenville, saw a luminous object in his rear-view mirror. He put his head out the window of his truck and looked back. There was a bright white flash. Webb threw his hands to his face, crying, “Oh, my God! I’m burned! I can’t see!” One lens had fallen from his glasses and the frames were melted. His wife took over the wheel of their vehicle and drove him to a hospital. Fortunately, the damage was not permanent.

  What puzzled me about Connie’s case, however, was that she had not seen a splendid luminous flying saucer. She had seen a giant “winged man” in broad daylight.

  According to her story, Connie, a shy, sensitive eighteen-year-old, was driving home from church at 10:30 A.M. on Sunday, November 27, 1966, when, as she passed the deserted greens of the Mason County Golf Course outside of New Haven, West Virginia, she suddenly saw a huge gray figure. It was shaped like a man, she said, but was much larger. It was at least seven feet tall and very broad. The thing that attracted her attention was not its size but its eyes. It had, she said, large, round, fiercely glowing red eyes that focused on her with hypnotic effect.

  “It’s a wonder I didn’t run off the road and have a wreck,” she commented later.

  As she slowed, her eyes fixed on the apparition, a pair of wings unfolded from its back. They seemed to have a span of about ten feet. It was definitely not an ordinary bird but a man-shaped thing which rose slowly off the ground, straight up like a helicopter, silently. Its wings did not flap in flight. It headed straight toward Connie’s car, its horrible eyes fixed to her face, then it swooped low over her head as she shoved the accelerator to the floorboards in utter hysteria.

  Over one hundred people would see this bizarre creature that winter.

  Connie’s conjunctivitis lasted over two weeks, apparently caused by those glowing red eyes. At the time of my first visit to Point Pleasant in 1966 I did not relate the winged weirdo to flying saucers. Later events not only proved that a relationship existed, but that relationship also is a vital clue to the whole mystery.

  V.

  Max’s Kansas City is a famous watering hole for New York’s hip crowd. In the summer of 1967 an oddball character wandered into that restaurant noted for its oddball clientele. He was tall and awkward, dressed in an ill-fitting black suit that seemed out of style. His chin came to a sharp point and his eyes bulged slightly like “thyroid eyes.” He sat down in a booth and gestured to the waitress with his long, tapering fingers.

  “Something to eat,” he mumbled. The waitress handed him a menu. He stared at it uncomprehendingly, apparently unable to read. “Food,” he said almost pleadingly.

  “How about a steak?” she offered.

  “Good.”

  She brought him a steak with all the trimmings. He stared at it for a long moment and then picked up his knife and fork, glancing around at the other diners. It was obvious he did not know how to handle the implements! The waitress watched him as he fumbled helplessly. Finally she showed him how to cut the steak and spear it with the fork. He sawed away at the meat. Clearly he really was hungry.

  “Where are you from?” She asked gently.

  “Not from here.”

  “Where?”

  “Another world.”

  Boy, another put-on artist, she thought to herself. The other waitresses gathered in a corner and watched him as he fumbled with his food, a stranger in a strange land.

  VI.

  A large white car with a faulty muffler wheezed and rattled up the back street in New Haven, West Virginia, where Connie Carpenter lived, and Jack Brown knocked at her door.

  “I’m a—a friend of Mary Hyre’s.”

  His strange demeanor and disjointed questions distressed her and disturbed her husband, Keith, and her brother Larry. It quickly became obvious that he was not particularly interested in Connie’s sighting of the man-bird the year before. He seemed mainly concerned with Mrs. Hyre and my own relationship with her (we were professional friends, nothing more).

  “What do you think—if—what would Mary Hyre do—if someone told her to stop writing about UFOs?” he asked.

  “She’d probably tell them to drop dead,” Connie replied.

  Most of his questions were stupid, even unintelligible. After a rambling conversation he drove off into the night in his noisy car. Connie called her aunt immediately, puzzled and upset by the visit. He was such a very odd man, she noted, and he wouldn’t speak at all if you weren’t looking directly into his dark, hypnotic eyes. Connie, Keith and Larry not only noticed his long-fingered hands, but there was also something very peculiar about his ears. They couldn’t say exactly what. But there was something.…

  VII.

  “Did you ever hear of anyone—especially an air force officer—trying to drink Jello?” Mrs. Ralph Butler of Owatonna, Minnesota, asked. “Well, that’s what he did. He acted like he had never seen any before. He picked up the bowl and tried to drink it. I had to show him how to eat it with a spoon.”

  Mrs. Butler was describing the man who had visited her in May 1967, following a flurry of UFO sightings in Owatonna. He said he was Major Richard French of the U.S. Air Force although he was dressed in civilian clothes and was driving a white Mustang. His neat gray suit and everything else he was wearing appeared to be brand-new. Even the soles of his shoes were unscuffed, unwalked upon. He was about five feet nine inches tall, with an olive complexion and a pointed face. His hair was dark and very long—too long for an air force officer, Mrs. Butler thought. Unlike Jack Brown, Major French was a fluent conversationalist and seemed perfectly normal until he complained about his stomach bothering him. When Mrs. Butler offered him the Jello she suspected for the first time that something was out of kilter.

  Richard French was an imposter. One of the many wandering around the United States in 1967. For years these characters had caused acute paranoia among the flying saucer enthusiasts, convincing them that the air force was investigating them, silencing witnesses and indulging in all kinds of unsavory activities—including murder. When I first began collecting such reports I was naturally suspicious of the people making such reports. It all seemed like a massive put-on. But gradually it became apparent that the same minute details were turning up in widely separated cases, and none of these details had been published anywhere … not even in the little newsletters of the UFO cultists.

  There was somebody out there, all right. A few, like Richard French, almost pulled off their capers without drawing attention to themselves. But in nearly every case there was always some small error, some slip of dress or behavior which the witnesses were usually willing to overlook but which stood out like signal flares to me. They often arrived in old model cars which were as shiny and well kept as brand-new vehicles. Sometimes they slipped up in their dress, wearing clothes that were out of fashion or
, even more perturbing, would not come into fashion until years later. Those who posed as military officers obviously had no knowledge of military procedure or basic military jargon. If they had occasion to pull out a wallet or notebook, it would be brand-new … although most men carry beat-up old wallets and notebooks quickly gain a worn look. Finally, like the fairies of old, they often collected souvenirs from the witnesses … delightedly walking away with an old magazine, pen, or other small expendable object.

  What troubled me most was the fact that these mystery men and women often matched the descriptions given to me by contactees who claimed to have seen a UFO land and had glimpsed, or conversed with, their pilots; pilots with either pointed features or Oriental countenances, dusky skin (not Negroid), and unusually long fingers.

  VIII.

  Linda Scarberry came home from the hospital on December 23, 1967, bringing with her Daniella Lia Scarberry, her brand-new daughter. She and her husband, Roger, lived in the basement apartment in the home of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Parke McDaniel. It was a modest but comfortable home and, like Mary Hyre’s office, had been a focal point for strangers ever since Linda, Roger, and another couple had seen the “Bird”—the preposterous winged man of Point Pleasant—the year before.

  Now there was a steady flow of friends and neighbors stopping by to look at the new baby, one of the few joyous occasions that bleak December. When Jack Brown’s noisy white car pulled into the McDaniel driveway he was welcomed as so many reporters, monster hunters, and UFO researchers had been before him. He announced himself as a friend of Mary Hyre, Gray Barker, and John Keel and entered the house hauling a large tape recorder which he set up on a kitchen table. It became immediately obvious that he was unfamiliar with the machine and didn’t know how to thread or operate it.