The page numbers below refer to the 2001 TOR Books reprinting of Mothman Prophecies by John Alva Keel, the version most easily obtainable by the general public.
CHAPTER FIVE
Page 52: Quite a few people saw something around the time and place Derenberger met Cold, it appears. A Parkersburg businessman named Walter Vanscoy admitted that "I observed a panel truck parked on the berm of the Southbound lanes of I-77 . . . I also observed what appeared to be a man standing by the right-hand front door of the panel truck." Several nearby residents told the police of bad TV reception at that time, and a couple of witnesses noted a beam of light in the sky around 7:30 PM. [Clark, pp. 328-329]
Mrs. Frank Huggins: "Irma Hudgins, her son Fred, and her daughter Pamela Sue," according to Clark; their sighting of an identical object was at the same place, at about the same time (6:45 PM), but two days later.
Page 53: "Uninhabited": See also the fold-out map Indians of North America from National Geographic, December 1972.
Curse of Chief Cornstalk: "A rare historical document relates that before he died he put a curse on the town." That's all we learn of the source of the Curse from The Silver Bridge (p. 115). In Wamsley (p. 117), a news clipping from 1967 calls the curse a "myth"; it seems one Holly Simmons of the West Virginia State Historical Society discovered there was no truth to the story, "her conclusion [based] on research of early history." Even the news story admitted, however, that many local people had heard of the curse "since early childhood."
Page 54: "Mooneyed people": See James Mooney's Myths of the Cherokee pp. 22-23.
"Back hills of Kentucky and Tennessee": The "white Indians" of Kentucky are thought by some to be the descendants of Prince Madoc, the Welsh prince, and his followers, who supposedly sailed to North America in the 12th century. (Brandon, p. 93) Several theories exist to explain the Melungeons of Tennessee, ranging from Madoc's people to a Lost Tribe of Israel. The Melungeons themselves believe that they are descended from Portuguese colonists. (Brandon, pp. 210-211)
Most books on New Jersey mention the "Pineys". They are a poverty-stricken group in the Jersey Pine Barrens, whose origin was probably multi-ethical. See, for instance, McCloy and Miller, pp. 18-20.
Page 54: "galaxy of Ganymede": Keel and other writers have harped on the fact that Ganymede is a moon of Jupiter. Cripes, there can be more than one thing named Ganymede in the infinite universe! "Lanulos": I wonder if there's any significance to the fact that this name is an anagram of "Sol" and "Luna". pp. 54-55: "Folks on Lanulos had a life-expectancy of 125-175 earth years. Naturally there was no war, poverty, hunger, or misery." Since about 1980 John Keel has denied ever believing in Derenberger's contacts. In FATE Magazine (April 2002), for instance, he says: "As for Indrid Cold, I never talked to him on the telephone. I always thought Woodrow Derenberger probably made him up." [p. 6] In Mothman I can find only slightly sarcastic lines like those quoted here that suggest he didn't take Woody and Indrid Cold seriously. Page 55: Gray Barker: The publisher of Saucerian Books, Barker turns out to have been quite a hoaxster. He brought the concept of "Men-in-Black" to prominence with such books as They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers and Flying Saucers and the Three Men (the latter by Albert K. Bender). Some investigators have claimed that he actually went "into the field," so to speak, dressed as a Man-in-Black, harassing UFO witnesses on his own time!
(There have been MIB cases that had no conceivable connection with Barker, including one from 1905, but we'll get to those later.) A friend of Barker's, John C. Sherwood, wrote an expose about the man for The Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 1998). It was later published online: See Gray Barker: My Friend, the Myth-Maker.
Curiously enough, Sherwood gives a sort of backhanded support to the Mothman sequence:
An interim letter, recounting his work on a book about the West Virginia "Mothman" sightings, reflects Gray's attitude about publishing fiction as nonfiction: "About half of it is a recounting of actual sightings and events in the Ohio Valley circa 1966. . . . I think that the 'true accounts' are told in an exciting way, but I have deliberately stuck in fictional chapters based roughly on cases I had heard about."
What Keel, Sherwood, and others forget is that Silver Bridge is admitted to be "fictionalized" in its own introduction (written by Allen H. Greenfield); it is a "hybrid that is -- strictly speaking -- neither poetry nor prose, but something of both." Reading it with other Mothman books at hand, it is fairly easy to identify the fictional sections (like the personal adventures of Indrid Cold and Men in Black), while it expands on known accounts of the flying entity (Bandit the German Shepherd, for instance, and the Scarberrys' and Mallettes' long night of fleeing Mothman).
Some of Barker's attitude leaks through the pages of his book The Silver Bridge. After mentioning the Men-in Black:
No doubt many UFO enthusiasts, reading of the men in black, picked up their telephones and rang up people who they knew were frightened by the idea, and spoke dire warnings to them in assumed foreign accents, usually German. [page 91]
Bandit, the German Shepherd: The biggest news in Jeff Wamsley's Mothman: Behind the Red Eyes is probably the revelations about the Bandit incident. First of all, the primary witness' name is Merle, not Newell Partridge, as has been given in every book, magazine, and even contemporary news clipping. (He must have answered to "Newell" occasionally, as the mistake was even on his birth certificate).
Page 56: Salem, West Virginia: We've just heard about Salem, Oregon. The Name Game at work? In Wamsley's book Partridge says he lived closer to Centerpoint, WV.
Page 56: Keel uses Barker's tape recorded interview with Partridge here. TV intereference: "Partridge didn't mention until later in the evening that he was disturbed and frightened from the time the interference first appeared on the screen. He also said there was a peculiar form to the almost undefinable shadows in the pattern." [Silver Bridge, pp. 23-24] In Wamsley (p. 50) Partridge reports that the picture tube exploded, sending debris across the room. A neighbor who lived two miles away reported his TV also exploded, at about the same time. Barker was certainly not the only person to interview Merle Partridge. The witness told Jeff Wamsley that "an Air Force colonel, a detective, and a few others" visited him the day after he reported Bandit missing (Wamsley, p. 48). Red eyes: Partridge now reveals that what he (and his wife) saw were two red lights, "going in circles." He denies seeing red "eyes". The next morning he found a circle of pressed-down grass forty to fifty feet wide -- making this event an "ordinary" UFO landing rather than a Mothman sighting. (Too bad -- the image of Mothman at the far end of a field, perhaps near a hay barn, has been an archtypical image to me since 1970, and that was inspired by the Bandit incident.) Page 57: Bandit vanishing: It would not have been too easy to just carry off this dog, according to Partridge:
"What animal would be capable of killing a dog his size?"
"I don't know of any animal capable of killing that dog, because I know I have tried to hold his head between my hands; and Roger, my oldest boy, and I, have both tried to hold that dog on the ground while playing with him, and both of us together couldn't hold him down." [Silver Bridge, p. 26]
Other strange things happened near Partridge's home and to the man himself. For a week or so after the dog's disappearance, silence reined throughout the countryside. "You didn't hear a cricket . . . you didn't hear a bird . . . you didn't hear a cow moo." (Wamsley, p. 51) Two weeks later a neighbor was forced off the road by "something" with flashing lights, and the man's youngest son vanished from his car. Partridge helped search for the boy, who reappeared walking up the road from the opposite direction of his father's route of travel. Even years later, the boy could not say what happened during his "missing time."
Odd events seemed to follow Partridge even years later, when he drove trailer trucks, ranging from a "bluish glow" that shorted out the battery and electronic gear to awakening from a nap to find the cab -- and himself -- covered with spider webs!
Page 57: Just to be complete, "Mineralwells" is a single word.
Barker, Gray. Silver Bridge (Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1970).
Brandon, Jim. Weird America. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978).
Clark, Jerome. UFO Encyclopedia 2nd Edition: The Phenomenon from the Beginning, Volume 1 (Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics, 1998).
Keel, John A. "Mothman Again," in FATE Magazine (Vol. 55, No. 3, April 2002).
McCloy, James F., and Ray Miller, Jr. Jersey Devil. (Wallingford, PA: Middle Atlantic Press, 1976).
Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. (Nashville: Charles and Randy Elder, 1982 [originally published in the 19th Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900]).
Wamsley, Jeff. Mothman: Behind the Red Eyes. (Point Pleasant, WV: Mothman Press, 2005).
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