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 NINE
Page 103-4: Blue Fireball: A curious encounter that brings in the attraction of "phenomena" to lovers and Lovers' Lanes, missing time, nighttime "sunburns", and other details that are cliche in UFO stories now but were new in 1966 (even in 1975, when Mothman was published).
Page 105: "some people are progammed to love . . ." In the opinons of medieval scholars, incubi and succubi -- the sex-oriented demons who had intercourse with mortals -- were not beings of flesh, therefore incubi could not produce sperm. The theory was that a succubus received a man's semen, transformed into an incubus, and then impregnated a woman. Is this all a eugenics program by unknown intelligences? Merlin from Arthurian legend was supposedly the product of such a demonic union . . .
U Thant and the UN: John Fuller reports, in Incident at Exeter: "On Christmas Eve, before the Look [magazine] piece had appeared, I was interviewed by U Thant's Chef de Cabinet on the research I had completed for the article. Since then, the UN has expressed serious interest in the phenomenon." (p. 218)
Pages 105-107: Don Estrella: This UN representative appears to have been cursed like others in the Mothman saga. He returned to his native Portugal and ran a cafe, according to John Keel in a Fortean Times interview. "It went broke or something, and he came back to the States. And then he had a terrible accident." Keel believes he ended up in a wheelchair. (p. 34)
Page 107: The Grinning Man: Gets a chapter to himself in SCFTAS/ Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings. Particularly eerie is the manifestation at Elizabeth, New Jersey, on October 11, 1966.
Phone Phreaks: Bear in mind that Gray Barker is one of them. In an interview with Jim Keith (August 23, 1996), Keel says: "I raised hell with the phone company, and they tracked down some of the calls I got, and some of them were from Gray Barker." (Keith, p. 158)
Page 108: Numbered People: Perhaps The Village, from the old British show The Prisoner, operates world-wide now. The movie Mothman Prophecies features the enigmatic phrase, "Wake up, Number 37!"
Page 109: UFOs using post-hypnotic suggestion: The beeping noises often described put witnesses into a trance and then bring them out again -- but that implies that the people were hypnotized at some point before ever encountering funny lights or shiny objects.
Page 110: Kenneth Arnold and Maury Island: Odd things certainly happened to Arnold, but the Maury Island sequence was undoubtedly a hoax. ("But whose?", to paraphrase Keel.) Look for Edward J. Ruppelt's 1956 book (old but still one of the best): The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. There's also Arnold's own account in The Coming of the Saucers (1952), and "The Maury Island Episode" in Curtis Fuller (editor), Proceedings of the First International UFO Congress, 1980.
Sonny DesVergers: The Florida Scoutmaster case. I'm not too sure about him, but judge for yourself.
Page 111+ : Woody Derenberger is described sympathetically concerning his supposed harrassments. But: page 112: "Woodrow Derenberger's story troubled me from the outset, and for many reasons." Page 113: "There was something mundane about Woody's descriptions of that nudist colony in outer space. Too mundane." More hints that Keel didn't think that much about Derenberger.
Page 113-114: Jim and Darla: Bear in mind these are two of Woody's friends, who later meet Indrid Cold and company, in this "silly episode."
Page 114: Good guys and bad guys: I recall reading personal "encounters" like this; usually the assaulting entity is thought to be a demon, and the rescuer, obviously, an angel. I'll try to locate some.
Animal mutilations: Another can of worms! Some books on the subject are Mystery Stalks the Prairie (1976), by Keith Wolverton and Roberta Donovan; Mute Evidence (1983) by Daniel Kagan and Ian Summers (a skeptical look); Linda Howe's Alien Harvest (1988) and Glimpses of Other Realities (1994); and Christopher O'Brien's The Mysterious Valley (1996).
Page 115: Vampires: Keel has suggested elsewhere that the vampire and werewolf attacks of earlier centuries were folklorish interpretations of the mutilation phenomenon. Charles Fort has similar ideas in LO!
Page 116: Magic ritual: UFOs are semi-science-fictional (for lack of a better term); even forces that use blood and flesh to create temporary physical beings could be made to sound scientific. But Keel mixes in black magic, witchcraft, and secret rituals! Our sense of division between the scientific, the psychic, and the supernatural becomes blurred in this world of anomalies and unknown forces.
". . . a purpose that might turn our hair gray instantly if we knew the full details." Keel and other Fortean writers such as Janet and Colin Bord have suggested that Big Hairy Monsters, phantom panthers, and similar entities are only temporarily "real". After mentioning the propensity for monsters and UFOs to snatch animals and take blood in SCFTAS, Keel quotes Jacques Vallee: "The devil does not have a body. Then, how does he manage to have intercourse with men and women? . . . All the theologians answer that the devil borrows the corpse of a human being, either male or female, or else he forms with other materials a new body for this purpose." (Which comes from Passport to Magonia, p. 126)
The implication seemed to me to be that some Intelligence somewhere used these stolen biological materials to create chimerical life-forms. Mothmen? Bigfoot-type humanoids? Beings that might even pass themselves off as people? A heady concept for my eleven-year-old self, when I first read SCFTAS in 1970. "Gross! Cool!" I yelled almost simultaneously.
Page 117: Bloodmobile incident. This is, indeed, an astonishing account. Has anyone ever hunted down Beau Shertzer and/or the nurse for an interview? In the "Search for the Mothman" documentary, the UFO is replaced by the winged apparition in the recreation of this event.
Page 119: Phantasmagoria of UFO sightings. By now even "beings" emerging from a landed saucer and leaving in an ordinary car seem almost acceptible.
Letart Falls angel: The witness is described as a friend of Ben Franklin IV, Gray Barker's traveling companion when the many taped interviews were made. "They, too reported puzzling events associated with the experience." Telephones rang with no one there, or ceased functioning entirely. Their TV developed interference, and once "'a Communist program' had been received on an otherwise unoccupied channel." (Silver Bridge, p. 111)
Barker, Gray. Silver Bridge (Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1970).
Fuller, John G. Incident at Exeter (New York: Berkeley Medallion Books, 1968 [1965]).
Keel, John A. "Mothman Again," in FATE Magazine (Vol. 55, No. 3, April 2002).
Keith, Jim. Casebook on the Men in Black (Lilburn, GA: IllumiNet Press, 1997).
Skinner, Doug, et. al., "Lunch with Keel," in Fortean Times No. 156 (April 2002), pp. 34-35.
Vallee, Jacques. Passport to Magonia (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1969).
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