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 ELEVEN
Page 140-41: It's truly astonishing that such amazing displays could be witnessed by so many people and simply not affect the rest of the world in any permanent way, unless this is a somewhat fictionalized section of the book.
Page 144: The Wednesday Phenomenon: There only seems to be one way to determine whether or not there is something to the Wednesday Phenomenon. Yes, I'm going through the Geobibliography of Anomalies page by page and charting what day every UFO sighting took place on (excluding "Hoaxes" and "?" and other indeterminable details). I'll get back to you in a decade or so.
Page 145: "Federal Officers": Not Men-in-Black but FBI agents, apparently. At least, as Keel told conspiracy author Jim Keith: "FBI men stand out like a sore thumb. They dress the same way, they wear neckties, they wear low cut shoes, these are not the kind of guys you see in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, on the street." [Keith, p. 141]
Page 146: Mary Hyre's Affadavit: Although it's nice to know such a document exists, it will prove nothing to most people. There were affadavits for the "David Lang" disappearance and the "Alexander Hamilton" Airship cow-naping, both of which are now known to be hoaxes.
Page 149: In his column "Beyond the Known" in FATE Magazine (December 1995), Keel expands on Mr. Elmore's encounter. He asked the old fellow to draw the "shed", and Elmore came up with a bizarre conglomeration of cubes and corners standing on metallic legs. Two years later Keel watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon in their Lunar Excursion Module "Eagle": "A shudder went through me as I watched this historic moment on black-and-white TV along with the rest of the world. Leonard Elmore had been trying to describe a LEM to me!"
Keel then calls to mind the "soda-pop factor," a phrase coined by Dr. James MacDonald after hearing of a contactee whose alien friends landed and asked for bottles of soda pop. "A majority of all reported UFOs seem downright silly because of the sly addition of the soda pop factor." Mothman Prophecies contains other examples of things seen before they existed, like the "secret helicopter" of Ohio [page 102].
Page 150: The fake census takers have been replaced, more-or-less, with bogus social workers intent on removing children from their homes. Of course, these cases have been dismissed as urban legends -- or have they?
“Children vanish more frequently than any other group. We’re not talking about ordinary runaways.” So says Keel in Our Haunted Planet [p. 202]. Certainly the missing children problem is growing at an alarming rate: “The best estimates are that about a million American youngsters leave home each year, with 90 percent returning in two weeks,” writes Gary Turbak. “Approximately 100,000 children are thus unaccounted for.” This is not even counting the “25,000 to 100,000 stolen by divorced or separated parents.” [Turbak, p. 61]
Keel, John A. "Beyond the Known: The Mysterious Shed." FATE Magazine (Vol. 48, No. 12, December 1995), pp. 26-27.
--. Our Haunted Planet (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1971).
Keith, Jim. Casebook on the Men in Black (Lilburn, GA: IllumiNet Press, 1997).
Turbak, Gary. "Missing: 100,000 Children a Year." Reader's Digest, Vol. 121 No. 723, July 1982), pp. 60-64.
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