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 NINETEEN
Page 258: Traffic backing up: In his interview with Doug Skinner, et al., in the Fortean Times, Keel finds the circumstances behind the bridge collapse to be very suspicious. "The stoplights froze at either end of the bridge -- they were stuck at red -- so the traffic piled up in the middle of the bridge." [p. 34]
Page 259: Electric cables parting: One witness erroneously reported the sparks as a UFO. In his book on Mothman, Donnie Sergent, Jr. mentions: "I received an e-mail from the last tractor-trailer driver across the bridge before it fell. He told me that he saw the Mothman fly around the front of his truck." [p. 25]
Page 263: Bridge victims: Loren Coleman's Mothman and Other Curious Encounters lists forty-six dead, including two women who were never seen again ( Kathy Byus and Maxine Turner, both of Point Pleasant).
Page 264: Men climbing on the bridge: Conspiracy writer Jim Keith sees more human than UT or MIB activity in the Point Pleasant story:
Although in print John Keel has remained mum about the most sinister of possibilities regarding the Silver Bridge disaster, he stated the following to me in a 1996 interview:
"First of all, FBI men stand out like a sore thumb. They dress the same way, they wear neckties, they wear low cut shoes, they are not the kind of guys you see in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, on the street. They suddenly turned up just before the bridge went down."
Was Keel hinting that FBI men may have been responsible for the Silver Bridge disaster? [p. 141]
"[Bridge] collapse was due to metal fatigue": In the Skinner interview Keel says "I did a study of suspension bridges, and I couldn't see how this could happen. The whole purpose of a suspension bridge is to prevent this from happening." [p. 34] A more mundane explanation is that an eyebar snapped -- due to a flaw in it since the day it was forged in 1926 -- resulting in a chain reaction of snapping links. See Coleman, p. 47, and Sergent and Wamsley, pp. 6-7.
Page 267: "Universal mind": A lot of readers have scoured the books of Charles Fort looking for this quote. It actually comes from Damon Knight's biography, Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained:
"Is there a polarity of madness, and do certain kinds of irrational states attract irrational happenings, not related to them except in being irrational?
"If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?" [p. 156]
Coleman, Loren. Mothman and Other Curious Encounters (New York: Paraview Press, 2002).
Keith, Jim. Casebook on the Men in Black (Lilburn, GA: IllumiNet Press, 1997).
Knight, Damon. Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).
Sergent, Donnie, Jr., and Jeff Wamsley. Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend (Point Pleasant, WV: Mothman Lives Publishing, 2002).
Skinner, Doug, et. al., "Lunch with Keel," in Fortean Times No. 156 (April 2002), pp. 34-35.
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