The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel Page B

state to another. In Sistersville, a town mentioned in the 1897 “airship” reports, local UFO fans organized an informal warning system, calling each other on party lines to announce curtly, “UFO—northeast,” etc. The town’s newspaper did not bother to publish a single report.
    Every night at approximately 8 P.M. one of these brilliant flashing lights would cruise majestically over the Ohio River, traversing Point Pleasant from north to south. Those who bothered to notice it at all assumed it was an airplane.
    Mrs. Kelly, the lady who had seen the longhaired man standing in the sky seven months earlier, lived in a house on the edge of a deep gully. She and her children were seeing blinding globes of light traveling close to the ground along that gully nightly. And her telephone was behaving strangely, ringing when there was no one on the line, and sometimes emitting beeps like Morse code.
    Early in November, an elderly man walked into Mary Hyre’s newspaper office. “I’ve just got to tell somebody,” he began nervously. The story he unfolded seemed totally unbelievable to Mrs. Hyre, who knew nothing of UFOs at the time, but she knew the man and was impressed by his sincerity.
    On November 2, 1966, he said, he and another workman were driving home to Point Pleasant from their job near Marietta, Ohio, on Interstate 77. As they neared Parkersburg, West Virginia, an elongated object appeared low in the sky and descended directly in front of them. They stopped their car and a man emerged from the object and walked over to them. He looked like a normal man and was grinning broadly. He wore a black coat and kept his arms folded with his hands out of sight under his armpits. The witness rolled his window down and there was a very brief conversation. The stranger asked the pair who they were, where they were from, where they were were going, and what time was it? Then he strolled back to the dark cylinder and it rose quickly into the chill, drizzling sky.
    The two men had a strong emotional reaction to the seemingly pointless encounter. They debated whether they should tell anybody, deciding against it. But the Point Pleasant resident found himself suffering from insomnia. And when he finally slept he had strange nightmares. He started to hit the bottle, something very unusual for him.
    Mrs. Hyre listened to his story, nonplused, and made a few notes. A day or so later the man’s son called on her and asked her not to print the story. Several weeks later she repeated the story to me and we called the man on her office phone. He verified the details and then said, “Look, don’t use my name. I don’t want to get involved in this thing. That scientist fella told me—”
    â€œWhat scientist?” I asked.
    â€œA couple of weeks after this thing happened, a scientist from Ohio came to see us. He told us it would be better if we forgot the whole thing.”
    â€œHow did he hear about it? How did he find you?”
    â€œDamned if I know.”
    â€œDid he identify himself?”
    â€œSure … but I can’t remember his name. But he seemed to know what he was talking about.”
    I couldn’t get much else out of him. I would have ignored the whole story except for one jarring fact. The same thing had happened that same night on the same road to another West Virginian. Unlike the two Point Pleasant residents, he had gone to the police with his story. A press conference was held and he was catapulted into the never-never land of the UFO contactees, the center of one of the biggest UFO stories of 1966.

5:
    The Cold Who Came Down in the Rain
    I.
    Woodrow Derenberger is a tall, husky man with close-cropped sandy hair, twinkling blue-gray eyes, and an honest open face. In 1966 he was in his early fifties but looked considerably younger. His life had been normal to the point of being mundane—a long succession of modest jobs, hard times, constant