The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel Read Free Book Online Page A

secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, remarked: “So many airline pilots report seeing them, that’s why I take the train.”
    Wherever you were in the year 1966, you must have heard about the coming of the flying saucers. The news media beat the story into a froth of ennui. The newsstands were glutted with one-shot UFO magazines and quickie paperbacks rehashing the reported sightings from previous flap years. Everywhere great crowds of people gathered on hilltops, in swamps and cemeteries, and around reservoirs and gravel pits, their eyes turned heavenward. Saucer-hunting became a national sport, rallying to the excited cry, “There goes one!”
    That year I stood on hilltops and beaches with those crowds, watching funny lights bob around in the night. But an uneasiness was overtaking me; a dark suspicion that Dr. Asimov’s tongue-in-cheek observation may have contained more truth than even he knew.
    The Year of the Garuda was at hand. A dark force was closing over a little town I had never even heard of: Point Pleasant, West Virginia. In a matter of months I would be arriving there like some black-suited exorcist, lugging my tattered briefcase, waving the golden cross of science. My life would become intertwined with the lives of the people of the Ohio valley.
    In March 1966, a shapely housewife, whom I will call Mrs. Kelly because she asked that her name be withheld, was waiting in her car for her children near the Point Pleasant school when she saw an unbelievable apparition low in the sky. It looked like a glistening metal disk and was hovering directly above the school playground. A doorlike aperture was open at its rim and there was a man standing outside. He was not standing in the doorway, he was standing outside the object in midair! He wore a silvery skin-tight costume and had very long silvery hair. He was looking down into the schoolyard intently. She watched him for a long moment until her children bounded up to the car. When she looked again, the man and object were gone. She decided not to tell anyone about this strange vision, attaching religious significance to it.
    That summer, Mrs. Mary Hyre was driving along the Ohio side of the river when a sudden glint in the sky attracted her attention. “At first I thought it was a plane,” she recalled. “Then I got a better look at it. It was perfectly round. I couldn’t make out what it was but I didn’t give it any thought at the time.”
    Another round object chose to hover above Tiny’s restaurant just outside Point Pleasant that summer, where it was seen by a number of customers including the wife of a local police officer. Tiny’s stands on the corner of the street where the McDaniels live. The McDaniel family would later serve as the focus for many of the strange manifestations.
    Not one person bothered to report a UFO sighting to the law or press in Point Pleasant, although there were many such sightings all summer long.
    People in distant Salt Lake City, Utah, weren’t so squeamish, however. When a bird “about as big as a Piper Cub airplane” circled that Mormon community on July 18, 1966, some people ran for cover while others ran for their telephones.
    Shortly after 2 P.M. on September 1, Mrs. James Ikart of Scott, Mississippi, grabbed her phone to call the Delta Democrat Times (Greenville). She and her neighbors were watching a whitish man-shaped flying object. “It got down pretty low and then would go up,” Mrs. Ikart said. “I never saw anything like it.”
    John Hursh, a local meteorologist, whipped out Standard Explanation No. 425. “It’s apparently somebody’s research balloon that’s gotten away,” he announced.
    Whatever it was, it bounced around Scott most of the afternoon.
    II.
    Three thousand years ago a small group of brilliant men investigated and solved the mystery of unidentified flying objects. Since then a great many