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The Mothman Prophecies
West Virginia, 1966. For thirteen months the town of Point Pleasant is gripped by a real-life nightmare that culminates in a tragedy that makes headlines around the world. Strange occurrences and sightings, including a bizarre winged apparition that becomes known as the Mothman, trouble this ordinary American community. Mysterious lights are seen moving across the sky. Domestic animals are found slaughtered and mutilated. And journalist John Keel, arriving to investigate the freakish events, soon finds himself an integral part of an eerie and unfathomable mystery...
272 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
872 people are currently reading
8256 people want to read
About the author
John A. Keel
47 books239 followersJohn Alva Keel (born Alva John Kiehle) was a Fortean author and professional journalist.
Keel wrote professionally from the age of 12, and was best known for his writings on unidentified flying objects, the "Mothman" of West Virginia, and other paranormal subjects. Keel was arguably one of the most widely read and influential ufologists since the early 1970s. Although his own thoughts about UFOs and associated anomalous phenomena gradually evolved since the mid 1960s, Keel remained one of ufology's most original and controversial researchers. It was Keel's second book, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), that popularized the idea that many aspects of contemporary UFO reports, including humanoid encounters, often paralleled ancient folklore and religious encounters. Keel coined the term "men in black" to describe the mysterious figures alleged to harass UFO witnesses and he also argued that there is a direct relationship between UFOs and psychic phenomena. He did not call himself a ufologist and preferred the term Fortean, which encompasses a wide range of paranormal subjects.
Keel wrote professionally from the age of 12, and was best known for his writings on unidentified flying objects, the "Mothman" of West Virginia, and other paranormal subjects. Keel was arguably one of the most widely read and influential ufologists since the early 1970s. Although his own thoughts about UFOs and associated anomalous phenomena gradually evolved since the mid 1960s, Keel remained one of ufology's most original and controversial researchers. It was Keel's second book, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), that popularized the idea that many aspects of contemporary UFO reports, including humanoid encounters, often paralleled ancient folklore and religious encounters. Keel coined the term "men in black" to describe the mysterious figures alleged to harass UFO witnesses and he also argued that there is a direct relationship between UFOs and psychic phenomena. He did not call himself a ufologist and preferred the term Fortean, which encompasses a wide range of paranormal subjects.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 880 reviews
March 6, 2017
When I read this book I was also on a huge UFO conspiracy reading binge and have to admit that this book kind of scared me at the time. Mr. Keel's realistic gathering of "Mothman" sightings and accounts especially as connected to the Black Helicopter sightings and various UFO's.
On November 12, 1966, five men who were digging a grave at a cemetery near Clendenin, West Virginia, claimed to see a man-like figure fly low from the trees over their heads. This is often identified as the first known sighting of what became known as the Mothman.
The Mothman is a legendary creature reportedly seen in the Point Pleasant area from November 12, 1966, to December 15, 1967.
The book should be read with an open mind.
On November 12, 1966, five men who were digging a grave at a cemetery near Clendenin, West Virginia, claimed to see a man-like figure fly low from the trees over their heads. This is often identified as the first known sighting of what became known as the Mothman.
The Mothman is a legendary creature reportedly seen in the Point Pleasant area from November 12, 1966, to December 15, 1967.
The book should be read with an open mind.
January 15, 2022
Huge thank-you to my GR friends, Karl because until I saw this on his shelf, I didn't even know it existed. And to think I was just a little girl, about an hour away when these events were going down.
I'm glad I read this. I've learned that John A. Keel is the dude that coined "Men in Black" and that his theories behind mysterious flying objects and their freaky light-shows is entirely unique, to me, at least.
I lived half my life in West Virginia, but sadly, never witnessed weird lights in the sky (my tiny WV college was haunted as hell, though). I do know that the area that the author refers to as "Ohio valley" is also known as "chemical valley". I'm no scientist, but that much toxic waste tumbling into the same river cannot be good.
I'm glad I read this. I've learned that John A. Keel is the dude that coined "Men in Black" and that his theories behind mysterious flying objects and their freaky light-shows is entirely unique, to me, at least.
I lived half my life in West Virginia, but sadly, never witnessed weird lights in the sky (my tiny WV college was haunted as hell, though). I do know that the area that the author refers to as "Ohio valley" is also known as "chemical valley". I'm no scientist, but that much toxic waste tumbling into the same river cannot be good.
May 22, 2021
some things to consider before deciding to pick up the mothman prophecies:
‣ it's not really about the mothman!! i love cryptids and was excited to read a cryptid classic from 1975. but ufologist john keel mostly just gives accounts of people seeing lights in the sky and getting strange phone calls. there are a few accounts of mothman sightings, and the book ends with the tragic collapse of the silver bridge. but i didn't even learn much about mothman!!
‣ john keel was quite racist and xenophobic (which is kind of ironic, for a ufologist). he describes many mysterious people as "dark and foreign-looking" or "deeply tanned" or as having asian features. seriously, did this dude think that every person of color he encountered was an alien??? while this racism may be a product of its time, it discredits his work, and is frankly disgusting.
(dude was a misogynist, too, providing gratuitous descriptions of women's appearances, and often describing them as becoming "hysterical," but no surprise there)
‣ john keel also had an ego problem. the guy was obsessed with himself, and the dialogue of his interactions with people around him are mostly unbelievable. the entire book reeks of arrogance.
it's interesting as an artifact of 1970s ufology, and it's cool that the book helped popularize the term "men in black." but this is absolutely a ufology book, not a cryptid book. and it's a slog to get through!! i want to believe in paranormal events, but this book only made me more skeptical.
‣ it's not really about the mothman!! i love cryptids and was excited to read a cryptid classic from 1975. but ufologist john keel mostly just gives accounts of people seeing lights in the sky and getting strange phone calls. there are a few accounts of mothman sightings, and the book ends with the tragic collapse of the silver bridge. but i didn't even learn much about mothman!!
‣ john keel was quite racist and xenophobic (which is kind of ironic, for a ufologist). he describes many mysterious people as "dark and foreign-looking" or "deeply tanned" or as having asian features. seriously, did this dude think that every person of color he encountered was an alien??? while this racism may be a product of its time, it discredits his work, and is frankly disgusting.
(dude was a misogynist, too, providing gratuitous descriptions of women's appearances, and often describing them as becoming "hysterical," but no surprise there)
‣ john keel also had an ego problem. the guy was obsessed with himself, and the dialogue of his interactions with people around him are mostly unbelievable. the entire book reeks of arrogance.
it's interesting as an artifact of 1970s ufology, and it's cool that the book helped popularize the term "men in black." but this is absolutely a ufology book, not a cryptid book. and it's a slog to get through!! i want to believe in paranormal events, but this book only made me more skeptical.
September 5, 2018
I read The Mothman Prophecies when it was first published - I know, scary, right? I was in high school and had just discovered Stephen King, a newish author that scared the hell out of me. It set me on a quest to read every horrifying book I could get my hands on and The Mothman Prophecies fell into that category.
John Keel was an avowed "UFOologist" - I'm not even sure that is spelled correctly, or a word, but that is what he claimed to be. He also absolutely believed every word that he wrote. Remember that in the 70s, as again now, distrust of the government was rampant. We trusted no one and everything that "officials" said was a lie. It turns out that we weren't that wrong - BUT, for Keel, that included everything the government told us about space exploration and life on other planets also was a lie. He traveled to West Virginia to "study" a series of strange events; this book was the result.
While Keel may have believed what he was writing, there were very people at the time who read this book as "fact." If you take it with a grain of salt and read it as "sci-fi" then it can be an enjoyable and somewhat terrifying read. That's my recommendation, and I do recommend reading it simply because it was so incredibly popular at one time and has a place in literature history.
John Keel was an avowed "UFOologist" - I'm not even sure that is spelled correctly, or a word, but that is what he claimed to be. He also absolutely believed every word that he wrote. Remember that in the 70s, as again now, distrust of the government was rampant. We trusted no one and everything that "officials" said was a lie. It turns out that we weren't that wrong - BUT, for Keel, that included everything the government told us about space exploration and life on other planets also was a lie. He traveled to West Virginia to "study" a series of strange events; this book was the result.
While Keel may have believed what he was writing, there were very people at the time who read this book as "fact." If you take it with a grain of salt and read it as "sci-fi" then it can be an enjoyable and somewhat terrifying read. That's my recommendation, and I do recommend reading it simply because it was so incredibly popular at one time and has a place in literature history.
August 9, 2024
The Mothman lives on, in the Ohio River region that was once his haunt. There is a Mothman Museum in downtown Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and a Mothman statue that shows a winged, human-like creature with glowing red eyes. The Mothman, as any resident of the region can tell you, began appearing to a number of people in the area around Point Pleasant in the fall of 1966. Mothman appearances, and other bizarre events, continued to occur until December of 1967, when the Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River, killing 46 people; and from that time forward, the Mothman was never seen again. That strange timeline of difficult-to-explain events becomes the central focus of John Keel’s 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies.
Keel worked as a journalist, but is probably best known as a student of the paranormal. Whether you refer to investigations in this field as parapsychology or “UFOlogy,” the common thread in the field is a belief that there are unexplained phenomena that do not lend themselves to rational analysis, and for which any attempt at a scientific explanation will be inadequate. Parapsychologists and UFOlogists will say that one must “open one’s mind” to the possibility of hidden interventions in human affairs – interventions by extraterrestrials, or by beings from another dimension – in order to find explanations for these unexplained phenomena. This field, which goes back at least as far as the writings of the early-20th-century author Charles Fort, still has many devotees, and Keel was proud to number himself among its defenders.
And what drew Keel from his New York City home to the Ohio River Valley in 1966 was the growing number of reports of sightings of the Mothman. The first Mothman sighting took place in November of 1966, and Roger and Linda Scarberry, a young couple driving with friends past an old abandoned generator plant, described vividly what they saw:
“It was shaped like a man, but bigger,” Roger said later. “Maybe six and a half or seven feet tall. And it had big wings folded against its back.” “But it was those eyes that got us,” Linda declared. “It had two big eyes like automobile reflectors”….It was grayish in color and walked on sturdy manlike legs….[I]t spread its batlike wings and took off straight up into the air….“We were doing one hundred miles an hour,” Roger said, “and that bird kept right up with us. It wasn’t even flapping its wings.” (p. 60)
As the story reported by the two young couples made its way through the Associated Press wire service, some copy editor dubbed the mysterious creature the “Mothman,” and the name stuck.
Part of what stood out about the Mothman stories, as Keel takes pains to document, is that the people who reported Mothman sightings did not seem like the publicity-seeking “weirdos” that a parapsychologist or UFOlogist often encounters. Rather, they were ordinary people characteristic of their conservative, patriotic, faith-oriented region – people like Tad Jones, with whom Keel talked about a UFO sighting near Charleston, West Virginia. “A gentle, handsome man in his thirties, Mr. Jones was a deeply religious person who did not smoke or drink” (p. 96). And it is worth noting that, more than 50 years after the time of the Mothman sightings, none of those who reported the sightings published retractions or issued deathbed confessions. Those people – nice, ordinary Americans – truly seemed to believe that they had seen something.
The Mothman sightings were not the only example of unexplained phenomena taking place around Point Pleasant at that time. Woodrow Derenberger, an appliance salesman in his fifties, reported receiving visits from a mysterious stranger named “Indrid Cold,” who “spoke” telepathically to Derenberger and told him about life on another world called “Lanulos.” Keel’s description of Indrid Cold – “The stranger was about five feet ten inches tall with long, dark hair combed straight back. His skin was heavily tanned….He was wearing a dark topcoat. Underneath it Woody could see some kind of garment made of glistening greenish material almost metallic in appearance” (p. 51) – invokes the UFOlogy archetype of “men in black.”
Those who have seen one or more of the Men in Black films – and a lot of people have; they’ve grossed almost two billion dollars worldwide – may not be aware that the film is based on the idea that UFOlogists regularly face harassment from “men in black” – government agents, or extraterrestrials, or extraterrestrials working for government agencies, who seek to intimidate UFO witnesses into silence, presumably to enable the extraterrestrials to study or monitor the people of Earth without undue interference.
To say that there are layers of logical contradiction in this scenario would be an understatement. Why would a Mothman appear, just so Indrid Cold could later visit those who’d seen the Mothman and tell them to keep their mouths shut? If the extraterrestrials are so all-powerful, with intelligence and technology so incomparably superior to our own, why do they keep making mistakes and appearing to people, so that they later need to send “men in black” around to keep things quiet? Why would the extraterrestrials engage in all these mysterious phone calls, leave crop circles in fields, provide all this “evidence” of their existence, if they really don’t want to be noticed? And how or why could the Mothman’s appearances be linked to the Silver Bridge collapse, when the Mothman spoke to no one, warned no one about the bridge, told no one to avoid the bridge?
These questions, of course, have no logical answers; but they may lend themselves to a consideration of why parapsychologists, cryptozoologists, and UFOlogists do what they do. The prospect of possessing secret knowledge unavailable to most people is a highly attractive prospect for many. In this “anti-elitist” era when specialized knowledge and formal training come under regular attack – when “anti-vaxxers” and climate change deniers feel free to disregard any amount of well-documented scientific evidence, because “when you know, you just know” – the idea that an ordinary citizen could know something that the “overeducated elites” don’t know can be particularly attractive. And – as many psychological studies have shown – a person’s adherence to a point of view can be strengthened, not weakened, by the presentation of countervailing evidence, particularly if the person feels that he or she is being “disrespected” in the process. In that context, the stubbornness with which some UFOlogists stick to their way of thinking becomes all the more understandable.
Historical context may help here as well. The 1960’s period in which the Mothman sightings occurred were quite a time for UFO sightings and other paranormal phenomena. In those Cold War days, the fear that nuclear or biological warfare would bring on a global apocalypse was omnipresent; and as the government of the United States of America continued to work on secret weapons projects that it felt could not be safely revealed to the public, a climate of popular distrust toward the government took hold. It is against that background that stories like the crash of a weather balloon in Roswell, New Mexico, or the establishment of an experimental-weapons base called Area 51 in Nevada, become “evidence” that the government is engaged in a coverup of extraterrestrial activity. This anti-rationalist societal myth still has great potency, as demonstrated by the popularity of the 1990’s TV series The X-Files.
All this being said, I found that many of the things that I liked best about The Mothman Prophecies had nothing to do with my own (skeptical) feelings about the paranormal. Keel writes with energy and verve, as when he describes the bizarre mindset that took hold around Point Pleasant during the “Mothman year” of 1966-67. Reporting a rumor that Woodrow Derenberger had been made pregnant by the extraterrestrials, Keel states that
The events of 1966-67 had fractured everyone’s sense of reality. Almost anything now seemed possible. A pregnant man was no more absurd than the winged behemoth, or the gigantic illuminated forms that cruised up and down the Ohio nightly. A fantastic new world was taking shape, populated by spacemen who drove Cadillacs and Volkswagens, psychiatrists who heard bodiless voices in the night, and things that ate dogs and cattle while everyone was looking in the wrong direction. (p. 151)
Keel writes movingly about the economic pressures of being a freelance writer, and about the lack of respect that UFOlogist writers face when attending author conferences. And what may be one of the most telling moments in The Mothman Prophecies comes when Keel speaks by telephone with an informant who is undergoing some sort of emotional breakdown. Keel says,
“There’s only one way ‘out,’ Dan. This damned thing becomes an obsession…a fixation. The only way to stop all the nonsense is to stop thinking about UFOs. Get rid of all your files. Take up stamp collecting or chasing women. The UFO business is emotional quicksand. The more you struggle with it, the deeper you sink.” (p. 247)
One wonders: does this passage express Keel’s own doubts regarding the path that he had chosen? While he writes in an afterword to this edition that “I was clearly meant to blunder into that little town in West Virginia, and learn things that some men have known for centuries but were afraid to ask” (p. 271), one cannot help wondering if there were sometimes moments when he wondered whether he had inadvertently stepped into emotional quicksand.
The Mothman Prophecies may be better-known than other works of UFOlogy because it was made into a major film in 2002. Stylishly directed by Mark Pellington, the film has a strong cast – Richard Gere, Debra Messing, Laura Linney, Will Patton, and Alan Bates as a Keel-type parapsychologist – and a decided X-Files feel. Perhaps Keel, who died in 2009, got something of a feeling of vindication from seeing his work translated to the big screen; while the film tells a fictionalized story, Keel wrote that the filmmakers “have managed to squeeze the basic truths into their film” (p. 272).
I found much of what I read in The Mothman Prophecies to be frankly unbelievable – weird phone calls, odd visits, erased tapes, alien encounters that are always at one folkloric remove from one’s informant. There are, after all, rational explanations for the Mothman sightings; for instance, West Virginia is on the edge of the migration zone for the sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis), a bird that has a seven-foot wingspan and eyes that glow red when illuminated by an artificial light source. And there is a reasonable explanation for the collapse of the Silver Bridge: a 1971 investigation by the National Bureau of Standards and other agencies of the federal government found that an eyebar in a suspension chain on the old and poorly maintained bridge had failed.
And yet – as I am reminded every time I visit the Point Pleasant area – there is something compelling about the Mothman story:
1. Appearances of the Mothman were reported a number of times throughout 1966 and 1967, by ordinary West Virginians who did not seem the publicity-seeking type.
2. No one who reported a Mothman sighting ever withdrew or retracted their testimony.
3. After about a year of Mothman sightings, the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46 people.
4. The Mothman was never seen again in the Point Pleasant area after the bridge collapse.
Is it all a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this” – the logical fallacy of assuming that one event must have caused a subsequent event)? Quite possibly. But the Mothman still has a hold on people in his part of the Ohio River Valley – you can learn about the Mothman Festival that takes place every September in Point Pleasant by going to https://www.mothmanfestival.com – and his popularity, like that of other “cryptids” like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, reminds us that the creatures of our imaginations are sometimes the ones that are most vividly alive.
Keel worked as a journalist, but is probably best known as a student of the paranormal. Whether you refer to investigations in this field as parapsychology or “UFOlogy,” the common thread in the field is a belief that there are unexplained phenomena that do not lend themselves to rational analysis, and for which any attempt at a scientific explanation will be inadequate. Parapsychologists and UFOlogists will say that one must “open one’s mind” to the possibility of hidden interventions in human affairs – interventions by extraterrestrials, or by beings from another dimension – in order to find explanations for these unexplained phenomena. This field, which goes back at least as far as the writings of the early-20th-century author Charles Fort, still has many devotees, and Keel was proud to number himself among its defenders.
And what drew Keel from his New York City home to the Ohio River Valley in 1966 was the growing number of reports of sightings of the Mothman. The first Mothman sighting took place in November of 1966, and Roger and Linda Scarberry, a young couple driving with friends past an old abandoned generator plant, described vividly what they saw:
“It was shaped like a man, but bigger,” Roger said later. “Maybe six and a half or seven feet tall. And it had big wings folded against its back.” “But it was those eyes that got us,” Linda declared. “It had two big eyes like automobile reflectors”….It was grayish in color and walked on sturdy manlike legs….[I]t spread its batlike wings and took off straight up into the air….“We were doing one hundred miles an hour,” Roger said, “and that bird kept right up with us. It wasn’t even flapping its wings.” (p. 60)
As the story reported by the two young couples made its way through the Associated Press wire service, some copy editor dubbed the mysterious creature the “Mothman,” and the name stuck.
Part of what stood out about the Mothman stories, as Keel takes pains to document, is that the people who reported Mothman sightings did not seem like the publicity-seeking “weirdos” that a parapsychologist or UFOlogist often encounters. Rather, they were ordinary people characteristic of their conservative, patriotic, faith-oriented region – people like Tad Jones, with whom Keel talked about a UFO sighting near Charleston, West Virginia. “A gentle, handsome man in his thirties, Mr. Jones was a deeply religious person who did not smoke or drink” (p. 96). And it is worth noting that, more than 50 years after the time of the Mothman sightings, none of those who reported the sightings published retractions or issued deathbed confessions. Those people – nice, ordinary Americans – truly seemed to believe that they had seen something.
The Mothman sightings were not the only example of unexplained phenomena taking place around Point Pleasant at that time. Woodrow Derenberger, an appliance salesman in his fifties, reported receiving visits from a mysterious stranger named “Indrid Cold,” who “spoke” telepathically to Derenberger and told him about life on another world called “Lanulos.” Keel’s description of Indrid Cold – “The stranger was about five feet ten inches tall with long, dark hair combed straight back. His skin was heavily tanned….He was wearing a dark topcoat. Underneath it Woody could see some kind of garment made of glistening greenish material almost metallic in appearance” (p. 51) – invokes the UFOlogy archetype of “men in black.”
Those who have seen one or more of the Men in Black films – and a lot of people have; they’ve grossed almost two billion dollars worldwide – may not be aware that the film is based on the idea that UFOlogists regularly face harassment from “men in black” – government agents, or extraterrestrials, or extraterrestrials working for government agencies, who seek to intimidate UFO witnesses into silence, presumably to enable the extraterrestrials to study or monitor the people of Earth without undue interference.
To say that there are layers of logical contradiction in this scenario would be an understatement. Why would a Mothman appear, just so Indrid Cold could later visit those who’d seen the Mothman and tell them to keep their mouths shut? If the extraterrestrials are so all-powerful, with intelligence and technology so incomparably superior to our own, why do they keep making mistakes and appearing to people, so that they later need to send “men in black” around to keep things quiet? Why would the extraterrestrials engage in all these mysterious phone calls, leave crop circles in fields, provide all this “evidence” of their existence, if they really don’t want to be noticed? And how or why could the Mothman’s appearances be linked to the Silver Bridge collapse, when the Mothman spoke to no one, warned no one about the bridge, told no one to avoid the bridge?
These questions, of course, have no logical answers; but they may lend themselves to a consideration of why parapsychologists, cryptozoologists, and UFOlogists do what they do. The prospect of possessing secret knowledge unavailable to most people is a highly attractive prospect for many. In this “anti-elitist” era when specialized knowledge and formal training come under regular attack – when “anti-vaxxers” and climate change deniers feel free to disregard any amount of well-documented scientific evidence, because “when you know, you just know” – the idea that an ordinary citizen could know something that the “overeducated elites” don’t know can be particularly attractive. And – as many psychological studies have shown – a person’s adherence to a point of view can be strengthened, not weakened, by the presentation of countervailing evidence, particularly if the person feels that he or she is being “disrespected” in the process. In that context, the stubbornness with which some UFOlogists stick to their way of thinking becomes all the more understandable.
Historical context may help here as well. The 1960’s period in which the Mothman sightings occurred were quite a time for UFO sightings and other paranormal phenomena. In those Cold War days, the fear that nuclear or biological warfare would bring on a global apocalypse was omnipresent; and as the government of the United States of America continued to work on secret weapons projects that it felt could not be safely revealed to the public, a climate of popular distrust toward the government took hold. It is against that background that stories like the crash of a weather balloon in Roswell, New Mexico, or the establishment of an experimental-weapons base called Area 51 in Nevada, become “evidence” that the government is engaged in a coverup of extraterrestrial activity. This anti-rationalist societal myth still has great potency, as demonstrated by the popularity of the 1990’s TV series The X-Files.
All this being said, I found that many of the things that I liked best about The Mothman Prophecies had nothing to do with my own (skeptical) feelings about the paranormal. Keel writes with energy and verve, as when he describes the bizarre mindset that took hold around Point Pleasant during the “Mothman year” of 1966-67. Reporting a rumor that Woodrow Derenberger had been made pregnant by the extraterrestrials, Keel states that
The events of 1966-67 had fractured everyone’s sense of reality. Almost anything now seemed possible. A pregnant man was no more absurd than the winged behemoth, or the gigantic illuminated forms that cruised up and down the Ohio nightly. A fantastic new world was taking shape, populated by spacemen who drove Cadillacs and Volkswagens, psychiatrists who heard bodiless voices in the night, and things that ate dogs and cattle while everyone was looking in the wrong direction. (p. 151)
Keel writes movingly about the economic pressures of being a freelance writer, and about the lack of respect that UFOlogist writers face when attending author conferences. And what may be one of the most telling moments in The Mothman Prophecies comes when Keel speaks by telephone with an informant who is undergoing some sort of emotional breakdown. Keel says,
“There’s only one way ‘out,’ Dan. This damned thing becomes an obsession…a fixation. The only way to stop all the nonsense is to stop thinking about UFOs. Get rid of all your files. Take up stamp collecting or chasing women. The UFO business is emotional quicksand. The more you struggle with it, the deeper you sink.” (p. 247)
One wonders: does this passage express Keel’s own doubts regarding the path that he had chosen? While he writes in an afterword to this edition that “I was clearly meant to blunder into that little town in West Virginia, and learn things that some men have known for centuries but were afraid to ask” (p. 271), one cannot help wondering if there were sometimes moments when he wondered whether he had inadvertently stepped into emotional quicksand.
The Mothman Prophecies may be better-known than other works of UFOlogy because it was made into a major film in 2002. Stylishly directed by Mark Pellington, the film has a strong cast – Richard Gere, Debra Messing, Laura Linney, Will Patton, and Alan Bates as a Keel-type parapsychologist – and a decided X-Files feel. Perhaps Keel, who died in 2009, got something of a feeling of vindication from seeing his work translated to the big screen; while the film tells a fictionalized story, Keel wrote that the filmmakers “have managed to squeeze the basic truths into their film” (p. 272).
I found much of what I read in The Mothman Prophecies to be frankly unbelievable – weird phone calls, odd visits, erased tapes, alien encounters that are always at one folkloric remove from one’s informant. There are, after all, rational explanations for the Mothman sightings; for instance, West Virginia is on the edge of the migration zone for the sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis), a bird that has a seven-foot wingspan and eyes that glow red when illuminated by an artificial light source. And there is a reasonable explanation for the collapse of the Silver Bridge: a 1971 investigation by the National Bureau of Standards and other agencies of the federal government found that an eyebar in a suspension chain on the old and poorly maintained bridge had failed.
And yet – as I am reminded every time I visit the Point Pleasant area – there is something compelling about the Mothman story:
1. Appearances of the Mothman were reported a number of times throughout 1966 and 1967, by ordinary West Virginians who did not seem the publicity-seeking type.
2. No one who reported a Mothman sighting ever withdrew or retracted their testimony.
3. After about a year of Mothman sightings, the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46 people.
4. The Mothman was never seen again in the Point Pleasant area after the bridge collapse.
Is it all a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this” – the logical fallacy of assuming that one event must have caused a subsequent event)? Quite possibly. But the Mothman still has a hold on people in his part of the Ohio River Valley – you can learn about the Mothman Festival that takes place every September in Point Pleasant by going to https://www.mothmanfestival.com – and his popularity, like that of other “cryptids” like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, reminds us that the creatures of our imaginations are sometimes the ones that are most vividly alive.
January 22, 2008
I'm giving this book two stars (rather than just one) because of the seemingly unintentional hilarity of it as well as its psychological depth. John Keel is clearly both delusional and megalomaniacal, and this book chronicles what appears to be his descent into madness.
My favorite parts are the ones in which he goes out to an abandoned road at night to commune with the Mothman BY HIMSELF, with no witnesses or cameras to prove it.
So yeah, this is a weird one. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a kick out of it, though.
My favorite parts are the ones in which he goes out to an abandoned road at night to commune with the Mothman BY HIMSELF, with no witnesses or cameras to prove it.
So yeah, this is a weird one. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a kick out of it, though.
May 24, 2020
Nope.
Got about a third of the way in and this continues to be nothing but a collection of anecdotes and bullshit. I have better things to do with my time.
I think Keel's attitude is best summed up by these lines that close chapter three:
"Camera malfunctions are remarkably common among would-be UFO photographers, and even those that try to take pictures of the serpent at Loch Ness. It almost seems as if some outside force fouls up cameras when monsters and UFOs are around."
I would like to think this is an example of winking self-awareness, but fear it is meant seriously. Earlier there was another brief hint of this when he rubbished Erich von Daniken, but Keel is either entirely unaware or a complete scam artist who knows it is all made up. He's not a good enough writer for me to stick with the book and find out.
Got about a third of the way in and this continues to be nothing but a collection of anecdotes and bullshit. I have better things to do with my time.
I think Keel's attitude is best summed up by these lines that close chapter three:
"Camera malfunctions are remarkably common among would-be UFO photographers, and even those that try to take pictures of the serpent at Loch Ness. It almost seems as if some outside force fouls up cameras when monsters and UFOs are around."
I would like to think this is an example of winking self-awareness, but fear it is meant seriously. Earlier there was another brief hint of this when he rubbished Erich von Daniken, but Keel is either entirely unaware or a complete scam artist who knows it is all made up. He's not a good enough writer for me to stick with the book and find out.
July 10, 2018
This is really eerie and uncanny!
April 17, 2020
Quit Thinking About UFOs
I thought that this would be a fun read, and it was in the beginning for it was strange, scary, and downright creepy. But I never got it out of my head, after reading a friend’s review of this book, that the Mothman could have been a sandhill crane, a large bird whose eyes glowed red at night. I would be frightened of any creature whose eyes glowed red.
I had never heard of the Mothman of the 1960s. While I have been somewhat interested in UFOs in my earlier years, I never read much about them. Mainly, I used to watch UFO sightings on the History channel. I had read one book that is listed under UFOs in my GR shelf. It was much more believable to me than this book.
I can’t imagine that there isn’t life on other planets, and perhaps they visit ours, but when the author began talking about strange men in black driving black Cadillacs or VW bugs, harassing people by following them, calling them on the phone and saying strange things, as well as knocking on people’s doors and asking then strange questions, I began to think that an intelligent alien race would not ask such stupid questions, etc.
Maybe a flock of cranes did settled in a small town in West Virginia, and when it was time, they moved on. Maybe a person saw one at night with its glowing red eyes. and his imagination ran way with him. Then he told others about the alien, and they saw it too. Hysteria.
As the book unwound, I realized that this author never doubted anything he was told. He was a true believer, so why would he think to doubt and to question? He and everyone around him that had seen the so-called alien had been harassed by it. People let these strange men in black into their homes. Who were these men that seemed to go along with this alien bird? I saw no reasonable answer. I found that odd. If I am to allow anyone into my home, I would have to know them. If they looked real strange, I would call the police, especially if they looked as strange as these men were. As for the strange phone calls from men with strange accents, well. we have had that happening to us all the time, and I have had other strange calls as They go like this:
Ring a d ding a ling.
Hello.
I am from Microsoft, and you have a virus on your computer.
I do?
Yes. Please go to your computer and type these words in...
By now I know that this person wants to take over my computer. The author would think that the man was an alien who also wanted to take over his mind. There is a lot of paranoia in this book.
Or:
This is the fire department. Would you like to donate?
Donate? They must want me to donate my brilliant mind to science. I did’t know what the author would think, but at least I know that my own thoughts are sane.
Then after so many calls, I get one saying,
This is the Social Security Department. You are under investigation. Please hit the number one button on your phone to get connected…
By now I am feeling so harassed that I push the required button on the phone and say:
Come and get me and take me off to jail, so I will not be receiving any more harassing calls.
As the author told a fellow space traveler, If you wish to not be harassed anymore, quit thinking about UFOs and get rid of all your UFO files.
I thought that this would be a fun read, and it was in the beginning for it was strange, scary, and downright creepy. But I never got it out of my head, after reading a friend’s review of this book, that the Mothman could have been a sandhill crane, a large bird whose eyes glowed red at night. I would be frightened of any creature whose eyes glowed red.
I had never heard of the Mothman of the 1960s. While I have been somewhat interested in UFOs in my earlier years, I never read much about them. Mainly, I used to watch UFO sightings on the History channel. I had read one book that is listed under UFOs in my GR shelf. It was much more believable to me than this book.
I can’t imagine that there isn’t life on other planets, and perhaps they visit ours, but when the author began talking about strange men in black driving black Cadillacs or VW bugs, harassing people by following them, calling them on the phone and saying strange things, as well as knocking on people’s doors and asking then strange questions, I began to think that an intelligent alien race would not ask such stupid questions, etc.
Maybe a flock of cranes did settled in a small town in West Virginia, and when it was time, they moved on. Maybe a person saw one at night with its glowing red eyes. and his imagination ran way with him. Then he told others about the alien, and they saw it too. Hysteria.
As the book unwound, I realized that this author never doubted anything he was told. He was a true believer, so why would he think to doubt and to question? He and everyone around him that had seen the so-called alien had been harassed by it. People let these strange men in black into their homes. Who were these men that seemed to go along with this alien bird? I saw no reasonable answer. I found that odd. If I am to allow anyone into my home, I would have to know them. If they looked real strange, I would call the police, especially if they looked as strange as these men were. As for the strange phone calls from men with strange accents, well. we have had that happening to us all the time, and I have had other strange calls as They go like this:
Ring a d ding a ling.
Hello.
I am from Microsoft, and you have a virus on your computer.
I do?
Yes. Please go to your computer and type these words in...
By now I know that this person wants to take over my computer. The author would think that the man was an alien who also wanted to take over his mind. There is a lot of paranoia in this book.
Or:
This is the fire department. Would you like to donate?
Donate? They must want me to donate my brilliant mind to science. I did’t know what the author would think, but at least I know that my own thoughts are sane.
Then after so many calls, I get one saying,
This is the Social Security Department. You are under investigation. Please hit the number one button on your phone to get connected…
By now I am feeling so harassed that I push the required button on the phone and say:
Come and get me and take me off to jail, so I will not be receiving any more harassing calls.
As the author told a fellow space traveler, If you wish to not be harassed anymore, quit thinking about UFOs and get rid of all your UFO files.
December 10, 2014
In 1967 I was dating a girl from WV. She was very aware of the Silver Bridge disaster, so I was very aware of it also. Of course if she had been very aware of pink elephants in sweat clothes I would have been to. High school and "love" ain't it great? She was also interested in "esoteric literature" and as it happened I was to...and this time I had been interested in it before I got interested in her. Over the years that we were together we read a lot of this type of book, including Keel's earlier efforts.
Over the years I've changed a bit, but still find these books at least interesting, my past of Frank Edwards, Charles Fort(e) and others including Keel is still with me. Keel has over the years put a lot of his "studies", "experiences", and interviews together and come up with a "theory". I won't lay his theory out as that (his theory)is basically the point of the book. I'll just say that to Mr. Keel all these phenomena are interrelated. Men in Black and Angels, UFOs and Yeti...all of these are tied together. He has taken them, historical reports, contemporary reports and developed a...hypothesis. I can't say that I agree with his conclusion. Really, I can't. ;).
Still, no matter how you feel or what you think about it all, you might enjoy the book. Like many others I believe that people have seen "something" and I don't know what it is...unlike Mr. Keel, I can't put it all together and "come out where he did". I got a little bored with the read and was very ready for it to be over before it was, but some will enjoy it more. Read it for enjoyment or information whatever is your pleasure. I did.
By the way the movie The Mothman Prophesies was loosly based on this book.
Over the years I've changed a bit, but still find these books at least interesting, my past of Frank Edwards, Charles Fort(e) and others including Keel is still with me. Keel has over the years put a lot of his "studies", "experiences", and interviews together and come up with a "theory". I won't lay his theory out as that (his theory)is basically the point of the book. I'll just say that to Mr. Keel all these phenomena are interrelated. Men in Black and Angels, UFOs and Yeti...all of these are tied together. He has taken them, historical reports, contemporary reports and developed a...hypothesis. I can't say that I agree with his conclusion. Really, I can't. ;).
Still, no matter how you feel or what you think about it all, you might enjoy the book. Like many others I believe that people have seen "something" and I don't know what it is...unlike Mr. Keel, I can't put it all together and "come out where he did". I got a little bored with the read and was very ready for it to be over before it was, but some will enjoy it more. Read it for enjoyment or information whatever is your pleasure. I did.
By the way the movie The Mothman Prophesies was loosly based on this book.
May 16, 2021
What an absolute disappointment! Total trash!
While I do not actually believe in cryptids and other such mythical creatures like the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot, I do find the histories and stories behind these beings to be fascinating. One of these cryptids which I have always wanted to learn more about was the Mothman of Point Pleasant, mostly because of the comparisons made between it and my home state's Jersey Devil. The most lauded book on the Mothman was John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies, and with decent ratings online, I figured I was in for a good time. Boy, was I led astray. I think I'll stop trusting the masses when it comes to book ratings now.
To begin, it must be noted that the Mothman – you know, the subject of the book – is only mentioned in a handful of chapters. In fact, the Mothman is not even brought up in great detail until the sixth goddamn chapter! So much of the book is wasted on UFOs, aliens, and other seemingly unrelated phenomena. I understand that Keel was trying to point out that mysterious activity in and around Point Pleasant was not exclusively Mothman related, and that the Mothman may have had some connection to the other assorted odd activities at the time, but Keel goes too far. He goes to extreme lengths to detail each and every account of UFO sightings and to profile the “contactees” to the point where the Mothman is left by the wayside and is all but forgotten in the process. If you took all of the Mothman related chapters and sections of Keel's book and put them into one work, you could maybe fill out a three-to-five page essay in total, which is absolutely unacceptable when the book advertises itself as a Mothman-centric book. In short, if you came for Mothman, you're out of luck, as I found out the hard way.
Another thing that peeved me all throughout my reading was John Keel's assumptive arrogance when it came to the discussion of extraterrestrial activity and study. He brazenly mentions concepts like alternate spheres of existence and dimensions which we cannot access as though they were proven phenomena and scientifically factual conceptions, never once divulging any of his evidence to support such beliefs. Keel never even entertains the notion that many of these oddities can more readily be explained away by rational and logical conclusions; he is rather wont to make the most outlandish leaps in logic if they satisfy his own deluded and egotistical preconceived notions regarding the extraterrestrial. In order for any of this book to be taken seriously, one would have to suspend their disbelief to astronomical proportions, to such lengths as to irreparably tarnish the reading experience because of the absurdity of the concepts being written about in what is supposed to be a work of nonfiction. What else should I have expected from a guy who prides himself on coining the term “Men in Black?” After I put the book down in disgust upon finishing it, I was dumbfounded to see that "A True Story" was tacked on to the cover underneath the title. Talk about false advertising! Can I sue? Keel seems much more adept at writing fiction than anything with even a modicum of truth to it.
More on the point that Keel seems to just make this stuff up as he goes: each and every instance of extraterrestrial activity chronicled by him is never cited or backed up by evidence or even simple, taken-for-granted, common knowledge facts. So many times did the author drag someone's name to the forefront as being a credible witness or expert in some pertinent field, only to provide zero accompanying citations or data points to substantiate these incredible claims. The Mothman Prophecies is written like a persuasive essay of sorts – the intention being to convince the readers that the Mothman is real along with the other litany of alien phenomena outlined – but as anyone with a properly functioning brain would know, any persuasive argument worth a damn must have proof to go along with it. John Keel never once offers anything more than circumstantial evidence to back up his claims, studies, and personal accounts, giving the whole book that distinct and pungent stench of B.S. As I stated before, I don't actually believe any of this stuff, so even if some sort of credible “proof” were to be offered to corroborate these claims, I wouldn't have suddenly become a believer, but it would have at least lent the author more credence as it relates to the profiling of the Mothman's story, and would most certainly have made the book much more compelling a read.
If I may add insult to injury (because Keel and his book deserve it at this point), I was constantly annoyed at how there was a severe lack of structure to the chapters. In any given chapter, over two dozen people and their supposed accounts of alien encounters can be brought up in quick succession, never having anything to do with the Mothman directly, nor even connecting to each other most of the time. Not to mention, Keel jumps from place to place like a cracked-out jack rabbit hauling ass to his speed dealer, going all over the map when his focus should have remained in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which is Mothman's hometown and the only setting predominately relevant to the fabled legend. The book frustratingly reads as though it were the mad ramblings of a conspiracy theorist trying to get his ideas out there as fast as possible before the Men in Black got to him...probably because that's exactly what it is (at least in Keel's crazed mind)! Focus was already a huge issue coming into this book due to the Mothman not even being in most of it, but that problem is only compounded by the aimless nature of each section, making an already grueling read even more difficult to withstand.
All told, The Mothman Prophecies was an awful book with so much wasted potential. The Mothman was hardly mentioned in all of its 300+ pages, and that sin alone is by far the most egregious and unforgivable. Imagine my utter disappointment when I started reading this book, expecting to get the history of the Mothman rumors or some folklore about the legend, but was instead met with the psycho babble of a UFO-obsessed loon who appears to have quite the aversion to tangible evidence and couldn't hold his focus if his life depended on it. If it hadn't been so long since I purchased this book, I would be getting my money back for it right now, I promise you that. If you are of the tinfoil hat-wearing crowd, then this may be the book to satisfy your conspiracy-addled brains. However, for those of us who only use our tinfoil to store food in the freezer (and occasional crinkle it up to use as a makeshift cat toy), there's nothing here for us except headache and woe.
Heed my warning: if you are interested in learning more about the Mothman, avoid this book at all costs. There are far better means by which you can learn about Mothy and many other cryptids for entertainment purposes (YouTube mini documentaries immediately come to mind). For a book that does cryptid history right, I recommend The Jersey Devil by McCloy and Miller, for they actually take care to cite information and keep their focus on the Jersey Devil throughout. Oh, and they're not crazy and know how to write a coherent book.
While I do not actually believe in cryptids and other such mythical creatures like the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot, I do find the histories and stories behind these beings to be fascinating. One of these cryptids which I have always wanted to learn more about was the Mothman of Point Pleasant, mostly because of the comparisons made between it and my home state's Jersey Devil. The most lauded book on the Mothman was John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies, and with decent ratings online, I figured I was in for a good time. Boy, was I led astray. I think I'll stop trusting the masses when it comes to book ratings now.
To begin, it must be noted that the Mothman – you know, the subject of the book – is only mentioned in a handful of chapters. In fact, the Mothman is not even brought up in great detail until the sixth goddamn chapter! So much of the book is wasted on UFOs, aliens, and other seemingly unrelated phenomena. I understand that Keel was trying to point out that mysterious activity in and around Point Pleasant was not exclusively Mothman related, and that the Mothman may have had some connection to the other assorted odd activities at the time, but Keel goes too far. He goes to extreme lengths to detail each and every account of UFO sightings and to profile the “contactees” to the point where the Mothman is left by the wayside and is all but forgotten in the process. If you took all of the Mothman related chapters and sections of Keel's book and put them into one work, you could maybe fill out a three-to-five page essay in total, which is absolutely unacceptable when the book advertises itself as a Mothman-centric book. In short, if you came for Mothman, you're out of luck, as I found out the hard way.
Another thing that peeved me all throughout my reading was John Keel's assumptive arrogance when it came to the discussion of extraterrestrial activity and study. He brazenly mentions concepts like alternate spheres of existence and dimensions which we cannot access as though they were proven phenomena and scientifically factual conceptions, never once divulging any of his evidence to support such beliefs. Keel never even entertains the notion that many of these oddities can more readily be explained away by rational and logical conclusions; he is rather wont to make the most outlandish leaps in logic if they satisfy his own deluded and egotistical preconceived notions regarding the extraterrestrial. In order for any of this book to be taken seriously, one would have to suspend their disbelief to astronomical proportions, to such lengths as to irreparably tarnish the reading experience because of the absurdity of the concepts being written about in what is supposed to be a work of nonfiction. What else should I have expected from a guy who prides himself on coining the term “Men in Black?” After I put the book down in disgust upon finishing it, I was dumbfounded to see that "A True Story" was tacked on to the cover underneath the title. Talk about false advertising! Can I sue? Keel seems much more adept at writing fiction than anything with even a modicum of truth to it.
More on the point that Keel seems to just make this stuff up as he goes: each and every instance of extraterrestrial activity chronicled by him is never cited or backed up by evidence or even simple, taken-for-granted, common knowledge facts. So many times did the author drag someone's name to the forefront as being a credible witness or expert in some pertinent field, only to provide zero accompanying citations or data points to substantiate these incredible claims. The Mothman Prophecies is written like a persuasive essay of sorts – the intention being to convince the readers that the Mothman is real along with the other litany of alien phenomena outlined – but as anyone with a properly functioning brain would know, any persuasive argument worth a damn must have proof to go along with it. John Keel never once offers anything more than circumstantial evidence to back up his claims, studies, and personal accounts, giving the whole book that distinct and pungent stench of B.S. As I stated before, I don't actually believe any of this stuff, so even if some sort of credible “proof” were to be offered to corroborate these claims, I wouldn't have suddenly become a believer, but it would have at least lent the author more credence as it relates to the profiling of the Mothman's story, and would most certainly have made the book much more compelling a read.
If I may add insult to injury (because Keel and his book deserve it at this point), I was constantly annoyed at how there was a severe lack of structure to the chapters. In any given chapter, over two dozen people and their supposed accounts of alien encounters can be brought up in quick succession, never having anything to do with the Mothman directly, nor even connecting to each other most of the time. Not to mention, Keel jumps from place to place like a cracked-out jack rabbit hauling ass to his speed dealer, going all over the map when his focus should have remained in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which is Mothman's hometown and the only setting predominately relevant to the fabled legend. The book frustratingly reads as though it were the mad ramblings of a conspiracy theorist trying to get his ideas out there as fast as possible before the Men in Black got to him...probably because that's exactly what it is (at least in Keel's crazed mind)! Focus was already a huge issue coming into this book due to the Mothman not even being in most of it, but that problem is only compounded by the aimless nature of each section, making an already grueling read even more difficult to withstand.
All told, The Mothman Prophecies was an awful book with so much wasted potential. The Mothman was hardly mentioned in all of its 300+ pages, and that sin alone is by far the most egregious and unforgivable. Imagine my utter disappointment when I started reading this book, expecting to get the history of the Mothman rumors or some folklore about the legend, but was instead met with the psycho babble of a UFO-obsessed loon who appears to have quite the aversion to tangible evidence and couldn't hold his focus if his life depended on it. If it hadn't been so long since I purchased this book, I would be getting my money back for it right now, I promise you that. If you are of the tinfoil hat-wearing crowd, then this may be the book to satisfy your conspiracy-addled brains. However, for those of us who only use our tinfoil to store food in the freezer (and occasional crinkle it up to use as a makeshift cat toy), there's nothing here for us except headache and woe.
Heed my warning: if you are interested in learning more about the Mothman, avoid this book at all costs. There are far better means by which you can learn about Mothy and many other cryptids for entertainment purposes (YouTube mini documentaries immediately come to mind). For a book that does cryptid history right, I recommend The Jersey Devil by McCloy and Miller, for they actually take care to cite information and keep their focus on the Jersey Devil throughout. Oh, and they're not crazy and know how to write a coherent book.
October 24, 2021
The Mothman, UFOs, MIB, and much more...
Based on a true event in the sixties.
People begin to see a mysterious apparition called the Mothman because of his resemblance to it!
This diabolical manifestation haunts a whole city in the USA, and carries a sinister warning about some catastrophe that will happen very soon...
After watching the movie adaptation starring Richard Geere, I knew that at some point I had to read also the book!
I'm very happy to have done so...
To everyone interested in the UFO phenomena and mysteries, this novel will be an eye-opener...
As a believer in other realities, I do fully recommend and support it!
Dean;)
Based on a true event in the sixties.
People begin to see a mysterious apparition called the Mothman because of his resemblance to it!
This diabolical manifestation haunts a whole city in the USA, and carries a sinister warning about some catastrophe that will happen very soon...
After watching the movie adaptation starring Richard Geere, I knew that at some point I had to read also the book!
I'm very happy to have done so...
To everyone interested in the UFO phenomena and mysteries, this novel will be an eye-opener...
As a believer in other realities, I do fully recommend and support it!
Dean;)
March 1, 2008
The book was pretty scary...veracity not withstanding. I like to look at it up on the bookshelf. It's a creepy title staring down at me, the haunting sound of fiddles off in the distance. Sometimes when I stare at this book for a while I get very hungry. Yet still scared and hungry in combination.
You might even say I get "Scungry". While reading this book on the toilet, my phone rang and and a disembodied voice on the other end screeched "Your in the bathroom aren't you?"
Turns out it was my mom (she sometimes sounds like the Mothman)but damn this book was scaaaaaaary!
I'm going to go get something to eat.
You might even say I get "Scungry". While reading this book on the toilet, my phone rang and and a disembodied voice on the other end screeched "Your in the bathroom aren't you?"
Turns out it was my mom (she sometimes sounds like the Mothman)but damn this book was scaaaaaaary!
I'm going to go get something to eat.
January 13, 2023
3,5 stars
February 11, 2021
This book is an example of how sometimes the worst books generate some of the most enjoyable discussions at a book club. Our group of about 8 participants at the Nightmare Factory book club had a rousing, laugh-filled session ripping this book to shreds. This book is bad on so many levels from its terribly written prose, to the shoddy research, from the unfocused, disorganized approach, to the lack of references or bibliography, and the stunning arrogance and insulting attitude of John Keel, shit-bubble extraordinaire.
If you want a book on which to practice identifying logical fallacies, look no further. Keel commits just about any fallacy I can think of, and not just occasionally, but on almost any page, frequently several per page. His basic premise is little more than an argument from ignorance, i.e. here's some "unexplained" phenomena, therefore it must be extra-dimensional intelligences. His hypothesis is utterly bullshit. It's so laughably stupid, that's it's "not even wrong" to borrow a phrase. This book is nothing but the most base, blind mystery mongering, with absolutely no intention to seek truth. Keen frequently insults other purveyors of mystical nonsense (like Von Daniken) calling them naive, childlike, or sloppy, all the while spewing forth a bizarre mix of occasional self-deprecation, with stunningly confident announcements of his own rectitude, if not outright brilliance.
After slogging through this utter mess of a book, it turns out that the mothman was warning about the collapse of a bridge. Really? Something that happened something like a year later, but then there wasn't actually any clear warning. It's all Keel and other people constructing a false narrative after the fact. There is a very good summary covering these events from a sane perspective at https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4159
On some level I think that maybe Keel was just taking the piss. The one phrase that really made me think he had to look at this all as a big fucking money-making joke was this gem from page 119: "Obviously, the Martians and Venusians buy their equipment from the same companies that supply our space program." Throw in his claims that ESP has been scientifically verified (it hasn't), spoon and key bending happen by the power of mind (this is a well know conjuring trick, that I know how to do, and I'm not a magician), the alleged mathematical precision of pyramids (also bullshit), and his simple-minded racist claim that "to plan and build such mountains of shaped earth required technical skills beyond the simple nomadic woods Indians." (page 20), and there's really no good reason to think that Keel was in any way a serious researcher trying to really discover truth.
At least this book was a reasonably fast read, which is about the best I can say for it.
If you want a book on which to practice identifying logical fallacies, look no further. Keel commits just about any fallacy I can think of, and not just occasionally, but on almost any page, frequently several per page. His basic premise is little more than an argument from ignorance, i.e. here's some "unexplained" phenomena, therefore it must be extra-dimensional intelligences. His hypothesis is utterly bullshit. It's so laughably stupid, that's it's "not even wrong" to borrow a phrase. This book is nothing but the most base, blind mystery mongering, with absolutely no intention to seek truth. Keen frequently insults other purveyors of mystical nonsense (like Von Daniken) calling them naive, childlike, or sloppy, all the while spewing forth a bizarre mix of occasional self-deprecation, with stunningly confident announcements of his own rectitude, if not outright brilliance.
After slogging through this utter mess of a book, it turns out that the mothman was warning about the collapse of a bridge. Really? Something that happened something like a year later, but then there wasn't actually any clear warning. It's all Keel and other people constructing a false narrative after the fact. There is a very good summary covering these events from a sane perspective at https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4159
On some level I think that maybe Keel was just taking the piss. The one phrase that really made me think he had to look at this all as a big fucking money-making joke was this gem from page 119: "Obviously, the Martians and Venusians buy their equipment from the same companies that supply our space program." Throw in his claims that ESP has been scientifically verified (it hasn't), spoon and key bending happen by the power of mind (this is a well know conjuring trick, that I know how to do, and I'm not a magician), the alleged mathematical precision of pyramids (also bullshit), and his simple-minded racist claim that "to plan and build such mountains of shaped earth required technical skills beyond the simple nomadic woods Indians." (page 20), and there's really no good reason to think that Keel was in any way a serious researcher trying to really discover truth.
At least this book was a reasonably fast read, which is about the best I can say for it.
November 29, 2021
"There wasn't much to do in Point Pleasant, a town of six thousand people, twenty-two churches, and no barrooms, so Mothman was almost a welcome addition."
More pressing than any of the mysteries that John Keel investigates in this book, I was earlier this month confronted by one of my own: why did my friend P ____, a responsible family man with a job in the U.S. government (I probably shouldn't get any more specific than that), loan me The Mothman Prophecies in the first place? Did he mean it as a joke (as I originally thought), as a real recommendation, or was there something else going on? And did it have anything to do with the fact that, within a week, P ____ had been assigned to a remote consulate in the far east of Kazakhstan, and his social media accounts went dark?
For the moment, these questions remain unresolved. I can only imagine the significance John Keel might have found in this odd series of events. But look, I'm not writing this to make fun of him. I thought, and still think, that I'm reasonably open-minded about the ostensible subject(s) of his book. Scientists discover new critters all the time, so why couldn't there be something out there that resembles the Mothman? I'm a little more skeptical of the red glowing hypnotic eyes part, but leave that aside for the moment. As for UFOs (ostensible in the sense that Keel discusses them early on), they seem to exist. We don't know that they're extraterrestrial in origin, I guess I think that's unlikely, but even Avril Haines, current U.S. Director of National Intelligence, apparently can't bring herself to rule out the possibility.
But this book is not actually about the Mothman- he (it?) is a minor character at best- and not exactly about UFOs either, but rather about a succession of uncanny incidents, most of which took place (according to Keel) in the Ohio River Valley of western West Virginia (this is excluding a Mothman sighting in Cape May, New Jersey- not far, incidentally, from the dwelling of the Jersey Devil), in the late 60s. These incidents may or may not have involved spacemen, poltergeist, unexplained electrical phenomena, lights in the night sky, cattle exsanguination, mysterious men in black (Keel is credited with coining the term), guys with names like Indrid Cold who claim to be from the planet Lanulos, spacecraft with hydraulic arms that chase buses down highways and try to carry the buses away into the night, and occasional sightings of "The Bird"- otherwise known as the Mothman.
This could all be fun. But Keel never focuses for very long on any single incident, narrative thread or claim, which prevents the narrative from gathering momentum. I eventually realized that Keel presented the events in this way because, for him, they are all related; related in a way that is too esoteric for me to describe with much confidence (my two cents: ), but I'll give it a try. The thing is, contrary to all my expectations of this book, Keel doesn't actually believe in Mothman or UFOs- in fact, writing in the late 60s, he bemoans the fact that speculation about UFOs has entered the mainstream. But he doesn't exactly disbelieve, either. Instead, he settles on the most convoluted theory I can imagine. Mothman, UFOs, and seemingly everything else that is in any way weird or unexplained are not purely physical phenomena, but they're not delusions, either. These entities are not extraterrestrials but ultraterrestrials, who exist on something he calls the super-spectrum.
Furthermore, according to Keel, the idea that there are extraterrestrials visiting us from another planet is a complete hoax, intentionally perpetrated by these beings. The paranoia of UFO enthusiasts- who believe that they're being shadowed by the men in black, or that their phones are being tapped by the government- is unfounded, because, in reality, these ultraterrestrials have concocted the entire thing.
Huh?
But wait- if these ultraterrestrials didn't want us to know that they exist, why appear to us at all? And secondly, aren't we splitting hairs? If we know so little about ultraterrestrials, isn't it possible that they come from another planet anyway, and they're actually the extraterrestrials they seem to be?
On the other hand, if you're feeling less literal-minded than I was, you might find Keel's ideas interesting in the same way that Plato's theory of forms or the Greeks' belief in the Gods or Jung's archetypes are interesting. Because according to Keel, the entire history of human beings reporting numinous, mystical and/or supernatural experiences is not evidence of people across time and geography responding to the common challenges of being mortal- it's instead evidence that it's all real, and that all of it exists on a plain of reality perceptible only under highly specific circumstances (being in West Virginia, for example). I guess you could call it a religious perspective.
By the end of the book, however, Keel is investing every slightly weird thing that happens to him- like a phone call with a beeping noise on the other end- with uncanny significance. At one point, he finds himself watching TV, convinced that when LBJ throws a switch to light the White House Christmas tree, the nation will be plunged into darkness. There's also something about a plot to assassinate the Pope. In the vaguely Christian vibe of his paranoia, Keel started to remind me of Philip K. Dick, who in his last years imagined that he was constantly receiving signs and messages from an entity he called VALIS.
None of this has to stop you from enjoying the book as a well-told series of unsettling anecdotes, which it is. I also don't discount the possibility that Keel intended at least some of it as a joke. At any rate, that is a part of the book that I appreciated- that Keel had a very dry and absurd sense of humor, which I think is evidenced in his choice of chapter titles. Below are my top eight. Possible writing exercise: choose your favorite as a prompt, and write for thirty minutes.
8) Beelzebub Visits West Virginia
7) The Cold Who Came Down in the Rain
6) Mothman!
5) Paranoiacs are Made, Not Born
4) The Creep Who Came in from the Cold
3) Even the Bedouins Hate Their Telephone Company
2) The Night of the Bleeding Ear
1) If This Is Wednesday, It Must Be a Venusian
May 7, 2014
What a disturbing book. I remember that the film was pretty disturbing too but it had nothing on this.
Account after account of strange lights, unexplained grey/winged creatures, animal evisceration, mechanical failures, hallucinations, strange phone calls- the list goes on and on. Then it gets truly bizarre as the "aliens" begin to predict world disasters, culminating in the bridge collapse at Point Pleasant.
John Keel leaves little doubt in the reader's mind that impossible things can happen to every day people. The question that he asks is: why? If all of this is some sort of natural phenomena, what is the purpose of it? And, there's no way to answer that question...
Account after account of strange lights, unexplained grey/winged creatures, animal evisceration, mechanical failures, hallucinations, strange phone calls- the list goes on and on. Then it gets truly bizarre as the "aliens" begin to predict world disasters, culminating in the bridge collapse at Point Pleasant.
John Keel leaves little doubt in the reader's mind that impossible things can happen to every day people. The question that he asks is: why? If all of this is some sort of natural phenomena, what is the purpose of it? And, there's no way to answer that question...
March 25, 2016
Amusing, well-written crazy that veers into nightmare fuel. The movie is as watered down an adaptation as Disney's "Hunchback of Notre Dame."
Let me give out a caveat: I don't think your enjoyment of this book hinges on believing a word of it. Kenneth Hite called Keel one of the premiere unappreciated horror writers of the 20th century, and this book is why. Treat it as fiction; I did, and I loved it.
Keel travels to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in order to examine a UFO "flap." On the way, he is bombarded by tales of the strange and the bizarre. This book starts the Men in Black mythos, and they're not Will Smith. They act as if they have no understanding of human society, drive pristine cars years old, and REALLY get excited over ballpoint pens.
Through it all, the mysterious creature known as the Mothman haunts the old dynamite testing range and a stranger named Indrid Cold taunts Keel with weird revelations.
Keel's take on the whole of it is terrifying. I'll leave some space for spoilers. Ready?
Ultraterrestrials. Things from another dimension. Aliens? Not from space. Bigfoot? Not a "missing link." Every weird thing is caused by the "phenomenon" for it's own amusement.
Seriously considering living in a world like that for a second.
You don't have to be a believer. Personally, I think there's probably something to Joe Nickell's claim that scared, disoriented people in the dark made a cryptid out of bard owls.
Hmmm.
Still, Mothman as the Mysterious Harbinger of the Weird is my favorite cryptid, and he's only a part of the show here.
Take a look at a gallery of Mothman pictures at my Tumblr!
Let me give out a caveat: I don't think your enjoyment of this book hinges on believing a word of it. Kenneth Hite called Keel one of the premiere unappreciated horror writers of the 20th century, and this book is why. Treat it as fiction; I did, and I loved it.
Keel travels to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in order to examine a UFO "flap." On the way, he is bombarded by tales of the strange and the bizarre. This book starts the Men in Black mythos, and they're not Will Smith. They act as if they have no understanding of human society, drive pristine cars years old, and REALLY get excited over ballpoint pens.
Through it all, the mysterious creature known as the Mothman haunts the old dynamite testing range and a stranger named Indrid Cold taunts Keel with weird revelations.
Keel's take on the whole of it is terrifying. I'll leave some space for spoilers. Ready?
Ultraterrestrials. Things from another dimension. Aliens? Not from space. Bigfoot? Not a "missing link." Every weird thing is caused by the "phenomenon" for it's own amusement.
Seriously considering living in a world like that for a second.
You don't have to be a believer. Personally, I think there's probably something to Joe Nickell's claim that scared, disoriented people in the dark made a cryptid out of bard owls.
Hmmm.
Still, Mothman as the Mysterious Harbinger of the Weird is my favorite cryptid, and he's only a part of the show here.
Take a look at a gallery of Mothman pictures at my Tumblr!
April 1, 2022
John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies is truly one of the craziest books I've ever read - and I mean that, sort of, as a compliment. Ostensibly, Keel's book chronicles the famous series of cryptid sightings that plagued West Virginia in 1967, where numerous residents claimed to encounter a giant, red-eyed flying monstrosity dubbed Mothman. But far more of the book's given over to Keel's bizarre experiences and ramblings on any number of topics, ranging from the conventionally strange to the truly absurd. Here a chapter about the "Men in Black" who supposedly harass UFO witnesses, at least one of whom has an unhealthy affinity for Jell-O; there, musings about dinosaur sightings in Texas. Having exhausted the possibilities of alien exploration, Keel devotes several chapters to random individuals predicting historical events, which he ties to sightings of Mothman shortly before a deadly bridge collapse. Does this fail to hold your interest? Okay, how about a passage blaming the Lincoln assassination on space aliens? Maybe you'll be thrilled to read about the drunken crank calls Keel received from ufologist friend Gray Barker, which he tries passing off as alien harassment. Evidently Keel felt like throwing every wild idea at the page, however crazy, in hopes that some of it would stick with readers. Clearly, it has; this book remains in print decades after publication, and inspired a mediocre movie with Richard Gere and Laura Linney a number of years ago. Lost somewhere in the mess is Mothman, who sadly proves to be less of interest for himself than as a gatekeeper to the wilder shores of ufology and paranormal research. I struggle to recommend this book on its literary or factual merits, but it's a fascinating read for those trying to gain insight into how weird the paranormal world can be.
July 14, 2025
this 300 pg ‘expose’ on Mothman, UFOs, inter-dimensional ‘Men in Black’ reads (50 yrs later) like a bizarre auto-fictional descent into paranoid delusion, twisting espionage and detective novels tropes from decades before into a successfully confounding experimental novel.
November 16, 2021
I just can't with this one. Too much self-important author, not enough Mothman.
August 15, 2024
It’s really a general UFO-ology book that is loosely centered around a Mothman theme. Dozens of briefly described, unconnected UFO and Men-in-black encounters, but no coherent storyline or even a coherent event—very few of the “encounters” take place in Point Pleasant, and the “Mothman” is barely even in the book.
As a horror novel—some of the UFO and MiB encounters are spooky or unnerving, but they are repetitive and there are probably about 100 of them in this book. The chapters on UFO theory and psychic phenomena were pretty dull and largely based on leaps of logic and jumps to conclusion.
2 pretty boring stars
As a horror novel—some of the UFO and MiB encounters are spooky or unnerving, but they are repetitive and there are probably about 100 of them in this book. The chapters on UFO theory and psychic phenomena were pretty dull and largely based on leaps of logic and jumps to conclusion.
2 pretty boring stars
January 6, 2019
Let me start by saying if you’ve seen the Richard Gere film adaptation of this book, this is not like that at all (and thank god!). Don’t get me wrong; the movie is entertaining but its story is merely inspired by this book. If you want to know the true play by play of what went down then start with this book. I was far more interested in finding a first hand account of the true Mothman story compared to anything Hollywood could conjure up. It wasn’t immediately clear when I looked up this book if it was like the film or not, so I just wanted to set that straight if you find yourself apprehensive about picking it up like I was.
Pro Tip: suspend all judgment when reading these kinds of books and just absorb what is given to you to get the most out of it. There are some aspects of the book I truly buy into (like the fact that there was some seriously odd stuff going on in West Virginia in the late 1960s), and other parts that I can’t quite get behind (the author hypothesizes that all great people in history have had to have had paranormal encounters to become great leaders of the human race…right…). Regardless, if you go into it willing to hear out the author you are in for a very creepy tale. One thing that really surprised me was how much this book dealt with UFOs and the Men in Black. I had no idea that our author is actually the one who coined this famous term, which automatically gave him some authority points on the subject in my mind. I was absolutely captivated by the sections describing the unusual, otherworldly Men in Black, their behavior, and the harassing games they would play on various people. I would go insane if I ever had to endure even half of what the author described happened to the people in the book. Forget the Mothman, the frozen in place devil grin of these quasi-government agents would be enough to keep me up at night.
Speaking of forgetting about the Mothman, that was one of the things that bummed me out about this book. It was very easy to do for a book with Mothman literally in the title. I really appreciated the in depth look at the UFO and Men in Black activity in the area and how this somehow must have correlated with the Mothman appearances. Having watched a lot of shows on this topic, you usually only hear about Indrid Cold and the fact that the Men in Black suddenly appeared in town once the Mothman sightings occurred. I never knew West Virginia was such a hot bed of paranormal activity in general during this time period. However, there really is very little focus on the Mothman after the encounters are brought up in the beginning of the book. The author spends a lot more time analyzing the UFO encounters and other strange occurrences, which makes sense. He was a Ufologist and it’s easier to write about what you know vs. a mythical being that was not a household name like Bigfoot or Nessie at that time. I wish this book was more Mothman focused since UFOs are a bit low on my interest list when it comes to the paranormal. There is so much that you can read about UFOs but so little about this subject that it’s a shame it takes a bit of a backseat.
Anyone who loves the paranormal or strange true stories should definitely check out this book. The story of the Silver Bridge collapse and the events leading up to this tragedy a year to the day before it took place are fascinating to consider. UFOs, aliens, Mothmen, Men in Black, government cover up conspiracies, animal mutilations, and residents experiencing visions of the future are just a few of the incredibly mind blowing events that Keel records as having taken place the year he investigated the goings on in Pt. Pleasant, West Virginia. If that isn’t some interesting reading I don’t know what is!
Pro Tip: suspend all judgment when reading these kinds of books and just absorb what is given to you to get the most out of it. There are some aspects of the book I truly buy into (like the fact that there was some seriously odd stuff going on in West Virginia in the late 1960s), and other parts that I can’t quite get behind (the author hypothesizes that all great people in history have had to have had paranormal encounters to become great leaders of the human race…right…). Regardless, if you go into it willing to hear out the author you are in for a very creepy tale. One thing that really surprised me was how much this book dealt with UFOs and the Men in Black. I had no idea that our author is actually the one who coined this famous term, which automatically gave him some authority points on the subject in my mind. I was absolutely captivated by the sections describing the unusual, otherworldly Men in Black, their behavior, and the harassing games they would play on various people. I would go insane if I ever had to endure even half of what the author described happened to the people in the book. Forget the Mothman, the frozen in place devil grin of these quasi-government agents would be enough to keep me up at night.
Speaking of forgetting about the Mothman, that was one of the things that bummed me out about this book. It was very easy to do for a book with Mothman literally in the title. I really appreciated the in depth look at the UFO and Men in Black activity in the area and how this somehow must have correlated with the Mothman appearances. Having watched a lot of shows on this topic, you usually only hear about Indrid Cold and the fact that the Men in Black suddenly appeared in town once the Mothman sightings occurred. I never knew West Virginia was such a hot bed of paranormal activity in general during this time period. However, there really is very little focus on the Mothman after the encounters are brought up in the beginning of the book. The author spends a lot more time analyzing the UFO encounters and other strange occurrences, which makes sense. He was a Ufologist and it’s easier to write about what you know vs. a mythical being that was not a household name like Bigfoot or Nessie at that time. I wish this book was more Mothman focused since UFOs are a bit low on my interest list when it comes to the paranormal. There is so much that you can read about UFOs but so little about this subject that it’s a shame it takes a bit of a backseat.
Anyone who loves the paranormal or strange true stories should definitely check out this book. The story of the Silver Bridge collapse and the events leading up to this tragedy a year to the day before it took place are fascinating to consider. UFOs, aliens, Mothmen, Men in Black, government cover up conspiracies, animal mutilations, and residents experiencing visions of the future are just a few of the incredibly mind blowing events that Keel records as having taken place the year he investigated the goings on in Pt. Pleasant, West Virginia. If that isn’t some interesting reading I don’t know what is!
May 24, 2020
In 1966, the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia experienced a host of UFO sightings, visits from mysterious men in black suits and panel trucks, and a far more sinister creature taller than a man with wings and red eyes. A little over a year later, the collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River resulted in the deaths of nearly fifty people, and the Mothman has haunted cryptid mythology ever since. Professional UFO investigator John Keel documents the sightings leading up to the tragedy and finds himself inextricably entwined with the people of Point Pleasant. Trigger warnings: death, animal death, drowning, alien encounters/abductions, minor eye horror, stalking/harassment, threats.
I gave a speech about the Mothman in high school and frightened my classmates with clips from the film, but I only used the book as a passing reference rather than reading it all the way through. I was excited to finally get through it, but now that I have, it’s entirely clear to me why I stopped. What… did I even just read? It’s about one chapter on the Mothman and Point Pleasant for every six chapters about UFOs and MIB encounters. I can see the connection Keel is trying to draw; it’s not a subtle point he’s making here: all these things come from the same place, if they’re not the same entity entirely, and they’re not alien at all but a natural force of our planet that we don’t understand yet and is only sometimes visible to us.
It’s not a bad theory. In fact, I find it more persuasive than the “Mothman is an alien” argument because there are plenty of things in the world that seemed magical or supernatural until we understood them. It’s not far-fetched to believe there are things living here that we don’t have the science to explain yet, especially when you think about how little of the spectrum of light is visible to us (and how machines designed to detect such things seem to malfunction around any kind of potential sighting). While the book was published in the 1960s, I suspect that argument is even more relevant today with the popularity of the many worlds theory. It’s not hard to imagine a dimension that sometimes overlaps with ours and lets things through that we consider UFOs or cryptids.
Unfortunately, Keel spends way less time developing this argument than he does citing a laundry list of UFO sightings in all parts of the country, from all kinds of people. Again, it’s not a subtle point that with so many reliable witnesses in so many different places, the odds are good they saw something. Whether that thing was an alien, some natural force, or something that accidentally slipped into our timeline, you’ll have to draw your own conclusions. It’s too widespread and isolated to be a hoax. But like, man, I got that point seven chapters ago; I definitely didn’t need 250 pages of almost nothing else. Not only is it tedious to read, it lacks any kind of central narrative thread to pull everything together. I was able to keep track of maybe three names out of at least a hundred.
The book begins and ends with the Mothman and the bridge collapsing in Point Pleasant, but I wasn’t at all satisfied with the takeaway. The title is about as misleading as it gets, since as far as I can tell, the Mothman himself never speaks to anyone, much less relays a prophecy of doom. Keel apparently gets those through his malfunctioning telephone; we know because there are chapters and chapters about “crank” supernatural telephone calls as well. While the film, apparently, takes a lot of liberties, it is way more entertaining. 10/10 will not be reading any more UFO books, ever (and, frankly, didn’t know I was signing up for one this time) Love monsters, could take or leave aliens.
I review regularly at brightbeautifulthings.tumblr.com.
I gave a speech about the Mothman in high school and frightened my classmates with clips from the film, but I only used the book as a passing reference rather than reading it all the way through. I was excited to finally get through it, but now that I have, it’s entirely clear to me why I stopped. What… did I even just read? It’s about one chapter on the Mothman and Point Pleasant for every six chapters about UFOs and MIB encounters. I can see the connection Keel is trying to draw; it’s not a subtle point he’s making here: all these things come from the same place, if they’re not the same entity entirely, and they’re not alien at all but a natural force of our planet that we don’t understand yet and is only sometimes visible to us.
It’s not a bad theory. In fact, I find it more persuasive than the “Mothman is an alien” argument because there are plenty of things in the world that seemed magical or supernatural until we understood them. It’s not far-fetched to believe there are things living here that we don’t have the science to explain yet, especially when you think about how little of the spectrum of light is visible to us (and how machines designed to detect such things seem to malfunction around any kind of potential sighting). While the book was published in the 1960s, I suspect that argument is even more relevant today with the popularity of the many worlds theory. It’s not hard to imagine a dimension that sometimes overlaps with ours and lets things through that we consider UFOs or cryptids.
Unfortunately, Keel spends way less time developing this argument than he does citing a laundry list of UFO sightings in all parts of the country, from all kinds of people. Again, it’s not a subtle point that with so many reliable witnesses in so many different places, the odds are good they saw something. Whether that thing was an alien, some natural force, or something that accidentally slipped into our timeline, you’ll have to draw your own conclusions. It’s too widespread and isolated to be a hoax. But like, man, I got that point seven chapters ago; I definitely didn’t need 250 pages of almost nothing else. Not only is it tedious to read, it lacks any kind of central narrative thread to pull everything together. I was able to keep track of maybe three names out of at least a hundred.
The book begins and ends with the Mothman and the bridge collapsing in Point Pleasant, but I wasn’t at all satisfied with the takeaway. The title is about as misleading as it gets, since as far as I can tell, the Mothman himself never speaks to anyone, much less relays a prophecy of doom. Keel apparently gets those through his malfunctioning telephone; we know because there are chapters and chapters about “crank” supernatural telephone calls as well. While the film, apparently, takes a lot of liberties, it is way more entertaining. 10/10 will not be reading any more UFO books, ever (and, frankly, didn’t know I was signing up for one this time) Love monsters, could take or leave aliens.
I review regularly at brightbeautifulthings.tumblr.com.
November 15, 2009
While I didn't buy that this was based on a true story, I did enjoy the movie, so I thought I'd read the book. However, the book has almost nothing to do with the movie. The Mothman barely makes an appearance and there isn't really any narrative structure. Instead of "based on a true story" the book should have "a series of unrelated anecdotes" on the cover.
John Keel lists numerous contactee stories from people all over the world and attempts to connect them. He claims that similarities between people's stories couldn't possibly be due to copying since most contactees, as he puts it, aren't well read. Contactee stories range from the fantastic (people transported to other worlds and interacting with aliens) to the banal (someone hears a car door slam, yet there are no cars in sight). Men in Black don't always have to be wearing black. Anyone who acts strangely, talks funny, or looks foreign seems to be considered a MIB. Men with long hair "before the hippie explosion" are considered interdimensional beings.
Keel isn't a skeptic, yet he seems to be one at times. In an afterword, Keel states that the Mothman sightings could have been due to the red glow of the U2 spy plane. He tells us of a woman who impersonates an alien as part of a publicity stunt and a man who flies his plane at night to trick people into thinking they saw a UFO. He admits that alien sightings aren't that different from angel and demon sightings and that they are largely due to hallucinations. He admits that most of the prophecies made by the aliens didn't end up happening and that every generation thinks the world will end during their lifetime. Yet, inexplicably, he still believes we are being contacted by beings from a different space/time than our own.
John Keel lists numerous contactee stories from people all over the world and attempts to connect them. He claims that similarities between people's stories couldn't possibly be due to copying since most contactees, as he puts it, aren't well read. Contactee stories range from the fantastic (people transported to other worlds and interacting with aliens) to the banal (someone hears a car door slam, yet there are no cars in sight). Men in Black don't always have to be wearing black. Anyone who acts strangely, talks funny, or looks foreign seems to be considered a MIB. Men with long hair "before the hippie explosion" are considered interdimensional beings.
Keel isn't a skeptic, yet he seems to be one at times. In an afterword, Keel states that the Mothman sightings could have been due to the red glow of the U2 spy plane. He tells us of a woman who impersonates an alien as part of a publicity stunt and a man who flies his plane at night to trick people into thinking they saw a UFO. He admits that alien sightings aren't that different from angel and demon sightings and that they are largely due to hallucinations. He admits that most of the prophecies made by the aliens didn't end up happening and that every generation thinks the world will end during their lifetime. Yet, inexplicably, he still believes we are being contacted by beings from a different space/time than our own.
April 12, 2021
I watched the movie a few years ago and learned it's based on a book. It's been at the back of my mind to read it ever since.
I was expecting to remember the movie and learn more info about the Mothman cases but he's barely present in the book. Most mentions of him are near the end and they seem a little rushed.
The rest of the book is full of Mr Keel's investigations into ufo sightings, other alien related encounters and his interviews with contactees.
As a bonus, there's his own experiences with the things above as well as the men in black. Did you know he invented the term MIB? I didn't either, the more you know.
Now, a lot of the book felt like jumping from one case to another with barely any links to the Mothman until later. For a book titled The Mothman Prophecies this isn't ideal, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
There's a scary element to the book as well. As someone with phone anxiety I found all the phone calls terrifying. And of course the men in black are as cool/spooky as usual.
I appreciate the wealth of information between the pages. There were some cases I was familiar with (like the Project Blue Book ones) and others I've never heard of so my knowledge was expanded. I'd have to reread it a few times for all of it to stick though.
I've been picking books with good narration lately and this one isn't an exception. I really liked the narrator and if he did the rest of Keel's books then I'm so on board to listen to them all.
I was expecting to remember the movie and learn more info about the Mothman cases but he's barely present in the book. Most mentions of him are near the end and they seem a little rushed.
The rest of the book is full of Mr Keel's investigations into ufo sightings, other alien related encounters and his interviews with contactees.
As a bonus, there's his own experiences with the things above as well as the men in black. Did you know he invented the term MIB? I didn't either, the more you know.
Now, a lot of the book felt like jumping from one case to another with barely any links to the Mothman until later. For a book titled The Mothman Prophecies this isn't ideal, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
There's a scary element to the book as well. As someone with phone anxiety I found all the phone calls terrifying. And of course the men in black are as cool/spooky as usual.
I appreciate the wealth of information between the pages. There were some cases I was familiar with (like the Project Blue Book ones) and others I've never heard of so my knowledge was expanded. I'd have to reread it a few times for all of it to stick though.
I've been picking books with good narration lately and this one isn't an exception. I really liked the narrator and if he did the rest of Keel's books then I'm so on board to listen to them all.
August 6, 2011
I'm actually surprised at the number of positive reviews of this book. Here's why:
0.5/5 stars because I feel obligated to give it something.
I enjoy reading about "unexplained phenomena". I really do. I love "real" ghost stories and the like. However, I prefer an author to take a very scientific stance, exhausting all possibilities. Keel does not. He's a "true believer" and that's the problem.
Somewhere in the book he supposes that this mysterious Mothman could have been a man on a hang-glider. "Wow," I thought. "That could almost be construed as logical." However, he IMMEDIATELY debunks that theory with a statement to this affect: "But hang-gliders were not very well known at that time."
*shaking my head*
Whatever...the man needed to become familiar with Occam's Razor.
At least the movie did something good with it.
Full disclosure; This is the only book I've ever read that I've wanted to burn. However, I did not. I threw it away.
0.5/5 stars because I feel obligated to give it something.
I enjoy reading about "unexplained phenomena". I really do. I love "real" ghost stories and the like. However, I prefer an author to take a very scientific stance, exhausting all possibilities. Keel does not. He's a "true believer" and that's the problem.
Somewhere in the book he supposes that this mysterious Mothman could have been a man on a hang-glider. "Wow," I thought. "That could almost be construed as logical." However, he IMMEDIATELY debunks that theory with a statement to this affect: "But hang-gliders were not very well known at that time."
*shaking my head*
Whatever...the man needed to become familiar with Occam's Razor.
At least the movie did something good with it.
Full disclosure; This is the only book I've ever read that I've wanted to burn. However, I did not. I threw it away.
June 28, 2016
I quit.
I liked the movie. I thought this was going to be "non-fiction" first-person narrative of John Keel's experiences in Point Pleasant and what he thought was the explanation.
He arrived in Point Pleasant convinced he had a solution and surprise, surprise, he found a mystery. I scanned ahead after reading 37 pages and the bulk of the book appears to be a compendium of the author's research "evidence" filled with phrases like, "Obviously the government was determined to cover up the facts." It's like being stuck next to a cult recruiter on the bus.
I rarely quit books. Last year I think it was 2 out of 173. When I do quit, I don't usually rate a book. This time I think the one star is fair.
You might really dig this if you're already a true believer in every UFO story ever and you're too paranoid to click around on Wikipedia for fear of being tracked by the government. Otherwise, this is a shitty, shitty book. Don't waste your time.
I liked the movie. I thought this was going to be "non-fiction" first-person narrative of John Keel's experiences in Point Pleasant and what he thought was the explanation.
He arrived in Point Pleasant convinced he had a solution and surprise, surprise, he found a mystery. I scanned ahead after reading 37 pages and the bulk of the book appears to be a compendium of the author's research "evidence" filled with phrases like, "Obviously the government was determined to cover up the facts." It's like being stuck next to a cult recruiter on the bus.
I rarely quit books. Last year I think it was 2 out of 173. When I do quit, I don't usually rate a book. This time I think the one star is fair.
You might really dig this if you're already a true believer in every UFO story ever and you're too paranoid to click around on Wikipedia for fear of being tracked by the government. Otherwise, this is a shitty, shitty book. Don't waste your time.
January 22, 2013
Keel is definitely no Charles Fort - he's too eager to make his case whereas the latter correlated, speculated, and encouraged the reader to come to their own conclusions; even so, if this ostensibly 'true' tale is taken with a generous serving of salt, it can provide an entertainingly unnerving reading experience for enthusiasts of the weird.
August 27, 2013
3.5 stars.
First off I'd like to mention that I have never been interested in UFOs or 'aliens'. This is fairly obvious given the title of my GR shelf for such books.
Secondly, John Keel rambles. Both 'The Mothman Prophecies' and 'Operation Trojan Horse' feel as if they were written in haste. Points are made then forgotten, or undermined by future passages. The writing and ideas simply don't flow. I will admit I skimmed many of the testimonials and sightings. Too repetitive by far.
My gripes aside, I am fascinated by Keel's conclusion that UFOs are not extraterrestrial, but ultraterrestrial. Quoting from his goodreads author page:
"It was Keel's second book, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), that popularized the idea that many aspects of contemporary UFO reports, including humanoid encounters, often paralleled ancient folklore and religious encounters. Keel coined the term "men in black" to describe the mysterious figures alleged to harass UFO witnesses and he also argued that there is a direct relationship between UFOs and psychic phenomena. He did not call himself a ufologist and preferred the term Fortean, which encompasses a wide range of paranormal subjects."
Now I've been looking into Fortean phenomena, since meeting someone who said she was channeling an 'angel'. The 'angel's' prophecy of a Rapture-like event, among other revelations, left me cold, and convinced me of one of two possibilities: the woman was as mad as a cut snake, or she was channeling something altogether unpleasant. I began to investigate.
My inquiries lead me to a series of books, one of which: The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts: A Riveting Investigation Into Channeling and Spirit Guides by Joe Fisher covered exactly what I was encountering. I don't need others to believe, but I can tell you truthfully that the whole episode scared the crap out of me. I had never entertained the possibility of malicious entities, hungry ghosts, demons, djinn, fairies, the phenomena, whatever you like to call it. My rational mind always stopped my inner mystic from floating too far away. Unfortunately, now I do.
Joe Fisher's book then lead me to look into the UFO and 'alien' phenomena, and also at prophecy through the ages. The End of the World as We Know It by Daniel Wojcik is a particular favourite.
O.k. now my review rambles as much as Keel's book...
I would recommend to anyone interested in Keel's work to also read The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts and The End of the World as We Know It.
First off I'd like to mention that I have never been interested in UFOs or 'aliens'. This is fairly obvious given the title of my GR shelf for such books.
Secondly, John Keel rambles. Both 'The Mothman Prophecies' and 'Operation Trojan Horse' feel as if they were written in haste. Points are made then forgotten, or undermined by future passages. The writing and ideas simply don't flow. I will admit I skimmed many of the testimonials and sightings. Too repetitive by far.
My gripes aside, I am fascinated by Keel's conclusion that UFOs are not extraterrestrial, but ultraterrestrial. Quoting from his goodreads author page:
"It was Keel's second book, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), that popularized the idea that many aspects of contemporary UFO reports, including humanoid encounters, often paralleled ancient folklore and religious encounters. Keel coined the term "men in black" to describe the mysterious figures alleged to harass UFO witnesses and he also argued that there is a direct relationship between UFOs and psychic phenomena. He did not call himself a ufologist and preferred the term Fortean, which encompasses a wide range of paranormal subjects."
Now I've been looking into Fortean phenomena, since meeting someone who said she was channeling an 'angel'. The 'angel's' prophecy of a Rapture-like event, among other revelations, left me cold, and convinced me of one of two possibilities: the woman was as mad as a cut snake, or she was channeling something altogether unpleasant. I began to investigate.
My inquiries lead me to a series of books, one of which: The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts: A Riveting Investigation Into Channeling and Spirit Guides by Joe Fisher covered exactly what I was encountering. I don't need others to believe, but I can tell you truthfully that the whole episode scared the crap out of me. I had never entertained the possibility of malicious entities, hungry ghosts, demons, djinn, fairies, the phenomena, whatever you like to call it. My rational mind always stopped my inner mystic from floating too far away. Unfortunately, now I do.
Joe Fisher's book then lead me to look into the UFO and 'alien' phenomena, and also at prophecy through the ages. The End of the World as We Know It by Daniel Wojcik is a particular favourite.
O.k. now my review rambles as much as Keel's book...
I would recommend to anyone interested in Keel's work to also read The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts and The End of the World as We Know It.
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