The Mothman Prophecies (13 page)

At 8:15
A.M.
on February 22, 1967, she started out for school. Keith was already at work. As she began walking down the quiet, tree-lined street a large black car pulled up alongside. Since all young people are automobile conscious, she said she could positively identify it as a 1949 Buick. The driver opened his door and called to her, asking for directions, so she walked over to his car. He was a clean-cut young man of about twenty-five, she said later, and was wearing a colorful mod shirt, no jacket, despite the cold weather. His thick black hair was neatly combed and he appeared to be very suntanned. He spoke with no noticeable accent. The car, though nearly twenty years old, was so well kept it looked like new. Even the interior had a look of newness about it.

When she reached the vehicle, the young man suddenly lunged, grabbed her arm, and ordered her to get in with him. After a brief struggle she managed to break away. She ran back to her house and locked herself in, completely terrified. She cowered in the house until her husband came home from work. And she decided to stay home the next day, too. At 3
P.M.
she heard someone on the porch and there was a loud knock on the door. She waited awhile then cautiously went to the door. There was no one on the porch and no car in sight, but a note had been slipped under the door. It was written in pencil in block letters on a piece of ordinary notebook paper.

“Be careful girl,” it read, “I can get you yet.”

That night Connie and Keith went to the local police. The note was turned over to officer Raymond Manly. In March 1967, I visited the police station, hoping to recover the note so I could compare the handwriting with other notes I had collected. Manly had lost it somewhere along the way. When I asked to see their file on the case they produced a printed form containing Connie's name and address and one scribbled line, “Dark Buick, young man.” The police chief assured me that no such car existed in Middleport and that it was obviously a case of some maniac trying to abduct a young girl. Officer Manly told me he was keeping the house under constant surveillance. I had to break the news that the Gordons had moved back to the West Virginia side of the river shortly after the incident. Despite my sheaf of credentials and press cards, both men were overly suspicious of me and asked me repeatedly if I really wasn't “from the government.” This fear of government agents was already universal in 1967, long before the general breakdown of faith in the government of the 1970s. The UFO enthusiasts had done their job well. Their twenty-year campaign against the air force had really shut the government off from many UFO reports.

In the mid-1950s I had experienced a variation of this paranoia while traveling through the Orient. The CIA had already earned an odious reputation abroad, its butterfingered agents often operating as wandering journalists, particularly in the Himalayas where they were trying to foment revolutionary activity against the Chinese who were then settling down in Tibet. More than once I was openly accused of being a secret American
agent provocateur.
Officials would “lose” my passport for days at a time while they checked me out forward and backward. In Baghdad, and again in Singapore, I was actually grilled by the authorities who were apparently convinced I was after state secrets or was planning to overthrow the government. Since I knew very little about the CIA in those days I was perplexed by all this attention.

Eventually I learned that the CIA had a habit of enlisting very young people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, frequently involving them in bizarre scenarios. Considerable evidence exists indicating that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA pawn early on.

Today the CIA has an annual budget in excess of $11 billion, and it doesn't have to account to the president or Congress. A large part of this budget is probably wasted on bureaucratic nonsense, and another large part is spent on what can only be termed malicious mischief. Technically, the CIA has no legal authority or responsibilities within the continental United States, but if you open a phone book for any moderate-sized U.S. city you will find a local CIA office listed. They also maintain thousands of “fronts,” offices disguised as legitimate businesses, throughout the country.

During the recent Watergate debacle investigating reporters documented the fact that some of the participants were not only long-time CIA agents, but also that these same men had been involved in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, and some had been present in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on the day President Kennedy was assassinated. It is noteworthy that reporters, editors, and citizens engaged in the investigation of President Kennedy's death suffered harassment and telephone problems identical to those experienced by UFO researchers. Some of these tactics will be examined in detail further on.

However, I can not accuse the CIA as being the source of the weird incidents outlined here. Rather,
the phenomenon is imitative.
This paranormal mimicry is difficult for many to understand but I come across constant examples. Early in January 1973, for instance, a reliable witness in Ohio observed an unusual-looking helicopter which she was able to describe in detail. When she sketched it for a local UFO enthusiast he was flabbergasted. He was an aeronautical engineer specializing in helicopters and he knew the thing she drew was a new secret helicopter
that was still on the drawing board!

Even closer to home, a few days after Tad Jones's sighting on Route 64,
True
magazine hit the stands with an article of mine about flying saucers. It was illustrated with drawings of all kinds of odd-shaped objects, many of them the pure products of the artist's imagination. It included an exact replica of Jones's sphere, complete with wheeled legs and propeller. An object exactly like this had never been described in the UFO literature before … or since. The artist had produced his layout many weeks before. Somehow the phenomenon had mischievously duplicated the artist's conception for Jones's benefit.

9:

“Wake Up Down There!”

I.

A young couple, very much in love, sprawled together in the back seat of an old jalopy on a deserted dirt road in the isolated back hills east of Ravenswood, West Virginia. It was a starlit, moonless night in the spring of 1967, just warm enough so the pair were able to strip to the buff comfortably. Things were rather pleasant on that squeaky back seat until about 10:30
P.M.
when a blinding bluish light poured in through the windows of the parked car.

“At first, I thought it was the police,” the young man told me later. “Then we both felt a funny tingling sensation that scared us half out of our wits. I jumped up and stared into the light. It wasn't a flashlight or spotlight. It was more like a big ball of bluish fire hovering a couple of feet off the ground directly alongside the car. There was a funny sound, too, like a low hum.”

His girlfriend screamed, he reported, and the light seemed to back away slightly while the humming increased in volume.

“The next thing we knew,” the young man continued, “it was gone. Just like that. We jumped into our clothes and got the hell out of there. Another funny thing, when we got into town it was after 12:30. We couldn't figure it out. It seemed like we only looked at that light for a couple of seconds. But somehow it must have taken two hours.”

Their first inclination was to run to the police but they decided against it, since they weren't supposed to be on that road doing what they were doing in the first place. (“Her old man would've killed me!”) They drove around for several minutes until their hysteria subsided and then he dropped her off at her home.

The next morning both the boy and the girl woke up to find themselves heavily “sunburned” from head to foot. The boy's eyes were almost swollen shut for two weeks afterward. It was not an easy matter for them to explain how they managed to get a total, and quite painful, sunburn at night in the early spring.

Shortly afterward he heard that I was in the area and sought me out to tell me the story. His skin was still reddish and his eyes were still bothering him when I met him.

The actinic ray burns were proof of his story. And I knew that UFOs often zero in on lovers in parked cars. Many—most—of the monster episodes in my files took place in remote lovers' lanes. Young love has to run enough hazards without the fear of a hairy weirdo hammering on the windshield.

What concerned me was the two-hour time lapse or spell of lacunal amnesia which apparently took place. What could have happened to the pair during that forgotten period?

The phenomenon has an almost pornographic preoccupation with our mating practices. One of its most celebrated games is the manipulation of romantic relationships. Early investigators of the fairy episodes, such as novelist Sir Walter Scott, noted that fairies seemed to delight in bringing people together and fostering love, or, conversely, indulging in conspiracies to force lovers apart. The Bell witch of Tennessee is supposed to have manipulated the love life of a Bell daughter, almost tragically. Brad Steiger, one of America's best-known investigators of the paranormal, has been involved in several poltergeist cases in which the mischievous poltergeists tried to wreck romances and marriages.
1
Nothing can quite affect a new groom's virility like being physically hurled from his wedding bed by an unseen force and pelted with flying ashtrays thrown by invisible hands. Unbelievable though it may seem, such things do happen.

Flying saucer contactees often have their marriages disrupted, even destroyed, after they begin their liaisons with the space people. And there are many cases in which flying saucer enthusiasts have been brought together—literally hurled together—through their mutual interest.

Could it be that some people are programed to love by this mysterious force?

II.

A public relations officer for the United Nations, Donald Estrella, accompanied me on one of my trips to West Virginia in 1967. In those days the UN was keenly interested in the UFO enigma. Mr. U Thant, then secretary general of the organization, held private meetings with author John Fuller and Dr. J. Allen Hynek, two leading UFO authorities. The late Drew Pearson created a sensation when he revealed that Mr. Thant regarded flying saucers as second in importance after the war in Vietnam. (Thant later denied the Pearson story.)

When Don Estrella saw all the bizarre things I was investigating, things which—to his surprise—seemed to have little relevance to wonderful spaceships from another planet, he told me about three unrelated events that had happened to him over a span of several years.

“Seven or eight years ago,” he said, “I was taking a vacation trip with four friends through the New England states. We were riding in a high-powered car along a deserted country road somewhere in New Hampshire, I believe. We were going quite fast when suddenly we hit something. This was in broad daylight and it was as if we suddenly crashed into an invisible brick wall. The whole front of the car was smashed in. Luckily, none of us were hurt but we were a bit stunned. We got out and looked around. There was absolutely nothing on the road. We never could figure out what had happened.”

Experience had taught me that paranormal events are often interlaced with puzzling yet seemingly normal things like strange phone calls. Had he ever received any odd calls?

“There was one thing,” he said slowly. “About five years ago I took a train out to see a friend of mine on Long Island and when I got there he accused me of playing a hoax on him. He said he'd received a phone call about half an hour before I arrived. A voice that sounded very distant had said, ‘Hello, Don.' My friend told him that I hadn't arrived yet. The voice then began to recite a series of numbers meaninglessly. My friend thought it was some kind of gag and hung up.”

Finally I asked him if he had ever had any really odd encounters with peculiar strangers. He looked at me bewildered and astonished.

“There's one that's always bothered me. It happened around the time of that phone call thing. One night when I was walking home to my apartment I became aware of a man following me. When I looked at him, he stopped and grinned at me … but there was an air of evil about him. I can't pinpoint it exactly.”

“Was he possibly some kind of sex deviate?” I suggested.

“No … I don't think so. He was short and slight, and wore a black coat and black trousers. His face was dark and foreign-looking. I don't know why, but that evil grin is burned into my memory.”

Don said he hurried into his apartment and never saw the man again. A mere chance encounter on a busy New York street. Perhaps.

The foolishly grinning man is a staple item in psychic lore. Black-suited with a dark complexion and craggy foreign face, he has been described to me in many places by many people.

As for strange phone calls, I have investigated so many that I am now practically a telephone engineer. They are hard to nail down because there are so many cranks, hoaxers, and “phone phreaks” out there today. But the calls that interest me most fall into patterns that exclude natural explanations.

At 8
A.M.
on March 24, 1961, two women in Prospect, Oregon, a town of about three hundred people, were talking together on the phone when suddenly a strange man's voice broke into the line and snapped, “Wake up down there!” One of the ladies regarded this as an affront and she proceeded to express a very strong opinion. The voice started to rattle on in a rapid-fire language that sounded like Spanish but the line seemed to be dead. The two women could not hear each other. After the man suddenly stopped, the line became live again.

The next day, at the same hour, the women were on the phone again, and again the strange voice interrupted with, “Wake up down there!”

This time the women listened quietly as the voice said something in the foreign language, and then it recited the numbers forty and twenty-five over and over. No one in Prospect spoke Spanish. There was no accounting for the incident.