The Mothman Prophecies (17 page)

I had three interesting physical reactions to this sighting. First of all, although I am used to prowling graveyards and TNT areas alone late at night, I was scared to death. My first thought was to start the car and get the hell out of there. But I managed to brace myself. I did lock the car doors. Second, while I was watching the object I thought I heard a sizzling or hissing sound. Later I realized I couldn't be sure if the sound had been real. Third, the next morning my eyes were sore and reddened. They felt like they were full of sand. I had a mild case of conjunctivitis and it persisted for several days.

In my notebook I scribbled, “2
A.M.
, drove to turnaround point [a driveway by a barn down the road], turned and returned to original parking position … unable to see anything in ravine … no lights or signs of acitivity … still scared … not anxious to get out of car…”

Another note reads, “No sign of moon which was supposed to rise at 1:59
A.M.
” This referred to something that had happened the night before. After the object with the reddish “window” had disappeared, Mary and I sat in the darkness for a long time when suddenly a great glowing object appeared behind some trees on a distant hill. It was red and large and we both thought we could see a human figure moving about on the hill. We really thought something had landed there. After a few minutes the object slowly rose upward and to our mutual embarrassment we saw that it was the moon. I had never seen a moonrise exactly like that one so I decided to deliberately watch the moon the following evening. I checked the papers for the time the moon was supposed to come up. But it never did.

That night, as I said, was cloudless and star-filled but the moon
never
appeared. I stayed in the area until 3:30
A.M.
and the moon was still conspicuously absent when I left.

The night after that the moon appeared right on schedule.

Sheriff Johnson, Deputy Halstead, Mary Hyre, and I went back to Five Mile Creek Road the next afternoon to look for my saucer. Deputy Halstead carried a Geiger counter. As Johnson followed my car up the hill he was startled when his car radio suddenly sprang to life, emitting police calls from the adjoining county. The amazing thing was that
his radio was turned off at the time!
It had to be turned on with a key and the key was not even in the lock!

We searched for scorched marks, broken tree limbs, radioactivity, anything that could have provided evidence of my sighting. But as Halstead and I clambered around the ravine I was chagrined to find that my estimates must have been way off. The object must have been further away from me than I thought, and therefore it had to be bigger than I thought (I estimated it was only fifteen or twenty feet in diameter).

In my favor was the fact that there were widespread UFO sightings on the nights of April 2–3. South of Charleston, West Virginia, a large group of people, including several state police officers, watched a formation of fifteen lights maneuver over a forest and descend.

Every night I went to the hill at Five Mile Creek Road, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by a few others. And every night I saw a variety of strange aerial objects. Only two airplanes passed over on a regular schedule, one at 11
P.M.
and another at 2
A.M.
Each night from three to eight unidentified “stars” appeared. They were always in the same position at the beginning of each evening and a casual observer would automatically conclude they were really just stars. However, on overcast nights these unidentifieds would be the only “stars” in the sky, meaning they were below the clouds. While the rest of the night sky slowly rotated, these phony stars would remain in their fixed positions, sometimes for hours, before they would begin to move. Then they would travel in any direction, up, down, clockwise, etc.

They had a number of curious traits. When a plane would fly over they would suddenly dim or go out altogether. As soon as the plane was gone they would flare up again.

It was always impossible to judge their size, altitude, or distance. Sometimes I thought they were relatively close only to find they were actually miles away, traversing the river. Boatmen on the river were obviously watching them also. Occasionally a searchlight from a riverboat would suddenly shoot into the sky, aimed straight at an object I was watching, and the object would skitter out of the way.

I doubted that these funny lights were spaceships from Andromeda and I made a strenuous effort to find rational explanations. Dr. Donald Menzel, a Harvard astronomer, advocates an air inversion theory, contending that these lights are ordinary lights reflecting off layers of warm or cold air and producing a mirage effect. This theory wasn't workable on Five Mile Creek Road simply because there weren't enough light sources. A large radio antenna some miles down the river did produce some interesting effects. When there was a haze the flashing red lights on the antenna were an eerie sight from my hill and never failed to excite first-time visitors to my lookout post.

Three or four days after my monumental UFO sighting I was sitting in Mary's office when she became very thoughtful.

“You know, there's something I've been meaning to tell you,” she began hesitantly. “I don't know why, but it always seems to slip my mind. That night that I left you early … the night you saw that colored disc … when I got to Route 2 and started for Point Pleasant I saw a big globe of light right on the river. I couldn't figure out what it was … but I didn't stop. The funny thing is, I forgot it completely. I didn't remember it until a day or so afterward. Then I forgot it again. I can't understand it. I've always had a very good memory.”

Lacunal amnesia, loss of the memory of specific incidents or moments in time, is a common part of the phenomenon. In December 1967 Faye Carpenter, Connie's mother, had a more bafflling attack of amnesia. The night that “Jack Brown” visited Connie (Chapter Two), Mrs. Carpenter had opened the door for him. He was in his shirt sleeves, no jacket or coat although it was extremely cold. She was not going to let him in … but she did. And she had absolutely no memory of his visit afterward even though she had been present when he talked with Connie, Keith, and Larry.

In the days following Mr. Brown's visit, a poltergeist settled in the Carpenter household. Securely fastened pictures fell off the walls. Small objects disappeared from shelves and reappeared in unlikely places. The manifestations lasted about two weeks.

IV.

During her news-gathering rounds, Mary Hyre was approached by a professional woman in Gallipolis, Ohio, the town directly across the river from Gallipolis Ferry, West Virginia. She said she heard I was in the area and she wanted to talk to me. My motel, the Blue Fountain, was on the outskirts of Gallipolis so I arranged a meeting with the lady. She held a very responsible job and insisted on anonymity, as so many witnesses do, so I will call her Mrs. Bryant.

We met in a private office in a major company in Gallipolis. Mrs. Bryant was a reserved, well-spoken middle-aged woman who looked slightly fatigued from overwork. She was very secretive and suspicious at first, but after I showed her my parcel of credentials she relaxed somewhat. It was obvious she had been through a great deal and she was concerned I would not believe her. She had gone to the local authorities, she said, and they had laughed at her. I assured her that I wouldn't laugh, that I was accustomed to hearing incredible stories from credible people.

“Last November … I think it was the second or third,” she began, “I was out behind this building, getting ready to go home. It was seven or eight o'clock. Suddenly there was a little flash, like a camera flash gun going off, directly above me … and then I saw a thing … some kind of flying machine. I couldn't move. I guess I was frozen with fright. This thing landed right there in the parking lot not twenty feet away from me. It was like a big cylinder. Anyway, it didn't make the slightest bit of noise. It just drifted down and stopped. Like I say, I couldn't move. I guess I started praying. Then two men came out of it and they walked over to me.”

She studied me anxiously as if expecting me to laugh.

“What did they look like?” I asked.

“They were just normal-sized, normal-looking men, but their skins were a funny color … dark, like maybe they were heavily tanned. The light was pretty bad there so I couldn't see them all that well.”

“Were they Negroes?”

“No. No, they didn't have Negroid features. Their faces seemed kind of pointed. You know, pointed noses, pointed chins, high cheekbones. There was a kind of evil look about them. I was afraid I was going to get robbed or attacked.”

“How were they dressed?” I leaned back and lit my pipe.

“As near as I could tell, they were wearing some kind of coveralls, something like a uniform. Then they started talking to me.”

She kept watching me, reluctant to continue.

“What did they have to say?” I prompted, trying to avoid leading questions.

“Well, it was all pretty silly. They just wanted to know my name, where I was from, what I did for a living, things like that. Sometimes it was hard to understand them. Their voices were sort of singsongy and high-pitched. It was like listening to a phonograph record played at the wrong speed. And they kept asking me for the time. They asked ‘What is your time? two or three times. Finally they just walked back to the thing and it took off. Then I could move again. I was scared out of my wits but I decided not to tell anyone. Then a couple of days later I heard about a man up near Parkersburg who had the same thing happen to him.”

“His name is Woodrow Derenberger,” I volunteered. “Have you met him?”

“No. I just heard something about him on the radio.” She paused and moistened her thin lips. “I wonder … did he ever see those men again?”

“He says he did.”

She looked relieved.

“Well, I saw them again. I saw them in broad daylight. Walking right down the main street in Gallipolis. This time they were dressed in normal clothes. They looked like anybody. They sort of nodded to me when they passed me. I got scared all over again. Real scared. That's when I went to the police and told them what I saw. They laughed at me and said I was probably just imagining things.” She paused again and shook her head sadly. “You see, I've been to the police before … about my cattle rustlers. I guess they think I'm some kind of a nut. I went to the FBI, too. They came out to my place but said they couldn't find anything. After that somebody tapped my telephone. Maybe it was the FBI.”

I was scribbling in my pocket notebook. A year or two earlier I would have classified Mrs. Bryant as a paranoid-schizophrenic. But she didn't seem like a common run-of-the-mill nut.

She and her two teen-aged children lived on a farm outside of Gallipolis. She kept cows there and beginning in 1963–64 she started to have trouble with cattle rustlers who butchered the animals in the field.

“Whoever they were,” she observed, “they didn't seem to want the choice cuts. They just took the brains, eyeballs, udders, and organs that—you know—we'd normally throw away.”

Had she ever caught the culprits in the act?

“Several times,” she said. “I'd see them out in the field and go after them with a shotgun. But they always got away. They're tall men and they wear white coveralls … which is kind of stupid because they really stand out in the dark. And they can certainly run and jump. I've seen them leap over high fences from a standing start.”

Her home burned to the ground during that period and she built a new one-story ranch house on the same site. One night when she was alone in the new house, she said, she woke up and found herself unable to move. She felt a wave of almost overpowering heat as she heard the kitchen door open. She had double-locked it before going to bed. While she lay there helplessly, she said she saw a tall figure walk through the kitchen and apparently go out another locked door on the other side. After it left, she was able to move.

Other strange sounds pervaded the house, she claimed. She and her children often heard heavy footsteps on the roof and loud metallic clangs.

After interviewing her, I drove out alone to her house to talk to her children. The Bryant farm was quite isolated on a hilly back road. The house stood on a knoll overlooking the surrounding fields. Her teen-aged son was a down-to-earth boy, used to the responsibilities of being the man in the family. He confirmed his mother's stories about the rustlers and added some interesting details. He pointed out some nearby trees. One night, he said, as he and his mother were walking up the road they saw a large glowing object hovering directly above the trees. “She was scared real bad,” he noted. Their telephone often went dead for no reason. Other times they got calls that just consisted of strange beeping sounds and “electronic music.” He also mentioned the big gray “flying boxcars” that often flew over the area at treetop level. “It's a wonder they don't crash,” he said. “If they flew any lower they'd have to put their wheels down.”

When I examined the kitchen of the little house I found that the locked door through which the nocturnal phantom had supposedly exited led to nowhere. There were no steps outside, just a very steep drop of about ten feet to the ground.

Later I checked with the local police about rumors of disappearing dogs and cattle in the area, and I brought up Mrs. Bryant's name. “That poor woman,” I was told. “She's always seeing things. Just a couple of months back she came in here with some story about spacemen walking around Gallipolis. Before that it was cattle rustlers.”

So Mrs. Bryant still sits on her farm, watching the strange lights in her fields, and when her phone rings she waits a long time before she picks it up.

11:

If This Is Wednesday, It Must Be a Venusian