The Mothman Prophecies (24 page)

Obviously Mr. Hickson's physical makeup includes some unknown but not unheard of force which interferes with watches. He could be surrounded by that special energy field or aura which attracts UFO-type phenomena. Calvin Parker was just unfortunate enough to be present when the phenomenon zeroed in on Hickson. Since the light was not operating on his alpha wave frequency, Parker wasn't entranced … he was knocked unconscious. Hickson entered a hypnoticlike trance and hallucinated.

Besides all the press attention, crank phone calls, and attending nonsense, Calvin Parker suffered a nervous breakdown. Yet, despite the uproar in Pascagoula, the men were never properly investigated by qualified persons … aside from the air force. A hydraulic engineer from Berkeley visited them, hypnotized them, and when they began to relive their terrible fear he cut the session short. Afterward he soberly informed reporters that he was certain the men had been examined by “robots from outer space.”

The air force investigation was another story. Deputy Tom Huntley accompanied the two men to the Keesler Air Force Base. “When we got there it was something amazing,” Huntley told Ralph Blum afterward. “We were in an unmarked car but the guards were expecting us and waved us through the moment I said who we was. I looked back through my rear-view mirror, and damn if two cars full of air police hadn't fallen in behind us. They had more air police stationed at each crossing all along the road. We pulled up in this concrete area behind a building. The police had halted all traffic. Doctors were waiting, and man,
they
looked like space creatures—all wrapped in white and masked and gloved. They went over Charlie and Calvin from head to toe. They ran a radioactive check. They swabbed between the boys' fingers, along the tops of their shoes, even under the heels. Then they put each swab into a little bottle and labeled each bottle.”

It was clear the air force doctors knew what they were doing and had probably done it many times before. After the examination was completed, Huntley, Hickson, and Parker were escorted to another building.

“It was something,” Huntley said. “Armed air police at each door and all along the route! Four of 'em in the conference room! And the brass—colonels, majors—the whole base command must have been there. And a heap of doctors.”

The men were closely interrogated for several minutes. Some of the questions asked were identical to the questions I ask in my own interviews. Questions about diet (some contactees seem to favor a high starch diet), marks or punctures on their bodies, family history, etc.

The intriguing part of this is the extensive security measures taken. It sounds as if the whole base had been put on alert for the occasion, and the two contactees were so closely guarded during their visit that it seems as if the air force expected them to blow up the base. To me, this Keesler Air Force Base investigation was far more interesting than the UFO contact itself.

Perhaps someone in the air force had read my 1967–68 articles in
Flying Saucer Review
advising investigators to “find out what they had for breakfast.”

III.

Woodrow Derenberger regarded the ufonauts as “time travelers.” He noted some interesting distortions of time during his jaunts to the far-off galaxy of Ganymede (actually Ganymede is the name of one of Jupiter's moons). When he went off on a trip with Indrid Cold, a trip that seemed to take hours or days, he always found on his return that only a few hours of earth time had passed. He rejected the notion that he may have hallucinated his interstellar voyages, so time-traveling was the only answer acceptable to him.

In many of the cases outlined here I have pointed out the entities' obsession with time. Their behavior as described by various witnesses further suggests their problems in adjusting to our time frame. For example, their rapid-fire unintelligible “language” noted by witnesses all over the world as sounding like “a speeded up phonograph record” could be caused by their failure to adjust to our time cycle when they enter our space-time continuum. They are talking at a faster rate because their time is different from ours. When they manage to adjust, they have to forcibly slow themselves down, articulating their words slowly, in a singsong manner. For high-speed radio transmissions we record signals at a normal speed, then broadcast the tape at very high speed. The receiver records it at the same high speed and then slows the tape down again to play it back. Our entities are like those radio receivers, playing back the message at slow speeds until they hit upon a speed we can interpret.

The entities also foul up in other ways. They arrive in clothes that are out of style, or not yet in style. Their vehicles are out of date. If they use slang, they might come up with archaic terms like “twenty-three Skidoo” or “hubba hubba.” The poor bastards not only fail to understand who or what they are, but also where they are or what time period they're in. Some of these mistakes seem intentional and have some allegorical purpose. But others seem to be just … mistakes.

This brings us to one of the most puzzling contact stories in my files.

At 1:15
A.M.
on the morning of Sunday, December 10, 1967, a young college student from Adelphi, Maryland, was driving home alone outside of Washington, D.C. As he was crossing the then-partially completed cutoff on Interstate 70, leading from Route 40 to Route 29, he saw a large object on the road directly ahead. At first he thought it was a tractor-trailer jackknifed across the road. Then he realized it was a bone-white reflective object shaped like an egg and standing on four legs. As he pulled to a stop a few feet from the object he could make out two figures standing next to the thing. Their appearance terrified him.

One of the men walked to his car with a broad grin on his face. He was about five feet ten, wore light blue coveralls, thick-soled boots or shoes, and he had a ruddy or suntanned complexion with large eyes “like thyroid eyes.” The grin remained fixed on his face throughout the episode.

“Do not be afraid of me,” he said several times in an audible voice. His name, he said, was Vadig. He spoke with Tom, the witness, for several minutes, asking ordinary questions about where he was from, where he was going, what he did, etc.

Finally he said pointedly, “I'll see you in time,” and walked back to the object. A small door opened and a metal ladder folded down. A hand reached out and helped Vadig aboard, then the thing rose silently into the air and disappeared. Tom told his three roommates about the encounter, but they didn't take him seriously so he didn't mention it to anyone else.

Tom was working his way through school by serving as a waiter part-time in a chain of restaurants in the D.C. area. He had not mentioned this to Vadig. But one Sunday night in early February 1968, Vadig entered the restaurant where he was working and sat at one of his tables. Vadig was now wearing a conventional suit with a black outer coat.

“Do you remember me?” Vadig asked.

“I sure do.” Tom answered, very surprised. They exchanged a few words and Tom brought him a cup of coffee.

“My presence here would be detrimental to the family trade,” Vadig said at one point with a chuckle.

He asked Tom if he would be willing to meet with him the following Sunday. Tom agreed and Vadig left the restaurant.

“I'll see you in time,” he promised.

After work the next Sunday, a waitress drove Tom home and dropped him off. As she pulled away, a big black car with its lights out glided from the shadows and halted at the curb. Mr. Vadig called out to Tom. Another man was in the car. Tom later recalled only that he wore a gray coat, had black hair, and never spoke. Tom got into the car.

“It was a very old Buick,” he reported. “But it was very well kept. It looked brand-new. It even
smelled
brand-new.”

They drove for about thirty minutes to a remote spot on a back road in Maryland. When Tom got out of the car he was astonished to see the egg-shaped object waiting for them. He was put into a circular room containing nothing but a couple of bucket seats and a gray TV screen. Vadig and his companion disappeared into another part of the ship.

After a few minutes the TV screen came alive, the object shuddered, and Tom watched the image of the earth receding to a tiny speck on the screen. Three or four hours passed. He was still dressed in his waiter's uniform and did not have a watch. But it seemed like hours before another planet appeared on the screen, grew larger, and then the craft landed with a thump.

The young waiter found himself in a place not too unlike the earth. He and Vadig got into a wheelless vehicle that traveled along a kind of trough.

“This is Lanulos,” Vadig announced with pride in his voice.

He repeated the name several times so it would stick in Tom's memory.

Their vehicle traveled through a large city with low, flat buildings and signs written in some kind of Oriental-looking characters. The people, male and female, were all nude.

“There were some real lookers there, too,” Tom commented.

After the tour, they returned to the egg-shaped craft and took off again. Tom sat alone in the same circular room watching the television screen for hours. Finally they arrived back on earth at the same place from which they had left. Tom, Vadig, and the silent man returned to the old Buick and drove for about thirty minutes until they reached his apartment house.

“I'll see you in time,” Vadig declared, then the car drove off.

Tom ran into his apartment, determined to wake up his roommates and tell them of his adventure. He found they were sitting up, waiting for him. But what amazed him most was the clock on the wall. The waitress had dropped him off around midnight. Now it was only 1:30
A.M.
The whole trip, including the thirty-minute rides to and from the UFO, had taken less than two hours!

His excitement and bewilderment were real and his roommates took him seriously this time.

A month later, Woodrow Derenberger visited Washington and appeared on a number of talk shows. Tom was sleeping when one of his roommates burst into his bedroom exclaiming, “Tom, there's a guy on the radio talking about
Lanulos!
”

All four were flabbergasted to hear Woody describe experiences very similar to Tom's. They called the radio station and spoke to him after the program.

By sheer coincidence, I was in Washington at the time and agreed to go with Woody when he interviewed the young man. But I sternly warned Derenberger and his wife not to ask any leading questions. Naturally, I suspected the whole thing was some kind of put-on. Either Tom and Woody were in cahoots, or Tom, who was a psychology major, was working on a paper about the gullible UFO buffs, I thought.

It quickly became apparent that Tom and his roommates were quite sincere. They were too involved in their studies to read UFO literature and, in any case, some of the details in Tom's story could not be found in any of the superficial UFO lore. I finally had to conclude Tom was on the level. He was not looking for publicity and I decided I would not write up his story.

However, Woody told others about him (I think even Woody was surprised by such direct confirmation of his own experiences) and some Washington UFO enthusiasts convinced Tom he should reveal his adventure to the world. Two years later he lectured before a UFO club and appeared on Long John's radio program in New York. Since he had chosen to come out publicly, I finally devoted a paragraph to him in one of my books. After the book was published, Tom wrote me an angry letter.

Ever since those appearances … I have been pestered and plagued by a horde of kooks. They call, write, stop to visit, etc. They drove me crazy. Some of my very close friends began to advise me of the dangers to my reputation that these types of individuals were posing. I decided to tell them all once and for all that I desired no more public contact.… Although the experiences I had were completely true, I sometimes wish I had never revealed them to anyone. The only reason I made them known was because I thought I could help to verify and help uncover some of the mystery that shrouds the UFO phenomenon.… I should have kept my mouth shut like I had planned to when you first interviewed me.

Tom married a beautiful girl and she didn't learn of his weird meetings with Vadig until months after the ceremony. Like so many others before him, myself included, he learned that the only thing more bizarre than the phenomenon itself is the unruly mob of true believers, cranks, and irresponsible self-styled investigators who pursue the subject; moths attracted to the flame. They tormented Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker in 1973, just as they had arrived by the carload in Point Pleasant in 1967.

15:

Misery on the Mount

I.

Daniel Drasin was about eighteen when he filmed a riot in New York's Washington Square, titled it
Sunday,
and won a number of motion-picture awards. Now still in his mid-twenties, handsome, quiet-spoken, intelligent, and perceptive, he was well into a promising career in the film industry. The West Virginia UFO documentary was an important break for him and he plunged into the project with a mixture of awe and enthusiasm. As I was on my way to Washington, D. C., from Point Pleasant, he was headed in the other direction with a skeleton crew hoping to get some authentic movies of those funny lights in the sky.

When I reached Washington I parked my car on Connecticut Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares, in broad daylight for a few minutes. Some of my clothes and camera cases were in the back seat so I carefully locked the doors. While I was gone someone smashed in the vent on the side window and robbed my car. They left behind my clothes and some of my cameras. They took my briefcase, tape recorder and all my notebooks, exposed films, taped interviews with witnesses, cheap telescope and other items with little or no value to anyone except me. Strangely, they had removed my irreplaceable address book from one of the cases and left it on the seat. I called the police. When they finally arrived their attitude was not very sympathetic. Anyone who would leave anything plainly visible in a locked car at 2
P.M.
on a main street in Washington was plainly a fool, or so they suggested.