Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #196559 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-18
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 288 pages

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1:
Beelzebub Visits West Virginia


I.

Fingers of lightning tore holes in the black skies as an angry cloudburst drenched the surrealistic landscape. It was 3 A.M. on a cold, wet morning in late November 1967, and the little houses scattered along the dirt road winding through the hills of West Virginia were all dark. Some seemed unoccupied and in the final stages of decay. Others were un-painted, neglected, forlorn. The whole setting was like the opening scene of a Grade B horror film from the 1930s.
Along the road there came a stranger in a land where strangers were rare and suspect. He walked up to the door of a crumbling farmhouse and hammered. After a long moment a light blinked on somewhere in the house and a young woman appeared, drawing a cheap mail-order bathrobe tightly about her. She opened the door a crack and her sleep-swollen face winced with fear as she stared at the apparition on her doorstep. He was over six feet tall and dressed entirely in black. He wore a black suit, black tie, black hat, and black overcoat, with impractical black dress shoes covered with mud. His face, barely visible in the darkness, sported a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. The flashes of lightning behind him added an eerie effect.
“May I use your phone?” He asked in a deep baritone, his voice lacking the familiar West Virginia accent. The girl gulped silently and backed away.
“My husband…” She mumbled. ’Talk to my husband.”
She closed the door quickly and backed away into the darkness. Minutes passed. Then she returned accompanied by a rugged young man hastily buckling his trousers in place. He, too, turned pale at the sight of the stranger.
“We ain’t got a phone here,” he grunted through the crack in the door just before he slammed it. The couple retreated murmuring to themselves and the tall stranger faded into the night.
Beards were a very rare sight in West Virginia in 1967. Men in formal suits and ties were even rarer in those back hills of the Ohio valley. And bearded, black-garbed strangers on foot in the rain had never been seen there before.
In the days that followed the young couple told their friends about the apparition. Obviously, they concluded, he had been a fearful omen of some sort. Perhaps he had been the devil himself!
Three weeks later these two people were dead, among the victims of the worst tragedy ever to strike that section of West Virginia. They were driving across the Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio River, when it suddenly collapsed.
Their friends remembered. They remembered the story of the bearded stranger in the night. It had, indeed, been a sinister omen. One that confirmed their religious beliefs and superstitions. So a new legend was born. Beelzebub had visited West Virginia on the eve of a terrible tragedy.

Customer Reviews

Perhaps the most interesting book I've ever read
The Mothman Prophecies is one of the few books that I've felt compelled to read several times. It's scary, thrilling, and intensely interesting, at least to a "paranomal" buff such as myself. And all of this in a nonfiction book. Perhaps truth really is stranger than fiction!

It seems some people don't like John Keel's writing style, as it seems rather scatterbrained. I believe this is deliberate, as the different subcategories of subject matter, such as the men in black, UFOs, the Mothman itself, etc., are touched on briefly, repeatedly intertwined with other subcategories of phenomena that were encountered during Keel's Point Pleasant adventure. This sylistic decision necessitated a temporally scattered book, in the interest of spreading out the aforementioned, varying subject matter.

The less informed typically negatively assess the eyewitness reports given in this book. Yes, it is odd that these alleged extra-dimensional beings possess a mixture sophisticated technology, and patently unsophisticated, contemporary human technology of the time. It isn't right to lambaste Keel or his interviewees over this subject matter of their testimony. The mixture of the low and high tech has been seen in most UFO contact cases of the last 130 years. Ultimately, this supports the theory, unpopular with many of the tinfoil hat wearers who give UFOlogists a bad name, that the UFO phenomena have probably absolutely nothing to do with aliens.

There are many strange features of the varied stories in this book. If you keep an open mind, you may find them just as entertaining as I do!

Compelling and gripping account of paranormal events
Books about the paranormal I never find to be entirely satisfying; you get teased and left to make up your own mind. I get drawn to this kind of material for some reason, always hoping to get some answers, to figure it out, to fit this into my theistic worldview. A year ago I got my first taste of satisfaction, from the book "Lights in the sky and little green men", in which the authors concluded that residual UFO's, the ones that cannot be explained away, are in fact real, but are not physical but spiritual.

John Keel, with The Mothman Prophecies, arrives at a somewhat similar conclusion. He scoffs at the idea that these are visitors from other planets, but is less convinced that they are from the spiritual realm, at least as commonly understood by Christians. His bizarre thirteen month set of experiences centered on Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966-1967, culminating in the tragedy of the bridge collapse, has left him certain of nothing. He does seem to see a continuity between paranormal experiences throughout history and those of today, with poltergeists, demons, Bigfoot, Nessie, UFOs, and Men in Black all falling under the same explanatory umbrella, whatever that may be. Possibly an independent spiritual world exists, or possibly these are psychic imprints and pollution, echoes that play back in certain geographical locations, like a record stuck, playing back the same groove over and over.

You are not going to get closure from this book, but his account is gripping and his speculations are thoughtful and intelligent. To repeat an overused phrase, you are not going to want to put it down.

Fascinating read, but more as evidence of a mindset than of a phenomenon
Having read this book umpteen times when younger, it was very interesting to skim back through it again. Back in print because of the less-than-stellar name-only movie, I was able to get it through my local library.

I grew up with John Keel and his ilk. I hungrily chomped down anything Fortean, anything High Strange. Since this was back when such books were far more scarce than now, I tended to re-read the ones I had and "Prophecies" was one of my favorites.

And TMP is an entertaining read, so chock-full of accounts of extraordinary flying objects, unlikely birds, monsters, poltergeists and Men In Black as to have been the inspiration for the whole run of The X-Files.

Entertaining? Certainly. Serious research material? Another question.

It has been at least 17 years since I last read the book. From that remove, a fresh exposure to it has a different taste. It is now in fact difficult not to view it as a paranoid fantasy.

I have respect for John Keel's aspirations as a researcher. Several of his precepts have worked solidly into my thinking. A phrase early on in the book --

"Paranormal phenomena are so widespread, so
diversified, and so sporadic yet so persistent
that separating and studying any single element
is not only a waste of time but also will
automatically lead to the development of belief."

-- has great resonance for me. I have seen far too many people start down the slippery slope of belief and become unable to climb back up.

And Belief, as Keel famously said, Is The Enemy. To accept a belief is to wear the blinders accompanying that belief, and miss things not associated with it. Beliefs are sticky things, easy to pick up but hard to set down again.

The quote above seems to support a position of investigatorial distancing from the subject, a desirable objectivity. But unfortunately for Keel's credibility he continues with the next sentence:

"Once you have established a belief, the
phenomenon adjusts its manifestations to
support that belief and thereby escalate it."

That is quite a different thing from the objectivity just previously presented! "Get interested in weird stuff," Keel is saying, "and not only will you become sucked in but you will be made an active focus of it."

TMP is full of instances of Keel himself being made the focus of "the phenomenon". Odd people come to town and ask not so much about UFO sightings, but about Keel's activities and interactions with his associates. His car is broken into and notes taken, his mail is tampered with; someone seems to be tapping his phone. On face value, the classic claims of a paranoid, only in this case it is not The Government which is doing it but Someone Else, the Agents of The Phenomenon.

Even the title smacks of delusions of grandeur: where there are "prophecies", there must be a "prophet", and the attentions Keel say were paid to him would prove him to be such an important personage.

A simultaneous problem and attraction of TMP is the wealth of anomalous reports with which Keel supplies us. In Keel's universe anomalous events are happening so continuously as to make those who are not witnesses feel inadequate. In the quote above he calls paranormal phenomena "sporadic" but you wouldn't know it from this book - unusual events are so constant as to not be unusual. Just as pornography may have the effect of leading you to believe that everyone else on the planet is having more and more-varied sex than you, so does "The Mothman Prophecies" make one feel unstudly for not having extraordinary paranormal experiences nightly.

"The Mothman Prophecies" is a landmark book in many ways. It helped to associate in the public's mind UFO reports with other paranormal activities such as monsters and poltergeists. (Just as Jacques Vallee's "Passport to Magonia" associated UFOs and fairy belief, in a more scholarly way.) TMP helped to standardize the image of the Men In Black, with results familiar to any moviegoer or X-Files fan. It gave us The Mothman, a critter right out of nightmare, resurrected by the movie to the degree that Mothman reports are now retroactively presented after major disasters.

But upon re-visiting this book, I have to feel that it is has less value as a representation of the events of the day, and more value as a record of one man's fascination with, and descent into, a particular form of belief. All the more ironic since Keel warns us against that belief even as he embraces it.