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The Mothman Prophecies

The Mothman Prophecies
By John A. Keel

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Product Description

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...

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #60383 in Books
  • Published on: 2002-02-18
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Mass Market Paperback
  • 288 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

Review
'A bestseller in America... an account of strange happenings... a dark terror inspired by unearthly noises and mysterious lights overhead. You'll believe it.' -- Peterborough Evening Telegraph 20020309 A 'supernatural suspense yarn that builds the tension without going into shock-horror' mode. -- Candis 20020204 'written by an investigator of the paranormal... this is a fascinating book' -- Huddersfield Daily Examiner 20020316 'Keel's meticulous research,wry style and humour make this one a delight.Authentically creeepy.' -- dreamberry 20020501

About the Author
John A. Keel is a noted Fortean investigator. He spent a year in Point Pleasant where he saw and experienced many of the strange manifestations personally.

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

The book is as mysterious as the Mothman4
John A. Keel's The Mothman Prophecies, as a book, is just as intriguing and mysterious as the topics he is writing about. In a nutshell, the book reads as if Keel kept a loose-leaf journal about paranormal events, both reported to and experienced by him, over the course of many years, then decided to throw all of the individual pages in the air, let them land as they might, stuck a couple hundred of them in a notebook and sent them off to his publisher. There is no novel-like narrative in The Mothman Prophecies, and it's not in chronological order-instead it choppily bounces back and forth and for its entire length.

The funny thing is that it works for the most part. I'm hesitant to say that the atemporally schizophrenic nature of the journal entries was an intentional, clever move on Keel's part, but it just may have been. The net effect is to mirror the inexplicability, seeming pointlessness, and skewered nature of the phenomena that Keel is talking about, but unfortunately, sometimes the attention-deficit-disorder-ladenness of the book is just aggravating. The primary thing to remember, if the book sounds interesting enough to you to tackle it (not that it's longer than your average pulp novel), is not to expect anything like a normal plot. There's an endless parade of names and events, many of which are only mentioned in one section, and it takes awhile to stop thinking that you're going to have to remember them to understand the story later. There really is no story. But once you stop waiting for a story to begin, The Mothman Prophecies should be more enjoyable to you.

There are plenty of reasons you might be interested in this book. Of course, there's the surface topic-a series of paranormal events ranging from UFO's to flying "birdmen" (the Mothman) to misbehaving telephones. If you're at all a student of the paranormal, you'll want to read this. Or, you probably already have. For me, I was initially intrigued by the film and the claim that it was based on true events (although publisher Tor calls it fiction on the copyright/catalog data page). But once I started reading, I quickly forgot about the film and instead was fascinated with the realization that The Mothman Prophecies must have been one of Chris Carter's primary sources for various plots of The X-Files.

If you're an X-Files fan, The Mothman Prophecies will tie the show together for you in an unprecedented way. After you read this book, the "mytharc" shows (all the alien conspiracy stuff) will no longer seem disconnected from the monster shows. And you'll frequently find yourself reminded of specific episodes correlated to specific journal entries in the book.

Undoubtedly, you'll find yourself wondering at some point how much of The Mothman Prophecies is fact and how much is fiction. Tor calling the book "fiction" doesn't help towards taking it too seriously, and neither does Keel's frequent references to UFO-monger Gray Barker, who was exposed as making up at least some of the things he wrote about--see, for instance, John C. Sherwood's May/June 1998 article in Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Joe Nickell has also prepared a "debunking" of the Mothman for Skeptical Inquirer's March/April 2002 issue. I'm nothing if not a skeptic, but Nickell doesn't actually debunk much. He suggests that Mothman sightings were actually sightings of owls, and that's about all there is to his article. Keel's book, and the film that prompted Nickell's article, is about much more than can be explained by sighting an owl and mistaking it for something else.

From my standpoint as a philosopher, there's something even more interesting about Keel's book. It's a wonderful example of instrumentalism. Instrumentalism, briefly, is the idea that theories about phenomena, insofar as they depart from simply recounting the phenomena in a dry manner, are interchangeable. That is, there are a multitude of possible theories for the metaphysics "behind" any observed event, and even allowing Occam's Razor (which is just a convention, not a fact, so we need not allow it-it could be misleading), any of them that accounts for the observed event is just as good as any other.

Of course Keel sometimes leads us on by simple juxtaposition of easily explainable events-even going so far as implying that there could have been something paranormal about the missing minutes on the Watergate tapes-and he could be making up a sizable percentage of the anecdotes to entertain us, but that's ultimately why you should read this book anyway-for entertainment. It's also, even if fiction, a fascinating psychological artifact, and even as fiction with plenty of structural quirks, an entertaining read.

Fascinating true account of the paranormal5
I have read over 200 books on UFOs and for many reasons, this is my favorite. Keel is an honest investigator who was fortunate to be involved in the strange, spooky events he writes about. Taken along with his first book, Operation Trojan Horse, this slim volume says more about the true nature of the UFO phenomenon than almost any other book written since. I was initially doubtful of the validity of Keel's claims, as some other reviewers are. However, I had the luck of meeting a man mentioned in the book who accompanied Keel on his investigations. This person, whom I trust and sincerely believe to be honest, flatly stated that everything in the book was true, that he had been there, spoke to the witnesses, and eventually became involved in the phenomena, as did Keel. The fact is, these things happened. In fact, Keel left some of the strangest evidence out of the book. Mothman Prophecies is a fascinating true story, and I recommend it to anyone who has a real desire to know the truth about UFOs and the paranormal.

The movie and the book are not the same thing!4
I just had to clarify the fact that the movie is "based" on the events that are recorded in Keel's book. The book is by far and away better than the movie. First off the book takes place in 1967/68 not the present. Besides giving you a look into all the paranormal phenomenon floating around Point Pleasant at the time it also gives you a look into the attitude and fear the people of the small town were feeling at the time.
There are stories of aliens, strange lights, men in black, mysterious phone calls and of course the mothman. The name is misleading as he does not resemble a moth at all (in fact the name came from a reporter making a reference to a Batman villian). But to anyone interested in cryptozoology he is a beast that is worth looking into.
True the book is a little egotistical as John Keel makes himself out to be a superhero at times but I genuinely enjoy his take on the situations. His writing style is a little choppy and sometimes jumps into other accounts of unexplained events but it is easy to get through.
As this is really the only book that centers on the Mothman and the events in Point Pleasant it is definately reccommended reading for paranormal fans. There is even a section on Indrid Cold (another being worth looking into for the interesting and sometimes ridiculous story).
Just please don't slight this chilling tale because of the terrible movie apparently made from the book's cliff notes.