In November 1966 four young people
in Point Pleasant,
West Virginia, reported a chilling encounter
with a seven-foot-tall monster with glowing red
eyes and a ten-foot wingspan. The press labeled
it Mothman, and during the next year more than
100 West Virginians would see it. If it had been
just another ten-foot-tall hairy monster I would
have ignored the report. After all, Bigfoot
sightings were superabundant. But the West
Virginia critter had wings, could take off
straight up like a helicopter, and was fond of
pursuing automobiles at 90 miles an hour. In
short, he was my kind of weirdie.
I found Point
Pleasant was a quiet little town of 6,300
people, dozens of churches and no public bars.
The Mothman sightings had taken place in a
desolate World War II ammunition dump on the
edge of town. More intriguing, there had been
countless UFO sightings up and down the Ohio
River all year. Eerie diamond-brilliant lights
passed over Point Pleasant every night at 8:30
on a regular schedule. I decided to do something
that the Air Force and the loud-mouthed UFO
buffs had never thought of doing. I decided to
investigate the situation instead of just
holding conversations with the witnesses.
Within a few days a
much bigger picture began to evolve. The region
was not only haunted by strange aerial lights,
the homes of the witnesses were plagued with
poltergeists and other supernatural phenomena.
Television sets were burning out at an alarming
rate. Telephones were going crazy, ringing at
all hours of the day and night with no one on
the other end. Some people were getting calls
from mysterious strangers speaking a cryptic
language. Black Cadillacs bearing
Oriental-looking gentlemen were cruising the
black hills of West Virginia.
Mothman assumed
minor importance as I uncovered all these other
things. I had been investigating psychic
manifestations all over the world for years and
I recognized the pattern here. Some UFOs were
directly related to the human consciousness,
just as ghostly apparitions are often the
product of the percipient’s mind. There are
deeply rooted psychic and psychological factors
in the UFO phenomenon, and the sudden appearance
of a light in the sky triggers and releases the
human energy that stimulated seemingly
supernatural events. We cannot define the exact
nature of those lights, but we can catalog the
many manifestations that accompany them and we
can demonstrate how identical manifestations
occur in many different frames of reference.
Religious apparitions are kissin’ kin with the
tall, stately Michael Rennie types that claim to
come from Ganymede, Uranus, Clarion (an unknown
planet on the other side of the sun) and a dozen
other absurd places. The “miracle” at Fatima,
Portugal, in 1917 was undoubtedly the
best-documented UFO sighting of all time (70,000
witnesses) and certainly the most thoroughly
investigated.
Unfortunately,
those interested in flying saucers had no
interest at all in psychic phenomena, and vice
versa. Those who were busy trying to trap a
Bigfoot frowned upon all other forms of the
weird and supernatural. Yet sea serpents,
Abominable Snowpersons, poltergeists, frog
rainfalls, and UFOs are all interrelated. You
can’t possibly investigate one without some
knowledge of the others. For example, the Men in
Black (MIBs) so well known in UFO lore are even
better known in the histories of witchcraft and
black magic. These mysterious gentlemen have
been reported for a thousand years. The UFO
buffs decided they were CIA agents. But another
group known as superbuffs thinks the whole world
is run by a secret league of wealthy men and
that the MIBs are their minions. In the Far
East, where belief in a “king of the world”
still rides high, people think the MIBs are
agents from the secret underground cities of the
king. In West Virginia the MIBs passed
themselves off as everything from Bible salesmen
to census takers.
When I returned to
New York City from that first trip to West
Virginia my own telephone went berserk. At first
I only had problems when I was speaking to Ivan
Sanderson in New Jersey. He was on one of those
freak pseudo-independent phone company lines and
it was common to be drowned out by static, or
have the call suddenly cut off. Ivan solved the
problem by shouting obscenities into the phone.
Strangely, it worked. It was not uncommon to be
having a conversation with this dignified Briton
when clicks and other noises would cause him to
pause and then bellow, “Get off this line, you
god******* son of a b****!” The line noises
would cease abruptly.
My problems soon
escalated. Someone would interrupt my
conversations with a sound like a one-stringed
guitar. The sound of an extension being picked
up could be clearly heard. The telephone company
ignored my complaints, naturally, until I wrote
directly to the president of the company. Then
fur flew. They checked out my line and happily
reported that I did not have one tap on my
wire—I had two! ......
"When I
first visited Point Pleasant in the
1960s and talked to scores of witnesses,
I was convinced I was on the track of a
very big bird of spectacular size.
I have no idea what I would have done if
I caught it ... or it had caught me.
In later misadventures, I had
experiences with numerous demonic forces
and in my dotage I am very aware that
our entire planet is occupied by things
we see only by accident."