The Mothman Prophecies

by John A. Keel

Paperback, 1991

Status

Available

Call number

001.942

Genres

General Nonfiction

Collection

Anomaly Archives

Publication

Illuminet Pr (1991), Edition: 3rd Revised edition, 275 pages

Description

"West Virginia, 1966. For thirteen months the town of Point Pleasant is gripped by a real-life nightmare culminating 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. Translated into over thirteen languages, John Keel's unsettling true story of the paranormal has long been regarded as a classic in the literature of the unexplained."--

User reviews

LibraryThing member stephmo

John Keel follows that rather dangerous path of conspiracy theorists - calling out and explaining the shenanigans and trickery of the fakers, explaining the logical explanation behind things incorrectly attributed to paranormal activity and even a few self-deprecating stories involving himself all

designed to explain why he MUST be telling you the truth about the theories he's about to explain. Of course, it doesn't help that establishing all that doubt upfront taints everything he says.

One has to give Keel credit. When he tells his story, he is convinced of his facts. At one point, he claims that American Indians refused to inhabit West Virginia and that a map he used identified West Virginia as "uninhabited." Yet West Virginia shows as being formally inhabited by the Shawnee, Cherokee, Tutelo and Saponi tribes with tribe descendants being relocated to Kansas and Oklahoma to reservations during the Indian removals of the 1800s. See how easy it is to twist history to fit your conspiracy? This is what the whole book feels like - Keel debunks other's facts and then clings to his own. He admits that his witnesses are unreliable, but wants to show that this is why they must be telling the truth. It's a confusing non-logic square wheel of truth or something...

It's a compelling myth that appeals to a lot of people - after all, we wouldn't have all of these shows on cable television devoted to the hunting of monsters, ghosts, aliens and the uncovering of conspiracies if it wasn't, would we? But I guess I'm just wondering when all the technology we have and all the individuals willing to be open to this thing - even Stephen Hawking is open to alien life! - why we're still stuck in the world of the fringe, the vague, the blurry and having to look at things in some sort of 3D-hidden-picture filter to get at the truth? After 40 years, shouldn't John Keel's Mothman epilogue had been about more than getting a movie made?

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LibraryThing member badgenome

A bunch of incomprehensible crap that's mindbendingly weird enough to be somewhat amusing. Keel is a nut.

LibraryThing member Ragnell

This is a fun book. It starts out as a semiskeptical report of UFO sightings and progresses into a paranoid breakdown. We follow the account of a guy smart enough to notice that UFO sightings bear a striking resemblance to fairy and demon stories from the past, and conclude that someone somewhere

is messing with the human race. Whether you believe or not, it's certainly fun to follow.

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LibraryThing member trivigo

This is a mixed bag, in terms of its reading value. Keel calls himself a Fortean writer and one can see that in this book. Forteanism purports to be anti-theory. It presents itself as an even more objective account of facts than Big Science, and certainly more so than the various competing

paranormalist factions. The basic worldview, to degree that it owns up to one, is that the world is a strange place that, for some reason, is populated both by all the “normal” stuff we experience, but also by UFOs, monsters, psychic phenomena, etc. etc.

Thing is, I found Keel to be all-too-willing to conclude something like “this person’s report illustrates the existence of another oddball entity or phenomena.” Nearly everyone's dotty beliefs and "unexplained" experiences are taken at face value, with little attempt to think about them critically. There’s objectivity and then there’s naiveté. Or, then again, perhaps one could see a willingness to posit monsters as having less innocent origins, there being the temptation of filthy lucre and all...

The positive side of it involves the horror movie value of it all. I still consider Strieber’s "Communion" to be the masterstroke of a horror writer, with its claims to nonfictionhood. With "Mothman," too, I found myself looking at the sky more often, peering at shadows more closely in the middle of the night, and so on. A nice helping of creep-out value, here. Plus, it helped me come up with an idea for a novel, so it will always have THAT going for it.

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LibraryThing member Crowyhead

Oh wow. Um, yeah. So, this book starts out pretty well; it's about a series of sightings in and around Point Pleasant, WV of "The Mothman," a strange creature with a manlike body, enormous glowing red eyes, and wings. I find this kind of thing fascinating in a folklore/sociological kind of way, so

I like to read about such sightings. Like I said, this starts out pretty well. Keel is a witty storyteller and draws a lot of interesting parallels between the Mothman and other sightings throughout history of giant birds, dragons, etc. Then things start to get really weird. Keel believes that all of these sightings (Bigfoot, UFOs, sea monsters) are connected -- they're actually beings from another dimension that are intruding onto ours. Okayyyy... Believe it or not, this is not where I really started to lose track of him. It was when he starts in about how the alien creatures from another dimension are toying with him, tapping his phone, impersonating him in the field, and so on that I really just lost patience. The writing gets worse and more confusing and convoluted, and Keel basically comes off like a paranoid schizophrenic. I really wanted to know if there was any truth to his claims about all the weird things happening to him, but there's really no way of knowing.

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LibraryThing member NocturnalLibrarian

A true disapointment. Rather than creating an engaging study of the paranormal and prohpetic omens, Keel drags his audience through a laundry list of alien and U.F.O sitings. A good book if you are interested in U.F.O.s, but not if you expect to gain in depth information on the topic the author

promises you.

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LibraryThing member 912greens

A strong beginning narrative of mystery, eerie coincidences and frightening phenomena soon implodes into a morass of confusing, unrelated theories and strange sightings- chaotic and incoherent drivel. It's possible I just didn't get it, but I think I can recognize nonsensical jibber-jabber when I

see it.

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LibraryThing member hwphoto

I truly couldn't wait for this book to be over. The beginning starts out ok, but there is a lot of jumping back & forth. One minute he's describing something that happened in 1967, then something in 1973, then back to 1967. It's hard to keep it all straight. Based on the description on the back of

the book you think you will be reading about events that happened in a single town during a ceratin time. You do, but with a lot of extra babbling thrown in. Not at all what I expected.

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LibraryThing member krysteria

I thought this book was going to be like the movie, all about the Mothman sightings in Point Pleasant, WV before the Silver Bridge collapse in the 60s. Only a very small fraction of the book was actually about the Mothman, and only about two pages at the very end were about the Silver Bridge

collapse.

Instead the whole book is about John Keel's theory for most major worldwide mysteries. He basically thinks all worldwide mysteries can be attributed to one thing. Meaning, all these things we think are separate mysteries, are not really. Mothman, UFO sightings, Bigfoot, ghosts, monsters, angels, the Virgin Mary sightings, Bermuda Triangle, crop circles, etc. He attributes them all to innerspace, really, hypnotism and hallucination. It's an interesting theory. It does make sense, but I'm not sure I can completely get my mind around it. It's just a huge concept!

The book gets a 5 for not being about what I wanted it to be about. It gets a 6 for introducing an interesting new theory.

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LibraryThing member boris_balkan

When writing the Mothman prophecies, John Keel was definitely scared and he handled the fear with anger and contempt for the 'enemy'. This contempt colors the text with an arrogance toward all who are against him - including various UFO investigators. Some readers will find this provoking - I found

it refreshing and understandable as I devoured this creepy, entertaining and very interesting book. Let us look at these two aspects of this story:

Entertainment

The Mothman Prophecies is excellent thrilling entertainment. I found the movie (2002) scarier than the book, but it's still creepy enough, and it's slowly dragging you into a world where consensus reality is gradually replaced by a grim place where we all can become victims to the forces who act behind the guise of the UFO phenomena (according to Keels hypothesis) and be dragged into a nightmare world. The story covers the thirteen months (1966-67) of UFO activity and monster sightings (mainly the Mothman) leading up to the collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant. Keel investigates the UFOs and the Mothman and his only weapons are his intelligence and sarcasm. As he reports the weird events he connects them to similar weirdness in ancient as well as then recent history. Keel builds an hypothesis of what's really going on while giving you even more paranormal events to process. Depending on how sensitive you are, this book could make it a bit hard to fall asleep.

Keel's hypothesis

The world seems to be a place not so far from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos universe. It's a cold and uncaring universe, but instead of the menace of the Great Old Ones, mankind has been harassed since its beginnings by a malevolent force that has in different guises toyed with humanity. The guise seems to be determined by the age and culture the human interacting with these forces belong to. Once they were little people or dragons, since the late 1940s they have appeared as UFOs, aliens, and of course the Mothman. More specifically, Keel labels the winged creatures 'the Garudas' (after Hindu legends I believe) and tells us they're associated with 'luminous phenomena'. He also connects them and the other manifestations to occult phenomena.

Other interesting findings are Keel's observation (based on UFO reports) that you're likelier to see a UFO on an Wednesday at 10 P.M. Alarmingly, children between ages of seven to eighteen are likelier to witness paranormal activity and that the events are often concentrated around schools. Also a majority of those who find their car chased by UFOs or winged horrors are said to be schoolteachers. Especially dangerous is being a teacher of abnormal children - bright or mentally deficient. One can only speculate what the reason for this could be.

It's refreshing that Keel is convinced that USAF and other government agencies are not guilty of being in an unholy alliance with the UFO-entities, nor are their agents the creepy Men in Black (term coined by Keel). The government seems as confused as the rest of the investigators.

I recommend the Mothman Prophecies to all readers who are interested in the UFO phenomena, the paranormal in general, or just want to to read an entertaining creepy story. It's a quick read if you like the subject, but as said before, beware if you're the sensitive type. This stuff gets under your skin to an extent.

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LibraryThing member jcozart

Great book! Gives needed information about these encounters in West Virginia. A recommended read for anyone interested in Cryptids.

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