The page numbers below refer to the 2001 TOR Books reprinting of Mothman Prophecies by John Alva Keel, the version most easily obtainable by the general public.
CHAPTER ONE
Page 1: The "Beezlebub" scene was more-or-less recreated in the film Mothman Prophecies. Rather than coming this late in the "Year of the Garuda," it became Richard Gere's character's introduction to Point Pleasant.
Page 3: Long hair = superintellectual. I can just hear Foghorn Leghorn: "Hey, boy! Put down that long-hair book!" By coincidence, the present writer recently flipped through a book written in the 1850s that made light of a meeting of Spiritualists, who were constantly referred to as "a bunch of long-hairs," indicating the phrase is at least a century and a half old. Nowadays, of course, one would think hippies.
Page 5: "I have shelved maybe fifty others. . ." Considering how many people he interviewed and weird events he reported in his articles and books, Keel's total case load must have been staggering.
Coincidences: Charles Fort was leery of them: "In the explanation of coincidence there is much of laziness, and helplessness, and response to an instinctive fear that a scientific dogma will be endangered." Also: "By a coincidence is meant a false appearance, or suggestion, of relations among circumstances. But anybody who accepts that there is an underlying oneness of all things, accepts that there are no utter absences of relations among circumstances --" Wild Talents, Chapter Two.
". . . irritatingly complex medical and psychological theories. . ." An indication that Keel is promoting what is known as the Psychosocial Theory here rather than the Ultraterrestrial or Extradimensional theories.
Hans Holzer: I'd like to read Holzer's version as soon as I figure out which house in Greenwich Village this is. Apparently there are several haunted ones.
Page 6: Mental telepathy: Other writers have made sweeping statements like this. I'm sure there has been evidence enough to convince many researchers that psi phenomena are real, but obviously, such powers are not accepted by the scientific establishment.
Tulpas: The most famous tulpa story comes from Alexandra David-Neel's Magic and Mystery in Tibet, which has been reprinted by Penguin and Dover Books in recent years. A lama of eastern Tibet told Ms. David-Neel: "Visualizing mental formations, either voluntarily or not, is a most mysterious process. What becomes of these creations? May it not be that like children born of our flesh, these children of our mind separate their lives from ours, escape our control, and play parts of their own?" (pp. 147-8 of the Penguin edition) The idea of a tulpa Shadow on the loose is certainly intriguing.
Page 7: Archeological sites: For revisionist or Fortean speculations in archeology, one might study the Sourcebook Project volumes compiled by William Corliss, like Ancient Man and Strange Artifacts. Also, Charles Hapgood's Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966) is one of the only "Atlantis/Lost Continent/Lost Civilization" books I ever found convincing.
Elephant Mound (and other elephant artifacts): See The Lenape Stone.
Page 8: Von Daniken: After a meteoric rise to fame in the 60s and 70s, Von Daniken's books have almost faded from view. While I see no reason why extraterrestrials could not have influenced earthly cultures in ancient times, Von Daniken's "evidence" has proven very dubious. Evidence such as "an 'eyewitness account of a space trip' supposedly contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh that, upon reading the entire Gilgamesh epic, one does not find!" (Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, Ronald D. Story, p. 58) See also The Space-Gods Revealed (1976) by Story, and "The Outer Space Confusion" in Francis Hitching's The Mysterious World (1978).
Ancient UFOs: Ronald Story (Encyclopedia) writes: "On the walls of the famous Les Eyzies, Lascaux, and Altamira caves in France and Spain are found renderings of objects that clearly resemble modern descriptions (and photographs) of disc-shaped UFOs. Just what the Magdalenian artists were attempting to portray -- 15,000 to 30,000 years ago -- may never be known." (pp. 58-59)
Keel's Operation Trojan Horse contains many references to UFO-like phenomena in the Bible. The Book of Zechariah describes that prophet's encounter with non-human entities that can pass for humans, what Keel would call "ultraterrestrials":
Zechariah 1:8. I saw by night, and behold a man riding upon a red horse, and he stood among the myrtle trees that were in the bottom; and behind him there were red horses, speckled and white.
9. Then I said, O my Lord, what are these? And the angel that talked with me said unto me, I will shew thee what these be.
10. And the man that stood among the myrtle trees answered and said, These are they whom the Lord hath sent to walk to and fro through the earth.
11. And they answered the angel of the Lord that stood among the myrtle trees, and said, We have walked to and fro through the earth, and, behold, all the earth sitteth still, and is at rest.
Other Intelligences (OINTs): Ivan Sanderson attempts to define "other intelligences" in Chapter 14 of Invisible Residents (1970), "Who and Where are the OINTs?" His introduction to the book seems more succinct: "whether the 'invisible residents' are truly residents or just visitors, we don't know, but after considering the evidence, I am afraid I have to say I think they are here."
Page 9: "They are not from outer space. There is no need for them to be." Keel says in Operation Trojan Horse (p. 127):
. . . we have thousands upon thousands of UFO sightings which force two unacceptable answers upon us:
1. All the witnesses were mistaken or lying.
2. Some tremendous unknown civilization is exerting an all-out effort to manufacture thousands of different types of UFOs and is sending all of them to our planet.
The governments of the world have seized upon variations of the first explanation. The UFO enthusiasts accept the second.
I do not accept either one.
Keel's alternative is known as the Ultraterrestrial Theory; more on that and yet further alternatives later.
CHAPTER TWO
Page 13: "Gray Barker of Clarksburg." This name will pop up frequently later, not always under the best of circumstances.
Page 14: Rockland, Texas Airship. "1897, April 22/[witnessed by] John M. Barclay/ Houston Post, 25 Apr. 1897, p. 13," according to the Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies. Oddly, Cohen's book (below) mentions Barclay in the index, but I could not find him in the text.
Michael Busby, in his book Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery, reprints the entire article from the Houston Post. The original article, oddly gives the witness' name as "John Smith," possibly to protect his privacy (which indicates Barclay was a real person, not a fictional character in a hoax). This could have led to a bit of confusion, since the "inventor" calls himself Smith. That name excites author Busby, however. His theory was that there really were secret inventors in the 1890s who actually built working Airships, one of whom was a Dr. C. A. Smith, who gave an interview to a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle (November 11, 1896):
"A horizontal rudder of sufficient dimensions will steer the ship up or down, and a vertical rudder will steer it to right or left. Both will be on the stern. The wings will extend the full length of the cylinder and in flight will be used as aeroplanes, like the wings of the larger birds."
Busby has identified "Smith" with a man named "Dr. Catlin" from another interview. Busby's book is impressive; he went to the trouble of taking every Texas airship report, plotting the time, date, place, and direction of travel, and re-creating their flight patterns -- patterns that simply wouldn't exist in a series of fake news stories.
Page 15: Aurora Airship. Daniel Cohen devotes a chapter to this affair in his Great Airship Mystery (1981).
Page 16: Eddie Webb: His nasty close encounter was sent across the country by UPI on October 5, 1973. The news story is reprinted whole in Beyond Earth: Man's Contact with UFOs (1974) by Ralph and Judy Blum.
Page 18: ". . . stranger in a strange land." You have to wonder: Did this guy pay his bill? Did he have to wash dishes?
Page 19: "Richard French" is expanded upon in Operation Trojan Horse, Chapter Ten. In November of 1966 Mrs. Butler and a friend were out in a field watching a phenomenon they had dubbed "little flashers," dancing, blinking lights that had been appearing nearly every evening. This night one of the lights dropped near to the ground at the other end of the field:
One of the women let out a little gasp and crumpled to her knees in a trancelike daze. Her friend, Mrs. Ralph Butler, reached for her, but she was immobile, her head dipped down. A strange voice, stilted and metallic, came spasmodically from her lips.
"What . . . is . . . your . . . time . . . cycle?" the voice asked. Mrs. Butler recovered from her surprise and tried to explain how we measured minutes, hours, and days. "What . . . constitutes . . . a . . . day . . . and . . . what . . . constitutes . . . a . . . night?" the voice continued.
"A day is approximately twelve hours long -- and a night is twelve hours long," Mrs. Butler replied. There were a few more innocuous questions, and then the other woman came out of her trance.
The object flew off. Mrs. Butler wrote to Keel, who interviewed her over the phone. She mentioned strange voices coming over her CB radio, and she was the one to bring up the subject of peculiar visitors, including Major French in May 1967:
This man was nattily dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, and black tie. "Everything he was wearing was brand-new," she observed. He drove a white mustang, and her husband copied down the license number and had it checked out later. It proved to be a rented car from Minneapolis.
"He said his stomach was bothering him," she noted. "I told him that what he needed was some Jello. He said if it kept bothering him, he would come back for some."
The next morning French returned. He still complained about his stomach, so there followed the infamous Jell-O-drinking bit. "Richard French" visited some friends of the Butlers in Forest City, Iowa, but afterwards vanished forever. Keel has made much of the fact that a genuine Richard French was serving in the Air Force in Minnesota at the time. Jenny Randles writes: "There was also a Richard French in the USAF but he denied 'pestering' the Butlers and the USAF proved his case by showing French's identification. The real Richard French bore no resemblance to the man who called at their home." (Truth Behind Men in Black, p. 99)
Page 20: UFO pilots: The odd-but-still-passable-as-human UFOnauts of the early days of ufology have been superceded by "Grays". There are lesser known types reported, like "Reptoids" and "Nordics", but the Grays hold the majority. This may be partially due to sociological factors. Nearly all popular portraits of extraterrestrials look like Grays, and an old comic book I own (UFO Flying Saucers), which depicts the "Kelly-Hopkinsville" incident and the "Bellicose Dwarves" of South America, makes the entities involved look very Gray-like.
Page 23: Lieutenant Colonel Maston M. Jacks appears in John G. Fuller's Incident at Exeter. Fuller met Jacks in January 1966 at the Pentagon:
Colonel Jacks was congenial but not very communicative. He restated the Air Force policy routinely, tapping a pack of Belair cigarettes on his desk and looking nonmilitary in a brown civilian suit.
"We don't attack people who say they saw these things," he said. "We don't really question what a person thinks he saw. We don't quarrel with it. We issue our reports resulting from our investigations, and our conclusions are that UFOs are no threat to national security, and that they are nothing advanced beyond known phenomena. If there's anything to it beyond that, I'd like to be among the first to know."
I asked him if he would like to review the tape recordings of the people I had interviewed in the Exeter area, but he wasn't interested. "I told a neighbor of mine, someone who is supposed to have seen one of these things," he said. "And I said: 'If you want to believe in UFOs, have fun. Enjoy it. God bless you.'" (pp. 215-216)
Busby, Michael. Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co, 2004).
Cohen, Daniel. Great Airship Mystery (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1981).
David-Neel, Alexandria. Magic and Mystery in Tibet (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1978 [1929]).
Eberhart, George M. Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980).
Fort, Charles H. Complete Books of Charles Fort (New York, NY: Dover Books, 1974 [1941]).
Fuller, John G. Incident at Exeter (New York: Berkeley Medallion Books, 1968 [1965]).
Keel, John A. Mothman Prophecies (New York, NY: TOR, 2001 [1975]).
Ibid. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (New York, NY: G. P. Putman's Sons, 1970).
Randles, Jenny. Truth Behind Men in Black (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997).
Sanderson, Ivan T. Invisible Residents (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970).
Story, Ronald D, editor. Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters (New York: New American Library, 2001).