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 TEN
** = More on this subject later.
Page 122: James Moseley: A fellow who's had his finger on the pulse of Ufology (and "Ufoology", as he calls it) for over half a century. In his memoirs, Shockingly Close to the Truth, he admits to many a hoax, but even he concedes there is a residue of the truly unknown in UFO lore. Saucer News may be gone, but his Saucer Smear is still going.
Gray Barker claimed to have questioned Keel straight out on his "mysterious knowledge": "Jim and I had a long talk about you. He had one impression about you which I also get. I somehow feel you have theories or some information you're holding out on all of us." There follows a fairly accurate outline of Keel's Ultraterrestrial hypothesis (in The Silver Bridge, p. 73).
Page 125: Baby crying: **
Checkered shirt/grinning man: **
Hypnopompic (and hypnogogic) states: **
P. 126+ : Keel did spend a lot of time with Mary Hyre during this period. No wonder there were rumors. "John Klein's" unfortunate wife is named Mary in the Mothman Prophecies movie.
P. 127: UFO disguised as airplane: Seems like this tactic would be a way to fool all those silly earth-people, but these objects frequently do something odd to give themselves away. Mysterious (usually black) helicopters are now a solid part of the "cattle mutilation" mythos.
P. 128: An article by Keel in Saga's UFO Report, "Mysterious Voices from Outer Space," expands on the fireball-hitting-the-transmitter incident and other occurrences mentioned in this chapter.
P. 129: Radio static: "He tried switching to several of the 26 available channels but none of them were working. (Later I learned that police and CB radios all up and down the Ohio valley were equally useless that same night.)" ("Mysterious Voices," p. 37.)
P. 130: Purple Blobs: An interesting new phenomenon or creature, assuming they weren't afterimages of some kind. They would be easily overlooked by most people at night, however . . .
In Operation Trojan Horse (pp. 60-61) we are told that "purple blobs" were reported often in the early days of the flying saucer era (seen, for instance, in Seattle, Washington, on June 24, 1947 -- the date of Kenneth Arnold's seminal saucer sighting). Unfortunately, no sources are given.
Also this night (in 1967, not 1947) Keel and Officer Harmon "visited a prominent resident of Pt. Pleasant at her home in Gallipolis Ferry, and we found her outside watching mysterious lights bobbing around the sky near a large factory which manufactures fuel for jet planes." ("Mysterious Voices," p. 37.)
P. 132: Thing in the gully: Keel is quite candid in the Saga article: "That's right, folks. The fearless world traveler and UFO chaser was scared out of his wits!" (Ibid.)
P. 133: This is one of the strangest statements in Mothman Prophecies, that the more-or-less full moon rose one night, failed to appear at all the next (despite the sky being cloudless), then rose as usual the third night. Since Keel mentions lacunal amnesia several times subsequently, perhaps he suffered from "specific forgetting" himself and just didn't enter the moonrise into his memory. Or, taking note of the date, maybe this is an "April Fool" from him. The "Mysterious Voices" article does not mention the missing moon.
P. 134: False stars: another good way for UFOs to camouflage themselves -- but why did they want to hang stark-still over these particular hills for nights on end?
P. 135: Lacunal amnesia: If you lose your memory of certain moments or events these days, more than likely people will conclude you've been abducted and subjected to alien anal probes and whatnot. But here we see the phenomenon occurring to a woman at home with her family.
P. 136: Mrs. Bryant: Her close encounter seems to have happened on the same day as Woodrow Derenberger's, one reason Keel might have taken Derenberger seriously.
P. 138: Mrs. Bryant is unique to my knowledge in catching her cattle mutilators "red-handed" more than once. Most "mutes" are simply discovered after the fact.
Barker, Gray. Silver Bridge (Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1970).
Keel, John A. "Mysterious Voices from Outer Space." Saga's UFO Report (Vol. 2, No. 5, Winter 1975), pp. 36-38, 74-76.
--. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1970).
--. Strange Creatures from Time and Space (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1970).
Moseley, James W., and Karl T. Pflock. Shockingly Close to the Truth!: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002).
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