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    The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story
    The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story
    The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story
    Ebook309 pages5 hours

    The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story

    By John A. Keel

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Translated into over thirteen languages, John Keel's The Mothman Prophecy is an unsettling true story of the paranormal that has long been regarded as a classic in the literature of the unexplained.

    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.

    The Mothman Prophecy is the basis of the 2002 film starring Richard Gere.

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateFeb 18, 2002
    ISBN9781466834835
    The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story
    Author

    John A. Keel

    JOHN A. KEEL was a prominent journalist and UFOlogist, credited with coining the term "Men in Black." He was the author of The Mothman Prophecies. He died in 2009.

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    Reviews for The Mothman Prophecies

    3.5/5

    27 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      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:EntertainmentThe 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 hypothesisThe 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.
    • 5/5
      Great book! Gives needed information about these encounters in West Virginia. A recommended read for anyone interested in Cryptids.
    • 3/5
      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?
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      A bunch of incomprehensible crap that's mindbendingly weird enough to be somewhat amusing. Keel is a nut.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      Great storytelling but it takes a long time for accounts of Mothman to even come up a couple times. He also makes some VERY big claims about the nature of these sightings - which, mind you, I found perfectly plausible - but the confidence with which he expressed his claims would have been more warranted if he’d fully fleshed out his justifications and explored the common skeptical arguments that would come up.
    • 3/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    The Mothman Prophecies - John A. Keel

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