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The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel
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The Mothman Prophecies (original 1975; edition 2002)

by John A. Keel (Author)

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8622224,857 (3.39)21
"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."--… (more)
Member:marcusstafford
Title:The Mothman Prophecies
Authors:John A. Keel (Author)
Info:Hodder Paperback (2002), Edition: New Ed, 352 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:
Tags:fortean, cryptozoology, non-fiction, mothman

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The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel (1975)

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» See also 21 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 22 (next | show all)
uh...this is a ridiculous bunch of tripe. i have no idea why this even came to be on my to-be-read list, but i suspect that if i wasn't listening to it, it would have been the first book i ever stopped reading. (listening was more passive and i sped it up so it didn't take too long and i didn't have to pay too close attention.) i do think i could be made to be interested in these things, although i'm not a believer, but this book didn't do it.

keel seems to go back and forth with his theories, where he says that some people are obviously crazy and are unreliable, so their visitations with creatures aren't true. but then other people (who sound an awful lot like the first unreliable people) are totally reliable and their accounts are true. as, of course, are his own. (nope, he doesn't sound crazy at all. eye roll.) i assume this is supposed to build his credibility, to make us think that he doesn't just accept all of these stories at face value. it is unclear what criterion he uses to differentiate between the ones that he calls crazy and the ones that he believes.

i actually could be made to believe in the existence of extraterrestrials (or ultraterrestrials, as he wants to call them) but i have a pretty hard time believing they'd appear the way he describes them in this book. it's a super american-centered, kind of racist description of these beings. (they're all "oriental" looking or "negroid" and either outright malicious or scary or just weird and discomfiting.) why would beings from another world care about our phone lines or a car accident in a random city in america? why would they not want to be discovered if they're trying to affect goodness in the world? (why would they interfere with electrical signals and jam cameras and video/recording equipment?) why would they know how to speak english? why would they not be obviously in existence with the technology we have now to detect them? it's just utterly ludicrous from beginning to end. ( )
2 vote overlycriticalelisa | Mar 27, 2021 |
This was...not entirely what I was expecting. Less is about the lore of the Mothman and more about other conspiracies. ( )
  ashelocke | Feb 20, 2021 |
I read this because I was curious about reading some kind of paranormal classic. And, uh, wow. This is an interesting collection of anecdotes about weird sightings and events, but it's also essentially a nonsensical mishmash. The book jumps around it in time, it includes multiple assertions by Keel that people are trustworthy without any particular evidence, instances of priming witnesses in advance, and is just insanely frustrating. Individual parts of he book are fascinating, but that people can take the whole thing and then assume that Keel is reliable narrator is just very disheartening. ( )
  Going_To_Maine | Nov 28, 2020 |
Classic. ( )
  thePatWalker | Feb 10, 2020 |
Not really sure what I expected with this one. My daughter and I had become entertained by the idea of West Virginia's "Mothman" (neither of us is a believer in such things, but we really enjoy these kind of tales) and so I thought I would go as close to the "source" as I could on this one and read a book by a man who was in Point Pleasant, West Virginia around the time of many of the Mothman sightings. I was also intrigued because this is thought of in some quarters as a seminal work in the field. One of those foundational "paranormal" books that birthed a thousand more. Keel, in fact, is credited with coining the term "Men in Black," and talks at length about them in this book.

The book is really well-written on a literature level--Keel knows how to write good sentences and paragraphs. What he's less adept at--or doesn't even attempt--is to write a thorough narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Worked in among his tales of his visits to Point Pleasant are all the OTHER weird things he took note of happening toward the end of the 1960s, both in the United States and around the world. What's left is a real jumble of events that don't really seem to add up to anything--or at least nothing that Keel even attempts to put together.

As another review here on LT said, he considered himself a Fortean, and Forteans are apparently less concerned with explanations as with documentation. In that regard, it's a fascinating book filled with collected documents--for as much as you can believe any of them. As noted before, he recounts MANY stories of "Men in Black" following up on UFO and cryptid sightings...but never once tries to explain (or even guess) who they really are and why they are here. There are plenty of times he tells us what they AREN'T (real officers from the US Air Force, for example), but not once does he even suggest who or what they might really be--other than a menace.

What's more mysterious to me is that I could never tell what side of the fence Keel really fell on. In one breath, he will talk about how you can definitely, without a doubt, tell someone's experience with a UFO is real because of the effect on their eyes and skin (the "actinic rays" cause mild sunburn and red, swollen eyes...). Then, in the next breath, he will refute the account of an alien visitation by another "contactee." How he deems one story to be legit and the next to be hokum is never truly explained. Is his doubt of SOME stories supposed to prove his belief in the others is scientific and genuine? But then, later, he expresses his disbelief in the idea that the universe is filled with habitable planets and alien life--just about the one thing modern science HAS put its faith in among all the other wild claims he makes in the book!

And his descriptions of the "Mothman" of West Virginia--at times, the evidence in the BOOK seems pretty clear that it was nothing supernatural, but instead a large bird (some people suggest a wayward Sandhill Crane, or something similar) or a flock of birds that surprised and scared a small mountain town not used to seeing such creatures. In the last chapter he even refers to the "Mothman" as a large bird, as though that's what he believes it is--yet he also presents the accounts of those who saw the mythical "Mothman" as though they saw something genuinely chthonic.

At one point early on, Keel proposes the idea that all of these strange phenomena--West Virginia's Mothman, UFOs, spacemen, ancient visitations from angels and demons--are not EXTRAterrestrial, but instead ULTRAterrestrial, a term he defines along the lines of energy from outside of space and time that manifests itself in the form of whatever things people of the contemporary era are able to interpret as. So ancients see angels, and we modern folks in the space race era saw spaceships and aliens. It's an interesting idea, and definitely not your run-of-the-mill explanation of UFOs and cryptids...but it's as unsubstantiated as the rest of it. So while the book might make an interesting film or an episode of the X-Files, as a treatise on Mothman, or UFOs, or ultraterrestrials, or anything else he presents here, "The Mothman Prophecies" ultimately reads like the rambling notes of a man who spent his adult life writing down every strange story he heard. ( )
1 vote GratzFamily | Oct 7, 2019 |
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Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
John A. Keelprimary authorall editionscalculated
Wasson, CraigNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail - all were there. the most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past. Yet now it stood smiling, in ebon majesty, with the sunlight gleaming upon its tremendous body, and with a human child resting trustfully on either arm.
- Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End, 1953
Dedication
To Mary Hyre and the people of West Virginia
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Fingers of lightening tore holes in the black skies as an angry cloudburst drenched the surrealistic landscape.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Wikipedia in English (1)

"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."--

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