More pressing than any of the mysteries that John Keel investigates in this book, I was earlier this month confronted by one of my own: why did my friend P ____, a responsible family man with a job in the U.S. government (I probably shouldn't get any more specific than that), loan me The Mothman Prophecies in the first place? Did he mean it as a joke (as I originally thought), as a real recommendation, or was there something else going on? And did it have anything to do with the fact that, within a week, P ____ had been assigned to a remote consulate in the far east of Kazakhstan, and his social media accounts went dark?

Adding to the scrutiny and scare-mongering, the cave in which she sheltered contained a pool which was well-known amongst locals for being shaped like a skull. The ostracised couple would be forced into a bleak existence in the middle of woodland far away from judgemental eyes and the local rumour mill.In no time at all, awareness of Ursula’s abilities and knowledge as an herbalist began to grow within the community and she soon became a very called-upon resource for those wishing for her to cure their ailments. Through it all, the mysterious creature known as the Mothman haunts the old dynamite testing range and a stranger named Indrid Cold taunts Keel with weird revelations.

Now I've been looking into Fortean phenomena, since meeting someone who said she was channeling an 'angel'. The 'angel's' prophecy of a Rapture-like event, among other revelations, left me cold, and convinced me of one of two possibilities: the woman was as mad as a cut snake, or she was channeling something altogether unpleasant. I began to investigate. I found much of what I read in The Mothman Prophecies to be frankly unbelievable – weird phone calls, odd visits, erased tapes, alien encounters that are always at one folkloric remove from one’s informant. There are, after all, rational explanations for the Mothman sightings; for instance, West Virginia is on the edge of the migration zone for the sandhill crane ( Antigone canadensis), a bird that has a seven-foot wingspan and eyes that glow red when illuminated by an artificial light source. And there is a reasonable explanation for the collapse of the Silver Bridge: a 1971 investigation by the National Bureau of Standards and other agencies of the federal government found that an eyebar in a suspension chain on the old and poorly maintained bridge had failed. The predictions do not follow chronological coherence and were written combining French, Greek, Latin and Occitan. It is believed that it contains anagrams, mythological and astrological references, in a subjective language that makes comprehension difficult. Some scholars claim that this was a resource used by Nostradamus to evade the Holy Inquisition, for fear of being persecuted for heresy. [4]It was here that she would come into her own, continuing her practise of creating herbal remedies whilst also dabbling in the odd premonition. Moreover, in a pamphlet dated 1641 which is one of the earliest surviving records of her predictions, she foresees Thomas Wolsey’s fate at the time of his demise, after he had fallen out of favour after failing to secure the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. On a journey between London and York he died from natural causes, a point which Mother Shipton had made when she claimed that Wolsey would never reach his destination. it's not really about the mothman!! i love cryptids and was excited to read a cryptid classic from 1975. but ufologist john keel mostly just gives accounts of people seeing lights in the sky and getting strange phone calls. there are a few accounts of mothman sightings, and the book ends with the tragic collapse of the silver bridge. but i didn't even learn much about mothman!!

The Mothman lives on, in the Ohio River region that was once his haunt. There is a Mothman Museum in downtown Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and a Mothman statue that shows a winged, human-like creature with glowing red eyes. The Mothman, as any resident of the region can tell you, began appearing to a number of people in the area around Point Pleasant in the fall of 1966. Mothman appearances, and other bizarre events, continued to occur until December of 1967, when the Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River, killing 46 people; and from that time forward, the Mothman was never seen again. That strange timeline of difficult-to-explain events becomes the central focus of John Keel’s 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies.

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I was expecting to remember the movie and learn more info about the Mothman cases but he's barely present in the book. Most mentions of him are near the end and they seem a little rushed.