The Mothman Prophecies Read Free

astronauts from another planet they will begin landing and collecting rocks from your garden.
    Many—most—of the manifestations accompanying the UFO phenomenon simply did not fit into the enthusiasts’ concept of how a superior intelligence from another galaxy would behave. So the flying saucer clubs carefully ignored, even suppressed, the details of those manifestations for many years. When a black-suited man in a Cadillac turned up, he couldn’t possibly be one of the endearing space people so he had to be a rotten, sneaky government agent. It was inconceivable to the hardcore UFO believers that the flying saucers could be a permanent part of our environment and that these men in black were residents of this planet associated with the UFOs.
    But this is a fact; the “truth” the UFO fans have sought for so long. And as Daniel Webster put it, “There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.”
    You can’t learn the truth by chasing UFOs helter-skelter through the skies in planes. The air forces of several governments tried that for years. It is vain to hire astronomers. They are not trained in the kind of disciplines needed to investigate earthly phenomena, or even to interview earthly witnesses. Interviewing is an advanced art, the province of journalists and psychologists. One does not hire a parachutist to go spelunking in a cave or a balloonist to go diving for treasure. If you need a brain surgeon you don’t hire a horticulturist who has spent his life trimming plants. Yet this is the approach our government has taken to the UFO phenomenon.
    I realized the folly of trying to measure the circle from some distant point, so I picked a microcosm on the edge of the circle—a place where many strange manifestations were occurring simultaneously. And I hit the jackpot immediately, rather like the opening of an old Max Schulman novel: “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life.”

2:
    The Creep Who Came in from the Cold
    I.
    Friday, December 22, 1967, was bitter cold and the frayed Christmas decorations strung across the main street of the little West Virginian town of Point Pleasant seemed to hang limply, sadly, as if to match the grim, ashen faces of the townspeople who shuffled about their business, their eyes averted from the gaping hole where the Silver Bridge had stood only a week before. Now the seven-hundred-foot span was gone. Clusters of workmen, police officers, and assorted officials stood along the banks of the Ohio, watching silently as divers continued to bob into the black waters. Occasionally ropes would jerk and a bloated, whitened body would be hauled to the surface. It was not going to be a merry Christmas in Point Pleasant.
    A few yards from the place where the bridge had been, Mrs. Mary Hyre sat in her office revising a list of the missing and the known dead. A stout woman in her early fifties, her normally cheerful, alert face was blurred with fatigue. She had had almost no sleep in the past seven days. After twenty years as the local stringer for the Messenger, recording all the births, marriages, and deaths in the little town, Mrs. Hyre suddenly found herself at the center of the universe. Camera teams from as far away as New York were perched outside her door. The swarms of newsmen who had descended on Point Pleasant to record the tragedy had quickly learned what everyone in the Ohio valley already knew. If you wanted to find out anything about the area and its people, the quickest way to do it was to “ask Mary Hyre.”
    For seven days now her office had been filled with strangers, relatives of the missing, and weary rescue workers. So she hardly looked up that afternoon when two men entered. They seemed almost like twins, she recalled later. Both were short and wore black overcoats. Their complexions were dark, somewhat Oriental, she thought.
    â€œWe hear