The Mothman Prophecies Read Free Page B

Barclay. Barclay grabbed his rifle and headed for the machine. He was met by an ordinary-looking man who handed him a ten-dollar bill and asked him to buy some oil and tools for the aircraft.
    â€œWho are you?” Barclay asked.
    â€œNever mind about my name; call it Smith,” the man answered.
    The UFO lore is populated with mysterious visitors claiming inordinately common names like Smith, Jones, Kelly, Allen, and Brown. In 1897, they often claimed to come from known villages and cities and were even able to name prominent citizens in those places. But when reporters checked, they could find no record of the visitors and the named citizens disavowed any knowledge of them.
    One of the proved hoaxes of 1897 (there were many hoaxes, largely the work of mischievous newspapermen) concerned an object which is supposed to have crashed into Judge Proctor’s windmill in Aurora, Texas. The remains of a tiny pilot were supposedly found in the wreckage and buried in the local cemetery by the townspeople. The story was published in the Dallas Evening News. From time to time, Aurora was visited by self-styled investigators who sifted the dirt on the old Proctor farm and marched through the cemetery reading tombstones, always without finding anything.
    The story was revived in 1972, and in 1973 a man identifying himself as Frank N. Kelley of Corpus Christi arrived in Aurora. He said he was a treasure hunter of long experience. He set to work with his metal detectors and instruments and quickly unearthed several fragments of metal near the windmill site. They appeared to be something like the skin of modern aircraft, he announced. He kept some of the pieces and turned the rest over to a reporter named Bill Case. Analysis showed the pieces were 98 percent aluminum.
    Kelley’s alleged discovery created a stampede to Aurora. UFO investigators descended from as far away as Illinois and battled for permission to dig up graves in the cemetery. The story received wide play in the national press in the summer of 1973.
    When efforts were made to find Frank Kelley in Corpus Christi it was found that he had given a phony address and phone number, and that no one in treasure-hunting circles had ever heard of him. Mr. Kelley was apparently another one of the impressive but elusive hoaxsters who haunt the UFO field. The joke was pointless, expensive, and, sadly, very successful.
    IV.
    The moment I met Mrs. Hyre’s niece Connie Carpenter in 1966, I knew she was telling the truth because her eyes were reddened, watery, and almost swollen shut. I had seen these symptoms many times in my treks around the country investigating UFO reports. Witnesses who were unlucky enough to have a close encounter with an unidentified flying object, usually a dazzlingly brilliant aerial light, are exposed to actinic rays … ultraviolet rays … which can cause “eyeburn,” medically known as klieg conjunctivitis. These are the same kind of rays that tan your hide at the beach. If you lay in the bright sun without protecting your eyes you can get conjunctivitis. Whatever they are, UFOs radiate intense actinic rays. There are now thousands of cases in which the witnesses suffered eyeburns and temporary eye damage … even temporary blindness … after viewing a strange flying light in the night sky.
    One of the more extreme cases of UFO blindness occurred on the night of Wednesday, October 3, 1973 in southeastern Missouri. Eddie Webb, forty-five, of Greenville, saw a luminous object in his rear-view mirror. He put his head out the window of his truck and looked back. There was a bright white flash. Webb threw his hands to his face, crying, “Oh, my God! I’m burned! I can’t see!” One lens had fallen from his glasses and the frames were melted. His wife took over the wheel of their vehicle and drove him to a hospital. Fortunately, the damage was not permanent.
    What puzzled me about Connie’s case,