~ my book review of The Mothman Prophecies (1975) by John Keel.
Synopsis: An Investigation into the Mysterious American Visits of the Infamous Feathery Garuda.
What are UFOs? Or UAPs? (Unidentified Flying Objects / Unidentified Aerial Phenomena)
Some believe UFOs to be aliens, others consider them secret government projects or scouts from breakaway civilizations (some under the sea).
Paranormal investigator and author John Keel boldly posits that UFOs are tulpas, or para-psychological entities created (or drawn out) by collective or latent, perhaps eternal, psychic energies generated by sentient consciousness on the planet.
You heard that right. UFOs are us, our art, our myths, our higher and lower selves borne from other planes & realities and coming to see us in the flesh sometimes, maybe to warn us…
In The Mothman Prophecies, Keel outlines his journey in and around the UFO-related instances of the “Mothman” cryptid of 1960s Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Various sightings of the large flying man with red eyes (as well as “Men In Black” and other seemingly supernatural incidents) abounded throughout the population of the Ohio River valley during the fall of 1967. Peculiar events and energies culminated in the collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 15th, 1967 and the deaths of forty-six people.
The Mothman thus carries an aura of foreboding and doomsaying because his presence preceded such a tragic and unlikely event. Engineers claimed the bridge collapsed due to age, wear & tear, and oversized traffic loads.
Some now believe the Mothman was warning the people of Point Pleasant, appearing to presage the catastrophe and then maybe explain it after the fact.
Excerpt: Readers of occult literature know there are innumerable cases of ghosts haunting a particular site year after year, century after century, carrying out the same mindless activities endlessly. Build a house on such a site and the ghost will leave locked doors ajar as it marches through to carry out its programed activity. Could these ghosts really be tulpas, residues of powerful minds like the phantom in the broadbrimmed hat? Next, consider this. UFO activity is concentrated in the same areas year after year. In the Ohio valley, they show a penchant for the ancient Indian mounds which stand throughout the area. Could some UFOs be mere tulpas created by a long forgotten people and doomed forever to senseless maneuvers in the night skies?
In this book’s recountings (some mix of truth and dramatization no doubt), Keel is not just a UFO researcher but also a key participant in the Point Pleasant community. He’s been called the Hunter S. Thompson of UFO research in the sense that he tends to become a character in his own play. In this case, Keel interviewed and knew many of the people affected by the ultimate tragedy of the bridge collapse, previously compiled their testimonies and insights on their UFO experiences, MIB visits, and Mothman perceptions & premonitions.
Chapter by chapter, Keel breaks down UFO theory like a paranormal scientist while also explaining the key encounters within the Mothman incident(s) like a journalist. Keel’s wide-ranging theory on paranormal phenoms — and especially the strange resistance to the research from shadowy persons & also deranged UFO fanatics — amounts to a mix between madcap belief and skeptical reinterpretation. All in all, psychosis and faith and a focused and imaginative consciousness play partial roles in the experiencing, and attempted explaining, of unexplainable events.
Excerpt: I am not concerned with beliefs but with the cosmic mechanism that has generated and perpetuated those beliefs…Back in the 1920s, Charles Fort, the first writer to explore inexplicable events, observed you can measure a circle by beginning anywhere. Paranormal phenomena are so widespread, so diversified, and so sporadic yet so persistent that separating and studying any single element is not only a waste of time but also will automatically lead to the development of belief. Once you have established a belief, the phenomenon adjusts its manifestations to support that belief and thereby escalate it. If you believe in the devil he will surely come striding down your road one rainy night and ask to use your phone. If you believe that flying saucers are astronauts from another planet they will begin landing and collecting rocks from your garden.
Keel’s considerable experience shines as an imaginative interrogator of such widely encompassing mysteries involving scared, uncertain, and often harassed figures. He’s kind, humorous, informative, and very weird, all incredible boons to his writing. He is also relentless in his pursuits and willing to get right into the meaty *woo-woo* of it all.
As a result of his work in such circles, Keel is intimately familiar with the various unfortunates that make the UFO & occult communities such an aggressively disordered bunch. This allows him to avoid many of the pitfalls that come in doing this kind of pseudo-scientific research. He knows how to precisely question those contacted to root out (or prevent) hoaxes. He also understands the patterns of paranormal accounts and uses history as a way of providing scaffolding to his beliefs regarding the ultimate origin of paranormal activity as a whole.
Keel’s thesis in sum: Human beings produce (or draw out) UFOs through our belief, and our earthly activity as imaginative carriers of culture, myth, and consciousness.
Through our consciousness, and our connection to soul / spirit realm / the Jungian collective unconscious / (God) ~ we can make Tulpas, or physical manifestations of our beliefs — and we can make contact with Outside entities (such as ghosts, angels, daemons, Mothman).
Humans are all creative beings at our core and we can all make contact, some better or worse, with the superspectrum of para-psychological power & Outside entities inhabiting the past or other dimensions or timelines.
Thus, UFOs are not from outer worlds in the cosmos but from inner worlds within the human consciousness.
My long and very expensive excursions into the borderland where the real and unreal merge have failed to produce any evidence of any kind to support the idea that we are entertaining shy strangers from some other galaxy. Rather, I have come to realize that we have been observing complex forces which have always been an essential part of our immediate environment. Instead of thinking in terms of extraterrestrials, I have adopted the concept of ultraterrestrials – beings and forces which coexist with us but are on another time frame; that is, they operate outside the limits of our space-time continuum yet have the ability to cross over into our reality. This other world is not a place, however, as Mars or Andromeda are places, but is a state of energy.
^This may be a lot to take in. But the more you think about it, about our history, our religions, and I would reckon your own personal experience too — it does all start to make sense. Or not, depending on who you are.
According to Keel, UFOs, Mothman, and the various daemons and angels known to antiquity as messengers from Gods or deliverers of divine justice ~ should be properly named as *Ultraterrestrials.*
As opposed to extraterrestrials, these beings have resided on – or interfaced with – Earth for a long time. They coexist with us humans on a different time frame (or frequency) and they have the capacity to cross over into our reality at certain times and spaces.
Keel ominously suggests, with much evidence from the encounterers and patterns to such contact, that these ultraterrestrial entities are most attracted to youthful, fertile women and prodigal children with extrasensory gifts.
I think we can see in the world today that many people in positions of power are also interested in women and children, for obvious reasons. Reproduction (creation) and learning/teaching/indoctrination (potential) are in play. In the Bible, angels end up desiring humans sexually whereas demons crave the corruption of God’s strongest and most faithful. The long lore of alchemy can also help explain the logos of some of these desires around controlling the human body and its inner energy.
Excerpt: That unidentified flying objects have been present since the dawn of man is an undeniable fact. They are not only described repeatedly in the Bible, but were also the subject of cave paintings made thousands of years before the Bible was written. And a strange procession of weird entities and frightening creatures have been with us just as long. When you review the ancient references you are obliged to conclude that the presence of these objects and beings is a normal condition for this planet. These things, these other intelligencies or OINTs as Ivan Sanderson labeled them, either reside here but somehow remain concealed from us, or they do not exist at all and are actually special aberrations of the human mind—tulpas, hallucinations, psychological constructs, momentary materializations of energy from that dimension beyond the reach of our senses and even beyond the reaches of our scientific instruments. They are not from outer space. There is no need for them to be. They have always been here. Perhaps they were here long before we started bashing each other over the head with clubs. If so, they will undoubtedly still be here long after we have incinerated our cities, polluted all the waters, and rendered the very atmosphere unbreathable. Of course, their lives—if they have lives in the usual sense—will be much duller after we have gone. But if they wait around long enough another form of so-called intelligent life will crawl out from under a rock and they can begin their games again.
Folklore necessarily evolves out of human belief and imagination and life experience. In vampires and werewolves and myths and Gods, we are co-creating our greatest fears x hopes. Some human beings do embody these daemons already in the world around us. Some people are cannibals and predators. Why couldn’t they be possessed or transformed? People have and will always believe in ghosts and angels and the like; people acting as vampires and wolves and evil gods seem to persist across the story of civilization.
It is worth mentioning that UFO encounters also tend to congregate around religious sites, cemeteries, and schools ~ places of great emotional energy and mental & physical change. They seem to be evermore riding the coattails of our religions and our folklore. Today, we have all kinds of examples of how consciousness exists beyond our brains and can manifest externally, such as how organ transplant patients exhibit changes in personality mirroring that of the donor.
Notably, UFOs appear in modernity (1950s-present) as starships, but in the past they were angels & daemons, gods and animals. Keel expounds how cryptids like Mothman inhabit planes of existence beyond our comprehension. In this way, perhaps contradictorily, they also tend to alter themselves to mirror the times that we live in.
Entities like Mothman, or the Garuda of eastern lore, can reach through by way of imaginative contact with the conscious minds of our shamans and visionaries (and psychotics). Mothman is indeed imagined, or collectively hallucinated, by the people of Point Pleasant. But that does not make him un-real.
For me, The Mothman Prophecies is quite an achievement in gonzo journalism and extrasensory ideation. John Keel is affable and absurd, a kind of linguistic magician that lays out his naturally ridiculous theses quite well, while also building an intriguing narrative in the weave between topics.
Keel adroitly moves in mystical spaces throughout his book. It was especially a joy to peel back the lid on MIB conspiracies by way of so many shared accounts & mythologies. No one can deny the fascination these events must summon within our hearts and minds. Keel is certainly a most qualified observer and communicator on the “superspectrum.”
The Mothman is my favorite cryptid. I happen to see him as a dark angel, a herald for not only the collapse of a bridge but the chaos of the epistemological crises coming in the late 20th century and we wrestle with now in the 21st. Mothman seemed to be saying: many realities exist for us to choose from.
It is also possible, as I theorize in my X-Files fan fiction written a few years back, that Mothman was a grand government social x bio experiment wherein frogmen dressed up like a winged humanoids while other black ops agents orchestrated door-knock confrontations and dosed the water supply with LSD.
But then why did the bridge collapse? How far does the clandestine operation go? And as with any conspiracy: how come no one has ever talked?
In my humble opinion, Mothman must be named as America’s best and most imperative ultraterrestrial. I believe Keel does the job of affirming this with his book. The Mothman Prophecies is also pretty short. I highly recommend it.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐️ 5 / 5 stars
Thresholds of Transformation 