The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel Page B

panicked. “I never saw anything like it,” he confided to Mrs. Hyre later. “I was so scared I just couldn’t go to work that day. This thing had a wingspan every bit of ten feet. It could be a bird, but I certainly never saw one like it. I was afraid it was going to come down right on top of me.”
    The old familiar symptom, unreasonable terror, took hold of him. “I’ve never had that feeling before. A weird kind of fear,” he said. “That fear gripped you and held you. Somehow, the best way to explain it would be to say that the whole thing just wasn’t right. I know that may not make sense, but that’s the only way I can put into words what I felt.”
    That same week some very freakish birds appeared in Ohio and Pennsylvania, far north of Point Pleasant. George Wolfe, Jr., twenty-three, of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, was out hunting when he came across a “seven-foot-tall bird that looked something like an ostrich” in a cornfield.
    â€œI could see it dodging in and out among the trees,” he said. “It didn’t leap over the brush like a deer would do, but just zig-zagged through the trees, in a strange sidewise motion.
    â€œI was so startled I didn’t take a shot at it. It had a long neck and a round body with a plumed tail that reached high above its body.
    â€œIt was a grayish color and looked about seven feet tall. It was about fifty feet from me when it stood up and began to run. My dog ran after it, but when Old Ringo caught up with it, he let out a howl. He ran back to me with his tail between his legs and he was howling and whimpering.”
    In Lowell, Ohio, about seventy miles north of Point Pleasant, Marvin Shock and his family watched a group of gigantic birds for about two hours on November 26. “They looked about as big as a man would look moving around in the trees,” Shock reported. “When we started walking toward them for a closer look—we were about one hundred yards from them—they took off and flew up the ridge.”
    Shock, his two children, and Ewing Tilton, a neighbor, watched the creatures from a distance. They were from four to five feet tall and had a wingspread of at least ten feet. There was “a reddish cast” to their heads, but the witnesses did not see the famous glowing red eyes.
    â€œThey had dark brown backs with some light flecks,” Ewing Tilton noted. “Their breasts were gray and they had five-or-six-inch bills, straight, not curved like those of hawks or vultures.”
    These reports indicate that some very unusual birds were in the general region at the time of the Mothman fracas, even though a systematic search of ornithological literature has failed to identify the creatures seen by Wolfe, Shock, and Ewing. One Ohio college professor insisted it was a rare sandhill crane, so I carried a picture of the sandhill crane in my briefcase and not a single witness recognized it or thought it resembled what he or she had seen.
    Altogether, more than one hundred adults would see this winged impossibility in 1966–67. Those who got a close look at it all agreed on the basic points. It was gray, apparently featherless, as large—or larger—than a big man, had a wingspread of about ten feet, took off straight up like a helicopter, and did not flap its wings in flight. Its face was a puzzle. No one could describe it. The two red eyes dominated it. (In a majority of the reports of angels, demons, and saucer spacemen the faces are also either covered in some manner or are nonexistent.)
    The “ostrich” in Pennsylvania and the big birds in Ohio did not seem to fit into the picture. If they were real birds of some kind, where did they go? Why weren’t they seen again?
    On the evening of November 26, a housewife in St. Albans, a suburb of Charleston, West Virginia, found Mothman standing on her front lawn. Mrs. Ruth Foster was one of the very few witnesses who