Free The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel Page B

bungalow back among the igloos. Mr. Thomas was the superintendent of the Trojan-U.S. operations there. His wife, Virginia, was a slender, gentle woman blessed—or cursed—with second sight. She had accurately predicted numerous accidents and local events over the years. She was careful not to seek attention and only her friends knew of her remarkable abilities. Deeply religious, she went to church almost every evening and on this night both she and her husband were out. The Wamsleys and Mrs. Bennett found only three of the Thomas children, Rickie, Connie, and Vickie, at home. After exchanging a few words with the youngsters, they headed back to their car. Off in the distance they could hear some trigger-happy hero firing a rifle around the power plant.
    Suddenly a figure stirred in the darkness behind the parked car.
    â€œIt seemed as if it had been lying down,” Mrs. Bennett told me. “It rose up slowly from the ground. A big gray thing. Bigger than a man, with terrible glowing red eyes.”
    Mrs. Bennett uttered a little cry, so horrified she dropped the small baby in her arms. The child began to cry, more insulted than hurt, but her mother couldn’t move to pick her up again. She stood transfixed, hypnotized by the blazing red circles on the top of the towering, headless creature. Its great wings unfolded slowly behind its back. Raymond Wamsley grabbed the paralyzed woman and the child and they all ran back into the house, slammed the door, and bolted it. There was a sound on the porch and the two red eyes peered in through a window. The women and children became hysterical while Wamsley frantically phoned the police. It was 9 P.M. Hundreds of people, many of them armed to the teeth, were less than a mile away and would not know about the episode until they read it in the local papers the following evening.
    By the time the police reached the house the creature was gone. But for Mrs. Bennett this was just the beginning of a long and frightening series of adventures.
    III.
    Woodrow Derenberger was living in bedlam. A group of local UFO enthusiasts representing the Washington-based National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), largely a lobby urging congressional UFO investigations, visited or phoned him daily, raising his ire by ordering him not to talk to anyone else about his experiences.
    His farm looked like the TNT area. Every night streams of cars would park all over the property he was renting and people would sit quietly in the dark. Watching. Waiting. Some brought guns and hiked into the nearby hills to sit behind trees. Widespread rumors said the UFOs planned to come back and land on the farm. Some of Woody’s visitors were determined to bag themselves a spaceman.
    In the midst of all the chaos, a black Volkswagen drove up, parked, and a tanned man in a neat black suit got out. He and Woody walked casually to the edge of the porch and talked. After a few minutes, the man got back into his VW and drove off. The great hunters continued to sit in the bitter cold behind their trees, their eyes anxiously searching the skies.
    According to Derenberger, he had been suffering from a stomach ailment for some time. Mr. Cold gave him a vial of medicine, he claimed, which cured his problem instantly. Cold now had a first name—Indrid.
    IV.
    Across the Ohio River, almost directly opposite the TNT area, a music teacher, Mrs. Roy Grose, was wakened by the barking of her dog at 4:45 A.M. on the morning of November 17, 1966. It was unusual for her little pet to bark late at night, so she got up to investigate. The moon was out and was very bright, she recalled. She looked out the kitchen window and saw an enormous object hovering at treetop level in a field on the other side of Route 7. It was circular, the size of a small house, and brilliantly illuminated. It seemed to be divided into sections glowing with dazzlingly bright red and green lights.
    â€œI was stunned,” she