The Paranomalist

The XYZ Files — Part Eight

Posted on: Saturday, July 23, 2011 by Frater Auxilior Arti in the Cryptozoology, Paranormal category

Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na- na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na–Mothman!

"Mothman" by the great Frank Frazetta.

Forget the Richard Gere movie and read Keel’s book.  I’ll say it again, and in a different way: if what you know about the Mothman flap of 1967-68 (near Solar Max) at Point Pleasant, W. Virginia comes from that movie, then you don’t know squat about what really happened until you read the book.  Fortunately, it was reissued at the same time as the movie so there’s lots of used copies about.  We’re even more fortunate that Fortean Times Magazine has done several followups on those events, and the events in John Keel’s spy-plagued life after it.  Simply put, Mothman isn’t the main show, it’s an artifact, a by-product of cold war electromagnetic weapons testing.  Keel tells us this very clearly in his books, and paid for it with his privacy for the rest of his life.  Ah, remember the peace, love and freedom of the 60′s? Yeah, right.

What I’m about to tell you sounds sufficiently crazy and paranoid to have a tail put on me too, but I no longer see evidence that business in the intelligence sector is done that way.  In this day and age, with the internet chuck full of every kind of paranoid conspiracy theorist, nut-job and foamy-mouthed prophet, my voice is just one more in the cacophony and the plausible deniability of this situation never ends.  Here we sit in a nation that with their own eyes watched 9-11 unfold in ways that cannot be supported by the official explanations and yet only a bout 1/3^rd of us are willing to admit it.  I’m guessing that about a third are scared to question anything and the other third are too ignorant to evaluate the evidence of their senses against the progress of science.  There are now 10s of 1000s of whistle blowers, each with vital parts of the puzzle, all being cheerfully ignored.  What government would want to mess with that?

The 60′s were different and the flow of information across entire nations wasn’t understood very well.  We were but 20 years away from WWII, where the flow of information and disinformation brought half the world to it’s knees and we were just starting to understand the value of that.  It didn’t help matters that we were quagmired in an increasingly unpopular war, that social structures were crumbling and that illicit drug abuse was becoming widespread . .  or did it?  In a sense, there could be no better time to test mind-bending EM weapons on an unsuspecting populace . . . and I’ve come to think that’s exactly what Keel was telling us in that book.  For those completely unfamiliar with the Mothman flap, allow me to direct you to this Wiki site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman which contains a pretty good overview.

Monsters are SO interesting...

My first clue came from the descriptions given in the initial reports: “We were doing 100 miles an hour . . .  and that bird kept right up with us.  It wasn’t even flapping its wings.” “It squeaked like a big mouse.”  “Suddenly it spread a pair of wings . . . and took off straight up like a helicopter.”  “I’ve never had that feeling before.  A weird kind of fear . . .  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.” Most of the descriptions of Mothman are of the “Dog-headed Men Smoking Cigarettes” variety, I. e. some sort of projection of the unconscious, likely.  This creature flies, and up speeds up to 100 mph, but it’s wings clearly aren’t big enough to lift it’s bulk even if it bothered to flap them, which  it often did not.  Top that off with the fact that it was typically seen as headless with saucer-sized eyes in its upper chest, covered with hair.  This thing is impossible by the usual standards by which we measure.  It seems hastily assembled from a collection of spooky images, the closest of which is not The Batman (after which its own name was coined) but rather the copyrighted Warner brothers monster character, Gossamer, whom—oddly enough—debuted in 1946:

I think we could stick some wings on him and be just about good to go.  Love the shoes . . .

My second clue came when Keel was investigating the TNT area (where the first sightings occurred) and came across a clearly-defined “zone of fear”.  Standing in one spot he felt fine, but a step or 2 to the left and he was filled with an unreasoning panic that he actually had to address consciously and overcome, if he was ever to get back to his car.  We can recognize this behavior from both the research of Dr. Persinger and from the UFO lore in general which is filled with incidents of panic fear arising almost immediately after the close sighting of an UFO.  As this and other events played out over the next year I surmised that an extraordinary amount of electrical power must have been utilized to get this and other effects and predicted that the general increase of cancer would certainly follow, and it seems that this is just what happened.  Over the years that followed, many of the original witnesses would succumb to the rarer cancers that we now are beginning to find are related to EM exposure.  Some of the witnesses died mysteriously in what looked like iffy suicides, freakish accidents and outright murders.

As the story unfolds, we find Keel pointing out time and again that there is a huge tendency to confabulate and whip up hysteria, given the right sort of mysterious stimulus and one can reasonably suppose that this was part of this experiment.  It wasn’t long before Mothman was a public spectacle, bringing people out to various siting locations around the area, sometimes by the 100′s.  If there was no Mothman to be seen, there were still plenty of odd, luminous shapes winging through the sky like so many UFOs.  I am put in mind of a man researched by Albert Budden who had the misfortune of building his house too close to a Ministry of Defense project.  He felt weird vibrations, observed chevron-shaped luminous objects in the sky and had a host of other paranormal complaints before coming down with a rare, and fatal, cancer.  He was trying to sue the MoD at the time of his death.

Even more telling are the Men in Black and various other personnel moving through this community, keeping tabs on people, threatening witnesses, misdirecting the US Mail, etc.  While I haven’t a clue why tall, thin Swedes and short, olive-skinned (more space Italians?) men would predominate, I would like to call the readers attention to several salient observations.  These guys wore shoes with thick, rubber soles.  One was observed to have a wire running from his shoe and from thence on up his trouser-leg.  Another took a pill in the presence of witnesses and many had bugged-out “thyroid eyes” and sweated profusely.  Many of these visitors behaved in a manner designed to produce a kind of cognitive dissonance, as in the example where one MIB began fondling a woman’s breast while asking her husband: “Am I doing this right?”  As crazy as it sounds, I think these guys are either wearing a device that was designed to scramble the perceptions of those in its vicinity, else they were operating within a some sort of field effect bathing the area from a remote projector.  Between the thick rubber soles, the wires and the pills and the obvious discomfort of the MIB, not to mention the physical symptoms that plagued the interviewees upon their departure, it looks like it adds up to nothing less than some sort of electronic psy-ops experiment.

Then of course, there’s the phones and the TV interference.  I’m not sure most people realize how inductance works and I don’t think I could give as scientific an explanation as I would like, but suffice it to say that strong, coherent radio signals can “step on” smaller, weaker signals and if conditions are right, and the signal strong enough, equipment can pick up both RF signals, EM interference and even a transient power supply.  Given that electricity is the movement of electrons along a buss, within discrete components or along or wire one should know that all that is required for a device to operate is for these electrons to be made to move in the manner for which the device was designed.  An unplugged radio or TV set, in the right kind of EM environment can operate (usually abnormally).  In fact when I hear tales of this sort of thing, the first thing I do is inquire about the relative locations of microwave communications towers and suggest a sweep of the premises with a trifield meter or the like.  It is also now clear the various militaries have advanced quite far in the realm of electronic jamming and countermeasures.  I believe that in certain paranormal cases we are seeing the natural-world version of the same principles.  I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t take much to make a device that would interfere and over-ride the function of the simple Western Electric Telephone that everyone had in those days, but it probably wouldn’t be necessary, as Keel’s book shows that the phone company was deeply infiltrated with illegal wiretapping at the time and the things that happened at Point Pleasant probably had their origin no farther away than the utility company itself.

Overall, the impression I get is that literally 100′s of agents were installed in this community with the intention of either administering this incredible mind-blow, documenting its effects on the citizens or both.  I can come to no other conclusion than believing that Keel was observed from close quarters by people in whom he’d placed some ordinary trust (like hotel clerks), had his mail opened and read and misdirected by planted agents in the post office and was carefully fed information and disinformation to see where he would take it and what he would do with it.  It doesn’t surprise me one bit that Skeptical Inquirer journalist John C. Sherwood  published an analysis of private letters between Keel and Barker during the period of Keel’s investigation and documented significant differences between what Keel wrote at the time of his investigation and what Keel wrote in his first book.  I suspect Keel came to the same sorts of conclusions I have and quite early on realized what he’d wandered into and edited his account accordingly.

Clearly, the thing that got him in the most trouble were his remarks about the nearby naval base and what he learned there.  Briefly, he visited the brass at that institution in order to get a military perspective on the unusual events and was pretty much stonewalled in a classic style.  But, being John Keel, he had to get his story somehow and relied instead on buying a few rounds of drinks at the NCO club until he’d heard enough about what was going on and remarked: “Some general at the Pentagon ought to have his butt kicked for doing this so close to a populated area.”  Can it be more clear?

Possible explanations for Mothman…

So, given that I believe this to be a large-scale psy-ops experiment, what then is Mothman?  I’ve puzzled over that for awhile and came up with a couple of pretty wild scenarios:

• Mothman is a projection of some kind, acted out at a remote location and beamed somehow as information into the vicinity, if not the minds of the witnesses.
• Mothman is a real entity, extraterrestrial or infraterrestrial, that is participating in a military experiment for reasons of his own.
• It’s a projection of the unconscious, or the form of an archetype (probably “The Bogeyman”) that comes about as the witnesses are stressed by the experiments.
• Mothman is some class of “temporary animal” caused by local and/or military EM disturbance
• Mothman is an ordinary denizen of the universe next door, temporarily made visible (and maybe even tangible) in our reality because our weapons testing is  stretching the fabric of reality in such a way as to make that happen.

There’s a few very good reasons why I would choose the last 2 possibilities over the first 3.  The main one is that Mothman and things like Mothman are seen all around the world and at many times in history, suggesting to me a natural, rather than artificial origin.  To date, giant dragons, snakes, pteradactyls and 40′ tall everglades-dwelling penguins have been spotted by competent observers and such things seem to have a part in our perceptions.  The integrity of the interactions the creature seems to have with vehicles, animals and people makes me think we are  not dealing with a mere projection but something that can perceive us in some way.   I always have a hard time getting 100% behind the notion that a diverse collection of witnesses could all have the same exact hallucination, but I’ll grant it a possibility.  In fact, one thing the Mothman case has in common with other EM-exposure cases  is the seeming blossoming of psychic powers, or at least a sudden preponderance of people who now think they have psychic powers.  I don’t find it impossible to believe that damage done to the nervous system of a given individual might result in some very strange experiences of the psi variety, and there are many cases on record.

But what is a “temporary animal”?  Given that the nature of reality (or so I believe) is malleable by human thought, it shouldn’t be too hard for an adept yogi to create a tulpa, and maybe something really grand if his efforts could find amplification, somehow.  Another “maybe” is that the mere thought of this bogeyman can become quite real, but only temporarily and only under peculiar electromagnetic duress, like say the EM events that seem to be triggered by seismic activity.  I personally think that all the observations lead up to a notion of multiple “worlds” or hidden sets of dimensions that are being accessed (or perhaps exploited) due to our exposure to EM fields . . . but it can be one step weirder.  Are we tearing at the fabric of reality and allowing weird monsters through?  Or are we tearing away at the reality we make with our senses and letting the monsters out?  And to what degree is our experience of reality different from reality when both are being tampered with at once?

Naturally, we’ll never know what happened there in Point Pleasant, because all we have at this date and time is a slowly-evolving carnival, a museum, a statue and pretty much another Roswell on our hands.  While we’re all being misdirected to wonder about this Mothman fellow, we should be asking ourselves something else.  What causes Mothman?

The Author: Frater Auxilior Arti

Frater Auxilior Arti (Brother “I facilitate the Arts”) is a practicing ceremonial magician attached to the House of Abraxas of Ordo Astrum Sophia and is a founding member of the Companions of the Glyph. He has studied in the Western traditions of occultism for over 35 years and has been a student of the inexplicable for about as long. The first 5 articles in this series were adapted from articles of the same name, originally written for the now-defunct rendingtheveil.com. Fr. A. A. invites your comments and if we can get a lively enough discussion going, we can alterrnate the regular columns with those that field questions from the readers and discuss up-to-the-minute paranormal news in the light of the arguments presented herein. More information and writings can be gleaned from his page at Companionsoftheglyph.org: www.companionsoftheglyph.org/frafiles/fra.htm.