Old Favorites Revisited - The Mothman Prophecies

"The Mothman Prophecies" by John Keel, 1975.

Having read this book umpteen times when younger, it was very interesting to skim back through it again. Back in print because of the less-than-stellar name-only movie, I was able to get it through my local library.

I grew up with John Keel and his ilk. I hungrily chomped down anything Fortean, anything High Strange. Since this was back when such books were far more scarce than now, I tended to re-read the ones I had and "Prophecies" was one of my favorites.

And TMP is an entertaining read, so chock-full of accounts of extraordinary flying objects, unlikely birds, monsters, poltergeists and Men In Black as to have been the inspiration for the whole run of The X-Files.

Entertaining, certainly. Serious research material? Another question.

It has been at least 17 years since I last read the book. From that remove, a fresh exposure to it has a different taste. It is in fact difficult not to view it as a paranoid fantasy.

I have respect for John Keel's aspirations as a researcher. Several of his precepts have worked solidly into my thinking. A phrase early on in the book:

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.

has great resonance for me. I have seen far too many people start down the slippery slope of belief and become unable to climb back up.

And Belief, as Keel famously said, Is The Enemy. To accept a belief is to wear the blinders accompanying that belief, and miss things not associated with it. Beliefs are sticky things, easy to pick up but hard to set down again.

The quote above seems to support a position of investigatorial distancing from the subject, a desirable objectivity. But unfortunately for Keel's credibility he continues with the next sentence:

Once you have established a belief, the phenomenon adjusts
its manifestations to support that belief and thereby
escalate it.

That is quite a different thing from the objectivity just previously presented! "Get interested in weird stuff," Keel is saying, "and not only will you become sucked in but you will be made an active focus of it."

TMP is full of instances of Keel himself being made the focus of "the phenomenon". Odd people come to town and ask not so much about UFO sightings, but about Keel's activities and interactions with his associates. His car is broken into and notes taken, his mail is tampered with; someone seems to be tapping his phone. On face value, the classic claims of a paranoid, only in this case it is not The Government which is doing it but Someone Else, the Agents of The Phenomenon.

Even the title smacks of delusions of grandeur: where there are "prophecies", there must be a "prophet", and the attentions Keel say were paid to him would prove him to be such an important personage.

A simultaneous problem and attraction of TMP is the wealth of anomalous reports with which Keel supplies us. In Keel's universe anomalous events are happening so continuously as to make those who are not witnesses feel inadequate. In the quote above he calls paranormal phenomena "sporadic" but you wouldn't know it from this book - unusual events are so constant as to not be unusual. Just as pornography may have the effect of leading you to believe that everyone else on the planet is having more and more varied sex than you, so does "The Mothman Prophecies" make one feel unstudly for not having extraordinary experiences nightly.

"The Mothman Prophecies" is a landmark book in many ways. It helped to associate in the public's mind UFO reports with other paranormal activities such as monsters and poltergeists. (Just as Jacques Vallee's "Passport to Magonia" associated UFOs and fairy belief, in a more scholarly way.) TMP helped to standardize the image of the Men In Black, with results familiar to any moviegoer or X-Files fan. It gave us The Mothman, a critter right out of nightmare, resurrected by the movie to the degree that Mothman reports are now retroactively presented after major disasters.

But upon re-visiting this book, I have to feel that it is has less value as a representation of the events of the day, and more value as a record of one man's fascination with, and descent into, a particular form of belief. All the more ironic since Keel warns us against that belief even as he embraces it.