The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel
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Book Reviews of The Mothman Prophecies
Book Review: Good Read
Summary: 5 Stars
Good read. If half of what is written in this book is true; then are world is much stranger than we can imagine.One of my favorite books.Book Review: Good read on Mothman Prophecies through Amazon
Summary: 5 Stars
Really good read. Interesting, fact finding information was researched very well.
Keeps you reading, not boring at all.
Book Review: The real story
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the real story behind the movie. This story is more compelling than anything Hollywood could make up.Book Review: A classic, but more scifi than documentary
Summary: 4 Stars
The Mothman Prophecies is a book by author John A. Keel which claims to tell the true story of mysterious events occurring in the eastern United States during the late 1960s. The tale is told entirely from Keel's vantage point as a first-hand investigator (and experiencer) of the paranormal happenings in question.
I must say that I began reading The Mothman Prophecies with certain expectations. I had previously been exposed to the exploits of the infamous mothman by various authors in other cryptozoology texts. There was no question that this book would be the authoritative, original source material from which most other writers have since taken inspiration. I was surprised, however, at the diversity of the matter which awaited me.
On the positive side, Keel is an excellent and engaging author. He writes colorfully, and offers a work that will not likely bore any of his audience. It's also nearly impossible to argue that this story isn't a "must read" for those interested in the Mothman, or any of the number of other strange incidents which Keel documents here. Having had the unique privilege of investigating and experiencing these events in person, as they were happening, the author boasts a definite authority and purity in documentation. It's obvious that The Mothman Prophecies has heavily influenced many modern researchers in various fields of the unexplained, making it an entry hard to ignore on any serious paranormalist's reading list. I must also say that, even if one were to discount its potential as a true story, the book does make a fairly good classic sci-fi page turner in its own right.
Enjoyment and intrigue aside, I did develop some rather serious criticisms of The Mothman Prophecies which I feel could negatively impact some readers. As with most texts, the degree to which these cons influence your personal experience will vary.
First off, Keel blatantly and repeatedly breaks one of the cardinal rules of good scientific documentation; he continuously introduces theories and opinions into his writing. The Mothman Prophecies is laced with personal interpretations of the phenomena being witnessed. In fact, something that really surprised me on several occasions, were the seamless way in which the author would offer what are essentially his beliefs as solid fact, with nary a disclaimer. It's not uncommon for paranormal investigators to attempt to draw conclusions from their works, but this goes well beyond that. Keels repeatedly debunks and downplays certain popular institutions, including UFO groups and alien visitation theories, while simultaneously replacing them with his own views. He ironically disclaims one ideology as being scientifically unsupportable, while concurrently supplanting it with his own, equally unsupported, theories. Keel regularly writes in a very matter-of-fact manner with explanations for curiosities that I do not believe have ever been accounted for scientifically, even to this day.
The lack of good scientific method is also not limited to the frequent disclosure of Keel's convictions. I additionally found myself curious how someone as dedicated to investigating the paranormal as the author must have been, could still be so unprepared to gather any data other than witness statements and personal observations. Throughout the book, Keel documents a multitude of occasions where he witnessed anomalous objects and individuals, both by chance and by intent. All this time, he never mentions taking a single photograph or measurement of those in question. In one chapter, we hear how he repeatedly visits a certain hilltop at night to view a recurring colorful orb in the distance, yet he apparently never thought to take photographs, nor to simply go and wait in the location where these lights actually appeared. His lack of ability to take advantage of the seemingly ubiquitous and predictable phenomena makes the sheer legitimacy of some of the accounts suspect.
Getting back to expectations, having already learned of the Mothman character from other sources, I had come into The Mothman Prophecies expecting to read an exhaustive, authoritative volume of documentation on one of my personal favorite cryptids. I was rather surprised to discover, then, that the Mothman creature really only plays a limited roll in the proceedings. This book is absolutely not the standard investigators report that one might expect to find on other monsters such as Sasquatch or Nessie. Mothman here is little more than a supporting character in a large cast of humans, weirdos, monsters, and anomalous objects. The majority of the book, particularly the latter half, is actually spent away from the Mothman, and enters into a huge variety of lights in the sky, men-in-black, UFO contactees, phone tapping, and lots of miscellaneous strangeness. In fact, Keel relates such a variety of bizarre happenings from this period in his life, that it may greatly strain ones ability to believe that the story is the least bit sane and true. The author, rather than being the normal independent observer, actually becomes the central character in what would more easily be viewed as an old school sci-fi tale, had the cover of the book not disclaimed it to be "based on a true events."
My final gripe, although smaller than the aforementioned bits, is that the writing style here has a tendency to be disjointed. Characters seem to pop up in various chapters, often for only a paragraph or two at a time. It makes remembering exactly who is where and doing what across chapters more confusing than it should be, and occasionally detracts from the ability to follow the overall story. The chapters, likewise, are somewhat hit or miss. They don't seem to follow any specific convention, some based on people, others on a block of time, and still others on a specific phenomena. The chapters themselves are also subdivided into numbered sections, in a way which at times felt arbitrary and pointless. While there are no doubt multiple ways to tell a complex and chronological story of this nature, it would have been nice had the author and editors simply picked one theme and stuck with it.
Ultimately, The Mothman Prophecies is an interesting work, to say the least. If you want a good paranormal story, you certainly need to look no further. Additionally, if you're in the market for a first-hand account of the origin of the Mothman or even the other paranormal events around Point Pleasant in the late 1960s, this is really a must read. On the other hand, if you're a scientifically minded individual looking for responsible investigation of the unexplained, you're likely to be disappointed by Keel's very human (and very biased) manner of recounting events, which greatly stains belief and credibility.
Rating: 3.5/5
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Matt LaPlante
8/3/2008
Book Review: The book is as mysterious as the Mothman
Summary: 4 Stars
John A. Keel's The Mothman Prophecies, as a book, is just as intriguing and mysterious as the topics he is writing about. In a nutshell, the book reads as if Keel kept a loose-leaf journal about paranormal events, both reported to and experienced by him, over the course of many years, then decided to throw all of the individual pages in the air, let them land as they might, stuck a couple hundred of them in a notebook and sent them off to his publisher. There is no novel-like narrative in The Mothman Prophecies, and it's not in chronological order-instead it choppily bounces back and forth and for its entire length.The funny thing is that it works for the most part. I'm hesitant to say that the atemporally schizophrenic nature of the journal entries was an intentional, clever move on Keel's part, but it just may have been. The net effect is to mirror the inexplicability, seeming pointlessness, and skewered nature of the phenomena that Keel is talking about, but unfortunately, sometimes the attention-deficit-disorder-ladenness of the book is just aggravating. The primary thing to remember, if the book sounds interesting enough to you to tackle it (not that it's longer than your average pulp novel), is not to expect anything like a normal plot. There's an endless parade of names and events, many of which are only mentioned in one section, and it takes awhile to stop thinking that you're going to have to remember them to understand the story later. There really is no story. But once you stop waiting for a story to begin, The Mothman Prophecies should be more enjoyable to you.
There are plenty of reasons you might be interested in this book. Of course, there's the surface topic-a series of paranormal events ranging from UFO's to flying "birdmen" (the Mothman) to misbehaving telephones. If you're at all a student of the paranormal, you'll want to read this. Or, you probably already have. For me, I was initially intrigued by the film and the claim that it was based on true events (although publisher Tor calls it fiction on the copyright/catalog data page). But once I started reading, I quickly forgot about the film and instead was fascinated with the realization that The Mothman Prophecies must have been one of Chris Carter's primary sources for various plots of The X-Files.
If you're an X-Files fan, The Mothman Prophecies will tie the show together for you in an unprecedented way. After you read this book, the "mytharc" shows (all the alien conspiracy stuff) will no longer seem disconnected from the monster shows. And you'll frequently find yourself reminded of specific episodes correlated to specific journal entries in the book.
Undoubtedly, you'll find yourself wondering at some point how much of The Mothman Prophecies is fact and how much is fiction. Tor calling the book "fiction" doesn't help towards taking it too seriously, and neither does Keel's frequent references to UFO-monger Gray Barker, who was exposed as making up at least some of the things he wrote about--see, for instance, John C. Sherwood's May/June 1998 article in Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Joe Nickell has also prepared a "debunking" of the Mothman for Skeptical Inquirer's March/April 2002 issue. I'm nothing if not a skeptic, but Nickell doesn't actually debunk much. He suggests that Mothman sightings were actually sightings of owls, and that's about all there is to his article. Keel's book, and the film that prompted Nickell's article, is about much more than can be explained by sighting an owl and mistaking it for something else.
From my standpoint as a philosopher, there's something even more interesting about Keel's book. It's a wonderful example of instrumentalism. Instrumentalism, briefly, is the idea that theories about phenomena, insofar as they depart from simply recounting the phenomena in a dry manner, are interchangeable. That is, there are a multitude of possible theories for the metaphysics "behind" any observed event, and even allowing Occam's Razor (which is just a convention, not a fact, so we need not allow it-it could be misleading), any of them that accounts for the observed event is just as good as any other.
Of course Keel sometimes leads us on by simple juxtaposition of easily explainable events-even going so far as implying that there could have been something paranormal about the missing minutes on the Watergate tapes-and he could be making up a sizable percentage of the anecdotes to entertain us, but that's ultimately why you should read this book anyway-for entertainment. It's also, even if fiction, a fascinating psychological artifact, and even as fiction with plenty of structural quirks, an entertaining read.