The Silver Bridge: The Classic Mothman Tale Read online

  Jimmy liked going to sleep, once he could really get started. For the real world dovetailed into one that was unreal; and in that half-lit country he could feel warm forms engulf him and a babble of voices which praised him, lifted him from one to the other as he ran a corridor of smiling, faceless people, swimming with him through pleasant vapors.

  But this half-world departed and again Jimmy was awake. The sounds in the next room had been supplanted by a familiar ritual, a reading of scriptures in the deep voice of his foster father, sometimes responded to by the soft, almost unheard voice of the woman. Tonight these took on a hollow, reverberating, unreal sound.

  Again, Jimmy felt he must reassure himself. He moved in bed toward the window, and with a hand trembling, half from the cold of the room, half from fear, jerked back the curtain with a swift, concise movement.

  There lay the scene, cold, austere, with the moving shadows of the high, fast-moving clouds. There were the familiar trees on the hilltop. There was the great oak tree with its horizontal limb.

  He fixed the limb in his stare, trying to reconstruct just how Mothman had stood, rigidly and motionless on it as it had moved up and down in the winter wind. He tried to envision just how tall the creature had been, and how long it had stared at him. Without closing the curtain, Jimmy fell back from his sitting position and turned onto his stomach, kicking at the mattress with wildly flaying feet.

  “Mothman!

  “Please come back, Mothman!

  “Mothman! Mothman! I love you, Mothman!”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE MAN WITH THE BEARD

  ‘Ah- Mr. Flame—there you are at last!”

  The phone had been ringing for some time, and my key had stuck in the door as I tried to get inside to answer. I was just returning from out of town, and tripped over a box of books while reaching the phone.

  “No, Jim,” I countered; “this is Mr. Tailfeather and I just went for a tailspin getting here before you would hang up.”

  Of course I knew that James W. Moseley was exercising his usual sense of humor. He probably was calling up to hear what I had found out about the latest Mothman cases, in which he was deeply interested. Jim, then the editor of Saucer News, earlier had made a joke, terming my interest in Mothman as similar to the fable, The Moth and the Flame. Lately he had been addressing me as “Mr. Flame.”

  “I’m calling,” he continued, “because there’s a man coming down there to see you. Don’t get me wrong. He’s one hell of a fine fellow, and you’ll enjoy talking with him. Still, however, he says he’s new to UFO research and would like to ask you some questions. One odd thing, however, is that despite his newness in the field, he knows too much about it—as much as you or I, and possibly even more.”

  “Who is he, anyhow.”

  “John Keel. You likely have heard of him.”

  “Yes, you mentioned him last week when I talked to you from Point Pleasant.”

  Then I thought of a book I had read about six months previously.

  “Now I place him,” I told Jim. “I read a book of his, one heck of a book which Randy Parks recommended to me. In fact I couldn’t get rid of the thing until I finished it, and as a result of staying up the most of the night I missed two appointments the next day. I forget the title—some sort of strange name.”

  “Jadoo is the title. I haven’t read it but I intend to.”

  I recalled the strange, compelling volume. Keel had spent a great deal of time in the Middle East, with the intention of exposing many of the miracles claimed by mystics and holy men there. He did expose some of them, but also encountered many mysteries he couldn’t fathom. Not only had the events been fascinating, but they had been described by a fluency of writing style that could come only from a highly talented author.

  “Maybe Keel’s just a better researcher than we and has covered a lot of ground in a short time,” I said, referring to his apparent wide knowledge of the UFO field.

  “That’s entirely possible. But maybe it’s just the general aura of mystery he carries with him. He has a full, black beard, and a very striking general appearance. Or, maybe it’s because he gives you the impression of not only knowing as much as we about Flying Saucers—but actually knowing a lot more—a lot that he is not telling.”

  Some beeping sounds and then a series of clicks temporarily interrupted our conversation.

  “There’s The Silence Group again,” I joked; then I told him, in an exaggerated manner, that I had just discovered the “secret” to the Saucer Mystery and planned to announce it the next day. I also threw in details about some bridges I planned to blow up.

  “You shouldn’t bait the Men In Black in such a cavalier manner,” Jim warned with mock seriousness.

  I knew that, despite our kidding, Jim, as I did, took some of the new cases involving threats by strange visitors very seriously. He had long been plagued by threatening telephone calls, and by annoying noises on the line. I had been receiving similar calls, but privately felt that if I expressed fear, the situation might get worse. So I had bugged the callers by giving them some funny business, and laughing into their ears. The calls had decreased in frequency.

  As Jim hung up and I was replacing the receiver I heard a deep, baritone voice on the line.

  “Hello! Hello! Gray Barker?”

  I put the receiver back to my ear and answered.

  “This is John Keel. Say, are you psychic? You answered the phone before it rang!”

  I explained that I had just finished a call and that his must have come through just as the other party hung up.

  “You must be psychic, too, John. I was just talking about you, with Jim Moseley.”

  After some pleasantries, John explained that he would like to interview Woodrow Derenberger. He would be in the Parkersburg area the following weekend, and needed directions to the home of the now famous contactee. Also, he would like to meet me on the trip. I suggested that we meet in Parkersburg the following Saturday.

  Keel was out of his room at the Green Acres Motel, so I walked to the adjoining Seddon’s Restaurant to look for him. From Moseley’s description, there was no doubt about the identity of the man sitting at a corner table. He had a copious black beard and was, I could see immediately, a ruggedly handsome man. He was dressed in a corduroy hunting jacket, and gave the appearance of being long and lean with a pronounced “writer’s stoop” from years bent over a typewriter. He was having coffee and poring over the local newspapers. Later I learned that, like many writers, he was a night person and usually had breakfast around 3 or 4 in the afternoon.

  As I approached, he looked up at me with intently piercing eyes, which changed to pleasantness when his face broke into a warm smile. We shook hands.

  “I see you’re not wearing your black suit today,” he chided, and I knew I immediately liked Keel. Unlike many UFO investigators, he had a good sense of humor.

  As I had dinner and he finished his afternoon breakfast, I felt out his knowledge of the UFO field, and like Moseley, was impressed. I asked him point blank how he had learned so much in so little time.

  “Simple,” he explained. “I employed a particular discipline that not too many people have. I simply read practically every UFO book ever published—and you, as an editor and publisher, know that’s pretty rough medicine. Some of the dullest stuff in the literary world appears between covers with brightly colored saucers on them.”

  “I know what you mean,” I agreed. “Unfortunately I have to read them before I publish them.”

  We swung off Route 50 a hundred yards from the restaurant, onto the short, newly-completed section of Interstate 79. Since I had arrived, a cold drizzle had set in. I told Keel it was the same kind of night during which Derenberger had allegedly experienced his initial contact.

  “That in itself is odd,” he told me. “I suppose you’ve noticed that only a small percentage of sightings take place during rain or snow.”

  I confessed that I had not thought about this.


  “Here’s another item for your ufological mill. This involves only one year, 1966, the only one I have been able to tabulate so far. Out of roughly 700 sightings I have analyzed for that year, 20% of them took place on Wednesdays, for some incomprehensible reason. Thursday was the next best day to see a saucer, with around 17%. I consider 700 to be a large enough sampling to make these figures meaningful.”

  Those two facts, though puzzling, impressed me further about Keel: they showed that he was not just a mere UFO buff, or professional writer—apparently he had conducted laborious statistical research.

  “You’ll find Derenberger an affable, hospitable man,” I told him. “You can still be skeptical, but if you demonstrate that you have an open mind, he’ll answer most any question you put to him.”

  “Well, I do have a lot of credentials,” he remarked, flourishing a leather folder which contained letters from several leading magazines, including True, Playboy, Saga, Science Digest, all verifying that he was working on UFO assignments for them. He also had a wallet filled with official press cards. I glanced through these “credentials”, impressed.

  “What?” I grinned. “No NICAP card?”

  “I don’t get abong very well with NICAP,” Keel confessed. “I’ve met Major Keyhoe several times but he frowns on my interest in the contactee aspects. It’s interesting that most of the professional writers and reporters I’ve talked with claim that they’ve had better cooperation from the Air Force than from NICAP. Some of them bypass NICAP altogether and deal mainly with the Air Force. Others, like the New York Journal-Americaan reporter who investigated the Michigan flap, have hinted darkly that they are very suspicious of NICAP’s real motives in all of this.”

  “It’s just as well,” I said. “Waving a NICAP card at Derenberger is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

  I presaged my explanation by pointing out that the Pittsburgh sub-committee of NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) was not necessarily typical of the UFO club as a whole, though it was the official investigation arm for the area.

  Members of the NICAP team made contact with Woody shortly after his story got on the news wires. They immediately stressed that he shouldn’t tell his story to any other group. Fortunately I had been able to reach him and warn him beforehand about them.

  The investigators first subjected him to what he termed “the third degree”, and insisted that one of the group, either a professional or stage hypnotist, be allowed to put him into a trance so that he would have “complete recall”. Woody, who had once, when a youngster, participated in such an experiment, could not be hypnotized and was told by the performer that he was “not a good subject”.

  Next, one of the group suggested that he take a written psychological test, supervised by a local psychiatrist. Woody hastily agreed, but with the stipulation that all members of the NICAP team take the same test at the same time, under the same controls. The group quickly reneged, and soon retreated, but with another adjuration not to give information to any rival group.

  Derenberger’s initial annoyance with the visitors was aggravated when a local member of the organization managed to obtain his unlisted telephone number and persisted in calling him night after night, always inquiring if he had talked with other UFO investigators.

  (Later Derenberger would voluntarily retain the services of a well-known Parkersburg psychiatrist, who would give him clinical psychological tests. Although the reports were privileged by medical ethics, the doctor did state in an on-the-air telephone conversation on the Long John Nebel Show, over WNBC, New York, that he had found the subject to be sane and with no obvious neuroses.)

  I slowed the Ford Wagon as the section of completed interstate highway ended. We pulled onto U.S. 21, then took a left on a side road which would lead us to Derenberger’s home. The cold drizzle had stopped and the sky was clearing. I saw the inviting lights from Woody’s large, two-story farmhouse beckoning from a rise in the terrain.

  We swung off onto the graveled driveway, then slowed to a creep as we inched our way between two lines of cars, parked on both side of the narrow strip. People were sitting silently in the vehicles, appearing only as dark forms. Some of them quickly turned their faces from us and some seemed to huddle lower. Taken within the context of the evening, their immobility and silence produced an unreal effect—as if they represented scores of window dummies in darkened stores at midnight.

  Only one such vehicle displayed signs of animation. A gaunt shadow of a man in a station wagon apparently filled with electronic gear seemed to twist knobs on a blue illuminated dial, probably a stero tape player. Faint strains of weird music (I thought I recognized Danse Macabre) emanated from the vehicle.

  “Although some of the press and a lot of people around here have given me a bad time and called me everything from a nut to a bunco artist,” our host remarked, “I think those cars out there will testify that some people take this seriously.”

  Woody explained that after some Parkersburg residents had reported seeing a low-flying UFO near his house, people came there every night, hoping the saucer would return. They didn’t annoy him greatly, however, for they usually sat quietly in their cars without bothering him or his family.

  He was disturbed, though, by a few of the visitors, who had been seen with rifles in their cars.

  “I must warn you of one thing,” he adjured. “I know you’ll want to get out and look around, but I wouldn’t stray into the woods if I were you. A few people hide out there with guns, and I suppose they would shoot at the space people if they appeared. Naturally Indrid Cold and the others know of this, and just don’t come around when there is danger.”

  “Indrid Cold?” I asked. “You never did mention a first name in your reports! You referred to the space man only as Mr. Cold.”

  As Keel’s mouth opened in amazement and as I dove for a notepad in my briefcase, Derenberger began to unfold a tale almost unique, even in the fantastic lexicon of saucer contact stories.

  One night late in December, 1966, he had come home much later than usual. The usual watchers had gone home, and he was locking his Ford Econovan when he saw two figures standing near his car.

  “Do not be frightened,” one of them assured him telepathically. “I am Indrid Cold and this is my panion, Carl Ardo (in their many conversations, Cold spoke of Ardo, obviously an outer-space form of co-pilot, as his ‘panion’.)”

  They told him they came from a planet called Lanulus, 30 light years away, near the constellation Ganymede. Lanulus was very much like Earth, except its people never had wars, and during the summer they wore no clothing. Due to their skills at mental telepathy, they had no secrets between one another, and that was the reason for their peaceful existence, Derenberger believed.

  Cold had a wife, Kimi; two other crewmen were named Tonni and Daryl. During one contact Cold was accompanied by a man named Clinnel, from the planet Cerenabus, and a woman, Elvaine Kletaw.

  During later visits Cold and his “panions” accepted his hospitality and came inside his house, sampled his Earth food and complained that it tasted “bland”. When Derenberger complained of ulcers, Cold gave him medicine which completely cured him. After several preliminary contacts, the spacemen took him aboard their craft, and flew him to a mother ship which crossed the vast distances to their planet, apparently in minutes, and set him down for a visit. The people of Lanulus, however, appeared apprehensive and even fearful of the Earth visitor, until Cold and Ardo convinced Derenberger he should remove his clothing so he would appear more like them. After he agreed, the people accepted him more warmly.

  “Have you had any visits lately, say in the past week or so?” John queried.

  Derenberger answered in the negative, but did feel that one or more of the ships was in the general area at that time.

  “When they are near I can contact them mentally. I can’t promise anything, but if it’s at all possible, I’ll concentrate and ask him to appear.”

  I
could detect a look of obvious skepticism on John’s countenance, and I, myself, suspected that Derenberger would get out of this one by saying he could not make mental contact that particular night. He excused himself and left us, while we talked to Mrs. Derenberger and some neighbors who claimed to have seen the ship land (though they had not been close to the occupants). After some time, possibly a quarter hour, Woody quietly rejoined the group, smiled and told us, “I can’t promise it, but I believe that if you’ll come out into the yard you will see something very unusual.”

  He invited us to look closely toward the end of a long valley. Gradually we could make out twinkling lights.

  “Let’s walk down that way,” John suggested.

  At closer proximity, and with the further clearing of the atmosphere, it became obvious that the lights were not the heralds of some otherworldly visitation, but quite mundane torches of Terra: lights from the nearby city.

  I think that John, as I, was somewhat disappointed; for despite our zeal for objectivity, I believe the both of us at that moment would have liked to have proved Derenberger’s claim.

  Suddenly John’s dejection was interrupted by surprise.

  “Look up there!” he cried.

  Moving up a ridge, in front of us and at the right of the valley, was a series of blinking lights.

  “Let’s go up there!” he urged.

  We took off across the field, but were temporarily delayed by a wire fence. John reached it first and started to throw his long legs over it. Suddenly he let out a yelp and sailed over the fence, sprawling headlong in a big mud puddle on the other side.

  “Don’t touch it!” he yelled as he struggled to his feet. “It’s an electric fence!”

  “Are you hurt?” I asked, backing away from the fence.

  “Just a little soggy,” he grunted, brushing at the mud that covered him from head to foot. He looked around uneasily. “Well, as long as I’m here I might as well check out those lights.”

  He started off alone into the darkness, rapidly disappearing up the ridge. A moment later Woody and his friends joined me.