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The Mothman Prophecies

The Mothman Prophecies

List Price: $6.99
Your Price: $6.29
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Terror, Tragedy, even a bit a humor!
Review: This is one of the greatest books ever written on my favorite subject: Cryptozoology. Although there is only one chapter dedicated to the Mothman itself, there are many accounts of aliens, and other "ulrtaterrestrial" beings that scared ...me. The book was tragic in a way as well, John's harrassments and the death of his friend at the end of the book. Anyway... John's wit choked a chuckle or two out of me and it takes A LOT to do that when I'm reading a book. This is a must have book for anyone! ...

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Boring
Review: Garbage. The author is no different from the other 50,000 lunatics running around the country chasing lights. The only difference is this guy wrote a book. Watch the X Files instead..

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Junk Science + Junk Writing
Review: I bought this book to get me through a 5 hour flight from Dublin to Newark, NJ. I still had about an hour of flight time to kill after finishing this horribly disapointing mess of a book What an utter waste of money and time The Mothman Prophesies is -it shares the distinction with William S. Bourough's "Exterminator" as the worst book I've ever read. You know you're in for a yawn when the scary bits involve snaps and pops on a phone line. The style and pacing are annoyingly disjointed and the text is peppered with non-sequitors.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Dull, Disjointed
Review: Two hundred pages into the book, and I'm still waiting for a cogent theme to emerge. Poorly written, poorly documented, and thin...in other words, perfect fodder for a commercial movie.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: "...and things that go bump in the night..."
Review: John Keel, like Jacques Vallee, is one of those UFO writers who obscures as much as he enlightens. Both men have a tendency to describe unquestionably physically real occurrences (smashed objects, landing traces, radiation effects), and then to try and dismiss them as some unfathomable "ultradimensional" phenomenon.

Still, Keel was at Point Pleasant during the 1966-67 UFO flap, of which Mothman was a part, and one doesn't have to buy his specious analyses to appreciate his simple good factual reporting. The best part of this book isn't even the reports of Mothman, but of all the other bizarre related UFO occurrences that came with him. This is one of the best books available discussing Men In Black, though typically Keel attempts to fit them into part of the "ultradimensional" view instead of applying Occam's Razor and calling them for what they most appear to be: government goons.

In conjunction with the movie, Keel was part of an FX T.V. special returning to Point Pleasant for a followup, which is quite interesting if you ever get a chance to see it. The movie covers only about ten percent of Keel's UFO coverage in the book.

In a new afterword, Keel oddly attempts to dismiss much UFO phenomena even as he is blatantly discussing it throughout his text, and for some reason calls the famous 1989 Voronezh sightings a Cold War hoax without once citing any source - I am an author in this field, keep pretty up to date, and have never once heard Voronezh even accused of being any kind of hoax. One does wish Keel would be a little less loose slinging broad, generalized accusations.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: They're all different pieces of the same puzzle!
Review: If you want to read one book about how creepy the truly weird can become, start with this one. This book is probably the most frightening, bizarre book ever written in this field, by a reporter who was actually there when the events happened.

Some of the reviewers that gave this book one star probably missed the point. The reason that Mothman, the men in black, and UFO reports are all in the book is that these are all different pieces of the same puzzle; they didn't all show up there together by coincidence. The book seems to jump around from topic to topic because all of these things were happening at the same time, and they are interrelated. Some readers probably don't see that (or don't want to), probably the same ones who saw the movie first and then decided to pick up the book, not realizing that "the rest of the story" is much stranger than the movie ever hinted at.

The movie, which only focused on psychic effects of the Mothman sightings, left out many important aspects of the mystery (mostly so they could add a fictional love story for Richard Gere.) A friend who hadn't read the book called the movie "incomplete", which is the best description I could give it too. But the book weaves all the bizarre elements together gradually as the events unfold, and they all need to be taken together to find some understanding of these phenomena. (Read Keel's classic "Operation Trojan Horse" for even more on solving these deep mysteries.)

Sure, this book isn't "All About Mothman", but that's a weak criticism. The movie wasn't about Mothman at all! At least the book has enough scary moments for a decade of Stephen King TV miniseries. That's more than enough reason to give it 5 stars, whether or not you believe in these types of phenomena. Read it before bedtime at your own risk.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: And the point was...?
Review: Although I prefer books with an actual plot, I don't mind reading choppy, journal-type entries if there is actually a point to all of it, or if at least such entries are entertaining. This book's are, albeit only in the beginning. After a while you'll begin to wonder if the author wanted to portray himself as a paranoid schizophrenic or if that's just a side effect of the complete lack of organization and logic in his writing style.

This book wasn't worth the time--or the title. There's hardly anything about "the mothman" in it.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Pretty disappointed
Review: I saw the movie and was intrigued enough to read the book, which I thought would maybe give a better idea of what really happened in West Virginia that year. I was disappointed to find that Mr. Keel spent a lot of time dwelling on UFO encounters and the history of UFO encounters and spent little time talking about the events in West Virginia, other than how it blended with the history of UFO-logy. The movie was more interesting, and I don't know how they developed a movie based off of this book. I didn't buy the book to read about Air Force involvement (or maybe lack thereof) in UFO sightings or about how Mr. Keel had been hunting UFOs and UFO witnesses. A big letdown.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Mothman proficies ?
Review: 257 pages covering Men in Black, lights in the sky, and phone troubles. 10 pages about the Mothman. If you want to read the same old 70's UFO stories, this is your book. If you want to read about the Mothman, buy something else.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The book is as mysterious as the Mothman
Review: 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.


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