The Mothman Prophecies (1975)

John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies is not a novel but first-person investigative reportage, chronicling his 1966–67 fieldwork in the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The red-eyed, winged "Mothman" appears alongside drifting aerial lights, uncanny phone calls and black-suited "Men in Black," which Keel treats as facets of a single transmedium high-strangeness event rather than as separate cases. Crucially, he rejects the nuts-and-bolts alien-spacecraft model, proposing instead "ultraterrestrials" — entities entangled with human consciousness and belief rather than visitors from another planet. The book turned Point Pleasant from a dot on the map into a landmark of American paranormal folklore. ^[1]