More like John Keel Prophecies, bro talks about himself 90% of the time and my boy mothman only gets 10%. Absolutely SCAMMED ( )

uh...this is a ridiculous bunch of tripe. i have no idea why this even came to be on my to-be-read list, but i suspect that if i wasn't listening to it, it would have been the first book i ever stopped reading. (listening was more passive and i sped it up so it didn't take too long and i didn't have to pay too close attention.) i do think i could be made to be interested in these things, although i'm not a believer, but this book didn't do it.

keel seems to go back and forth with his theories, where he says that some people are obviously crazy and are unreliable, so their visitations with creatures aren't true. but then other people (who sound an awful lot like the first unreliable people) are totally reliable and their accounts are true. as, of course, are his own. (nope, he doesn't sound crazy at all. eye roll.) i assume this is supposed to build his credibility, to make us think that he doesn't just accept all of these stories at face value. it is unclear what criterion he uses to differentiate between the ones that he calls crazy and the ones that he believes.

i actually could be made to believe in the existence of extraterrestrials (or ultraterrestrials, as he wants to call them) but i have a pretty hard time believing they'd appear the way he describes them in this book. it's a super american-centered, kind of racist description of these beings. (they're all "oriental" looking or "negroid" and either outright malicious or scary or just weird and discomfiting.) why would beings from another world care about our phone lines or a car accident in a random city in america? why would they not want to be discovered if they're trying to affect goodness in the world? (why would they interfere with electrical signals and jam cameras and video/recording equipment?) why would they know how to speak english? why would they not be obviously in existence with the technology we have now to detect them? it's just utterly ludicrous from beginning to end. ( )

This was...not entirely what I was expecting. Less is about the lore of the Mothman and more about other conspiracies. ( )

I read this because I was curious about reading some kind of paranormal classic. And, uh, wow. This is an interesting collection of anecdotes about weird sightings and events, but it's also essentially a nonsensical mishmash. The book jumps around it in time, it includes multiple assertions by Keel that people are trustworthy without any particular evidence, instances of priming witnesses in advance, and is just insanely frustrating. Individual parts of he book are fascinating, but that people can take the whole thing and then assume that Keel is reliable narrator is just very disheartening. ( )

Classic. ( )