Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

   (Chicago: Bird Mountain Books, 2022). ISBN: 9798848732122 It is not a stretch to say that Mothman is presently the most popular cryptid—bigger than Nessie, Bigfoot, and Dogman. It would also not be a stretch to posit that the collapse of the Silver Bridge, connecting Point Pleasant, West Virginia to Gallipolis, Ohio, until it fell within minutes on December 15, 1967 (killing 46 people), is the most tragic in U.S. history. It spurred President Johnson to form a highway commission and change the frequency and process by which bridges are inspected. Consider for a moment that these disparate events (despite persistent lore) happened in the course of almost exactly 13 months (starting with the first Mothman sightings around November 15, 1966) in the same tiny town of 6,000. No wonder Point Pleasant is almost mythical and certainly magical in bringing tens of thousands of visitors each year to its stuck-in-time Main Street and nearby McClintic Wildlife Management Area (aka t...

A Review of John A. Keel: The Man, The Myths, and The Ongoing Mysteries , by Brent Raynes (Available on Amazon and from the author, 2019). ISBN 978-1-0790-1450-1 If you are interested in the paranormal—whether it be UFOs, cryptids, or poltergeist and haunting phenomena—chances are good that you know the name John A. Keel. A journalist turned paranormal investigator and author of some of the foundational works in the field (including perhaps his most famous— The Mothman Prophecies ), Keel was cutting edge and controversial. To fully appreciate his complexity, Brent Raynes—a life-long investigator, publisher, and podcast host—delivers a text that is part biography and part survey of the areas that Keel was studying and the prevalent investigators who are still carrying on that work. I found this approach to be refreshing and appropriate given who Keel was, and, as stated in the subtitle, the “ongoing mysteries” that survive him in death. It is also an opportunity for the reader to a...

By Chad Lewis, Noah Voss, and Kevin Lee Nelson (Eau Claire, WI: On the Road Publications, 2013). ISBN: 978-0982431467 Thanks in large part to horror films and cable “reality” paranormal shows, the immense amount of time and effort legitimate paranormal investigators spend in libraries and historical societies chasing down leads is largely ignored. Most people are only interested in the “sexy” aspects of the haunting or cryptid visitation—who got chased, frightened, possessed, or injured? What dark menace is lurking in the corner? Are there “jump scares” as the investigators walk insane asylum hallways in the green glow of night-vision technology? Viewers don’t realize that paranormal investigators are in large part journalists and historians, tracking down the history that provides the context for the paranormal phenomena at play. One of the world’s best known paranormal investigators was John Keel, of Mothman fame. He was also a journalist. So was his counterpart in the film Th...

 (New Brunswick, NJ: Global Communications/Conspiracy Journal). ISBN: 9781606112489 Over the past few years, there have been dozens of documented sightings of flying humanoids over the city of Chicago, IL, reigniting interest among the general public in this phenomena, which has been a part of human art and culture since the earliest civilizations up through the well-known Mothman sightings on the Ohio River in the late 1960s. I am what is referred to among crypto-zoologists and paranormal investigators as an “experiencer,” as is my wife. In August 2009, while exploring outside of Point Pleasant, WV, where the Mothman was first seen, we saw a flying humanoid cross the road in front of us. Since that time, we have also witnessed interdimensionals. All of these experiences are detailed in our upcoming book from Visionary Living. I grew up at the Jersey Shore, near the fabled Pine Barrens, home of another winged cryptid—the Jersey Devil. If you consider human fascination with...

 by Ken Gerhard (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2013). ISBN: 978-0-7387-3720-1 The field of cryptozoology, which many consider a pseudoscience, involving the search for and study of “hidden animals” such as Bigfoot, is one that is equal parts fascinating and controversial. In the age of Reality Television (which we all know often has little to do with “reality”), there is a vast array of shows in which cryptozoologists and their teams go out into the woods and other undeveloped geographical areas in search of creatures from the Mothman to the Owlman to the Chupacabra. For those who follow this field, names like John Keel, Loren Coleman, and Stan Gordon dominate, although there is a younger, very hip group of cryptozoologists out there, doing field research, and gathering reports and doing interviews with witnesses of a plethora of sightings, all over the world. Having witnessed a few unexplainable entities, and having a number of good friends in the fields of cryptozoology and, ...