Window Areas

The Man Who Named the Thing

The vocabulary came first, and it came from one person.

Alva John Kiehle — writing as John Keel (March 25, 1930 – July 3, 2009) — argued across Operation Trojan Horse (1970), Strange Creatures from Time and Space (1970), and Our Haunted Planet (1971) that anomalies recur in the same geographic locations, century after century. He named those places window areas, and the term stuck so hard that people now use it without knowing anyone invented it. He coined "ultraterrestrials" for non-human entities capable of assuming various forms, and proposed a "Superspectrum": a vast electromagnetic range beyond human perception in which those intelligences operate. He popularized "men in black," giving the phrase its fixed form and its abbreviation in a 1967 Saga article — though the phrase predates him, appearing as "three men in black" in Gray Barker's 1956 book.

Here is the part his admirers skip. Keel did not believe in visiting aliens. The man who gave believers their favorite geographic concept spent his career arguing against the extraterrestrial hypothesis he is now cited to support.

There is also a sourcing problem at the foundation. In Skeptical Inquirer vol. 26 no. 3 (May/June 2002), John C. Sherwood — an author Barker had published, and later his collaborator — analyzed the Keel–Barker correspondence archived at the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library in West Virginia. What Keel wrote during his Point Pleasant investigation does not match what he published in The Mothman Prophecies (1975). In the contemporaneous account of a July 14, 1967 phone call, the caller's supposed wife is "Mrs. Gray Baker" in every reference; she becomes "Barker" only in the book. Privately Keel called Barker an inept investigator and a hoaxster; in print he praised his thoroughness. Sherwood put the contradictions to him repeatedly in 2001. Keel replied that eye surgery kept him from reading the questions, and never answered the four later requests. DOCUMENTED

The other durable term is Jenny Randles'. In UFO Reality (Robert Hale, 1983), p. 100: "This effect is so common and important that I have adopted a name for it… I call it 'the Oz Factor', after the fairytale land of Oz." In a later essay she catalogs the recurring features — a mental tingling before the event, time losing all meaning, and every ambient sound dropping away: bird song, wind in the trees, distant trains.

And Randles reports something her own side rarely quotes. Medium-definition sightings average about 2.6 witnesses per case. Close encounters — which she defines not by distance but by physical or physiological effects, car stops, burn marks — average about 1.2. Often, she adds, nobody else saw anything, "even if there were people in a position where they should have." Her gloss: "The Oz factor certainly points to consciousness as the focal point of the UFO encounter." She gives no sample size, so treat the figures as reported rather than audited. My own view: a believer's numbers pointing inward, toward the person rather than the place, is the most interesting result in this file, and it arrived from the wrong direction.

Skinwalker Ranch, In Full

512 acres in Uintah County, Utah. Zack Van Eyck's 1996 Deseret News coverage put the place into circulation. Robert Bigelow, who had founded the National Institute for Discovery Science in 1995, bought it from the Shermans that same year, with Colm Kelleher as deputy administrator running the investigations. Knapp and Kelleher's book followed in 2005. Then the federal money: AAWSAP, roughly $22 million, 2007–2012. Then Brandon Fugal in 2016. Then seven seasons and 86 episodes as of August 2026.

Bigelow reportedly paid about $200,000 — though the ranch's sale prices are exactly where the record goes soft: on Fugal's 2016 purchase Wikipedia says $500,000 in one article and $4 million in another. If the recorded sale price of American real estate is contested, calibrate your confidence in the orb footage accordingly.

Thirty years of near-continuous investigation, and searches of the Journal of Scientific Exploration — not a hostile gatekeeper, a welcoming one — for "Kelleher" and "Skinwalker" return no field results.

Now the pre-1994 question, which is the whole case. Kenneth and Edith Myers owned the ranch from 1934 to 1994. Kenneth died in April 1987; Edith left for a rest home around 1992 and died in March 1994. Neither ever spoke publicly. What exists is an interview with Kenneth's younger brother Garth, who worked the place three summers as a teenager in the 1930s, recorded at age 88 by Frank B. Salisbury, professor emeritus at Utah State, on September 3, 2009, with a follow-up call September 5, published in The Utah UFO Display (Cedar Fort, 2010), pp. 218–222.

"There was nothing, unequivocally, absolutely nothing that went on while she and my brother lived there."

"I can tell you unequivocally that up to 1992 there had never been and there never were any signs of that [UFO and similar activity]."

Be precise about what that is: one relative's uncorroborated secondhand testimony, reasoning from his conviction that his brother would have told him. No second witness has ever come forward. It is not a documented absence ALLEGED — and it is still the strongest counterweight on record, and it rarely surfaces on television. Jason Colavito's verdict on the mythology, that it is "entirely a modern creation, fabricated in the late twentieth century," belongs beside it.

Two footnotes. The regional UFO record is real: Salisbury's own 1974 book documents hundreds of Uintah Basin sightings back to the 1950s. It does not attach to this parcel. And the skinwalker — yee naaldlooshii — is Navajo. The ranch is in Ute country.

Point Pleasant and the Bridge

November 15, 1966: two couples report a large dark creature near the abandoned West Virginia Ordnance Works. The Point Pleasant Register runs it the next day under the most honest headline in this entire literature — "Couples See Man-Sized Bird … Creature … Something."

The name "Mothman" came out of press coverage nearly a decade before Keel's book; he inherited the word and built the mythology on it. Who coined it is not documented — no journalist, no paper, no first printed use. The often-repeated copy-desk story has no source behind it, and the Batman connection is surmise: the series was airing twice a week that autumn, and reference works suggest the comic villain Killer Moth, who never appeared on the show, may have colored it. Belief, not evidence. ALLEGED

Every drawing gives the creature glowing red eyes. Benjamin Radford found the only glowing-red-eyes report was secondhand — one woman quoting her father. The mundane candidates disagree with each other, which is the honest shape of the thing: WVU wildlife biologist Robert L. Smith proposed a sandhill crane; Joe Nickell proposed barred owls and ordinary eyeshine; Daniel A. Reed argued a great blue heron is likelier where no eyeshine was reported.

The Silver Bridge fell on December 15, 1967, killing 46. The cause was stress corrosion cracking in eyebar 330: a crack one-tenth of an inch deep, in a design investigators said "inadvertently made inspection all but impossible and failure all but inevitable." Kathy Byus and Maxine Turner were never recovered. The collapse produced America's first national bridge inspection program. DOCUMENTED

Keel fused the creature to the bridge in 1975 — eight years after the fact. The prophecy postdates the disaster it prophesies.

Something genuinely is wrong out at the TNT area, though. The Ordnance Works has been on the Superfund National Priorities List since September 8, 1983, at a cleanup cost around $72 million. The town has older ghosts too: Chief Cornstalk was murdered at Point Pleasant on November 10, 1777, under a flag of truce; five men were charged and all acquitted, because their fellow soldiers refused to testify. The town later decided the problem was a curse.

The festival began in 2002. It drew more than 15,000 people in 2023, to a town of 4,070.

The Triangles

Bennington

The five cases, as they actually read:

• Middie Rivers, 74, November 12, 1945. Hunting; never found.
• Paula Jean Welden, 18, December 1, 1946. Hiking the Long Trail, underdressed for a night temperature drop.
• James Tedford, 68, December 1, 1949. Mentally ill, "despondent"; last seen boarding a bus in Burlington.
• Paul Jepson, 8, October 12, 1950. A child with special needs; at the town dump.
• Frieda Langer, 53, October 28, 1950. Solved. Slipped into a stream near Somerset Reservoir; body recovered May 12, 1951, in the Deerfield River. DEBUNKED

Five people, five unrelated circumstances, five years, multiple towns — and no triangle at all until Joseph A. Citro named one decades later. A solved case is a hole in a triangle, which is why Frieda Langer is missing from most retellings.

The zone's center, Glastenbury, peaked at 241 residents in 1880 on charcoal and logging, lost its railroad in 1889, and was formally unincorporated by the Vermont legislature in 1937 with seven people left. Nine at the 2020 census. It did not become spooky. It became empty, which is cheaper.

The real legacy is institutional and literary. Within seven months of Welden's disappearance, the legislature created the Vermont State Police. Shirley Jackson, who lived down the road, turned the case into Hangsaman (1951).

Bridgewater

Loren Coleman drew it in the 1970s — roughly 200 square miles of southeastern Massachusetts — and expanded on it in Mysterious America. The contents are a conspicuously broad grab bag: UFOs, phantom panthers, giant snakes, Bigfoot, poltergeists, thunderbirds, cult animal mutilations. The historical ballast is genuine: Metacomet used the Hockomock Swamp as a strategic base during King Philip's War, and Hockomock is Algonquian for "place where spirits dwell." The mundane fact that makes it work is that Hockomock is large, wet, and genuinely hard to search.

Snippy, Who Was Not Snippy

Her name was Lady. Snippy was her sire, and belonged to Berle Lewis. Agnes and Harry King found the horse near Alamosa, in the San Luis Valley, on September 9, 1967. The story that grew out of it had her head and neck stripped by impossible cuts, no blood at the scene, and a medicinal odor.

Condon Committee investigator Wadsworth Ayer concluded there was "no evidence to support the assertion that the horse's death was associated in any way to abnormal causes." Sheriff Ben Phillips said lightning and never drove out. Two Alamosa State College students later confessed to shooting her — several weeks after the case became famous, which accounts for a bullet and not for a death. The founding case of the entire cattle-mutilation phenomenon is named after the wrong horse.

The federal answer arrived through an ordinary procurement chain. On April 20, 1979, U.S. Attorney R. E. Thompson and Senator Harrison Schmitt — the Apollo 17 astronaut, the only professional geologist to walk on the Moon — held a public meeting for about 80 people, Paul Bennewitz among them. That meeting produced the money: a $44,170 Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grant to retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel, whose 297-page report of June 1980 concluded mutilations were predominantly natural predation — while conceding that some cases held anomalies conventional wisdom could not account for. Believers quote the second half. Skeptics quote the first. Both halves are in the document.

Named critics dissent, and deserve their say. New Mexico state patrolman Gabe Valdez said reports went quiet during Rommel's tenure and believed he never saw a genuine case; RCMP Corporal Lyn Lauber said much the same. A reporting rate dropping during an official investigation has an obvious deflationary reading and a suspicious one, and the honest position is that it is evidence for neither. CONTESTED

The most elegant demonstration is not federal. A sheriff's office in Washington County, Arkansas watched a dead cow for 48 hours. Postmortem bloating tears skin into incision-like edges; blowflies and maggots take exactly the soft tissue — lips, eyes, tongue, genitals — that makes mutilation photographs so terrible. Every element of the horror is a documented biological sequence, on a schedule, for free.

"Portals," the Physics Term

Two real things, neither of them the folkloric door.

The wormhole. Einstein and Rosen, Physical Review 48, 73 (1935): the bridge exists in the mathematics and pinches off faster than light can cross it. Morris and Thorne, American Journal of Physics 56(5):395–412 (1988) — note the venue, and the subtitle, "A tool for teaching general relativity" — worked out what a traversable one would require: a spherical shell of exotic matter with negative energy density, which nobody has. Thorne did advise Carl Sagan on the wormhole physics in Contact. Ninety years of movie portals descend from a paper whose answer was no, and from a homework problem.

The magnetic portal. NASA's popular writing called flux transfer events "magnetic portals," and the internet has never given the word back. FTEs are real: they form roughly every eight minutes on Earth's dayside, are cylindrical and about the width of the planet — up to four times that — brief and dynamic, and have been sampled directly by ESA's Cluster and NASA's THEMIS. At an X-point, field strength approaches zero, field lines splice into new domains, and magnetic energy converts to heat, motion, and accelerated particles. What passes through is charged particles from the solar wind. That is the whole itinerary. NASA's own page for MMS — launched March 2015 to study exactly this — says the fields "connect and disconnect." It does not say portal.

The Control Group

Hessdalen, Norway, is the case that stays open, and it stays open properly.

At peak — December 1981 to mid-1984 — the lights were seen 15 to 20 times a week; by 2010 the rate had fallen to 10 or 20 a year. Field work ran 1983–1985. The automatic measurement station, the "Blue Box," has been recording since 1998. The EMBLA campaigns brought in Østfold University College and Italy's National Research Council. Bjørn Gitle Hauge's optical spectra identified hydrogen, oxygen, titanium and other elements; results have appeared in Acta Astronautica and, in 2024, the Journal of Applied Geophysics. Live hypotheses include incompletely understood combustion of airborne mining dust involving scandium; the Paiva–Taft model of macroscopic Coulomb crystals in a plasma ionized by alpha particles from radon decay; and piezoelectric effects in strained quartz-rich rock. Jader Monari's team tested a valley-scale geobattery by drawing enough current between rocks across the river Hesja to light a bulb.

There is no consensus. Matteo Leone has argued from inside the Italian committee that mundane candidates — the Oslo–Trondheim air route, misidentified stars and aircraft, ground-level lights in the station's own photographs — have not been systematically excluded. And the project's sensor list runs: two night-color cameras, a passive-radar SDR, an infrasound sensor, and a random event generator. One of those is a parapsychology instrument. That single line is the honest portrait of the field.

Before dismissing the whole enterprise, note what the file next door contains. Flashes above thunderstorms were reported from at least 1886 and treated as misperception for a century. C. T. R. Wilson predicted them theoretically in 1925. On July 6, 1989, University of Minnesota researchers testing a low-light camera caught one by accident. Sprites are now mainstream atmospheric physics, and NASA's 2023 UAP panel names them as the model. DOCUMENTED The hurried debunker and the true believer make the same mistake at different speeds: both decide before the instrument reports.

Erling Strand's 1984 formulation is the only defensible posture anywhere in this territory: "Whatever it is, can be measured." Norway has held it for more than forty years, and the outcome is still "we don't know" — which is a different and better kind of not-knowing than a season finale.

The Recipe

Strip the cases down and the same four parts assemble every time: isolation, a founding incident, a chronicler, and an economy.

• Skinwalker Ranch. Isolation: the Uintah Basin, Utah. Founding incident: the Sherman accounts, 1994–96. Chronicler: Knapp and Kelleher. Economy: a private institute, a $22 million federal program, 86 episodes.
• Point Pleasant. Isolation: an abandoned ordnance works. Founding incident: November 15, 1966. Chronicler: John Keel. Economy: a festival drawing 15,000-plus into a town of 4,070.
• Bennington. Isolation: clear-cut, depopulated Glastenbury. Founding incident: the 1945–50 disappearances. Chronicler: Joseph Citro. Economy: books.
• Bridgewater. Isolation: the Hockomock Swamp. Founding incident: none in particular — a grab bag. Chronicler: Loren Coleman. Economy: books.
• San Luis Valley. Isolation: a high valley, thinly populated. Founding incident: Lady, September 9, 1967. Chronicler: Christopher O'Brien. Economy: books.
• Sedona. Isolation: absent — a resort town, not a backcountry. Founding incident: none. Chronicler: unattributed; the Page Bryant naming story is unverified. Economy: jeep tours and a working New Age tourist industry.

The chronicler is load-bearing. Before the naming there is no zone — only unrelated incidents in the same county, filed in different drawers. Keel named the Mothman zone and the window area itself; Citro named the Bennington Triangle; Coleman named the Bridgewater Triangle; Knapp and Kelleher named Skinwalker Ranch.

Sedona proves it by subtraction. Four named sites — Bell Rock, Airport Mesa, Cathedral Rock, Boynton Canyon — a Harmonic Convergence organized by José Argüelles in 1987, and a functioning New Age tourist industry. The widely repeated story that psychic Page Bryant named the vortexes around 1980 through a channeled entity could not be verified against any reliable source; treat it as unverified. ALLEGED No monster, no bridge, no missing girl, no dead horse. Remove the anomaly entirely and the window area still runs fine — which suggests the naming and the economy are the only two structurally necessary parts. Adrian J. Ivakhiv's Claiming Sacred Ground (2001) treats Sedona and Glastonbury together as contested sacred places, which is the right frame: these are places people are claiming, not places that are emitting.

A window area is not where more happens. It is where more gets written down — by someone with a name for it, in a place with few competing explanations, and with somebody's reason to keep the story in repair. The ground is ordinary everywhere. What varies is who walks across it holding a notebook.