The Mothman Prophecies - John A. Keel

The excerpt of the book “The Mothman Prophecies” by John A. Keel which we heard dealt with a supernatural occurring. It revealed the superstitions of society at the time (1967). A superstition is a belief not based on knowledge (from a TOK perspective, NO belief is knowledge). It weighs more importance of certain happenings and finds patterns in these string of events to justify something. In this excerpt, it is believed by the friends of the couple that the couple had encountered the devil himself. The cause for their death is attributed to this encounter of theirs. This reasoning by society could be coherent to what actually happened but there lies a difference between coherence of events, and a coincidence. It seems to me, personally, that what really happened was nothing but a coincidence. I cannot obviously explain the presence of the hooded man at the couple’s door late one night and his rather mysterious disappearance, but it is hard to believe that it was the devil himself. It raises too many questions which haven’t been answered to date. Who is the devil? Is there a devil? There’s no proof for it, there’s no proof against it, so there is much point in arguing about it but the fact is, from a rational point of view the accident suffered by the couple could have been suffered by anyone else. I’m sure in the time span between their encounter and their death, various other deaths (or a few at least) would have occurred in West Virginia. How might society put a reason on those deaths?
By my reckoning, this event goes down as a mere coincidence. It is not evident from the extract whether others had similar encounters with the devil. It might have been any person who was stranded in the middle of the night albeit a little scary in appearance.
This type of baseless reasoning by the society at that time just reflects how easily people accepted things. They were ready to put two unrelated things (to me, at least) together and make it seem like something ominous.