The Mothman Prophecies

We listened to the story from John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies which deals with paranormal occurrences. The story leads to much discussion and argument from a TOK point of view and leads us to ask the eternal question – Can we believe everything that we see?”

In the excerpt, a couple in West Virginia encounters a “fearsome apparition” in the middle of a rainy night. The apparition was a stranger, dressed in black, requesting to use the phone since his car had broken down. The couple assume that he is the devil incarnate himself and shut the door on his face. The couple’s friends agree that they had encountered the Mothman. The belief is further strengthened by the fact that the couple die in a fatal car incident. However, according to me, the encounter with the stranger had nothing to do with the couple’s death. It was a matter of coincidence which served to fuel a belief of the Virginian people.

I think that the couple presumed that the stranger was the devil because that is what they wanted to believe. Mark Twain famously said that ‘you cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.’ The Virginians in the 1960s had a preconceived superstition and they seemed to link all unusual happenings to it. There can be two reasons attributed to it.

The first is the ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ fallacy which is based upon the mistaken notion that simply because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event. However, many events follow sequential patterns without being causally related.

The second reason can be that ‘believing is seeing’ rather than the other way around. We do not shape our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is influenced by our beliefs. Often, we do not see what is there, but rather what we want to or expect to see. The stranger could have been genuinely seeking the help of the couple but they saw him as the devil because they wanted to see that. The whole setting of a stormy night, the black clothes and the strange accent could have also supplemented their perception of the stranger as the devil.

The reasoning of the couple and their friends seems illogical to me. Their belief in the devil cannot be justified, but at the same time, it cannot be disproved either. According to me, a mere stranger stranded in the middle of a rainy night, was mistaken to be the devil since the people of West Virginia believed in the devil. The couple’s death was unrelated to the mysterious man’s appearance at the doorstep. According to me, their death cannot be explained through that incident but the people in that time wanted to believe that and so they did.

I will end with a quote by William James – “Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.”