From the Archives: This is the first post I made after the introductory post.
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The Meaning of “Indrid Cold”
–Andy Colvin ©2005
The meaning of “Indrid Cold” is simple. In order to approach such Mothman riddles all one needs, it seems, is a basic knowledge of either Hindu mythology, Buddhist mythology, Celtic mythology, Judeo-Christian mythology, Aboriginal or Native American mythology. In this case it turns out to be a particularly Hindu case, or at least one that uses Hindu terminology–but all of the above traditions provide ample clues for deciphering such symbolic codes and “name-game” mysteries. The “superspectrum,” as John Keel termed it, has embedded itself into our very consciousness, and this is reflected in our religion, our language, and our mental coding (itself essentially a binary electrical circuit, tending to “spin” conceptual thinking toward dualistic poles such as “good” or “bad,” angelic or demonic, and so on).
After having a basic understanding of one of the above mythologies, one then probably needs either a few coincidences to occur, or something else in one’s experience that one can draw from, in order to gain insight into the answer to the riddle. Luckily (or sometimes not), these kind of “coincidences” seem to occur fairly often in the lives of Mothman witnesses. This may be one of the reasons this phenomenon exists: to give us feedback from the universe. For some this is a blessing, for others it is a curse. Some witnesses get so many psychic pieces of information coming at them that it tends to make them a bit paranoid; others make fast decisions and judgements, internally, which baffle others (because others cannot sense the same input). I am reminded of the fact that the Indians initially couldn’t see the ships of Columbus because their brains couldn’t process it. A shaman had to spend many days looking at where the ships were said to be, in order to finally see them. At times, when I am trying to explain my Mothman experiences (which words really cannot express) and everyone is shaking their heads and thinking I am nuts, I feel like that shaman.
In addition to having seen the creature myself, I have a long string of synchronicities and seemingly profound, symbolic events in my life that seem to be related not only to the “Mothman” of WV, but the “Thunderbird” of the Blackfoot and Cherokee (my blood tribes), and the “Garuda” of the Nath and Dzogchen Orders (my spirit tribes). In my opinion, these creatures all come from the same source. I wonder if all Mothman witnesses aren’t each given particular “clues” in the form of dreams, pre-cognitions, telepathic messages, unusual meetings with unusual beings, and other means to getting us to closer to what is going on around us. My discussions with other Mothman witnesses reveal such a pattern. Witnesses such as Faye DeWitt and Marcella Bennett speak of “hunches” alerting them to potential dangers. But it could go even further than that, in the sense that the universe, via the superspectrum (in conjunction with our own minds), could be sending out information about specific, powerful human events, like the defeat of Chief Cornstalk and the Eastern tribes (and his curse on Pt. Pleasant), the collapse of the Silver Bridge, the collapse of the Elk River bridge in 1904, or the various assassination prophecies documented by John Keel. This information seems to come in the form of visions, sounds, messages, seemingly random coincidences, and codes to witnesses.
I interviewed Keel for my documentary on Mothman, and asked him about Indrid Cold. Keel seemed to feel that much of the Cold story is fabricated. He suspects that Indrid Cold was speaking “through Woody Derenberger” on the phone. Having just interviewed a Bigfoot contactee myself who apparently feels that Bigfoot speaks through him, and even writes letters through him, I can attest to being put off by the thought that the witness is helping to create his own “evidence.” Still, looking at it another way, I think there is a lot that is interesting about trying to figure out what is behind a phenomenon that finds contactees feeling that they can “channel” for, or “telepath” to, an MIB, Mothman, or Bigfoot. I personally feel that Derenberger was not a hoaxer, but may have a been a victim of a hoax himself, or perhaps even a victim of mind control. The Air Force involvement in his case, the psychiatric interest, and his week-long debriefing at NASA headquarters are all possible indicators of this.
In looking at this Indrid riddle, though, the first thing I did was to see the name “Indrid Cold” not as a name, but as a descriptor. The main word appeared to be “Cold,” with “Indrid” as a modifier. I ran some anagrams of “indridcold” and got lots of interesting little references to things from the Mothman story. But nothing solid. Then, I turned it around 180 degrees and started looking at “indridcold” not for its constitutent parts, but looking at it as a constituent part of a even bigger word. I asked myself if there might be any relevance to the word “indridcold” being spelled out of larger words, and could those larger words represent potential leads, or “name-game” clues?
I got a couple of odd pieces of information using these off-beat methods. Knowing that Keel had observed, in the 1960s, that most of the entities channeling through contactees had names that sounded like “synthetic fabrics,” I decided to try and fit “indridcold” into some names of petrochemical companies (who manufacture such items). One company I found that fit used the acronym “IRP.” This was a company that subcontracted to Union Carbide, and which had employed many of the men in my neighborhood in WV [the company has now moved its headquarters]. I myself had worked there, and I was good friends with the son of the owner. I thought back to my experiences at this company, and realized there were some leads there to other parts of the Mothman story, such as the company’s original location at the confluence of the Elk and Kanawha Rivers–where a bridge collapsed on Dec. 15th, 1904 (same day of the year as the Silver Bridge collapse). The owner’s family lived on a bluff overlooking the confluence. Several interesting characters with Mothman links lived in that particular neighborhood. Psychic abductee Harriet Plumbrook had dreams of the bluff prior to ever seeing it, and feels the location is a geomagnetic source for the phenomenon–as do I (we visited there during our 2003 Mothman Tour documentary). I was also reminded of a story my mother told me when I was a little boy: that Magic Island, at the confluence of the Elk/Kanawha Rivers, was haunted by “the ghost of a little girl.” Over the years, the memory of the bridge collapse itself had faded from local memory, yet the death of one small child (apparently caused by official WV Transportation Department neglect) had certainly not. When I later found, in 2002, that one could literally “see” a vision of the 1904 bridge collapse if one visited the so-called “vortex” on upper Woodward Dr. under the right conditions, my suspicions about the reality of string theory and “overlapping dimensions” of time/space seemed further confirmed. I had once again clearly seen the superspectrum in operation.
Another odd reference I found was that “indridcold” fit into the official Canadian name of the chemical company that leased land on both sides of the I-64 bridge in Dunbar, WV, where the famous Tad Jones sighting occurred. That company: Union Carbide. This held significance for me because not only because of the Jones sighting, but because my father (who grumbled that “the government” was behind Mothman) worked for Union Carbide. This spot on I-64 is where I saw a large flying silhouette behind our car. It is also where Shamblin Stone is now located [Mr. Shamblin, coincidentally, now owns our old family farm on the Middle Fork of the Pocatalico River, near Devil’s Hollow.] The I-64 bridge is within a couple of blocks of where my niece, Sharon Moore, lived (after she moved away from our neighborhood), and where she often saw “glowing letters and symbols” at night. Btw, years later in another house in Mound, directly across from the Blaine Island Carbide facility (once sacred to the Indians), Sharon saw both a “satyr” and a creature similar to Mothman in her bedroom. One interesting detail of this was that one had to use the Canadian name of Union Carbide Canada, Ltd. to make “indridcold” fit into it. When I “googled” Carbide’s Canadian facility as a simple reference check, one of the first ones to come up was a book about the Martin Luther King assassination. This reference stated that Union Carbide was the only entity from which James Earl Ray could have gotten the classified personnel information he used to construct his famous Eric Galt alias. The real Eric Galt was a security-cleared employee of Union Carbide, at a time when the company was making top-secret “proximity fuses” for missiles at its Canadian facilities.
Sometimes, it seems that these strange Mothman events occurred when and where they did so that they could be signposts for us later. I’m not suggesting that anyone at Union Carbide in particular committed a crime, all I’m saying is that the company is one of the symbols of the Mothman story and should be appreciated, and perhaps studied, for that reason. Union Carbide was known for its pioneering work in handling both “hot” materials like uranium (many of the uranium mines in the Four Corners area are operated by Union Carbide) and extremely “cold” technologies. Carbide could “super-cool” metals and materials like no other company of the time. It was the premier “chemical factory” in the area where Keel was told a “chemical factory” might blow up. In the early 1960s, Carbide already had a complete simulation of the Martian landscape built so that they could test various substances and materials. While various conspiracy theorists have speculated about the role of Union Carbide in the Jonestown massacre (which occurred on land previously owned by Union Carbide), or the role of the petrochemically-connected Layton family (of WV) in the Jonestown tragedy, or the supposed role of Jonestown’s mind-controlled “zombie killers” in political assassinations similar to those prophesied to Keel, the connection of these to the Mothman events remains tenuous, at best. Still it is of interest to me, as an artist who has written about right-wing political control in the art world, that a major stockholder in Union Carbide, Dede Wilsey, is also the most powerful art maven in San Francisco. It might also be of some interest to know if Keel interviewed any Mothman witnesses who had experienced prophecies of the MLK assassination [note: I have now confirmed that MLK assassination probphecies did indeed exist in relation to Keel’s investigation. It is found in my TV interview with Keel done in 2003. I had simply overlooked it before.]
But back to Indrid. I decided to do another turnabout and look at “Indrid” as the subject, and “cold” as the modifier. This would prove to be much more beneficial at getting at the root of the “real” Indrid. The trouble, however, is that “Indrid” is not a word we know in America. I had to look for a word that was similar to Indrid. After reading Ted Holiday’s work connecting historical dragons (and indirectly, Mothman) to flying saucers and earthworks, it somehow popped into my head that the Hindu god “Indra” (the god of fire) might be the connection I had been missing all along. Although there are many tales of Indra and many tales of Garuda in Hindu legend, I happened to find one that phrased things in such a way that, suddenly, it all made sense. The wording that did the trick stated that repeatedly, throughout eons, “the Garuda puts out the fire of Indra.” Garuda (or Bird-Man) literally consumes the fires of Indra, rendering them “cold.” The two, the Birdman and Indra, are always very closely associated in Hindu literature. When one sees this relationship, suddenly one sees that only thing on earth that can be a cooled-down form of Indra is: the Garuda. And since Indra is no longer the real, bonafide “hot” Indra when he is cooled down and in Garuda form, he can only be properly termed “like Indra” or “of Indra” (i.e., “Indrid”).
In essence, Indrid Cold was telling us that he was Garuda in his most “cooled-down,” or “cold” form–that of a physical human!
Of course, none of these ancient facts about Hinduism, nor Keel’s data showing that paranormal creatures do go through visible temperature and wavelength changes, prove that Indrid Cold was not a hoax. If John Keel feels there is a hoax there, there probably is. But is the Cold story a regular bogus hoax, or perhaps a “reverse hoax” intended to leak accurate, inside information? Regardless of whether Derenberger was manipulated by a disinformation hoax, or by a truth-leak hoax, such a hoax had to perpetrated by someone who knew something about Hinduism. Was this an intelligence operative who had recently been to Tibet helping the CIA get the Dalai Lama over the mountains to India? Very few people in the West knew much about Hinduism back then. Keel certainly knew it (since he originally put the term “Garuda” in the title of his Mothman Prophecies book), but so did the early cryptozoologists who traveled to Nepal to “search for Yeti” with the Tom Slick/CIA Bigfoot expedition! As one can see, knowing the probable meaning of the Indrid Cold name only begs more questions. One of the most pertinent is the fact that many of the UFO contactees of that era were given messages pertaining to the White Brotherhood of Tibet and Thule Ultima, both standard beliefs of the Nazi occultists (who were heavily involved in Tibetan research) and Operation Paperclip scientists spirited out of Germany (through the Vatican “ratlines”). These Nazis were given jobs in the CIA and on major military bases like Wright-Patterson in Ohio. Amazingly, none other than Werner von Braun was in put in charge of NASA security (which also had a major field office in Ohio).
Update: Within the past few weeks, I have been informed that one of the mothers in our neighborhood (now in her late 70s) has identified Dr. Alan Roberts (Woody Derenberger’s psychiatrist) as being the same psychiatrist who was treating my best childhood buddy on Woodward Dr. This buddy was assailed by many different forces, including aliens, Mothman, and MIBs. His father was an “engineer” at Carbide’s Tech Center (a world-class scientific lab and think tank, now rumored to be involved in “data-mining” against US citizens). Tad Jones, as well the man communicating with Keel after Jones disappeared (named Jarrett), were also “engineers” at the Tech Center. My buddy considered himself to be a warlock (at age 8!) who would eventually work at NASA (as predicted by the spacemen). This turned out to be true. His mother, a former Miss WV, also works at NASA. In 1967, this buddy introduced me to a vision of the future (from 2001, a year we always fantasized about) that could only be seen while standing in a certain spot (supposedly designated by the “aliens”). The vision showed buildings being bombed in NYC! After seeing this vision (of 9/11) and then the beginnings of scenes from my adult life, I freaked out, pulled myself away, and began a process of disentangling myself from my buddy. But I never forgot what happened. Recent reports that a plane crashed south of Pt. Pleasant on the day of 9/11/01 (on the exact flight path of the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon), give credence to the theory that a missile was used on the Pentagon (due to the fact that Flight 93 was late on take-off and the rendezvous between, and simultaneous first-strike by, these two planes was botched). It also explains one of the reasons why two boys in WV, in 1967, were shown precognitions of the attack. Another reason might be that the same people involved in the other prophecies of the Mothman (i.e. carrying out assassinations, downing bridges, etc.) were the same people behind the hijackings, and the Garuda wanted this message to somehow get out. To date, an outline of such connections can indeed be found in the writings of a handful of researchers working in the tradition of the late Mae Brussell (i.e., John Judge, Alex Constantine, David McGowan, etc.).
I have since come to find out that magical “workings” of any magnitude require “at least two 6-8 yr. olds” in order to manifest. Since my buddy and myself built a shrine around the time of Mothman, it is possible that we unwittingly played some role in unleashing these forces. Regardless, there are many questions to be asked about what Roberts’ may have been doing in our neighborhood. It is possible that we were all being visited by Indrid Cold since, according to Derenberger, Cold was tracking Roberts’ movements. My father may have been conveniently murdered, and ushered away into the afterlife, by none other than Cold. The fact that Tad Jones left a lucrative engineer job to be an “appliance salesman” (a typical cover for gov’t. agents) and then completely disappeared is suspicious, especially since his new job probably put him into contact with Woody Derenberger (also an appliance salesman). While the Army/Air Force was massaging the public aspects of these cases, could the Navy (who still leases to Carbide/Dow/Bayer) have been using the petro-chemical plants’ best and brightest to track, manipulate, or create UFO contactees behind the scenes?