Indrid Cold And All His Splendor

The case of Woody Derenberger and his encounter with the extraterrestial "Indrid Cold" is one of the most famous and publicized UFO contact stories in history. Woody reported that he met an alien visitor on a stretch of road off Interstate 77 near Mineral Well, WV. The alien said it was from a planet named Lanulos and communicated with Derenberger through telepathy. His story was partly collaborated by other witnesses claiming to have seen strange lights in the same area during the same time. Over time his story blew up the media and became an overnight sensation, prompting other witnesses to come forth about similar accounts of alien contact. Indrid Cold would contact Derenberger several more times, even taking him aboard his spaceship and transporting him to Lanulos.  Below is an excerpt from John Keel's book, The Mothman Prophecies, (1975) about Woody Derenberger and Indrid Cold:

Woodrow Derenberger is a tall, husky man with close-cropped sandy hair, twinkling blue- gray eyes, and an honest open face. In 1966 he was in his early fifties but looked considerably younger. His life had been normal to the point of being mundane—a long succession of modest jobs, hard times, constant movement from one rented house to another pursuing no particular ambition. Surviving. Feeding and clothing his attractive young wife and two children. Now he was working as a salesman for an appliance company and living in a simple two-story farmhouse in Mineral Wells, West Virginia. It was a good time in his life.

At 7 P.M. on November 2, 1966, he was heading home in his panel truck after a long, hard day on the road. The weather was sour, chill, and rainy. As he drove up a long hill outside of Parkersburg on Interstate 77 a sudden crash sounded in the back of his truck. He snapped on his interior lights and looked back. A sewing machine had fallen off the top of a stereo, but there didn't seem to be any real damage. A car swept up behind him and passed him. Another vehicle seemed to be following it. He eased his foot on the accelerator. He had been speeding slightly and thought it might be a police car. The vehicle, a black blob in the dark, drew alongside him, cut in front, and slowed.Woody Derenberger gaped in amazement at the thing. It wasn't an automobile but was shaped like "an old-fashioned kerosene lamp chimney, flaring at both ends, narrowing down to a small neck and then enlarging in a great bulge in the center." It was a charcoal gray. He slammed on his brakes as the object turned crossways, blocking the road, stopping only eight or ten feet from it. A door slid open on the side of the thing and a man stepped out.

"I didn't hear an audible voice," Woody said later. "I just had a feeling ... like I knew what this man was thinking. He wanted me to roll down my window."

The stranger was about five feet ten inches tall with long, dark hair combed straight back. His skin was heavily tanned. Grinning broadly, his arms crossed and his hands tucked under his armpits, he walked to the panel truck. He was wearing a dark topcoat. Underneath it Woody could see some kind of garment made of glistening greenish material almost metallic in appearance.

Do not be afraid. The grinning man did not speak aloud. Woody sensed the words. We mean you no harm. I come from a country much less powerful than yours. He asked for Woody's name. Woody told him. My name is Cold. I sleep, breathe, and bleed even as you do.

Mr. Cold nodded toward the lights of Parkersburg in the distance and asked what kind of place it was. Woody tried to explain it was a center for business and homes—a city. In his world, Cold explained, such places were called "gatherings."

While this telepathic conversation was taking place, the chimney-shaped object ascended and hovered some forty or fifty feet above the road. Other cars came along the road and passed them.

Cold told Woody to report the encounter to the authorities, promising to come forward at a later date to confirm it. After a few minutes of aimless generalities, Cold announced he would meet Woody again soon. The object descended, the door opened, Cold entered it, and it rose quickly and silently into the night.

When he got home, Derenberger was in a very distraught state. His wife urged Mm to call the Parkersburg police. They seemed to accept his story without question and asked if he needed a doctor.

The next day he was questioned at length by the city and state police. The story appeared in the local press and on radio and television. People who had driven that same route the night before came forward to confirm that they had seen a man speaking to the driver of a panel truck stopped on the highway. Mrs. Frank Huggins and her two children had reportedly stopped their own car and watched the object soar low over the highway minutes after Woody watched it depart. Another young man said the object had frightened him out of his wits when it hovered over his car and flashed a powerful, blinding light on him.

Woodrow Derenberger became a super-celebrity. Crowds of people gathered at his farm every night, hoping to glimpse a spaceship. His phone rang day and night. He switched to an unlisted number but within a short time the calls began again. Crank calls, threatening him if he didn't "shut up." Calls that consisted of nothing except eerie electronic sounds and codelike beeps Mr. Cold kept his promise. He returned.

After just reading the first few sentences describing Woodrow Derenberger's account with Mr. Cold its easy to chalk it up as made up and completely bonkers. When most people take this tale at face value its hard to believe but the way Derenberger speaks is perceived as a very honest. He wasn't ever known to be one to make things up, and his family collaborated his story with their own experiences. Overall the ultimate media attraction led to a constant stream of harrasment and criticism of Derenberger and helped facilitate a destruction in his marriage. One would think no seemingly normal person like him would ever want to bring such unwanted attention upon themselves for no reason. Here is an excerpt from Keel's Mothman Prophecies, which describes his encounters with Cold and the public reception.

As I write this book, I keep getting phone calls warning me to stop. They have even called my wife at her place of employment, telling her to stop me or they will. These people have also called my friends making the same threat. I have no way of knowing who these people are, yet they are calling too often to be crank calls. Several times I have written material that has disappeared from my home. When I leave home for any reason, I always lock all doors and windows, yet several times when we returned home, we found our home had been ransacked, drawers pulled out, papers strewn all over the floor, and valuable tapes missing, and my tape recorder broken. ... I have mailed letters, dropped personally by me in the Post Office letter box, that have failed to reach their destination.

After Woody's contact became widely known, two gentlemen dropped into the appliance store where he worked and walked directly up to him.

"We think you know who we are, Mr. Derenberger," they said flatly. "We'd advise you to forget all about what you've seen."

They left as abruptly as they'd arrived. Woody described them as being short, stocky, dressed in black suits, and having olive complexions. For some reason he concluded the Men in Black were really from the Mafia.

No matter where he moved—and he moved several times in 1967—the phone pranksters and black Cadillacs managed to find him, he claims.

Meanwhile, his pretty young wife and their two children also met Indrid Cold and his colleagues from the planet Lanulos. Mrs. Derenberger was frightened of them and felt they were engaged in something evil. They were just like us, she told me, traveled about in ordinary automobiles, and were probably infiltrating the human race in large numbers.

Woodrow Derenberger's story troubled me from the outset, and for many reasons. It didnot fit the mold of the usual UFO contact tale. While the telepathy element was common enough, the total physicality of his experiences seemed too real. They defied easy classification and would not fit into any of the pigeonholes I had constructed. Either he was the world's most convincing liar, and had somehow trained his wife, children, and friends to back up his lies, or he had had a very special set of experiences beyond the limits of ufology.

By March 1967 the crowds had given up in discouragement and Mr. Cold was able to safely land his spaceship on Woody's farm. Woody went aboard, according to his story, and took a flight all the way to Brazil and back. The interior of the spaceship was disappointingly normal, with bunks and equipment of obvious terrestrial manufacture. Later that year, Derenberger would be flown to Lanulos ... a pleasant little planet where the people ran around nearly nude. Most contactees who claim to have visited other planets, and there are many, usually described a futuristic world. There was something mundane about Woody's descriptions of that nudist colony in outer space. Too mundane.

Listen to complete audio file recorded by the local news station the day after the incident interviewing Woodrow Derenberger and his meeting with Indrid Cold:

For fun here is a clip from the 2002 film, The Mothman Prophecies starring Richard Gere that takes a creepier take on Indrid Cold:

What do you think? Did he make it up or is Cold for real? Post any comments below!