That Charming Man: Indrid Cold Reconsidered, Pt. 1
Woodrow Derenberger, Indrid Cold, and the Possibility of Covert Operations in West Virginia
The year is 1966. The town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia is overwhelmed by the appearance of a giant birdlike creature and a bevy of inhuman spooks descends upon the nervous residents. Subject of Grey Barker’s The Silver Bridge and John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies, the high strangeness that accompanied the “Mothman” sightings has left an indelible stamp on popular culture, particularly within fringe communities. But weeks before Mothman himself made his first publicized appearance, another mysterious entity made his grand entrance into the material realm and introduced himself to a sewing machine salesman.
Keel describes Woodrow Derenberger as “a tall, husky man with (...) twinkling blue-gray eyes and an honest open face.”1 Despite this trustworthy and unassuming appearance, others’ credulity would be tested by Derenberger’s claim that one night in November 1966 along a West Virginia interstate, he met a man from another world. Just outside of Parkersburg, West Virginia, Derenberger saw a bizarre “charcoal grey” craft cut in front of him on the road. His description of this UFO was highly unconventional, looking “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.’”2 After it blocked the roadway, Derenberger saw a door slide open and a man exit the craft. The figure spoke to him telepathically and requested that he roll down the car window. Keel relays Derenberger’s recollection of the man:
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.3
The strange man spoke to Derenberger telepathically once again, telling the earthling that he had come in peace: “My name is Cold. I sleep, breathe, and bleed even as you do.”4 This would be the beginning of a series contacts that continued for the rest of Derenberger’s life and would even be passed on to his children. Indrid Cold, his spaceship crew, and his family became fixtures of this normal West Virginian man’s life. One must admit, it all sounds outlandish, but was Derenberger telling the truth?
In Andrew Colvin’s reprint of Woodrow Derenberger’s Visitors from Lanulos, after the text describing Derenberger’s wild experiences with Cold, Colvin includes some tantalizing additional material where he reveals the possible identities of Cold and his crew. “After years of painstaking research and a lot of luck, local investigators in the Ohio Valley were able to ascertain the identities of three individuals possibly associated with Team Cold,” writes Colvin. “Fred Crisman, a CIA pilot suspected by prosecutor Jim Garrison of having shot John F. Kennedy from the grassy knoll, came to Derenberger’s house posing as a ufologist from the Cleveland UFO Group (CUFOG).”5 Hurting the credibility of this story is that the names of these local investigators are not given and there is no further citation. Crisman was undoubtedly involved in UFO operations of some stripe in the past, being an integral figure at the Maury Island Incident and even inserting himself into the Shaver Mystery. However, his presence along the Ohio/West Virginia border in 1965 is purely speculation, and I must question Colvin’s insistence on this specific reading of events with neither concrete evidence nor direct testimony given.
The Woodrow Derenberger story, his contacts with Indrid Cold, and the weirdness that enveloped the Ohio River Valley is strange and complicated enough without resorting to inserting a famous spook into the mix—and Colvin postulated that other counterintelligence “celebrities” were involved. The alopecic and unpredictable David Ferrie, another JFK assassination figure, is said by Colvin to have “attempted to abduct Mothman and UFO witnesses”6 and to have also been the true identity of the “frightwig” Man in Black documented by John Keel.7 Also put forth as a suspect is the Nazi German spy Simon Emil Koedel who was arrested in West Virginia and has a name phonetically similar to Indrid Cold. “By the late 1960s,” Colvin writes, “Koedel was out of jail and may have returned to spy on Point Pleasant’s TNT area and/or assist Team Cold.”8 Beyond the fact that some sources say that Koedel was deported to Germany in 1946 and died in 1949, I am again disconcerted by Colvin’s lack of direct citations.9 This unease is not caused by a total aversion to Colvin’s mode of thinking, just certain specific assertions that seem to arise from either hearsay or thin air. In all honesty, I think Colvin’s approach to the case of Woodrow Derenberger and Indrid Cold is close to the appropriate one: A parapolitical analysis of Derenberger’s recollection of events with a suspicion that certain aspects of his experiences were orchestrated.
It is relatively clear that Derenberger did experience, at the very least, something strange. As he stood there along Interstate 77 having a telepathic conversation with a man named Cold, he saw other cars pass them while the oddly-shaped ship was still hovering nearby. The spaceman urged him to report his experience to the authorities and promised that they would meet again. Derenberger went home in a state of shock. His wife Ruby recalled that he was genuinely shaken by the ordeal:
You should have seen him when he got home. He looked awful. I thought he’d struck and killed somebody with the truck. He loves to play with the children, but not that night. I had to shoo them out. He just sat there in the kitchen, grey-colored and saying, ‘You’re going to think I’m crazy,’ and ‘you’re going to laugh at me.’ Then he told me what had happened.10
With Derenberger’s wife genuinely convinced of the traumatizing events that befell her husband, one wonders if he could have put on such a good performance. “He couldn’t even hold the phone,” Ruby said. “I had to make the call and when I reported it, the officer said it was the third call like that they’d had that night.”11 If Derenberger’s story was hoax, his wife also did not seem to follow his established storyline of positive ET contact, later saying that she “was frightened of” Cold and his kind “and felt they were engaged in something evil.”12 After all, these “Lanulosians” all seemed remarkably human—they looked human, they acted human, and they drove human automobiles. She was concerned that they “were probably infiltrating the human race in large numbers.”13
Even though Colvin may have overstated the situation by assigning specific human spooks to “Team Cold” and the Woodrow Derenberger operation, the case abounds with curious human element. This series will be a parapolitical examination of the Derenberger contactee experience, focusing on odd features of the case, Derenberger’s background, and further historical context. It is through this method that we might find that this commonplace West Virginian man was part of an elaborate psychological operation meant to convince him of genuine alien contact.
While the events in Point Pleasant may not be attributable to the same figures involved in the Kennedy assassination, John Keel—who was “trained in psychological warfare during (his) stint as a propaganda writer for the U.S. Army”14—makes an important observation about the high strangeness in the 1960s Ohio River Valley: Just as Derenberger would be in the weeks and months that followed his roadside experience, “reporters, editors, and citizens engaged in the investigation of President Kennedy’s death suffered harassment and telephone problems identical to those experienced by UFO researchers.”15 Further than that, Keel notes that the CIA had made a habit of hiring people to do “what can only be termed malicious mischief”—covert operations of uncertain purposes.16 Even if Derenberger was the target of such mischief, what would be the ultimate goal of convincing a normal American citizen that he was in contact with a humanoid spaceman? To grasp at an answer that question, we may need to look at the bizarre experiences of yet another appliance salesman named Tad Jones.
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Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Tor, 1975. Page 50.
Ibid., page 51.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Colvin, Andrew. “Appendix: Team Cold” in Woodrow Derenberger’s Visitors from Lanulos: My Contact with Indrid Cold. Self-published, 2014. Ebook. Page 75.
Ibid.
Kent, Sherwood. Most Dangerous: A True Story. Walterville: Trine Day, 2015. Ebook. Page 254.
Colvin, Andrew. “Appendix: Team Cold” in Woodrow Derenberger’s Visitors from Lanulos: My Contact with Indrid Cold. Self-published, 2014. Ebook. Page 76.
Mickolus, Edward. The Counterintelligence Chronology: Spying by and Against the United States from the 1700s Through 2014. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. Page 45.
Keller, Raymond A. “Lessons Learned From A Contactee: Woodrow W. Derenberger (1916-1990).” Phantoms & Monsters. 20 July 2020. https://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2020/07/lessons-learned-from-contactee-woodrow.html.
Ibid.
Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Tor, 1975. Page 112.
Ibid.
Keel, John A. Operation Trojan Horse. Lilburn: IllumiNet Press, 1970. Page 267.
Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Tor, 1975. Page 102.
Ibid., page 101.