That Charming Man: Indrid Cold Reconsidered, Pt. 9
Against the Urban Legend-ification of Indrid Cold, the Grinning Man
Indrid Cold was a recurring character in Fortean journalist John A. Keel’s books cataloging our haunted planet, predating the figure’s relevance to the Point Pleasant flap and The Mothman Prophecies by half a decade. Keel gives Indrid Cold a passing mention in 1970’s Why UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse in a section dedicated to strange languages spoken by experiencers. He notes how “Derenberger (…) rattled off the language of UFO entity Indrid Cold, speaking the strange jargon as easily as he spoke English.” Keel seemed rather impressed by Derenberger’s fluency in an alien language: “It did not seem to be a made-up language of a hoax,” Keel writes. “It had structure and grammar.”1 In Strange Creatures from Time & Space (aka The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings) of the same year, Keel touched on Derenberger and Indrid Cold more extensively in a chapter where Cold is dubbed “The Grinning Man”—a moniker assigned because of his expression when he first met the humble salesman. Always the sensationalist, Keel connects another strange humanoid sighting to the Indrid Cold entity, one that occurred before the West Virginia weirdness.
On October 11th, 1966, several different observers in Pompton Lakes and Wanaque, New Jersey spotted “a blazing white light ‘as big as a car’” near a reservoir and—like Point Pleasant—an explosives factory.2 At around the same time as these sightings, forty miles south in Elizabeth, NJ, two boys had an even more unsettling encounter. James Yanchitis and Martin ”Mouse” Munov were near the elevated New Jersey Turnpike when they “saw the strangest guy (they’d) ever seen.”3 The man was described as very large, grinning “a big old grin,” and clothed in “a ‘sparkling green’ coverall costume that shimmered and seemed to reflect the street lights” with “a wide black belt around his waist.”4 When investigated by Keel along with James Moseley (of Saucer Smear fame) and actor Chuck McCann, the trio was exposed to an odd tale:
McCann, who was the star of his own TV series in New York, is a very large man about six feet two inches tall, but both boys said the person they saw was bigger than McCann and much broader. He had a very dark complexion and “little round eyes... real beady... set far apart.” They could not remember seeing any hair, ears, or nose on this figure, nor did they notice his hands. He was standing in the underbrush behind the fence and his feet were out of sight.5
There were even rumors about this grinning green man chasing down another Elizabeth resident on the same street that very night, but the intrepid Keel, Barker, and McCann could not find the witness in question. Reading this description and the excerpts, one might find themselves thinking: What in the name of Lanulos does this have to do with Indrid Cold? Readers would be correct to ask this question, but John Keel nevertheless explicitly connects these New Jersey incidents to Derenberger’s contacts with Cold and his crew. “A giant grinning man stood behind a high fence on a street corner in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on the night of a ‘flap,’” Keel writes. “It hardly proved anything – but we have heard about ‘the grinning man’ over and over again in our travels.”6 He then proceeds to tell the story of Derenberger’s contact with Cold, implying that the recurrence of the grinning humanoid indicated a singular entity or a group of similar entities. However, there is very little connecting the two stories together beyond the grin, which tends to be exaggerated in depictions of Indrid Cold. Derenberger himself simply reported that Cold was smiling in their first encounter, only in the sense he was friendly and sociable—and he certainly did not try to chase anyone down malevolently. While the clothing under his dark coat was described as “glistening greenish” and “almost metallic” as in the New Jersey incident, Cold was only 5-foot-10, not the enormous entity the duo witnessed in Elizabeth.7
The fact that these two incidents were tied together, to the extent that the New Jersey encounter is often repeated in the countless retellings of the Indrid Cold tale, is a befuddling turn of event. But Keel was first and foremost a high strangeness entertainment writer and it is certainly more compelling to imply that others experienced Cold before the Derenberger sighting—even if this is based on loose connections. Indeed, despite the bizarreness of the Cold/Derenberger story, it has been commonly featured in fringe culture into the present, becoming popular to the point of existing as an odd sort of urban legend. This can be seen in modern-day depictions of Indrid Cold which range from looking like Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs, the Batman supervillian The Joker, (explicitly influenced by Veidt’s portrayal,) or more Slenderman-esque figures. Using the kindly Lanulosian as a spooky paranormal entity in a broader mythology of high strangeness has become a tradition that trudges ever onward.
The ongoing paranormal documentary series Hellier, largely hosted by Greg and Dana Newkirk, sees Indrid Cold becoming an integral facet of the series’ underlying mystery—a vast web of synchronicity and seemingly supernatural occurrences stemming from an email asking the team to investigate goblin creatures in Kentucky mining country. Through a series of connections, the Hellier crew comes across mention of Derenberger and Cold in occultist and UFO researcher Allen Greenfield’s The Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts. The original emailer had stated that he was referred to the Newkirks by a man named Terry Wriste, an individual who appears in an interview conducted by Greenfield in his 1994 book and largely nowhere else—indicating to many that Wriste is a creation of Greenfield himself. In using the cipher and searching for the meaning behind a series of strange coincidences, the paranormal investigators find themselves drawn into the Indrid Cold mystery, even visiting the site of the original encounter and interviewing Woody’s daughter, Taunia Derenberger-Bowman.
The Hellier team is quick to note clear differences between the Indrid Cold portrayed in Derenberger’s writings and those depicted in Greenfield’s book. Whereas Derenberger saw his experiences as a fairly straightforward contact with outer space people, Greenfield sees hidden occulted knowledge buried in coded language, the titular cipher. He writes:
In the West Virginia flap of the mid-1960s, we can see now that the “beings with funny names” who appear dotted among the so-called “Mothman” accounts predict the latter, along with the very real and tragic Silver Bridge Disaster, for anyone who took the trouble to decode their names. But INDRID COLD and CARL ARDO appear in 1966 and 1967, and the classical solution to the Cipher in The Book of the Law wasn’t discovered until 1974.
What goes on here? Like the old alchemical ciphers, the messages of the contactees are meant to be truly understood only by deep initiates in possession of the code out of which the cipher was constructed.8
Greenfield’s reading of the events is decidedly more magickal, a quality not seen in the works of Keel or Derenberger himself. It goes without saying that this approach to the subject—using fringe cultural methods to solve fringe mysteries—is not necessarily a guaranteed recipe for success. But Greenfield’s utilization of the Derenberger contacts and the Indrid Cold entity is a literary device more than anything, the author finding the “archetypal” and “mythic qualities” the most compelling facets of the encounter.9 The mysterious Terry Wriste was able to meet Cold himself, using the kabbalistic cipher to siphon clues from Indrid Cold’s name and the names of his crew and home planet. Wriste’s interpretation of the Lanulosian is nearly as outlandish as Derenberger’s original account, going so far as to describe him as an “outlaw (…) who can project features at will (…) in the interest of security.”10 In a conversation with Wriste that I highly suspect is fictional, Greenfield correctly intuits that Cold presented himself as a “black guy” to Wriste while also being a “Blond” within the space brother cosmology. This detail seems to be intentionally rewriting the suspiciously ethnocentric views of other contactees like George Adamski and George Hunt Williamson whose outer space contacts were Aryan preachers of Theosophy-esque spiritual teachings. (See endnote for further extrapolation.11) While these cases are an important contextual framework to examine the Indrid Cold story under, Derenberger himself does not connect his contacts to these cases beyond a casual trip to Venus and meeting a woman named Della who was an associate of Adamski’s Venusian friend Orthon.12 Without getting into excruciating detail, I am attempting to convey that Greenfield’s writing on the Derenberger/Cold case is the ufological equivalent of fan fiction with a secret code for extra amusement.
Not to throw cold water on a fun spin on the paranormal documentary format, but the Hellier team utilizing Greenfield’s work brings us nowhere closer to establishing the truth behind the Derenberger case. If anything, the ARG-esque approach Greenfield introduces adds on to the mystery in irreconcilable ways and renders it even more unwieldy. Like much of Keel’s work, Hellier is a paranormal entertainment production, so deeper dives into the suspicious networks at play in the space aren’t always the most entertaining to unpack. However, the Newkirks have pretty consistently avoided parapolitical readings of the fringe, occult, and supernatural subjects they cover, even when said readings are staring them directly in the face. As such, covering the Indrid Cold story as a legitimate paranormal enigma is an unsurprising move, but one that does not grasp the potential for the case being a hoax or human-led operation. Amidst all this hoopla involving occult mysteries, extraterrestrial contacts, and primordial supernatural folklore, the story conveyed by Derenberger—a tale of remarkably human interactions with ETs who looked identical to any human—has gotten a bit lost in the reeds. “That Charming Man” has considered the notion that the Cold encounters was playing a role in a broader operation in the region, whether that be a psychological warfare test, an odd response to a labor dispute, or something even stranger. But the answer has always been very human—albeit weird and human.
As Indrid Cold has hovered into the realms of creepypasta or urban legends in the present day, it is important to remember that the contacts have always been predominantly ordinary. Even when the Hellier crew speaks to Taunia Derenberger, Woody’s daughter, she speaks of Cold as a family friend who continued to visit her on holidays and only recently passed away in a spaceship crash.13 Even in Derenberger’s original account, Taunia, “while too young to understand” the situation, nevertheless made “fast friends” with both Indrid Cold and his companion Karl Ardo as if they were normal people.14 Andrew Colvin, while a source to be taken with a grain of salt, reported that Taunia “stated on discussion lists that Mr. Cold moved to Cleveland after the Mothman events,” a very domestic venture.15 These very human angles are not brought up in the interview with Taunia. Instead, the focus lies on the possibility of contacting the still-living Lanulosians of Cold’s crew telepathically or the chances that reports of Indrid Cold’s death are greatly exaggerated. While I understand that the goals of a paranormal reality TV series are very different from my own, I nevertheless think it is important to emphasize the far more grounded elements of Derenberger’s encounters with Indrid Cold. For each example of media urban-legend-izing the story, the common theme is tenuous connections to other paranormal encounters, even though a more effective approach would be to examine the singular case on its own merits or lack thereof. If there is one takeaway that I want readers to draw from this series, it is that there are interesting elements to be found in the minutiae of every UFO case or paranormal incident. Removing the story from its original ecosystem or tacking on additional high strangeness of dubious linkages will not lead to a resolution. This is not to say that a resolution has been reached in this article or the previous articles, but I imagine comes closer than any purely paranormal treatment of the narrative. Despite the events involving Derenberger and his charming Lanulosian friend occurring more than half a century ago, the West Virginia high strangeness is still a living mystery. It is a puzzle that is still being decoded, not with a cipher, but with good, old fashioned investigation. And it is one that could, with diligence and a little bit of luck, still be more satisfactorily concluded. Stay tuned on that front, but for now, just as he promised in 1977, Indrid Cold will return.
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Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Much to plug today: Thanks to Lon Strickler at Phantoms and Monsters, SMiles Lewis at Anomaly Archives, and Bill Murphy at The Anomalist for linking to my prior article. Check out my podcast appearances on Binnall of America with Tim Binnall and The Farm with Steven Snider (aka Recluse). I was a guest on Weird Reads with Emily Louise’s livestream series a few months back, but I would recommend some of the recent streams wholeheartedly such as those by Martin Cannon or Bradley Plaisier. Until next time, stay spooked.
Keel, John A. Why UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse. New York: Manor Books, 1970. Page 268.
Keel, John A. Strange Creatures from Time & Space. Point Pleasant: New Saucerian Books, 1970. Page 176.
Ibid., page 177.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., page 178.
Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Tor, 1975. Page 51.
Greenfield, Allen H. The Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts. Self-published, 1994. eBook. Page 23.
Ibid., page 43.
Ibid., page 74-75.
These inclusions are made more concerning when taking into consideration the fact that Greenfield downplays the fascist views of George Hunt Williamson. He writes: “(Williamson) claimed a doctorate in anthropology and was a one-time follower of Guy Ballard’s I AM movement, an organization with an unsavory reputation for overlap with the pro-Nazi Silver Shirts, an American subversive body broken up by the U. S. Government after America entered World War Two. (…) He was certainly an Initiate, much given to ciphers and intrigue. One can only guess at his complex motives.” (Greenfield, Allen H. The Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts. Self-published, 1994. eBook. Page 17.)
Williamson’s connection to the I AM movement was far from his only fascistic leaning, being an acolyte of the teachings of William Dudley Pelley, the very founder of the Silver Shirts. Additionally, the I AM movement did not merely suffer from Silver Shirt “overlap,” but in fact “supplied the pattern for some of the Ballard (I AM) work” and Silver Shirts were recruited directly into the Yammer ranks. Greenfield’s retelling of Williamson’s life and interests are approaching sanitization. (Bryan, Gerald B. Psychic Dictatorship in America. Los Angeles: Truth Research Publications, 1940. Page 20-25. http://www.orgonelab.org/PsychDict.pdf.)
Derenberger, Woodrow W. Visitors from Lanulos. Point Pleasant: New Saucerian Books, 1971. Page 68.
“Hellier Season 2: Episode 2 | And the Dead.” YouTube, uploaded by Planet Weird, 13 December 2019. Available here.
Derenberger, Woodrow W. Visitors from Lanulos. Point Pleasant: New Saucerian Books, 1971. Page 63.
Colvin, Andrew B. The Mothman’s Photographer II: Meetings with Remarkable Witnesses Touched by Paranormal Phenomena, UFOs, and the Prophecies of West Virginia’s Infamous Mothman. Seattle: Metadisc Books, 2007. eBook. Page 33.