INDRID COLD

Opening

On the evening of 2 November 1966, Woodrow Derenberger, a 50-year-old sewing machine salesman, was driving his panel truck home from Marietta, Ohio, to Mineral Wells, West Virginia, on Interstate 77 just outside Parkersburg. He said a charcoal-coloured object shaped like an old kerosene lamp chimney blocked the road and forced him to stop, and a man in a glossy topcoat got out and walked up to his truck.

The man spoke to him by thought, Derenberger said, told him not to be afraid, and said he was called Cold. Derenberger went to the police that night and on television the next afternoon. Thirteen days later the Mothman reports began downriver in Point Pleasant, and John Keel made the smiling man part of the same story.

Timeline

11 October 1966In Elizabeth, New Jersey, two boys say a tall man in a sparkling green coverall grinned at them from behind a fence. Keel is the only source for this case.

2 November 1966, about 7 p.mDerenberger stops on I-77 near the Route 47 interchange. By his account the conversation lasts about ten minutes.

2 November 1966, laterDerenberger reports the encounter to the Parkersburg police.

3 November 1966, 4 p.mWTAP-TV in Parkersburg broadcasts a 30-minute interview with him. The audio survives.

4 November 1966A UPI story runs as "Parkersburg Salesman Speaks with Spaceman" in the Raleigh Register. Police say an Air Force spokesman indicated the report would go to higher authorities. Derenberger says the telepathic contact has resumed and that the visitor's full name is Indrid Cold, from a planet called Lanulos.

15 November 1966The first Mothman sighting is reported at Point Pleasant.

1967Derenberger later says he made a trip to Lanulos this year.

1968He lectures on his contacts in Youngstown, Ohio.

1970Keel's Strange Creatures from Time and Space includes a chapter, "The Grinning Man", that puts Cold beside the Elizabeth boys' story.

1971Derenberger publishes Visitors from Lanulos, written with Harold W. Hubbard.

1975Keel returns to Derenberger in The Mothman Prophecies.

March 1990Derenberger dies.

Key figures

Woodrow Derenberger kept to his story for the rest of his life and paid for it: he described harassing phone calls, losing his job, headaches and depression, and his marriage ended. In later years he stopped talking about it publicly. His daughter, Taunia Bowman, later wrote Beyond Lanulos: Our Fifty Years With Indrid Cold.

John Keel met Derenberger while investigating the West Virginia sightings and gave the case its lasting shape. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid reviewed it in 2013, and John C. Sherwood's 2002 Skeptical Inquirer article "Gray Barker's Book of Bunk" compared Keel's letters from the period with his books.

Physical and documentary trail

There is no physical trace. The documents are the WTAP interview audio, the UPI wire story, Derenberger's 1971 book, and Keel's two accounts. No police report has been published, and I have found no Air Force record of the referral the Parkersburg police mentioned.

Derenberger's own words on the WTAP tape are plainer than the legend. He describes a courteous, friendly man of about six feet and 180 to 185 pounds, tanned, with dark hair combed back. Of the clothes he said: "It was more like you'd wear a suit to town." He does not describe an unusual grin.

Don't be frightened, we wish you no harm.

Things you might not know

• At first he was just "Cold". On television Derenberger said only that "he said he was called Cold." The first name Indrid came two days later.
• The grin is Keel's word. Derenberger said the man "had a smile on his face" and was "very courteous and friendly". Keel's chapter title, "The Grinning Man", came from linking him to the New Jersey boys' story.
• Lanulos came with an address. Derenberger placed the planet in what he called Ganymede, which is also the name of one of Jupiter's moons.
• He is in a video game. A smiling man who introduces himself as Indrid Cold was added to Fallout 76, set in post-nuclear West Virginia, in a 2023 update.
• Bill Laing played him. In the 2002 film of The Mothman Prophecies, the role of Indrid Cold went to the actor Bill Laing.

Competing explanations

A real encounter, as described. Derenberger reported it the same night, gave a detailed television interview within a day, and never retracted it despite what it cost him. To people who take the account at face value, his steadiness is the evidence.

An experience that grew. The first account is a short roadside conversation. Within days it included a planet and a full name, and by 1971 a book and a journey to Lanulos. That pattern, from one striking event to a long contactee story, is common in the 1960s, and it does not require anyone to have lied.

A story made larger by its writers. The "Grinning Man" type, and the link to New Jersey and to Mothman, come from Keel. Dunning found nothing to corroborate the Elizabeth case outside Keel's book, and Sherwood found that Keel's contemporary letters and his later books did not always agree.

Invention. There is no confession and no evidence that Derenberger made it up.

Later life of the case

Keel's books carried Indrid Cold into the wider Mothman and Men in Black lore, and the 2002 film fixed him there. He has since turned up in Fallout 76, the podcast The Adventure Zone: Amnesty and the second season of the documentary series Hellier in 2019. For more of what Keel kept from these years, see The Letters Keel Kept and the John Keel Archive.

Finding

This is a single-witness case. Derenberger's core account was given quickly, stayed consistent and was never withdrawn, and the account can't be tested: no second witness, no trace and no official record have surfaced. The grinning, sinister figure people know comes mostly from Keel's framing, not from Derenberger's description of a polite man in a good coat.

What still will not resolve: what stopped Derenberger's truck on I-77, and whether the Air Force ever received the report the Parkersburg police said they were passing on.