Encounter with the fey

"The Mothman Prophecies" is a 2002 film featuring Richard Gere as the involuntarily roving reporter John Klein, who gets entangled in a series of paranormal events. The film is freely based on John Keel´s 1975 book, also titled "The Mothman Prophecies". So freely, in fact, that almost nothing remains of the original story (such as it was), except the paranoia and the idea that the supernatural is fundamentally incomprehensible to mere mortals. In the film, the character "Alexander Leek" is closer to the real life John Keel than the reporter "John Klein". Note that "Leek" is Keel spelled backwards! 

Keel did investigate a series of weird events in West Virginia shortly before the 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant. A winged humanoid monster later known as the Mothman had been sighted by several people in the community. Keel also looked into an unrelated UFO case in another part of West Virginia, where a farmer claimed to have recieved messages from an alien entity named Indrid Cold. In the 2002 film, Mothman and Indrid Cold have been conflated into the same character. Indeed, it seems that all supernatural visitors from Keel´s book have contributed to the film´s version of Indrid. 

As already mentioned, the main point of the film seems to be the eminently Keelian claim that the supernatural dimension, while very real, is also completely unfathomable. Its denizens act in ways that are frequently illogical, baffling or morally ambivalent from a human perspective. Is "Indrid Cold" an angel or a demon? Cold causes a car crash which severly hurts Klein´s wife and drives the character Gordon mad until the madness kills him, but eventually saves Klein and his new love interest Connie from the disaster at Silver Bridge. Why? Nobody knows. Leek tells Klein that the supernatural creatures might not be wiser or smarter than us - they just see more of reality, a bit like a guy in a high building sees more of the city than a pedestrian. Of course, even such an elevated observer can be rational, but the problem with "Indrid" is that he doesn´t seem to be. 

The real life Keel drew the disturbing conclusion that the "ultraterrestrials" are part of a malevolent cosmic control grid over humanity, and in a later book even suggested that God himself might be insane! However, Keel also had a more interesting idea: Mothman, Indrid and their associates are fairies or fey, trickster-like creatures from folklore known for their abilities to shape shift. This made him unpopular in UFO-logical circles, since the average believer in UFOs insist that they are literal space craft from alien worlds in the physical universe. To Keel, this is just the latest form the fey have taken to confuse the human observer. As Indrid explains to a skeptical Klein in the film, when the latter asks how Indrid looks like: "It depends on who is looking"...

Of course, in order to believe this solution to the mystery, you have to accept the existence of fairies in the first place. Even apart from the fact that it´s not much of a solution anyway, since we still don´t know where the fey are at.

But then, we really don´t know anything else important either, so why should this be the exception?