The Grinning Man Explained – Analysing the 1966 Sightings Archive

In one 1966 sighting, a man in a dark topcoat stood in truck headlights and smiled pleasantly at Woodrow Derenberger on Interstate 77 in West Virginia. Roughly three weeks earlier, on a street in Elizabeth, New Jersey, two teenagers looked through a wire fence at a steep embankment and saw a hairless figure in a green suit break into a wide grin, and fled. Half a century later the two figures share a name, a face and a chapter title, and the person who put them there was John A. Keel.

The New Jersey Turnpike Sighting 1966

James Yanchitis and Martin Munov were walking home along Fourth Street and New Jersey Street in Elizabeth, New Jersey, at roughly 21:45. Munov’s name is sometimes cited as Marvin Munoz; this discrepancy remains unresolved.

Behind a high wire fence, on the steep incline that carries the New Jersey Turnpike above the neighbourhood, a figure stood without moving. He was, the boys later said, the biggest man either of them had ever seen. His complexion was dark, his eyes beady and set far apart, his head bare of hair, his face without ears or nose.

Over six feet tall, he wore a reflective green one-piece suit fastened with a wide black belt. His mouth was open in a wide grin that, as the boys reported it, stretched too far across the face.

The boys then ran to report the encounter to the Elizabeth Police that night, according to every secondary retelling of the story. The original Elizabeth Police incident logs for October 1966 have not been located in the municipal archive.

Three days later the account was written down in the form the public would inherit. Keel, accompanied by the UFO lecturer James Moseley and the actor Chuck McCann, interviewed the two boys separately at the home of a Mr George Smythe in Elizabeth. That the interview took place, that it happened at Smythe’s house, and that Moseley and McCann were present, all rests on Keel’s own account in his 1970 book Strange Creatures from Time and Space.

No independent record of the Smythe interview has surfaced.

The secondary record cannot even agree on the date of the sighting itself. Some sources, including Keel’s own book, place it on 11 October 1966; others, including the Cryptid Wiki and the SCP-9165 entry, place it on 16 October 1966. Without the Elizabeth Daily Journal microfilm from October 1966 or the missing police logs, the date sits in the record as two competing entries.

Interstate 77 Encounter with Indrid Cold

Woodrow Derenberger was 50 years old and worked as a sewing machine salesman. On the evening of 2 November 1966, at roughly 19:00, he was driving his Ford Econovan home along Interstate 77 near Parkersburg, West Virginia. The weather was cold and rainy.

A charcoal-grey craft descended in front of him. In his 1971 book Visitors from Lanulos, Derenberger described it as shaped like an old-fashioned kerosene lamp chimney, and said it blocked the highway to the point where he had to stop. Secondary retellings have generalised the Econovan into a ‘panel truck’, but Derenberger’s own book gives the make.

A man stepped out of the craft. Derenberger, watching him in the headlights, later described him as between five feet ten inches and six feet tall, weighing 180 to 185 pounds, with a deep tan and thick dark hair combed straight back. He wore a dark topcoat over what Derenberger called a ‘glistening greenish’ material, almost metallic in appearance, or in another passage ‘blue trousers which were quite shiny’.

The man stood with his arms crossed and his hands tucked into his armpits.

He introduced himself, telepathically, as Cold. He told Derenberger to have no fear, and that he wished him no harm, only happiness. Derenberger’s book records that the entity had, in his own words, ‘a very pleasant appearance’ and ‘a very pleasant smile on his face’.

Nothing in Derenberger’s account describes a hairless head, missing ears, a missing nose, or a green one-piece suit. The book contains no reference to a grin at all.

The WTAP TV Broadcast Investigation

WTAP-TV Parkersburg put Derenberger on the air the next day. At 16:00 on 3 November 1966 he sat down with Ronald Maines, the station’s General Manager, for an interview that ran 30 minutes.

Most of the broadcast is gone. What survives comes in secondary quotations, because the full unedited tape has never turned up in the WTAP-TV archive.

Within those surviving fragments, Derenberger is quoted describing the man as looking ‘perfectly natural and normal as any human being’. He described normal facial features and eyebrows. That description is the most direct rebuttal in the record to the later ‘faceless’ framing.

Local press coverage in the days that followed used the vocabulary of the early 1960s UFO scene. Papers including the Parkersburg News, the Parkersburg Sentinel and the Athens Messenger described the figure as a ‘spaceman’ or a ‘contactee’, a term used at the time for anyone who claimed peaceful communication with a visitor. None of those secondary citations describes a grin.

No copies of the original November 1966 clippings from these papers have been located on microfilm.

The sceptical writer Brian Dunning arrived at the same reading decades later. Working from the available public record, Dunning noted in his Skeptoid investigation that Derenberger’s original story specified a pleasant smile and did not specify anything resembling the unnatural grin later attached to the entity. Whether the full 30-minute broadcast contained any detail Dunning’s sources did not, remains an open question until the tape resurfaces.

Thematic Bottleneck in Strange Creatures

Four years after both sightings, the two accounts landed in a single chapter of a single mass-market paperback. Keel’s Strange Creatures from Time and Space was published in 1970 by Fawcett Gold Medal, a paperback house with a national distribution reach that Derenberger’s own book would never come close to matching.

Chapter 14 of the book is titled ‘The Grinning Man’. Inside that chapter, Keel places the New Jersey teenagers’ encounter and the Interstate 77 encounter alongside one another. He organises them not by geography, not by chronology in any strict sense, but by the fact that both entities moved their mouths in a way the witnesses noticed.

Nothing in the chapter’s text bridges the two accounts as a shared event. Keel does not explicitly claim that the entities in the New Jersey and West Virginia sightings were identical. He is, however, letting the chapter title do the work of the argument.

Chapter 14 discusses the West Virginia sighting at length. It notes that Derenberger appeared on radio and television in the days after 2 November 1966. Nowhere does it cite the 3 November WTAP-TV interview by date, by broadcaster, by presenter’s name, or by the phrase ‘perfectly natural and normal as any human being’.

The one recorded primary statement in which Derenberger described the entity’s face in his own words, from within a day of the event, is not brought into the chapter that would go on to define the figure for the reading public. A reader coming to Chapter 14 in 1970 has no route from Keel’s text back to the Maines broadcast.

Keel’s raw 1966 field notebooks might settle the question of whether the merger happened at the drafting stage of the manuscript or was already there in his notes from October and November. Those notebooks are held today by the researcher Doug Skinner, who inherited the surviving Keel archive.

They have not been examined for this investigation.

Analysing the Visitors from Lanulos Rebuttal

A year after Keel’s book, Derenberger published his own. Visitors from Lanulos, dated 1971, was brought out by Vantage Press. Vantage was a vanity publisher, which offered little editorial gatekeeping or bookshop reach.

The 1971 copyright page names Harold W. Hubbard as editor. Derenberger’s account of the 2 November 1966 encounter runs across the opening chapter in his own voice.

In that chapter, Derenberger describes the entity as having ‘a very pleasant appearance’ and ‘a very pleasant smile on his face’. He restates the description he had given on WTAP-TV the day after the encounter. The height, the weight, the tan, the combed dark hair, and the dark topcoat are all listed again, along with the entity’s statement that he wished Derenberger no harm.

Absent from Derenberger’s 1971 chapter: any mention of a missing nose, missing ears, a hairless head, or a reflective green one-piece suit.

The rebuttal, though, went nowhere. Vantage Press was a small-scale vanity operation with limited distribution, while Fawcett Gold Medal was a mass-market paperback publisher whose books reached drugstore spinner racks across the United States. Derenberger’s correction was trapped inside a print run that few readers ever saw.

Original Vantage Press sales figures for the 1971 first edition have not been located.

Digital Archive and Cultural Fusion

In 1975, Keel returned to the same Ohio River Valley material with The Mothman Prophecies. That book became his best-known work. Within its pages the ‘Grinning Man’ framing carried forward, embedded now within a much larger cultural narrative about the Silver Bridge and the Point Pleasant sightings.

Amplification arrived again in 2002, when Screen Gems released the feature film adaptation of The Mothman Prophecies. In the film, the Derenberger character is renamed Gordon Smallwood and played by Will Patton; a separate silent figure, credited as Indrid Cold, is played by the performer Bill Laing. Both on-screen figures reinforce, for a global cinema audience, that the polite contactee and the unnerving silent figure belong to the same story.

By the time paranormal encyclopedias moved online, the two figures had become one in the record.

Entries on Cryptidz Fandom, the SCP Foundation’s SCP-9165 file, and popular paranormal podcasts describe Derenberger’s entity as bald, dressed in a reflective green suit, and displaying a grin that stretches too far across the face. That physical description belongs, in the original 1966 record, to the New Jersey teenagers’ account. Somewhere in the digital drift it has been transplanted onto the man Derenberger described as having a very pleasant smile and combed dark hair.

A 2022 academic study by David Clarke, held in the Sheffield Hallam University Shura repository, tracks this pattern as a case of local folk stories drifting from one witness account into another over time in the Ohio River Valley material. Clarke’s work is the one peer-reviewed treatment in this investigation’s evidence base. What the study does not do is pin down who first grafted the specific green coverall and the faceless grin onto the Interstate 77 figure.

That question sits open. No single later author or podcast has been isolated in the citation chain as the point where the fusion became explicit rather than implied.

Derenberger himself died in 1990. Between the 1970 publication of Strange Creatures from Time and Space and his death, no broadcast, letter, or press interview has been located in which he objects to the physical misrepresentation of the entity he said he met.

Whether that absence reflects indifference, resignation, or simply a correction that was never recorded, the record does not say.

Source Box

Sources include: John A. Keel’s ‘Strange Creatures from Time and Space’ (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1970), Chapter 14; Woodrow Derenberger’s ‘Visitors from Lanulos’ (Vantage Press, 1971), Chapter 1; John A. Keel’s ‘The Mothman Prophecies’ (Saturday Review Press, 1975); WTAP-TV Parkersburg broadcast fragments from 3 November 1966; the Screen Gems film adaptation of ‘The Mothman Prophecies’ (2002); Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid investigation into the Indrid Cold accounts; David Clarke’s peer-reviewed study ‘The Mothman of West Virginia: A Case Study in Legendary Storytelling’ (Sheffield Hallam University Shura repository, 2022); and secondary reference entries on Cryptidz Fandom, the SCP Foundation SCP-9165 file, the Fictional Characters Wiki, and Wikipedia’s Indrid Cold entry.