Woodrow Derenberger and Indrid Cold

West Virginia, 1966. It was the year of the Point Pleasant Mothman flap and of John Keel's wider investigation of the region. Woodrow Derenberger was a sewing-machine salesman from Mineral Wells. On Wednesday, 2 November, he was driving home from a sales trip to Marietta, Ohio, on Interstate 77.

It was shortly before 7:30 PM. A vehicle passed him. Close behind it came an object that, in his words, "swerved directly in front of my truck." It slowed gradually until he had to stop completely. He described a "shiny, charcoal-colored thing the shape of a kerosene lamp, tapered at both ends and with a bulge in the middle." A door opened. A man walked to the passenger-side window.

The man looked "perfectly natural and normal as any human being." He had "a good tan" and dark brown hair combed straight back. He was close to six feet tall, in a glossy outfit "like it was metallic." His arms were folded. He was smiling, and the smile did not move while he spoke.

"Why are you frightened? Don't be frightened, we wish you no harm." For about 10 minutes they talked telepathically. Asked his name, the man answered "Cold." He called himself a searcher. "We come from a country that is not nearly as powerful as yours." Meanwhile the craft lifted and hovered. It came back down. He stepped back into the object and it rose out of sight.

Derenberger went home and told his wife, Ruby. Then he called the police and the press. A young man on the same road reported that a ship had hovered over his car and shone a "brilliant, white light" on him.

The next afternoon, Derenberger gave a live 30-minute interview on WTAP-TV in Parkersburg, conducted by Ronald Mains. The panel reportedly included West Virginia State Police, Parkersburg Police and a representative from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. A UPI headline read "Parkersburg Salesman Speaks with Spaceman."

Cold came back. Derenberger said telepathic contact resumed on 4 November. Giving his full name as Indrid, Cold said he came from the planet Lanulos in the Ganymede star cluster. In 1967 Derenberger claimed a ride there. In 1971 he published Visitors from Lanulos with Harold W. Hubbard. The attention had a price: harassing phone calls, a lost job and friends, headaches, depression, divorce. He never recanted. He simply stopped talking about it.

An initial investigation concluded he "was not a fraud or hoaxer, but hallucinations could not be ruled out." By the 1980s, ufologists "had dismissed his unsubstantiated stories."

In 2013, Brian Dunning of Skeptoid argued that this friendly visitor had been merged with the frightening "Grinning Man" of Keel's 1970 book Strange Creatures from Time and Space. Dunning found no newspaper or NICAP support for that figure, and no named independent witnesses to the highway encounter. David Clarke said Keel's line "between fact and fiction was a very fine one." Writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2002, John C. Sherwood found big differences between Keel's letters and his published books.

Derenberger died in 1990. Indrid Cold did not. His echo runs through The Mothman Prophecies, The X-Files, The Adventure Zone: Amnesty and Fallout 76. His daughter, Taunia Derenberger, carries the family story forward in Beyond Lanulos: Our Fifty Years With Indrid Cold.