Woodrow Derenberger encounter — Cedar Grove, November 2, 1966

On the evening of November 2, 1966, Woodrow Derenberger was driving home through West Virginia after a day selling sewing machines. Near Cedar Grove on U.S. Route 60, he said a dark object swept low over his truck and settled or hovered across the road ahead, forcing him to stop. The highway ran between steep wooded hills, and the encounter unfolded in the open roadway rather than at a remote landing site. Derenberger compared the object to an old-fashioned kerosene-lamp chimney: broad through the middle, narrower above and below, dark on the surface and without visible wings or propellers. A door or opening appeared, and a human-looking man stepped out. The visitor did not resemble the small grey figures now associated with abduction folklore. He had dark slicked-back hair, an olive complexion, a broad persistent smile and a shiny deep-blue one-piece garment. The man approached the truck and, according to Derenberger, communicated without visibly moving his lips. Derenberger experienced the exchange as telepathy while answering aloud. The visitor identified himself with a name rendered as Cold or Indrid Cold, asked ordinary questions and offered reassurance that he meant no harm. The conversation lasted about ten minutes. The calm manners and fixed smile made the episode uncanny without turning it violent. Cold reportedly promised that he would return. He walked back to the object, which lifted from the highway and departed. Derenberger continued home and quickly told his family. He also contacted authorities and the local media. Contemporary reporting and a NICAP investigation created a record close to the event, distinguishing the initial roadside claim from the much more elaborate contact narrative that followed. In the following days and months, Derenberger described additional communications and meetings. He eventually supplied an extensive cosmology involving the visitor's home, family and planet. Other people in the Point Pleasant region also reported strange lights and figures during the period later associated with the Mothman wave. Those later stories are historically connected through time and place, but they do not independently verify the ten-minute highway encounter and should not be collapsed into it. The first report had some external context: Derenberger was a named witness who spoke publicly, newspaper accounts appeared promptly, investigators interviewed him, and traffic on the road meant the incident was not placed beyond all possibility of corroboration. Yet no authenticated photograph of the object or visitor was made, no physical trace established the craft's presence, and the telepathic conversation depended entirely on Derenberger's testimony. His later claims raised additional questions about suggestion, publicity and narrative expansion. Possible explanations range from fabrication or misperception to a sincere anomalous experience. Supporters emphasize the rapid reporting and detailed visual description; critics point to the absence of physical evidence and the increasingly elaborate later contact story. The Atlas keeps those evidentiary layers separate. It treats the November 2 roadside report as the core case and labels subsequent material as later testimony. The portrait reconstructs that narrow first encounter: Derenberger beside his 1960s work truck on a damp Appalachian road, the human-looking smiling visitor in a deep-blue suit, and the dark lamp-chimney-shaped object hovering ahead. It deliberately avoids a grey alien, Mothman, or a conventional saucer. The image is an illustrative reconstruction of what Derenberger reported, not proof that Indrid Cold existed.