The Dark Side of Flying Saucers - Are We Dealing With Something Evil?

Sean Casteel on Tue, 03/01/2011
http://www.ufodigest.com/article/dark-side-flying-saucers-are-we-dealing-something-evil

The mystery of just who is piloting the UFOs witnessed around the world since ancient times has many so-called “solutions.” Working from the available evidence, one can argue for any number of interpretations of the phenomenon, and those interpretations run the gamut from the UFOs being an early harbinger of the Second Coming of Christ to an invasion by cold-blooded, methodical aliens bent on colonizing our planet by the skillful combining of our DNA with theirs.

There is also this less frequently heard interpretation: that the present day UFO and alien abduction phenomenon are simply a modernized, more technological manifestation of the same demons that have tormented and sought to manipulate mankind since the beginning of time. In other words, the gray aliens are nothing new and their basic malevolent intent has never changed.

This statement, by no less an authority than Lord Hill-Norton, the late five-star admiral and the former head of the British Ministry of Defence, helps to put that perspective into focus: “UFOs are essentially a religious matter rather than a military threat, and furthermore there is certainly a degree of psychic involvement in almost every case. Quite often, however, such experiences are definitely antithetical to orthodox Christian beliefs.”

I recently took part in the writing of a new book on this darker side of flying saucers. The book is called “Round Trip To Hell In A Flying Saucer.” A portion of the book is a reprint of an earlier book, circa sometime in the 1950s, by Cecil Michael, with which the later anthology shares its title. In the book, Michael describes a hellish abduction experience in which he visits the domain of the damned and is somehow miraculously returned and left coherent enough to write about the experience. Michael’s take on the subject is exactly the opposite of the majority of 1950s contactees, most of whom describe pleasant-looking, blond, Nordic aliens who compassionately warn mankind of his potential coming doom through nuclear warfare and environmental decay.

Given that Michael is for his time a dissenting, minority opinion, one would think it easy enough to dismiss what he is saying. But such is not the case. As all the updated material that was poured into “Round Trip To Hell In A Flying Saucer” so ably demonstrates, there are a great many researchers and abductees of our more current age who also believe that the UFO phenomenon is Satanic and demonic.

Two of the more prominent names in UFO research, the late John Keel and the celebrated Jacques Vallee (the character of LaCombe in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was modeled after Vallee), both arrived at the conclusion that there is a spiritual, paranormal aspect to flying saucers that is too often denied by nuts-and-bolts researchers who see only the appearance of aliens from another planet in physical ships. But there is much about typical UFO encounters that blends rather fuzzily with time-honored stories of demons and run-ins with the “little people.” It is that opening of one’s self to the paranormal and psychic components that makes the overall experience so terrifying to so many.

And the updated book does indeed present some terrifying anecdotes as it winds its way through its exhaustive treatment of the subject. One section of the book deals with the Jinn, the demons of Islamic mysticism, and makes a case for their overlapping with modern aliens. The Jinn are a morally complex form of demon, with some of them laboring to do good in the world, even “confessing” to the truth of the Koran.

Contributor Adam Gorightly deals with sexual encounters between humans and aliens, and discusses how “the Great Beast” Aleister Crowley used hallucinogenic drugs along with sexual “magick” to invoke otherworldly entities. Gorightly lumps together the sexual aspects of our present understanding of the alien abduction experience with ancient myths about demons as sexual predators in his chapter on “Psychic Space Age Vampires.” Meanwhile, author Tim Swartz recounts stories of human mutilation at the hands of the UFO occupants, one incident of which took place on a military base in Texas in 1956. The notion that the aliens/demons may feed on the energy contained in human blood and on human misery in general is also explored.

My own contributions to the book include a general overview of the beliefs of the aforementioned Keel and Vallee, as well as the case for the phenomenon’s wickedness made by pilot and researcher John Lear, the son of the man who invented the Lear Jet. When one sees the beguiling light show of an approaching UFO, Lear advises one to “run like hell” and not be suckered in by the beauty of the ships or in any way to assume their true demeanor is a friendly one. According to Lear, the aliens just want to suck out the marrow of our souls, and our fear and humiliation is nourishing to them.

I also interviewed a retired pastor named Tom Horn, who tells a story of a real-life encounter with a demonic entity that was witnessed by several members of his congregation. A rebellious teenager who had fallen under the spell of satanic heavy metal music appeared to become “possessed” and went charging at Horn only to run head-on into some kind of invisible force field and drop like a sack of potatoes. Horn believes he was singled out for the attack by the demon because of his position of authority as pastor, and testifies further that all who witnessed the apparent miracle were very shaken up and knew that there is a living God who watches over such things.

Horn very much believes that the UFO phenomenon is demonic for the most part, but he also acknowledges that his sister is an abductee, which creates a moral dilemma for him that he continues to ponder along with the many other spiritual issues that have long troubled him. He allows as how some of the UFO activity in the Bible can be put in the righteous category and that the present day abducting gray aliens may somehow stand outside normal notions of sin and wrongdoing. The phenomenon is not easy to categorize in everyday terms of black and white, even for those of devout Christian faith.

I also contributed a short chapter in which I discuss the views of “Communion” abductee Whitley Strieber and “Intruders” researcher Budd Hopkins. Strieber, at the time my interview with him was conducted, said it was very easy for him to equate the gray aliens with demons, and that the terror and the misery of the experience made it impossible to distinguish between them. Hopkins, on the other hand, said the moral complexity of the abduction phenomenon made it impossible to draw conclusions about the aliens’ inherent good or evil. All we can really do, according to Hopkins, is try to pick it up by the human end of it and examine the way it’s affected people, apart from any premature conclusions about the moral character of the abductors.

Meanwhile, there is no lack of scary stories to be told about the wicked aspects of UFO lore. In an interview with Timothy Beckley, the book’s editor and publisher, Christopher O’Brien discusses the folklore surrounding creatures called “skin-walkers” in the mysterious San Luis Valley, which spans parts of Colorado and New Mexico and has been a UFO hotspot for several decades. The term “skin-walker” is interchangeable with “shape shifter,” and essentially means a creature that can change his appearance from human to animal and back again.

“According to traditional knowledge,” O’Brien says, “skin-walkers are able to read a victim’s thoughts. They are also thought to be able to mimic any human or animal sound. This ability is sometimes used to draw unwitting victims outside by calling in the voice of a person known to them or using a familiar animal sound. Don’t ever look into and/or lock eyes with a suspected skin-walker. This will enable his will to enter you and take over all your motor functions and make you do and say things that are completely beyond your control. It takes the voodoo zombie thing to a whole new level!”

What is the government connection to all this? How do the intelligence community and the Pentagon view the good-versus-evil-of-the-aliens question? Noted author Nick Redfern alleges, in an interview with Tim Beckley about Redfern’s book “Final Events,” that the government long ago concluded that the UFOs were of a demonic nature and there was little to be done in terms of protecting the general public from the flying saucer devils. They began to develop a plan to convert the entire population to Evangelical Christianity so that they could at least wage a kind of spiritual battle for their immortal souls. Tom Horn, who I referred to earlier in this review, calls such people “prayer warriors,” saying, “Fervent prayer by the righteous would be the battering rams that could push through that demonic oppression.” Whether the government will ever go public with the prayerful strategy is another question entirely.

The classic demons of Christianity as well as zombies, shape-shifters, hellhounds, vampires, succubi and incubi – “Round Trip To Hell In A Flying Saucer” has it all. (Coauthor Tim Beckley believes that the ghosts who trouble the haunted are also part of that same list of manifestations of “alien” evil.) There exists nowhere else such a complete, exhaustive study of the evil aspects of the UFO phenomenon. Drawing on a large collection of contributing authors, every angle of wickedness is covered in remarkable depth and thoroughness. It is also packed with photos and interesting sidebar material and will keep the reader absorbed throughout its 300 pages.

I would like to add, however, that I personally believe the UFO phenomenon and even alien abduction are not simply demonic. It would take a whole other book to make the argument for righteous aliens to as complete a degree as “Round Trip To Hell In A Flying Saucer” argues for the evil interpretation, but in the meantime you can check out my earlier books “UFOs, Prophecy and the End of Time,” “Signs and Symbols of the Second Coming” and “The Excluded Books of the Bible.” In any case, it certainly can’t hurt for us to pray for God’s mercy on our souls, which you will definitely want to consider doing once you’ve read “Round Trip To Hell In A Flying Saucer.” The cover alone, with artwork by Tim Swartz, is enough to put a scare into you, so please approach this book with caution.

If you enjoyed this article, please visit Sean Casteel’s UFO Journalist website at http://www.seancasteel.com/ Several of his books are available for purchase there, as well as at Amazon.com

Great Quotes: John Keel

"This planet is haunted by us; the other occupants just evade boredom by filling our skies and our seas with monsters."

Fortean Ufology

http://www.forteanswest.com/lowfiguesteditorial-SkylaireAlfvegren0809.html

L.O.W.F.I's Guest Editorial
The League of Western Fortean Intermediatists presents...
Fortean Ufology: Long Live the Old Guard, Long Live the New Flesh
by Skylaire Alfvegren
8-9-9

The real UFO story must encompass all of the many manifestations being observed. It is a story of ghosts and phantoms and strange mental aberrations; of an invisible world that surrounds us and occasionally engulfs us; of prophets and prophecies, and gods and demons. It is a world of illusion and hallucination where the unreal seems very real, and where reality itself is disorted by strange forces which can seemingly manipulate space, time, and physical matter--forces that are almost entirely beyond our powers of comprehension.

Nearly all of those who have finally come to an understanding of the true nature of the phenomenon have quietly abandoned the subject because they found it impossible to articulate their findings and make the incredible credible... they were rendered mute by the awesome and overwhelming realization that man is not alone; that the human race is merely a trifling part of something much bigger.

Many flying saucers seem to be nothing more than a disguise for some hidden phenomenon. They are like Trojan horses descending into our forests and farm fields, promising salvation and offering us the splendor of some great supercivilization in the sky. But while the statuesque long-haired "Venusians" have been chatting benignly with isolated traveling salesmen and farm wives, a multitude of shimmering lights and metallic disks have been silently busying themselves in the forests of Canada, the Outback country of Australia, and the swamps of Michigan. Before we can find any answers, we must first find the right questions to ask. We must understand the exact nature of these visitors, and of ourselves.

--John Keel, Operation Trojan Horse

Many, many moons ago, in a dark and smoky bar deep in the wilds of Maryland, I toasted British phenomenalist/megalith expert John Michell with a fine, single malt scotch. Among the many things he impressed upon me was the idea that “at any given time, there are never more than 1,000 true Forteans on the planet.” Charles Fort, the iconoclastic author who was the first to seriously examine the airship mystery of 1896-97, as well as the first to poke fun at astronomers and their poo-pooing of strange things in the sky (Lo!, 1931), is a figure not everyone with an interest in the subject of UFOs may be familiar with, but should be.

I have long marveled at how interest in strange phenomena is so very cyclical — the spiritualist explosion of the ‘20s and ‘30s, the occultish Age of Aquarius of the ‘60s, which morphed into the crystal-strewn New Age movement of the ‘80s which morphed into the Art Bell, X-Filed ‘90s. My friend Tony Perkins has a fascinating theory about the evolution of portrayals of extraterrestrials in popular culture being shaped by astrology.

There has been an upsurge in interest amongst the general public (what that is, I’m not really sure) in UFOs, the paranormal, cryptozoology, and the like, in the past few years. Evidenced by UFO Hunters, Monsterquest and a handful of (frankly) really dumb-ass, infra-red saturated ghost-hunting excursions, I take it all as a good omen (even as the world of print continues to cough and sputter, cut pages and go bankrupt.)

My first mentor, John Keel, spent over a year of his life interviewing thousands of UFO witnesses all over the country in the late ‘60s. Sifting through mountains of data, transcripts, and sighting reports, he eventually reached a fairly startling conclusion. Coining the term “ultraterrestrial,” it was his contention that many of the strange lights seen in the sky were actually of an extradimensional — rather than extraterrestrial — origin. His groundbreaking ideas coagulated into his 1970 classic, Operation Trojan Horse (republished in paperback by now-defunct Illuminet Press in 1996, and available at a reasonable price via http://www.bookfinder.com/.)

I admired Keel for a rainbow of reasons; part of the cantankerous coot’s appeal laid in the fact that he had gotten to be a truly phenomenal adventurer, and luckily for us, managed to put a lot of it down on paper. He traveled to India in search of the elusive rope trick, got more than he bargained for, and published the whole thing in Jadoo (1957, Julian Messner, Inc.). He was first on the scene (along with fellow researcher, Gray Barker) in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when locals were being terrorized by a fuzzy, bat-winged, red-eyed behemoth which came to be known as Mothman. (Keel’s 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies, was fictionalized in a film of the same name starring Richard Gere in 2000; the book itself is available for almost nothing in mass market, movie tie-in paperback.) In the decades preceding the publication of his books, Keel globe-trotted, typewriter in tow, filing crazy stories for men’s magazines from Cairo to Loch Ness. Oh, how I romanticized his life when I was a kid, knowing full well that the world he had lived in was one I would probably never see. This obsession grew worse when Keel and I began corresponding when I was 17, and writing my first magazine column about “the weird stuff.” After mailing him a stack of my work, he wrote back, with warm sarcasm: “Your copy looks great, and your Xeroxing is perfect.”

John Keel passed away in New York City, on July 3rd of this year, due to a bad heart and complications of diabetes. John Michell (after having given up drinking some years ago — and trust me, no one did it with more finesse) passed away earlier this year in London. In Ufological/Fortean circles, these men were giants. (Patrick Huyghe, proprietor of Anomalist Books and Anomalist.com, remarked of Keel after his death that “he was our Michael Jackson.”)

Keel’s ultraterrestrials and tales of terror at the hands of the dread “Men in Black” linger to this day; but as we all know, Ufology is a funny thing. It is a “field,” it is a “science” of sorts, but it’s also a hobby for thousands of people — albeit a hobby laced with serious, sobering implications. A television production company recently asked me to produce my “credentials” as an Ufologist. My answer? Asking an Ufologist to produce his credentials would be like asking Captain Crunch to produce his military service record.

Meaning that, anyone can be an expert. Anyone can write a book. Anyone can espouse their individual theories without having to produce a shred of hard evidence, and for that reason, Ufology is admirably democratic, but also the reason why it has such a damn hard time being taken seriously. (As far as I know, only the venerable Jim Marrs has ever managed to teach an accredited college course on the subject of UFOs.)

After all these years bounding down the proverbial rabbit hole, I still have plenty of questions. Are we alone in the universe? What is the nature of reality? Has some shadowy government agency really had a hand in the deaths of dozens of UFO (and conspiracy) researchers over the years, and to what degree do terrestrial agencies have to do with strange craft in the sky?

My questions, however, are coupled with a lifetime of weird sightings and strange experiences. Last time I saw Jordan Maxwell, he admonished us to “always trust the one who’s looking for the truth -- never trust the one that claims he has found it.”

Ufology has many factions, which remind me at times of the street gangs in Walter Hill’s goofy 1979 movie, The Warriors. You’ve got the “hardware hounds” who believe that UFOs are solely the product of advanced military technology; you’ve got the “true believers,” who know we’re being visited by little green men and a plethora of other EBEs (which fracture into “good” and “bad” aliens); and then you’ve got the “experiencers” and abductees, the group, ostensibly, with the most up close and personal interest in the truth. Over the years, I’ve been told some wild stories, often in the strictest confidence, because “no one back home believes me.”

The work of the “old guard” is fundamental. John Keel and John Michell (and others) continue to inspire new generations of the cracked and inquisitive. Our culture, obsessed by youth and damaged by advertising, in large part, doesn’t respect its elders. (Although I give you, dear reader, more credit than the average Joe.) In the subculture of Ufology, I find far less solidarity than I would like, and as figures like Keel and Michell thin in numbers, it is up to the “new blood” to take the reins, without bickering too much in the process. Differences of opinion lead to a healthy discourse; to that end, I have attended conferences where one speaker’s lecture will entirely contradict the one following it, as attendees take it all in stride. I’ve also seen researchers get into fist fights.

Science fiction author, music legend and all-around bad-ass, Mick Farren, told me a story about organizing a famous music festival in 1971. The outdoor concert took place over Glastonbury, a mystical part of England which figures prominently in the work of John Michell. It is where a goodly number of England’s ley lines converge. Ley lines, areas of extreme geomagnetic energy, criss-cross the earth, and have long been associated with paranormal activity and mystical experiences. (In Mexico, for instance, it was discovered that the natives had built their sacred temples atop these areas of highly concentrated geomagnetic energy — which the Conquistadors later demolished, only to erect churches on the same sites, hoping to capture the sacred energy.) At the Glastonbury festival, the job of set-up was handed to some acid-dropping biker hippies. Overseeing the construction of the pyramid-shaped stage, said biker hippies stopped short before pounding the metal scaffolding into the earth. “Crikey,” one exclaimed. “What if we bloody well split the world in half?”

The point I’m trying to make with this story is that it pays to be phenomenally inclusive, rather than exclusive, to remain open-minded yet skeptical in a “classical” sense, as many of our intellectual forbears did.

John Keel Interviewed by Kenn Thomas

This is what appeared in Steamshovel Press #7 of my 1993 interview with John Keel. The interview was much longer and I’m transferring the tape of it into a digital.

Kenn Thomas, SteamshovelPress.com

John Keel Discusses Winged Cats, Mothmen and Unidentified Flying Objects
Interviewed by Kenn Thomas

Q: Mothman Prophecies is a regarded as a classic ufological world and it details your experiences in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the mid 1960s but the book wasn't published until the mid-1970s.

A: It took almost ten years for the book to be published. It came out around 1975. The New York editors had never heard about some of the things in the book and didn't care very much. They only know what they read in the New York Times. If they didn't see it in the Times then it doesn't exist for them. Although this material got nationwide publicity it didn't get much publicity in New York City itself. That was a handicap.

I happened to be in West Virginia when the story broke. I was there investigating a winged cat.

Q: A winged cat?

A: Yes, there was a famous winged cat down in West Virginia. A young boy had found this cat in a woods and he decided it was worthy of public attention and so he charged ten cents a look. All of his neighbors lined up to see this winged cat for ten cents. He came to New York and did the Today show. The cat's name, as I recall, was Thomas. And then one of his neighbors suddenly appeared and said, "That my cat!" and demanded the cat back. There was a big controversy about this winged cat down in Beckley, West Virginia. And I was in Beckley, West Virginia when this story in Point Pleasant broke. So I went and talked with the witnesses there and got involved with this.

Q: The Point Pleasant experiences, of course, all involved a winged man.

A: This was two young married couples in an automobile, driving through an area outside of Point Pleasant called the TNT area. It was really a sort of lover's lane kind of thing, a sort of isolated area. It had been used in the Second World War to manufacture high explosives and had been closed ever since. They were driving through this area and they suddenly saw this large creature standing next to a building there. He was larger than a large man, they said, and he had fiercely glowing red eyes. And suddenly he spread his wings and he had a ten foot wing span and he started chasing the automobile. And these teenagers, they were all under twenty years old so I'll call them teenagers, they were so terrified that they drove as fast as their jalopy would take them to the local police station. It takes quite a lot to get teenagers to go to the police in any town. They were terrified. And the police were very impressed by their story. So the police held a press conference the next day and the story carried on all the wire services. That's how it all began.

In the end, I had tracked down over a hundred witnesses, all of whom had seen this creature. Some of them very prominent people in the area. One was a local banker, the head of the Chamber of Commerce. Eventually the wife of one of the deputy sheriffs saw this thing. Quite a few people saw it. But nobody ever got a picture of it.

Unfortunately, the winged cat shed its wings. The wings fell off. That ended the controversy. When the wings fell off it was just another cat and so the neighbor said, "That's not my cat! I don't want that cat!" So the boy had the cat Thomas, I guess, until it died.

Q: The appearance of Mothman, of course, was just the beginning of the weirdness at Point Pleasant, right?

A: It got more and more complicated as time went on. The witnesses to this thing began to have other experiences., UFO type experiences. Interference with their television sets, strange phone calls, a multitude of things like poltergeist manifestations. It just seemed to grow and grow. And people began to see UFO type lights over the TNT area itself and finally great crowds of people would gather every night to watch the UFOs go over. You could almost set your watch by them. All up and down the Ohio Valley they were seeing things during that period anyway. Between 1964 and 1968 there were thousands of UFO sightings all over the country, in fact all over the world. It was a major UFO wave.

In the Army I studied psychological warfare. I was a propaganda writer in the Army. I know quite a bit about psychology and I certainly know a lot about these people in West Virginia and other areas. And they're usually not seeking attention and they're certainly not the kind of people who have that kind of imagination that would make something up. Most of them are often very sorry afterwards that they even said anything to anybody.

I've had a lifetime background in journalism and professional writing. I really don't have any major theories about any of this. I just find that none of theories that have been forth work. The extraterrestrial does not work at all when you the study all of the aspects of the UFO phenomenon. It simply doesn't work. We're dealing with manifestations that have been reported throughout the centuries, not just in modern times.

Our version of reality is probably as wrong as an ant's version of its reality. The ant can only perceive things immediately around it and then it perceives it in a wrong way. People really have no sensory equipment at all. Our eyes are very limited in what they can see and our hearing is also very limited. Many animals have better hearing than we do. AN eagle certainly has better eyesight. Our perceptions are very wrong in many ways.

John Keel 1930-2009

http://www.ufomystic.com/wake-up-down-there/john-keel-1930-2009/

John Keel 1930-2009
Greg Bishop
Monday, July 6th, 2009
Books, Breaking News, Occult/Esoteric, Strange Creatures, UFOlogists, UFOlogy, Wake Up Down There, fortean.

John Keel, journalist, author, fortean, and originator of some of the most unique theories on UFOs and the paranormal, died on July 3rd in New York City. His influence on generations of researchers is probably immeasurable.

Born Alva John Kiehle on March 25, 1930, Keel began writing at an early age. He was producing a column in the local newspaper in Perry, New York by age 14, and moved to New York City at 17 to pursue a career as an author and adventurer. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and worked for the Armed Forces Radio Network, where he once broadcast a program from inside the Great Pyramid at Giza.

After his tour of duty was over, Keel set out on a trip through the middle east to visit fakirs, magicians and occultists and wrote his first book about the experience, Jadoo, published in 1957. Fate magazine gave Keel an early interest in the UFO enigma, and together with Ivan Sanderson, they began to write a write a book on the subject in the mid-1960s. They quickly found that their views were incompatible, and Keel began research into what would later become seminal books such as The Eighth Tower and UFOs, Operation Trojan Horse.

Keel first challenged the extraterrestrial hyposthesis with his idea of the “superspectrum,” which theorized that UFOs were controlled by intelligences that moved freely between wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, appearing and disappearing from the infrared and the ultraviolet. Building on the ideas of little-known researchers like Meade Layne and Trevor Constable, he also proposed the theory (and provided ample evidence for this) that UFO entities were not from other planets, but were most likely native intelligences that had been involved with mankind throughout history and prehistory, and perhaps did not have our best interests in mind. These ideas were heresy to the ufological partyline at the time, and continue to be, which is a testament to their originality and implications.

In 1975, Keel rocked the paranormal community with the publication of The Mothman Prophecies, which was his take on the strange events leading up to the Silver Bridge disaster in Point Pleasant, West Virginia on December 15, 1967. In 1966, Keel began investigating reports of a frightening creature in the area around the town. Dubbed “Mothman,” the entity appeared as a headless human form sporting large wings and glowing red “eyes” in the chest area. Mothman did not fly like any known bird, bat or insect, swooping down on unsuspecting motorists and teenagers, and taking off from the ground vertically without moving its “wings” before keeping pace with fleeing cars and disappearing.

Keel documented other weird goings-on in Point Pleasant for nearly two years, including poltergeist phenomena, strange visions, doppelgangers of Keel himself and a scary character who called himself Indrid Cold. Critics claimed that he took storytelling liberties in The Mothman Prophecies, changing events and timelines to suit his narrative, but the essential message of the book still rings true. As Keel stated in the text, “Once you have established a belief, the phenomenon adjusts its manifestations to support that belief and thereby escalate it.” This hypothesis has been tested numerous times since in other UFO “flap” areas, (such as events around the Dulce, New Mexico area in the late 1970s and the more recent Stephenville case) and continues to hold its own.

In the late 1980s, Keel founded the New York Fortean Society and continued to write and lecture periodically well into the late 1990s.

In 1999, I called Keel and asked for a quote for the release of a collection of articles from The Excluded Middle, my old magazine. He politely refused a few times, but finally offered “The truth is out there, but it’s nowhere in this book. Buy mine instead.” The quote went on the back cover of Wake Up Down There: The Excluded Middle Collection when it was published the next year. The title of that book and this blog is based on a strange phone conversation related by Keel in Mothman Prophecies.

In 2000, I finally visited Keel in New York and we had lunch before visiting the Museum of Natural History and a store that sold all manner of bones and skeletons. His comments on the hubris of some scientists and paranormal researchers were cantankerous but delivered with a smile, and he signed my copy of Jadoo.

John A Keel will be sorely missed.

P.S. In some sort of cosmic trickster way, Keel may have gotten a final laugh as my computer locked up and apparently died as I was writing this obituary. After a couple of tries, it miraculously resurrected itself. Long live Keel!

John A. Keel Has Died

Author and researcher, John A. Keel, 79, passed away on July 3 in New York City.
Norio Hayakawa
7-6-9

I am saddened by the death of John A. Keel. He truly was a long-time hero of mine in the field of ufology. He was a unique author and a maverick researcher. In the late 60's, I became fascinated with Keel's unique theories on UFOs. In fact, Keel didn't like the word "ufology". He preferred the term "demonology". He was a maverick researcher. In fact, he greatly influenced another hero researcher of mine, Dr. Jacques Vallee, who is still doing fine. Dr. Hynek and Dr. Jacques Vallee were both impacted tremendously by Keel's theories.

You can read more about John A. Keel at:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/keel-obit/

Thanks to my fellow researcher, Dennis Robinson, for notifying me of John A. Keel's passing away.

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/keel-obit/

John A. Keel Has Died
Loren Coleman
July 6th, 2009

John Alva Keel, 79, a friend, Fortean, fierce fighter for his theories, professionally a writer and journalist, has died. A fellow admirer of Mothman and the anomalies all around us, such as the “name game,” is gone.

Keel, who lived most of his life in New York City, passed away on Friday, July 3, 2009, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, after some months in a nursing home near his Upper West Side apartment.

Born Alva John Kiehle in upstate New York on March 25, 1930, John Keel began writing at a young age. Indeed, Keel’s first published story was in a magician’s magazine at the age of 12.

Keel would go on to become a scriptwriter for radio and television, and a stringer for newspapers. He later moved to Greenwich Village and wrote for various men’s and speciality magazines.

Keel’s first published book was Jadoo in 1957, which was quickly serialized in a men’s adventure magazine. The paperback is his account of his journey of discovery to India to investigate the alleged activities of fakirs and holy men who perform the Indian rope trick and who survive being buried alive. In Jadoo, Keel also told of tracking a Yeti, an Abominable Snowman, in the jungles of Asia.

John A. Keel’s non-fiction look at the very real unplanned twists in life were recorded in his 1966 novel, The Fickle Finger of Fate. It is a rare book, and few realize that Keel wrote this book.

Keel was an early admirer of Charles Fort (1874-1932), and while still doing the mainstream writing, began authoring articles for England’s Flying Saucer Review (FSR) and a long series of columns for Saga.

Further influenced by Fortean Ivan T. Sanderson and ufologist Aimé Michel, in early 1966, John Keel commenced a full-time investigation of monster, aerial and paranormal phenomena. Over a four-year period, Keel interviewed thousands of people in over twenty U.S. states, especially in the Ohio River Valley of the United States. More than 2,000 books were reviewed in the course of his investigation, in addition to thousands of magazines, newsletters, and newspapers. Keel also subscribed to several newspaper-clipping services, which often generated up to 150 clippings for a single day during the 1966 and 1967 UFO “wave.” Besides FSR, Keel wrote for several magazines including Saga with one 1967 article “UFO Agents of Terror” referring to the Men in Black. He also wrote one of the first articles on Mothman in FSR, during this same time period.

Like other contemporary 1960s researchers such as J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, Keel was initially hopeful that he could somehow validate the prevailing nuts-and-bolts, extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis for UFOs. However, a year into his investigations, Keel realized that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was untenable and did not explain, for him, based within his personality and belief systems, all the answers.

Keel’s insights also included his view of cryptozoology.

I grew to know Keel after being introduced to him through mutual friends Brad Steiger and Ivan Sanderson. I worked closely with Keel on contributing as yet-unpublished material of mine for his book, Strange Creatures from Time and Space (1970), which would influence my and Jerome Clark’s first two books The Unidentified (1975) and Creatures from the Outer Edge (1978).

Keel’s impact is far-reaching. Keel’s book, Strange Creatures from Time and Space was the inspiration for Craig Woolheater’s interest in Bigfoot and eventually would stimulate the creation of Cryptomundo.

Love him or hate him, John Keel was popular and one of the most widely read and influential Fortean authors of the late 20th century. Although his own thoughts about aerial, monster, and associated anomalous phenomena gradually evolved during the 1960s, Keel remained one of ufology’s most original and controversial researchers.

It was Keel’s second book, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), that alerted the general public that many aspects of contemporary UFO reports, including humanoid encounters, often paralleled certain ancient folklore and religious encounters. Keel also argued that there is a direct relationship between UFOs and elemental phenomena. Keel informed me often that he did not consider himself a “ufologist,” but a “demonologist.”

“Ufology is just another name for demonology,” John Keel told me, a week before the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, which occurred just a couple of miles from where he lives.

…as noted in Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, page 114, (NY: Paraview, 2002).

As Keel himself wrote, “I abandoned the extraterrestrial hypothesis in 1967 when my own field investigations disclosed an astonishing overlap between psychic phenomena and UFOs… The objects and apparitions do not necessarily originate on another planet and may not even exist as permanent constructions of matter. It is more likely that we see what we want to see and interpret such visions according to our contemporary beliefs.”

In UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), Keel argued that a non-human or spiritual intelligence source has staged whole events over a long period of time in order to propagate and reinforce certain erroneous belief systems (mirroring Vallée). Keel conjectured that ultimately all anomalies, such as fairies, 1897 mystery airships, 1930s phantom aeroplanes, mystery helicopters, creatures, poltergeists, balls of light, and UFOs, are a cover for the real phenomenon.

It was during this time period that Keel maintained an enormous and active correspondence with other researchers around the world. For example, I, Loren Coleman, was introduced to my now long-time friend Jerry Clark by John Keel, via letters. These exchanges between Keel and his fellow writers and researchers, even as intellectual disagreements and different paths took many of us on varied journeys, cemented 40 years of solid friendships among a small group of dedicated Fortean writers.

In Our Haunted Planet (1971), Keel coined the term “ultraterrestrials” to describe the UFO occupants. He discussed the seldom-considered possibility that the alien “visitors” to Earth are not visitors at all, but an advanced Earth civilization, which may or may not be human. Keel took no position on the ultimate purpose of the phenomenon other than that the UFO intelligence seems to have a long-standing interest in interacting with the human race.

UFO historian Jerome Clark wrote that Keel was “a radical theorist who believes that UFOs are ‘ultraterrestrial’ rather than extraterrrestrial. By that he means they are shape-changing phenomena from another order of existence. These ultraterrestials are basically hostile to, or at least contemptuous of, human beings and manipulate them in various wasy for example by staging ‘miracles’ which inspire unfounded religious beliefs. Ultraterrestrials and their minions may manifest as monsters, space people, ghosts and other paranormal entities.” (The UFO Encyclopedia, Volume 1: UFOs in the 1980s, page 148, NY: Agogee, 1990).

After years of writing parts of the story in various articles and other books, in 1975, Keel published The Mothman Prophecies, an account of his 1966-1967 investigation of sightings of the Mothman, a “winged weirdie” reported in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

Keel corresponded with Ivan T. Sanderson, quietly for months, trying to determine what kind of bird might be involved with the sightings. It was later, as Keel more fully revealed the tale of the sightings and concurrent phenomena, that other elements came into the mix.

The book was contemporarily adapted into a 2002 movie directed by Mark Pellington, starring Richard Gere, Debra Messing, Laura Linney and Alan Bates.

Two parts of Keel’s personality were played by Gere and Bates. Bates’s character was “Leek,” which was “Keel” spelled backwards, and Gere’s character was a newspaperman, “John Klein,” also a play on Keel’s name. Because Keel was ill at the time, Sony/Screen Gems cut back Keel’s schedule of public appearances to only a few televised ones. I assisted Keel by becoming the movie’s publicity spokesperson on 400 radio shows, and appeared with Keel in the David Grabias documentary Search For The Mothman, which is in the Deluxe DVD of The Mothman Prophecies.

Keel often played, with tongue-in-cheek, on the Men-In-Black interest swirling around his work.

At the time of the release of the movie, a rumor circulated that Keel had died. On January 14, 2002, a story rapidly made the rounds via the web that John A. Keel had just died.

I quickly put the rumor to rest by calling Keel, and confirming that Keel was, indeed, still alive, although Keel quipped that everyone should be told, “his funeral is on Saturday and he will be wearing black.” Keel told me that this happened to him at least once before, in 1967.

In recent years, Keel’s appearances would be few and far between. But his sense of humor never left him, including wearing an all white suit to the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia for the unveiling of the new Mothman replica.

Keel suffered a heart attack sometime before October 13, 2006. He admitted himself to New York City’s Lenox Hill Hospital on Friday the 13th of October, and underwent successful heart surgery on October 16, 2006. Keel then was moved from the hospital to a rehabilitation center on October 26, 2006, as his close New York friend Doug Skinner told me soon afterward. Skinner became invaluable in assisting Keel, and passing along messages to and from Keel’s old friends.

Keel’s impact cannot be underestimated, especially in terms of his analysis of patterns. His work on “windows” (specific hotspots of combined phenomenal appearances), “waves” (cyclic appearances of the phenomena), and the “Wednesday phenomenon” (the theory that a disproportionate number of UFO events occur on that day of the week) are deeply influential across time and space. Generations of readers of Fortean literature often do not even realize that Keel’s writings may be behind “name game” discussions or authors’ speculations on the fact that a certain location on a ridge might have a high rate of strange events occurring there after the 21st of the month on a Wednesday in a high-frequency month such as April. Keel was there first trying to look at such patterns.

The popular cultural influence of Keel has been enormous. It shall take future academic studies to fully realize his reach among the subculture that respects and are denizens of his ongoing intellectual playground.

On July 6, 2009, as word swept through the Internet, from Phyllis Benjamin at INFO and others, that Keel had passed away last Friday, tributes and sorrow were shared online in overwhelming fashion from his followers, fans, and friends.

John A. Keel will be missed.

John A. Keel Bibliography

Jadoo. (NY: Tower, 1957)

The Fickle Finger of Fate. (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1966)

UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse. (NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970) (reprint, Atlanta: Illuminet Press, 1996)

Strange Creatures From Time and Space. (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1970)

Our Haunted Planet. (1971) (rev., Lakeville, MN: Galde Press, 1999)

The Mothman Prophecies: An Investigation into the Mysterious American Visits of the Infamous Feathery Garuda. (NY: Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton, 1975; NY: Signet, 1975), (rev.. NY: Tor, 2002)

The Eighth Tower. (NY: Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton, 1975)

Disneyland of the Gods (NY: Amok Press, 1988) (reprint, Atlanta: Illuminet Press, 1996)

The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings. (NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1994) (rev. edition of Strange Creatures from Time and Space)

The Best of John Keel. (Lakeville, MN: Galde Press, 2006)
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For more on John A. Keel’s legacy, see Chapter Seven, “Keel’s Children” in Mothman and Other Curious Encounters.