Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (11 page)

One of the first UFO investigators to be harassed by the MIB had figured out – correctly – that UFOs seemed to originate from some point near the North and South poles. Other investigators who have discarded the extra-terrestrial hypothesis and studied the earthly links with the phenomenon have experienced more harassment, mail, and phone problems, etc., than their colleagues who believe in outer space vehicles. If you collect a piece of unidentifiable metal from a UFO witness, you will have no problems. But if a witness hands you a piece of aluminum, magnesium, or silicon – all common earthly substances – you are very apt to receive a visit from the Men in Black. Some witnesses who fall victim to these charades do not consciously understand the importance of what they have seen. Nor do the investigators who believe in the ET hypothesis realize the importance of these cases. In fact, it is common practice for the amateur UFO organizations to denounce such cases as hoaxes and brand the witnesses liars (or worse) when they find their “evidence” is plain old aluminum. They can be excused for this, though, since the U.S. Air Force has also labeled many cases “hoaxes” for the same reasons.

If any real suppression exists, it is to conceal evidence of terrestrial origin. Whoever is waging this campaign has agents around the world, and technical facilities surpassing those of any known government. By mid-1967, my own conclusions had changed dramatically. I began to freely discuss and write about the terrestrial origin of UFOs. During a trip to Washington, D.C., I was invited to record an hour-long tape for “Voice of America.” At that time, the late Al Johnson was doing a series of UFO programs that were broadcast throughout the world on VOA. Johnson interviewed me for an hour and I discussed at length the theory of terrestrial origin. A few days later, he phoned me full of apologies. Our tape had inadvertently been placed in “the wrong pile” and had been completely erased before it could be broadcast. It was just one of those things.
Or was it?

That same year, a team from a German TV station was touring America interviewing UFO witnesses and investigators. They were seasoned, professional technicians. They came to my New York apartment, set up all their expensive equipment, and filmed me for 30 minutes. A few days later, I received a call from their Washington office. Their film of me was unusable. Parts were overexposed, and the magnetic soundtrack was spoiled by inexplicable static. It was just another one of those things… Variations of these “coincidences” continually happen. Radio and TV transmitters suddenly go dead during UFO discussions. Vital tapes are mysteriously erased. Precious photographs are lost in the mails. Investigators’ phones suddenly go dead at the height of a UFO wave. (The line of my phone was physically cut by a pair of wirecutters
twice
in 1967.)

In 1974,
France Inter,
the Paris radio station, aired a series of 39 programs about UFOs, beginning with a pro-UFO talk by Robert Galley, France’s Minister of Defense. French broadcasters had spent much of 1973 locating and recording statements by leading authorities in France, England, and the U.S. The list was an impressive one and included such luminaries as Dr. David Saunders, the psychologist at Colorado University who has been entering thousands of UFO sightings into computers; Dr. Jacques Vallee, author of three UFO books; Pierre Kohler, a famous astronomer; and even Cardinal Danielou, a prominent churchman. The broadcasts were divided into two parts. The first part consisted of statements by witnesses and local French enthusiasts and officials. Hynek, Vallee, and some of the other “advanced” observers of the phenomenon were scheduled for the second part. The second section was never aired. Someone broke into the radio station and
stole the tapes!

Jean-Claude Bourret sent the following explanation to Gordon Creighton, the distinguished British UFO authority: “Unfortunately, on Monday, March 18, 1974, a mysterious burglar carried off all the tapes that were still waiting to be broadcast. That this was an act of deliberate malevolence is beyond question… There were two piles side by side: those interviews that had already gone out, and those that were still to be broadcast.
Only this second pile was taken.”
What was the gist of the tapes? Like most of the professional scientists and journalists who have undertaken a serious study of UFOs, Dr. Hynek, Jacques Vallee, and their colleagues have found the popular extraterrestrial hypothesis untenable. For some time now, they have been weighing the awesome alternative: that UFOs are earthly in origin, are accompanied by so-called psychic manifestations, and are produced by complex distortions of space, time, and even of reality itself.

“What the theft was designed to prevent,” Creighton notes, “was the dissemination to millions of European listeners that similar views about UFOs are held by foreign experts of the caliber of Dr. J. Allen Hynek. It looks as though ‘somebody’ is mighty anxious that we Earthlings do not learn the truth about ‘something’ which, I suggest, might relate to the 64-billion-dollar question:
who owns and controls this planet…and us?”

Who, indeed, has the ability to control the mails, the telephones, and radio and television stations
worldwide?
Are people from some distant planet traveling the backroads of Long Island in black Cadillacs, or was Ivan Sanderson right? Are we dealing with beings that originate on our own planet? Someone has tried very hard for years to convince us that those strange things in our skies are harmless spaceships from some distant world. So long as we believe it, and believe that they originate from far beyond our pitiful reach, we seem to be relatively safe. But when we look in the wrong direction – towards Earth itself – there comes a heavy knock on our door in the middle of the night.

CHAPTER 5

“CONTACTEE” RUSTLING – 1979 LECTURE

Those of you who’ve read some of my books know that I’m a growing skeptic. I started out as a great believer, and I’ve gradually turned into a skeptic as my investigations have progressed. I’m going to try to explain to you today some of those investigations and why they have made me skeptical of the basic flying saucer premise. That basic premise, of course, is that these things are from outer space. There’s no question that there are strange things in the sky, but where they come from and what they’re doing here is wide open. We know very little about them after 35 or 40 years of investigation. Our main problem, as I’ve stated in a number of books and articles, is that the will to believe is much stronger than the will to understand. People are very quick to accept a belief without any evidence. Sometimes with no evidence at all... A lot of our major religions are based on that strange ability of the human mind to accept such beliefs.

Harry Houdini, back in the ‘20s, became a good friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Harry Houdini, of course, was the great escape artist. Arthur Conan Doyle was also a famous investigator of psychic phenomenon in that era. He decided that Harry Houdini was not a magician at all, but a psychic. Doyle believed Houdini wasn’t just escaping from these boxes and things; he was dematerializing and materializing outside the boxes. So he approached Harry Houdini with this theory and Houdini laughed at him saying, “That’s nonsense, I use simple trickery to get out of these boxes.” But Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced that Harry Houdini was a medium, and he stated this in some books and magazine articles. Harry Houdini got so mad that he broke off his relationship with Doyle. Doyle refused to believe that these were magic tricks…

Now, with flying saucers, we have a similar situation. We have been accepting, at face value, a lot of the things that have been said. I’d say 98% of the literature on flying saucers is absolute garbage. I know because I’ve had to read all of it over the years. When you try to track down some of these things (especially things that happened some years ago), you either end up at a blank wall or you find that it was much different from what was reported in the flying saucer magazines of that time. There are great dissimilarities. So after a lot of bad experiences, I decided to investigate only things that hadn’t received any publicity and had happened very recently. And that got me into the Mothman mess. I went down to West Virginia many items and tried to find out what was happening there. There were flying saucer sightings galore. In fact, I saw so many myself down there that I actually lost count. To a skeptic, this seems incredible. Once, in Washington, D.C., I made that statement when the skeptic, Phil Klass, was in the audience. He stood up and said in a very loud voice, “That man is a terrible liar!” And he stalked out of the hall.

But when you’re in an area where there is a UFO wave going on, you’re bound to see them. They were following a schedule in West Virginia. Every night at 8:30, you could go out and look up at the sky and one would go over. There were people with private airplanes chasing the damn things. Of course, they always got away, and we never solved the mystery. Then I discovered that at 10:00 on Wednesday nights, we seemed to have more activity than any other period of time. I mentioned this on a television station down in West Virginia. The next Wednesday night, half the country was out looking at the sky. Thank god, three of them went over in formation at 10:00 on Wednesday night. I was then considered a great seer, because I had managed to figure this out.

There are a lot of other patterns to the phenomenon, which we can figure out if we lend ourselves to it. Going back through history, I have found that these patterns are continuous. I had to do some research into the Great Plague of the 1300s. I kept coming across references to strange atmospheric phenomenon. I kept digging into more and more books trying to find out what kind of strange atmospheric phenomenon they were talking about. It was taking place while everybody was dropping dead with the Plague. I finally found some references that described very large bright lights that were flying around these cities, especially where people were dying in droves. At that time, they assumed that it was some kind of religious phenomenon related to all the deaths that were taking place. The Indians had a belief that these were “sky ships” taking souls away into space after they died… In the ‘60s, we had a great many sightings directly over funeral homes and mental hospitals. I could never figure that out, either. Why funeral homes and mental hospitals? In the mental hospitals, the doctors and the nurses would be reporting these UFOs (not the inmates). Maybe there were inmates there that the UFOs were interested in. Inmates who had read some of my books or something…
[
laughter
]

I felt that the one thing that had not been properly investigated were the contactees themselves. Since we never managed to catch a flying saucer, our best evidence was the contactee. At that time in the 1960s, contactees were frowned upon. They were ridiculed. They were attacked at every corner. There were 2 or 3 contactees who had gotten rather famous, and this really irked some of the more prominent ufologists (who were very publicity-minded). There were contactees like George Adamski, who became very famous. He was much slandered and, so, towards the end of his life, he denied everything. He thought that he had been used in some fashion. He didn’t know how he had been used, but he thought something very fishy was going on – that many of the things he had believed earlier about flying saucers were wrong. But he couldn’t figure out what was really going on.

I started interviewing contactees. And because of my magazine articles about contactees, more contactees would write to me. In fact, I was swamped with letters from all over the country. Some people had had experiences 20 years earlier, and had never told anyone, because they didn’t know exactly who to tell. Finally they’d read an article by me about contactees, and decide to get in touch with me. In the end, I dealt with probably five or six hundred people who had had some kind of contactee experience. I lost count. There were hundreds of others that I could never visit personally, or talk to on the telephone, but with whom I corresponded briefly.

I found that there were certain patterns in the contactee phenomenon, which had been deliberately overlooked by the ET believers. There were medical effects that had been deliberately overlooked or missed, because the average UFO investigation was more of a conversation. Nobody ever examined these contactees physically, or even asked them what kind of physical affects they had suffered after their experience. It was virgin territory at that time. Fortunately, around the country there are quite a few doctors and psychologists now doing the same thing that I was doing then. But it was a long, uphill battle in the ‘60s to get anyone to pay any attention to the contactees. They were really scorned, yet they hold many of the keys to the UFO phenomenon.

There are six basic types of contactees. Not just one, as you’d think. There are six types, with a couple of subgroups. I’ll try to explain each type and their medical characteristics.

TYPE 1: TRANCE CONTACTEES

The first type, Type 1, is a
trance
subject. This is, I’ve found, the most prevalent type. Usually this witness claims that he’s suffered paralysis – that he was unable to move a muscle or even blink his eyes. This is a sure sign that he was in a trance. We have religious miracles (name any date, they’re going on all the time) like the one in 1962 in Garabandal, Spain. Two small children would go out into a field and kneel by a bush for five or six hours. They would be in a complete trance. Hundreds of people would mill around them, watching this. When they came out of the trance, they would tell that they had had a long conversation with the “lady” that was visiting them.

This happens over and over again in religious miracles. People are actually in a trance, but they don’t know they’re in a trance. They think they’re fully conscious. In hypnotherapy, a person will often be hypnotized and be “under” for two hours. When you bring him out of hypnosis, he doesn’t think that he’s been under for two seconds. If you tell him that he’s been hypnotized, he’ll argue with you. He’ll say, “No, I couldn’t have been hypnotized,” until he looks at the clock and realizes that two hours have passed.