Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (25 page)

Having worked for the government in the past, I knew how the bureaucracy operated and thought. A secret UFO project would be carefully concealed, probably in a seemingly unrelated department like the Dept. of Transportation, or some sub-agency not connected with the Air Force or CIA. The standard journalistic method for ferreting out such projects is to study the budgets of the agencies and search for large, unspecified expenditures. I wasted a lot of time on this. In any case, duplication of effort is common in government, and it is quite possible that several different UFO projects are being conducted by different agencies without any coordination or cooperation.

While I was living in Washington in 1971-72, the newspapers were filled with stories about a mysterious windowless building that had been constructed on government property there. Curious reporters tried vainly to find out which agency had built the structure, even though such basic information is supposed to be freely available (since tax dollars were spent on the project).

If a government group can construct an expensive (and illegal) building in the heart of Washington and keep it a secret, then other groups could possibly set up sub-rosa UFO study projects. If such projects are largely “medical” and run by doctors, our chances of learning anything about them are, alas, slight.

When I realized the contactees might hold the key, I enlisted the aid of a number of doctors and psychologists in the New York area to help me. Some of them later threw their hands up in despair, partly because what they were learning could never be made public without jeopardizing their careers. Another medical man, well-known in UFO research, recently told me the same thing. “The best cases involved such ethical considerations and uncertainties,” he said, “that one is pledged to secrecy.”

There’s the rub. The very nature of our investigations makes in necessary to keep the identities of the witnesses secret. The deeply personal aspects of UFO experiences have an automatic silencing factor. In essence, when a responsible investigator does stumble onto important information, he finds he cannot reveal it publicly without seriously affecting the lives of the witnesses. This is undoubtedly why some government investigators have advised certain witnesses to keep quiet.

Only a few of the many hundreds of MIB cases have been made public for the reasons stated above. It is apparent, though, that the MIB often employ the same techniques as the elusive government agents. In many cases, it appears that two different groups are involved, and that these groups are actually working against each other. A kind of underground war of nerves is taking place around the world.

A large part of the UFO mystery is nothing more than myths based upon the speculations of bewildered outsiders. The government successfully diverted civilian research for two decades. If Menger and others like him are correct, official brainwashers may have actually worked to
create
the extraterrestrial theory. The idea was to misdirect the civilian ufological establishment while, in the shadows, some covert government agency quietly tried to get at the real truth.

CHAPTER 13

BEHIND THE FBI’S UNDERCOVER FLYING SAUCER INVESTIGATION –
MEN
MAGAZINE, 1968

It crossed the dawn-lit French countryside in eerie silence, and the early-rising farmers stood in their fields and stared at it with wonder. At first they thought it was a giant hot-air balloon on fire and about to crash. As it swooped low over the skies near the village of Alençon, it began to whistle. It slowed, rocked up and down as if it were out of control, and then plummeted down onto the top of a high hill. The grass and shrubbery burst into flames from the heat of the object. Crowds of farmers and villagers rushed up the hill to fight the fire.

When they reached the summit, they stopped. The fiery sphere appeared to be some kind of mechanical contrivance. A door on its side suddenly flew open. A man stepped out and looked around uneasily at the gathering crowd. Later, the witnesses described him as looking “just like us, except that he was dressed in strange clothes – very tight-fitting garments.” The man mumbled something no one could understand, and then he ran into some nearby woods and disappeared. He was never seen again. A few minutes later, his odd vehicle exploded
in complete silence.
Nothing was left except granules of metallic powder.

A few days later, Paris sent a police inspector named Liabeuf to the site to investigate. He found that the eyewitnesses included two mayors, a physician, and three other local authorities, in addition to dozens of peasants and farmers. All of their stories matched, detail for detail. Something very unusual had apparently happened at Alençon, but it was never reported to the French Air Force. And for very good reason...

The incident occurred 178 years ago, at 5 a.m. on the morning of June 12, 1790. There were only three or four hot air balloons in the entire world at that time. (The first balloon had been sent up by Montgolfier brothers only eight years earlier.) What and who did these Frenchmen view on that distant date? Many of the details in Inspector Liabeuf ’s report are uncomfortably similar to modern “flying saucer” accounts. If this same distinguished group of witnesses were around in 1968 and reported something like this, they would have been branded “contactees,” subjected to ridicule, and the French Air force would probably have explained the UFO away as a “weather balloon.”

Unidentified flying objects have been turning up throughout history. Many thousands of people claim to have actually seen and even spoken with the “ufonauts” (pilots).

Not all of these people can be lumped into the category of “kooks, cultists, and crackpots.” Their constantly growing ranks include judges, senators, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and hard-boiled newspapermen. A good many of these witnesses understandably choose to remain silent about their experiences, because so much controversy and ridicule has been heaped upon “contactees” who dared to publicly reveal their encounters with the “flying saucer people.”

“People” may be the right term, too. In many reports, the ufonauts are described as looking just like us, with human features and an apparent ability to breathe our atmosphere without difficulty. But there have also been a spate of stories involving “little men” in “diving suits,” and “giants” in “space suits” complete with transparent helmets. “Contacts” with the flying saucer pilots have now been reported from every country on Earth, including the Soviet Union. Since very few of these stories are widely publicized or circulated, it is remarkable that so many witnesses, so separated by distance, could come up with the same correlative details. It is easy for us to dismiss the single reports as being the work of liars and cranks but, in the past 20 years, over 2,500 such stories have been carefully investigated by trained scientists and reporters on every continent. And historians have unearthed hundreds more going all the way back to ancient Roman times. The sightings of the flying saucers themselves (there are now over 100,000 fully documented sightings from all over the world) pall into insignificance beside this mass of data about the UFO
occupants.

Deep in East Africa, the residents of the tiny village of Baira, Mozambique reported an incident in April 1960 that is almost identical to that 1790 “touchdown” (landing) in France. According to the story filed by the Portuguese news service
Lusitania,
hundreds of villagers saw a whistling orange object land in a field outside Baira, and a group of “tiny little men” leaped out of it. They ran into the forest just as the thing exploded. Searchers could find no trace of the “little men,” either. The objects and their pilots have an uncanny way of disappearing without leaving any evidence behind, and it is this absence of hard physical evidence that keeps anti-UFO skepticism alive.

Since the flying saucers and their peculiar occupants have apparently been busy in our skies since the beginning of history (there are extensive UFO descriptions in Hindu scriptures dating back 5000 years and, of course, there are several UFO-like accounts in the Holy Bible), it seems unlikely that
“they”
will ever provide us with concrete evidence or enter into formal and open contact with our governments. The UFO buffs have been waiting patiently for twenty years now, hoping that one day soon, a flying saucer will land on the White House lawn or settle in front of the United Nations. This will probably never happen. Indeed, if some of the UFO pilots look just like us, there is no need for this to happen.
They
could easily walk our streets and even move into our apartment buildings without ever being noticed. And it does seem as if
they
want it that way.

Sure, this sounds like a bad plot from the TV series,
The Invaders.
But, to coin a cliché, fiction is always struggling to keep up with fact.

In 1866, a man in Massachusetts named William Denton announced that he was in contact with beings from other planets. He said they looked just like us, could speak our languages, and flew through the skies in saucer-shaped machines made from aluminum. (The commercial process for manufacturing aluminum was not developed until 1886.) Mr. Denton also explained that
they
could communicate silently via mental telepathy. Needless to say, not very many people took these startling revelations seriously. There had been other “contacts” in 1823 and 1846 but, of course, nobody paid much attention.

In March and April of 1897, thousands of people all over the U.S. reported seeing gigantic cigar-shaped machines in the sky (this was long before any kind of dirigible had been successfully flown in the U.S.), and many told of landings and casual chats with the pilots. What did these pilots look like? Fortunately, there were hundreds of extensive newspaper stories on these incidents throughout the period. UFO researchers have burrowed into the old files and come up with hundreds of interesting items. The pilots of the 1897 “airships” were slight in stature, had dark olive skin, deep black eyes, and long fingers. They spoke perfect English, according to the witnesses.

Not all of the UFO occupants are male, either. There are many stories of “beautiful ladies” alighting from the objects.

An ex-Senator named Harris, from Harrisburg, Arkansas, testified that a strange flying machine landed on his farm early on the morning of April 21, 1897, and that two men and a woman stepped out to draw water from his well. A week earlier, a similar object allegedly landed on a farm near Springfield, IL. Two men and a woman disembarked from it briefly to chat with Adolph Winkle and John Hulle. Both farmers later signed notarized affidavits swearing to the truth of their story.

A pair of Arkansas lawmen, Constable John J. Sumpter and Deputy Sheriff John McLemore, also signed sworn affidavits claiming that they saw a luminous object land on the night of May 6, 1897, in Garland County. They said that two men and a woman appeared, and filled a sack with water from a well while they watched. In all three of these cases, one of the men was said to have sported a waist-length beard of “silken” whiskers and acted as the spokesman. Bearded ufonauts were also reported by a large group of witnesses at Bell Plains, Iowa, on April 15
^th
of that year.

There were scores of other “contacts” in 1897, and hundreds of detailed aerial sightings. The objects themselves flew low over Chicago, Omaha, San Francisco, and even Washington, D.C. They were viewed by thousands of people. When all of these reports were sifted and organized by dates, it was obvious that many “airships” were involved, for they appeared simultaneously over dozens of localities on a single date.

There are now many hundreds of “little men” reports from all over the world. In the majority of these, the witnesses describe the creatures as having Oriental-like eyes, lipless slit-like mouths, and long, slender hands. They seem to share these physical characteristics with the taller (usually 5’9”) ufonauts who have now been reported in abundance, particularly in North and South America. The beings who purportedly abducted Betty and Barney Hill in New Hampshire, in 1961, were described by them as being less than five feet tall and having “wraparound” eyes. Usually they are said to be dressed in tight-fitting black coveralls or in “silver suits.” Occasionally there have been reports of green-suited creatures. Early reports of such types gave rise to the “little green men” stories. In approximately 80% of the known contact cases (both tall and short), the ufonauts have been described as having dark or olive complexions.

Where all of these “people” are coming from is a complicated part of the mystery, and there are no real clues. We can only note that they seem to reappear consistently in the same isolated and thinly populated areas, year after year. Michigan, Minnesota, and Arkansas had hundreds of sightings in 1897, and the objects were back in strength in the same areas throughout 1966-67. In some areas, UFO sightings can be traced back hundreds of years. It almost seems as if it is a local phenomenon. Why, we must ask, would beings from another planet travel to the dustbowl of Oklahoma year after year, century after century? Local Indian legends of the “Sky People” go back many centuries.

The many “contact” reports and creature sightings, sometimes involving dozens of witnesses, mean that we must exclude purely natural causes for the phenomenon such as “ball lightning,” meteors, weather balloons, and the like. The objects are obviously manned, and we now know a great deal about those occupants (although we still don’t know enough).

We also have very good reason to believe that there is a group or organization of people living amongst us who do not want us to find out what is really going on… The U.S Air Force now admits that they have been trying to catch the unknown persons who have masqueraded in Air force uniforms and threatened American citizens, sometimes only minutes after those citizens had observed a UFO –
and before they had a chance to report their sighting to anybody.
The air Force now quietly hands over UFO cases to the FBI, not to harass the witnesses, but to find out
who
is harassing
them
!