Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (29 page)

Then, in Feb. 1970, four of the missing youngsters reappeared separately. Two were found stumbling about the streets blindly, suffering from amnesia.

Although the other two were able to remember who they were and fragments of what happened, their stories were as bizarre as a science fiction tale. They each had been stopped on the street, they said, and were offered a ride in a large American-style limousine (a hard-to-resist treat for a poor Brazilian youth). Once in the car, each was given a cigarette, which was apparently drugged, for they then lapsed into unconsciousness. One returnee recalled that he awoke in a small hut, tied hand and foot, and that a stranger finally entered, freed him, and told him how to find the nearest police station. An 11-yr. old girl named Vani said her kidnapper was a woman named “Laura.” Laura fed her sweets and then took her to a field where an airplane was waiting. But when Vani began to scream and fuss, Laura gave her some money and returned her to her village. Most of the victims were boys, although a few girls were included.

Once the kidnapping wave began to receive publicity, several youths who had heard of it had narrow escapes, fleeing the big cars and their mysterious occupants when they were offered lifts. Brazilian correspondent Eduardo Keffel reported in the German magazine
Die Bunte Illustrierte
(March 24, 1970) that the police were speculating that a slavery ring was operating in the area. But the possibility exists that
saucer men
may have been the culprits.

Actually, large numbers of children have been disappearing for centuries all over the world, and most of these cases have remained unsolved. Some have been handed down as rumor and myth; others have been heavily documented and repeated in books dealing with unusual events. The celebrated Pied Piper of Hamelin, Germany, is more than just a charming children’s story. A stranger actually
did
appear in Hamelin in the Middle ages, and he did lure 150 children away, never to be seen again. The event is still celebrated in Hamelin each year with a festival.

One of the first colonies of the New World, the Roanoke Island colony, established in 1585 off the coast of what is now North Carolina, disappeared magically. Virginia Dare, the first child of European descent born on this continent, was among the missing. The local Indians were not hostile, and were as baffled by the colony’s disappearance as the explorers who searched for it. Historians have been arguing the fate of Miss Dare and her compatriots ever since.

Another village, a remote Eskimo settlement in northern Canada, lost its entire population in Aug. 1930. Supposedly the village was found abandoned. Its 30 inhabitants had left their food, clothing, kayaks, rifles, and dogs. Since no Eskimo is likely to travel very far without his precious rifle (or his dog), everyone was baffled. Strangest of all, a grave on the edge of the village had supposedly been opened and the body taken. Grave robbing is an unspeakable crime among Eskimos, and it is unlikely that they dug up the body and fled the village, leaving behind their weapons, tools, food, and dogs. A purported investigation failed to yield any clues (and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police claims to have no record of the incident).

More recently, in the summer of 1967, another very peculiar report came out of the Canadian north, from an Indian village accessible only by air. This case came to the attention of a leading Canadian investigator named Brian cannon. He pieced it together from the stories told by bush pilots and hunters. According to cannon, about 40 Indian schoolchildren suddenly vanished from the village one weekend. Forty-eight hours later, they all reappeared unharmed, bubbling over with an amazing story. They had been taken, they said, by a group of very small men who subjected them to various examinations but treated them very well. When they were released, each child was given a small white cube that was sweet, but did not melt like sugar.

Since the village is so remote, there has never been an on-the-spot investigation by Mr. Cannon or other competent researchers. The case must remain pure hearsay, but it is not unique. The fairy tales of Ireland and northern Scandinavia contain similar accounts: little people – fairies and leprechauns – who are supposed to have frequently indulged in kidnapping. Even today, there are periodic epidemics of vanishing children.

One district in Sweden has had so many “little people” reports that for centuries, it’s officially been known as “Elfland.” One of the most celebrated cases of occult kidnapping took place there in 1668, at the peak of the worldwide witch craze. One hundred children in the villages of Mohra and Elfdale were allegedly lured into the night to participate in strange rites. A legal trial was later held, so there are extensive records of the whole affair. The judges were impressed by the fact that all of the 100 victims gave identical details. Fifteen of the children were later
executed,
While 60 others were sentenced to be whipped, once a week, for a year. Their stories involved mental telepathy, astral projection, strange entities that possessed the power of flight, and amnesia. All of these things are familiar ingredients in modern flying saucer stories.

In reviewing this bizarre case, the British parapsychologist Peter Robson recently commented, “Suppose (there was) a black magician possessing immense powers – powers that included the ability to set up some form of telepathic communication with the untroubled mind of a sleeping child. And not just one child, but 100… Subconsciously, the children receive an order to go to a certain place at a certain time. The next day, the children rendezvous at the gravel pit near the crossroads. The magician appears and leads them like a kind of satanic Pied Piper. Afterwards, the children are ordered to forget the place and the way to it; their memory of the journey is hypnotically supplanted by a surrealist dream.”

In modern flying saucer stories, we find that the unknown objects frequently appeared over, or landed in, gravel pits near crossroads. Innumerable UFO witnesses have purportedly received telepathic messages and also have suffered from amnesia. Modern psychiatrists and psychologists investigating UFO contact stories have concluded that the witnesses had actually experienced “a surrealist dream,” and that their memories of what actually took place were replaced by false memories of visits to other worlds. This process is known as “confabulation,” and may be a vital key to the whole flying saucer mystery.

In other words, just as the children of 1668 remembered incredible (if not altogether impossible) meetings with a “black magician” or the devil, modern flying saucer contactees may be remembering only what they have been
programmed
to remember.

Some witnesses are simply programmed to forget a specific period of time altogether. This type of amnesia is prevalent in the early fairy and witchcraft lore and, now, in the present-day UFO reports. In 1959, Pfc. Gerry Irwin, a Nike
missile technician,
was the subject of an intensive investigation by the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). While driving near Cedar City, Utah, on Feb. 28, 1959, Irwin saw what appeared to be an airliner attempting a forced landing nearby. He stopped his car and started out on foot for the site of the “crash.” The next thing he knew, he was in a hospital in Cedar City, minus his jacket.

A few weeks later, Irwin felt a compelling urge to revisit the same area. He went AWOL from his post at Ft. Bliss, TX, and made his way back to the spot where he thought the object had crashed. There he found his jacket with a pencil through the buttonhole. A piece of paper was wrapped around the pencil. Without knowing why, Irwin burned the paper without even reading it. It was only after the paper was reduced to ashes that he came out of the “trance” that had drawn him to the spot. He turned himself over to the local sheriff immediately. For several weeks after, Private Irwin was in and out of hospitals. Psychiatrists could find nothing wrong with him. Then, on Aug. 1, 1959, he went AWOL again. It was as if he had vanished into thin air, for he hasn’t been heard from since.

Movie and soap opera plots to the contrary, a simple blow on the head rarely induces amnesia. The traditional medical explanation for amnesia is that it is caused by an overwhelming emotional trauma. A man murders his wife in a fit of rage, and then his mind represses his entire memory of the act. A child sees his beloved dog run over by a car, and erases the painful memory by forgetting that entire period of his childhood. Psychiatrists can spot this form of amnesia and cope with it. But most of the amnesia cases apparently induced by paranormal happenings, such as encounters with “fairies” or flying saucers, are not so easily diagnosed and dealt with. And there are many other cases of amnesia that are not so easily explained. The nature of the trauma is never determined.

Every July, there is a sudden rash of amnesia cases in the national press; and July is also a peak month for UFO sightings. People mysteriously turn up in all parts of the world, sometimes knowing who they are, but baffled that they are suddenly so far from home. A Londoner inexplicably finds himself in South Africa; a girl from Cleveland awakes to discover she is in Australia; an unemployed Swedish milkman suddenly finds himself on a golf course of a remote resort island for the very rich. They become the subjects of amusing little “human interest” stories in the July newspapers. But what really happens to such people? Who, or what, suddenly transports them thousands of miles from home without their conscious knowledge? Often they are also displaced in time, unable to account for or remember the past six months or two years.

Others vanish without reason and turn up weeks or months later, many miles from home, unable to remember even their names. Did they suffer blows to the head, or did something far more complicated and mysterious happen to them?

A woman in Allentown, PA soberly related this strange story… She and her husband have a small summer cottage in the Pocono Mountains, a 30-minute drive from their home. One Saturday morning in July 1966, the young couple got in their car and started out for the cottage. As they drove along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which seemed strangely devoid of traffic that day, they saw a large circular object in the sky ahead of them. It looked as if it was going to land directly on the turnpike. Her husband, mildly alarmed, pulled over to the edge of the road and stopped. They watched as the object, a shiny metallic thing with large black spots or windows, flew very low over their car. Then, suddenly, it was gone. Her husband started the car again and they drove on to their cottage. It was not until after they arrived that they looked at their watches. It was 1:30 a.m. They had started out at 9:30 a.m. For some reason neither of them can explain, it took them four hours for a trip that normally takes 30 minutes!

On a warm night early in Aug. 1966, a Philadelphia policeman named Chester Archey, Jr., set out on a routine patrol in North Philadelphia. He drove instead through that door into the unknown… Archey, a veteran with 15 years on the force, suddenly found himself in Pennsauken, NJ, where he became involved in a minor accident while he was driving around in confusion. “I don’t have any idea how I got there,” Archey protested at a police hearing later. “I don’t even know where Pennsauken is!”

According to the newspaper
Diario de Cordoba,
a well-known Argentine businessman suffered a strange distortion of time and space in 1959. He reportedly got into his car one morning in the city of Bahia Blanca, Argentina, and started to drive away from his hotel, when a strange cloud seemed to envelope his vehicle. The next he knew, he was
standing
alone on a deserted spot in the countryside. He hailed a passing truck and asked the driver to take him to Bahia Blanca. Looking at him as though he was some kind of maniac, the driver explained that they were in Salta. Bahia Blanca was over 1000 kilometers away! He drove the befuddled businessman to the nearest police station, and they called the police in Bahia Blanca, who later called back and confirmed that the businessman’s car was still outside the hotel
with its motor running.
Strangest of all, only a few minutes had elapsed from the time the man had first climbed into the car. Yet he had somehow been transported about 600 miles.

An almost identical incident occurred outside Bahia Blanca in May 1968, when Dr. Gerardo Vidal and his wife said their auto was caught up in a dense fog and they lost consciousness. They came to on a strange road. Their watches had stopped, and the surface of their car was badly scorched. They soon learned that 48 hours had passed, and they were now in Mexico, many thousands of miles north of Bahia Blanca.

How can cars and people be shifted almost instantaneously from place to place? We have only a few slender clues. On March 4, 1964, a leading Japanese newspaper,
Mainichi,
carried an unbelievable story about an automobile disappearing from view on a crowded highway. The witnesses were three officials of the Fuji Bank. They reported that they saw a black car ahead of theirs going in the same direction. Aside from the driver, they saw an elderly man in the back seat reading a newspaper. “Suddenly a puff of something gaseous, like white smoke or vapor, gushed out from somewhere around the black car, and when this cloud dispersed (in a matter of not more than five seconds) the black car had vanished,” the newspaper account said.

The trio of witnesses was shaken by the car’s disappearance and reported it to the police. And, thus, another inexplicable oddity was added to already bulging files. Could the car in Japan have been taken by the same unknown force that transported the Argentinean businessman 1000 kilometers? Could that force have been working during the Korean War, when British Wing Commander J. Baldwin flew into a cloud and
never came out again?

Is it the same kind of cloud that literally devoured an entire British regiment near Sulva Bay, Turkey, in 1915? A group of men later signed affidavits that they had watched the One-Fourth Norfolk Regiment march into a peculiar brown cloud that hugged the ground in their path, and that none of them reappeared on the other side. After a few moments, the witnesses said, the cloud rose and flew away, joining a group of similar clouds, which then sailed off
against the wind.
No one from that regiment was ever seen again! Eight hundred men missing – or taken – from the face of the earth!