Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (30 page)

People also disappear from ships. In June and July of 1969, five crewless ships were found in the Atlantic, in that section that has become known as the “Bermuda Triangle.” All the ships were in good condition, and there wasn’t a clue explaining why their crews had abandoned them so suddenly. Since the 1840s, over 1000 sailors have been lost in the Bermuda Triangle area. There was a wave of such cases in the 1920s. Three American ships vanished in the Triangle in a single week in June 1921, with over a dozen ships listed as missing in that month alone.

Each new wave of disappearances creates a brief sensation and is then quickly forgotten. No one ever manages to find out what happened to these people. In 1912, five unrelated men inexplicably disappeared one week in Buffalo, NY. Montreal, Canada had a wave of missing persons in July 1883, and again in 1892.

Teenage children, as already noted, disappear more frequently than any other age group. In Aug. 1869, 13 children vanished in Cork, Ireland. There was no sign of kidnapping or foul play. That same month, there was a wave of disappearing children in Brussels, Belgium. Another group of youngsters vanished in Belfast, Ireland, in August, 1895. And, again, in August 1920, eight girls, all under 12 years of age, disappeared forever in Belfast.

The latter part of the nineteenth century produced several classic disappearances. On Thursday, Sept. 23, 1880, a farmer named David Lang took a few steps into an open field near Gallatin, TN, and instantly vanished in front of several witnesses, including a judge. Where did he go? A long and thorough search of the field produced nothing. Five years later, on Thursday, April 23, 1885, another farmer named Isaac Martin walked into a field near Salem, VA, and, like David Lang, dissolved into nothingness.

Such sudden, inexplicable disappearances still occur. In the summer of 1969, a 7-yr. old boy named Dennis Martin was whisked away in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. One second he was walking along with his father and other relatives, and the next he was gone. Every stone and crevice was searched. A massive hunt was launched, with more than 1,400 people looking everywhere. The boy was never found.

People have vanished from their own backyards while mowing the lawn. Entire families have disappeared leaving behind all their belongings. Bruce Burkan, 19, melted away wearing nothing but a bathing suit. On Aug. 22, 1967, Burkan left his girlfriend on the beach at Asbury Park, NJ and went to put a coin in a parking meter. After waiting for his return for quite a while, his girlfriend checked the car and found it locked.

Two months later, long after his family had given him up for dead, Bruce Burkan found himself in a bus terminal in Newark, dressed in a cheap, ill-fitting suit, with seven cents in his pocket. He could not remember anything of those missing eight weeks. The date of the return of his memory was Oct. 24
^th
. Students of paranormal happenings have long been puzzled by the fact that so many of these things seem to occur on the 24
^th
of the month.

On Aug. 15, 1967, seven days before Burkan’s still-unexplained disappearance, a 37-yr. old research scientist named Paul T. MacGregor left his office at the Polaroid Corporation in Boston, Ma and started out for Camp Kirby to join his vacationing family. He never got there. One month later, he walked into a police station in Buffalo, NY and told them he didn’t know who he was. His identity was traced through the labels in his clothes and the inscription on his wedding ring. Doctors at Meyer Memorial Hospital in Buffalo examined him, and said they were convinced that he was suffering from amnesia. What occurred on that Massachusetts highway that night that caused his mind to shut off the past?

Airplanes are also lost at an average of 50 a year. The Bermuda Triangle has claimed over 40 aircraft in the past 20 years. Of course, many lost planes are discovered years later in remote areas. But many other disappear forever, and extensive searches by land, sea, and air fail to uncover any debris, oil slicks, or other traces.

Blimps and dirigibles have also been victims of this plague. On Dec. 21, 1923, the French dirigible,
Dixmunde,
became the subject of a massive and fruitless search, after vanishing somewhere over the Mediterranean, taking 52 passengers and crew with it. And two young naval officers named Cody and Adams disappeared inexplicably from a blimp, the L-8, in California in 1942. The lumbering blimp came down in the streets of Daly City, a San Francisco suburb, and there was no clue as to the fate of her two-man crew. Parachutes, life jackets, and other equipment were all intact.

Another celebrated case took place on July 24, 1924, when Lt. W.T. Day and Pilot Officer D.R. Stewart took off in a single-engine biplane for a routine patrol over the Arabian Desert. When they failed to return, a search party went looking for their plane. It was found the next day, parked on the desert, completely intact, and in excellent working order. There was gasoline in the tank, and no sign of violence. The footprints of the two men were clearly visible in the sand. They had taken a few steps away from the plane…
and then the footprints stopped.

An Italian correspondent, Alberto Fenoglio, reported a similar disappearance in the Soviet Union in 1961. A small mail plane was missing, but was quickly located in perfect condition near the remote town of Tobolsk, Siberia. “Everything on board – engine, radio, mailbags, etc. – was in perfect order,” Fenoglio stated. “The tank contained fuel for two hours of flight. The four passengers had vanished without a trace. At a distance of about 300 feet from the aircraft there was a huge, clearly defined circle, on which the grass was scorched, and the earth depressed.”

Naturally, these mysteries have attracted the flying saucer researchers, and two researchers apparently joined the missing, voluntarily, on Nov. 11, 1953. Wilbur J. Wilkinson held a responsible position with the Hoffman Radio Corp. in Los Angeles. According to his wife, “he had tape recordings of conversations with men from other planets, who landed here in saucers.” The den in his home was lined with UFO photographs, weird symbols, and formulations supposedly passed along by “little men” from the planet “Maser” (whose inhabitants were preparing to invade Earth). Wilkinson’s partner, Karl Hunrath, claimed to have information about landed saucers, and talked his friend into renting an airplane so they could try to find them. They took off from the Gardena, CA airport with a three-hour supply of gasoline. That was the last anyone saw of them. A widespread search failed to turn up either the plane or the two men.

At least one eyewitness claims to have seen a UFO seize a plane in mid-air and carry it off. In letters sent to both the Civil Aeronautics Board and the FBI, Eugene Metcalfe of Paris, IL, avowed that on Wed., March 9, 1955, he was watching a jet-fighter shoot across the sky when, suddenly, a gigantic object “shaped like a cow bell” descended over it. This object, Metcalfe wrote, literally swallowed up the fast-moving jet “as easy as a hawk would a chicken’ and then disappeared upwards with its prey.
A jet-fighter and its pilot were reported missing in the region that very day!

In spite of his detailed report on the incident, Metcalfe was never questioned further by the authorities. He later signed notarized affidavits swearing to the truth of his report.

Not only have planes and ships disappeared, but there are also two recorded cases in which entire railroad trains disappeared between stations. And a ferryboat carrying 170 people vanished in Japan’s Inland Sea on Jan. 26, 1958. There was no debris. No hats, newspapers, or lifejackets were floating in the water afterwards. It just simply “went.”

Submarines, too, have shown a tendency to vanish in cycles. In 1939, before WWII began, four subs vanished in four months. They belonged to Japan, the U.S., Great Britain, and France. During the week of Jan. 21, 1968, both a French and an Israeli submarine vanished in the placid Mediterranean. Search parties reported unidentified flying objects in the area, and one group of would-be rescuers detected a metal object and thought they had found one of the missing craft. But the object scooted away and was never explained. Since then, four more subs belonging to the U.S., England, and France have disappeared. The most recent, the French
Eurydice,
was swallowed up last March 4
^th
in the Mediterranean. Somebody seems to be collecting submarines.

Much of this strains our credibility, yet these are documented cases from police files, military records, reliable newspapers, and valid historical accounts. These things have
happened
– and are continuing to happen – almost entirely unnoticed. New reports flood in constantly.

Researcher Joan Whritenour investigated a fascinating case in 1969. A young enlisted man in the U.S. Air force reported that he was walking alone along a beach near his base in the deep South one evening, when he saw a strange luminous object offshore. The glowing thing bobbed and weaved in the classic “falling leaf motion” described by many UFO witnesses. As it drew closer to the airman, he was overcome with a tingling sensation and lapsed into unconsciousness. When he came to, he was still on the beach, but something odd had happened. All the metal had been stripped from his uniform – the insignia, metal buttons, and belt buckle. And the few dollars he’d had with him were gone. The only things left in his pockets were a few coins – exactly
seven
cents (like Bruce Burkan).

Everything points to one grisly conclusion: our planes, ships, automobiles, and people are being removed by a force whose origins and motivations are totally unknown to us. Dogs and animals also seem to be disappearing at an alarming rate in UFO “flap” areas. Statistically, these events tend to cluster around the 10
^th
and 24
^th
of the month, year after year, with a disproportionate amount of activity on Wednesdays. These patterns indicate that some form of intelligence is behind it all.

While all this has been going on, our government has been looking the other way, and comparatively small groups of ET believers have been fooling themselves with pap about the noble “Brothers from outer space.” These buffs naively speculate, “Well, if they’re smart enough to build flying saucers, then they’re obviously smart enough to have outgrown war and hostility.”

But hostility does not always manifest itself in the form of a direct poke in the nose. You can poison the soup instead or, if you have the capability, you might even poison the human mind itself.

On Wed., Jan. 6, 1974, Richard Lee Smith, a motorist in Florida, allegedly collided with a 7-foot monster, which limped away but was seen later by another motorist on U.S. Route 27. Patrolman Robert Holmeyer of the Hialeah Garden police also glimpsed the critter.

While our astronauts collect rocks, do our UFOs collect ears?

CHAPTER 16

MYSTERIOUS GAS ATTACKS –
SAGA
MAGAZINE, JULY 1968

At 9:15 p.m. on the evening of Tuesday, July 4, 1967, Thomas Valley was sitting on his front porch in Youngstown, Ohio, when he suddenly found it hard to breathe. His neighbors also found their eyes watering, and their lungs bursting, as they ran indoors to reach for their phones. A few blocks away, patrons in Lee and Eddie’s Lounge stumbled frantically into the street and collapsed as Lt. Howard Moore and Patrolmen Thomas E. Kelty and Geno DiFabio cruised along Market Street. They saw what appeared to be a large cloud of faintly luminous smoke rolling along the ground.

“We pulled into the lot to check if a fire had started,” Lt. Moore said later. “When I got out of the patrol car, I began to choke, got dizzy, and my eyes watered.”

The Youngstown Fire Department rushed oxygen equipment to the area. “It was like a phantom cloud that made your eyes water and made you feel weak,” Battalion Chief Glenn Schultz declared. Both the firemen and the police searched for the source of the gas, but could find nothing. The mysterious cloud drifted away eastward.

That same night, holiday celebrants on Cape Cod, hundreds of miles east of Youngstown, were watching strange lights dancing in the darkened skies as a massive power failure hit a large part of New England. There were reported UFO landings in Connecticut and on Long Island, NY later that same night. In the two weeks following the strange “gas attack,” hundreds of citizens in the Youngstown area reported low-flying circular objects and strange lights. Some witnesses claimed the objects gave off a smell “like burning tar.”

Something about the UFO mystery literally stinks. Most often, it smells like rotten eggs, according to the many witnesses who have reported unseemly odors in the vicinity of hovering or grounded unidentified flying objects. Chemists interpret “the smell of rotten eggs” to mean the presence of hydrogen sulfide, a volatile combination of hydrogen and sulfur that was known to the ancients as “brimstone.” But other ugly smells and enigmatic clouds of unidentifiable gas have also been associated with the “flying saucers.”

The people in Youngstown will be startled to learn that a similar “attack” was recorded on Aug. 13, 1954, in far-off Singapore. An area covering two square miles around the Chiangi Airport was affected, and everyone
indoors and out
was choking and crying copious tears for several hours that day. Authorities could never pinpoint the source. Normal air pollution did not seem to be the answer.

Just as assorted authorities have been obliged to explain away the thousands of UFO reports during the past two decades, so have they been forced to come up with some wild theories for the hundreds of “gas attacks” that have taken place during the same period. Most of these incidents have rated only a few lines in the back pages of your hometown newspaper if, indeed, they were mentioned at all. But they have been on the increase since the resurgence of UFO activity in 1964, and are now occurring almost weekly somewhere in the world.

In May 1967, a large section of Naples, Italy, had to be evacuated because of an overpowering toxic gas, which no one could identify. Its source was never determined. In June 1967, thousands of residents in towns along the southern shore of Long Island, NY were awakened in the middle of the night by the potent odor of rotten eggs, which was apparently rolling in from the Atlantic Ocean. Authorities tried to blame New York City’s smokestacks, but they failed to explain how Manhattan’s polluted air could drift out over the Atlantic and then drift back.