Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (32 page)

Throughout the year 1954, thousands of automobile windshields suddenly shattered or became strangely pitted. Maybe it happened to your own car. Newspapers from Canada to Florida busily reported this peculiar phenomenon, which actually began in 1952 and continued to the fall of 1954. It recurred in 1957. Police departments and investigating scientists were baffled. Plate-glass store windows were also affected, and hundreds of people in Toronto complained of a mysterious substance falling from the sky that burned their skins.

Whatever this stuff was, there was apparently a healthy (or unhealthy) rain of it throughout the United States. It had somewhat the same effect as the “stuff” that haunted Oklahoma a decade later, and ate holes in china.

In that strange summer of 1954, thousands of people reported UFOs in the skies over Rome, Italy. One of the witnesses was Mrs. Claire Booth Luce, then U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. She, like hundreds of other people in Rome, was stricken with an odd malady that sapped her vitality and reduced her to a thin, pale shade of her former self. Eventually her bewildered doctors decided she was suffering from lead poisoning, brought about by the lead content in the paint on the walls of her Rome apartment.

Hundreds of people around the little town of Barrie, Ontario were laid low by “lead poisoning” three years later, during a massive UFO flap there in 1957. They became weak, nauseous, mentally confused, and their doctors were unable to alleviate their illness. The odd ailments lasted for about two weeks. Some residents complained that their water (mostly from private wells), turned green during that period. (In July 1967, the tap water in Civitavecchia, Italy also turned a bright green. Authorities shut down the town’s plumbing while they searched for the cause. If they found it, it was never revealed.)

Clouds of gas, foul odors, pitted windshields, fertilizer factories, mysterious maladies, and green water… Where is all this leading us, and what has it got to do with flying saucers? It is leading us to still another unexplained phenomenon, something well known to every UFO-phile. We call it “angel hair.”

For centuries, there have been reports of this peculiar, cobweb-like material falling from the sky and melting away when touched. Ships at sea have been covered with it. Farmers have awakened in the morning to find their fields strewn with it. Many people have attempted to collect it and have it analyzed, but it always seems to dissolve, even in sealed bottles. In Nov. 1954, a Mrs. Dittmar of Marysville, OH reported seeing great quantities of the stuff spew out of a silver cigar-shaped UFO. “It was soft and fine to the touch,” she said, “but not sticky. It stretches without tearing, although it stains the hands green.”

During my travels investigating new UFO incidents throughout the country, several people have told me of having witnessed falls of “angel hair,” but only one man has claimed to have obtained a sample and had it analyzed. In Aug. 1967, this man phoned me long distance. He identified himself as “Philip Berger.” He said that he lived in Virginia, and had been reading my articles. Berger came up with something so startling that it might be a serious mistake to overlook it.

Mr. Berger said that his farm had been covered with strange strands of a substance that looked like “spun glass” (a common description for “angel hair”), and that he had managed to pick up some of it with a stick. He filled a plastic bottle to the brim with it, he said, and was staring at it as he talked with me. “Funny thing,” he remarked, “the bottle is already half empty. I stuffed it full this morning.”

He asked me what he should do with it next. On the spur of the moment, I suggested he rush it to the nearest druggist and see if they could suggest a nearby lab that might analyze it. Since it was “melting” fast, I proposed that he have the air in the bottle analyzed as well. Two days later, he called me back. He sounded discouraged and apologetic.

“I went to a drugstore,” he said, “and they suggested that I take it to a hospital. By the time I got to the hospital, there was nothing in the bottle but a few slivers in the bottom. But there was an intern there who seemed very interested, and he went through a lot of trouble. He did like you said, used some kind of spectator-graph…”

“Spectroscope,” I corrected.

“Yeah, that was it – a spectroscope. Anyway, he said there was nothing in it but some kind of ordinary gas.”

“What kind of gas?”

“I think he said ‘fluorine’.”

I nearly fell of my chair. My research into the puzzle of the fertilizer and chemical plants had already led me to the discovery that the major waste product pouring from their smokestacks was fluoride! Mr. Berger was unable to give me the name of the intern, but he promised to go back and get the man to put his findings in writing for me. The name of the hospital was “County General,” which wasn’t much help, and Mr. Berger didn’t have a phone. He was calling me from a payphone. He gave me a mailing address, and I wrote to him three times. None of my letters came back, but I never heard from him again.

The problem here is to judge whether or not this was an honest man trying to be of help, or whether it was some outrageous prank. From the sound of quarters being poured into that payphone, the joke (if it was a joke) cost him several dollars and would have been quite pointless. At that time, no one knew of my research into factory smokestacks, and certainly no one knew that I was beginning to find correlations with fluoride. It would have been a very, very far-out coincidence for a hoaxer to have coincidentally come up with the very thing I was already suspecting (i.e., that “angel hair” was serving as a means of sowing fluoride into the atmosphere).

Fluorine, in its basic form, is a greenish-yellow gas that is both pungent and corrosive. Mix it with hydrogen, and you have hydrofluoric acid, a chemical that attacks silica and is widely used to etch glass. Spray it on an automobile windshield and see what happens... Add it to hydrogen sulfide and you not only have a terrible smell, you also have a gas that can give you fluoride poisoning. It could produce fainting spells, weakness, nausea, and respiratory failure. Excessive exposure to this gas could cause the teeth to mottle and, in the case of a severe dose, cause the teeth to fall out. And apparently that is exactly what happened to those unfortunate farmers in Oklahoma. They were very likely exposed to a potent mixture of hydrogen sulfide and fluoride. Perhaps that Trenton, NJ watchman suffered from the same mixture.

According to
The New York Times
of Aug. 20, 1967, citizens in the tiny village of Garrison, Montana, were up in arms over a small phosphate plant that was pouring fluoride gasses into the air. “Fluoride gasses from the plant have brought complaints of damage to vegetation, animals, and human health since the plant was moved to Garrison four years ago.” Federal, state, and county officials ordered the plant to shut down.

Sodium fluoride is a deadly poison and can produce emotional and mental problems. It contains an almost undetectable substance known as “mechanacide,” which can do horrifying damage to the brain, destroy willpower, and create a feeling of helpless lethargy. These very symptoms were reported in the 1957 Canadian “epidemic.”

If the UFOs are actually hostile, as many leading ufologists now contend, then a subtle long-range plan to poison our atmosphere with such substances might make sense. On the other hand, if the UFO entities need to breathe fluoride gasses, it would make equal sense for them to introduce it in small amounts over a very long period of time, giving us a chance to adjust to it. Hydrofluoric acid could be added to our atmosphere from the air by mixing it with some form of silicon, which would generally disintegrate (from the natural chemical action) before the resultant “angel hair” hit the ground. Occasionally, as in the 1954 windshield incidents, they might overdo it and release too strong a mixture. Normally, however, the hydrofluoric acid would “melt” high in the air. Being “hygroscopic,” it would absorb, or be absorbed by, the moisture in the clouds. An accidental overdose might produce a stinging rainfall such as fell in Toronto, Canada.

It would be extremely difficult and very costly to make all the tests necessary to confirm this hypothesis. The problem is compounded by the unhappy fact that we are adding a considerable amount of fluoride to the air ourselves. In 1942, hydrofluoric acid was substituted for sulfuric acid as an alkylating agent in high-test gasolines. So today, automobiles are contributing to the fluoride in the air. In fact, fluorides are the third largest air pollutant in urban areas, following sulfur dioxide and ozone. UFO skeptics could easily point to this as a possible explanation for nearly all of the cases cited in this article. But I have not been able to find sufficient medical or chemical proof to make a purely natural explanation acceptable. The Oklahoma incidents are beyond natural cause. One or two cases of auto windshield damage would make it easy to dismiss the pockmarking as a local aberration, a freak combination of the necessary gasses in a single area. But there were thousands of these cases scattered over the entire North American continent.

No, we must look deeper and study the situation very carefully and thoughtfully. The “Smellies” seem to be in our midst now, prowling homes near factories spewing out clouds of fluoride. Perhaps as the fluoride content of our air goes up, the visits of these mysterious critters – if they are critters – will increase. UFOs seem to be collecting like flies in areas where the fluoridated air is most intense. They have also been clustering around reservoirs in places where the drinking water is deliberately (though very minutely) fluoridated. Maybe they’re even adding something of their own to our drinking water, as some ufologists have suggested.

Ufologists are unable to agree on many things in this complicated and contradictory business, but most of them concede that it is probable that more than one or two different “alien” groups are involved. There are many indications that these groups are in direct conflict with each other. This unprovable “fact” raises still another confusing possibility. It may be that one group is using fluoride gasses to combat the presence of another group.

Our life here on Earth is based upon the carbon atom. Exobiologists at Harvard and elsewhere have speculated that
silicon
could be used as a substitute for carbon on other planets, and that a silicon-based lifeform might be possible. If some of the ufonauts are composed of silicon instead of carbon, then hydrofluoric acid would be a very effective weapon against them. If one group of ufonauts is especially interested in our planet and has reasons for keeping the silicon-based groups away, it would be reasonable for them to raise the fluoride content of the air. This could lead us to another startling conclusion: that the “puddles” of silicon found at UFO landing sites might actually be the remains of silicon-beings who had literally melted when they became exposed to our atmosphere.

This much we can say with certainty: Throughout man’s history, we have recorded the frequent presence of gruesome, unspeakable “monsters” that were surrounded by the noxious odors of hydrogen sulfide and fluoride. Generally these “monsters” were regarded as evil and alien. They continue to appear, and the mysterious, inexplicable clouds of foul gas continue to invade homes, farmland, and whole towns. More and more people are suffering ill effects from these gasses. The fluoride count in our heavily polluted atmosphere continues to rise. “Angel hair” continues to fall. The Air Force and the UFO-philes have spent the last twenty years chasing lights in the sky when the real problem – and the ultimate answer – might be much closer, prowling living rooms in West Virginia, California, Florida, and Nebraska. Something very alien – and possibly, very dangerous – may be sitting on the barren plains of western Oklahoma. And more of “them” may be on their way.

Isn’t it about time we made a real effort to find out?

CHAPTER 17

THE SECRET UFO-ASTRONAUT WAR –
MEN
MAGAZINE, SEPT. 1968

It was drizzling and cold, and Woodrow Derenberger, a middle-aged sewing machine salesman from Mineral Wells, WV was anxious to get home. He was driving his truck along Interstate 77, just south of Parkersburg, WV. Traffic was light and he was making good time. It was about 7:30 p.m. The date: Wednesday, Nov. 2, 1966. Suddenly, a strange object swooped down out of the rain and landed directly in front of him. Mr. Derenberger slammed on his brakes and watched in amazement as a man got out of the object that was, he said, shaped like an old-fashioned lamp chimney. The man was about five feet, nine inches tall, had pointed features and a dark complexion, and was dressed in a dark coat. As he approached the truck, Derenberger heard a voice that asked him to roll down the window. The man stepped up to the door silently, his arms folded across his chest, and Derenberger heard the voice again, although the man’s face remained fixed in a grin. He claims this voice asked him who he was, where he was going, and what “those lights” were (indicating the city of Parkersburg in the distance). After a few minutes of rather meaningless “telepathic” conversation, the man returned to the object and it flew off. Derenberger stepped on the gas and sped home.

After he told his wife the incredible story, they decided to call the Parkersburg police. The police not only were not surprised, they admitted that two other people had reported an
identical
experience to them that day. Woodrow Derenberger found himself in the uneasy company of the growing crowd of controversial “contactees” – people who claim to have met the pilots of UFOs. (The author has talked with the other two witnesses. While they confirm the story, they do not want any publicity. “I just don’t want to get involved,” one of them said.)

At the request of the Parkersburg Police, Derenberger “starred” in a press conference, together with eight other witnesses who had reported seeing a UFO on the night of his “contact.” Later, he voluntarily submitted to an extensive physical and psychiatric examination in a local hospital. There was an astonishing development when one of his examiners, a leading West Virginia psychiatrist, became a “contactee” himself a few weeks afterwards. The psychiatrist (Dr. Alan Roberts) has talked freely about his own UFO experiences on radio programs, and has endorsed Mr. Derenberger.