Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (7 page)

What is the Air Glow phenomenon? Astronauts orbiting Earth have seen and photographed spherical glows on the dark side of this planet. These spheres are sometimes arranged in neat formations, like rows of soldiers. This phenomenon is rarely seen by ground observers, just as the huge, self-luminous, brownish clouds also reported by astronauts seem to elude witnesses on earth. It is probable that in a few rare, isolated instances, these phenomena have been mistaken for UFOs.

Ball lightning, another rare phenomenon, can also produce spurious UFO reports – especially from ships at sea. Ball lightning consists of spherical charges of electricity that appear during storms and sometimes glide along the surface until they touch something and disappear with a loud explosion. They have been known to come down chimneys, circle a room, and fly out an open window or door! In a number of cases, animals and humans have been killed by these discharges. Ball lightning at sea appears to be a solid, glowing sphere rushing down from the sky and disappearing into the water.

Although few laymen are aware of it, lightning, including ball lightning, does not always travel from the sky to the ground. It sometimes rises from the ground or sea and races upwards into the storm clouds! This lightning-in-reverse can easily be mistaken for a UFO taking off and disappearing into the sky.

In the late 1940s, government scientists became concerned with another kind of natural phenomenon – glowing green fireballs. They still zip across the skies in the Midwest and southwest, and we still don’t know much about them. They are probably related to bolides – small, low-flying meteors. Since they usually appear and disappear very quickly most witnesses tend to disregard them rather than report them.

Throughout the 1960s, German and American scientists launched hundreds of special rockets all over the world, which released great clouds of barium gas into the upper atmosphere. These luminous clouds slowly stretched out, following the patterns of the Earth’s magnetic field like iron filings clustering around a horseshoe magnet. Some of these experiments inspired erroneous UFO reports because they could be seen for hundreds of square miles.

For some mysterious reason, the UFO phenomenon has apparently taken advantage of the barium cloud experiments, particularly when the space shots were given advance publicity. In 1966, a barium cloud shot was announced for August 16 and that night, thousands of people turned in UFO reports. The phenomenon was so intense that radio and TV reporters in Arkansas stood in the streets and gave their audiences eyewitness live coverage. A group of scientists in Chicago gleefully collected a large number of reports from Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, believing the barium cloud shot had caused the UFO flap. The only problem was:
the August 16
^th
shot was postponed at the last minute!
So the witnesses in five states must have been watching something else. But what? The barium cloud shot was postponed several more times and was finally held on Sept. 24, 1966. Not a single UFO report was registered on that date!

A few serious UFO investigators have made it a point to find and read technical books about the barium cloud phenomena. Too many others, irritated by the Air Force’s often absurd explanations, still continue to overwhelm the UFO reporting networks with reports of these things. Common meteors zooming across several states have also inspired waves of false UFO reports. Occasionally, mischievous youngsters get into the act by releasing hot-air balloons consisting of plastic bags heated by candles. Several states have now outlawed such activities because the balloons can cause fires when they finally drift earthward.

Colorado University’s controversial UFO study (i.e., The Condon Committee) admitted that genuine hoaxes seemed to be rare. Nevertheless, whenever a civilian UFO research organization came across a case containing puzzling psychic elements, it has been a longstanding practice to cry “hoax” and brand the innocent, well-meaning witnesses as liars and frauds. They failed, however, to realize that the stranger the ingredients in the witnesses’ stories were, the more likely it was that the reported incidents were true. Modern investigators must be very cautious about crying hoax. Legally, a hoax must be proved either by overwhelming evidence or, preferably, by a written confession signed by the perpetrator of the hoax. Otherwise, both the investigator and the organization he represents can be sued for libel. In many instances, local police and reporters have deliberately labeled a case a hoax at the request of the witness to protect him from the hordes of amateur investigators and enthusiasts who inevitably descend upon the scene after the initial report is published.

One of the most difficult problems in ufology is proving the validity of actual UFO photographs. Hundreds are taken each year – so many, in fact, that the photography agencies that supply newspapers and magazines are now very selective in their distribution. They pay the paltry sum of $10 for all rights to UFO photos that are unusually clear and distinctive. Many UFO photographers simply give their pictures away free to UFO organizations or the wire services. The flying saucer photos taken in 1966 by Ralph Ditter, a barber in Zanesville, OH, were widely published on the covers of magazines and in many UFO books and publications without him ever receiving as much as a nickel for his efforts. He had tacked the pictures on the wall of his barbershop, where they remained for months until a local newspaperman happened to see them. Ditter turned the pictures over to the reporter and signed a release relinquishing all rights. The wire services picked them up and literally spread them throughout the world. Later, an eager but uninformed local UFO investigator branded the photos hoaxes because the numbers on the film were “out of sequence.” That is, the pictures were not taken in the sequence that Ditter remembered.

Actually, this out-of-sequence phenomenon is as mysterious as the UFOs themselves. It has occurred in dozens of cases. Even Polaroid films are numbered in sequence. This numbering of films is done by an automatic machine; the possibility of the numbers being stamped out of sequence are almost inconceivable. Nevertheless, it is common for the witness’s memory to be different from the photographic record. He might recall that picture number one was of his child on a bicycle, number two was of a UFO hovering over his house, number three was of the UFO flying off above some trees, and so on. But on the film, picture number one turns out to be of the UFO flying off over the trees, number two is of the child on the bicycle, and number three is of the UFO over the house. It is as if some mysterious force has juggled the numbers – or the witness’s memory. This is one of the many reasons why it is so important to examine the witness in depth – something few investigators bother to do.

Many civilian UFO enthusiasts conduct conversations rather than investigations.
Witnesses must be interrogated carefully by reviewing each incident and movement on the day of their sighting, as well as their movements and actions after the sighting. Some remarkable, often incredible, details crop up during well-conducted, in-depth interviews. In a Long island case in 1967, I learned that the witness had started the day by being followed by a mysterious car. When he parked on Main Street in Babylon, NY, the car pulled in behind him and its occupant jumped out, pointed a camera at him, and took his picture. He thought this was odd, but soon dismissed it. Later that same day, he saw a circular object hovering low above some trees on a lonely stretch of road. He did not think the two incidents were related, of course, but I have investigated many “phantom photographer” cases, and I believe these mysterious cameramen are connected to the phenomenon in some strange way. Other investigators have uncovered similar incidents in England and, most recently, in Sweden.

In other cases, I have found that healthy witnesses have suffered inexplicable blackouts or fainting spells hours before seeing a UFO. These blackouts, experienced by people who had never suffered them before, are especially prevalent in UFO “contact” cases. It is also important to extract a complete biography of the witness with emphasis on any unusual psychic or occult experiences they have had prior to their UFO encounter. I discovered that the majority of all witnesses had latent or active psychic abilities. After I revealed this in a series of articles in the 1960s, other independent investigators around the world confirmed it in their own research.

Although many UFO believers choose to assume that most UFO sightings are random chance encounters, the startling truth is that
witnesses are selected
by some mysterious process and that strictly accidental sightings are rare, if not altogether nonexistent.

Perhaps the greatest deficiency in the Air Force questionnaire was its neglect to extract the most basic personal information about the witness. It asked only for the witness’s name, occupation, and address. However, even the birthdates of the witnesses can be important. (In a series of contact cases I investigated in 1967, I discovered that
all
of the witnesses had been born on the same date!) Religion can also play a part. Although we now have a huge body of many thousands of reports covering the past 30 years, we find that Catholic and Jewish witnesses are extremely rare. Protestants and “fallen Catholics” (those who have drifted away from the active practice of their religion) account for the bulk of the reports. People with American Indian or Gypsy blood in their background tend to see more UFOs than other people.

If sightings occurred on a purely accidental basis, certain statistical laws should be followed. There should be more smiths, Browns, and Joneses among the witnesses simply because there are more of them in the population. But this isn’t the case. People with unusual names like Jabkowsky tend to have more sightings than the Smiths. Although left-handed people are a decided minority, there are more left-handed contactees than right-handed ones. The late Ivan Sanderson once pointed out that people with red or blond hair also seemed more prone to have UFO experiences.

The selectivity doesn’t end there. Occupations also are of special importance. Schoolteachers, especially those dealing with “gifted” or, conversely, “developmentally delayed” children, seem to be involved in an unusually high percentage of low-level cases and incidents in which the object pursued a car. This UFO penchant for schoolteachers seems to be a worldwide factor. In my travels, I found another special group not widely mentioned in published reports: police officers and night watchmen. While the UFO observations of on-duty policemen are frequently cited by reporters searching for reliable witnesses, a great many lawmen also have unusual sightings while off-duty, as do night watchmen (who are often retired cops). Finally, and most chilling of all, men and women who are
civilian
employees at military bases (or who work at jobs requiring a security clearance) are targeted. Barbers, farmers, and auto mechanics are decidedly rare among UFO witnesses. In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in sightings among doctors, lawyers, regional politicians, and stubborn, skeptical newspapermen.

Obviously the UFO phenomenon has some system of selectivity, and it is highly probable that most of the people picked undergo something more than a mere visual sighting –
something they cannot remember later.
Are their minds being reprogrammed, as many of the top researchers now suspect?

The only way we will ever learn what is really going on is by thoroughly investigating the witnesses themselves. The UFOs are so widespread (the objects must number in the thousands during flap periods) and so active at ground level that they must be doing something. Whatever it is, it’s obvious they are doing it to people – special people who have been carefully picked from the mainstream of society and chosen for special treatment. Therefore, their descriptions of what they have seen are less important than what they have experienced physically, psychologically, and mentally. The objects are merely the medium for their message, whatever it might be. The Air Force never got anywhere because it was concerned solely with explaining away the descriptions of the objects. The civilian UFO organizations have never made any progress because they have been concerned with trying to interpret the meaning of the objects, determining their source, and attacking the Air Force explanation. Proving the reliability of witness became more important to them than learning the details of what the witnesses actually experienced.

A few years ago, Dr. J. Allen Hynek devised a "Strangeness" index to compare witness reliability with the degree of strangeness in their report. Unfortunately, strangeness is totally subjective, like pain, and difficult – if not altogether impossible – to measure. What might seem incredibly strange to one inexperienced investigator might seem almost routine to a more experienced person. Reliability is also difficult to establish. The usual criterion is the person’s occupation. But the history of ufology has shown that a town drunk can have a real UFO experience as well as the town’s police chief. The drunk would automatically receive a very low rating on the reliability scale. The police chief might actually be a conniving, cantankerous, lying old reprobate, but his occupation would give him high rating.

Similarly, a person who has a long history of prophetic dreams and other psychic experiences might be known to the local gossips as a crackpot, and would rate low on the reliability scale. But extensive UFO studies have shown that this is also the kind person
most likely
to have a genuine low-level or landing sighting. Their psychic ability might also make them susceptible to receiving a telepathic message or undergoing something even stranger. So they would have a high strangeness quotient and a low reliability rating, thus negating their report and unfairly depriving the public of valuable information.

Witnesses should be judged only by experts trained in such matters: psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, and experienced journalists. An experienced lawyer can be a much better UFO investigator than an astrophysicist, for example (whose training does not include dealing with – and judging – people). If nothing else, the past 30 years have taught us that technology is virtually useless in UFO investigation. Nevertheless many civilian investigators still load themselves down with Geiger counters and other expensive gadgets. It is true that excessive radiation has been found at a few UFO sites in the past 30 years, but so few that the odds for stumbling into such a situation are astronomical. Even then, Geiger counters can only indicate the presence of radiation. They cannot give an accurate and scientific measurement of the radiation.