John wrote this letter home when he was 20. He describes working around the clock to finish his first film script, an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun. He doesn’t mention the title in the letter, but here’s a clipping about it; I don’t think it was ever filmed. He also reflects on his past three years in NYC, after he had left home and hitch-hiked to Greenwich Village to make it as a writer. He didn’t have an easy time of it!
Here is the last part of John’s talk for a MENSA convention in NYC, 10/29/72. Charles Fort’s statement “I think we are property,” which John quotes at the end, can be found in Chapter 12 of The Book of the Damned (p. 163 in the old Henry Holt omnibus).
Here we have the second part of John’s 1970 speech to a MENSA convention. A few notes: The man at Giant Rock was George Van Tassel, who did eventually finish his “crazy structure,” the Integratron. Truman Bethurum wrote about meeting Aura Rhanes in Aboard a Flying Saucer (De Vorss & Co., 1954). The Englishman who met “Yamski” was Ernest Arthur Bryant, who claimed a UFO experience in Scoriton, Devonshire on April 24, 1965. The case was described in Eileen Buckle’s 1967 book The Scoriton Mystery. Norman Oliver, of the British UFO Research Association, later said that Bryant’s widow said the story was fiction. I think Itkonen was Veikko Itkonen, a Finnish director who was working on a UFO documentary in 1969; I haven’t been able to find more about it.
Here, to follow up on John’s 1970 speech to the Humanist Society, is one for a MENSA convention in NYC in 1972. He touches on some of the same subjects, but is more concerned with the connections between paranormal and religious experiences. A few corrections about Charles Fort: he was not a “little man,” but six feet tall and stocky; he died in 1932, not 1931; the quotation “If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?” (with which John closes The Mothman Prophecies) was written by Damon Knight, in his biography of Fort; it was Aaron Sussman who proposed the title God Is an Idiot, which Fort rejected, preferring Tiffany Thayer’s suggestion Lo!
I’ll post the speech in three installments.
Today is John Keel’s birthday; he would have been 91. He would, no doubt, be glad to know his fans are still reading him, and would still be asking, “Yeah, but where’s the money?” Here he is doing magic tricks when he was much younger. Happy birthday, John!
Here are the final pages of John’s 1970 speech for the Humanist Society. There are still many reasons to be pessimistic, but we can only hope there are indeed “unknown psychic forces at work,” and that more people will be saying “Lollipop” in the future.
Here’s the third part (of four) of John’s speech for the Humanist Society, 7/22/70. And what a speech it is!
And here’s the second part of John’s speech for the Humanist Society. Note that the second page below, 5A, is to be inserted after the first paragraph on page 5.
John gave this speech on July 22, 1970. He used parts of it in the last chapter (“The Revolution of the Mind”) of Our Haunted Planet, where he noted that he gave it to the Humanist Society. There have been a number of Humanist societies; I think this one was the First Humanist Society of New York, founded by Charles Francis Potter in 1929.
The material is certainly more trenchant and personal in this earlier, longer version; among other things, he mentions some of his own psychic experiences, particularly at the death of Mary Hyre, his correspondent in Point Pleasant. The speech is 16 pages, so I’ll break it up into sections.
We have here a curious bit of cultural history, and a glimpse of John’s life as a “youthful Greenwich Village poet.” When he came to New York in his teens, he sold a few pieces to the Hobo News (later the Bowery News), and got to know some of the colorful characters in the hobo and Bowery subculture. In 1949, he read the eulogy at the funeral of Dan O’Brien, “King of the Hobos.” The event was covered by a couple of New York papers. Here’s a clipping from the New York Sun, November 4, 1949.
And here’s the coverage from the New York World-Telegram, also on November 4, 1949. Note that Coney Island Willie is reading the Bowery News.
John saved the business cards of just about everyone he met. Here are the cards of Dan O’Brien, Prof. Giuseppe Ravita, Jim Crouch, and Harry Baronian, editor of the Bowery News. The note on the back of Harry Baronian’s card assured somebody named Alex that the young Keel was “okay.”
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