JOHN KEEL: NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

John, like other UFO researchers, had to contend with crank mail from a group (or, probably, one prankster) called “The International Bankers.”  Here’s how he defined them, in his unfinished dictionary:

He did, in fact, receive one of these letters.  Here’s how he described it in Anomaly 3:

Here are the letter and envelope:

As he says in Anomaly, he was struck by the similarity to military franking, as in this letter from PFC Richard S. Hack.  Note, though, that military mail is postmarked by the Army Postal Service, and that the letter above has no postmark:

This envelope was also in John’s files.  It was sealed, so I took the liberty of opening it, only to find newspaper ads cut to the size of the envelope.  I assume John sent it to himself, to see what the Post Office would do with another unstamped letter from “Bankers.”  He found out: they wanted their nickel.

The idea of “International Bankers” having a hand in UFOs had long been woven into the antisemitic conspiracy theories of George Hunt Williamson, John McCoy, William Dudley Pelley, and others.  Somebody, though, went to the trouble of printing stationery and sending out crank letters.  I suspect that it was Gray Barker, cooking up confusion again; although I suppose it’s unfair to blame all ufological pranks on him.  Any ideas?

ADDENDUM:  Mentioning Gray Barker reminds me that I’ve been meaning to rescan his “Grunt Letter.”  I’ve also added John’s notes on the matter…

In Chapter 10 of The Mothman Prophecies, John discussed the curious wooden plugs that he found in a woman’s telephone in Point Pleasant.

He did indeed keep the sliver of wood in a plastic box.  In fact, there are two of them, along with a card noting the woman’s name and the date.

They’re 10 mm long, and, as you can see, whittled from some light wood.  Are they really cigarette loads?  I’m not going to put a match to them; judging from the reviews I checked on Amazon, many are duds anyway.  Here’s a photo of some contemporary loads for comparison.

Whether they’re cigarette loads are not, what were they doing in Doris Lilly’s phone?

Here’s the conclusion of John’s proposed script for Lost in Space.

John occasionally mentioned that he wrote for the TV show Lost in Space, but was vague about the details.  I was curious, though; it sounded interesting.  Although John was a science fiction fan as a teenager, he wrote very little in the genre, and I wondered what he would do with it.  I eventually discovered that he did indeed write a seven-page plot outline, but that it was rejected.  Here, then, is the first part; I’ll post the second part later this week, so you can enjoy the pleasures of serialization.

At one point, John planned to write a UFO dictionary, and filled a small box with definitions on index cards.  He wrote 188 of them, though many just have words without definitions.  The scope is characteristic: they include not only terms used by ufologists, but words from physics, occultism, psychiatry, medicine, contactee lore, and gypsy culture. Even some of the vocabulary used by Richard Shaver and Barbara O’Brien finds a place.  Here’s a sampling:

If you took a look at this website recently, you saw that it had been quarantined as an attack site.  Well, we were hacked; but now we’re back in business.  Many thanks to Kai McBride and Anthony Matt, who cleaned it up and put it back together.  We lost the last post, but everything else was saved.  More Keeliana is on the way!

Keel fans have obviously enjoyed seeing his jottings, so here are some more from the same notebook.  Included here are messages that I presume were passed along by contactees; Connie Carpenter’s unpleasant interaction with a disturbing stranger; more notes on sightings; and, finally, the message that John sent to a UFO via flashlight.  This last, by the way, occurred the same night as the landing that I posted last time.  Both events are described further in Chapter 10 of The Mothman Prophecies.

This weekend the tenth “Mothman Festival” is taking place in Point Pleasant.  It’s organized by Jeff Wamsley; details are here.  So, now seems a good time for some of John’s notes from Point Pleasant.

These pages come from a small notebook he used on his trips there.  Most of the book is taken up with the nuts and bolts of reportage: names, phone numbers, and directions.  Here are some of the more interesting pages.  There are no great revelations, but you get to see John at work; and his notes for April 3, 1967 are particularly vivid.

1966 was a pivotal year for John.  He had been working in television, and growing increasingly dissatisfied with the world of one-liners and game shows.  He turned to UFOs; and, like many before and after him, became fascinated with the subject.  Beginning with this post, I’ll share some of his correspondence from that year, as he moved from a career in show business to focus on ufolology and forteana.

In January, he wrote to Senator Robert Kennedy, of all people, to complain about the way the Air Force was handling sightings.

Kennedy’s office replied with a short, polite, and dismissive note.

John followed this up with another letter.  The statement that he had “been assigned to do an in-depth probe into this subject for PLAYBOY magazine” was somewhat of an exaggeration.  He had pitched a UFO article to the editor, who agreed to look at it if John was willing to write on spec.  His interaction with Playboy did not go well; I’ll post some material on that next.  Meanwhile, the thought of John Keel and Robert Kennedy meeting to discuss UFOs is intriguing; however, the correspondence ended there.

In the early 1970s, John started to make a film about UFOs.  He never finished it.  It wasn’t too complicated; it consisted mostly of him speaking to the camera, with occasional shots of relevant books and photos.  He shot it in regular 8mm, with magnetic sound, which was, unfortunately, a particularly difficult format.  The rough cut has survived: it shows John, in some flamboyant ’70s fashions (he favored ruffles and paisley at the time), delivering his lines before a variety of backgrounds.  Apparently the sound was hard to regulate, as his voice is recorded at different speeds, and occasionally drowned out by background noise.

I’m not sure where he planned to show it.  It looks as if it was a lot of work.  Perhaps he wanted a more elaborate version of one of his talks, something that he could show at conventions.  It’s fairly unwatchable in its current state (unless there’s an unsuspected audience for mod Keel on helium); we’ll see if we can standardize the speed.  Meanwhile, it does contain some interesting footage of James Moseley interviewing Woodrow Derenberger; I hope to post that online soon.

John also left a packet of script pages and index cards.  Here, then, is the beginning, and one of the cards that he used while shooting.