JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

http://artedgeek.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/db-safe-mode.php 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.