JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

John responds to Ms. Catoe’s last letter with quite a letter of his own. He writes the day after the collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, and is clearly still shaken. (The bridge fell on the 15th, but the letter is dated the 17th, so he must have the date wrong.) He also answers Ms. Catoe’s remarks about his “grave manner” with some notes on comedy writing, reports on UFOs and animal mutilations in Point Pleasant, and gives more details about his research and his “underground of local allies.” He is also cautious about Isabel Davis, and reveals that he too is a fan of Georges Méliès.

He wrote the letter in two parts, so I’ll post it in two parts.

Lynn Catoe writes back with a letter taking John to task for some of his methodology and confirmation bias, most pointedly in a postscript quoting occult historian Maurice Bessy. She also fills him in on her background and interests, mentions a visit with Isabel Davis, of the UFO group Civilian Saucer Intelligence, and deplores the infighting among UFO buffs.

Ivan and Alma are Ivan and Alma Sanderson; Sue Brown was Sanderson’s personal assistant at the time; Stewart Nixon was a member of NICAP.

John Keel would have been 90 today. Here he is as a boy, proudly holding his Charlie McCarthy doll. According to the inscription on the back, the photo was taken on Cedar St. in Hornell, NY, and the two girls are Landy and Carolyn. I don’t know who they are.

Stay safe during the pandemic! Stay at home and read some Keel books!

Lynn Catoe’s letter must have provoked John, because he answered with a remarkable letter. He writes about his abandoned UFO book with Ivan Sanderson, hoax letters from “The International Bankers,” experiences with his network of “silent contactees,” and interactions with his fellow researchers Gray Barker, Jim Moseley, and Gordon Evans. He also goes into more detail about his research and objectives.

The Straith letter was a letter written to contactee George Adamski by Barker and Moseley, on stolen stationery from the Department of State. The supposed writer, “R. E. Straith,” said he believed Adamski’s claims, but had to keep his support secret. Joseph Henslik was a supposed contactee whom John believed had been coached by Barker and Moseley.

Lynn Catoe responds to John’s letter with some bewilderment, suggesting that he’s a bit more “round the bend” than he thinks. She also wants to know exactly what “specialized research” he’s doing, and what his methods are. And she also suggests that the mysterious phone calls he’s received may have been pranks.

John writes to Lynn Catoe, shortly after they began conferring about her proposed UFO bibliography. Among the interesting bits in this letter are Gordon Evans’s withdrawal from ufology, reports of a John Keel impersonator, a black Cadillac cruising Ivan and Alma Sanderson’s farm, warnings of “odd incidents” Ms. Catoe might experience, and the news that John is now “trying to lead away from the extra-terrestrial thesis and point in new directions.” The “episode with the man in the pickup truck” happened to Ms. Catoe while she was driving to visit the Sandersons in October. A man stopped her and insisted on crawling under her car; when she reached the farm she discovered three lumps of putty on the bottom of her gas tank. John tells the story in more detail in Chapter 17 of The Mothman Prophecies.

ADDENDUM: In the comments, Clarence Carlson expressed curiosity about Gordon Evans. Here’s a link to a transcript of Jim Moseley’s UFO convention in June 1967, which includes a talk by Evans. There’s also a talk by John, and contributions by Gray Barker, Long John Nebel, Ivan Sanderson, and other people who show up in these letters.

We’ve gone through the “Official Correspondence” file for 1966, so now I’ll turn to the correspondence between John and Lynn Catoe, with occasional contributions from Ivan Sanderson. John and Ms. Catoe did start dating after a few months; I will, of course, only post the letters about their UFO research. No love letters for you, Keel fans!

On October 12, Lynn E. Catoe, bibliographer for the Library of Congress, wrote to Margaret Rose for advice on a proposed bibliography of UFOs. I haven’t found anything about Margaret Rose, but I assume she had an interest in parapsychology, and was not the Countess of Snowdon of the same name. Ms. Rose passed on John and Ms. Catoe’s addresses to each other. Ms. Catoe’s UFO bibliography was published in 1969; it can be found here.

In this letter, John pitches an article to Andrew Mills, associate editor of True. The article was to be about “a constant hotbed of UFO reports” in Virginia in 1965. His pitch seems to have been rejected. True did publish an article of his in February, 1967, “Never Mind the Saucer! Did You See the Guys Who Were Driving!”, reprinted in The TRUE Report on Flying Saucers that year as “Who Was That 6-Inch High Animated Tin Can I Saw You With Last Night?” It doesn’t mention the Virginia sightings, though, and I don’t know of any other article he wrote about them.

Coral Lorenzen’s last letter in the “Official Correspondence 1966” file concerns a visit to New York by Olavo Fontes, the Brazilian doctor who had investigated the Villas Boas case. Ms. Lorenzen recommends some APRO members he might want to meet, and fills in John on a recent increase in membership, due at least in part to recent books by Jacques Vallee and John G. Fuller. UFOs were a hot topic in 1966!

John writes to Long John Nebel, who hosted an all-night radio talk show that often centered on UFOs. He offers to plug his new book, The Fickle Finger of Fate, or to appear as a ufologist. Nebel’s format included a panel who often interviewed guests while he took a break. Apparently, John hadn’t appeared on the show since he’d plugged Jadoo in the ’50s. There’s no response in the file, so I don’t know if he ever discussed his superhero spoof, but he did appear on the panel later.