JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

We’re at the end of July 1967, and John continues to keep detailed notes on the daily strangeness. Or, at least, what Jaye Paro reports as daily strangeness. Apol’s replacement, Rubin, finally appears, and shows a passion for gin rummy; John interviews him (indirectly, as always). Jaye witnesses an alien birth, and John suggests some passwords for her contacts, to prevent bogus messages from the Fourth Group. John particularly noted the salt under the baby’s tongue, in the Catholic/alien baptism, because Jaye had reported that aliens ate large amounts of salt.

A couple of footnotes: Ivan was Ivan Sanderson, writer of many books on animals, forteana, and ufology; Charles Bowen was the editor of the British Flying Saucer Review.

As July 1967 comes to a close, we find John transcribing a message from Apol in a motel in Long Island. He doesn’t say how it was transmitted, but my guess is that Jaye Paro dictated it over the phone. Much of it is the usual vague rambling studded with scripture, but there are a couple of interesting points. One is the request, “What do you suggest regarding our messages? How can we prove we are we,” which John later follows up on with some passwords. I was also struck by the sentence, “We can not let your people all become as a subject controlled by an operator.”

To John, that must have recalled the book Operators and Things, a disturbing memoir of schizophrenia by Barbara O’Brien (probably a pseudonym; I don’t think the author has been identified). The Operators and Things of the title refer to malevolent disembodied entities, and the humans that they control with rays (a classic influencing machine delusion). UFO buffs in the ’60s were intrigued by its similarity to the accounts of Richard Shaver. Its use here may indicate that Jaye was familiar with O’Brien. John was; here’s his definition of “operator” from his unfinished UFO dictionary. And then Apol’s message in that distinctive Keelian manuscript.

“The messenger,” by the way, is Jaye Paro.

I was in upstate New York last week (I gave a concert in Lily Dale, of all places), and took the opportunity to stop off in Perry, where John Keel grew up. Mamie Caton and I had lunch in the Country Kitchen, took a picture of me at the local library (where John was, in his words, “a reading machine”), and admired Silver Lake.

John told the story of A. B. Walker’s Silver Lake Sea Serpent hoax in Chapter 21 of Strange Creatures of Time and Space (Chapter 22 of the revised version, The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings). I posted an old postcard of it here. The sea serpent is still the town mascot: a trailer park by the lake is called Sea Serpent View, and the Perry Fire Department holds an annual Sea Serpent Softball Tournament. What could be more fitting for John’s hometown?

A couple of messages from Apol (or Appel) introduce Jaye Paro’s new contact, Rubin. The first message is in Apol’s usual Biblical mode; I guess it’s paraphrasing Exodus 19. In the second, Denton may refer to William Denton, who promoted psychometry. Rubin, not surprisingly, will turn out to be rather problematic.

Well, as we all expected, the 26th came and went, and the Pope was not assassinated. John visits Jaye in Long Island, and reports on Apol’s replacement (Rubin), twin Agars, stolen pigs, and other strangeness; they visit a Montessori school (John thought there might be an alien connection), and talk with another contactee, Louise. John also visits Ivan Sanderson, who has more oddities to report.

Jaye also tells John that the aliens want her to marry him, and have children. When I first read that, I thought it might explain a lot of her behavior, that her interest in John was primarily sexual. Now, I’m not so sure; she could have just been trying to shock and confuse him. But who knows?

John’s “Long Island File” continues with fourteen pages of Jaye’s messages from Apol and Agar. I won’t post them all; here’s John’s introductory page (that’s his handwriting), Jaye’s first page, and another page with a note by John.

Some of the messages prophecy an upcoming apocalypse. Others complain that the messenger (Paro) refuses to comply with all of their requests, and that the council is displeased with her. They warn that “calamity will fall if our directions are not followed carefully,” and ask, “Is it because we do not understand your minds and ways?”

Mixed in with this are frequent passages from the Bible. I Googled some, and found verses from Ezekiel, Isaiah, Proverbs, Leviticus, and Matthew. Some are garbled; most seem to come from the Douay-Rheims translation (favored by many Catholics). On one page, John notes that one verse from Proverbs was, somehow, underlined in his own Bible. Naturally, this disturbs him.

So, was Paro channeling or hoaxing, or both? As I’ve said in the comments, John wasn’t the first investigator to contend with a puzzling and unreliable witness. And what are to we make of that underlined verse?

We now come to July 24, 1967, in John’s Long Island file. The day for the aliens’ prophecies is approaching, and John’s daily life is only getting stranger. On this day alone, Jaye Paro reports a visit from Agar and another alien, John questions Agar (through Paro), Paro’s mail and drawings are stolen, Harold Serkin (I don’t know who he was) reports on strange phone calls in Washington, D. C., Serkin’s call is interrupted by whistling sounds when John mentions the Pope, Paro gets more baffling messages (Rey vis eug?), and John finds out that a map in his apartment has been altered. We also learn how Agar opens eggs. All of this, as usual, should be taken with a grain of salt (the aliens like salt).

John died eight years ago, on July 3, 2009. I’m sure he’d be glad to know we’re still reading him. He’s shown here picnicking with friends, sometime in the late ’90s.

It’s July 23, 1967, and the day for the android’s prophecies approaches. John sends a letter to some of his close associates, just in case. Ivan would be Ivan Sanderson, but I can’t identify the others. He also writes a letter to those supposed androids, and receives two messages from them, I assume through Jaye Paro.

John sends another letter to the purported Androids, with a test to find out if they can read his mind. He pastes some clippings into the record, about a Soviet claim of a propaganda campaign mounted by the U.S. and about an earthquake that might delay the Pope’s planned visit to Turkey. He follows with a report on more strangeness, and on odd phone calls received by Jaye Paro, Ivan Sanderson, and others. As he says in his report, he’s having trouble keeping up with all of it.