JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

The outline below is for John’s first UFO article. He had written a radio show (“Things in the Sky”) for the American Forces Network while he was stationed in Frankfurt, but hadn’t pursued the subject after that, despite a sighting in Egypt in 1954.

He had been working in television, writing game shows (“Play Your Hunch”) and kids’ shows (“Mack and Myer,” “The Chuck McCann Show”), and had become unhappy with the business. Playboy had published a letter of his, about the poet and Bohemian wastrel Maxwell Bodenheim, so he followed up in March, 1966, with a few pitches. The editor, Jack Kessie, turned down pieces on Hugo Gernsback (the founder of Amazing Stories) and on the colorful Hobo News that had printed some of John’s first poems. But he was interested in an article on UFOs, which were then very much in the news. John agreed to write 8,000 words on spec, and went to work.

Unfortunately, he became more and more obsessed with the subject; the article grew longer and longer; and his correspondence with Playboy grew acrimonious. Eventually, Kessie rejected the article as far too long and credulous, and ran a piece by J. Allen Hynek instead. Much, of course, to John’s dismay.

It’s perhaps just as well. The surviving draft is, essentially, a digest of the current literature, taking the reader from simple lights in the sky up to the Villas-Boaz incident (a famous case in which a Brazilian farmer claimed a sexual experience with an alien). John started doing his own research shortly after, leading to the book with the same title.

But here’s that first outline. It shows John’s approach to the subject back then, and contains a number of piquant details. I hadn’t known, for example, that he dated Carl Sagan’s former secretary.

The ’80s were difficult years for John.  The market and audience had changed, forteana was unfashionable, and he wasn’t selling much.  He worked on a number of novels and plays, but without success.  He decided to make a few bucks with mail order, selling ad sheets and booklets from his P.O. Box.  Among them was a recipe for toothpaste, presented with his usual gusto.

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.

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.