JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

In this report for the Ohio, Athens Messenger, Mary Hyre describes a visit to NYC.  She appears with John Keel on the Long John Nebel show, interviews the enigmatic Vivenus, and attends the 1967 Congress of Scientific Ufologists.  We even get a glimpse of the young James Randi, back when he gave talks at UFO conferences.

Mary Hyre reports here on two recent UFO sightings — one by Keel himself.

A longer column, reporting UFO sightings, strange footprints, and a TV appearance with Keel.

Mary Hyre was one of the first, and one of the most persistent, to cover Mothman and other strangeness in Point Pleasant.  In her column, “Where the Waters Mingle,” in the Athens, Ohio Messenger, she regularly reported the latest sightings and speculations.  I’ll post some of her columns here, from John’s files, starting with this one.

Here’s a brief book proposal, which seems to be from around 1966.  It got no further than this, but shows John figuring out the clearest (and most commercial) way to organize his material.  The report  of Russian scientists obtaining a Yeti body is news to me; maybe some Yeti scholar out there has more information.

In the 1980s, John Keel made several attempts to return to his earlier career as a comedy writer.  He pitched a number of comic novels and plays, none of which made it past an agent.  Larry “Ratso” Sloman was then editor of the National Lampoon; and John also made a number of suggestions in the gross-out vein of that magazine (like a “sick humor” book on Hitler, called Hitler Was a Nice Guy).  His only published piece was in the November 1985 issue, entitled “The Mad as Hell Issue.”  105 celebrities were invited to write about their pet peeves.  most contributed only a paragraph or two, but John weighed in with a longish article.  Here’s the first part of it:

However, he did make one other appearance: as an uncredited print model in the January 1986 issue.  The photograph was one of several illustrating an article by Ed Subitzky and Karen Dale Boss, “The  Modern Woman’s Guide to Time-Efficient Sex Planning and Management.”   Since this was a pictorial on sex in the workplace, it is, by definition, not safe for work; so I’ve placed it on another page.  It shows John in a way that may be unfamiliar to some of his readers.

(more…)