JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

Holly Springs Meanwhile, John was preparing to beard NICAP in its den, and to see if he could dig up anything from the military.  He was also working on his ill-fated UFO piece for Playboy; the research was apparently destined for both the article and the book.

He visited Ivan Sanderson and his wife Alma to discuss the project.  John liked to reminisce about his visits to Sanderson’s farm, particularly the fact that a playful baby elephant was once in residence, and delighted in goosing visitors.  This bread-and-butter letter was written on April 12, 1966.

After the last exchange of letters, Ivan Sanderson fired off a short note to John, full of enthusiasm for the subject and for the proposed book.  He also attached a 16-page talk he had given to a local UFO group.  The title (if you’re curious) is “Notes on a New Concept: This may be described as a General Biological Field Theory of a cosmic nature.”  Vintage Sanderson!

Two days later, he responded to the criticisms that John had written to their agent, Ollie Swan.  He puts up a lively defense; and points out his years of experience in writing and speaking for the public.  There’s also an interesting bit in there about the “worrying matter of Forteanism.”  He also attached a few pages on the different kinds of ufologists, and a transcript of the Q. & A. from his talk to the UFO group.  (I haven’t included the attachments, since they’re long and faint carbons).

Sanderson wrote to his agent, Oliver Swan, on April 12, 1966, filling him in on the proposed UFO book.  He gave his reasons for the title, and discussed his working relationship with Keel.  I should mention that, in fact, John didn’t have a commission from Playboy to write the definitive UFO article; he had agreed to a short article on spec.  Also, he didn’t write regularly for the magazine, but had only been published in the letters column.

On April 15, John also wrote to Swan.  There was trouble brewing: he was already balking at Sanderson’s chatty style.  John was an American journalist, and Sanderson a Scottish raconteur; and they had very different approaches to their material and to their audience.  Ideally, they should have complemented one another, but ideals don’t always materialize.

I posted something a while ago on the book that John Keel and Ivan Sanderson tried to write together in 1966.  It was to be called Abominable Space Things, and was to cover the subject of UFOS from early history to the present (well, to 1966, that is).

In the next few posts, I’ll air some of the correspondence from that failed collaboration.  As you’ll see, they had different approaches and strong personalities, and the project fizzled.  This first letter is from Sanderson to Keel, April 12, 1966.  He’s evaluating some of their sources, assessing the commercial possibilities of the book, and figuring out representation.  More will follow…

In 1967, Jaye Paro put John in contact with Mr. Apol, or Appell, a supposed ultraterrestrial. John exchanged several letters with him; I posted one of them a while ago, here.

John also sent him a series of questionnaires, which he filled out with his customary red pencil. There were five of them; I’ll post the second, only because the pencil is darker on this one.

All of John’s contact with Apol was through Paro; as far as I can tell, she was channeling him. Apol’s answers are interesting; but John’s questions intrigue me more: these are the things that he wanted to know. He clearly valued the correspondence at the time, and believed he was getting valuable information. But, of course, these damned ultraterrestrials, whether imaginary or not, are not to be trusted…

John’s foray into mail order and ad sheets in the ’80s puzzled many Keel-watchers. However, his articles weren’t selling, and his attempts at novels and plays were no more successful. The ad sheets were a way to have a little harmless fun, and maybe pick up a few bucks. He put out nine issues of the Big Apple News, from 1984 to 1986.  It was usually a two-sided sheet, although a couple were four pages. It contained small ads, usually for other ad sheets, John’s own ads, and a sprinkling of cartoons and clippings. Here are some representative samples; the article on snakes was one he did for High Times in 1980.

Well, this is a curious thing. In the same little plastic box with the wooden plugs from a telephone in Point Pleasant, John kept this pill. And he had this to say about it, in his unfinished dictionary:

In fact, sulfa or sulpha is a common antimicrobial, and the most popular antibiotic before the discovery of penicillin. Roche still produces it. The idea that aliens might want to protect themselves from microbes recalls, inevitably, The War of the Worlds, in which microbes were the downfall of those nasty Martians.

Several of John’s “silent contactees” (UFO experiencers who shunned publicity) reported that aliens and/or Men In Black took pills. I suppose this one was given to John by one of them. (ADDENDUM: It was given to him by Jaye Paro, one of the contactees he was investigating, in 1967.)

I’ll point out that John doesn’t seem to have had direct contact with anyone claiming to be an alien; phone conversations and correspondence were always through the contactees, sometimes by channeling. To me, that suggests that the supposed UTs (ultraterrestrials) had no independent existence. But, for all of us intrigued by those persistent tales of pill-popping aliens, well, this is what the pills looked like.

I’m happy to announce that a new edition of John Keel’s Jadoo, edited by Patrick Huyghe, is now available from Anomalist Books.

Jadoo was John’s first book, published in 1957.  It’s an account of the year he spent traveling through Egypt and India, investigating magicians, tracking down legends, and getting into trouble.  He visited a mummy-maker, played Russian roulette with a notorious bandit, chased the yeti, and gave a spectacularly unsuccessful performance of the Indian rope trick.

This edition also includes some new material: a chapter cut by the publisher (about John’s romantic difficulties during that year), travel notes written while sailing to India, a book review written under one of his pseudonyms, a pitch for a sequel, and photos from the period.

Here, to whet your appetite, is the song written for the original publication.  Jadoo!

John included this sighting of a hairy creature in his 1970 book Strange Creatures From Time and Space.  He may have written the initial report for SITU (the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained), or simply for his own files.

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.