Kalmunai John Keel and Gray Barker had a long and complicated friendship. As most Mothman aficionados know, Barker also investigated the disturbing events in Point Pleasant in the ’60s, and wrote his own book about them, The Silver Bridge (1970). He took a different approach than Keel, turning the material more toward fiction than reportage.
He did describe his first meeting with Keel, however; and since the book is now scarce, I’ll post it here. It’s from Chapter 8, “The Man with the Beard.”
John shot some 16mm home movies when he visited Egypt in 1954, gathering material for his first book, Jadoo; and you can now watch it here. The four minute film shows John and Lite Beilenberg (to whom the book is dedicated) visiting the pyramids, as well as some entertaining footage of snake hunters. John later edited this into an 8mm reel that he used to show at Fortean events. Thanks to Anthony Matt for the digital transfer; and to Angela Alverson for help with the upload.
The last post mentioned that John was editing the magazine “Poets of America” in 1948; this is what it looked like.
He was very interested in poetry at the time; he recalled that he used to declaim his verses in the park, in the grand old Greenwich Village tradition. This issue included selections from 29 poets, as well as a tribute poem to Anton Romatka by the editor, and an ad selling Romatka’s books. John remembered quitting the magazine when the editor wanted to charge poets for publication — a policy John found unethical.
Here you can meet the staff, in an excerpt from a subscription flyer, including a bio of the 18-year-old John A. Keel.
One of John’s sadder experiences in his teens was finding the body of Anton Romatka. But I’ll let him tell the story himself, in this article from the Greenwich Village paper Caricature, April 1948.
John spent most of his military service in Frankfurt, writing for the American Forces Network. The first photo above shows him listening to sound effects; the second busy at his typewriter. Most of his scripts were based on subjects from the army publication “Troop Topics,” devoted to points of military discipline and morale. He often dramatized them as science fiction, or as comedies — many featuring a hapless Brooklynite named Mulvaney. He did, however, also write material on some of his preferred subjects: Halloween broadcasts from Frankenstein’s castle and the Great Pyramid, coverage of the army chapter of the Baker Street irregulars — even a documentary on UFOs.
I’ve listed all the scripts I know of in the bibliography; any additions are welcome!
In 1967, John Keel and Ivan Sanderson made a serious attempt to write a book together. The subject was UFOs; the year was notable for the unusual number of sightings, and public interest was at its height. A book by these two remarkable writers and researchers was bound to be a success.
They chose the title to avoid the words “UFO” and “saucer” (which “send the interested reader and even the aficionados screaming for television”), and to invoke Sanderson’s popular book Abominable Snowmen: “it avoided both the stigma of kookery on the one hand and heavy science on the other.”
Unfortunately, this promising idea was never to be. All that remains is this title page, a brief pitch, and a proposed table of contents. The book was to be “strictly reportorial… completely without faiths, beliefs, and theories.” The table of contents was chronological, from “The Beginning: Prior to 20,000 B.C.” to “The Breakthrough: A.D. 1966.”
Despite these clear intentions, their collaboration proved impossible. Keel found Sanderson’s approach too speculative and chatty; and Sanderson, in turn, wasn’t interested in detailed lists of sightings. Both went on to write their own, very different, treatments of the subject. And we’ll never know what their combined approach would have produced.
I hope you don’t mind seeing this sideways; that’s how John pasted it into his scrapbook. “A Moron Speaks” is a column of humor, topical comment, and light verse. Nothing remarkable, perhaps, but a pretty professional job for a boy of 15.
John made many 8mm movies in the ’60s; here he is filming his fellow film buffs at a meeting of the Metropolitan Motion Picture Club in 1964.
John Keel’s first book, Jadoo, was promoted in many ways: interviews, excerpts in magazines, and a Keel snake act in a Manhattan store window. There was also a song. I don’t know who wrote or performed it (and John didn’t remember); I don’t know if it was ever released or aired. But — now you can listen to it on YouTube, right here.
Many thanks to Anthony Matt and Geoff Brady for restoring the scratchy 78; and to Angela Alverson for posting it.
John Keel and Doug Skinner have lunch somewhere in Manhattan, sometime in 2001.