JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

buy ivermectin in uk The Acapulco Conference (1er Congreso Internacional Sobre el Fenomeno Ovni, to give it its proper name) was apparently a full-throttle fiasco. It was poorly organized and underfunded; poor ticket sales, botched airline and hotel reservations, inadequate food and water, and searing heat didn’t help matters. Neither did the fact that many of the participating ufologists detested one another; some even refused to be in the same room together.

Amid all of this, John’s position was indeed that of pariah. In an article in the Dec. ’77 Chic (“Close Encounters in Acapulco”), Don Strachan brackets Keel with Jacques Vallee as “too eccentric to place on a left-right continuum”: “Then, prominent UFO writer John Keel drops a bomb by defecting from the fold. ‘The UFO establishment is a powerful propaganda machine,’ he declares. ‘The average UFO publication isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. They used to think in the Middle Ages that these were witches with lanterns on their broomsticks,’ continues Keel, who argues that UFO sightings are caused by local disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field.”

And in the Sept. ’77 Fate (“Disaster in UFO-Land”), Jerome Clark reports that Keel further fueled the theorists’ quarrels: “As if to aggravate the situation further, John Keel, the earliest and most vocal proponent of the paraphysical hypothesis, delivered a blood-and-thunder address which argued that UFOs as such don’t exist, that they are just temporary manifestations of a kind of intelligent energy which he holds responsible for virtually all of mankind’s ills.”

In an attempt to salvage the situation, another conference was held in Mexico City. As Clark reports, “I didn’t go on to Mexico City but later I talked with John Keel who did and from whom I heard further horror stories of disorganization, bouncing checks and dwindling audiences. The last night of the Congress, April 27, attracted a grand total of 20 paying customers.”

It was not the pleasant junket John and others had hoped; and probably not the best context for challenging ideas…

[Theo Paijmans sent this along for the site; many thanks to him! It first appeared in Stars and Stripes, April 22, 1977. ]

In his Strange Creatures From Time And Space, John Keel writes about “window areas”: “We have a theory. It is not very scientific but it is based upon the known facts. These creatures and strange events tend to recur in the same areas year after year, even century after century…” but there his theorizing did not stop. If there’s one important evolution in his oeuvre, it is his breaking away from the – at that time – predominant ETH explanation for the UFO phenomenon. This theory permeates his books like UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse, Our Haunted Planet, and The Eighth Tower, this last title the least known of his tremendously influential titles, but the most comprehensive in regards to his theory on the “Ultraterrestrials,” and the intelligences or intelligence that inhabits the Superspectrum, all of which can be compared more or less to Charles Fort’s musings on the Supersargasso Sea encircling the earth.

That Keel had a hard time to promote his theories and to voice them inside the ufological communities, is demonstrated by the following newspaper account published two years after his Strange Creatures From Time And Space was published. While never having met Keel, I only talked over the long distance telephone a couple of times with him, I can imagine that he somehow would have enjoyed the protests.

Theo Paijmans

I believe most of the activities of the Institute of Fortean Parapsychology took place in P.O. Box 20024.  P.O. Box 20024, however, was quite a lively place.

In the mid-’80s, John became fascinated with the subculture of mail order: classified ads, ad sheets, and mailers. He was not alone; in that pre-Internet culture, many infophiles were swapping zines, booklets, and mail art. (Ivan Stang’s book High Weirdness by Mail was typical of the time.) Reverting to his old pseudonym, Jakeel, he went on an ad binge:  “During the past two years I have systematically placed all kinds of classified ads in the many different newspapers and weekly tabloids here in New York City, testing various mail order scams and schemes, even making all sorts of free offers.” He printed an array of booklets, flyers, and ad sheets, which he sold or traded through similar ephemeral publications. He liked to get mail, particularly if it had dollar bills in it.

“Madison Avenue Confidential” (from which the above quote was taken) was a series of one-page ruminations on publishing and advertising; “Bamboozle,” “Big Apple News,” and “Filthy Rich Digest” offered clippings, jokes, and ads: for typesetting, mailing lists, how-to books, and other Jakeel sheets. “The Unicorn Review” reprinted a couple of clippings about unicorn sightings, and urged the reader to send in money to save the unicorns.

How to Rob the Mail promised the reader a lesson in scams. Instead, it delivered a mail-order primer: warnings against chain letters and pyramid schemes, advice on copy and marketing, and anecdotes about legal and illegal get-rich schemes, all with the usual Keel humor. At $2, it was no swindle.

Just in case you wondered what Mothman himself thought of the whole business…

“Riot on Rashid Street!” appeared in Men’s Digest, Vol. 1, No. 4, in 1957.  It was typical of the short stories he was writing back then: an adventurous yarn rooted in the local color he was soaking up in his travels.  The cover promoted it as “Adventurer John A. Keel’s true story of a man’s hunger, a woman’s desire, and a mob’s aimless violence in the no-man’s land of Baghdad.”

The author’s bio gives a taste of how he was promoted in those days: “John A. Keel cannot write unless he is climbing mountains, cutting through jungles, or meeting exciting females.  At 28, he has known many more countries, more sights, more women, than ordinary men would know in a millennium.  And the stories he then tells are insistent, demanding, as his life constantly is.  It is the raw, elemental life of a Hemingway, but told with the rich style of a Homer.  His new book, JADOO, attests to Keel’s rare genius for finding truth that is stranger than fiction.  Here then is a story for men, by a man worthy of the name.  Published for the first time anywhere, John A. Keel’s true ‘Riot on Rashid Street!'”

And here is the opening, just to give you a taste of the Keel style in its 1957 vintage:

“On the heat glazed streets of Baghdad, beyond the sunflaked walls of the old hotel, the shouting had turned to shooting.  Machine guns stuttered brisk warnings against the tepid morning air and the angry murmur of the crowds rose and fell with each burst.

“In the dark bathroom of his ‘suite’ on the third floor of the hotel, Charles R. Underwood was trying to drag a razor over his weatherbeaten face and concentrate on the tormenting memory of the tall, slender blonde he’d seen in the hotel bar the night before when he’d checked in.  He hadn’t been near a woman for six weeks and the ache was on him.  Six weeks of nothing but sun and sand and smelly Arabs waiting for him to turn his back so they could feed their khanjers in his flesh.  They called him ‘the big effendi with the hard rock fists’ because he had his own way of handing out discipline on the pipeline.  He hated the nickname but it meant survival.  Now he wanted nothing more than to scrape off the dirt and beard of the desert and relax and be human until it was his turn to go out again.

“Suddenly the weak light blinked out altogether and the sharp crash of breaking glass rang through the building, followed by a roar of approval from the mob.”

“John A. Keel: he writes.”  That’s all you needed to know.

Given the strange subjects that John covered, it’s not surprising that he was often challenged on his facts.  In this exchange from the letters column of Saga (May 1967), he defends himself from the unusual charge of inventing small towns.

I’m not sure what “specialized research” is; but I have no doubt that John specialized in it with his usual flair.

Love That Spy! was published by Lancer Books in 1968.  According to John’s half-sister Cheryl, John wrote it, under the name T. A. Waters.  However, Waters was a real person with several books to his credit; and, according to Jim Steinmeyer, who knew him, wrote them himself.

So who was responsible for Love that Spy!?

I found a copy through an online book service, and sat down with it.  It didn’t take long to read.  It’s a generic spy-and-sex adventure, 141 pages long, and obviously modeled on the James Bond books, then at the height of their popularity.  In it, secret agent Sean Patrick travels from London to Greenwich Village to Berlin, battling bad guys, bedding women, and brandishing gimmicky gadgets.  It could have been written by any professional writer in 1968.

John and Waters might have known one another — both were regulars at L.A.’s Magic Castle.  Maybe they worked on it together; maybe John helped Waters.  I have no idea.  But I’ll mention it here, anyway; I think John would have enjoyed the confusion.