by Colin Wilson
Yet Keel did encounter real magic. A sheik called Abdul Mohammed sat in front of him, and told him the precise amount of money he had in his pockets, including his reserve in his watch pocket. The same old man pointed out that there was a desert viper under Keel’s chair, and, when the snake lashed out with its fangs, held out a hand over its head, and killed it merely by staring at it. Keel examined the snake and verified that it was dead.
It was on a trip to Aswan and Upper Egypt that Keel encountered the greatest mystery of the twentieth century. Above the dam, in broad daylight, he saw a metallic disc, with a rotating outer rim, hovering for several minutes. As it happened, Keel had already produced a radio programme about flying saucers, and his research had convinced him that they had been around on Earth throughout human history.
In a later article on UFOs, Keel was to write: ‘Although many UFO believers choose to assume that most UFO sightings are random chance encounters, there is evidence to show that witnesses are selected by some unknown process, and that strictly accidental sightings are rare, if not non-existent’. Certainly, the sighting of the UFO over the Aswan dam was to have important consequences for his own future.
In Bombay, Keel learnt snake charming, and almost died when bitten by a cobra. In Benares, he allowed himself to be buried alive for half an hour, surviving by rationing his breath.
Crossing the Himalayas, Keel heard a great deal about the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, and caught a glimpse of two of them, enormous brown hairy creatures who fled up a mountain at his approach. In Tibet, he sat in a roomful of lamas, and heard one of them describe a fire in a northern village, which he had just seen by ‘travelling clairvoyance’—the ability to project the mind to other places. Later, Keel was able to check, and discover that the lama had been telling the truth.
Finally, at Singhik, he met Nyang-Pas, a lama he had been seeking, who was reputed to be able to levitate. And, within a few minutes of sitting in Keel’s bungalow, he revealed that it was more than a rumour. Placing one hand on top of his stick, he pushed himself up off the floor until he was sitting cross-legged in the air. Then he conducted the remainder of the conversation sitting in midair. He then offered to read Keel’s mind. ‘Think of an object’. Keel thought of a tree. ‘That is too easy’, said the lama. ‘You’re thinking of a tree’. Keel switched his mental picture to a pair of boots, and the lama said immediately, ‘Now you are thinking of a pair of boots’.
The trick of mindreading, the lama explained, was to choose a good subject, who can clearly visualise the object he is thinking about. Then the mindreader must concentrate and focus his mind on the subject, and, after a moment, the object being thought about will pop into his head. Keel found that these instructions worked, and that he was slowly able to perform mindreading. (Uri Geller clearly used the same technique when he read my mind and duplicated my drawing.)
Nyang-Pas claimed that travelling clairvoyance, or kinga sharrira, depends on relaxing deeply, and imaginatively conjuring up a familiar road, following it mentally and visualising every detail. Then the aspirant must continue to visualise some part of the road with which he is unfamiliar. One who is skilled in this discipline—which is virtually what Jung calls ‘active imagination’—can finally see places that he does not know and events that are taking place at the moment. Many years after Keel’s visit to Tibet, the New York clairvoyant Ingo Swann demonstrated travelling clairvoyance under scientific conditions at Stanford University, while Prof. Robert Jahn (of whom we shall have more to say in chapter 9) undertook a series of investigations that left no doubt that the ability can be found in many ordinary people.
Keel also heard about the ability of some lamas to create mental objects—known as tulpas—by concentration, although he was unable to witness any demonstration of this ability. (But the British traveller, Alexandra David-Neel, learnt how to do it, and describes in Magic and Mystery in Tibet how she once conjured up a phantom monk who looked so solid that a herdsman mistook him for a real lama.) Again, the concept proved to be of basic importance to Keel.
When Nyang-Pas took leave of Keel, he said, ‘I hope you will never stop asking questions’. The rest of Keel’s life has shown that he took this comment to heart.
His departure from Tibet was not the end of his travels. In late 1955, he stopped in Italy, then went to Barcelona and found himself another radio job with the wire services. There he lived in a hotel on a hilltop with his girlfriend, Lite (pronounced Li-ta), and wrote Jadoo, which is dedicated to her. He had met her in Frankfurt, and she had accompanied him on some of his travels (when he was solvent). However, the American publisher who accepted Jadoo thought the book was better without romance, so Lite was deleted.
The publisher also insisted that Keel should return to America for publication, for interviews and television appearances. And the book had the effect of making him a celebrity—for a while it was impossible to open a newspaper without seeing photographs of him performing the Indian rope trick or handling snakes. Now there was a healthy market for his journalism and short stories, and, for most of the next decade, he worked in a variety of jobs, including television and publishing. And, as usual, he continued to investigate mysteries wherever he found them—he and Jacques Vallee were in Costa Rica at the same time, studying the giant stone balls whose purpose is still unknown.
Inevitably, if rather reluctantly, Keel became interested in UFOs. He was inclined to feel that the subject had been marking time for a decade or so, and there was nothing new to investigate. But at least the public had become more interested. Before Keel’s departure for Germany in 1950, UFOs had been of only moderate interest to most Americans. But the death of Capt. Thomas Mantell, chasing a balloon-like object, in January 1948, gave impetus to Project Sign, the air force study of UFOs, with Allen Hynek as adviser; this in turn became Project Grudge, which—as we have seen—was more intent on soothing and misinforming the American public than in uncovering new information. Eventually, this blatant cover-up irritated Keel into action.
In March 1966, there was a ‘saucer flap’ in America: sightings were reported from all over the country. And the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, blandly assured the American public that UFOs were illusions. Then, on 25 March, Allen Hynek told the assembled reporters in the Detroit Press Club that the hundred or more witnesses who had seen UFOs in Michigan had been misled by marsh gas. All over America, a roar of outrage and derision went up.
Since Keel had himself seen a UFO, he regarded all this discussion of whether they existed as a waste of time. Finally, he was irritated into a full-scale investigation. After the television jobs, his bank account showed a healthy credit, and he now asked press-cutting agencies to send him every cutting they could find on UFO sightings.
The sheer quantity staggered him. On 30 March, the day that McNamara announced that he did not believe in UFOs, hundreds of newspapers from coast to coast carried reports of close-up sightings of spinning discs whose radiation seemed capable of stopping car engines. Keel rang the newspapers and was assured that, far from exaggerating the stories to manufacture news, they had selected only the more interesting ones. He checked with witnesses, ringing them long distance, and learnt that, in fact, the newspapers had deliberately suppressed what they felt to be incredible. People described being chased in their cars by UFOs, which had sometimes landed on the road and later reappeared over their homes. They often reported that their eyes were red and swollen for days after a sighting, and a few males confessed to pains in the genitals. Others had felt nauseating waves of heat. Being a natural sceptic, Keel was at first inclined to dismiss much of this as hysteria. But soon he was converted by the sheer quantity of the reports.
With the same obsessive thoroughness and curiosity he had displayed in his search for Oriental magic, he took to the road and spoke to thousands of people all over the country. A few were obvious publicity seekers and hoaxers, but he found these easy to spot. Most people were obviously ordinary and honest, and many we
re reluctant to discuss their experiences until he had won their confidence.
Keel collected ten thousand clippings in 1966, and a further two thousand in the month of March 1967 alone. He set out to analyse this vast mass of data, and soon discovered one peculiar fact: that more than a fifth of the sightings took place on Wednesdays between 8 and 11 p.m. Moreover, the ‘flaps’ were often in specific states: for example, he found hundreds of sightings in Arkansas on 16 August 1966, in two belts running north to south, but none at all in surrounding states. He concluded that Martians—or meteors—would not group themselves so neatly. The data suggested that the UFO denizens know about human calendars and geographical boundaries.
In other words, Keel was approaching the same conclusion that Jacques Vallee arrived at in The Invisible College—that the purpose of UFO activity is, to some extent, the effect it has on human beings. They have every intention of being seen. And when UFOs began to follow him around—like the one that accompanied him along the Long Island Expressway on 4 October 1967—he realised that they could somehow focus in on his own mind.
He had another reason for believing that UFOs possessed intelligence. At the Washington Fortfest of 1995, Keel described how he had noticed that most of the press cuttings were not about flying saucers, but about lights—often green and purple blobs. (According to Keel, similar light balls were beings seen at about this time—1964–68—all over the world.) He learnt that they descended on cargo boats navigating the Ohio River at night, and that the boatmen soon realised that the balls of light did not like their searchlights, and would quickly move out of the way when the lights were directed at them. Keel himself sat on a hilltop near the Gallipolis Ferry in West Virginia, in early 1967, fascinated by the lights, which he describes as small clouds of glowing gas, purple in colour. There were twenty or more, and at first he thought they were some kind of natural phenomenon. But, when he directed his powerful torch at them, they skittered out of the way of the beam. That argued that they could be alive. So he tried flashing at them in Morse code, telling them to go left or right, or up or down; they followed his instructions precisely. Then he decided to invent his own code—a circle for left, a triangle for right, and so on. And, once again, the lights followed his instructions. That could mean only one thing: the code was superfluous—they were reading his mind.
After three years of investigation of UFOs, Keel set down his conclusions in Operation Trojan Horse (1970). By this time, he had gone back to all the source material, including the Bible and the ancient historians. He unearthed many interesting stories from the past, including one from Alençon, France, dating back to June 1790, described in a report by a Paris police inspector named Liabeuf. The witnesses, who included two mayors and a doctor, all told of an enormous globe that had crashed into a hilltop and started grass fires; then a door in its side opened, and a man came out, dressed in ‘clothes adhering completely to his body’ (i.e., a skin-tight suit), who, seeing the reception committee, ran away into the woods. A few moments later, the globe exploded like a bubble, leaving only fine powder.
Keel was also intrigued by the strange series of ‘airship’ sightings of 1896–97, when there were fairly certainly no airships in the United States. These began when a witness in Sacramento, California, heard a cry of ‘Throw her up higher—she’ll hit the steeple’, and saw a huge, cigar-shaped object, with a lighted glass cabin underneath, sailing slightly above the level of the rooftops. Five nights later, on 22 November, it came back again, this time floating so high above Sacramento that it simply looked like a bright light, with something looming above it. One man who looked at it through a telescope reported that it seemed to rise and fall as it moved, like a ship on the high seas—or, as Kenneth Arnold might have put it, like a saucer skipped over water.
More reports came from San Francisco—of some high-flying object with a bright light. The mayor of San Francisco concluded that ‘some shrewd inventor has solved the problem of aerial navigation . . .’. By February 1897, reports came from Nebraska, then Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Arkansas, before the phenomenon moved south to Texas. By April, dozens of stories started to come in from all over Texas, and were reported in the newspapers. Colonel W. A. Robertson of Mississippi saw it from a train approaching Dallas and reported that it was travelling faster than the train.
Many reports came from people who claimed to have seen the airship on the ground. In April, Judge Lawrence A. Byrne told a Texarkana newspaper that he had walked through a thicket, and found ‘the airship I have read so much about’. It was manned by three men of vaguely Oriental appearance (the judge thought they might be Japanese) talking in a foreign language. They obligingly showed the judge all over the ship.
A farmer named Alexander Hamilton, in Kansas, described in April how the airship stole one of his calves. It was about three hundred feet long and had a brightly lit glass cabin underneath. There were six occupants, who talked in a foreign language. Then it rose off the ground, and seems to have lassoed a calf, which then became caught in a fence. Farmer Hamilton found it was held by a cable. He cut the wire of the fence to free the calf, and watched the animal sail away. Later, its hide, legs and head—complete with Farmer Hamilton’s brand mark—were found on a farm four miles away.
The last people to report the airship were a couple called Captain and Mrs. Scobie, of Fort Worth. On 12 May 1897, after dark, Mrs. Scobie called her husband to come and see something strange. They both watched the large, dark object moving through the sky over Fort Worth, with a brilliant light underneath. (Various witnesses had claimed the airship had an ‘electric searchlight’.) Then the airship vanished from history. There had been 109 recorded sightings in Texas alone.
There were further ‘airship flaps’ in America in 1909 and South Africa in 1914. And in Scandinavia, from 1932 to 1937, there was a wave of sightings of enormous aeroplanes, bigger than any commercial planes then in use—one was reported as having eight engines, twice the number on the largest plane of the time. What was so odd was that these craft appeared—over Norway, Sweden and Finland—in appalling weather conditions that kept all normal aircraft on the ground. Moreover, they would do something that would be regarded by most pilots as suicidal: cut their engines, then circle at increasingly low altitudes, often ‘gliding’ in this manner three or four times. They frequently flew low, and a powerful searchlight raked the countryside.
The air forces of the countries concerned were baffled by the planes. The only explanation seemed to be that a mad millionaire, like some villain out of a James Bond novel, had a secret base somewhere, with elaborate maintenance equipment and an army of skilled mechanics. But why, in that case, was he also deploying red, green and white lights, which were often seen far above the phantom aeroplane?
On the mad-millionaire hypothesis—or perhaps of some unknown foreign power—the military and air forces of Norway and Sweden mounted an extensive search, losing two planes in the course of searching wild and distant places. On 11 February 1937, there was a close-up sighting: a fishing boat called the Fram left the port of Kvalsik, Norway, for some night fishing, and, as it rounded a cape sticking out into the sea, the sailors saw the lights of a large seaplane on the water. Assuming it might be in trouble, the Fram approached it. As it did so, its lights went out, and it was enveloped by a cloud of mist. Then it vanished.
This was, of course, the period between the wars, when nations like Germany were arming, so the phantom aircraft were assumed to be some form of spy plane—particularly since they were often sighted around military installations. But there were no aircraft at that time capable of such manoeuvres, and, when World War Two came, it was soon clear that Germany simply did not have such planes.
Yet, just as in the great airship wave of 1897, there was a convenient explanation to satisfy the popular mind. Only experts knew that large aircraft do not choose to fly in snowstorms or to cut out their engines and ‘glide’ in circles close to the ground. It was as if the phenomenon wanted
to remain ambiguous.
In 1946, objects like rockets were sighted over Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Greece—Sweden alone had more than two thousand sightings. Rockets were seen to plunge into Lake Mjosa in Norway and Lake Kolmjary in Sweden, where something exploded. Yet a military investigation revealed nothing whatsoever. The Swedish military issued a statement declaring that 80 percent of the sightings were ‘celestial phenomena’ (i.e., meteors), although it did not explain how meteors can be mistaken for rockets. In Greece, an investigation headed by Prof. Paul Santorini concluded that the objects were not missiles. To begin with, they occasionally changed direction in mid-flight.
But Keel also has his doubts about meteors. He spends most of a chapter in Operation Trojan Horse talking about sightings that were explained as meteors, and pointing out that they could not possibly be meteors—for example, one of November 1779 ‘which appeared like a ball of fire’ and ‘was visible for near an hour’. No meteors remain visible for an hour—the slowest speed ever recorded for a meteor is twenty-seven thousand miles an hour, which would take it right round Earth’s equator in less than an hour.
