Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel

by Keel, John A.

  The most significant trend in 1966 was the fantastic number of low-level and touchdown reports. These came in from every state in the union, and many of the witnesses complained of eye ailments following a sighting. I interviewed a number of people while their eyes were still swollen, red, and watery. We now have many stories of UFOs pursuing people on the ground and coming directly up to the doors and windows of homes. It is almost as if they are singling out certain individuals and observing them closely…

  Generally speaking, we can break the 1966 flap down into the following categories:

  Geographical: Sightings that followed a geographical and chronological pattern along rivers and interstate highways, moving progressively from point to point along those features.

  Technical: The usual pattern of sightings around technically interesting areas such as Air Force bases, arsenals, military installations of all kinds, chemical factories, power plants, dams, transformer stations, radio and TV antennae, etc.

  “Monitoring” flights: Pursuits of automobiles, airplanes, and individuals on foot, plus hovering activities around individual homes.

  Reservoir sightings: These continued on a large scale throughout the U.S. in 1966.

  Landing and direct contact reports: There were more of these in 1966 than in any previous year.

  Altogether, these thousands of reports mount up to an alarming picture. Perhaps they indicate that the UFOs are now engaged in a massive “final stage” of operations.

  Tad Jones, the witness of the January 19th, 1966 landing outside of Charleston, West Virginia, reported that the object he saw had wheels. If this is true, then we have a new development that would suggest that the UFOs are going to abandon their old tripod-type landing gear, and replace it with something that will give them ground mobility.

  My repeated visits to the Pentagon have convinced me that the USAF is not genuinely interested in this problem. They have made no real attempt to interfere with the UFO activity in the flap areas, and they have shown no real interest in the complaints from citizens living in those areas.

  At the same time, I should add, I have not tried to keep my research secret, and I have not been approached by any agency or individual intent on hampering my efforts. The Air Force, NASA, and other official agencies have actually granted me limited cooperation and have, in fact, gone to considerable trouble to supply me with specific information when I have requested it. John Fuller recently told me that certain officers in the Pentagon actually encouraged his research. Fuller certainly paved the way for public acceptance of flying saucers.

  The intensive UFO activity seems to support APRO’s theory that our population is now being rapidly prepared to accept the existence of UFOs and to deal emotionally with the fantastic social changes that their arrival is sure to foster.

  CHAPTER 2

  INVESTIGATING UFOS: PROBING A PHENOMENON WRAPPED IN MYSTERY – SAGA MAGAZINE, AUGUST 1977

  “The average UFO report isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” an Air Force officer in the Pentagon told me back in 1966. At the time, I scoffed at the statement, assuming it was just part of the sinister conspiracy to downgrade and dismiss the UFO phenomenon. But gradually, I came to realize that the statement was painfully accurate. Few UFO reports, even today, contain enough substantive information for a valid analysis. The art of writing reports is still a puzzle to many civilian UFO investigators. The result is a flood of paper and red tape that tells us nothing whatsoever about the UFO witnesses themselves, and very little about the actual case being investigated. Before Project Blue Book was dismantled in 1969, Air Force investigators often dismissed baffling cases with the terse remark: “insufficient information.”

  A major part of the problem was created by the Air Force’s own official questionnaire (form FTD 164), which was closely copied by most of the civilian UFO investigators and their various organizations. The form is practically worthless. It looked impressive in its seven-page format, but it was obviously designed by pilots and astronomers for a singular purpose: to extract only information that would make it possible to identify the “unknown” as a conventional object or mundane astronomical phenomenon. It asked the witness to make impossible estimates of speed, altitude, angle from the horizon, etc., without defining important factors such as the exact position of the witness and the local terrain.

  Early in my own investigations, I discovered that the average witness could not even pinpoint true north – even when he or she had lived in the area all their life. It is common for a witness to say that the object appeared in the east, say, and traveled to the southwest when, actually, I found that it had appeared in the west and traveled northeast! Estimates of altitude are much more difficult to make, even for experienced pilots. And at night, it is almost impossible to judge the altitude of an object (usually just a light) of unknown size. Everything becomes relative. For example, a jet airliner traveling at 500 miles per hour at 30,000 feet appears to be moving rather slowly to a witness on the ground, while a Piper Cub rattling along at 60 miles per hour, at treetop level, seems to be moving at a much faster speed. In my files, I have reports by police officers that claimed the object they saw must have been traveling at a speed of at least 2000 miles per hours. One report by an elderly man in Florida claimed he saw an object take off at a speed of 5000 miles per hour!

  If you are a battlefield veteran, you know that the experienced eye can actually see a cannon shell in flight and even estimate roughly where it is going to land. Artillery shells lumber along at a fairly slow speed – 700 to 800 miles per hour. Bullets and high velocity shells travel much faster and can’t be seen with the naked eye. In order to see a fast-moving object, particularly at night, it must either be gigantic in size or it must be a great distance from the observer. An orbiting satellite, for example, can be traveling several thousand miles per hour but is visible because it is hundreds or thousands of miles from the observer.

  Therefore, estimates of UFO speeds are usually inaccurate, and altitude estimates are questionable unless the object appears near something of a known altitude – such as a mountain or a conventional aircraft. The knowledgeable investigator also carefully checks direction with a compass, allowing for normal magnetic variations in the area, from the exact position of the original sighting. (It is surprising how few investigators bother to do this.) Ninety percent of the time you will find that the witnesses were completely wrong in all their estimates, particularly if they were in a moving vehicle at the time of their sighting. We are on safe ground only in the comparatively rare cases in which a local radar station got a reading on the object or when – as has happened in several instances over the years – the witnesses were able to track the object with a theodolite, a surveying instrument that measures angles and directions accurately.

  While Air Force investigators were bent on “proving” that the witness had seen the planet Venus or a weather balloon, the average civilian investigator is biased in the opposite direction. He’s usually trying to prove that the witness saw some type of alien spaceship. This bias leads to all kinds of misrepresentations in his report. The witness may have just seen a bluish light with a red glow on the upper parts but the investigator gets him to admit that the light was circular or discoid (all lights seen from a distance are circular in appearance), asks many leading questions, and ultimately ends up putting together his own version of the event. The final report is apt to read: “Witness saw a solid object surrounded by a blue haze, with a red flashing light on top.” When the report is later translated into magazine articles and books, it becomes “a disc-shaped object with blue lights and a red strobe light on the upper surface.” The strange blue light has become a metallic flying saucer from outer space!

  Unfortunately, the Air Force debunkers were often correct when they claimed that a large percentage of UFO sightings were of natural phenomena – weather balloons and conventional aircraft. But, oddly, none of the astronomers and physicists associated with Project Blue Book ever
bothered to study the sources of these misinterpretations. For example, a phenomenon known as noctilucent clouds has produced many spurious UFO reports – but the only real study of these clouds has been made in the Soviet Union.

  Noctilucent clouds are brilliantly glowing masses of self-luminous gas that orbit the Earth at altitudes ranging from 80 to 500 miles. Some are gigantic in size, and a ground observer can easily think they are much lower in the atmosphere. They appear in a variety of shapes from spherical to spiral and saw-toothed forms. Back in the mid-1960s, Soviet scientists discovered that these clouds reflect radio and television waves. The USAF attempted to fire instrument-laden rockets into them from isolated bases in Alaska, but the results of these experiments were never released. We really know very little about how these clouds are formed. Some scientists think they are related to the Air Glow phenomenon.

  What is the Air Glow phenomenon? Astronauts orbiting Earth have seen and photographed spherical glows on the dark side of this planet. These spheres are sometimes arranged in neat formations, like rows of soldiers. This phenomenon is rarely seen by ground observers, just as the huge, self-luminous, brownish clouds also reported by astronauts seem to elude witnesses on earth. It is probable that in a few rare, isolated instances, these phenomena have been mistaken for UFOs.

  Ball lightning, another rare phenomenon, can also produce spurious UFO reports – especially from ships at sea. Ball lightning consists of spherical charges of electricity that appear during storms and sometimes glide along the surface until they touch something and disappear with a loud explosion. They have been known to come down chimneys, circle a room, and fly out an open window or door! In a number of cases, animals and humans have been killed by these discharges. Ball lightning at sea appears to be a solid, glowing sphere rushing down from the sky and disappearing into the water.

  Although few laymen are aware of it, lightning, including ball lightning, does not always travel from the sky to the ground. It sometimes rises from the ground or sea and races upwards into the storm clouds! This lightning-in-reverse can easily be mistaken for a UFO taking off and disappearing into the sky.

  In the late 1940s, government scientists became concerned with another kind of natural phenomenon – glowing green fireballs. They still zip across the skies in the Midwest and southwest, and we still don’t know much about them. They are probably related to bolides – small, low-flying meteors. Since they usually appear and disappear very quickly most witnesses tend to disregard them rather than report them.

  Throughout the 1960s, German and American scientists launched hundreds of special rockets all over the world, which released great clouds of barium gas into the upper atmosphere. These luminous clouds slowly stretched out, following the patterns of the Earth’s magnetic field like iron filings clustering around a horseshoe magnet. Some of these experiments inspired erroneous UFO reports because they could be seen for hundreds of square miles.

  For some mysterious reason, the UFO phenomenon has apparently taken advantage of the barium cloud experiments, particularly when the space shots were given advance publicity. In 1966, a barium cloud shot was announced for August 16 and that night, thousands of people turned in UFO reports. The phenomenon was so intense that radio and TV reporters in Arkansas stood in the streets and gave their audiences eyewitness live coverage. A group of scientists in Chicago gleefully collected a large number of reports from Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, believing the barium cloud shot had caused the UFO flap. The only problem was: the August 16th shot was postponed at the last minute! So the witnesses in five states must have been watching something else. But what? The barium cloud shot was postponed several more times and was finally held on Sept. 24, 1966. Not a single UFO report was registered on that date!

  A few serious UFO investigators have made it a point to find and read technical books about the barium cloud phenomena. Too many others, irritated by the Air Force’s often absurd explanations, still continue to overwhelm the UFO reporting networks with reports of these things. Common meteors zooming across several states have also inspired waves of false UFO reports. Occasionally, mischievous youngsters get into the act by releasing hot-air balloons consisting of plastic bags heated by candles. Several states have now outlawed such activities because the balloons can cause fires when they finally drift earthward.

  Colorado University’s controversial UFO study (i.e., The Condon Committee) admitted that genuine hoaxes seemed to be rare. Nevertheless, whenever a civilian UFO research organization came across a case containing puzzling psychic elements, it has been a longstanding practice to cry “hoax” and brand the innocent, well-meaning witnesses as liars and frauds. They failed, however, to realize that the stranger the ingredients in the witnesses’ stories were, the more likely it was that the reported incidents were true. Modern investigators must be very cautious about crying hoax. Legally, a hoax must be proved either by overwhelming evidence or, preferably, by a written confession signed by the perpetrator of the hoax. Otherwise, both the investigator and the organization he represents can be sued for libel. In many instances, local police and reporters have deliberately labeled a case a hoax at the request of the witness to protect him from the hordes of amateur investigators and enthusiasts who inevitably descend upon the scene after the initial report is published.

  One of the most difficult problems in ufology is proving the validity of actual UFO photographs. Hundreds are taken each year – so many, in fact, that the photography agencies that supply newspapers and magazines are now very selective in their distribution. They pay the paltry sum of $10 for all rights to UFO photos that are unusually clear and distinctive. Many UFO photographers simply give their pictures away free to UFO organizations or the wire services. The flying saucer photos taken in 1966 by Ralph Ditter, a barber in Zanesville, OH, were widely published on the covers of magazines and in many UFO books and publications without him ever receiving as much as a nickel for his efforts. He had tacked the pictures on the wall of his barbershop, where they remained for months until a local newspaperman happened to see them. Ditter turned the pictures over to the reporter and signed a release relinquishing all rights. The wire services picked them up and literally spread them throughout the world. Later, an eager but uninformed local UFO investigator branded the photos hoaxes because the numbers on the film were “out of sequence.” That is, the pictures were not taken in the sequence that Ditter remembered.

  Actually, this out-of-sequence phenomenon is as mysterious as the UFOs themselves. It has occurred in dozens of cases. Even Polaroid films are numbered in sequence. This numbering of films is done by an automatic machine; the possibility of the numbers being stamped out of sequence are almost inconceivable. Nevertheless, it is common for the witness’s memory to be different from the photographic record. He might recall that picture number one was of his child on a bicycle, number two was of a UFO hovering over his house, number three was of the UFO flying off above some trees, and so on. But on the film, picture number one turns out to be of the UFO flying off over the trees, number two is of the child on the bicycle, and number three is of the UFO over the house. It is as if some mysterious force has juggled the numbers – or the witness’s memory. This is one of the many reasons why it is so important to examine the witness in depth – something few investigators bother to do.

  Many civilian UFO enthusiasts conduct conversations rather than investigations. Witnesses must be interrogated carefully by reviewing each incident and movement on the day of their sighting, as well as their movements and actions after the sighting. Some remarkable, often incredible, details crop up during well-conducted, in-depth interviews. In a Long island case in 1967, I learned that the witness had started the day by being followed by a mysterious car. When he parked on Main Street in Babylon, NY, the car pulled in behind him and its occupant jumped out, pointed a camera at him, and took his picture. He thought this was odd, but soon dismissed it. Later that same day, he saw a circular object hovering low above so
me trees on a lonely stretch of road. He did not think the two incidents were related, of course, but I have investigated many “phantom photographer” cases, and I believe these mysterious cameramen are connected to the phenomenon in some strange way. Other investigators have uncovered similar incidents in England and, most recently, in Sweden.

  In other cases, I have found that healthy witnesses have suffered inexplicable blackouts or fainting spells hours before seeing a UFO. These blackouts, experienced by people who had never suffered them before, are especially prevalent in UFO “contact” cases. It is also important to extract a complete biography of the witness with emphasis on any unusual psychic or occult experiences they have had prior to their UFO encounter. I discovered that the majority of all witnesses had latent or active psychic abilities. After I revealed this in a series of articles in the 1960s, other independent investigators around the world confirmed it in their own research.

  Although many UFO believers choose to assume that most UFO sightings are random chance encounters, the startling truth is that witnesses are selected by some mysterious process and that strictly accidental sightings are rare, if not altogether nonexistent.

  Perhaps the greatest deficiency in the Air Force questionnaire was its neglect to extract the most basic personal information about the witness. It asked only for the witness’s name, occupation, and address. However, even the birthdates of the witnesses can be important. (In a series of contact cases I investigated in 1967, I discovered that all of the witnesses had been born on the same date!) Religion can also play a part. Although we now have a huge body of many thousands of reports covering the past 30 years, we find that Catholic and Jewish witnesses are extremely rare. Protestants and “fallen Catholics” (those who have drifted away from the active practice of their religion) account for the bulk of the reports. People with American Indian or Gypsy blood in their background tend to see more UFOs than other people.