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

by Keel, John A.

  If sightings occurred on a purely accidental basis, certain statistical laws should be followed. There should be more smiths, Browns, and Joneses among the witnesses simply because there are more of them in the population. But this isn’t the case. People with unusual names like Jabkowsky tend to have more sightings than the Smiths. Although left-handed people are a decided minority, there are more left-handed contactees than right-handed ones. The late Ivan Sanderson once pointed out that people with red or blond hair also seemed more prone to have UFO experiences.

  The selectivity doesn’t end there. Occupations also are of special importance. Schoolteachers, especially those dealing with “gifted” or, conversely, “developmentally delayed” children, seem to be involved in an unusually high percentage of low-level cases and incidents in which the object pursued a car. This UFO penchant for schoolteachers seems to be a worldwide factor. In my travels, I found another special group not widely mentioned in published reports: police officers and night watchmen. While the UFO observations of on-duty policemen are frequently cited by reporters searching for reliable witnesses, a great many lawmen also have unusual sightings while off-duty, as do night watchmen (who are often retired cops). Finally, and most chilling of all, men and women who are civilian employees at military bases (or who work at jobs requiring a security clearance) are targeted. Barbers, farmers, and auto mechanics are decidedly rare among UFO witnesses. In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in sightings among doctors, lawyers, regional politicians, and stubborn, skeptical newspapermen.

  Obviously the UFO phenomenon has some system of selectivity, and it is highly probable that most of the people picked undergo something more than a mere visual sighting – something they cannot remember later. Are their minds being reprogrammed, as many of the top researchers now suspect?

  The only way we will ever learn what is really going on is by thoroughly investigating the witnesses themselves. The UFOs are so widespread (the objects must number in the thousands during flap periods) and so active at ground level that they must be doing something. Whatever it is, it’s obvious they are doing it to people – special people who have been carefully picked from the mainstream of society and chosen for special treatment. Therefore, their descriptions of what they have seen are less important than what they have experienced physically, psychologically, and mentally. The objects are merely the medium for their message, whatever it might be. The Air Force never got anywhere because it was concerned solely with explaining away the descriptions of the objects. The civilian UFO organizations have never made any progress because they have been concerned with trying to interpret the meaning of the objects, determining their source, and attacking the Air Force explanation. Proving the reliability of witness became more important to them than learning the details of what the witnesses actually experienced.

  A few years ago, Dr. J. Allen Hynek devised a "Strangeness" index to compare witness reliability with the degree of strangeness in their report. Unfortunately, strangeness is totally subjective, like pain, and difficult – if not altogether impossible – to measure. What might seem incredibly strange to one inexperienced investigator might seem almost routine to a more experienced person. Reliability is also difficult to establish. The usual criterion is the person’s occupation. But the history of ufology has shown that a town drunk can have a real UFO experience as well as the town’s police chief. The drunk would automatically receive a very low rating on the reliability scale. The police chief might actually be a conniving, cantankerous, lying old reprobate, but his occupation would give him high rating.

  Similarly, a person who has a long history of prophetic dreams and other psychic experiences might be known to the local gossips as a crackpot, and would rate low on the reliability scale. But extensive UFO studies have shown that this is also the kind person most likely to have a genuine low-level or landing sighting. Their psychic ability might also make them susceptible to receiving a telepathic message or undergoing something even stranger. So they would have a high strangeness quotient and a low reliability rating, thus negating their report and unfairly depriving the public of valuable information.

  Witnesses should be judged only by experts trained in such matters: psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, and experienced journalists. An experienced lawyer can be a much better UFO investigator than an astrophysicist, for example (whose training does not include dealing with – and judging – people). If nothing else, the past 30 years have taught us that technology is virtually useless in UFO investigation. Nevertheless many civilian investigators still load themselves down with Geiger counters and other expensive gadgets. It is true that excessive radiation has been found at a few UFO sites in the past 30 years, but so few that the odds for stumbling into such a situation are astronomical. Even then, Geiger counters can only indicate the presence of radiation. They cannot give an accurate and scientific measurement of the radiation.

  Today, experienced investigators carry tape recorders for interviewing witnesses, and a few plastic bags for collecting samples of any substances that might be found at the UFO site. A compass, a star chart for locating the exact position of the brightest stars in the sky at the time of the sighting, and a pocket camera are the only other pieces of equipment you will really need. Elaborately outfitted expeditions lugging walkie-talkies, theodolites, flares, and firearms are a thing of the past.

  Finally, what should you do with your UFO report once you have carefully interviewed the witnesses and painstakingly typed it all up? Make several copies and distribute them to more than one organization or investigative body. The national UFO organizations have a distressing habit of throwing the reports they receive into a file drawer and forgetting about them. Some organizations even demand exclusive rights to all reports they receive. You might as well flush your report down the toilet.

  If the witnesses don’t want their names used, give their full names, addresses, etc., in your report but include a notation stating that they wish to remain anonymous. If they agree to having their names used, get the agreement in writing. If you take photographs, buy a pad of “model release” forms from a camera store and make sure everyone who appears in your pictures has signed a release form; if your pictures are ultimately published in a magazine or newspaper you could get in a lot of legal trouble if you don’t have written permission from the people you’ve photographed.

  Back in the good old days, UFO investigating was a relatively easy task. Nowadays, ufology is slowly evolving into an exact science and is becoming more and more complicated. The simplistic extraterrestrial hypothesis is losing ground to the complex paraphysical concept. Investigators are no longer concerned with merely proving the Air Force is lying, or that UFOs came from outer space. We are trying to find out what is really going on, and what the ultimate meaning of the phenomenon is. So we have to approach everything with the same thoroughness that military intelligence might use in collecting evidence to find a spy in the Pentagon.

  CHAPTER 3

  KEEL’S SPEECH TO THE CONGRESS OF SCIENTIFIC UFOLOGISTS – NEW YORK CITY, 1967

  I’m sorry but this award, and the plaque you have given me, really threw me off the track... This is a complete surprise to me…

  Nonetheless, I have a very sensational speech… I am going to tell you where the flying saucers come from, and I am going to tell you all of the secrets of the saucers. [laughter]

  I have been chasing these things for over a year. I have traveled in some twenty states and talked to thousands of people who have seen these things; and I have seen quite a few of them myself. One of them came down very close to the car I was in and scared the living daylights out of me on the night of April 3rd, down in West Virginia. I spent a lot of time down there, as some of you know, chasing the Mothman, but never caught him. We may do a TV series on the Mothman.

  I started out a year ago to apply the so-called “scientific method” to saucer sightings. I started checking reports from all over the country. I end
ed up with 10,000 reports for the year 1966. I have tried, and I am still trying to, sort these into categories: the times that the objects were seen, the kinds of objects seen, the type of witness, and so on, in the hope that this information will give us some clue as to what they are. But, as I plunged deeper into this mystery, I discovered that the flying saucers are not the mystery. The mystery is something else. The mystery is more in the nature of what we call “contactees” and UFO “landings.” I think these objects are doing some things here, stealthily, at low-level all over the country – all over the world – and that they are doing them constantly.

  I would like to read to you a typical contactee story from The Daily Texarkanian, of Texarkana, Arkansas. The date is April 25. It says that on Friday night, one Judge Lawrence Byrne, who is a distinguished man known for his honesty throughout the community, claims that he was driving along a bayou outside of Texarkana. He saw what he described as a “large aluminum disc” on the ground. He went over to this thing, and there were three people there. And he talked with them, or tried to talk with them. They couldn’t understand him, and he could not understand them. They were speaking in some kind of strange, foreign language. They were slight in stature, and they had Oriental eyes, dark skin, and high cheekbones. He thought they were Japanese. Even though he could not talk with them, they took him aboard this machine and allowed him to examine it. They gave him a guided tour through the machine and, when they let him out, the thing took off and flew away.

  Now, there is nothing too remarkable about this story, because we have been hearing them all the time for the last twenty years; but this story is dated April 25, 1897. It is one of the hundreds of contact stories from 1897. And they all fall into the same category. It has only been in the last year that researchers around the country, and around the world, have begun to go back to old newspapers to try to find out what these dirigible-shaped objects were. There were no dirigibles then. A few years later, Count Von Zeppelin came along with his zeppelin. The experiments with lighter-than-air craft up to that time had been very unfortunate. They crashed, or they went about 20 miles and blew up.

  So you all have heard of these famous sightings, and we have all kinds of contact stories. Many of them compare favorably with each other, even though they were not widely circulated at the time. The majority of contact stories describe the pilots as being normal-looking people. The Judge said he thought he ran into some Japanese people, but the majority of them have described normal-looking people who could speak English very well (at least in the United States reports). There is a mysterious “woman” described in several of these. In fact, in a series of accounts ranging through Texas, Arkansas, and into California, we have three passengers described. One was an elderly man with a beard, another was a younger man, and the third was a woman. These three people – or three people like them – were apparently seen all over the country during that flap.

  Now, you know where this leads us. It sort of indicates that maybe Adamski was telling the truth after all. Maybe a lot of these other people are telling the truth, and yet their stories are contradictory.

  All of these witnesses in 1897 were told something different. Naturally, the whole world was in an uproar over this mysterious dirigible. Actually, there were a lot of them, because on the same day, you find a dirigible was seen over Chicago, one was seen over Texas, and one over London. There were too many of them. There must have been several of these machines flying around. You find that when witnesses approached the pilots on the ground and asked them where they were from, they all got a different answer. In only one case did the pilot mention outer space, and in that case they said that they had just built this thing, and that they were going to try to fly to Mars in it. In all of the other cases, they claimed they were local inventors from Indiana and/or Nebraska.

  In every case, they gave a different story and said that the full details of the invention would be released to the world “any day now.” In a couple of cases, they mentioned the world situation at the time (in 1897). They said that “as soon as Cuba is free,” they would release their invention to the world.

  The point is that they were deliberately lying to the witnesses. Obviously, all the witnesses, or some of them (the judge, the police officers, and so on) may not have been making up the stories. They may have made up some details, as often happens, but I think that these people were being lied to. And I think that these people today – the contactees – are being lied to.

  There is an enormous “contactee” situation going on right now, this week, throughout the country. These are what we call “silent contactees.” you never hear about them. They never make any noise. In fact, their next-door neighbors don’t know their stories. As I travel, I dig out these people. Sometimes it is a lot of hard work. Sometimes it requires two weeks of work to locate or track down one rumor and to talk with people. They all tell me basically the same things, except for the content of the messages they have received.

  Woodrow Derenberger in West Virginia says that he was told these “spacemen” come from Lanulos. And you are familiar with other stories where the names of “planets” like “clarion” and “Maser,” and so on, have been mentioned.

  The truth is that the “flying saucers” don’t want us to know where they come from. They are quite willing to contact us, and they do contact us frequently. They contact individuals on highways. They contact people on farms, in isolated spots. And there is a lot of it going on. I can’t prove any of this in a short talk, but you have to believe that I have the documentation. I have talked to many people.

  I have fascinating tape recordings, some made in New Jersey, and some made in West Virginia. If you play them side by side, the people are telling the same story, although they have never heard of each other. Their stories have never been published. These are not the kind of stories that people like George Adamski have been telling; these are details about the craft, and about the type of beings that have approached them. There are other details as well…

  When I find a new contactee, I have a questionnaire of eight questions. If they answer these questions “right,” I tend to believe their story. I find also that the majority of these new contactees are women. There are very few men. I think this probably has been the case throughout. Perhaps we usually think of women as being talkative, but I think women are also less skeptical and easier to approach.

  We also have a number of cases where people have become frightened and have gone to the police complaining that these things were landing in their backyards, and that these “spacemen” were trying to talk to them. While the police keep a record of this, they make fun of these people who report. When I walk into a police station (that is always my first stop), they say, ”Oh, we’ve got a nut down the road who claims these things are landing in their backyard.” So I go and talk with that “nut,” who is usually a woman, and she usually has the same story that I heard a hundred times. I could practically recite it, but I won’t. As I say, these are details that I am keeping to myself (although now I am beginning to spread them among a few investigators; we are using these details to check out and possibly confirm these stories).

  An object landed in a rather desolate place on long Island on April 14, 1967. The witness was driving an automobile, and the car stalled. He saw a door open on the object, and some kind of mechanical device got out of the object. It was not a person, but the witness was able to see inside the object. He said he saw dials and so on. There were a few details in his story that confirmed details we have heard elsewhere. He said this mechanical device got out and shoveled up some dirt, just like the “rover” we sent to the moon.

  Two weeks earlier, on March 31st, something supposedly landed on a farm in Wellington, Texas. The witness (Carroll Wayne Watts) said he did not see anybody, but that a door opened, and he heard a voice that invited him aboard. He walked aboard the thing, and a voice told him they would take him for a ride if he would submit to a physical examination. He refused to
submit to the physical examination. He got off the thing, and it took off. There was one detail to his story that has gone unpublished. When I learned that one detail, I tended to believe his story was true.

  I think we now have many thousands of these stories going unnoticed, because nobody is investigating them. The air Force investigation, as it has been said here many times, is a joke. If you report a sighting to the Air Force, they will mail you a form that is idiotic. They will mail this form, and expect you to fill it out and mail it back to them, and they will put it in their file. If you fail to come up with one little detail, like what the temperature was when you saw the object, they classify it as “insufficient,” and they put it in their insufficient file. They don’t record it in their statistics.

  In some cases – and I have talked with people who have gone through it – they have reported a low-level sighting, or have said that their automobile was being pursued by these objects. In those cases, the Air Force may make several phone calls. These calls usually come long-distance from Wright-Patterson, and they will sometimes be as long as three hours. Somebody at Wright-Patterson grills these people very carefully about every detail. And it is obvious to the witnesses that a form is being filled out on the other end – a much more elaborate form than the one that is mailed out.

  I have gone to the Air Force and said, “I am not interested in this form that is mailed out; I would like to see the other one – the one you use on the phone calls.” They say, “Oh, we haven’t got anything like that.” so, then I produce tapes of these people who told me the story and the questions they were asked. Many of the questions asked in these phone conversations seem quite irrelevant to the flying saucer problem. Obviously, the Air Force and the government are aware of what is going on, but they are not paying attention to the individual sightings. Nobody could afford to. They are, however, paying a great deal of attention to the areas where the sightings are constant.