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

by Keel, John A.

  These distortions of reality are well known, in every age. In other ages they were often blamed on witchcraft. They would finger the black magicians, or the “X group.” The fairies got a lot of the blame during the Middle Ages. There’s case after case of distortion of reality in the fairy cases.

  TYPE 4: ASTRAL PROJECTION CONTACTEES

  There’s a couple of other kinds of contactees which, in many ways, are much more interesting than the space contactees. The fourth type is the astral projectionist. We get a lot of this, where people claim to have the ability to project themselves out of their bodies via the “out-of-body experience.” They claim that they go to spaceships thousands of miles above the earth that travel to other planets, and so on... Back in the early ‘70s, Otto Binder, a science writer, was onto a case with a lady who was a marvelous astral projectionist. I have a file at home that’s this thick, of transcriptions of things she said while in this state. She would lie down and go into this hypnotic state, and then she would start to describe where her “alter body” was going, and what it was seeing. It was all very fascinating. At one point, Otto wanted to do a book about it, but it never materialized. With out-of-body experiences, usually the person doing it has a “guide.” As soon as he pops out of his body, this guide shows up and conducts him on a tour of space or whatever. The guide usually is an Indian or a Tibetan. But in modern times, we’ve got a lot of spacemen acting as guides. They usually fit the classic description you find in many of the UFO accounts. Astral projection has to be recognized as part of the UFO phenomenon.

  TYPE 5: COSMIC ILLUMINATION CONTACTEE

  Now the 5th type, this is a type that we’ve known about for thousands of years. It’s an integral part of every religion. We don’t have any idea how it happens, or why it happens. It’s called cosmic illumination. This happens to many people who think they’re having a UFO experience. They’re actually undergoing cosmic illumination. There are libraries of books that will describe it to you in detail. Basically the person is usually alone, and a beam of light will come down out of the sky and touch this person. For a few minutes, this person will be in a different state of consciousness. He will suddenly be aware of everything. Of everything that’s ever happened in human history… Of everything that’s ever going to happen… He will be totally aware of his linkage with the entire human race. It’s the kind of experience that people who take drugs want to have, but seldom do.

  And it’s a total experience. It happens very briefly, sometimes in only ten seconds. When the light ceases, the person sits down and tries to remember what just happened. But he can’t remember any of it. It’s all in his unconscious mind. This happens to millions of people in every generation. It’s studied by every great church. As I say, there are libraries of books about this. The person’s IQ usually skyrockets immediately after this has happened. Their personality changes; their consciousness changes... Very often they change their whole life. They will quit their job. They’ll divorce their wife or their husband. They’ll start a whole new life. In many cases, they’ll even change their name. As I say, this is not a rare experience. It’s a common experience, except that when it happens to somebody, they usually don’t talk about it very much. They don’t end up on 60 Minutes talking about it.

  But people today often associate cosmic illumination with UFOs. They may have seen a UFO or a mysterious light earlier that night. Then suddenly, they find themselves bathed in this (usually) reddish light, and they think that the UFOs are doing it to them. But we don’t know who is doing it to them. We just know that there is a force on this earth that is constantly manipulating the human race, reprogramming us, changing us for good or bad, directing us towards a destiny that we can’t define. It knows what it’s doing, but we do not.

  TYPE 5 SUBGROUP: FALSE ILLUMINATION

  Unfortunately, there is another subcategory called false illumination. This is when the contactee goes bananas afterwards. It destroys their life. They become fanatics. They become religious fanatics, or they become political fanatics of one type or another. It’s a reprogramming process. Their whole mind is reprogrammed. Maybe this false illumination is just an example of the programming “missing” somehow (i.e., an attempt at cosmic illumination doesn’t “take”). Or maybe it is caused by some other force.

  TYPE 6: THE “GENUINE” CONTACTEE

  The last type would be the genuine contactee. That is, a flying saucer lands, a door opens, and the contactee walks through the door and is taken for a ride with normal-looking, English-speaking pilots. We have hundreds and hundreds of reports of this from people who claim this has happened to them. We usually have good reason for disbelieving them, but there is a chance that it might happen. If there is any reality to UFOs at all, it must have happened. It might happen tomorrow. So that would be our 6th type, the most rare type.

  In the 1950s, the government was very interested in the contactee phenomenon. The so-called “scientific” ufologist wouldn’t touch a contactee with a hundred-foot pole in those days, but the Air Force was very interested. In 1957, there was a big UFO wave. There was a rash of landings in November of that year, and a rash of contactee stories around the country. The Air Force collected a number of these contactees and put them in mental hospitals, where they were subjected to the very same kinds of tests I subjected them to twenty years later. In talking to these old-time contactees about their experiences, I discovered that they were in the hospital for 5 or 6 days before being released. When they told the ufologists about it, the ufologists hit the roof, thinking that this was an attempt to discredit the whole situation. But it seems to me that the Air Force, or the government, knew exactly what the hell it was doing (which is more than I can say for it now).

  Somebody in the Air Force at that time realized that there was some psychological factor to this, some psychic factor that had to be explored. They were collecting these contactees and putting them through a rigorous testing process to find out just what the hell really happened to them… The files on all these people are probably long gone, but we do have some evidence. We know that in the early 1950s, around 1949 and 1950, there were mysterious men running around who were definitely from the government. The CIA in those days was just a small organization called the CIG. In 1952, this kind of government activity suddenly ceased. So we can assume that by 1952, the CIA had found out something either very negative or very positive and said, “Let’s publicly drop the whole bloody thing.” From 1952 on, the Air Force’s Project Blue Book was a sham. It was run by a Master Sergeant, named Moody, who was very anti-UFO. I don’t want him to sue me, so I’ll just say that he was a bit of a jerk. They had various officers who claimed to be the head of Project Blue Book. They checked in only once a month or something. They didn’t pay any attention to it.

  The files of Project Blue Book were in worse shape than any amateur ufologist’s files. You couldn’t find anything in them. There would be missing pages and things that had been torn out and crossed out. It was a mess. Project Blue Book was just a joke. During all of this business in West Virginia, I called the Air Force in Columbus, Ohio, and asked them if they could give us any kind of help, or even send airplanes over. We knew the UFOs were coming over at 8:30 every night. A jet plane ought to be able to chase one of them. The Air Force was strictly disinterested. They didn’t want to be bothered…

  Some contactees have claimed the ability to “call” UFOs. Unfortunately, I’ve been present when this has happened. I can only say that it has happened. Woodrow Derenberger in West Virginia claimed that he could tell when the UFOs were around, through telepathy. He said that he could call to them telepathically and, by golly, he did it in my presence (and a lot of other peoples’)! These lights would suddenly appear in the sky when he would concentrate. It has to be a form of psychic ability. I don’t think that most people can go out and summon a UFO. It would have to be a contactee…

  By the way, there are three international holidays that are based on the flying saucer phenomen
on. We don’t have much time now to go into that, but the three holidays are:

  1) The winter solstice, which takes place around Christmas week, when we have massive UFO waves every 4 or 5 years…

  2) The vernal equinox, which is based on the ancient Phoenician goddess of Ashtar, who is now well known in ufology because so many contactees claim to have talked to Ashtar. This goes way back. Ashtar has been dominating the scene for thousands of years. Ashtar is, of course, Easter. In Europe, the word for Ashtar is Easter, the goddess of fertility. That’s why we have the Easter eggs and so forth.

  3) The summer solstice, which is around the end of June. That’s when the whole UFO thing started in 1947, with the sightings on June 24th. The winter solstice is the shortest day of the month. The summer solstice is the longest day of the month… On the vernal equinox, we have night and day equal.

  Mexico is a hotbed of flying saucer reports. They’ve also had cattle mutilations there. Also, a human body was found mutilated in the same way as the cattle. It was cut in half and some of the organs were missing…

  There is a former Jesuit priest who has been investigating that. He came to New York a couple of years ago, and showed me a lot of really horrible photographs and things. My memory now is a little vague... It seems to me that a child and a man were involved; both were cut in half. There was something else involving an automobile that had hit a man in the road. The driver stopped, and when they got out, they found that the man was long dead. He had been terribly mutilated previously.

  This is all very weird. How could he have been standing in the road if he had been so mutilated? Perhaps some Mexican magazines have carried more detailed reports, but I don’t know of it. I wish somebody would go down there and really find out what is going on. Now the cattle mutilations are going on in Canada. The cattle are having all their blood drained from their bodies, and their sex organs removed. God knows, but somebody’s got a collection of 500,000 cattle sex organs.

  Closer to home, in New Jersey, two mutilated humans were found earlier this year. Their bodies were mutilated, and the blood had been drained from their bodies. It was in the newspapers.

  There’s a Paris, TX, newsletter devoted to this, called Stigmata. There are very good investigators working on this out west. You’ll find horrifying Men in Black stories taking place in those areas where the mutilations are going on.

  In the Middle ages, in France, strange flying objects used to appear. Every once in a while, the people of France would catch one of the pilots and, usually, stone him to death. In the Middle Ages, they believed that these aircraft came from a place called “Magonia.” They thought Magonia was a marvelous land in the sky…

  The cattle mutilations are the only physical evidence we have. We don’t have a workable theory for these mutilations. I’ve run through all the theories and none of them work. We don’t know who’s collecting all this blood, or why. But because it is the only physical evidence we have, we must go on studying it.

  Just recently, the government gave $48,000 to a retired FBI man in New Mexico. He was going to get to the bottom of it. He made a few phone calls, collected his $48,000, and said, “These mutilations are being caused by predators like wolves and such.” And that was the end of that big experiment.

  Cattle mutilations really started coming back about five years ago. I don’t have time to get into it all right now but, at the time, I wrote a brief article for my newsletter Anomaly, which went into some of the specifics…

  CATTLE MUTILATION FOR BEGINNERS – ANOMALY #11, APRIL 1974

  The great UFO wave of 1973 began in the northeast in February, and was marked by the reintroduction of phantom helicopters – large, unmarked machines whose configurations and sounds are unmistakable. As usual, when witnesses like Evan C. Williams, mayor of Milton, PA, reported seeing one of the choppers, a thorough check of all airports and military installations drew a blank.

  By midsummer, however, the phantom helicopters were being associated with the widespread cattle rustling in the Midwest. Huge military-type helicopters were seen hovering low over cattle herds in several states. Farmers were even taking potshots at them. The whirlybirds were operating at night, without lights, in rural areas.

  “We were near Jones’ place southeast of town, and came around a curve, up over a hill,” Rev. Albert Lambeth of Mark, Iowa said in April. “Then this helicopter started to raise out of the field right in front of us. It hovered over our heads a few seconds. When we got out of the car, we could see the tail structure and the fuselage structure. It wasn’t one of those bubble-type copters. It had an enclosed fuselage that I would guess could carry four or five men. And there were not visible numbers on the helicopter.”

  Local law officials, the FAA, and FBI all failed to pinpoint the origin of these choppers, although they were apparently the size of military ambulance copters, and would have required a lot of fuel and logistical support.

  We had gone through it all before. We had pursued phantom helicopters up and down the East Coast in 1966-67, and cited a number of these cases in our books and articles.

  In October, at the height of the UFO flap in the United States, a curious UPI report appeared, describing two “mystery helicopters” seen near Saigon.

  An estimated $30 million worth of cattle are rustled in the U.S. annually. Modern cattle rustlers are very professional and very efficient. They drive their trucks into a field, slaughter several choice cows, and butcher them on the spot, loading only the prime cuts into their vehicles. They leave hides, forequarters, etc., behind, along with plenty of foot and tire tracks. It is questionable if several different teams in different states could suddenly acquire expensive helicopters. Our phantom helicopters were turning up everywhere at once this summer.

  As in previous UFO waves, somebody or some thing was wantonly slaughtering cattle, sheep, and dogs across the country throughout 1973. Unlike mundane cattle rustlers, these phantom animal mutilators did not leave any tracks or clues behind, even in mud and snow. The animals were killed with surgical precision, just as in many cases described in our books. Most perplexing of all, there was never any blood in evidence. Real cattle rustlers leave plenty of blood behind.

  The phenomenon spread across the country, from California to New York. Some lawmen speculated they were dealing with a devil-worshipping cult. But we have seen the results of sacrificial rites in cemeteries and on beaches; the sacrificed animals were always slaughtered crudely, clumsily, bloodily, and were left surrounded by spent candles and other debris.

  A news story from Kansas tells us how the destroyed animals had one ear and/or their tail cut off. In some cases, their sex organs were also mutilated. Animals examined in Minnesota bore this same puzzling “trademark.”

  This mystery is not confined to the U.S. In 1972, there were at least six similar cases in Sweden.

  The year 1973 produced an unusual number of tall, hairy monster sightings. And, as usual, dogs and small domestic animals vanished in areas where many of these monster sightings took place. In some cases (i.e., Murphysboro, IL), witnesses claimed the creature they saw was carrying a dead dog under its arm! Yet no one has ever found a half-eaten dog carcass in one of these places, or even the bones. Do our resident monsters even eat meat or bones?

  Fortunately, there have not been any verifiable reports of human mutilations in UFO flap areas, but there have been several rather mysterious deaths. Some were apparently caused by lightning, but others resulted from concussion, distinguishable by bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears.

  The 1973 UFO wave followed the basic patterns. As in earlier flaps, the key witnesses were schoolteachers. Decoy manifestations (such as the now-famous Pascagoula, Mississippi case involving two fisherman) diverted the press and generated more “outer space” propaganda, just as the sheriffs of the Midwest went hunting for “rustlers” and “devil cultists.”

  The UFO phenomenon also picked up in other places, such as South America and Scandinavia. Mystery subm
arines reappeared in the Norwegian fjords in November, driving the Norwegian Navy bananas. New HITI (holes in the ice) turned up in several Swedish lakes in Jan. ’74, prompting new official investigations. It was all very hush-hush.

  In 1973, there was a sharp increase in cases in which UFO witnesses received mysterious red marks on their neck, on the major nerve just below the ear. Persons suffering such marks usually have absolutely no memory of the period when they acquired it. They simply see a strange light or object approaching their car and then – zap – the next thing they know, they are home in their own bed, wondering if it was all just a dream.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE FLYING SAUCER EVIDENCE EVERYONE IGNORES – SAGA MAGAZINE, JUNE 1973

  Somewhere in California, the U.S. Air Force maintains a warehouse full of carefully catalogued scraps of metal, and at least one completely intact flying saucer. In that same warehouse, there are several glass tanks of formaldehyde containing the bodies of a group of tiny humanoids retrieved from a UFO that crashed in the Southwest in the late 1940s.

  At least, that’s the story that’s been handed down by some American ufologists for the past 25 years. And, like a great many popular flying saucer beliefs, it’s all fiction. It was originated partly in a newspaper hoax first published in Mexico. It was given immortality by humorist Frank Scully in his 1950 bestseller Behind the Flying Saucers. Scully first heard the rumor from an oilman who said he had gotten it straight from a flying saucer pilot. Later, after Scully’s sources had been tracked down and exposed by other reporters, he publicly repudiated the whole thing. But the rumor goes marching on; the Air Force still receives letters from newcomers to the UFO scene demanding the truth about those pickled spacemen. When Air Force public relations officers reply that there is no substance to the rumor, the UFO enthusiasts howl, “Coverup!” and accuse the government of keeping evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial flying saucers from the public.