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

by Keel, John A.

  A far more bitter truth is the sobering fact that the UFO enthusiasts and their organizations have overlooked a mountain of evidence themselves, often suppressing such evidence because it doesn’t conform with their dogged belief in extraterrestrial visitations. If they had systematically collected all the physical materials dropped from flying saucers in the past 25 years, they would now have their own warehouse full of proof.

  The problem is most of the debris found in the wake of UFO sightings and landings turns out to be rather ordinary – largely aluminum, magnesium, and silicon. These are common earthly materials. The UFO enthusiasts have been looking for, and expecting, something far more exotic.

  Unfortunately, after all these years of research, study, and investigation by thousands of people and scores of scientists operating outside the Air Force and government, there is still no evidence to back up the notion that flying saucers come from outer space. There is, on the other hand, considerable evidence that real UFOs are of earthly manufacture and are piloted by normal human beings (excluding those landings and contacts that seem more in the nature of psychic or psychological phenomena). What’s more, there is evidence that persons who dress and look like us (and probably are earthlings) are often engaged in collecting UFO artifacts, arriving on the scene before the original witnesses have had a chance to tell anyone about what they have just seen.

  Today, it’s popular for ufologists to speculate that the CIA is responsible for some of these mysterious events. But the CIA didn’t come into being until 1947, and these strange Men in Black (MIB) were busy 50 years before that, during the UFO waves of 1896-97 and 1909!

  Shortly after a UFO landing in Wales in May 1909, a clerk reported that he had seen five “foreigners” at the site, taking measurements and snapping pictures (UK Daily Mail, May 20, 1909). There have been thousands of similar stories since then. They have produced an elaborate lore and inspired acute paranoia among many ufologists. No one has yet managed to resolve the simple basic question: who are these “foreigners” and what is their purpose and interest?

  These mystery men show a peculiar penchant for visiting isolated areas in northern Canada, Alaska, South America, and other out-of-the-way places. Usually, investigators stumble across their trail rather accidentally, and then labor to find an acceptable frame of reference for them. The CIA takes a good deal of the blame today, even in Spain.

  A number of Spanish ufologists are convinced that the CIA is playing games with them, trying to interfere with their contacts with an interplanetary race from Ummo. In case you have never heard of Ummo, it is supposed to be a planet revolving around a star called “Wolf 424,” about 14 light-years from earth. The Ummoans have been leading persistent Spanish investigators on a merry chase for several years.

  The Ummoans have supplied us with some first-rate physical evidence, neatly embossed with their symbol. They even correspond with Spanish ufologists, stamping the pages of their letters with the symbol. This may sound ridiculous, but the whole story is quite bizarre and impressive.

  On Feb. 6, 1966, a circular flying object made a brief landing near the village of Aluche, a suburb of Madrid. It was seen by a group of soldiers at an ammunition dump, and by several civilians as well. As it took off and flew overhead, the witnesses reported seeing a large symbol on the belly of the saucer. It resembled two curved lines with a straight line between them. The sighting was widely publicized in Spain at the time. (And, of course, that was the year in which widespread sightings in the U.S. were making headlines.)

  Sixteen months later, on June 1, 1967, another saucer-shaped object bounced at treetop level over the Madrid suburb of San Jose de Valderas. Again, this was a multiple-witness event with unrelated people reporting the object from several different positions. Like the Aluche saucer, this one bore a large symbol on its underside – two curved lines with a straight line between them.

  Symbols have been observed on UFOs before and since, but this is one of the rare cases in which the same symbol has appeared in two different incidents. A wide variety of markings (crosses, squares, semicircles with arrows in them, Greek-like letters, etc.) have been seen only once over the years.

  Two of the people in San Jose de Valderas had cameras and snapped photos of the object. One set of negatives was later turned over to the photo editor of the newspaper Informaciones. The other photographer, Antonio Pardo, sent his pictures to Marius Lieget, author of a book on flying saucers. The photos show a standard saucer-shaped object with wide rim in the center. The symbol is clearly visible in one picture.

  About three miles from San Jose de Valderas, the object landed near a restaurant called La Ponderosa. Its flight had been seen by a large number of people, including the students of Convent College. When the local people went out to investigate, they found three rectangular marks in the soil, forming an equilateral triangle with sides measuring about 18 feet. They also found a number of small metal tubes scattered around the site. Antonio Pardo later claimed he bought one of these tubes from a local boy. The boy told Pardo he had opened it with a pair of pliers, and found it contained a liquid that quickly evaporated. It also contained two green plastic strips, each stamped with a symbol like the one seen on the saucer.

  A few days later, the people in the area received printed circulars offering a reward of 18,000 pasetas (about $260 at that time) for each tube forwarded to one Henri Dagousset at a post office box in Madrid. The circular contained a photograph of one of the tubes and details of its size. Later efforts to locate Dagousset failed. So the mystery remains: who was he, and why was he offering such a large sum for the tubes?

  Pardo’s tube was submitted to the Spanish National Technical Institute for Aeronautics and Space Research. Their analysis stated the tube was made of “nickel of an extraordinarily high degree of purity.” The plastic was polyvinyl fluoride. It was not available commercially, but the Dupont Company in the U.S. was then making small quantities of polyvinyl fluoride for missile nose cones! No one else was manufacturing the stuff. So how did these samples of a classified material end up in a field near Spain?

  Nickel tubes of high purity have another use. They are an important component of the machinery used to handle fluoride gasses in the manufacture of fissionable materials for our atomic missiles and bombs.

  Although two Spanish ufologists, Rafael Farriols and Antonio Liobet, found many reliable witnesses to the overflight and landing of the object, Antonio Pardo became something of a mystery man. After he sent the photographs and tube to Lieget, he seems to have vanished.

  In the aforementioned landing in Wales in 1909, the occupants of the strange flying machine left behind a mess of junk including a spare part for a tire valve manufactured in France, but not distributed in Wales. Apparently this was a ploy to lead the witnesses into thinking they had seen a French flying machine (aeronautical historians reject this possibility).

  But the mystery guests overplayed their hand. On May 7, 1909, Egerton S. Free of Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, England, reportedly saw a long, sausage-shaped dirigible hovering about 60 feet above the ground. When his wife checked the spot, she found a steel and rubber bag, five feet long, weighing 35 pounds. It was stamped with the words “Muller Fabrik Bremen,” so when free discussed his sighting with newspapermen, he automatically speculated that the mysterious dirigible had come from Germany.

  A few days later, two strangers, “foreigners,” appeared at the Free estate, studied the beach where the object had hovered, and closely examined the area.

  “The men hovered about my house persistently for five hours,” Free said in an article in the East Anglian Daily Times, May 18, 1909. “When the servant girl set out to church, she heard them conversing in a foreign tongue. Finally they came up to her, one on each side, and one of the men spoke to her in a strange language. The girl was so frightened that she ran back to my house, and would not again leave for church.” (We are indebted to British researcher Cal Grove for uncovering this report, and about 30 others from
the year 1909.)

  Incidentally, the steel and rubber object was eventually identified as part of a target used by the Royal Navy for gunnery practice.

  A subtle variation of this particular game was repeated many times in the U.S. and Europe during the 1960s. After a rash of sightings in the area, a conventional weather balloon would conveniently turn up in some conspicuous spot. (One was even found on the front lawn of a small-town mayor in Ohio.) The police and newspapers would pounce on the balloon with glee and announce that the mystery had been solved. But in investigating many of these weather balloon cases, we had to conclude that the balloons were deliberately planted. By whom? Perhaps by whoever planted the tire valve in Wales and the gunnery target in Essex.

  Perhaps UFOs have been using the old “crippled submarine” tactic over these many years. That is, they have been dumping all kinds of extraneous garbage across the landscape to confuse and mislead us, just as our submarines released oil and debris in WWII when under attack. The fact that so much of this UFO debris consists of ordinary earthly materials has led many investigators to erroneously label authentic UFO sightings and landings as hoaxes. The “hardware boys,” as the evidence-seeking ufologists are called, have been blindly seeking exotic, non-earthly materials and rejecting everything else.

  One of the first pieces of evidence was “a large wheel made of aluminum, about three feet in diameter, and turbine in shape” that was dropped rather deliberately at the feet of a farmer in Pennfield, MI, in April 1897. According to the testimony of George Parks, published in the Detroit Evening News, April 15, 1897, he and his wife observed “a very bright object that appeared to be about 100 feet from the earth and swiftly approaching.” It made a humming sound and dropped the wheel as it passed overhead. There was a massive wave of sightings of strange flying machines throughout the U.S. that year. Since it is illogical that any “spaceship” constructed by a “superior technology” could travel all the way to this planet and then fall apart so easily, we can only assume that such incidents have been very deliberate.

  Since 1897 it has been a common practice for UFOs to discharge mundane materials at their landing sites. The 1909 French tire valve was just the beginning. In more recent times, these drops have consisted of more sophisticated materials.

  Frequently a major UFO sighting with multiple witnesses will be followed by a series of weird manipulations designed to discredit the witnesses and cast doubt on the whole event. The record shows that even official investigators for the U.S. Air Force were often taken in by such manipulations in the 1950s, and this undoubtedly contributed to the government’s “negative” stance. For example, Air Force investigators discredited an alleged UFO landing at Glassboro, NJ in 1964 because they found a small quantity of potassium nitrate at the site. Although there were holes in the ground, identical in size and shape to the holes found at other landing sites, and the surrounding trees were damaged, the Air Force decided that the existence of potassium nitrate – commonly used in explosives – was proof of a human hoax. But similar chemicals have been found at other sites around the world.

  Various amateur UFO organizations have long accused the Air Force of “covering up” by accepting lame explanations for these events. But anyone who knows how the government and the military really work can see that officialdom was actually taken in by these deceptions and manipulations. The source of the UFO phenomenon – whatever or whoever it may be – is extremely clever, and very skilled in the use of psychological warfare. To them, it was desirable for the Air Force and government to reject and ignore the UFO phenomenon. This was accomplished in a long series of “hoaxes” throughout the 1940s and early 1950s until, by 1955, the official investigators became totally disgusted and negative. Once the ufonauts got the government off their backs, they could operate with impunity. The Air Force “investigations” became superficial public relations efforts after 1955. They had “bought” the phony evidence dumped on their doorstep.

  If an officer of the U.S. Air Force had visited the UFO site near Madrid, he would have undoubtedly classified the whole affair a hoax. The presence of the nickel tubes would have been his proof. He would not ask, of course, how rare and precious missile nose-cone material could turn up in Spain. These tubes might have ended up in some Spanish basement, or the local garbage dump, if the mysterious Mr. Dagousset had not deliberately called attention to them and offered a large reward for their recovery. The detailed circulars distributed in the area were probably designed to focus attention on the tubes.

  It’s quite possible that Antonio Pardo (a name as common in Spain as “John Smith” is in the U.S.) and Dagousset were either working together or were one and the same man. There is no way of knowing if the tube Pardo sent to author Lieget was, in fact, one of the tubes that actually turned up at the landing site. The printed pamphlet may have just been a ploy to make the Pardo tube seem authentic. Obviously, whoever printed the pamphlet already knew what the tubes looked like and had one in his possession. So why offer a reward for the recovery of the others?

  Finally, such an elaborate and expensive hoax makes no sense at all. Why go through all that trouble to excite and baffle a handful of Spanish ufologists?

  The overflight and landing of the object had too many witnesses to easily discredit it. But, as in other incidents, it was possible to create an aftermath of confusion that would generate doubts in official minds. At the same time, the symbol clearly seen on the object could be used to reinforce a new game with the ufologists.

  Since 1965, various ufologists in Spain have been receiving letters and phone calls from persons claiming to be spacemen – visitors from the planet Ummo. The letters bear a stamp or seal identical to the symbol seen on the Madrid object. They contain warnings about the CIA (an American agent identified as “Mr. W. Rumsey” is supposed to be working in Spain, trying to track down the Ummoans). Spanish investigators have been in an uproar over the Ummo affair for years. It is even the subject of a book, UMMO: Otro Planeta Habitado by Fernando Sesma.

  These “spacemen” hoaxes are a worldwide phenomenon. The author has received many strange letters and phone calls of this sort here in the U.S., sometimes related to material that was then in his typewriter and not shared with anyone! Other investigators in scattered parts of the world have experienced the same things. The implication is two-fold: ufologists are being watched – kept under surveillance by some mysterious group – and large numbers of “spacemen” are already living among us and freely using our mails and telephones.

  Because these “hoaxes” are so widespread, and often so complicated and expensive, it is unlikely they are the product of a few juvenile practical jokers. Rather it seems to be a very well-organized and well-financed effort. When you cut through all the nonsense, the only apparent purpose seems to be to create and sustain belief in “spacemen” and, incidentally, to keep the ufologists wallowing in paranoid confusion. Many American ufologists have fallen for these games and convinced themselves that the U.S. Air Force or the CIA is behind it all. And a number of amateur investigators have even suffered nervous breakdowns and committed suicide.

  The belief that “alien” parahumans are living among us is not confined to ufology circles. Numerous religious and occult groups have claimed for hundreds of years that angels and devils that look and act exactly like us have been in our midst since the dawn of man – shades of The Exorcist… Various UFO contactees claim the “spacemen” have told them that anywhere from 10 to 10 million interplanetary visitors are now residing in our cities. The late Dr. James McDonald, a meteorologist from the Univ. of Arizona who became embroiled in the UFO controversy, privately discussed, in his last years, the possibility that “aliens” were not only present on this planet, but were systematically taking over top posts in the government and military.

  The late zoologist, Ivan T. Sanderson, one of the best-known observers of the UFO scene, offered an even more interesting hypothesis. In his book Invisible Residents, he suggested tha
t maybe an elder race developed in the world’s oceans while our ancestors were still climbing trees. This race has remained apart from us, but they account for innumerable sightings of unidentified submarines, ships, and flying saucers (which have been seen entering or leaving bodies of water). Since biologists and evolutionists are convinced that life began in the oceans, Sanderson speculated that it would be logical for an advanced race to have its beginnings there. Maybe these “aqua-people” remained at the bottom of the ocean and developed a whole supercivilization there, regarding us as contemptuously and disinterestedly as we do ants.

  These theories remain intellectual exercises, since no real evidence has been uncovered to support them. They are in the same category as the devil theories of earlier religious groups.

  Still, we have the many perplexing reports on mystery men of the pre-CIA era, and the staggering problems presented if we accept the popular extraterrestrial (interplanetary) explanation for UFOs. How, for example, would people from another planet come by nickel tubes of polyvinyl fluoride?

  If, on the other hand, some UFO enthusiasts have been right in accusing the CIA and Air Force of all these puzzling hoaxes, what would be the government’s motive for spending so much time and money on seemingly profitless enterprises? How could they justify such expenditures to congress? And why is it that after 25 years of this, not a single employee or former employee has blown the whistle on the whole project? The government has a hard time keeping anything secret these days. We can probably exclude the government as the culprit. They may have been victimized by the phenomenon (or private interests), just like all the rest of us.