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

by Keel, John A.

  The trio followed the birds by car and saw them settle on the edge of the woods about 200 yards from the home of Ewing Tilton. Tilton joined them. Both men agreed that the birds stood from four to five feet tall and had a wingspread of at least 10 feet.

  “They had dark brown backs with some light flecks,” Tilton observed. “Their breasts were gray and they had five or six-inch bills that were straight – not curved like those of hawks or vultures.”

  Shock thought there was “a reddish cast” to their heads. The birds kept their distance and finally fluttered off into limbo.

  At the Gallipolis, OH airport, just across the river from Pt. Pleasant, five local pilots got an unexpected look at the bird at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 4, 1966. When they first saw it, they mistook it for an airplane.

  “Look at that crazy character coming in downwind in that plane,” Eddie Adkins commented.

  Everett Wedge of Pt. Pleasant, Henry Upton of Leon, WV, and Leo Edwards, Ernie Thompson, and Adkins, all of Gallipolis, stared at the winged form gliding low over the river. It was about 300 feet up, they all agreed, and it was traveling about 70 miles an hour effortlessly, without flapping its wide wings.

  As it sailed past the airport, the men noted that it seemed to have an unusually long neck and was turning its head from side to side, as if it were taking in the scenery.

  “It was like something prehistoric,” one of them remarked later. “I don’t think it was a crane.”

  Wedge grabbed his camera, jumped into his plane, and took off after it. But it had disappeared somewhere downriver. This was the only sighting in which a neck was observed at all.

  A month later, another witness thought she was seeing an airplane, too, when she first noticed a large, winged thing majestically swooping along RT. 62 at 5 p.m. on Jan. 11, 1967. Mrs. Mabel McDaniel, the mother of Linda Scarberry, one of the original Mothman witnesses, was near Tiny’s Drive-In Restaurant on the outskirts of Pt. Pleasant when she first saw the “Bird.”

  “I thought it was an airplane, then I realized it was flying much too low,” she told me later. “It was brown and had a wingspread of at least 10 feet.” Then she added an interesting detail. “I thought I could see two legs – like a man’s legs – hanging down from it. It circled over Tiny’s and then flew off.” She did not see any head or neck. The wings were not moving and there was no sound.

  Now over 100 people in the Ohio Valley swear that they have seen this mysterious flying creature. Point Pleasant is part of the highly industrialized Ohio Valley, and is on the edge of the Bible Belt. Its 6,000 inhabitants support 22 churches. There are no bars. Most of the witnesses I talked to were very devout, well-educated, and owned late model cars and color TV sets. They all seemed remarkably honest and sincere, and many requested anonymity. They said they came forward with their stories only because they “wanted to help.” They wanted to assure me that “all those other people saw what they said they saw.”

  Beginning in the fall of 1966, the TV sets and telephones in the region began to go wild as strange globs of crystalline white light appeared in the night skies. Many of these lights moved at treetop level. There were also many daylight sightings of strange, circular metal objects, particularly in the TNT Area. By the end of 1967, over 1,000 UFO sightings by responsible witnesses had been recorded throughout the valley. As with the Mothman sightings, I often had to “dig out” the witnesses, for many feared publicity and the attending ridicule. For each UFO report that appeared in the Athens Messenger and the Point Pleasant Register, hundreds went unpublished.

  “I’m just getting too many reports,” Mrs. Hyre explained. “We can’t print them all.”

  Cars passing along the Camp Conley Road, south of the TNT Area, stalled inexplicably. TV sets and radios, some brand new, burned out suddenly, without cause. In March and April of 1967, the UFO sightings hit an incredible peak, with the objects appearing nightly at low level over the TNT Area – as if they were following a regular flight schedule. Thousands of people invaded the area again to view this new wonder. No one was disappointed. Sheriff Johnson and most of his men were among the witnesses, but soberly refused to comment publicly on the phenomenon.

  As the UFO activity seemed to increase, the Mothman reports dwindled off. An Ohio man claimed that a “huge winged something” pursued his car up Rt. 33 on a rainy night in March 1967, and two women swore they saw Mothman fly up to meet a UFO on May 19, 1967.

  “We were driving past the TNT Area on Rt. 62 around 10:30 p.m.” one of the ladies told me, “when we saw two bright red lights on a shadowy form high in a tree just off the road. Suddenly, this big red light appeared and approached the tree, and the form rose up toward it, and disappeared. Then the big light took off to the north.”

  That same night, twenty persons reported seeing a brilliantly lighted object land briefly in a field next to the junior high school in Pt. Pleasant. Sightings and landings around schools have become common in the past year. They have been reported in Miami, Boston, Lima (Peru), Melbourne (Australia), and many other places.

  In November 1967, four hunters told Mrs. Hyre that they had encountered Mothman in the Chief Cornstalk Wildlife Area south of Pt. Pleasant. They said they were so startled when the huge, gray thing with red eyes loomed up in front of them that it never occurred to them to try to use the rifles they were carrying.

  Shortly after noon on Nov. 2, 1967, Mrs. Ralph Thomas says she heard a sound “like a squeaky fan belt” outside her home in the TNT Area. She stepped onto her porch and saw what she described as “a tall gray figure, bigger than a man” moving swiftly among the nearby “igloos.” It didn’t appear to be walking, she said, rather it was sliding or gliding along the ground. She was positive that it was not a man or a bear. Since it was the hunting season, no man in his right mind would wear gray there, she noted, but would wear a red or orange hunting jacket.

  The UFO-Monster situation in West Virginia and Ohio is obviously a most complicated one. It may be only a coincidence that the region was “invaded” simultaneously by giant, unidentified birds and unidentified flying objects. No photograph of the “Bird” was ever taken. No single theory seems to fit all of the reported sightings. If a huge winged creature is hiding in the TNT Area, thousands of eager hunters have failed to flush it out. Perhaps, like the “Flatwoods Monster” of 13 years earlier, it will eventually become part of West Virginia folklore and legend.

  “I laughed at those people who said they’d seen Mothman,” John love of Pt. Pleasant remarked to me soberly. Then on the morning of Nov. 19, 1966, he and four others came face-to-face with the thing in the TNT Area. “I’m not laughing anymore. We all got the shock of our lives. I never want to see that “Bird” again!”

  But the winged thing with glowing eyes will probably reappear in the months and years ahead. What it is, where it comes from, where it goes, and why it crops up periodically to chase cars and frighten lovers may always remain a mystery. Perhaps several different things were on the loose in West Virginia in 1966 and 1967. Perhaps the great brown birds were not even distant kin of the gray giants with luminous eyes. Or perhaps they all slipped through that mysterious door that seals our world off from a world of dragons and elves and things that go bump in the night – a world spun of myth and fantasy and legends going back as far as man’s memory can take him.

  From time to time, that door seems to swing open, and monsters and ghouls stalk across the landscape, bringing derision to those unfortunates who glimpse them. Then, as the posses sally forth with pitchforks and guns, the creatures slip back across the dark borderline, and the door swings shut behind them.

  The sincere testimony of scores of badly frightened people seems to shift the burden of proof onto the shoulders of the baffled scientists, who typically ignore things that they cannot carry into laboratories for study beneath their microscopes. The mystery is not that such creatures live; it is that we have been able to overlook them for so long.

  CHAPTER 8

  NEVER
MIND THE SAUCER! DID YOU SEE THE GUYS WHO WERE DRIVING IT? - TRUE MAGAZINE, FEB. 1967

  “I would know him if I saw him in Oklahoma City tomorrow. He saw me. He’d know me, too.” William “Eddie” Laxton, a 56-year old electronics engineer from Temple, OK, was discussing a man he had briefly encountered in the predawn hours of March 23, 1966. He was an ordinary-looking man who might easily go unnoticed in a crowded bar, according to Eddie. But Eddie didn’t meet him in a bar. He saw him getting into a strange, brilliantly illuminated, cigar-shaped flying contraption that rested on four legs in the middle of a highway – a craft similar to many described by other witnesses all over the world. Usually they are termed “unidentified flying objects” or UFOs.

  At about 5:30 a.m. that bleak March day, Laxton was driving along a deserted stretch of Highway 70, near the Texas-Oklahoma border. He was on his way to work at Sheppard Air Force Base near Wichita Falls, TX (where he teaches electronics), when a huge fish-shaped object suddenly loomed in front of him. According to the story he later told to newsman Paul Harvey and UFO investigator Hayden Hewes, he jammed on his brakes and pulled to a stop about 50 yards from where the object was blocking the road at a 45-degree angle. The thing was, he estimated, about 75 feet long.

  “There were four very brilliant lights on my side,” he said. “Bright enough so that a man could read a newspaper by the light a mile away.” He also observed that it seemed to be lit up inside and that it “had a plastic bubble in front that was about three feet in diameter, and you could see through it.” It had a tail structure with horizontal stabilizers about two and a half feet long. Friends and associates say Laxton has always been blessed with a phenomenal memory, and they believe him when he says he was able to distinguish a group of numbers painted vertically in black on the side of the fuselage. He remembers them as reading TL4768 (or TL4168).

  Halfway along the fuselage, there was a porthole about two feet in diameter. It was divided into four equal sections and there was a small door below it, measuring about four and a half feet high and two and a half feet wide. This door was open and white light was pouring from it. Directly outside the object, a human-looking man was examining the underside of the craft with some kind of flashlight. As Laxton climbed out of his car, this creature turned, climbed up a metal ladder and entered the door. “I’m sure it was aluminum,” Laxton said later.

  He described the mysterious “pilot” as weighing about 180 pounds and being five feet nine inches tall (like many airline pilots), with a light complexion. He was wearing what looked like a mechanic’s cap with the bill turned up. “I got the impression he was about 30 to 35 years old,” Laxton said. “He wore either coveralls or a two-piece suit that looked like green-colored fatigues. I got the idea that he had three stripes about and three below, on his sleeve. The above stripes were in a wide ‘V’ shape.”

  A few seconds after the door closed, Laxton says, “The craft started up. It sounded like a high-speed drill. It lifted off the ground about 50 feet high and headed toward the Red River. In about five seconds, it was a mile away.” When the machine took off, Laxton reported, “The hair on the back of my hands and neck stood up.”

  Admittedly excited by what he had seen, Laxton got back into his car and drove about a mile, when he came upon a huge tank truck parked beside the road. The driver, C.W. Anderson of Snyder, OK, said that he had seen something following him in his mirror and that he had also watched it fly away toward Red River. After the two men’s stories appeared in local papers, other truck drivers came forward with reports of having seen similar objects along Highway 70 earlier in the year.

  Laxton was later interviewed by scientists from Northwestern University, the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, and the U.S. Air Force.

  “I was interviewed by 25 or 30 persons,” Laxton says. “There were generals, captains, sergeants, secretaries, and stenographers. They had me make drawings of the object and tell everything I knew about it. It was all one-sided. They asked, I answered.”

  Soon after he had filed his initial report, a group of Army vehicles picked him up at his office. “A colonel, his driver and a detail of men drove me to the landing area,” Laxton reports. “We were there about 30 or 35 minutes. While I answered more questions, the men searched the area. I got the impression they knew what they were doing.”

  “We’ll put down that you saw a helicopter,” he says one of the officers finally told him.

  Laxton’s report of a human-type UFO pilot in coveralls did not come as any great shock to followers of UFO news. In recent years, there have been many UFO reports involving human-type and human-sized pilots.

  These unidentified tourists seem to have a limited wardrobe. They wear either coveralls or some type of space suit, topped off with visored helmet or transparent “goldfish bowls.” In a few instances, as when one of them appeared near Adelaide, Australia on Oct. 28, 1962, they have been seen wearing a “gas mask” type of headgear. In that case, the witness, a high-school teacher named Mrs. Ellen D. Sylvester, told of seeing an illuminated oval object resting on three legs near a highway. Mrs. Sylvester said she saw a six-foot tall being “in some kind of uniform” with its face covered by “a form of breathing apparatus.” It was apparently inspecting the tripod landing gear of the craft. She watched as it got back into the machine and took off in a northerly direction.

  On one occasion at least, it appears that a UFO pilot may have been photographed. On July 31, 1952, a 30-yr. old Italian engineer, Gianpietro Monguzzi, and his wife were mountain climbing in northern Italy. They were struggling up the Cherchen Glacier in the Bernina Mountains.

  “It was about 9:30 a.m.,” Monguzzi explained shortly after the incident, “when we saw this circular machine, with a transparent dome on top, swoop low and land 75 or 100 feet away from where we were standing. I wanted to move closer to it, but my wife became frightened and begged me to stay with her.”

  Lying in the snow, Monguzzi says he unlimbered the camera he was carrying, a Kodak Retina I. It was loaded with fast black-and-white film and was equipped with a Schneider lens. After snapping a picture of the object, he and his wife were astonished to see a normal-sized being walk around from behind it and inspect its underside with a long flashlight with a glowing sphere on the end of it. This being was dressed in a space suit, wearing a helmet, a pack of some sort on its back and heavy, possibly weighted shoes.

  Monguzzi excitedly snapped away, he reports, taking a series of pictures as the creature stiffly walked around the craft and bent over to look under it. An antenna had unreeled above the object after it landed, and it looked as if the space-suited being was also wearing an antenna. The two witnesses could not see any form of landing gear. The object had settled directly onto the snow, its convex body leaving a circle on the spot. After completing its inspection, the creature disappeared behind the thing again, and it lifted noiselessly into the air and flew away. Monguzzi even took a picture of its departure.

  He was certain that he had taken the most astounding pictures of the century. And perhaps he had. But when they were developed, they looked too good to be true. A Hollywood special effects studio could not have done a better job with the latest in tabletop photography techniques. The lighting was perfect; too perfect. The bright mountain sun bouncing off the shimmering snow and ice produced a high contrast. The object was clear and distinct, and the creature was well outlined and appeared as a human-sized being might appear at that distance (75 feet) under those circumstances. At long last, the world had “proof” that flying saucers existed and that some kind of “human” life was riding around in them. Or so he thought.

  As soon as the existence of the pictures became known – and the young Italian didn’t make much of an effort to keep them secret – he was inundated with reporters. He even claimed “an American secret agent” turned up at his cottage disguised as an Italian bersagliero (military ski trooper), and questioned him closely through an entire night, trying to get him to contradict his story. Later, he sol
d the pictures to the Italian magazine EPOCA, and was horrified when they were published with a caption identifying them as clever fakes. The conservative Italian Edison Society, of which he was a member, was also horrified. They booted him out unceremoniously. Regrettably, the director of the Society was also Monguzzi’s boss at the Monza industrial plant near Milan. He fired the now-disgraced photographer. Today, Monguzzi prefers not to discuss the incident. “They cheated me,” he told one UFO investigator. “This bad joke of the journalists made me lose my job as well as my membership in the Edison Society. I was out of work for a year and a half.”

  Not all of the millions of people throughout the world who have reported seeing UFOs have lost their jobs – not even the hundreds who claim to have seen “pilots” or “ufonauts.”

  A French student of UFOs, Aime Michel, recorded and investigated over 100 sightings of ufonauts in 1954 alone. Jacques Vallee, an astronomer at Northwestern University and author of the best-selling Anatomy of a Phenomenon, published a study in which he tabulated 80 specific sightings between 1909 and 1960. A total of 153 “beings” were observed around grounded UFOs in these sightings. Of these, 35 were described as normal-looking humans and several were seen wearing coverall-type garments similar to those reported by Eddie Laxton.

  Other investigators have made similar tabulations, all of which tend to show that real or imagined contact with “space beings” is much more common than most of us realize. And it seems reasonable to believe that more cases occur than are actually reported. Many people, for obvious reasons, are reluctant to walk into their local police station or newspaper office and announce, “Hey, I just had a talk with a three-foot man who got out of a flying saucer.” Many witnesses who do make reports insist that their names not be used.