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

by Keel, John A.

  In Madison, Indiana, in 1962, several farmers glimpsed another hairy humanoid. Footprints were found. Posses were formed. No results.

  In Lost Gap, Mississippi, in 1962, there were many reports of a giant nine-foot tall beast with glowing green eyes. Local police were convinced that it existed. Helicopters and bloodhounds were used in a massive search. The creature got away.

  In 1964, another enormous “something” was seen by many witnesses near Sister Lakes, Michigan. Mobs of hunters tried in vain to track it down. It came back the next year, appearing in the vicinity of Monroe, Mi. Mrs. Rose Owen and her daughter, Christine Van Archer, said that a hairy monster that “grunted and growled like a mad dog,” jumped on the side of their car, and grabbed Christine by the hair. The girl suffered a black eye from the incident. Another girl, Shirley Morrin, 18, of Temperance, MI, said that a similar beast had leaped at her car, broken her windshield and scratched her arm. As usual, huge posses covered every square inch of ground in the area and found nothing. All of these incidents took place near the Enrico Fermi Atomic Power Plant. Flying saucer sightings are commonplace in the region. The famous UFO flap of March 1966 occurred nearby. UFOs have shown a decided interest in atomic installations all over the world.

  The year 1966 was not only a peak period for UFO activity. It also marked a major outbreak of monsters all across the country. On May 21, 1966, a group of young people in an automobile encountered a giant, faceless creature in broad daylight in the Historical Park at Morristown, NJ. They told local police that it was well over six feet tall, had huge shoulders, and was covered with hair. It shuffled up to a parked car and thumped on the back of it. The head was either pulled down into the shoulders, or it was headless. The witnesses did not linger to examine it closely. During the past thirty years, a monster dubbed the “Jersey Devil” has been repeatedly seen all over the state.

  In July 1966, a giant hairy monster reportedly prowled the streets of Jessore, East Pakistan. It killed four people. Witnesses swore that it was not a tiger or other known animal. The army was called out to search for it. It was never caught.

  That same month, five people in a car on a beach on Presque Isle in Erie, Pennsylvania, reportedly saw a brilliantly illuminated flying saucer land on July 31, 1966. They were terrified when a tall figure shuffled up to their car in the dark. Large footprints were later found at the site. A few days later, a tall hairy being appeared near a small lake in Edinboro, Pennsylvania (18 miles from Erie) and a posse of college students went hunting for it. Although they claimed to have glimpsed the creature, it got away as usual.

  In the fall of 1966, a new kind of monster popped up in West Virginia. From November 1966 to the summer of 1967, more than 100 people had close encounters with a giant winged entity that became known as “The Bird” or “Mothman.” It had blazing red eyes, broad shoulders, a ten-foot wingspan, and stood almost seven feet tall. Schoolteachers, ministers, newspaper reporters, and other reliable persons claimed to have seen it. All of their descriptions were identical. Simultaneously, there was a massive UFO “flap” in the same area of the Ohio River Valley, with flying saucers making nightly appearances before thousands of witnesses. Dogs and cattle disappeared throughout the region. Mutilated, bloodless carcasses were found in both West Virginia and Ohio.

  Is it possible that our hairy (and feathery) humanoids are riding around in flying saucers? There is certainly a considerable amount of evidence to indicate this. The fact that they always manage to elude hundreds of pursuers, including bloodhounds and helicopters, suggests that they must have some means of rapid transportation that enables them to instantly flee an area after staging an enigmatic appearance. A large, hairy animal, no matter how cunning, could hardly enter a fairly densely populated area such as upstate New York (they have been seen near Ithaca, site of a major UFO flap in 1967), and escape again.

  Experts have offered various theories and speculations. It has been suggested that the UFOs are planting these creatures amongst us, or that the UFOs are chasing and collecting these creatures every time they appear. One UFO group believes these monsters spring from hidden caves.

  It is also possible that this is a dual problem. There is evidence that some of the animals are, indeed, of UFO origin, while others may have always been hiding in our forests and parks, and are rarely seen.

  In 1966, somebody somewhere actually shot and killed one of these tall, hairy humanoids. We may never know who did it, or where. But the body was immediately frozen in a huge cake of ice, and eventually found its way into the sideshow of a traveling circus in the Midwest. For two years, thousands of people paid 35 cents apiece to enter a refrigerated van and stare at this wonder. Finally, a herpetologist named Terry Cullen wandered into the sideshow and became the first to recognize this might be the scientific find of the century. He got in touch with one of America’s foremost zoologists and a leading authority on the Abominable Snowman, Ivan T. Sanderson.

  Accompanied by Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans, Europe’s leading expert on unusual animals, Sanderson tracked the block of ice down to its winter headquarters in Rollingstone, Minnesota (near Minneapolis). There the two men, together with other specialists, huddled in the van in below-zero temperatures and carefully measured and photographed the body. It was their considered opinion that it was genuine.

  The frozen carcass was six feet long and covered with hair two to four inches long. It had apparently been shot in the right eye, and in the chest. The hands were of abnormal size and thickness, measuring seven and one-half inches wide and eleven inches long. The feet were massive and gorilla-like, except for the big toes, which seemed to be manlike. The nose was “pugged” and the lips were very thin, almost nonexistent. It conformed to the descriptions of eyewitnesses that had been published over the years.

  The creature was neither man nor ape. It was an unknown animal. Perhaps it was the long-searched for “missing link.” Dr. Heuvelmans labeled it Homo pongoides (“apelike man”).

  The experts carefully considered every possibility, including hoax. Professor George A. Agogino of the Paleo-Indian Institute in New Mexico stated, “While it is impossible to rule out fraud, the structure of the ice and the complexity of making a composite animal with scientific continuity makes this unlikely.”

  Dr. Heuvelmans was even more specific in his report, which was published in the Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium: “It cannot be an artificial, entirely manufactured object... It cannot be a composite, produced by assembling anatomical parts taken from living beings of different species... It cannot be a normal individual belonging to any of the known races of modern man... It cannot be an abnormal individual, or freak.”

  It looked as if the long, long trail was ended. The legendary hairy monster had finally been brought to bay. Sanderson contacted the Smithsonian institution in Washington, and they expressed immediate interest.

  But Mr. Frank Hansen, the caretaker of the refrigerated van, took a dim view of these proceedings. He expressed concern over the laws that forbid transporting bullet-ridden cadavers from state to state. He also refused to identify the actual owner of the carcass, and could not tell the scientists where or how the creature had been killed.

  Sanderson, Heuvelmans, and their colleagues were convinced that the body was genuine. They had photographs and carefully compiled scientific data to back up their opinion. But when other scientists hurried to Rollingstone to view the remains, they found a crude wax effigy!

  “The moment official inquiries were initiated,” Sanderson said recently, “the owner came to the place in Minnesota where the specimen was stored, removed it in a refrigerator truck, and substituted some form of copy made in wax.”

  The “Missing Link” is again missing! Its whereabouts are still unknown.

  So, we are almost back to where we started. Meanwhile, people continue to see these mysterious animals. In the spring of 1969, Don Cox reportedly saw a hairy figure eight to ten feet tall near Beacon Rock State park,
Washington. “I first saw what I thought to be a tree leaning toward the middle of the road,” Mr. Cox said. “I slowed my car and turned my headlights to high beam. It was then that I saw this fur-covered human form with the face of an ape. It ran across the road in front of the car, leaped up a 40-degree slope, and disappeared into the woods.”

  In the fall of 1968, a group of hunters encountered an ABSM type near Fremont, Wisconsin. It got away from them, leaving behind the usual giant footprints. Other reports have come in from Montana, Oregon, Georgia, and a hundred other places in between.

  It is more probable that these are not actual animals, but are distortions of reality, inserted into our space-time continuum by the mischievous forces of the “superspectrum.” The reported density of some of these creatures indicates they are not flesh and blood, but are composed of highly condensed atoms – comparable with, say, plutonium. And like plutonium, a manmade radioactive metal, these creatures deteriorate at a very rapid rate.

  Since energy masses in the superspectrum can alter their frequencies and move up and down the electromagnetic spectrum, we can assume they can also manipulate atomic structure and enter our plane of reality by creating atoms compatible with our atomic structure. The ancients called this process “transmogrification.” heavier, tightly compacted atoms with a dense field of orbiting electrons dissipate their energy quickly. Plutonium is a very unstable element, prone to spontaneous combustion. Let’s imagine that when energies of the superspectrum vibrate down into our reality, they change into very short-lived atoms of unusual density. In the early stages of creation, the transmogrified entities are relatively harmless to us but, when deterioration begins to occur, they throw off electrons and radiation that can harm humans and animals in the same way that flying saucers harm us.

  Another byproduct of atomic deterioration is its curious effect upon electrical apparatus. One of the first devices invented to test radioactive materials was the electroscope. This was simply two pieces of gold leaf hanging from a metal rod in a bottle. The gold conductors were charged with static electricity and repelled each other, spreading apart. When a radioactive substance was held over the rod, the gold leaves fell together, their charges having been instantly dissipated. This same effect can stall electrical ignitions and disrupt power lines and telephone communications, not because of the electromagnetic effect, but because the energy field of the radioactive monster or UFO interferes with the atomic qualities of the wire temporarily. Electricity cannot pass through the affected wiring until the energy field is removed.

  The Kelly family near Mahomet, IL had an encounter with a UFO in October 1967, which resulted in a very peculiar aftermath. Their lights didn’t go out, but their electric bill for the following month went crazy, jumping by 500%. Whatever the thing was, it kept coming back to the Kelly homestead and apparently made their electric meter run wild. Then, at 4 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, Dec. 19, 1967, Mrs. Maryellen Kelly looked outside to see what was agitating her dog. There, hovering directly above some nearby trees, she saw what she described as a great, glowing, orange-yellowish “thing.” it rose to the northeast and zipped away.

  “The next day,” she said later, “my face started to get red. My eyes were bloodshot, my hands were red, and the exposed area between my short slacks and boots I had been wearing turned red, too. My left ear hurt and, when I blew my nose, it bled.”

  I have examined dead animals in UFO areas that had blood running from their ears, noses, and mouths. This is almost a sure sign of concussion – a sudden increase in air pressure. An ordinary explosion can cause this, of course, but in many of these cases, no explosion was heard. There are cases of unexplained human deaths by concussion going all the way back to 1946.

  Some our monsters remain in an area for several days and are seen by many people before they finally disappear. Token attacks on domestic animals occur throughout the period, because the monster is somehow replenishing its diminishing energies with earthy animal matter. But it is a losing battle, and the monster must ultimately melt away, leaving nothing but a terrible stench behind.

  In several cases, UFO lights have appeared above the monsters and cast a powerful beam of light onto them. The monsters vanished leaving only a residue of silicon carbide (SiC), a very hard, crystalline compound that has been found at hundreds of UFO and monster sites all over the world. Often it is mistaken for common furnace slag. It is logically the only remains of the transmogrification process.

  The fact that UFOs have been seen “attacking” entities with light beams has inspired theories that the flying saucers are policing Earth and protecting us from monsters. At the Presque Isle sighting, a tall hairy monster approached a group of witnesses in a car. A luminous aerial object appeared, firing beams in all directions, and the monster vanished. Its footprints were found on the sandy beach, and a small quantity of silicon and silicon carbide was found at the spot where the tracks abruptly stopped.

  Believers in the extraterrestrial hypothesis have been repeatedly disappointed by forms of silicon – a fairly common substance – at UFO sites. They would prefer to find some exotic, unidentifiable metal “not of this earth.”

  In the prelude to the great 1947 UFO wave in the U.S., the “ghost rockets” that swarmed over Scandinavia in 1946 left large quantities of silicon carbide in their paths. And the most important UFO event of 1947, the complex “Maury Island Affair” in Tacoma, WA also produced a great heap of “slag.”

  We cannot name the place where flying saucers and hairy monsters come from, but we do know where they go. They poor slobs literally melt.

  But clearly, these fellows are nobody to fool with. In many of the dozens of cases I have studied, the creatures approached or even attacked automobiles and their drivers. Animals such as dogs, sheep, and cattle were found killed or mutilated in a significant number of cases.

  Throughout 1972, dozens of people in the Pittsburgh, PA area received unwelcome glimpses of a tall, hair-covered monster. While the hardcore UFO buffs howled with derision, local researcher Stan Gordon confirmed findings that I had published years earlier: both UFOs and monsters seemed to zero in on human females undergoing their menstrual period. I also noted that animal disappearance and mutilations were commonplace in UFO/monster areas. Gordon found that dogs, cats, chickens, and sheep were disappearing or meeting horrible fates in the wake of the monster sightings.

  This raises a very important question: If these creatures are real, what do they eat? The obvious answer is anything or anyone they want to. An animal 7 to 10 feet tall and weighing from 300 to 800 pounds (judging from the depth of the footprints) must have a voracious appetite. If they are vegetarians like, say, elephants, they would leave wide path of despoiled foliage. If they are carnivorous, they would certainly require more than the occasional cat or dog. They would be emptying entire chicken coops, gulping down whole herds of sheep, or grabbing dozens of toddlers on their way to kindergarten.

  The problem is that the animal disappearances in these areas are too few. They seem to be nothing but token attacks, perhaps to support a belief that they are real animals.

  However, thousands of cows do vanish during each big UFO wave, often leading local police on wild-goose chases thinking they are pursuing cattle rustlers equipped with silent airplanes or helicopters. The first known UFO cattlenapping took place during the “airship” wave of 1897. A family reportedly watched a cigar-shaped object swoop over their farm near Vernon, Kansas that April. It was occupied by six strange beings. They jabbered in a foreign language as they lowered a rope, lassoed one of the cows, hauled it aboard, and flew away. This episode has been reprinted in great detail in almost every UFO book out there. There are many modern cases identical to this.

  Point Pleasant, West Virginia’s winged “Mothman” left behind only a few footprints and droppings (which disappeared soon after I turned them over to a testing facility). Oddly, most of the “Mothman prints” looked like those of a giant dog. Similar tracks have been fou
nd at other monster sites around the world.

  One morning is April of 1969, Ernest Atkins stepped from his home on a farm near New Haven, WV (very close to Pt. Pleasant), and found his beagle pup dead in his yard. “There was no evidence that the pup died in a fight,” Adkins said. “But there was a large, very neat hole in its side, and the animal’s heart was lying outside the body. It looked as if something had chewed it out. There were no other marks on the body.”

  But no known animal would, or could, neatly tear the heart out of a dog without leaving other marks on the carcass. And any animal that might attempt such a thing would certainly have eaten the heart or some part of the dog.

  We investigated the situation in Pt. Pleasant as thoroughly and as carefully as was humanly possible. But after all of our interviews and all of our experiences, we were still left with the basic, disturbing question: What is really on the loose in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other isolated “window areas” of the world?

  There is an ancient religious theory that contends that demons and gods need physical matter from this world to aid their own materializations. And once they have materialized in a physical form, they must replenish themselves frequently to retain that form. This, of course, is found in numerous variations in the vampire lore of Europe. The deaths and disappearances of animals and people during these mysterious invasions has always been carefully explained by some kind of phenomenon acceptable to the people of the period. We no longer believe in vampires, but millions of us now believe in flying saucers from outer space, and even in giant, red-eyed monsters.

  Perhaps one of these days you will come face-to-face with one of these tall humanoids near your own hometown. If you can bring it in – alive or dead – don’t sell it to a sideshow. There are several top scientists who will want to talk to you.

  But be careful. Wherever these monsters tread, the flying saucers (and the Men in Black) are never very far behind.