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

by Keel, John A.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE FLYING SAUCER CRIME WAVE THEY CAN’T COVER UP – SAGA MAGAZINE, DEC. 1968

  “It’s a science-fiction nightmare!” a burly sheriff in West Virginia groaned recently. “And there doesn’t seem to be anybody who can help us.”

  “I don’t give a damn what the Air Force says,” another sheriff in Texas complained. “Something big is happening, and we need help.”

  “We’ve been getting too many cases of people being hurt, burned, gassed, and paralyzed,” a public health official in New York State remarked grimly. “We asked the Air Force directly for advice, and they told us there was nothing to it – that it was all nonsense.”

  These men, and many other responsible authorities throughout the United States, are trying to cope with the horrifying problems left in the wake of the eerie, nocturnal visitors known as flying saucers.

  The record is long, appalling, and exceptionally well-documented. People all over the world have been pursued, injured, kidnapped, and even killed by UFOs. Automobiles have been wrecked, and planes have crashed because of flying saucers.

  It is a lonely battle for most of the people involved. Twenty years of ridicule has made the subject of unidentified flying objects disreputable and largely unapproachable. No effective program on the federal government level has been created to deal with the situation. Only in the last year has the FBI cautiously begun to get its feet wet by studying, often secretly, some of the hair-raising UFO incidents now pouring in from everywhere.

  The U.S. Air Force has confined its investigations largely to a public relations effort designed to discredit the problem. Astronomers and physicists have been assigned to investigate cases that should have been turned over to a high-level law enforcement agency or a branch of military intelligence.

  The Air Force says unidentified flying objects are “weather balloons” and mirages. The astronomers blame meteors, lightning bolts, and “marsh gas.” Even the hardcore ufologists are sharply divided in their interpretations of the mass of hostile incidents now documented in their files. These cases rarely make headlines outside of the areas where they occurred because there are so many of them. An entire edition of a Sunday newspaper could be devoted to the new UFO cases of a single week, and there would still be cases left over!

  As far back as 1953, there are records of UFO attacks. In November of that year, two men, Albert and James Grear, were standing in a field near Zanesville, OH when, according to their story (which not even the ufologists took seriously at the time), James started to rise into the air, seeming to levitate toward a shining object high above. His brother grabbed his legs and held on for dear life, hauling him back to the ground.

  Had a UFO tried to kidnap James Grear?

  Scores of other cases involve attacks on motorists who have sworn that the control of their vehicles had somehow been wrested from them. Two young men in Idaho, Will Begay and Clyde Soccie, burst into the office of the Sheriff of Bonneville County on the night of Nov. 2, 1967. They said they had been driving near Ririe, Idaho when something seemed to land on the roof of their car. Then, as they put it, “a power bigger than they could cope with” forced them off the road. They leaped out of their vehicle and were astounded to see a saucer-shaped object perched on the roof. Two men, both “about three feet tall,” appeared and addressed them in some incomprehensible language. Unable to communicate, the little men finally got back into the object and flew off.

  These things have been going on largely unnoticed for years. Whatever these objects are, they not only can paralyze people, but they can also cause automobiles to stall. They can jam radios and knock telephones out. They have even reportedly picked up trucks from highways and hoisted them into the air. Local police have found themselves totally helpless when a UFO flap hits their area. And they haven’t been able to find anyone in the federal government who will even listen to their tales of horror. Deputy Sheriff A.N. Perkins and Patrolman C.F. Bell of Williston, FL claimed that they were engulfed with an intolerable wave of heat and became temporarily paralyzed as a group of objects flew over a line of stalled autos on Dec. 5, 1966. Other police officers have claimed that they reached for their guns to fire on “flying saucers,” yet found themselves unable to pull their weapons from their holsters.

  One of the many apparent patterns emerging from this mass of data is the consistent reappearance of the objects in the same isolated, thinly populated areas year after year. These sectors, known as “flap areas,” have become inundated with other bizarre problems in the last two years. Giant “prowlers” or “peeping Toms,” always described as being at least six-feet, six-inches tall with shiny silver hair, have sparked police searches all over the country. Identical “prowlers” have appeared in West Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, and in New York State. Farmers in New York’s Delaware County have been pursuing these elusive giants with shotguns. They soberly describe how the “prowlers” are able to run with incredible swiftness in total darkness, and seem to leap over high obstructions with astounding ease.

  In Ohio, the author was told similar stories of “cattle rustlers” in shiny white coveralls, who performed feats of running and jumping that were impossible for a human being. Local law enforcement officials everywhere have been perturbed over the sharp increase in “cattle rustling” in “flap areas” in Florida, Ohio, and other states. Often the mutilated carcasses of the animals are found drained of blood. One cow was found in Ohio in December of 1967, cleanly cut in half “as if it had been snipped by a giant pair of scissors.” These UFO “cattle rustlers” never leave any footprints or other clues behind.

  After a futile search for footprints and truck tracks, a sheriff’s deputy in Florida asked ufologist Joan Whritenour, “Just where does a rustler put a full-grown cow? Sure as hell not in his back pocket!”

  In the fall of 1967, the story of Snippy, a horse found mutilated in Colorado, was given considerable newspaper space. But there have been hundreds of “Snippys” in the past few years. And hundreds – if not thousands – of dogs have also disappeared or been found inexplicably dead and bloodless in “flap areas.” Mutilated animals have also turned up in Canada and South America. In Condona, Peru, a farmer named Alphonso Perez reported that six of his prize heifers had been slaughtered in the spring of 1968 by parties unknown. Veterinarians who examined the carcasses said the animals had slit throats, and the wounds appeared to have been cauterized. The blood had been drained from all of them (or had dried up inside). Old fashioned, western-style cattle rustlers often butchered animals in the field, but they made off with the prize steak cuts, not the blood or soft tissue.

  It looks as if UFOs are interested in, or have a serious need for, animal blood. But what about human blood?

  Here’s a case that may offer a clue. Early on a rainy morning in March 1967, a Red Cross Bloodmobile, laden with fresh blood collected from human volunteers, was driving along Route 2, next to the Ohio River, en route to Red Cross headquarters in Huntington, West Virginia. The driver was Beau Shertzer, 21. He was accompanied by a young nurse. As they hit a completely deserted stretch of road, a large glowing object lifted from a nearby hill and sailed silently toward the vehicle. Shertzer rolled down his window and looked up.

  He was panic-stricken to see some kind of arm or extension being lowered from the glistening machine, which was cruising only a few feet above his bloodmobile. The nurse looked out her window and saw another arm reaching down on her side of the truck. It looked as if the flying saucer was trying to wrap a pincer-like device around the vehicle. The nurse went into hysterics, understandably, and Shertzer opened the engine up wide, trying desperately to outrun the thing. Apparently they were saved by the sudden appearance of headlights from oncoming traffic. As the other cars neared, the object retracted the arms and hastily flew off.

  To this day, Beau Shertzer refuses to drive along that highway.

  Other puzzling incidents have had far more serious consequences. One man died of drowning after
jumping into Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela together with dozens of other terrified fisherman, when a huge luminous object flew low over them on Oct. 6, 1961. Another man, Francis Bedel, Jr., lost control of his car five miles north of Freetown, Indiana on the night of Jan. 17, 1967, when a bright glowing object swooped out of the sky and made a low-level approach. Bedel’s car swerved off the highway and ended up in a creek, badly damaged.

  There are growing numbers of cases in which innocent people have been badly burned, blinded, or given a near-lethal dose of radiation poisoning by the mysterious objects. “Sonny” Desvergers, a scoutmaster, was reportedly burned and knocked unconscious by a “ball of fire” that came from a circular object near Boynton Beach, FL in August of 1952. Desvergers said there was the “smell of rotten eggs” around the object. The Air Force said his whole story was a hoax.

  A young boy near Hobbs, NM, Charles Davis, was “burned bald” by a low-flying UFO on June 2, 1964. His grandmother saw the object shoot away as the boy screamed with pain. His face began to swell until his eyes were closed, and his ears “looked like pieces of raw meat.” Another child, an 11-yr. old girl, was allegedly burned in an identical manner by “a flying ashtray” near Oklahoma City, OK in the fall of 1964. When Robert Stiff, a local ufologist, tried to investigate the case, he found the Air Force had whisked the girl away to a military hospital. He was never able to get to the bottom of the story.

  A 45-yr. old woman near Fleming, NY was struck by a “ball of fire” from a UFO while riding in a car in the spring of 1966. She was hospitalized and remained partially paralyzed for weeks afterwards. But one of the severest of all “burn” cases took place in Canada on May 20, 1967. Steve Michalak, 52, was gathering rock samples near a place called Falcon Lake when he blundered upon a circular object that looked like stainless steel.

  He watched it land, he claims, and heard voices coming from it. He called out but received no reply, so he walked up to the thing and actually touched it. As he did so, the disc began to revolve and a blast of heat struck him, burning his chest under his clothes, leaving an odd checkerboard pattern. He became ill immediately and has not been well since, apparently suffering with all the symptoms of radiation poisoning. His case has been thoroughly investigated by both Canadian and American scientists and medical men.

  A 12-yr. old boy named Gregory Wells became involved in this undercover nightmare on March 19, 1968. Gregory had gone outside his home near Beallsville, OH to get a thermos jug of water. Suddenly a reddish, football-shaped object appeared low over the trees, making a noise like a generator. A tube projected from the object and flashed a beam of red light at the boy, knocking him to the ground and setting his jacket aflame. A local investigator for APRO, Dennis Jones, filed a careful report in which he said he felt the witnesses involved were “telling merely what they saw.” He felt that “Gregory was telling the truth.” Young Wells required serious medical attention.

  A beam of light from an object “as big as a baseball diamond” paralyzed and partially deafened another Ohio boy on Aug. 19, 1966. Chris Ward, 14, and three young friends were camping out in sleeping bags on the back porch of a home in East Liverpool, OH, when around 12:40 a.m., Ryan Reed, 12, woke up and became aware of something hovering over the porch. He woke up the others and they excitedly left the porch to watch the enormous object hanging low over the house. Suddenly a beam of light shot out from underneath the craft, striking Ward and rendering him immobile.

  Terror swept over the small group. The others grabbed Chris, but found they couldn’t move him. It was as if he were rooted to the spot. The object turned bright red and shot upwards. As it disappeared eastward, Chris was able to move again – and move he did. All four boys scrambled desperately around to the front of the house. Chris had the key to the front door, and he twisted it in the lock so violently that it actually broke in two.

  Police lieutenant Kenneth Mooney and Patrolman James Buckley later said that the boys were genuinely terrified by whatever they had seen. Dozens of people, including several policemen, reported seeing a “huge fireball” blazing across the sky shortly after the boys’ sighting. Chris Ward’s face was partially numb, he complained, and his hearing was impaired for several hours after his experience with the “beam of light.”

  All of these incidents indicate that the “flying saucers” are engaged in activities far more complex and searching than a mere “aerial survey” of our planet. It is also clear that they have a need for both human beings and animals. There are hundreds of cases of open and deliberate hostility. The objects and their occupants have rather pointlessly injured innumerable people, pursued or attacked thousands of others, and ruthlessly raided our pastures and farms.

  The UFO weaponry is awesome. They can paralyze and immobilize both machines and human beings, and they can somehow tamper with the human mind.

  But why do they seem to be preoccupied with children and teenagers? Where are all of the disappearing people going? We only hear about the ones who get away from their abductors. There are undoubtedly thousands of incredible cases that have never been reported to anyone.

  As of now, isolated sheriffs and police authorities scattered around the country are fighting a lonely battle, trying to cope with an unseen and dangerous enemy. Thousands of people in small towns and villages are afraid to go out alone at night, terrified of what may be lurking in their once placid skies.

  Air Force jets do pursue the objects at every opportunity. When a flap broke out around Columbus, OH in the spring of 1968, the Air Force was on the job, scrambling fighters, trying to seek out these strange will-o’-the-wisps that appear and disappear almost magically.

  But how can you fight a thing that can freeze your limbs and blank out your mind? Perhaps the best advice, for now at least, can be found in the words of a sheriff in South Carolina, who has been living with this nightmare for over a year.

  “All we can do is keep our windows and doors locked,” he said. “And don’t go joy-riding late at night. There’s something out there, alright, but we’re like a bunch of kids trying to hunt an elephant with a bean-shooter.”

  CHAPTER 20

  OCEAN-BASED UFOS RING THE UNITED STATES – MALE MAGAZINE, DEC. 1970

  Early on the morning of June 11, 1970, an eerie luminous sphere appeared in the skies over the Atlantic Ocean, and cruised silently past the tiny papyrus reed boat Ra 2, manned by explorer Thor Heyerdahl and a small crew. “It was in sight for several minutes,” navigator Norman Baker reported by radio, “and then it vanished in a bright orange flash.”

  The Ra 2 was attempting to cross the Atlantic to prove Heyerdahl’s theory that ancient Egyptians could have visited the New World centuries before Columbus. An earlier expedition in a similar craft, the Ra 1, had been aborted in 1969 when the ship had been engulfed in a storm and sprang a leak.

  When Baker’s message reached the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) at Colorado Springs, CO, a spokesman said that the object could not have been connected with a space shot, but that “it might have been a meteor.” However, it is highly unlikely that the seasoned sailors aboard the Ra 2 would have mistaken a meteor or other natural object for an unidentified flying something. Besides, Thor Heyerdahl had seen and reported UFOs before, during the historic voyage of his raft Kon Tiki across the Pacific several years ago.

  Unidentified flying objects have been sighted consistently by the crews of hundreds of ships all over the Atlantic Ocean. In many well-documented cases, witnesses have claimed that strange metallic saucer-shaped and cigar-shaped objects have suddenly surfaced from beneath the waters, risen into the air, circled their ships, and flown off into the stars. In other cases, flying objects have descended to the surface of the ocean and disappeared underneath.

  There are still other baffling cases of gigantic “mystery submarines” that apparently do not belong to any known nation. They have successfully eluded massive searches by sea and air launched by the navies of several nations. All of these reports have gen
erated one of the most popular and persistent legends in the “flying saucer” mystery – that UFOs are actually based underwater in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. An extension of these legends is the claim that “Lost Atlantis” still survives, and that there are huge, technologically advanced cities existing in the oceans.

  While the existence of Atlantis will always remain a subject for scholarly debate, the innumerable sighting reports of reputable captains and crews indicates that mysterious aircraft and ships seem to have some intangible relationship with the world’s major sea-lanes.

  The first known Atlantic sighting is found in the log of Christopher Columbus himself. On the night of Oct. 11, 1492, a few hours before land was finally sighted, Columbus and other members of his crew reportedly watched a strange light bobbing up and down in the distance, following the now-traditional “falling leaf ” motion of UFOs. Columbus’ crew was uneasy and in a state of rebellion after their long and seemingly futile voyage. They regarded the mysterious light as a hopeful omen and, sure enough, land appeared on the horizon the next day (in the same vicinity as the unknown and never-explained light).

  When traffic between Europe and North America increased in the 19th century, sightings of UFOs multiplied dramatically. In some of these cases, the now-familiar UFO effects of sudden rises in temperature, blinding headaches, and conjunctivitis (eyes burned by ultraviolet rays from the objects) were noted.

  The Captain of the British steamer Flamborough was temporarily blinded and suffered a “considerable pain in his head” after viewing a brilliant flying object off the coast of Maine on Nov. 18, 1887. Others were reporting weird “globes of fire” flying in formation, and luminous, circular “clouds.” Sometimes the pungent smell of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide) was mentioned in these early reports. Dark spheres and seemingly metallic objects plummeted into the waters near ships, or rose suddenly out of the water to fly away.