by John A. Keel
The newsmen decided it was all a joke but that it “was a first-rate performance … whoever that was had talent and electronic equipment to work with.”
In my travels I found that newspaper offices all over the country have received these calls, usually hollow voices that sound “like they’re in the bottom of a well,” with background sounds like electronic music or Teletypes. The purpose of the background is simple enough … it makes it impossible to tape the voices. I’ve tried and found that the background completely smothered the voice on the tape.
I kept a careful log of the crank calls I received and eventually cataloged the various tactics of the mysterious pranksters. Some of these tactics are so elaborate they could not be the work of a solitary nut harassing UFO believers in his spare time. Rather, it all appears to be the work of either paranormal forces or a large and well-financed organization with motives that evade me.
From my years in show business I know that talented mimics are rare and that some voices are almost impossible to imitate. Nevertheless, cur hypothetical Organization is able to mimic almost anyone—including myself. And I have a flat, colorless voice somewhat like former Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s. Professional mimics like Rich Little and David Frye were never able to get Agnew’s voice down pat.
At 1 A.M. on the morning of Friday, July 14, 1967, I received a call from a man who identified himself as Gray Barker from West Virginia. The voice sounded exactly like Gray’s softly accented mellifluous own, but he addressed me as if I were a total stranger and carefully called me “Mr. Keel.” At first I wondered if maybe he hadn’t been out celebrating. The quiet, familiar drawl told me that he knew I wrote for newspapers and he had just heard about a case which he thought I should look into. It was, he said, similar to the Derenstein case. Gray and I had visited Woodrow Derenberger together so I knew this was not the kind of mistake he would make.
Around that time I had received a number of reports from people in the New York area who had been receiving nuisance calls from a woman who identified herself as “Mrs. Gray Barker.” I knew that Gray was not married but when I mentioned these calls to this “Gray Barker” he paused for a moment and then said, “No, Mrs. Barker hasn’t been calling anybody up there.” He returned to his recital of an absurdly insignificant UFO sighting near West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. It was not the kind of incident that would have inspired a long-distance call. Later I did try to check it out and found all the information he gave me was false.
We talked for about ten minutes and throughout that period “Gray” sounded like a man under duress … as though someone was holding a gun to his head. I tricked him several times with different meaningless references and by the time I hung up I was definitely convinced that this man was not the real Gray Barker.
An hour later my phone rang again and a young man said, “Gray Baker has been trying to reach you … he asked us to give you this number and to please call him.” He recited a number that was identical to my own except for the last digit.
There were more calls from strangers that night, and more pointless messages from Gray Baker.
The next day I called Gray long distance and he denied having placed the call, naturally.
Soon after that I discovered that another “John Keel” had been phoning people around the country, imitating my voice and mannerisms exactly. Mary Hyre received one such call. I phoned her a few days afterward and she said, “I’m glad you’re feeling better … you sounded sick or drunk the other night.”
“What other night?”
“When you called a couple of nights ago. Remember we talked about your letter and what you thought was going to happen on the river.”
I had not called her and discussed the letter. Nor had I discussed the disaster prediction with anyone other than the contactees who were told about it.
Jaye P. Paro called me one morning to complain.
“You must think I’m crazy. I wouldn’t go up to Mount Misery alone at midnight.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded.
“Last night. You called and told me to meet you on Mount Misery.”
“I didn’t call you last night, Jaye, and I certainly wouldn’t ask you to do such a thing anyway.”
“You’re putting me on. It sounded exactly like you.”
I spent most of March 1968 in Washington, D.C. While I was gone an old army buddy, a serious, quiet man who worked in advertising, stayed in my apartment. He was totally reliable and not a practical joker. When I returned I found a stack of messages from phone calls he had received while I was gone. One was from George Clark, a UFO enthusiast in New Jersey. He had called on March 23 and asked for me to call him back. I never got around to it. So a few days later he called again and I apologized for not returning his previous call. There was a stunned silence on the other end and then he slowly told me that I had called him back around 10 P.M. on March 27. A voice that sounded exactly like mine had talked to him at length, using my pet expressions and noncommittal statements such as, “Well, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next.”
Two days later George said he called my number again around 8 P.M. and a “hippie” answered. “No, man, Mr. Keel ain’t here right now … but he ought to be back soon. Would you like to leave a message, man?” George left a message with him.
That particular evening I was back in New York and sitting next to my phone.
Three months earlier, on January 18, 1968, my phone went dead again. The main office of my exchange could find nothing wrong, so a repairman was dispatched to my apartment. He examined my telephone but it seemed okay. I accompanied him to the basement where he unlocked the telephone room and began examining the maze of wires. The multitude of connections are coded in such a vague way that only a real expert can pick out an individual line.
“This is where your line is connected,” he explained to me. “And you see…” He stopped and stared at the wires. “Look at this. This wire has been cut.” He waved a neatly snipped wire. Someone had managed to single out my telephone line in that maze and cut it with a pair of pliers!
As soon as the wire was spliced and my phone was working again I called my friendly telephone representative.
“This I must have in writing,” I snapped.
A few days later I received a letter from her stating that my phone had become disconnected on January 18 because a piece of solder in the main office had loosened. I knew there was only one piece of solder on my line in the main exchange and I had examined it personally only the month before.
Between the IRS, the phone company, Apol and his gang, and flying saucers I was rapidly becoming a candidate for the funny farm.
18:
“Something Awful Is Going to Happen…”
I.
Mrs. Virginia Thomas was working in her kitchen deep inside the TNT area when she heard a loud squeaking sound unlike anything she had ever heard before in her years there.
“The best way I can describe it,” she told Mrs. Hyre and me, “is that it was like a bad fan belt … but much louder. I stepped outside. It seemed to be coming from one of the igloos. Then I saw a huge shadow spreading across the grass. It was just after noon so there shouldn’t have been any shadow like that. Then this figure appeared. It walked erect like a man, but it was all gray, and it was much bigger than any man I ever saw. It moved very fast across the field and disappeared into the trees. It didn’t seem to be walking exactly. It was almost gliding … faster than any man could run.
“It was the hunting season so I knew it wasn’t a hunter. No hunter in his right mind would dress in gray. Around here they all wear red coats and red caps. And it wasn’t a bear or anything like that. It really scared me.”
Since that sighting on November 2, 1967, Mrs. Thomas had been plagued by bad dreams.
“I see a lot of strange people around the river,” she explained. “It’s like some kind of invasion or something. They come over the bridge in trucks and they pour into the TN
T area. We grab the kids and run. I can’t figure out what it means.”
I had flown to West Virginia after a trip to Atlanta and a quick tour through the Carolinas investigating some UFO landings. Mrs. Hyre had picked me up at the Charleston airport, and as we drove to Point Pleasant she told me about her own dreams.
“Just before I got your letter,” she said, “I had a terrible nightmare. There were a lot of people drowning in the river and Christmas packages were floating everywhere in the water.”
“Maybe you were just picking up my thoughts somehow,” I suggested.
“Maybe. But I’ve covered a lot of drownings on that river, but never anything like this dream. There were so many people. I’ve been feeling uneasy ever since. And everybody else feels the same way. You can’t really put your finger on it … but it’s like something awful is about to happen.”
Perhaps it was only suggestion and an emotional hangover from all I had been going through, but when we reached Point Pleasant I could feel a heavy atmosphere of foreboding. I wandered around the village under an oppressive cloud. One by one, old friends confided in me. “You know, Keel, something is wrong here. I don’t know what. Ever since all that flying saucer business last spring things just haven’t seemed right.”
“We don’t get many UFO reports anymore,” Mary told me. “And except for that thing Mrs. Thomas saw, Moth-man seems to be laying low. Everything is quiet. Too quiet.”
Toward midnight on November 19, Mary and I were cruising through the TNT area. The sky was heavily overcast. It had been raining earlier and no stars were visible. The cloud ceiling was probably below five thousand feet.
“Don’t look now, Mary,” I said lightly. “But there’s one of our friends straight ahead.”
A brilliant light was bouncing around in the blackened sky over a row of hills far to the east. Mary stopped the car and we watched it silently for about ten minutes. It dropped down, then shot upward again. It slid from side to side, moving several degrees and then returning to its original position. Finally, Mary started her car again and drove slowly along the dirt road, hoping to find a better vantage point. We passed through a wooded section and when we reached another clearing the object was gone.
“Well, what do you think?” she asked laconically.
“It definitely wasn’t a star or a plane,” I observed. “It was so low somebody else was bound to have seen it. Let’s wait and see if we get any reports.”
We didn’t have to wait long. At 12:45 that morning Mr. Albert Brown, a shift superintendent at a mine near Elmwood, West Virginia, was driving home from work when he, too, noticed an unusual light weaving around the sky. He stopped his car and watched.
“It seemed to turn colors,” he told us later. “First it was white, then blue, then orange. It looked like it was going down on top of a hill.”
Mr. Brown was northeast of the TNT area on Route 35, approximately twenty miles from our position in a direct line. After watching the object for a few minutes, he tried to find a road that might lead him into the hills where the object seemed to be “playing.” But he couldn’t find such a road, so he simply parked and watched, enthralled. Finally he went home and called the Civil Defense in Charleston. They told him to call the state police. A police car was sent to the area but the thing was gone by the time they arrived.
Who or what was on that remote hilltop, I wondered? Was some little cabin being bathed in an eerie light? Was some lonely person there staring fixedly, paralyzed, into the night?
II.
From West Virginia I went to Washington, D.C. Al Johnson, an old army friend, was working for Voice of America and he had been doing a series of broadcasts on flying saucers, covering every aspect. (VOA is our official propaganda outlet and Johnson’s pro-UFO programs were heard around the world.) In the VOA studios we taped an hour-long discussion on the subject, covering everything from purple blobs to contactees.
Finally I returned to my New York apartment at 2 A.M. in early December, nursing a heavy cold, a souvenir of the freezing West Virginia rains, exhausted. Before I even had a chance to take off my coat the telephone jangled.
Dan Drasin was on the line and I had never heard him in such a state. His normally calm voice dripped with terror.
“How can I stop all this, Keel?” he cried.
“Stop what?”
“All the things that have been happening. I want to quit. I want out!”
“Look, I just got in. What’s wrong? What’s been happening?”
“Everything. I can’t take it anymore.”
I knew Dan didn’t drink or take drugs, and I certainly never expected him to go to pieces.
“There’s only one way ‘out,’ Dan. This damned thing becomes an obsession … a fixation. The only way to stop all the nonsense it to stop thinking about UFOs. Get rid of all your files. Take up stamp collecting or chasing women. The UFO business is emotional quicksand. The more you struggle with it, the deeper you sink.”
I finally calmed him. A few days later he gave me part of his files and destroyed the rest. I returned his files to him a year or so later. I asked him many times about what prompted that frantic phone call but he would never discuss it.
The day after I returned, Al Johnson called. The tape of our interview had been accidentally erased, he said. He wanted me to come to Washington and do another one, which I finally did several months later. An engineer had accidentally placed the first tape on a pile to be erased. Such errors were becoming routine to me. On one occasion, a German reporter came to my apartment with a camera crew to interview me for German television. Originally he planned to shoot about fifteen minutes of film, but I was so brilliant, charming and informative that we ended up doing a full half-hour. A few days later he phoned me.
“We can’t understand it, Mr. Keel,” he began, with dismay in his voice. “But the footage we shot in your apartment isn’t usable. Parts of it are overexposed and sections of the sound track are filled with static.”
The same reporter, incidently, had visited Derenberger in West Virginia and was present when Woody announced, “Cold is over the house right now.” They went outside, and, sure enough, a large luminous blob was soaring casually overhead.
Strange things happened to the written word, too. I was at Ivan’s farm one afternoon when a New York editor called and demanded to know what had become of a UFO story Ivan had promised him.
“I sent it to you a week ago,” Ivan protested.
When we went into town to pick up the mail there was a large manila envelope with a Florida postmark. Ivan opened it and threw the contents down in disgust. It was the UFO story which he had mailed to New York the week before! Somehow it had gone to Florida instead and someone had remailed it back to him.
My own problems were equally bizarre. The editor of a short-lived occult magazine asked me to contribute an article, “anything … it can just be something from your trunk.” I dug out a short, unpublished piece from my files and mailed it to him. There was a deafening silence. A couple of weeks later I met him for lunch and he pulled out a sheaf of papers.
“I’m afraid we really can’t use this, John,” he said. He handed me a dog-eared manuscript, single-spaced in elite type. I have always used pica type and automatically double-space my manuscripts. My name and address were at the top of this masterpiece and it had arrived at his office in one of my envelopes. As I read it I could see that it was a real piece of garbage. To this day I don’t know what happened to my manuscript, or how the trashy substitute was switched with it.
When I returned to New York in December I found that my entire stable of contactees was mourning my passing. Apol, Lia, Cloe, and their band of poseurs had convinced them all that I had come to an untimely end in a mine cave-in. This marked the beginning of a new phase. It was no more Mr. Nice Guy. The entities spread vicious rumors, turned against the contactees, and terrified them. Jane woke up one night to find all the gas jets on her kitchen stove were turned on and the house wa
s filling with fumes. The same thing happened to Shirley, and on the same night. Fred Miller, an elderly Long Island farmer who entertained men in shiny spacesuits in his kitchen, suffered a rash of mysterious fires.
Even the old devil and Daniel Webster theme was dusted off. Harassed contactees were ordered to sign an impressive-looking piece of parchment, allegedly a contract for their beleaguered souls. I was caught up in the game, playing old Daniel’s role, arguing with demons to save the contactees. They let me win, of course, having proved their point. Good and evil were synonomous in their phantasmagorical world.
When Linda Scarberry gave birth to a baby girl that month she decided to name her Daniella Lia. No one other than a couple of contactees knew of the Indian-like entity named Lia. Linda had just picked the name from left field because she liked it. Later Dan Drasin told me his mother’s name was Lia … a fact I had not known. Neither had Linda.
Synchronocity all over the place!
On my way to see an editor of True magazine one afternoon, the elevator in the Fawcett building stopped inexplicably between floors and the lights went out for several seconds. That night a contactee called to tell me she had met Mr. Apol and he was chuckling over how I had been “stuck in an elevator.”
The big “EM effect” slated for December 15 was now more clearly defined. The space people were timing it so it would coincide with the annual Christmas tree ceremony on the White House lawn, I was told. At the very moment when President Lyndon Johnson threw the switch to light up the tree, the power all over the country would fail. Knowing the entities’ perverse sense of humor, and impressed by the accuracy of many of their previous predictions, I bought this lock, stock, and barrel.
My biggest concern, however, was my telephone. My bills were now astronomical. I was constantly being cut off in the middle of conversations, or foreign sounds were injected into my line. Somebody would strum a one-stringed guitar or blow a shrill whistle while I was talking. Like Ivan, I often heard the distinct sound of an extension being picked up or put down. Electronic beeps, eerie music, hollow metallic voices, all became common on the blasted instrument. My gentle protests to the telephone company turned into howls of rage. I demanded the privilege to personally examine my telephone line from one end to the other. And the telephone company granted permission.
