THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum

by Keel, John A.

  Believers in the extraterrestrial hypothesis have been repeatedly disappointed by the appearance of forms of silicon—one of the most common substances on earth—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 mystery in Tacoma Bay, 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. The poor slobs literally melt.

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  Ancient dragons, monsters, and demons supposedly reeked with the smell of brimstone (sulfur). Burning sulfur smells like rotten eggs. Modern witnesses often complain that the monsters—and some UFOs—smelled like rotten eggs. Sometimes the smell is even more rancid and is compared with the wretched stench of marsh gas. Marsh gas is composed of hydrogen sulfide, methane, and phosphine.

  Our first clue is, therefore, the awful smell. It can be so bad it makes dogs and people ill. I’ve received a powerful whiff of this myself in my travels. It reminded me of the hydrogen sulfide stink bombs I used to make with my chemistry set as a boy—when I wasn’t trying to build an atom bomb and become the first kid on my block to take over the world. But to saturate an outdoor area with this stink (it sometimes lingers for hours) would take an enormous quantity of hydrogen sulfide gas.

  Another important characteristic of our monsters is that they nearly always appear close to water—lakes, streams, reservoirs, swamps. This has stimulated some discussion that the creatures might be amphibians that actually live at the bottom of bodies of water and only rarely venture onto land. If this were actually the case, they shouldn’t be so desperately in need of a bath. They might be faintly scented with the odor of stagnant water. But hydrogen sulfide?

  Hydrogen is, of course, the first and most basic element in the universe. Some kind of chemical reaction is occurring in the UFO flap areas, probably a simple combination of carbon and hydrogen (methane gas) stimulated by the injection of a mass of energy. No mere animal could produce such a huge volume of gas by itself, no matter how long it had gone without a bath. So we can safely conclude that the smell accompanies the animal and is not necessarily produced by the animal. This smell is a byproduct of the chemical process which produces the transmogrification. In countless ghost stones well-documented in the psychic lore, there are descriptions of the smells that permeated the air while the spirits walked. The smell of rotten eggs is common, as is the smell of violets. In the famous “Bell Witch” case of the last century, a ghoulish visitor was able to fill a whole house with a wretched odor almost instantly. Like Mr. Harrison’s Momo, the Bell Witch smelled like excrement.

  There is something rotten out there, and it isn’t from Denmark.

  The horrible stench of the hairy monsters visited Trenton, New Jersey, in 1956 and felled a night watchman. The case deserved far more notice than it got at the time, for it was one of the rare incidents that provided some hard evidence, medical and legal. Harry Sturdevant, a watchman for 20 years with the Herbert Elkins Construction Company, was making his usual nightly patrol of a construction site when he saw a red light in the sky.

  “It was about 60 to 100 feet in diameter,” Sturdevant described it easing closer.

  It was shaped like a cigar, had no wings and no fins. It made a hissing sound like escaping steam.

  It gave me the greatest shock of my life. There was a smell like sulfur or brimstone, but it was different. I don’t know what it was really except it was very nauseating and it made me sick. I lost my sense of taste and smell; my throat would not swallow properly. My stomach felt worse than the time I was overcome with mustard gas in France in World War I.

  I collapsed in pain, and lay there on the ground for half an hour before I was able to drive.

  Sturdevant also suffered a temporary loss of hearing, possibly because of a sudden change of air pressure or ultrasonic waves coming from the object. He applied for workmen’s compensation and won his case. A thorough, sophisticated medical examination might have told us something important about the phenomenon. Unfortunately, even today medical examinations are rarely performed on witnesses. Investigating UFO enthusiasts are more interested in extracting minute details of what the witness saw (or thought he saw) than what he felt or suffered. The UFO experience is a total one, not just a visual perception. Indeed, many of the visual impressions are fleeting and inaccurate or even completely erroneous.

  Ufology was in disgrace in the 1950s. The few ufological spokesmen of the period were dedicated to attacking the sinister conspiracy to withhold the “truth” from the public, and no practical research was taking place on any level. Hairy monsters with body odors were of no interest to believers in Martians and Venusians. Even UFO landings, and there were many during that decade, were ignored or denounced as hoaxes by the ufologists who were striving for respectability and public acceptance. On the one hand they believed UFOs were space ships, but on the other they could not believe the things were actually landing and assorted creatures were climbing out of them.

  A family near Mahomet, Illinois, 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 from a normal $14 to a staggering $72. 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, December 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 too 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 flap 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 deaths by concussion going all the way back to 1946.

  Skyquakes—mysterious explosions in the sky—have been reported all over the world for many years, long before man broke the sound harrier and invented the sonic boom. Fort listed a number of skyquakes from the nineteenth century. This seems to be some kind of meteorological phenomenon, a sudden massive displacement of air in the upper atmosphere. So far as I know, no legitimate scientist has made a serious study of this phenomenon. Skyquakes are rarely associated with the appearances of UFOs even though the UFO enthusiasts do labor to put the blame on flying saucers. Phantom objects have been tracked electronically with radar and visually with theodolites traveling at speeds far exceeding the speed of sound within the atmosphere without producing sonic booms. To the believers, this is proof of their superior technology, but more sober minds, such as physicist-writer Arthur C. Clarke, think the absence of sonic booms proves their paraphysical or non-material nature. They simply do not displace air because they are not solid constructions.

  Thunderous explosions, causing little or no damage, have also occurred in haunted houses and in psychic manifestations. One explanation might be that when an entity or force suddenly materializes on or near the surface of the earth, it naturally displaces a mass of air equal to its own mass. This sudden displacement would produce an explosive effect. In ufology there are a number of cases in which the objects did not land or fly away but appeared or disappeared very suddenly, accompanied by a loud bang. In several recorded “little man” or fairy events, the creatures disappeared suddenly with a loud noise. If a temporarily physical
object is abruptly removed from the atmosphere, the air would rush in to fill the hole and this would produce an implosion.

  Skyquakes could be a partial answer to the periodic epidemics of shattered windows and windshields that can be traced back to the 1920s.

  Throughout the year 1954 and again in 1974, thousands of automobile windshields suddenly shattered or became strangely pitted. Maybe it happened to your own car. Newspapers from Canada to Florida busily reported this peculiar phenomenon which actually began in 1952 and continued through until the fall of 1954. Plate-glass windows were also affected, and hundreds of people in Toronto complained of a mysterious substance falling from the sky that burned their skins. Today, normal pollution would probably be blamed. But normal pollution does not include massive quantities of hydrofluoric acid, a chemical that attacks silica and is widely used to etch glass. Spray it on an automobile windshield and see what happens. Add it to hydrogen sulfide, and you not only have a terrible smell, you have a gas that can give you fluoride poisoning. It attacks the nose and throat, produces fainting spells, weakness, nausea, and respiratory failure. Excessive exposure to this gas can even cause the teeth to mottle and, in extreme cases, to fall out.

  A luminous cloud of this stuff visited Youngstown, Ohio, on Tuesday, July 4, 1967. At 9:15 p.m. that evening, Thomas Valley was sitting on his front porch when he suddenly found it hard to breathe. His neighbors also found their eyes watering and their lungs bursting as they plunged indoors to reach for their phones. A few blocks away, patrons in Lee and Eddie’s Lounge stumbled frantically into the street, and some collapsed as three police officers cruised along Market Street and noticed what appeared to be a large cloud of faintly luminous smoke rolling along the ground.

  “We pulled into the lot to check if a fire had started,” Lt. Howard Moore said. “When I got out of the cruiser, I began to choke, got dizzy, and my eyes watered.”

  The Youngstown Fire Department rushed pulmotors and oxygen equipment to the area. “It was like a phantom cloud that made your eyes water and made you feel weak,” Battalion Chief Glenn Schultz declared. Both the firemen and the police searched for the source of the gas but could find nothing. The mysterious cloud drifted away eastward. In the two weeks following the gas “attack,” hundred of citizens in the Youngstown area reported observing low-flying circular objects and strange lights. Some said the objects gave off a smell “like burning tar.”

  A similar incident was recorded on August 13, 1954, in far-off Singapore. An area covering two square miles around the Chiangi Airport was affected, and everyone indoors and out was choking and crying copious tears for several hours. Authorities could not pinpoint the source. In May 1967, a large section of Naples, Italy, had to be evacuated because of an overpowering toxic gas no one could identify.

  Several times since 1935, cities and villages around the Gulf of Mexico, particularly those along the coasts of Florida and Texas, have been hit by huge clouds of these noxious gases, apparently blowing in from the sea. Whole towns have been evacuated during these strange inundations. The phenomenon has spread all the way up the New England coast.

  On January 19, 1968, everyone in lower Manhattan held their noses as acrid, eye-smarting, throat-burning fumes poured over New York and Brooklyn, starring around 8 p.m. New Jersey’s oil refineries took the rap for that one. Unfortunately, the New Jersey smells would have had to not only fight the ocean breezes, but they would also have had to build up after peak working hours. Fifteen large luminous objects had been reported in the vicinity of nearby Jones Beach the week before, and the phones in neighboring Long Island villages had been out of action from 6:30 to 8 p.m., January 13, the hours when the objects were in the area. Between the thirteenth and the nineteenth, there were extensive local power failures in the Bronx, Queens, and on Long Island. When you add all these things up, you can conclude that something very unusual was happening in the New York area that January.

  Something even more unusual took place in 1963-65, when a section of Roger Mills County in Oklahoma had to be evacuated, because an evil-smelling something had settled there and was systematically killing off livestock and making all the inhabitants ill. Forty farms were affected by something that smelled like—you guessed it—rotten eggs. Roger Mills County is on the eastern tip of the state, far removed from any industrial complex and far from the stink factories of New Jersey. Total population of the county is only five thousand.

  This affair began in January 1963, on the farm owned by the Daniel Allen family. According to Mr. Allen, they suffered “terrible odors which made us nauseated and ill with suffocating, coughing, diarrhea, and burning of our flesh to a deep red.” The Allen home, a concrete-block ranch house built in 1955, started to crack and crumble. Within weeks, the invisible “stuff” was peeling and blistering the paint and plaster and causing curtains and clothing to disintegrate.

  “Dishes were eaten until they looked like mice had chewed them around the edges,” Mrs. Allen later told reporters. “Black holes were eaten in silver tableware, stainless steel articles, and cooking utensils.”

  While eating supper on the night of March 12, 1963, both Mr. and Mrs. Allen suddenly fainted. As soon as they recovered, they fled, abandoning their furniture, clothing, and house wares. They moved twice again to homes northeast of their original spread, but the curious plague followed them. Dr. Frank Buster, the county health authority, warned them to move further away. Dr. Philip Devanney of Sayre, Oklahoma, told them, “You have only hours to live if you don’t get out of what’s poisoning you.”

  The evil “stuff” spread to the Woodrow Myers farm 3.5 miles south of the Allen home. The Myers’s cattle sickened, and their three small children turned frail and pale, began to lose their teeth, and suffered fits of nausea, burning skin, dysentery, and coughing. Even the mice, birds, and insects seemed to vacate the county. Forty farmers in the area appealed to Oklahoma Gov. Henry Bellmon, and the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare joined the investigation. They concluded that “an air pollution problem does not exist in the vicinity.”

  The sheriff of nearby Hutchinson County, Hugh Anderson, issued a quarantine forbidding any resident of Roger Mills County from entering Hutchinson County “until such time as ‘the stuff’ is identified.”

  I have collected a fat file of reports describing mysterious “gas attacks” in recent years, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Phoenix, Arizona. Some of course have perfectly natural explanations, such as the leakage of chlorine gas, but most are inexplicable and point to the insertion of hydrogen sulfide and hydrofluoric gases into our atmosphere by some unknown source. As if we aren’t already doing a pretty good job of poisoning our own atmosphere, somebody or something is helping its out.

  That somebody staged a rather blatant demonstration over South Webster, Ohio, on January 9, 1975. People there saw a low-flying, unidentified aircraft circling over their village that afternoon, spewing out a cloud of mist. Within minutes everyone was gasping for breath. The gas caused nausea, burning of the eyes, sore throats, and skin irritation. Several people became ill from it, and 50 homes had to be evacuated overnight until the gas cleared.

  “We don’t know what it was or if it was dumped accidentally or on purpose,” Dep. Archie Kirker said. “It covered about a square mile and took more than five hours to disperse.”

  Local officials tried vainly to identify the mysterious aircraft. After releasing its cloud of hydrofluoric gas, it disappeared into the wild blue yonder.

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  If a long-haired blond Venusian knocks at your door while you are reading this and asks for a glass of water so he can take a pill (the pill will be green or orange, of earthly manufacture, and composed of a derivative of sulfur), you can be almost certain that the same little drama will be taking place at some other house at the same time, but perhaps hundreds of miles away from you.

  This is the law of synchronicity. Duplicate paranormal events occur simultaneously in different locations to lend cred
ibility to a belief or frame of reference. Ufological lore abounds with synchronous events, but so, too, does religious, occult, and psychic lore. Paranormal incidents take place in massive waves, sometimes grouped years apart. Poltergeist manifestations erupt simultaneously with UFO flaps. Angels, demons, hairy monsters, and sea serpents all surface at the same time that UFOs are stopping lone drivers on remote back roads. Window areas suddenly explode with all kinds of ghosts, UFOs, monsters, animal disappearances, and people suffering inexplicable lapses of memory. (A window area is a geographical location where unusual events have occurred over and over again, century after century.) Ufologists try to explain the flap phenomenon by pointing out that it takes a long time for the spaceships to go back and forth from their home planer. Occultists nourish a more complicated belief—that the earth passes through zones in space inhabited by terrible spiritual beings. Each time we enter such a zone, the beings ooze through holes in our “etheric envelope,” these holes being located in what I call window areas.

  What intrigues me is the fact that each new wave produces a type of entity, even a type of event, unknown in previous waves and never repeated in later waves. There are, of course, numerous consistencies as well. Otherwise the beliefs inspired by the manifestations would die out very quickly.

  On November 5-6, 1957, there were several UFO landings and contacts throughout the United States. Yellowish-green ufonauts spoke briefly in broken English to startled motorists on a highway near Playa del Rey, California, on the night of November 6, while a truck driver near House, Mississippi, was being confronted by a group of pasty-faced shorties who babbled in a language he couldn’t understand. But the big event of that distant flap was the amazing encounter of a fertilizer salesman named Reinhold Schmidt outside Kearney, Nebraska. Schmidt claimed he was given a tour of a grounded cigar-shaped object by some German-speaking pilots (he spoke fluent German). The next morning, Everett Clark of Dante, Tennessee, reportedly saw a glowing object in a field outside his house. The German-speaking ufonauts were apparently trying to catch his dog. Many miles away, a New Jersey farmer named John Trasco was chasing a little man with large, bulging frog-like eyes off his property. “We are a peaceful people,” the little man protested. “We don’t want no trouble. We just want your dog.”