by John A. Keel
Far in the interior of Brazil, according to the explorer Lieutenant Colonel P. H. Fawcett, there thrives a dreaded group of “bat people” who live in caves and possess telepathic powers.
Why haven’t any of these entities ever been photographed? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle performed a celebrated investigation into one set of photos of fairies taken in England by a couple of children in 1917. Sixty-six years later, in 1983, one of them signed a written confession, explaining how the pictures had been faked.
For some reason, children seem to see the little people more often than adults. Back in 1966, I chatted with a man on Long Island who told me the following story after extracting a promise that I wouldn’t use his name. One night that spring, he said, his small daughter ran into the house and told him that there were some little men in silver suits running about the backyard. He tried to shrug her off, but she was insistent. Finally he glanced into the backyard to appease her, and he was amazed to see three tiny figures darting around in the grass. They were less than 2 feet high and were wearing skin-tight metallic suits of some sort. He cautiously opened the door and stepped outside, and the three figures instantly ran to the far end of the yard and vanished.
The historical records certainly indicate that the little people have always existed all over this planet; that they possess the power of flight, the power of invisibility, and, to varying degrees, the power to dominate and control the human mind.
We call them elementals, too. In story after story, the witnesses encountered them near swamps, lakes, and rivers, often carrying out the same actions so often reported by UFO witnesses. Flying lights and spheres are said to accompany some fairies and little people. Witnesses were paralyzed in their presence, just as the unfortunate people who reportedly encountered vampires in central Europe were supposedly frozen in their tracks by some mysterious force or power radiating from the entities. The manifestations have remained the same throughout history. Only our interpretations of those events have changed.
The occult literature asserts that there are several different types of elementals. Fire elementals somehow utilize the energy of flames and materialize in burning houses, fireplaces, furnaces. Then there are water elementals, air elementals, and elementals that feast upon the energy of plants. (Some fascinating experiments with plants have been under way for several years by various independent researchers. Sensitive lie detector devices have been hooked up to potted plants and actually respond when other plants in the room are deliberately injured. The device also reacts to human pain, indicating that all living things might somehow be interrelated by undetermined energy forces.)
The most interesting elemental type is the humanlike being who materializes at séances. Such beings have actually been photographed and examined by medical doctors. The spiritualists have developed their own jargon to describe and explain these unbelievable materializations, but it does seem that these entities are identical to the ufonauts. In these cases, the medium goes into a trance, his or her metabolism declining almost to the point of death. Then a figure slowly begins to appear in the séance room. (In many cases, the room is fully lighted, and the witnesses completely surround the figure, ruling out mundane trickery.)
In the majority of cases, the entity resembles an Indian or an Oriental, with high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and reddish or olive skin. They usually wear robes or Indian garb but have also appeared in the accepted dress of the period. Long hair is a common feature. Both male and female entities have been described. They can speak audibly and carry on conversations with the witnesses. These séance materializations seem to be identical, also, to the Valkyrie types who appear repeatedly before isolated individuals.
Sir William Crookes, the famed physicist, attended no less than forty-five materializations of this kind, photographing and physically examining the entities.
Here is a rather routine description of a materialization event from the late 1800s, as recounted by Archbishop Thomas Colley in a commentary appended to the 1882 edition of Oahspe, witnessed by a group of doctors and clergymen: “A spirit form, eight inches taller than Dr. Monck [Reverend Francis Monck, the medium], grew from him by degrees, and building itself up into giant proportions, with muscular limbs developed like statuary of bronze, and of the color, there came into disconnected, independent vigorous life, apart from the medium, an ancient Egyptian …I now got the spirit to measure hands, placing its palm on mine. The hand was small—like all Easterns’, and the wrist was also small, but the arm was massive, muscular, bronzed, and hairy. Its eyes were black and piercing, but not unkindly; its hair lank and jet, and mustaches and beard long and drooping; its features full of life and expression, yet Sphinx-like. Its headdress was very peculiar, a sort of metal skullcap with an emblem in front, overhanging the brow, which trembled and quivered and glistened. I was suffered to feel it, but as I did so, it seemed to melt away like a snowflake under my touch, to grow solid again the moment after.”
In a séance room such an entity is automatically regarded to be a spirit—the shade of a long-dead Egyptian. But if the same entity wearing the same metallic skullcap should stride out of the bushes in West Virginia and alarm clandestine lovers in a parked car, he would be considered a spaceman.
Now we can reach another tentative conclusion. In order to materialize and take on definite form, these entities seem to require a source of energy; a fire or a living thing—a plant, a tree, a human medium (or contactee). Our sciences have not reached a point where they can offer us any kind of working hypothesis for this process. But we can speculate that these beings need living energy that they can restructure into a physical form. Perhaps that is why dogs and animals tend to vanish in flap areas. Perhaps the living cells of those animals are somehow used by the ultraterrestrials to create forms which we can see and sense with our limited perceptions. Perhaps human and animal blood is also essential for this process.
The Birth of Spiritualism
In 1823, young Joseph Smith woke up in a farmhouse near Palmyra, New York, to find a faceless “messenger” standing beside his bed. Within a few years, “Spring-heeled Jack” was leaping around the British countryside, his cape fluttering in the still night air. In 1846, the skies went mad with strange lights and peculiar meteorological phenomena. In 1847, the house occupied by the Mitchell Weekman family in the tiny hamlet of Hydesville, New York, only a few miles from Joseph Smith’s former home in Wayne County, developed a ghost. Somebody kept knocking on the door—but there was never anybody there. An eight-year-old girl in the family screamed that a cold, invisible hand touched her and caressed her body. The Weekman family packed up and moved out—and a family named Fox moved in.
In March 1848, the two Fox children, Kate, twelve, and Margaret, fifteen, not only heard the mysterious rappings and rattlings of the ghost, but they communicated with it.[12] They developed a simple code for yes and no and for all the letters of the alphabet and carried out conversations with the unseen entity. The story slowly leaked out, and the Fox sisters became famous. What’s more, the ghost apparently followed them about, and they were able to hold séances in other towns with the entity communicating with them by rapping on walls or tables.
This single sequence (or was it a communications breakthrough?) was the beginning of modern spiritualism. So here is another freakish coincidence to ponder: Both Mormonism and spiritualism were born in the same county in places only a few miles from each other!
Spiritualism became a rage in the 1850s and 1860s. Mediums blossomed all over the world. Many of them proved to be fraudulent and were merely cashing in on the fad. But others—many others—performed inexplicable feats. Because ghosts and spiritual manifestations seemed to offer proof of religious beliefs, many educated men took an active interest in investigating such phenomena. Leading clergymen, educators, and scientists took up the investigation of these matters as a hobby. Scientific journals of psychic research were founded and published the extensive reports of these above-average “ghost hunters.�
� We have been left a wealth of heavily documented case histories covering most of the nineteenth century.
Thomas Edison’s parents were active spiritualists, and Edison himself privately expressed his belief in the survival of the human spirit after death. He was born in 1847. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, spent the last half of his life pursuing and investigating occult matters, as did Sir William Crookes, a physicist who made a number of outstanding contributions to science (he was among the first to study radioactivity, and he invented the Crookes tube, predecessor to X-rays and radio tubes).
I cannot even begin to review all of the occult evidence here, but there are dozens of excellent books available covering the whole spectrum of spiritual events. If you take the time and trouble to examine some of the better literature, you will find precise parallels and correlations with the UFO phenomenon. It appears that the same forces are at work in both situations, the same patterns prevail (particularly the hoax patterns), and the same underlying purposes seem to be present.
In short, we can conclude that spiritualism is just another means of communication between the ultraterrestrials and ourselves. And this form of communication has been in constant use throughout history.
UFOs and Things That Go Bump in the Night
The late Dr. Nandor Fodor, a leading New York psychiatrist, made an extensive study of seemingly genuine trance mediums and even attempted to psychoanalyze their spirit guides, or alter egos. He also performed an outstanding study of the poltergeist phenomenon. In his book, Haunted People, written in collaboration with Hereward Carrington, he presented 375 typical poltergeist cases from A.D. 355 to A.D. 1947. A great many of these cases are identical to our modern UFO incidents.
For example, in September 1824, small “symmetric objects of metal” rained out of the sky near Orenburg, Russia. In 1836, globular lights appeared around the home of a Captain Lamber in Szeged, Hungary. Strange sounds were heard in the house, and a “woman in white” appeared and disappeared frequently over a long period. The breaking of glassware and rappings on doors and walls were routine in many of these cases all over the world. “A floating, vaporous body shaped like a football” was seen around a boardinghouse in New York in 1882 and was accompanied by rapping sounds. Dogs frequently reacted with terror during these manifestations. Bedclothes were yanked from beds by unseen hands, and many, many of the victims awoke in the middle of the night to find elusive phantoms standing over their beds.
One of the most celebrated of all poltergeist cases, known generally as the Bell Witch, took place in Robertson County, Tennessee, in the 1820s. The home of John Bell was plagued for years by a mysterious presence that made all kinds of noises, indulged in destructive manifestations, and even talked to the victims and the numerous witnesses. Lights “like a candle or lamp flitting across the yard and through the field” were frequently seen.
General Andrew Jackson (seventh President of the United States, 1829-37) reportedly paid a visit to the Bell homestead. As he neared the place, his horses suddenly halted, apparently unable to pull his wagon farther. The general got down and examined the wheels and the road and could find no reason for the horses’ struggle. Suddenly a metallic voice rang out from behind some bushes, “All right, General, let the wagon move,” and the horses were able to pull it again. This sounds like our first electromagnetic case—even though no motors or electrical circuits were involved!
Another witness, one William Porter, claimed that he tussled with an invisible entity in the Bell home. He was awakened in his bedroom when someone or something hauled the covers off him. He grappled in the dark and managed to roll the entity up in the quilt. Then he picked the struggling shape up and headed for the smoldering fireplace, intending to throw the cover, “witch” and all, into the fire. “I discovered that it was very weighty,” he wrote later, “and smelled awful. I had not got halfway across the room before the luggage got so heavy and became so offensive that I was compelled to drop it on the floor and rush outside for a breath of fresh air. The odor emitted from the roll was the most offensive stench I ever smelled.”
A detached, derisive voice frequently spoke to the Bells and the various people who visited them to witness the manifestations. It actually succeeded in breaking up the marriage plans of young Betsy Bell, saying “so many things to Betsy and Joshua [Joshua Gardner, her fiancé] in the presence of their friends of a highly embarrassing nature that the girl in time became quite hysterical and worn out in despair.”
This is a common factor in many poltergeist cases. The invisible entities loudly reveal and discuss the intimate secrets of the victims in the presence of outsiders, indicating that they, like the UFO entities, know everything about our life histories. This type of behavior is reported in case after case, extending far back into history. An English poltergeist back in A.D. 1190, for example, “used to talk with people and… it would reveal publicly deeds done from the time of their birth, which least of all they wished others either to hear or know.”
(In many modern UFO contact cases, the visible and apparently physical entities nearly always establish at the outset their complete knowledge of the contactee’s past, often coming up with information about distant relatives unknown to the contactee which, when checked out, proves to be valid.)
Another common factor in poltergeist cases is the sudden materialization or disappearance of physical objects. Stones have often fallen from the ceilings of rooms in such quantities that they had to be shoveled out every morning. This has even reportedly happened in tents on the desert. Ordinary objects, such as ashtrays, suddenly vanish and are later found in outlandish places. UFO contactees report this same kind of phenomenon shortly after they receive their first visit from the entities.
The controversial contactee Truman Bethurum soberly cited an incident in which the beautiful female captain of a flying saucer, Aura Rhanes, asked him to hold a plastic flashlight on his open palm. She stared at it intently, and it vanished instantaneously, without a trace. This, she told him, was what would happen if we tried to attack “them.” We would simply disappear. Demonstrations of this type have been staged since the beginning, as in the case of the prophet Hermas and his magical book which vanished after he had read it.
Bethurum’s story is a classic in ufology. He said he was sleeping on a truck on Mormon Mesa, outside Las Vegas, Nevada, on Sunday, July 27, 1952, when he awoke to find himself surrounded by eight or ten men, all under 5 feet in height. They looked like Latins or Italians, he reported, with dark olive skins, jet-black hair trimmed short, and tight-fitting blue-gray jackets and trousers. They spoke to one another in an unknown language but addressed him in perfect English. He was led to a hovering saucer and was introduced to Aura Rhanes. He saw a good deal of Captain Rhanes after that. She even materialized suddenly in his bedroom on a number of occasions, somewhat to the consternation of his wife, who later divorced him. In the UFO name game, “Aura Rhanes” might well have meant the aura reigns.
Truman Bethurum died on May 21, 1969.
Bedroom visitants and poltergeist activity are a common factor in the contactee syndrome. And these poltergeists are not only thieves and mischiefmakers, they are also proven arsonists. In hundreds of cases the haunted houses suffer mysterious fires. As soon as one fire is extinguished in one part of the house, another breaks out elsewhere. Witnesses such as doctors, policemen and firemen have been present and have actually seen the fires suddenly burst out in corners of rooms, curtains, waste baskets, and furniture. There seems to be no earthly explanation for these sudden conflagrations.
When I was visiting Hyderabad in central India, I heard stories of a haunted hut on the outskirts of the city that had been plagued by an arson-bent poltergeist. The local police chief had gone to investigate, and while he was in the hut, his trousers suddenly caught fire. That did it! He ordered the hut vacated and sealed up.
It is traditional that haunted houses eventually burn to the ground. UFO witnesses, researchers, an
d contactees have this same problem, as I pointed out earlier. Soon after researcher Stephen Yankee acquired a microfilm copy of Morris K. Jessup’s Varo Papers (a strange UFO document), his Michigan home went up in flames.
There have also been several cases in which human beings have been found burned to ashes, even though the chairs or beds they were in were only slightly scorched. It takes a very hot flame to reduce human bones to ashes. In recent years, there has been an increasing number of cases in which people have been found totally cremated in their automobiles while the upholstery was only mildly singed.
Water also plays an enigmatic role in the poltergeist phenomenon. Torrents of water from unknown sources have flooded houses, gushing from walls containing no pipes, squirting from ceilings, pouring down staircases, splashing by buckets full out of nowhere to drench witnesses.
Just as the UFO cultists have settled upon the extraterrestrial thesis to explain flying saucers, the occultists have decided that poltergeists are caused by energy radiated from disturbed children or by restless ghosts. The common procedure for investigating poltergeists is to examine the entire history of the house and land. In some cases, it is discovered that someone was murdered there or buried there years—even hundreds of years—before the manifestations began. So the ghost is blamed for the phenomenon. There are, of course, thousands of murders and violent deaths every year, and it might be useful to perform a study of all the scenes of these crimes to determine the percentage of hauntings that occur afterward. I suspect that percentage would be quite small.
