Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeart Radio in grim and Mild from Aaron Mackey. For the best experience, listen with headphones.
I would like to tell you a little bit about tonight's speaker, mister John Keel. Mister Keele writes for approximately one hundred and fifty newspapers in this country and all over the world which deal exclusively with the problem of UFOs. For the North American Newspaper Alliance that's NASA, he's traveled over one hundred for a out of ten thousand miles in nineteen sixty six alone. He personally has investigated scores of UFO incidents, and he has interviewed scores of witnesses.
Mister Keel, I would say, at the present time, has done more recently surely for the UFO subject than any other writer or lecturer that I know of, and it gives me personally a great deal of finessius faction to bring him now to our microphonas mister John Keel.
I'm Toby Ball, and this is Strange Arrivals Episode ten, Invasion of the Ultra Terrestrials. The difference between UFO stories that become widely known and those that fall into obscurity is often a product of the telling. Simply put, an exciting story will gain traction and a less exciting one will fade away. The classic example of this is the nineteen forty seven Roswell Crash, which we covered in season two.
The incident largely disappeared from the UFO world soon after it happened, only to resurface in nineteen eighty with the publication of Charles Burlett's and William Moore's The Roswell Incident. After that retelling, it became a staple of UFO lore. Behind every famous citing or encounter, there is a storyteller who made the experience captivating to the public, as we saw with the moth Man encounters and all they went with them. One such storyteller was John Keel.
It's interesting to me because I was attracted to his books and writings from a very early age, and this is when I was first sort of became interested in weird stuff, and like him, I'd read the books of Charles Forts. I was sort of subscribing to Fourteen Times and to Flying Sourcer Reviews. I'm David Clark. I would describe myself as a folklorist and journalist. I work at Sheffield Heller from the University where I teach in the journalism department, and for a couple of decades I worked
as a news reporter before I got into academia. But I'm also the author of a lot of books and articles on anomalous phenomena, UFOs, cryptozoology, and Footian subjects. The issues of Flying Source Review that I was reading had a lot of his articles in there, and what struck me immediately because I was a budding writer myself and I was trying to get break into writing and get
things published. I just loved his writing style. I put me a finger on what it is about his writing style today, I think it's fast paced, it's energetic, kits, it draws you in, uses a lot of sort of quote speech, and I didn't realize it at the time, and now as a teach on the journalism course, I've come to realize that he was writing in what became known as the new journalism style, which was popularized by in Hunter S. Thompson Tom Wolfe.
New journalis was a movement that developed in the nineteen sixties and seventies. It featured a literary approach to reporting and centered the journalist as both a character and the story and a subjective narrator.
He sort of crafted his own version of it rather than writing in the way that they were. He's incorporated all this sort of forty and weirdness and mixing nonfiction with fiction and with verbatim reportes, and I don't know a real heady mix that to me as a I think I must have been thirteen or fourteen years old when I first read the Mothmann prophecies. Even today, it just blew my mind.
John Keel was born in nineteen thirty in western New York State. In nineteen fifty seven, he published a memoir titled Jadu. It recounted his travels, mostly in Asia and his strange experiences.
He'd gone to Egypt, where it's seen his first flying sorcerer, I think, in nineteen fift fifty two. And he'd been to Iraq, where I think he may have even met someone that sounds very much like Sadam Hussein in the mid nineteen fifties, and he crossed over into It, traveled into India, into Kashmir, and actually managed to get over
the border into Tibet before the Chinese closed it. In his autobiography Jadou, he talks about being led by these people up into this remote valley where they were hearing these crying noises, and he saw what we would describe as the Yeti or the abominable snowman's.
This is from Jadou describing his encounter with the Yeri. It gives you an idea of the sense of adventure that he was able to convey through his writing.
The Lamas had given me a bare little monk's cell for the night, and I was sitting there trying to finish up some notes before going to bed. The cry came drifting across the Yuksam Plateau on the low icy wind sweeping down from the frosty head of Mount kanchun Junga, only a few miles away. At first I thought it was just a bird and didn't pay much attention to it. Then a flurry of activity sounded in the dark, smelly corridor in the old high Lama of Dutti. A wizard,
baggy eyed little man appeared in my doorway. You're here, he asked excitedly. Here was just a bird, wasn't it?
No bird?
Shukba Kil and a guide set off to track the Yeddi. Shukpa is another name for the same animal. They follow its tracks for days, encountering strange things along the way, including a kind of seance in a Buddhist temple high in the Himalayas. Eventually he arrives in the village of Lachin, which he says is eighty eight hundred feet above sea level. Children had apparently seen the Yeddi just hours before his arrival and take him to the spot, and that is where Keel has his encounter.
Cautiously, I moved forward, staggering up and inclined paths strewn with giant boulders. Finally I emerged onto the edge of a sweeping cavity filled with water, where broken trees and decayed bushes poked up like skeletons. That was where I saw it. Maybe it wasn't a YETI I wasn't close enough to be absolutely sure. But something was out there across the lake, something big, breathtakingly big and brown and moving swiftly, splashing through the shallow, icy waters toward a
pile of boulders. As it neared them, another brown blur moved out to meet it, and together they disappeared beyond the debris of a landfall.
Keel also read the works of Charles Fort. Fort wrote a series of books in the early twentieth century that defined the realm of the paranormal. He was a collector of facts and stories that he related to show the pervasiveness of things and events that were not explained by current science, things like spontaneous human combustion, rains of frogs, poltergeists, unexplained disappearances, and of course UFOs.
I think the influence from Fort was mostly just this idea that there are a lot of weird things happening. It's not just one thing or another. To my understanding, Fort did not necessarily theorize about what might be causing various things.
Aaron Gullias, host of the Saucer Life podcast.
He was more of a collector of stories and a coalator of stories, and Keel takes that idea of looking at a wide array of strange things that's happening and then theorizing about what might be going on. And one phrase from Fort that Keel mentions at least a few times in various writings is this idea that humans on earth, that we are property, that we belong to somebody. There's something out there that We're not much different from the
other animals. We're just part of the collection. So what Keil does is he'll take little phrases like that and sort of spin them into theories. Kills an interesting guy, and he came up with these various ideas and never you'd never really get a huge impression about what he actually comes down on the side of as far as believing any of this, But there's a lot of wild thought and speculation and things like that in his writing.
I think he was described as the olmful terrible of vieupology, you know, terrible French pronunciation, And I think he just enjoyed disrupting the whole scene.
Keel especially like poking at what are called the nuts and bolts researchers, the ones who wanted to use scientific methods to find evidence and proof of metallic craft flying through our skies.
He described them as serious in inverted comma, serious euthologists, the type that I mean. I do this. I'm someone who spends lots of times looking at government documents and things, but I do think there's a group that take themselves very very seriously and the whole thing about contact tees, for instance, and the more esoteric aspects of upology which Kiele loved to talk about and to write about. There is a group of people who just want that not to be part of the UFO myth.
In fact, the nuts and Bolts people found the contactees and esoteric thinking to be embarrassing and to undermine what they considered the importance of the topic. Here's Aaron Gollias again talking about Keel. He mentions NICAP and APRO, which were two prominent civilian in UFO research organizations that tended towards the nuts and Bolt school of ufology.
He was a UFO person, but he was not somebody that would go to NICAP or APRO meetings and sort of get excited about convincing the Air Force to release all of its paperwork. I think it was Keel who had this line in one of his articles where he sort of reversed the way things are normally presented and he says the UFO research community is not telling the Air Force what it knows about flying saucers and basically saying, look, look, the Air Force probably doesn't know any more than we do,
and probably they know less. We just think they have the answer because we think they're physical objects in the air. But if it's stranger than that, then the Air Force isn't going to have a clue one way or the other. So that sort of puts him at odds with the nuts and bolts flying saucer people who dominated the scene in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Where Keel was probably the most popular was with those other flying saucer people that weren't necessarily part of that mainstream.
In an open letter to all UFO researchers released on January first, nineteen sixty eight, Keel blasted the UFO community for not generating any substantial research. He writes about the vast number of appearances of these objects in nineteen sixty seven and believes it important that a better understanding of their appearance is necessary.
The UFO activity is far greater than the UFO reports. Each report probably represents thousands of non reported sightings. The sightings are therefore unimportant to the big picture, and their only value is to provide a statistical springboard. It may be that the objects themselves are irrelevant to the basic problems inherent in the phenomenon if they are are merely vehicles of some type, then we must determine the actual purposes of their many landings and covert activities in isolated,
thinly populated sections of the world. Later, he writes, remember this, sightings are generally irrelevant, even misleading. Why do you suppose the Air Force spends so little time and effort investigating routine sightings.
So anyone who's trying to find evidence of physical UFOs, you know not and Baltz craft are on a hiding to nothing. They're never going to find them. It's like trying to find the end of a rainbow. You know you're never going to find that. And I think he will realize that, and that's why he came up with the concept of ultraterrestrials.
Rejecting the idea that UFOs were from outer space, Keel put forward a theory involving what he called the super spectrum and ultraterrestrials, a theory that was expansive, engrounded in an eccentric reading of history, and well unusual. After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment. I think if you talk to most people about UFOs, even if they aren't believers or have any interest in the subject, their
understanding will be that UFOs come from outer space. This is called the extraterrestrial hypothesis or ETCH, and this is where most researchers start. But some researchers get frustrated by their inability to approach an answer to the phenomenon. This group included j Allen Heinek, the in house scientists for Project Blue Book and the best known UFO researcher in the sixties and seventies again David clark Well.
Heinech, like lots of other people who've gone through that stage, was trying to make the subject scientifically respectable. He was using a lot of scientific language to use a phrase that Keile used to use, the people just tilting at the same windmills over and over again and reinventing the wheel, and trying to put something into a box and make people take it seriously in a scientific way that it's impossible to categorize in that way, because the UFO is what is it.
Heineck eventually distanced himself from et and became more interested in stranger explanations. John Keel was already there.
And what Keel does is he begins to look at UFOs and other paranoral phenomenon not as necessarily discrete things,
but maybe all being various expressions of one phenomenon. And one of the ideas he discusses quite a bit is this almost ultradimensional theory of UFOs and other paranormal phenomenon, where perhaps there are entities, objects, things in dimensions that exist above ours, sort of like an overlay to our dimension that at various times and in various places or to various people, these things break through, and people on our side perceive something that might be completely normal in
this other dimension, but for us in our dimension seems amazing or strange or physically impossible.
Kiel lays out this theory in his nineteen seventy five book The Eighth Tower.
And he came up with this amazing, as I thought at the time, amazing idea about the supersprum of these things were from some sort of higher vibration, and that they came into our will via this all of the ultraviolet frequencies, and that the vibration so that they came into the visible light spectrum. This is set out in his final book, The Eighth Tower, which is just Bulker's.
The Eighth Tower is the book that lays out Kiel's theory of what he calls the super spectrum and ultra terrestrials. He talks about both of these ideas in an incredibly broad context, involving the entire world and going back to deep prehistoric times. Trying to summarize the entire book would be impossible, but we can get at some of the basic ideas. First, Kiel says that there's a super spectrum of vibrations that we are unable to detect, but which
definitely exist. The easiest way to understand this is probably the idea that there are colors that exist but not within the spec visible to humans. Ultraviolet light, for instance, is below the frequency that we can detect. Keel's theory is that there is an entire reality that exists in the same place that we do, but that we can't detect. Paranormal events, he says, are when that reality interacts with ours.
He gives an example of a boy who is looking through a microscope at a drop of water he sees a microbe. The microbe, if it was capable of awareness, would have no idea that the boy even existed. Kiel then says that if the boy used the point of a needle to manipulate the microbe, the microbe would quote have no frame of reference for such an object, so it would have to speculate and theorize and invent an explanation.
He further says that if you explain to the microbe that a world exists outside of its under standing, it would not believe you and tell you that everyone knows that the universe is made of liquid. He goes on to say.
The plastic masses of energy that form the nucleus of the UFO phenomenon exist outside our time in the same way, and like the boy's needle, only passed through our dimension occasionally.
And later.
The energy field of the super spectrum shares the space of our solar system, define another one of our physical laws. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Because the energy of the super spectrum is markedly different from the energy of the electromagnetic spectrum, the two can occupy a single space.
As Arengolius said earlier, the super spectrum exists as kind of an overlay over our own reality, and because these visional breakthroughs from the super spectrum are not really from our reality. The physical laws that we experience don't apply to them. Thus, UFOs can move in ways that seem to defy the laws of physics, and cryptids can just disappear into thin air. Speaking of which, the other part
of this theory is the idea of ultraterrestrials. These are beings from the super spectrum that occasionally end up in our reality. Kiel puts this in a historical context of priests of ancient civilizations communing with gods. He theorizes that these priests are people with enhanced psychic abilities that allow them to more easily perceive the super spectrum. Are you still with me?
Keel?
Rights?
The religious orders conjure angels, even great luminous blobs purporting to be God himself. The magical crafts called up demons and great spirits. The spiritualists summon the shades of the deer departed.
He says that these rights can summon altraterrestrials from the super spectrum, and when the altraterrestrials interact with humans, their substance changes from pure energy to atomic reality, and they are now in our physical world. Kiel says, that they are adrift without a mind of their own.
Some of these transmogrifications attain a degree of independence once they have been created, but they are mindless and lost. They wander around our dimension as ghosts and goblins, harmless until they find a believer. Then they feed off the mind and emotions of that believer, assuming the identity subconsciously chosen by the believer, and creating manifestations within the context of the belief or frame of reference.
I think I know what it means in that there is no external agency that's creating this, and that we are the phenomenon. That's how we phrased it. And I think it means that all the stories, all the experiences, are all things that are happening to us that appear to be external. There's an external source, but they're actually generated by us that were almost like a dream that we're living.
This theory explains why paranormal experiences change over the centuries, from fairies and werewolves to the Yeddi and aliens or angels, to giant airships to UFOs. While the altra terrestrials are separate from us, our minds give them their form, and so the paranormal phenomena comes in large part from inside us. This was broadly speaking, fairly close to theories put forward by most notably prominent UFO researcher Jacques Valet, who laid out a similar vision in his nineteen sixty nine book
Passport to Magonia. But Keil had been working on this for years and claimed that he was the originator of these ideas. This is from a letter to the editor that appeared in Gray Barker's Newsletter in March nineteen seventy six. Keel begins by referencing a drawing of him that appeared on the cover of a previous edition.
Dear Gray, my usual fee for allowing my handsome countenance to be used on the cover of scurrilous publications is five thousand dollars. However, in this case you will be an exception. I have instructed my lawyer to sue you for everything you've got.
He then claims that Alan Heinez and especially Jacques Valet's recent works were essentially restating things that he had theori rised and written about in the nineteen sixties, in which those two men had criticized at the time. He refers to Valet's nineteen seventy five book The Invisible College as part Valat, part Keel, and part bullshit.
Then he writes, the simple truth is this, there is nothing whatsoever to the UFO phenomenon. There is nothing to be gained by a scientific study of the matter. The etch is nothing but a trick, a propaganda device that has been foisted upon us historically. The overall phenomenon has done considerable damage to the human race and is responsible for the deaths of millions of people. It is human to indulge in wishful thinking and hope that it is leading us somewhere, but it has always let us down
dead ends to destruction. I don't think that's situation is suddenly going to change.
Barker replied that he was glad Keel was suing him for everything he had, because his net worth was about minus thirty seven cents, and Keel would end up owing him money, but that he'd settle for a beer. Clearly a couple of jokers. You might have noticed that Keel claimed that the phenomenon is responsible for millions of deaths.
He doesn't explain that statement, but in the Eighth Tower he ties the phenomenon to all sorts of historical events, including the Black Plague, which did kill millions in Europe during the Middle Ages. So I think that's what he means. So how should we take all of this? Keiel was such a character. It's not clear how serious or exacting he was compared with, say Alan Heinek.
To paraphrase the xpiles, I think I definitely think he wants it to believe. It was difficult to divine what he actually believed from his writings because there's a lot of contradictory material in there. And there's no doubt that even in his repetage of events that we knew we know took place, you know, like with the mofman out sightings in West Virginia. I mean, there's no doubt about it that a lot of his descriptions of that, although
it's factual, it's exaggerated, it's done for effect. The way he's presented it. You do wonder did those events really happen in the way that he described them, And I think some of them didn't, and I think he knew they didn't happen in that way, But because he needed to write a good story, he cunningly sort of combined real happenings with fictional happenings.
And this might be a product of keel self image, because unlike Heinek or John Mack or Cynthia Hind, he didn't see himself first and foremost as a researcher.
They actually asked him that question, and they said, what would you like to be remembered as? And rather than being, you know, remembered as a euthologist or you know, a new age person or the author of the mouth and prophecies, he just wanted to be remembered as an effective writer.
And being an effective writer in his case at least meant that he didn't necessarily intend for every word he wrote to be taken literally.
I thought he believed all this. I thought he was convinced that these altra terrestrials were real. The big sort of thing, the blow, as he was at the time when I met him and we had this long discussion, was he just told me that he'd invented the whole thing. You know, it was a literary device.
Now many years later, the folklorist and Clark isn't so much concerned with the truth of the story as in the story itself and the storyteller.
Attracted te Kiel's writings because he was a storyteller, a very effective storyteller, and his writings will live on long after a lot of these serious upologists have been long forgotten.
If he seems to be talking about these ideas in the present tense, it's because the ideas are still around today and they're influencing some of the highest profile UFO research being conducted right now. Next time on Strange Rivals.
Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by rima Il Kali, Jesse Funk, and Noemi Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manke, and supervising producer Josh Thain, with voice
acting by Ben Bolin. Learn more more about the show at Grimminmild dot com, slash Strange Arrivals, and find more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.