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

by Keel, John A.

  In November of 1966, four young people in an old broken down car were driving through the local lovers’ lane – an area that was called the TNT Area. During the Second World War, there was a TNT plant there. Actually, it was more complicated than that. They were making parts for atom bombs there, but that’s a long, involved story. Anyway, there was an old building there that they called a “power plant.” It was a building that housed generators for these TNT factories. They were driving past this building and saw what looked like a very large man, 6 or 7 feet tall, standing next to this power plant. He scared the death out of them.

  The boy who was driving hit the accelerator, and they drove out of there at a high speed. This thing rose up in the air and followed their car. They were going over 60 miles an hour out on the dirt road, and over 100 on the paved road. Still, this thing was flying right along with them. So they drove straight to the police station. You have to realize that in small towns, teenagers do not go to the police station voluntarily. But they were so scared that they went to the police and reported this. The police were so convinced by their behavior that they held a press conference the next day. Reporters from the local newspapers, from Charlotte and other cities around there, came to hear this very bizarre story of this flying man. The four teenagers gave a very convincing account of it, and the newspapers labeled this creature “Mothman.” That was the beginning of the Mothman “caper.” The television show Batman was popular at the time…

  Some of these people had seen this creature walking around and making strange noises. But it didn’t leave footprints in the snow. All of the descriptions pretty much matched, except some people said the eyes were blazing red. Most people said they couldn’t see the face at all. It would be dark, and they could just see this giant figure bearing down on them. Then they’d see it fly away.

  When I talked to some of the witnesses in depth, it was obvious that they had been in a trance state when they saw this creature. A banker had seen it. The banker heard a noise and went out on his front porch. He stood there for twenty minutes. His wife was inside watching television. Finally, twenty minutes later, he staggered into the house. She said he looked like he had seen a ghost. He was pale and shaking, and didn’t realize twenty minutes had passed. He claimed that during those twenty minutes when he was outside, this creature was standing on his lawn, staring at him. And he couldn’t move...

  My Mothman book came out in 1975. That was the year that the police in West Virginia discovered a cave filled with bodies. All of the animals had been in there, and the bodies had been rotting for a long time. They couldn’t tell how many bodies there were. They think there were 20 or 30 bodies in the cave. So I was right about a serial killer being on the loose there. Now it even gets stickier. The police, after a rather short investigation, dropped the whole thing…

  The reason our suicide rate in the United States is so high is because they often put murders down as “suicide” in small towns, because they don’t want unsolved murders on the books. Very often, they know who committed the murder, but they figure, “Well, the victim deserved getting murdered, so we’ll just forget about it.” It seemed like everyone in West Virginia knew who this killer was. I wouldn’t dare give his name here, but he belongs to a prominent family in West Virginia. The reason that they know he did it is because he was put away for a while in a mental institution. While he was in the mental institution, all of the disappearances stopped. When he was released from the mental institution, they started up again… I don’t know if those are still going on – if this fellow is still on the loose. I hope he’s not. As I say, for a New Yorker to get involved in West Virginia affairs like that is a pretty sticky wicket. It was smarter of me to stay out of it.

  A lot of things are still going on in West Virginia. I still get mail from a lot of people down there, some that I knew 30 years ago. One of the mysteries that I tried to untangle – and found hopeless – was that there were a number of babies born during that period who seemed to be rather unusual. After the babies were born, they were surrounded by poltergeist activity, and other odd things…

  THE INFRARED TOWER – 1990 LECTURE

  People are always asking me what I expect next, and sometimes the answer is “more of the same.”

  We had the animal mutilations in the 1960s and ‘70s that got a lot of attention. And they are still going on… We never did catch whoever was doing it. They would remove certain organs from these animals. Sometimes the animal, say a cow, would be tied down right next to the house where the whole farm family was sleeping. They’d wake up in the morning and their cow had been mutilated right next to the house. There was no way this could happen without the cow making noises, because cows (and horses) make a lot of noise if any unknown person starts prowling around them. If someone starts hurting them and drawing blood, there’s certainly going to be a lot of racket. These people didn’t hear a sound during the night.

  These animal mutilations began in the 1960s. I started writing about it, and everybody said I was full of crap. They’d never heard of such a thing. Then as the years went on, it spread all across the country, almost methodically. It became huge in the 1970s. All of the UFO buffs jumped on it and said that the flying saucers were doing this to our animals. Occasionally, flying saucers would be seen in the area of these mutilations... I went up into Canada, and the Canadian Royal police wouldn’t release any data on it. But we know there were a lot of mutilations up in Canada…

  Now, years later, we’ve gotten reports from police that there were also human mutilations at the same time, which the police kept out of the papers… The police try to blame “devil cults” and so on, but there’s really no indication that such a cult exists. There are some small cults that practice black magic – that take very small children and use them as sacrifices in their rites – but there are probably not more than 25 people in the whole country that are involved in that kind of ritual magic.

  I saw a lot of UFOs in the 1960s, and I tried to take pictures of them. I had some very good equipment. In most cases, what came out on the film was much different from what I saw with the naked eye. I started wondering about this. What was it about UFOs that responded differently on film? I started a lot of experimentation with photographic equipment around 1968. I had a friend who was a professional photographer. He had a big studio. We set up various kinds of metallic objects and aimed ultraviolet and infrared rays at them. We photographed them to see what would come out. What we got were photographs of rather ghostly-looking blobs. For example, I had an aluminum teakettle that we used in one experiment. We aimed ultraviolet light (“black light” as it’s called) on the teakettle and photographed it. It came out looking just like many of the ghost photographs that you’ve seen over the years.

  In 1966, LIFE magazine was going to get to the bottom of the whole UFO mystery. At that time, Henry Luce, the founder of LIFE, was a big UFO buff. He died shortly after, but he ordered LIFE to do something about it. They sent teams of professional photographers to the Croton Reservoir in New York State, where people had been reporting all kinds of UFOs. These photographers used infrared film and various kinds of filters, and they came up with some very interesting and surprising photographs. I saw the photographs. LIFE never did their special issue on UFOs, because LOOK magazine beat them to it. LOOK came out with a special issue about 3 months before LIFE, so LIFE gave up their special issue. Then Henry Luce died, and they dropped the whole thing…

  Back in the 1950s, amateur radio operators started receiving voices that they couldn’t explain on their HAM radio sets. These voices claimed to be from outer space. This created a whole cult. There are tape recordings that are still available, claiming to be voices from outer space… In the 1960s, I knew a HAM operator in West Virginia who had a VLF set, which is very low frequency. It takes a lot of explanation, but normal frequencies are quite high, while a VLF is below 100 on the Hertz scale. It is used mainly now by submarines, because VLF waves will travel a great distance a
nd penetrate water. It’s a convenient way of communicating with submarines. But because of the nature of VLF, you really can’t transmit voices. You can only transmit dots and dashes. And yet on the VLF sets that I listened to, we were getting voices. These voices were talking in a very strange language. A very guttural language like German or Swedish... Yet they weren’t those languages. We were familiar with those languages. We couldn’t identify what they were talking about, or how they were even being transmitted because, as I say, normally you can’t transmit the human voice on VLF.

  Now, as our technology progressed, people began to get more things on tape recorders. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the voices that are picked up mysteriously on brand new tapes on tape recorders. There’s a whole cult of ghost-watchers who’ve tried to identify the voices on these tapes. One friend of mine swore that he had a tape recording made by George Bernard Shaw, who’d been dead for about 30 years at that time. The UFO investigators had all kinds of trouble with their tape recorders. They would record something, thinking it had recorded perfectly. When they got the tape home, there would be nothing but static on the tape.

  With the introduction of the personal computer, we now have a rash of cases of “haunted computers.” people will have their computer unplugged. They’ll get up in the morning and there’ll be a message on the computer, even though it wasn’t plugged in. There’ve been a number of these stories in the computer literature. The computer buffs are now becoming ghost buffs, trying to figure out where these strange signals on their computers are coming from.

  The truth is that all electronic equipment is susceptible to this kind of mysterious interference, whether it’s a computer or tape recorder or telephone. Lots of people get telephone messages from the dead. There are books on it, listing these calls. The last step was to get messages from TV. The way they did it was actually very similar to what I was doing in the 1960s. Buffs would aim ultraviolet lights at a mirror, and then turn the video camera on the mirror. When they’d play the tape back, there would be these images. The very first image was of Romy Schneider, the actress, shortly after she died. This became a big sensation in Europe. A lot of people started doing it, because anybody with a video camera can do this. You need a video camera, a mirror, and an ultraviolet light (which you can buy almost anywhere).

  They’re making rapid “progress.” We’re going to find that electronically, we can communicate with whatever this force is. It’s a very mischievous force. Don’t be surprised if by the end of this decade, we are all going to parties to watch tapes of dead people. [laughter]

  I’m going to change the subject a little bit and get away from the dead people. Back in 1941, there was a minister in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, who was taking an evening stroll in that town. He stopped to light his pipe. There was a roar in the tree that he was standing next to. This creature jumped out of the tree, knocked his hat off, and knocked the pipe out of his mouth. He said it was like a baboon. It was a large, hairy creature. This is one of the classic stories in our Bigfoot anthologies. Many other people in that particular area also reported seeing this same kind of creature in ‘41 and ‘42.

  Then in 1966, there was a man in West Virginia, whose name was Wooten. He was sitting by a small creek, fishing. He was smoking a pipe. Suddenly, out of the water of the creek came this huge, hairy monster. It smelled terrible, as hairy monsters often do. That’s why they call it the Abominable Snowman (although there’s a publicity campaign to change his name to “the sweet-smelling snowman” or something). Anyway this creature came out of the creek, walked up to this very startled fisherman, and knocked the pipe out of his mouth. Then stalked off… That story got into the local press.

  In New Jersey in the 1970s, we had several “Bigfoot” cases. In a number of these cases, the Bigfoot would come out of the woods, walk up to the house that was there, pound on the air conditioner, and then stalk off.

  People in the house would rush out, see this thing, and nearly faint. The monster would simply walk off.

  In Erie, Pennsylvania, people were seeing what they thought was a robot. It was walking down the street near the waterfront. As it walked down the street, it would pound on the hoods of some of the cars. It would pick out certain cars and just pound on the hood, and then walk off.

  We had a tremendous UFO wave in the 1960s and 1970s. I was collecting information on the UFOs that were chasing automobiles. Many of you have heard of the UFO “abduction” cases that we have now. In those days, we didn’t call them abduction cases. We had many cases where these UFOs – these lights in the sky – were coming down very close to the cars, and chasing the cars. The question that I had was, “Why were they picking out certain cars and chasing them?” So we started collecting all the details we could… We found in a number of cases that women who were having their menstrual period were driving the cars. This is a very curious fact. We also found that they were mainly chasing a car known as the Ford Galaxy. The UFOs were after our Ford Galaxies! Another little interesting fact is that the drivers of many of these cars were teachers. And some of them were teachers of gifted children. It seemed odd that UFOs were able to pick that out. But if you were a teacher of gifted children driving a Ford Galaxy, you were in big trouble. And if you were also having your menstrual period, you were in terrible trouble.

  For the last 40 years, we’ve had a great many sightings around atomic plants, too. All of these disparate sightings have one thing in common, and that is infrared. The man’s pipe, when he’s smoking it, gets very hot and it gives off infrared rays. That’s what infrared is... It’s what you see from heat. The air conditioner on the side of a house gives off a lot of heat. It’s surrounded by heat. And again, it’s infrared. We took photographs of a number of different automobiles with infrared film and infrared filters, to see what the infrared characteristics of different cars were. For some reason, the Ford Galaxy was giving off more infrared than most of the other cars. These creatures were being attracted to the air conditioners, pipes, and cars by the infrared that was around them.

  Many animals can see infrared. That’s how animals are able to hunt at night. A bird flying 2000 feet in the air can’t see the rabbit on the ground in the middle of the night. But the rabbit’s body is giving off heat, and they can see that infrared. The bird can then come down and pluck up the rabbit, as they often do. So Bigfoot and the UFOs, for some reason, are attracted to infrared. Maybe they can’t see the object itself, only the infrared around it.

  We’ve known this for many years, but it’s very difficult to get people to experiment with this. First of all, the average UFO buff doesn’t know what you’re talking about when you talk about infrared. And the big companies, they’re just simply not interested in this kind of stuff. But if somebody would come up with a couple of million dollars, you could do some very interesting experiments with this.

  Our atomic plants, by the way, make electrical energy with steam. We heat the water with the atomic materials. They are nothing more than big steam turbines, and they’re generating a hell of a lot of heat. So it’s not unusual that these things would hover over atomic plants. In New York State we have a couple of atomic plants. The UFOs are seen all the time around these plants, but I don’t think they’re interested in our atomic matters at all. They’re drawn to it by the infrared around the plant.

  What does all this mean? If you study the UFO phenomenon for very long, you realize that the vast majority of these things are bright lights; they’re not metallic objects. There may be metallic objects out there, but what most people are seeing are bright lights. Bright red lights... Again, we’re back to infrared. These lights seem to be a compressed form of energy that might even have an intelligence of its own, in the same way that a computer has intelligence. Negative and positive particles are storing information…

  We learned several years ago that we are surrounded by an energy field. The entire planet has an energy field around it, which can manipulate all of our electrical apparatus. As I
said before, our telephones, televisions, and computers can all be manipulated. We can’t believe a damn thing that comes through. If a man’s voice appears on a tape recorder and says he’s George Bernard Shaw, that doesn’t mean it is George Bernard Shaw. It means it’s an imitation of George Bernard Shaw. If a voice comes across on a telephone that sounds like your late uncle (and this has happened many times), the voice will usually sound rather distant on the phone. It may use your uncle’s favorite expressions. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s your dead uncle. It means it is this force manipulating the telephone. If a picture of Romy Schneider appears on the television set, it either means you’ve got an old movie or you’ve got somebody faking the image of Romy Schneider. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Romy Schneider is on the television set.

  I tried to define this energy field in a book about fifteen years ago called The Eighth Tower. A lot of people didn’t understand the book. A lot of people hated the book. In Europe it’s now a cult book. It’s practically a new Bible over there. I’m afraid to go to Europe because they’re going to start worshipping me. But here in the States, they’ll throw rocks at me. This energy field seems to operate outside of our space-time continuum. This is very difficult to explain in a few words, but it knows our future as well as our past. Our future already exists.

  A simple way to explain this would be a boy looking through a microscope, watching a microbe on a drop of water. The boy can see where the microbe is going before the microbe reaches it. The boy is therefore outside of the space-time continuum of the microbe. The boy can predict what’s going to happen to the microbe. There may be a bigger microbe there, about to eat it. The boy knows this but the microbe doesn’t, unfortunately. So whatever this force is (and we’ve given it a million names throughout history), it knows our future. That’s how some people’s clairvoyance can tap into this energy field and predict the future.