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

by Keel, John A.

  In a story published in the London Sunday Dispatch, a military spokesman was quoted as saying, “They are invisible to the human eye. Every time, they have followed the same pattern, always around midday. All our radar sets in the area have picked them up… Even if I did know what they are, I am too worried to say anything.”

  The invention of the transistor made possible the development of the “black boxes” that became an important part of our arsenal in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. These black boxes are, in effect, transmitters that can send signals on the wavelengths of the enemy radar and create false images or jam enemy sets. But the Japanese certainly did not have such devices during the Okinawa campaign, nor were they in use in 1954.

  Another device, also developed long after the war, is the Luneberg lens, a sphere about 12 inches in diameter, which concentrates the beam from enemy radar and reflects it back so that it produces a radar echo equal to an object 700 feet across. This gadget could produce some of the radar UFO's that have been reported over the years – even the huge blips at Nansei-shoto. But the Japanese did not have the Luneberg lens.

  The only explanation is that in 1944, and again in 1954, a number of unrelated radar sets all went haywire at exactly the same moment and produced identical false echoes. Some “impossible” explanations could include the presence of an invisible spherical object bouncing the signals in the manner of the Luneberg lens, or the presence of an unknown aircraft equipped with electronic gear years ahead of our own. There is evidence that ultra-sophisticated submarines belonging to no known nation have been plying our seas for years. Any UFO enthusiast will tell you about the “superior intelligence with advanced technology” that is assumedly behind the flying saucer mystery.

  We now have even perfected “stealth” devices that render aircraft invisible to radar. They absorb the enemy signal so he can’t receive any echo at all. And today we have satellites orbiting the Earth that can broadcast signals that could confuse radar sets over half the planet. We have come a long way from the days when British gunners dumped boxes of chaff out of their gun ports… In view of all these developments and techniques, radar sightings of unidentified flying objects lose much of their impact. But the late Dr. James McDonald, a meteorologist and radar expert, studied a number of these controversial UFO radar sightings, and could find no conventional explanation for them.

  Aside from the puzzling radar reports of the past 30 years, is there any other evidence that some UFOs might be invisible? There is indeed! In fact, it even seems possible that UFOs are normally invisible, and are seen only by accident or design. This is such a mind-boggling concept that most flying saucer researchers reject it out of hand and ignore the evidence that tends to support it. Yet one of England’s foremost military leaders (a recognized authority on the UFO phenomenon) openly discussed the subject of invisibility in a public lecture in London in 1969. He is RAF Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard. Of cabinet rank, Sir Victor was active during the RAF’s UFO investigations of the 1950s. “If the materiality of UFOs is paraphysical (and consequently normally invisible), UFOs could more plausibly be creations of an invisible world coincident with the space of our physical Earth,” Sir Victor said. He was talking about the widely held theory that flying saucers are interdimensional rather than interplanetary. The theory seemed completely wild when it was first advanced by Dr. Meade Layne in the 1940s, but was later accepted by such men as Lord Dowding (head of the RAF during the Battle of Britain) and Brinsley Le Poer Trench, one of England’s most famous ufologists.

  In thousands of sightings recorded since 1947, witnesses have claimed that UFOs suddenly appeared and disappeared. In many of the landing reports, the objects did not descend from the sky but seemed to appear instantaneously on the ground, according to the amazed witnesses. And in many accounts, the objects are described as being completely transparent... During the August 1965 “flap” in Grand Forks, ND, six witnesses said they saw a blinking, transparent object resting on a golf course, and that it contained “little figures inside, moving like silhouettes.” When the witnesses ran toward the object, it disappeared with a loud bang. “It just blew up,” one of them said.

  One of the most interesting of the “transparent” sightings occurred on Oct. 18, 1968. The McMullen family in Medulla, FL, looked outside their home when their dog began to howl and bark. They reportedly saw a purplish-red object hovering about 10 feet off the ground. A strong odor of ammonia was present. The object was completely transparent, and two normal-sized men were visible inside. As the McMullens watched, the 30-foot sphere slowly ascended and flew away.

  But there is a strange footnote to this story. Mrs. McMullen made a sketch of the object showing the positions of the two men inside the sphere. Later, Mr. F.W. Holiday, a thorough British researcher and author, discovered that her drawing was “very nearly identical” to a carving on a slab of stone at Kivik in Scandinavia! The carving is thousands of years old, and has long puzzled archaeologists. Did the ancient people of Kivik see the same thing that appeared in Medulla, FL in 1968? And did they feel it was important enough that it should be carved in stone?

  The lore of invisible flying objects does extend back thousands of years. Ancient records in India not only describe saucer-shaped objects that flew by making strange music (probably an attempt to describe the humming and whining sounds associated with UFOs), but also mention that these objects could be invisible to human eyes. Some UFOs have been described as being completely transparent at first, then slowly turning opaque in front of the astonished onlookers. Finally, in many instances, brave witnesses have claimed that when they attempted to approach a grounded UFO, they found themselves barred by an invisible wall or shield around the object.

  In 1967, a young official from the United Nations told me a strange story about something that had happened to him several years earlier. He and a couple of friends had been driving along a deserted country road in New England, in broad daylight, when suddenly their car collided with something unseen. “It was like hitting a brick wall,” he said. The entire front of the car was demolished and the passengers were badly shaken, but there was absolutely nothing to be seen on the road. Their car had crashed into something that was totally invisible… That may sound farfetched, but there have actually been several airplane accidents where the planes crashed into something solid and invisible in mid-air. On June 11, 1938, the Chicago Daily News reported the crash of a U.S. Army bomber outside Delaware, IL. Nine men were killed after what one ground witness described as a “sudden crash in mid-air.” Crash with what? No one knows.

  After a thorough study of the debris of a jetliner that crashed outside Calcutta, India, on May 2, 1953, the British Ministry of Civil Aviation announced that it had “collided with a fairly heavy body.” Witnesses said there was no other plane near the doomed airliner when it “seemed to stop short in mid-air” and crashed… Then a B-47 smacked into something solid in October 1955, and only one man survived. He was quoted in the newspaper accounts as saying that the plane was “struck in mid-air” with a jolt so terrific he thought they had smashed into the ground. That crash took place near Lovington, NM, and authorities said there were no other planes in the vicinity. One witness on the ground did claim, however, that a ball of fire appeared near the plane just before the crash… There have been several other aerial disasters of this sort, all indicating that invisible objects are a constant hazard in our skies. As if this isn’t enough, each year several ships collide with unseen objects in the oceans – objects that shouldn’t be there and are never located afterwards…

  Perhaps the strangest phenomena of all are the “Invos” – invisible entities who harass UFO witnesses and investigators during flap periods. These characters have been widely reported, but have received very little publicity, perhaps because they seem so closely related to traditional psychic phenomena. Parapsychologists tend to regard the “Invos” as a variation of the well-known poltergeist.

  There was virtually an epidem
ic of “Invos” in the 1967-68 period when many people were involved in UFO research. Some of the incidents seemed ludicrous and others were bloodcurdling. One family in West Virginia not only saw low-flying UFOs practically every night, but their house was seemingly haunted by “Invos” who unlocked doors, slammed kitchen cabinets, and caused so much confusion that the family finally moved to another house. Other “Invos” trod heavily up and down stairs and created the sound of a car door slamming when there was no vehicle in sight. This slamming phenomenon has been reported by UFO witnesses in many sections of the country.

  Then, too, there are those invisible creatures accompanied by the smell of ammonia or, worse, the rank odor of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide). Their odor announces their presence before they begin to play their tricks, such as moving objects, hiding things, and even starting fires. It was curious that homes that had never before been haunted were suddenly invaded by “Invos” immediately after (and sometimes immediately before) UFOs were seen in their vicinity. The “Invos” seemed to accompany the UFO phenomenon. A number of investigators had problems with them soon after getting involved in a particularly important case.

  Some “Invos” seem to have trouble breathing. They make a loud, very audible gasping sound, as if they were choking for air. One UFO researcher heard heavy breathing in her backyard one afternoon, so she filled a pail with water and hurled it off her back porch. There was a wild commotion, though not a thing could be seen.

  If there are invisible flying saucers, why shouldn’t there be invisible saucer pilots, too? The foul odors have been associated with many UFO sightings, such as the McMullen report, and the heavy breathers have allegedly been seen as well as heard. In a number of controversial contactee cases, witnesses have noted that the ufonauts seemed to have trouble breathing and spoke in short gasps. In 1955, the late Gen. George c. Marshall, one of our top military leaders, made a fantastic statement about flying saucers, in which he implied that the pilots were having trouble breathing our atmosphere!

  But is invisibility really possible? Light is a form of electromagnetic energy, and visible light covers only a very small part of this spectrum. You are surrounded at this very moment by all forms of energy. If your eyes could take in waves slightly higher on the electromagnetic scale, you would see these energies as a multitude of colors. A small percentage of the total population is able to see slightly beyond the visible spectrum. Such people are more apt to see ghosts, apparitions, and flying saucers.

  Early man was quite aware that psychic ability was simply the ability to see slightly beyond the range of normal vision, and that this dimension was inhabited by strange things invisible to most people. Animals are not only able to see into this invisible zone, but they can also hear sounds above the level of human hearing. Very often, UFO witnesses like the McMullens are alerted by a dog, horse, or cat. Animals behave hysterically in the presence of UFOs, even when human witnesses can’t hear or see anything unusual.

  Recent studies indicate that the UFO phenomenon is closely related to the Earth’s magnetic field. When certain magnetic conditions exist, certain people in particular geographic locations begin to see UFOs, and a “flap” results. These conditions are cyclic, peaking every four to five years, with a major peak every 19 years. The UFOs do not come and go as spaceships. They are always around, but we can only see them when special conditions exist. So, the problem is environmental rather than extraterrestrial. Scientists currently working in a number of disciplines are putting all this to the test. Within the next few years, we will arrive at a new understanding of the strange “invisible world” that has always existed around us, and was even well known and well defined in ancient times.

  The geographical locations where these things tend to occur were isolated by occultists hundreds of years ago. They called such places “gateways.”

  Ufologists called them “windows.” Charles fort, the founder of ufology, wrote about this subject in the 1920s. Modern ufologists were diverted, however, by the enchanting extraterrestrial hypothesis, and wasted 25 years trying to find evidence proving that UFOs were spaceships from another planet. Meanwhile, every time there was unusual sunspot activity or a sudden burst of electromagnetic energy from Jupiter, a wave of flying saucer sightings would take place in the “window” areas. It took us a long time to realize that the key was a more careful study of the witnesses and their psychic abilities. These people were gaining momentary glimpses of things that had been there all along, beyond our normal sensory field. The ancients in Kivik may have even seen the very same entities viewed by the McMullens in 1968.

  In 1973, there was some very unusual activity on the sun, accompanied by some strange disturbances of the Earth’s magnetic field. Simultaneously, a great worldwide wave of UFO sightings occurred, along with a sharp increase in psychic phenomena and the appearances of awesome, hairy, red-eyed monsters (the latter were often accompanied by strange lights in the sky). Apparently all these things are interrelated, and share a common cause. That cause, to greatly simplify, may be a magnetic influence upon the witnesses in the “window” areas!

  Modern technology has now given us the tools to “see” beyond the normal, and some of these tools were grossly neglected by ufologists for years. For example, back in the mid-1950s, an engineer in California, Trevor James constable, revealed that he was experimenting with infrared photography. He hauled his equipment to the desert and photographed stretches of empty sky. Some of these photographs revealed curious blobs and objects that had not been visible to the naked eye. Instead of welcoming this discovery, UFO research organizations attacked Constable. Later, qualified scientists and engineers quietly repeated his experiments, with the same intriguing results. And a national magazine sent a team of professional photographers to New York’s Croton Reservoir in 1966, where, using infrared film and filters, they, too, obtained photographs of invisible objects.

  Over the years, astonished amateur cameramen in many parts of the world have taken UFO pictures unexpectedly. Usually they were just photographing some landmark or pastoral scene, but when the pictures were developed, objects appeared that they didn’t see at the time. One of the most publicized pictures of this type was taken by a fireman in England, in May 1963. James Templeton had photographed his little girl in a park near an atomic energy station. Later, when he went to the camera store to pick up the developed pictures, the clerk told him that “it was a shame the best picture had been spoiled by the man in the background wearing a white suit.”

  “I thought the clerk was joking at first,” Mr. Templeton told me in a personal letter, “because there was not another soul in the vicinity when I took the photograph.” But there, on the negative, is the clear image of a tall, bloated figure in a white outfit, with a helmet on his head. This figure did not appear in any of the pictures he had taken immediately before and immediately after. He showed the puzzling photograph to the local police, who then forwarded copies to Police HQ in Penrith, England, where it was studied by experts. Film company officials said it was impossible for any kind of exposure to have been made on the film before it had been sold to Templeton. Supt. Tom Oldcorn, head of the Carleton CID, made the understatement of the year when he said, “My photography men have had a look at the print and film, and the feeling is that someone else had gotten into the picture.”

  What? Someone else? An “Invo,” perhaps, wearing some kind of breathing apparatus?

  In 1964, and again in 1966, Yellowstone National Park was haunted by mysterious humming sounds. Tourists taking photographs of Old Faithful found large circular objects in their developed prints, which had not been visible when the pictures were taken.

  The manifestations of the UFO phenomenon are filled with baffling contradictions. Amateur photographers have frequently been puzzled when their UFO pictures turned out to be very different from their visual impression when they snapped the shutter. Distinct cube-like objects hovering close to the ground have come out as very indistinct diaphanou
s blobs in the darkroom. In a great many cases, objects clearly seen by entire groups of witnesses have failed to appear on film at all!

  “I can’t understand it! We should have gotten something,” Patrolman Paul Carter of Colby, Kansas, complained in August 1972. He had tried to photograph a brilliantly illuminated saucer-shaped object that was hovering about 150 feet above a trailer home near Gem, KS. It was making beeping sounds like Morse code transmission, and a dog in the area had its head to the ground, trying to cover its ears. Carter attempted to photograph it with an Instamatic camera. Another witness used a Polaroid and did get a smear-like image that “could be anything.”

  Some cameras fail to function altogether when a UFO is present, then work perfectly after the object has left. Sites where UFOs have landed often prove to be unphotographable for days afterwards. The film just comes out completely blank!

  When a team of professional television cameramen visited West Virginia in 1967, they saw a number of UFOs but were plagued by sudden equipment malfunctions. They did manage to take a few feet of movie film, however, but when they got it back to New York, the footage was “accidentally ruined” in a professional developing lab.

  Good, sharply defined UFO photographs are so rare that most investigators are very suspicious when a witness produces a distinct picture. Even so, the photographic evidence accumulated over the past 25 years indicates that the stoic mechanical eye of the camera is able to see and register things that are invisible to limited human vision.

  It is now a well-established fact that some UFOs radiate powerful rays in the ultraviolet and infrared range. A logical starting point for laboratory experimentation would be a relatively inexpensive series of tests, photographing various metals and plastics bathed in these rays in an attempt to duplicate the effects produced by amateur photographers in the field. Some work has been conducted along these lines by government scientists, and especially by researchers in the Soviet Union. We now know, for example, that very low frequency (VLF) radiowaves produce the same medical effects on test animals as do UFOs.