THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum

by Keel, John A.

  From Sweden to Spain, Australia to South Africa, these phantom James Bonds have stalked the wild-eyed nuts, scattering fear and confusion along their trail. During Colorado University’s Air Force-sponsored UFO study, a black limousine even visited Boulder, and a stocky, olive-skinned man in dark glasses and black suit approached the head of the project, Dr. Edward U. Condon. He identified himself as “Mr. Dixsun” and offered to hand over the secrets of the universe for a paltry few million dollars. Dr. Condon and his staff wasted a lot of time trying to check out his outer-space credentials. When they failed to produce the money, Mr. Dixsun got back into his limousine and rode off into the sunset.

  In 1880 Galisteo Junction, New Mexico, was not exactly a thriving metropolis. Today it has a population of 150. It lies south of Santa Fe, somewhat off whatever beaten tracks existed in those days. On the evening of March 26, 1880, four men were walking there when they saw a fish-shaped “balloon” cruising low in the sky. They could even make out eight or ten figures in the craft, and could hear them babbling in some unknown language. As the object passed overhead, something dropped from it—a vase of some sort covered with strange hieroglyphics. The men carted it to the local general store as proof of their sighting, and it was placed on display there. A couple of days later, a stranger came into town. He identified himself as “a collector” and bought the vase for an unspecified amount of money, then, like Mr. Dixsun, he rode off into the western sunset.

  The story might seem apocryphal until you realize there were no operational dirigibles in the U.S. in 1880. The great “airship” craze of 1896-97 was still seventeen years away. Communications between Galisteo Junction and the outside world at that time were not the best. Yet somehow this “collector” from some far-off place heard about the vase and traveled to this remote little town to buy it.

  This particular charade has been repeated endlessly since. Some kind of evidence is found at a UFO site. The person who retrieves it is soon visited by a stranger who buys it or steals it.

  There were many interesting UFO sightings in the 1920s, and at least one of these was accompanied by MIB manifestations. Mr. John Cole, a retired newsman in West Virginia, told me the story in 1967. The incident had puzzled him for years. In 1924 a farmer outside Gem in monster-haunted Bratton County reported seeing an airplane crash in a forest. Planes were a very rare sight in those days, especially in West Virginia, and a crashing plane was big news. According to the farmer, the plane was very odd in that it didn’t seem to have any wings, didn’t make any noise, and seemed unusually large. “As big as a battleship” is the way the farmer described it. A party of men, including the local sheriff and Cole, systematically searched the woods. Within hours they found the wreck in a small clearing. According to Cole:

  We weren’t the first ones there, though. There were already five or six men in the clearing. Some of them were dressed in black business suits, neckties and all, and that seemed damned silly in that neck of the woods. Others were dressed in coveralls of a funny color—some kind of very shiny material. They were talking among themselves in a rapid-fire foreign language when we found them. They got real excited when they saw us. The men in coveralls ran into the wreck—like they were trying to hide. Some of our men were carrying guns and one of them said to me, “By God, they’re spies!” and he raised his gun. The strangers were all small, just a little over five feet tall, and they all looked like Orientals. You know, with high cheekbones, slant eyes, dark skin. One of them spoke English. He told us nobody was hurt, that everything was all right. He said he would call on the sheriff later and make out a complete report. There wasn’t much we could do. No crime had been committed. Nobody was hurt.

  But here’s the real funny part. While I was looking around I spotted a little thingamajig on the ground. I picked it up and decided to keep it. Don’t know why I didn’t turn it over to one of the foreigners. Anyway, I put it in my pocket. We all finally went away, leaving the foreigners to fuss with their contraption. It didn’t look like much of a flying machine. In fact, I don’t think it could fly at all. It was like the fuselage of a modern plane, with windows and all. But it didn’t have any wings, tail, or propellers. And, like the farmer said, it was mighty big. I’d say it was at least seventy-five feet long. It filed the whole clearing.

  I went back home… I was living in Weston in those days. I went right to bed. I was pretty tired from all the day’s hiking. About three a.m. somebody started pounding on my door. I got up and looked and there was an army officer standing there. He was dressed in one of those broad-brimmed hats they used to wear, with those leg wrappings and all. It was a U.S. Army uniform all right. I was in World War I. But we didn’t see many soldiers in West Virginia in those days. Anyway, except for his clothes he looked just like those foreigners from the airplane. Slant eyes, dark skin, but he was maybe a little taller.

  “You picked up something today,” he said. “We need it back.” I was half asleep and at first I couldn’t think what he meant. Then I remembered the metal thingamajig. It was still in my coat pocket. I went and got it.

  “Is this what you mean?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. Just grabbed it and walked off without a word. He didn’t seem to have a horse or a car. I shuffled back to bed. But the next day I started wondering about it. How had he managed to track me down? A couple of days later I went back to those woods and found that clearing. It was empty. The grass and bushes were all crushed down where the airplane had been but there was no other sign of anything or anybody.

  You know, I never wrote the story up. After that army officer came by I figured that maybe it was a secret army deal of some kind and I though it was better to leave it alone.

  Some years later I received a letter from a man in the Northwest recounting an identical incident which supposedly happened in Oregon in the 1930s. A strange plane crashed. Local farmers collected pieces of it. And shortly afterwards army officers visited them and collected the souvenirs. The U.S. Army was remarkably efficient in those days.

  The Illuminati, the International Bankers, the Freemasons, the Jesuits, and the CIA have all been blamed for the antics of the MIB during different periods in history. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries secret societies were popular, not so much to join as to blame. By the turn of the century a new mythical group seized the public imagination—the sinister International Bankers—a loathsome cartel of munitions makers, money manipulators, and archfiends. Like the Illuminati and other phantom orders before them, they were accused of running the world from behind the scenes. The mischievous men its black suits were tagged as agents for the International Bankers in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

  The CIA may have been busy at Key West in 1951 when several naval officers and crewmen out in a motor launch saw a pulsating cigar-shaped object hovering over the water. They watched it through binoculars and could see a greenish column of light extending down to the surface of the water. The sea was strewn with dead fish. Suddenly a fast-moving fighter plane appeared, and the object took off, vanishing in seconds. As soon as the motor launch docked, the naval men were surrounded by officious gentlemen in dark suits who hustled them away and held them for hours, questioning them in a manner, one of the witnesses said years later, that “seemed more aimed at discrediting” them than anything else.

  These “silencers” did not confine their activities to the U.S. Shortly after an engineer named Gianpietro Monguzzi took some controversial photos of a flying saucer in the Italian Alps in 1952, he claimed he was visited by “an American secret agent” disguised as an Italian ski mountain policeman, who interrogated him through a long night, apparently trying to get him to repudiate his story of having seen a disk-shaped object land on a glacier.

  Dr. Jacques Vallee uncovered another odd Italian story from that year. The witness was fishing near Vico, Italy, on the night of July 24, 1952, when he allegedly saw a disk descend and lower a hose into the water. While he was watching, a ray of light darted from the disk and gave him a sev
ere electric shock, leaving him weak and helpless while the saucerers continued about their business. Six days later he was again fishing in the same spot when a tall, thin man who spoke Italian with a foreign accent approached him and asked him if he had seen any airplanes or flying saucers. The witness said no. The stranger offered him an unusual-looking gold-tipped cigarette, and when he took a couple of puffs on it, he became suddenly ill. The stranger tossed the cigarette into the water and walked off.

  A surprising number of talkative witnesses claim to have been coerced into signing an “oath of secrecy” by alleged government agents. In 1955 twenty workmen were making repairs on the outside of a large factory building in southern New Jersey when a gigantic circular craft silently descended from the sky and hovered almost at ground level above the six-hundred-car parking lot. The object was so big that it covered the entire lot, and the workmen watched it for several minutes, hardly believing their eyes. Later, as they all filed in to punch out on the time clock, a man in civilian clothes herded them all into a meeting room.

  “We want you all to sign an oath of secrecy,” he told them grimly, flourishing a sheaf of papers, “promising not to tell about what you saw today. Those of you who don’t want to sign needn’t come in to work tomorrow—or ever again.”

  Everyone signed.

  Who was this man? What was the purpose of this secrecy oath? One thing is obvious: He had to know that the flying saucer was going to appear that day. He had to be prepared for it, just as the hush-hush officials in Florida had to be immediately on hand when that motor launch filled with witnesses reached dock. These agents must have also had the necessary credentials to get them onto the navy dock and into the factory building (which was engaged in classified work for the Navy). They had to know what was going to happen in advance, and they had to have some reason for suppressing the witnesses.

  Or the whole story has to be pure baloney.

  As a matter of fact, the Florida story comes from an anonymous letter published in a Miami paper. The factory story is more folklore than fact. The story has circulated by word of mouth for years, but no one has ever pinned down any of the original witnesses, if they exist.

  But there are many other stories of this type, which have been verified to some extent, were reported by reliable witnesses, and were investigated by qualified journalists and scientists.

  Dr. J. Allen Hynek tells of two men “engaged in work requiring military clearance” who saw a UFO land in North Dakota on a rainy night in November 1961. Thinking it was a plane in trouble, they stopped and ran towards the object. “Their surprise was understandably great when they discovered humanoids around the craft, one of which boldly waved them off in a threatening manner,” Hynek says.

  The men did not report their sighting to anyone, but the next day one of them was called out from work and introduced to two strangers. “They asked to be taken to his home, where they examined the clothing he had worn the night before, especially his boots, and left without any further word,” Dr. Hynek reports.[21]

  Such incidents raise a lot of questions. How did these men know the witness had seen something? How did they know how to find him? What were they looking for when they examined his clothing?

  The late Frank Edwards, a newscaster and best-selling UFO author, reported similar encounters. He told of a minor official in a large industrial plant who saw a huge glowing object at four-thirty one morning in December 1965. He stopped and reported it to the state police. A few hours later two “military officers” turned up at his plant and questioned him for two hours. At the conclusion of the interview, one of the officers said, “We can’t tell you what to do, but we can offer a suggestion: Don’t talk about this matter to anyone.”

  A feisty farmer in Ohio once told me how he had seen a strange object land in one of his fields one night in 1966. He ran to his house to get his rifle, and when he returned, the object was gone. It had been circular and glowing, he said. Very early the next morning a black limousine pulled up to his farm, and a man in an Air Force uniform knocked on his door. He told the farmer to forget what he had seen the night before. Annoyed, the farmer ordered him off the property and said he would tell anyone he damned please.

  When I asked for a description of the Air Force officer, the witness looked thoughtful. “I’ll never forget him,” he answered. “He didn’t look like an American at all. He was a little fellow, maybe five-feet-four, and with a face like a Chinaman or a Jap. But he talked good English.”

  The flying-saucer enthusiasts of the period never bothered to collect detailed descriptions from witnesses in this type of case. The moment they heard “Air Force,” their faces turned purple. Since the U.S. Air Force had been telling everyone for years that UFOs didn’t exist, it seemed reasonable that Air Force officers would try to silence witnesses and suppress civilian investigations.

  On May 26, 1964, a British fireman named James Templeton took some snapshots of his five-year-old daughter in a park near the Chapelcross Atomic Energy Station. When the pictures were developed, he was astonished to find that “someone else had gotten into one of the pictures.” That someone was a very tall human-shaped being in a white garment with a helmet over his head. No one in the park at the time the pictures were taken had seen such a man. Baffled, Mr. Templeton took the picture and negative to the firm that had processed it. They couldn’t explain the anomaly, nor could police photographic experts.

  Two sedate gentlemen in bowler hats appeared at the Templeton home a few days later and questioned him carefully about the picture. This pair did not identify themselves and referred to each other by numbers. Certainly any self-respecting secret agents could invent phoney cover names for themselves. They could call each other Charlie and George instead of Number 9 and Number 14.

  These two numbered agents asked Mr. Templeton several intriguing questions including: Had he seen any birds in the area when he had taken the pictures? From the fireman’s bewildered description of this encounter, it is obvious that these two men knew a great deal more about the UFO phenomenon than most amateur ufologists. Again, who were they, why were they so blunderingly conspicuous, and why were they so interested in a freak snapshot of someone in a “space suit”?

  Our MIB also gad about in helicopters. Ray Hawks was running a tractor outside of Boulder, Colorado, in 1960 when his engine stalled and he heard a humming sound “like an electric motor out of phase.” Then he saw a wobbling gray disk in the sky, oozing smoke and seemingly undergoing repairs. He heard a distinct click as a metal plate snapped into place. As the object scooted off, he felt as if he were coming out of a dream, possibly a symptom of trance. A few days later he returned to the same spot and was surprised to find a helicopter containing three men waiting there. Men dressed as an Air Force colonel and major approached him.

  “We want you to tell the newspapers that the saucer will be back on August 20,” the colonel told him.

  “I can’t do that,” Hawks says he protested. “The whole town would come out here on the twentieth, and when the thing didn’t show up, everybody would think I was some kind of nut!”

  Were the three men really from the Air Force? Would high ranking officers indulge in such a shabby exercise? Investigators from the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization thought so. And that’s probably just what somebody wanted them to think.

  Three years earlier an Ohio house painter named Olden Moore took a ride in one of these helicopters. On November 6, 1957, Moore allegedly observed the landing of a large circular machine with a pointed dome in a field near Montville, Ohio. The next day the Lake County Civil Defense Director, Mr. Kenneth Locke, examined the site and found it was highly radioactive. He also discovered six strange footprints in the field and two fresh holes three feet in diameter. Moore voluntarily visited a local Air Force base where he answered questions for several hours. His story, and Locke’s findings, were written up in extensive detail in the local papers.

  A few days later, according to Moore’s
account, the local sheriff drove up to his house with some men in Air Force uniforms. They asked him to accompany them. They drove him to the field where he had seen the UFO. A helicopter was waiting there. He was flown to an airport and put aboard a plane which took him to Washington, D.C. Two officers closeted him in a hotel-like room in the city and grilled him for three days, trying to get him to admit he had seen nothing but a “fireball.” He was literally held prisoner and was never left alone. Finally, he was asked to sign an oath of secrecy, and then he was flown back to Ohio.

  The whole story is absurd on the surface. He had already told the Air Force everything he knew. His story had already been widely published. Dozens of others had similar experiences that same night.

  Olden Moore did not keep his oath of secrecy for very long. He told his strange tale to local UFO buffs, and it spread like wildfire. But the sheriff would not back his story, and when more responsible investigators sought some kind of verification from the Air Force, they were met with astonishment. Moore’s trip was either a total fabrication or else he had been the victim of a distortion of reality.

  Over a twenty-year period hundreds of encounters of this type were reported to the eager anti-Air Force UFO cultists. Many of them began with convincing anonymous letters and phone calls. Others were based on raw assumption. Anyone who tried to silence a witness just had to be from the Air Force or the CIA. Not that the Air Force is completely innocent. But many of their cover-up efforts have smacked of a comic opera. Major Quintanilla, head of Project Blue Book in the 1960s, once berated an Ohio police officer and tried to get him to switch his story of a saucer sighting while a tape recorder was running in full view and recording the whole conversation. The major never realized he was on Candid Microphone. In other well-documented cases in my files, the Air Force shamelessly took material evidence from witnesses and later returned shabbily contrived imitations of the original substances. They have even been caught in the act of doctoring UFO photos so they could brand them fakes. In instance after instance, the Air Force has found its blue trousers at half-mast.