Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs

by John A. Keel

  Those who have tried to investigate the UFO phenomenon in purely physical terms have speculated on the possible mechanics of such objects. The general consensus has been that the UFOs utilize an antigravity device which surrounds them with a magnetic field, and this magnetism ionizes the nitrogen in the air around the object, causing it to glow. On the surface, this has seemed like a plausible theory. But in reality it is not workable. A tremendous amount of magnetism would be required to produce the magnetic effects blamed on the objects, such as the stalling of automobiles. The Ford Motor Company, working with the UFO-investigating group at Colorado University, discovered that simple magnetism could not stall an auto engine encased in the protective steel body of a car. A field strong enough to accomplish this would also be strong enough to bend the car itself and possibly affect the passengers as well.

  Continuous ionization of the air is also a difficult feat. It’s more likely that the objects are composed of electromagnetic energy themselves. Witnesses are observing frequency changes rather than ionization. In some cases, the ground has been found radioactive after an object has landed. This might be the by-product of the gamma rays, which are one of the energy constituents of the objects, not just an effect of some mechanical process.

  We also have a considerable body of testimonial evidence in which the objects were transparent, even though they appeared to be mechanical in some way. For example, at 7:30 P.M. on Friday, October 18, 1968, the McMullen family in Medulla, Florida, looked outside their home when their dog began to howl and bark. They reportedly saw a purplish red object hovering about 10 feet in the air. It was completely transparent, and two normal-sized men were visible inside it. A strong odor of ammonia was in the air. The two men were pumping a horizontal bar up and down. As they watched, the 30-foot sphere slowly ascended and flew off. A few minutes earlier, two other witnesses saw a bright light rising from the grounds of the Medulla school, just north of the McMullen home. There were also some mysterious explosions in the area during that period.

  Was this transparent sphere a spaceship from another planet? Not very likely. The witnesses saw nothing inside it except the men and the bar. No machinery. No wonderful apparatus.

  There have been many bewildering accounts of shell-like objects with no visible means of propulsion, no signs of any kinds of technology. Contactee Reinhold Schmidt’s German-speaking ufonauts, who invited him aboard their saucer in Nebraska in 1957, didn’t walk but glided across the floor of their spaceship as if they were on roller skates. Other sober and baffled witnesses have described how the UFO occupants seemed to fly from the ground to their waiting saucers. Still others have claimed that the ufonauts simply walked through the sides of their craft like ghosts. In story after story we have testimonial proof that the objects and their occupants are not made of normal substances.

  The hard (seemingly solid) objects are another problem. Bullets have been fired at them and have ricocheted off. They sometimes leave imprints on the ground where they land. If they are the product of a superior intelligence with an advanced technology, they seem to be suffering from faulty workmanship. Since 1896 there have been hundreds of reports in which lone witnesses have stumbled onto grounded hard objects being repaired by their pilots. In flight, they have an astounding habit of losing pieces of metal. They seem to be ill-made, always falling apart, frequently exploding in midair. There are so many of these incidents that we must wonder if they aren’t really deliberate. Maybe they are meant to foster the belief that the objects are real and mechanical.

  In the foregoing I have tried to demonstrate how the soft objects seem to be directly related to the electromagnetic spectrum. This is hardly a new theory. Not only have the occultists, spiritualists, and religionists been telling us about frequencies, vibrations, and the color spectrum for centuries, but modern researchers such as Dr. Meade Layne worked all of this out years ago. Dr. Layne evolved a theory of “mat” and “demat” (materialization and dematerialization) of extradimensional objects. His findings were privately published and not very widely circulated.

  Others, such as British ufologist Harold T. Wilkins, also worked this out and published books about it in the early 1950s. But the spectrum theory lacks the strong emotional appeal of the extraterrestrial thesis.

  There is a rather curious entry in Project Blue Book Report No. 14 (1955) on page 295. In the section showing how various sightings are classified, number 8 in Code 79-80 Final Identification is “Electromagnetic Phenomenon.” This is crossed out (the report was reproduced by photo offset), and the now well-known classification of “Unknown” was substituted.[3]

  4

  Machines from Beyond Time

  “It was shaped like a disk about the size of a boxcar, with a domed top and square red and green windows,” Mrs. Rita Malley recalled. “And it made a humming sound, something like the vibration of a television antenna in the wind.”

  Mrs. Malley, a pretty, young blond mother of two, was recounting her science-fiction-like experience of Tuesday, December 12, 1967. She was driving home along Route 34 to Ithaca, New York, with her five-year-old son, Dana, in the back seat. Around 7 P.M. she became aware of a red light that seemed to be following her.

  “I was speeding slightly,” she explained later. “So naturally I assumed that I was just about to be pulled over by the state police.”

  She glanced out of the window and discovered that instead of a police car she was being paced by an eerie illuminated flying object that was traveling along just above the power lines to the left of the car. At this same moment, she said, she was horrified to find that she could no longer control the automobile. She shouted anxiously to her young son to brace himself, but he remained motionless. “It was as if he were in some kind of a trance,” she continued. “The car pulled over to the shoulder of the road by itself, ran over an embankment into an alfalfa field, and stopped.

  “A white twirling beam of light flashed down from the object… and I heard the humming sound. Then I began to hear voices. They didn’t sound like male or female voices but were weird, the words broken and jerky, like the way a translator sounds when he is repeating a speech at the United Nations. But it was like a weird chorus of several voices.

  “I became hysterical,” she admitted frankly. “My son would not respond to my cries. I knew the radio wasn’t on. The voices named someone I knew and said that at that moment my friend was involved in a terrible accident miles away. They said my son would not remember any of this. Then the car began to move again, although still not under my control. We came up out of that field and over the ditch as if it were nothing, and then back onto the road.”

  She said she got control of the car again and jammed her foot down on the accelerator, speeding all the way home.

  “I knew something was wrong the moment she walked into the house,” her husband, John Malley, told reporters. “I thought maybe she had had an accident with the car or something.”

  The next day Mrs. Malley learned that her friend had been in a serious automobile accident the night before. She told her incredible story to local civilian UFO investigators, and later the Syracuse, New York, Herald Journal (December 21, 1967) published a brief outline without revealing her name.

  For years now, apparently sincere people have been relating unbelievable experiences similar to Mrs. Malley’s. Some of the UFO factions have battled to ridicule and suppress such contactee tales, fearing that they serve to discredit the situation. But they keep coming in, year after year, from every corner of the globe. Reporters and investigators who interviewed Mrs. Malley came away convinced that she was telling the truth as she knew it.

  “Days later, when memories of the episode would flood her mind,” the Syracuse Herald-American noted, “she would break down sobbing all over again.”

  Her story does contain several important details that have cropped up in many other little-known UFO encounters. A large percentage of these events seem to occur when a small child is present. In this ca
se, the child went into a kind of trance. Such trances are frequently reported. The car itself was taken out of Mrs. Malley’s hands. This seizure of control of mechanical objects—even of airplanes in midflight—is also a common factor. Mrs. Malley’s extreme emotional reaction to the event, even days afterward, is still another key point. Finally, if her story is true, she was given absolute proof (to her) that the UFO not only knew her identity but knew of her relationship to a distant person and even knew that that other party was involved in an accident.

  All of this is a pretty big pill to swallow for those who have not followed events like this carefully over a long period of time. In many eases, the ufonauts have convincingly demonstrated that they have total knowledge of the individual percipients and that they can even foretell their future.

  There is a superabundance of historical documentation which plainly indicates that these objects and their elusive occupants have always been a part of the environment of earth and that they seem to know everything about us, are able to speak our languages, and are even familiar with the total lives of some—if not all—human beings.

  So long as we adhere to the notion that we are dealing with random extraterrestrial visitors, none of these contactee stories makes any sense. So I ask you to place the UFOs into a terrestrial or ultraterrestrial framework. Think of them as you might think of a next-door neighbor who is hooked up to your party line. The pieces of this puzzle will begin to fall into place.

  Of Prophets and Prophecy

  Most theologians reject any suggestion that unidentified flying objects may be even remotely connected with religion, but many leading ufologists suspect that innumerable historical incidents branded as religious phenomena may actually be misunderstood UFO activity.

  The Bible was completely suppressed for centuries during the Dark Ages, and then it was heavily edited and censored, whole sections being deleted altogether before the modern version was released. Scores of translators contributed to the muddle by altering meanings with high-flown poetry, and by subtly interjecting their own comments and opinions. As a result, the contents of modern translations vary widely, and many of the original meanings and descriptions of what were probably actual events have been mutilated beyond interpretation. Theologians recognize this and freely comment upon it. The late Pope John XXIII once made a wry remark about the confusion brought about by all these translations.

  Try to shelve your own religious beliefs for a moment, and look at the Bible stories objectively. The prophet Elijah was well protected by balls of fire that came out of the heavens and consumed 100 soldiers and their captains (Kings II, Chapter 1). In Chapter 2 of the Second Book of Kings, Elijah leads Elisha into the desert where a fish-shaped object spitting fire from its tail descends from the sky to carry him away forever. (Most translations of the Bible have somehow managed to turn this object into a chariot of fire drawn by fiery horses.) Read this section carefully, and the implications are startlingly clear: Was Elijah somehow connected with an aerial race who protected him and who finally took him away?

  Fireballs and thunderbolts from the angry skies apparently wreaked a lot of havoc in Biblical times. Some scholarly scientists have suggested that these accounts sound suspiciously like atomic explosions. A Soviet physicist, Professor M. Agrest, has even proposed that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by an atomic bomb. Lot’s wife, he asserts, did not turn into a pillar of salt but was reduced to a pile of ashes when she ignored a warning not to linger behind Lot’s fleeing party. Furthermore, in an article in Moscow’s Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1959, Professor Agrest offered the startling theory that ancient Baalbek was the Cape Kennedy of its day, serving as a launching platform for spaceships from another civilization. His “proof” consisted of the tektites and fused crystals found there. Such substances are the by-products of atomic explosions.

  A “flying roll” measuring 15 feet by 8 feet is described in the Bible’s Book of Zechariah, Chapter 5, and the children of Israel were said to have been led out of Egypt by a pillar of fire in the sky (Exodus, Chapter 13). According to the detailed Bible story, Moses not only held conversations with a brightly burning bush (“And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed” Exodus 3:2), but he was called to the summit of Mount Sinai after a “cloud” appeared and covered it. Moses climbed the mount and disappeared into “the midst of the cloud.” He was gone for forty days and forty nights while his people waited below (Exodus, Chapter 24). Mount Sinai is actually just a high and rugged hill, and we might ask how Moses managed to survive alone on its summit for more than a month without food. Perhaps there was more to that “cloud” than the children of Israel suspected. When Moses finally returned, he brought with him orders for the construction of an ark to be filled with gold artifacts and left as a token to the Lord. Among the instructions were directions for building a “mercy seat” of pure gold measuring 50 inches long and 30 inches wide. Gold plays an important part in many Bible stories and it also seems to have an interesting role in the UFO mystery.

  That “pillar of fire” not only led the Israelites out of Egypt, it also intervened and protected them from the pursuing Egyptian army (Exodus, Chapter 14). But the most graphic account of all is detailed in the first chapter of Ezekiel and is so well known and so frequently quoted that we need only mention here that Ezekiel claimed an encounter with four strange beings who got out of some kind of flying object. “Their appearance,” he said, “was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps.”

  In a paper presented before the American Rocket Society on November 15, 1962, Dr. Carl Sagan, a young Harvard astronomer, repeated some of Professor Agrest’s speculations and urged that ancient myths and legends be reexamined for possible clues to an early visit by an extraterrestrial civilization. The Biblical story of Enoch, for example, relates how he dreamed of “two men, very tall, such as I have never seen on earth. And their faces shone like the sun, and their eyes were like burning lamps… They stood at the head of my bed and called me by my name. I awoke from my sleep and saw clearly these men standing in front of me.”

  These tall men took him into the sky and conducted him on a tour of “seven heavens.” When he returned to earth, he wrote 366 books about what he had seen and learned. Although The Book of the Secrets of Enoch has been widely published, the Bible grants him only a few lines of Chapter 5, Genesis.

  Another book, a latter-day Bible, was created in the nineteenth century by a young man who claimed an experience similar to Enoch’s, except that he did not go off to other worlds. It is the Book of Mormon, the Mormon Bible, and is purportedly a history of North America in Biblical times. Therein lies another remarkable story.

  On Tuesday, September 23, 1823, a young man named Joseph Smith awoke in his bedroom in Palmyra, New York, to find a strange luminous being standing over his bed. This being, he said, was dressed in a white robe and had a brilliantly glowing face. He called the youth by name and told him where he would find some gold plates buried nearby. When the proper time arrived, the entity is supposed to have told him, he was to dig the plates up. Then the figure floated upward and vanished.

  Sometime later the boy was crossing a field when, in his own words, “my strength entirely failed me, and I fell helplessly to the ground, and for a time was quite unconscious of anything.” When he came to, he said the same “messenger” was standing over him and gave him further instructions about the gold tablets. He was to dig them up four years later.

  So on Saturday, September 22, 1827, Joseph Smith went to the appointed spot and started digging. Sure enough, he actually found a stone box containing several plates of gold bearing a strange, neatly engraved writing. Later eleven of his friends and neighbors examined the plates and signed affidavits swearing that they had seen them and that they contained writing “which has the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship.”

 
; Smith was not a well-educated man. He worked for years deciphering and translating the writing on these tablets, and when he was finished, he had an intriguing historical document that was, apparently, a history of North America in very ancient times—predating the Indians. This document became the Book of Mormon, for Joseph Smith founded the Mormon Church. The tablets later disappeared or were somehow destroyed, and Joseph Smith was brutally murdered by a hostile mob in Illinois in 1846. Today the Mormon Church has more than 2,500,000 followers.

  Was Joseph Smith’s strange nocturnal visitor a UFO type of entity? Was some strange psychic force at work there, trying to pass along information about those gold tablets?

  Consider the prophet Daniel. Like Ezekiel, Daniel reported seeing “wheels as burning fire” (Daniel 7:9). He describes in some detail his encounters with an entity who came down from a “throne” in the sky and whose hair was “like pure wool.” This being was dressed in a white robe with a gold belt and had a luminous face with two bright glowing eyes. He spoke to Daniel in a thundering voice that terrified the earthman. “And I Daniel alone saw the vision: For the men that were with me saw not the vision; but a great quaking fell upon them, so that they fled to hide themselves” (Daniel 10:5-9). “Yet I heard the voice of his words; and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward the ground.”

  Like Joseph Smith, and even like Dana Malley, Daniel apparently passed into some kind of hypnotic trance. Later he was given specific prophecies about contemporary problems, and they came true.

  Angels and Spacemen