Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs

by John A. Keel

  Rather, it seems that these events are concentrated in base areas and are merely a side effect of the other things taking place there unnoticed. Small, confined areas all over the world appear to be haunted century after century by mischievous entities who are able to adopt any guise and who maintain such total control over material objects that they can produce any kind of manifestation. Our willingness to accept the restless ghost theories is based upon our ego-inspired need to believe in the immortality of the human soul or spirit. The ultraterrestrials might recognize that need and wickedly take advantage of our beliefs, tailoring their manifestations so that they appear to support our religious convictions.

  I have prepared two interesting graphs based upon the independent research of the occultists and the ufologists. One is a chart of the known UFO reports of the nineteenth century. The other is a chart of the recorded poltergeist cases for the same period. We find striking similarities in these patterns. In some cases, the poltergeist wave preceded by a few months or a year or two the UFO activity in the same area. In other cases, the UFO and poltergeist activities occurred simultaneously. Our biggest problem is that the occult phenomena have been more thoroughly investigated, recorded and researched than the UFO phenomena. The occult records are lavish with essential details about the people and the areas involved, while the UFO reports provide little or no details other than descriptions of the objects.

  The problems in computing accurate charts from this kind of sampling are obvious, particularly because most of the better poltergeist reports of the period came from Europe, where investigations were better organized and more widely published (this holds true today for UFO coverage). We are forced to estimate that a proportionate amount of poltergeist activity was occurring in the United States in those years. Most of the UFO reports in this particular study were from the United States, and several of them are detailed elsewhere in this book.

  Assuming that each discovered historical report represents a larger number of unpublished or undiscovered reports, just as today’s published UFO reports represent on the average 250 unreported or unpublished sightings, we can conclude that a flap condition existed in the years 1820, 1834, 1844, 1846, and 1849. We find that there was an outbreak of poltergeists in 1835, 1846, and 1849.

  As the nineteenth century progressed, reporting improved, and we are able to make more precise correlations. A UFO flap took place in 1850, and there was also a series of poltergeist cases. A larger poltergeist outbreak occurred in 1867, following flaps in 1863-64. UFO activity became more intense beginning in 1870, and there were notable flaps in 1872, 1877, and 1879. The 1880s produced a major explosion of all kinds of phenomena, including the sudden disappearances of people. Poltergeist cases were in abundance in that decade, particularly in the big flap years of 1883 and 1885.

  Morris K. Jessup labeled the years 1877-87 the Incredible Decade after scouring the astronomical journals of the period. Astronomers made some remarkable discoveries during those years. The previously unobserved satellites of Mars popped into view in 1877, new craters appeared on the moon, and all kinds of strange objects flitted around the upper atmosphere. Bonilla photographed unidentified objects while observing the sun during the flap year of 1883 (Chapter 2). The great flap of 1897 was apparently in preparation.

  In 1866, a New Englander named William Denton declared himself to be the first modern contactee. He claim to be in telepathic contact with beings from another planet, and he and his whole family later purportedly visited Venus and Mars. Denton wrote a series of books describing saucer-shaped vehicles in detail, which he thought were made of aluminum. (A commercial process for manufacturing aluminum was not invented until 1886.) He also told his audiences (he lectured widely) that the folks who rode around in aluminum airships looked very much like us. His narratives were, in many respects, identical to those of the modern contactees.

  Trance Mediums and Possession

  Trance mediums were nothing new in 1850. In the Bible’s First Book of Samuel, Chapter 28 describes how Saul consulted a medium (“… a woman that hath-a familiar spirit”). Mediums acted as oracles in ancient times, and people with this peculiar gift appeared in each new generation. Such persons seem to serve as instruments through which the ultraterrestrials can speak to us directly, and they often come up with amazingly accurate prophecies of the future and precise details of events that could seemingly be known only to the dead relatives of the people who consulted them.

  Of course, when spiritualism became a national fad, a goodly number of charlatans and hucksters moved in. But most of the genuine mediums exercised their talents carefully and for free. They did not indulge in fancy hocus-pocus and did not need paraphernalia, such as spirit cabinets. They were—and are—people who can apparently summon up unseen entities or alien intelligences and extract information from them.

  I am not a spiritualist myself, although I have attended a few séances over the years, usually in the role of a scoffer and disbeliever. As a longtime amateur magician, I have been able to see through the frauds, but I have also been genuinely perplexed by some of the manifestations I have personally witnessed.

  Essentially, a trance medium lapses into an unconscious state, and while in this condition, his or her body is taken over by some outside influence. This influence is usually a self-styled “Indian guide” from “the other side.” Many mediums have been simple, uneducated people, but when in a trance state they have been able to talk foreign languages fluently. Scientists and clergymen have put countless mediums through severe tests over the years. At one group of séances in the 1920s, sitters, who were all versed in different languages, grilled mediums in everything from ancient Chinese to Swahili, and the controlling entities not only conversed in those languages but corrected the sitters’ grammar! The daughter of Judge Edmunds, president of the Senate in the 1850s, gave incredible performances while in a trance, speaking fluently in Greek, Spanish, Polish, Latin, Portuguese, Hungarian, and several Indian languages.

  Because the sitters—and the mediums—assume that they are dealing with residents of heaven, they ask mostly spiritual questions. Customarily, the “control” will announce that Mr. Blank is standing next to him and wishes to speak to Mrs. Blank, who is attending the séance. Mrs. Blank excitedly begins to question her dead husband, Mr. Blank. How is life on the other side? Just fine, the control replies, a little bored, everyone lives in vine-covered cottages, and all is sweetness and light. Where did Mr. Blank hide his valuable gold watch before he died? It’s wrapped in an old sock and buried under some papers in the bottom drawer of the old rolltop desk, the control answers. Sure enough, when Mrs. Blank gets home, she finds the watch exactly where the medium’s alter ego said it would be. Try to convince Mrs. Blank that she didn’t talk with her dead husband!

  In many cases, the medium even begins to talk in a voice that sounds exactly like the dead Mr. Blank, uses his pet expressions, and even refers to things known only to Mrs. Blank, indulges in their private jokes, and so on. Occasionally, a deceased celebrity will “break through.” Recently the late George Bernard Shaw made a tape recording in England that is now circulating in occult circles. Those who knew Shaw claim that it sounds exactly like him, uses his phraseology and vocal mannerisms, and displays his brilliant and distinctive wit.

  The trance phenomenon deserves extensive study because so many aspects of it are directly related to the contactee phenomenon. The contactees have been told a hundred different stories of what life is like on other planets. If you review the descriptions of heaven produced at the thousands of possibly genuine séances, you will find the same contradictions. The entities will lie transparently at one point in the séance, and a few moments later will come up with astounding information that could not be based upon simple trickery.

  The mediums themselves have always been aware of their controls’ mischievous sense of humor. They speak of false shades and malevolent spirits who perform outrageous hoaxes. So the mediums and the professional
investigators are always wary. The fact that a control can imitate George Bernard Shaw does not necessarily mean that GBS is doing the speaking from the spirit world.

  The fact that a control knows where Mr. Blank hid his gold watch does not necessarily prove that Mr. Blank is standing at his side “on the other plane.”

  The medium generally remains completely inert while in the trance or “occupied” state but in some instances can become quite animated and make gestures appropriate to whatever is being said. In a very real sense, the medium’s mind has been blanked out, and his or her body has been completely taken over by the control. The medium has become a zombie of sorts, possessed by an alien entity, an entity who lacks a physical form of his own.

  Contactees often find themselves suddenly miles from home without knowing how they got there. They either have induced amnesia, wiping out all memory of the trip, or they were taken over by some means and made the trip in a blacked-out state. Should they encounter a friend on the way, the friend would probably note that their eyes seemed glassy and their behavior seemed peculiar. But if the friend spoke to them, he might receive a curt reply.

  In the language of the silent contactees this process is called being used. A used person can suddenly lose a day or a week out of his life. I have known silent contactees to disappear from their homes for long periods, and when they returned, they had little or no recollection of where they had been. One girl sent me a postcard from the Bahama Islands—which surprised me because I knew she was very poor. When she returned, she told me that she had only one memory of the trip. She said she remembered getting off a jet at an airport—she couldn’t recall getting on the jet or making the trip—and there “Indians” met her and took her baggage. She remembered nothing further after that. The next thing she knew she was back home again.

  It seems likely the same methods are applied to both mediums and contactees. In the case of the mediums, the mind control serves a useful purpose. It enables the entities to establish direct vocal communication with us and, in many instances, pass along worthwhile information.

  This process can also be destructive. A young man from Ithaca, New York, called me some time ago at the urging of William Donovan, president of Aerial Investigation and Research (AIR), to tell me of his close brush with death. One evening in the fall of 1967, he said, he left his home to drive to a meeting. For some reason he couldn’t explain, he got out of his car, went back into his house, and carried out several aimless actions such as picking up a book from a table and putting it on the shelf. “Finally, I said to myself, Okay, it’s time,” he told me. He remembers leaving the house and again heading for his parked car.

  The next thing he knew he was in a hospital bed.

  He had apparently driven about four miles to a railroad crossing just in time to meet an oncoming train. His car was demolished, but he escaped rather miraculously with only a few minor injuries. If he had not gone back into the house and carried out those meaningless, time-killing chores, he would have avoided the train altogether. It is possible, of course, that the shock of the accident blotted out his memory of that four-mile drive—but he couldn’t even remember putting the key in the ignition.

  This man had been active in investigating the UFO flap that took place around the radio telescope installations near Ithaca in 1967-68.

  In his book Passport to Magonia, Dr. Jacques Vallee, a NASA astronomer and computer expert, touches on all this. “In the Soviet Union, not so long ago, a leading plasma physicist died in strange circumstances,” Dr. Vallee states. “He was thrown under a Moscow subway train by a mentally deranged woman. It is noteworthy that she claimed a ‘voice from space’ had given her orders to kill that particular man—orders she could not resist. Soviet criminologists, I have been reliably informed, are worried by the increase of such cases in recent years. Madmen rushing through the streets because they think the Martians are after them have always been commonplace. But the current wave of mental imbalance that can be specifically tied to the rise and development of the contactee myth is an aspect of the UFO problem that must be considered with special care.”

  So there seem to be both good and evil forces at work in this type of phenomenon. The good guys latch onto people with particularly receptive minds and turn them into trance mediums. The bad guys use the same methods to tamper with the minds of contactees and even to commit murders indirectly. Because incidents of these types can be traced throughout history, it seems probable that these forces have always been extant on this planet.

  When the good guys worked through mediums, they needed some excuse that we would accept. The answer seemed to be “communication with the dead.” These communicative efforts led to the foundation of spiritualism, and the entities played the role to the hilt, using their complete knowledge of us and our individual lives to provide us with “proof” of the existence of a spirit world. This is the same precise methodology being employed with the UFOs to build up support for the extraterrestrial thesis. We humans need acceptable explanations for unnatural phenomena, so “they” happily—and often humorously—supply us with all the explanations we can handle. At the same time, they give us tiny fragments of the real truth, hoping no doubt that we will be able to digest them slowly. Ever so slowly.

  In earlier times it seems as if they made a complicated attempt to convey the truth to us through mediums and psychics, but we chose to misinterpret these efforts and placed them within the context of our primitive religious beliefs. We are still doing this, and they are going along with it because even misinterpreted communication is better than no communication at all. Religion may not be truth but may merely be a step on the long path of the real truth.

  Fragments of the truth have been passed along to us through many different channels of communication. One of these is called automatic writing. The medium holds a pen or pencil loosely, and the controlling entity takes charge, moving the hand to write out the message. Many thousands of people have this gift, and believe it or not, whole books have been written by this process. Hundreds of them have been published over the years and form what is known as inspired literature. One of the most remarkable of these works is a huge volume titled Oahspe. It was written by a New York dentist named Dr. John Newbrough in 1880. He was, so the story goes, awakened one morning by a hand on his shoulder and a bodiless voice. He found his room lit up “with pillars of soft light so pleasing to the eyes it was indescribable.” His mysterious visitors ordered him to purchase one of the newly invented typewriters and to spend an hour each morning sitting with his fingers on the keys. He didn’t know how to type, but he turned out a voluminous manuscript at the rate of about 1,200 words an hour. When it was completed, it was an intricate history of the human race, filled with amazing information about our solar system, such as the Van Allen radiation belt, which has only been recently confirmed by our space program. Much of the historical information in Oahspe checks out. A complex language, a mixture of ancient tongues and even Algonquin Indian, is defined and utilized in the text. To research such a book and compile the language would have required many years of study and hard work for a seasoned linguist—which Newbrough was not.

  Another popular mode of communication is the Ouija board. This doesn’t work for most and produces nothing but mischievous rubbish (probably from the subconscious mind) for others. But some medium types have obtained amazing results with it.

  Do the ultraterrestrials really care about us? There is much disturbing evidence that they don’t. They care only to the extent that we can fulfill our enigmatic use to them.

  The Reverend Arthur Ford is one of America’s best-known trance mediums. For most of his life he has served as an instrument for an entity who calls himself Fletcher. In 1928, Fletcher announced that Harry Houdini (who had died in 1926) was on hand and had a message which he wanted conveyed to his widow, Beatrice. The message was in a code once used by the Houdinis in a mind-reading act. This code was known only to the couple and had never been publis
hed or revealed to anyone. Fletcher, through Ford, was able to give precise details of this secret code, and Mrs. Houdini later confirmed that the message had to come from her husband. This was only one of Ford’s many coups. In the fall of 1967, Ford went into a trance on Canadian television and produced a message for Bishop James Pike from his deceased son. Bishop Pike, who was present at this televised séance, avowed that the message seemed authentic and seemed to come from the familiar personality of his son. This well-publicized séance launched a major revival of spiritualism in the United States.

  Reverend Ford travels in high circles but has never made any material gain from his peculiar gift. He gives freely of his time—and Fletcher’s advice from the other side—at séances all over the country. Mrs. Ruth Montgomery, the well-known author and Washington reporter, tells of the time that Reverend Ford visited her in Washington and lapsed into a trance so she could ask Fletcher for some advice on his behalf. Reverend Ford was then in the process of moving and wanted to know what he should do with some of his things. Fletcher seemed totally disinterested in Ford’s problems, Mrs. Montgomery reported, and when she asked if Ford should visit a clinic for a checkup, Fletcher snapped, “He’d better do something. If he doesn’t, I can’t work through him much longer.”

  Although Reverend Ford had voluntarily submitted his person to Fletcher’s use for nearly half a century, the entity was apparently completely disinterested in his problems and welfare.

  This is, alas, rather typical. Even the most helpful entities seem more dedicated to the job of communicating than to any kind of involvement with those to whom (or through whom) they are communicating. The bizarre history of psychic phenomena is filled with Fletchers.

  Mrs. Montgomery, incidentally, indulges in automatic writing herself and has received constant messages for the past few years, many of which have been valid prophecies and stern advice meant to govern her future actions.