Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs

by John A. Keel

  Psychic Hoaxes

  There have been innumerable psychic hoaxes for the past 150 years, and many of these parallel the UFO hoaxes. In 1855, the Fox sisters confessed that their spirit rappings were a hoax. They said they produced the sounds by “snapping their toes.” Think about that for a moment. Snapping your toes so that it sounded like a rap on a wall or table would be a most remarkable talent—perhaps even more remarkable than the ability to communicate with the spirit world. I don’t believe I would pay ten cents to hear someone talk to a rapping spirit—but I would happily pay five dollars to examine someone who could duplicate the rapping sound by snapping his toes.

  Later the two sisters said the confession was false, and they had been bribed to make it.

  Mrs. Houdini was genuinely astonished and impressed by Reverend Ford’s messages from her husband, and she made numerous public statements to that effect, as well as signing various affidavits. But later, in the 1930s, she chose to deny it all for a time. Then, shortly before her death, she reversed her denials.

  In ufology we have to contend with teenagers’ hot-air balloons, and in psychic phenomena we have to worry about youngsters firing rocks at houses with slingshots and phony mediums levitating “spirit trumpets” with black thread. But there are many more UFO sightings than there are plastic balloons, and there are more poltergeists dumping rocks in living rooms than there are wild-eyed youngsters with slingshots.

  There are also more ultraterrestrial entities than either the occultists or the UFO enthusiasts dream of.

  13

  A Sure Cure for Alligator Bites

  Slag fell out of the sky over Darmstadt, Germany, on June 7, 1846, according to Charles Fort. Slag! Preposterous, of course. Why, slag could no more fall out of the sky in Germany than it could over Puget Sound a century later. Fort detailed more than a dozen other slag-fall cases from the nineteenth century, always carefully listing his sources. I have taken the trouble to check out several items from the works of Fort, and I found that he was painstakingly accurate. His books, all written in the first three decades of this century, recount case after case of strange aerial phenomena that are identical to our modern UFO sightings. So when the late Mr. Fort informed us that 1846 was a most unusual year, we are obliged to take him seriously.

  Indeed, 1846 was a most extraordinary year!

  It not only rained blood and frogs and slag. There were strange glowing objects circling those garbage-filled skies, and our naughty poltergeists were having a field day, particularly in France. Furniture was floating around a house in La Perriere, France; rocks were being tossed in the home of M. Larible in Paris; dishes were dancing across the tables of Rambouillet, France; and in a field outside of the little town of La Salette a “miracle” was taking place.

  Two children, Melanie Calvet, fifteen, and Maximin Guiraud, twelve, convinced skeptical adults that they had seen a religious vision—a great globe of light hovering above the fields. It opened up, they avowed, and a smaller, brighter light moved out. It was some kind of glowing entity who spoke to them in French. The two youngsters, having been schooled in Catholicism, assumed that this entity was Our Lady. She gave them a series of prophecies, accurately predicting the terrible potato famine that struck far-off Ireland in the winter of 1846-47 and the failure of Europe’s wheat crops in 1851. In fact, all kinds of droughts and diseases affected crops from 1846 to 1854 throughout Europe, causing great suffering and starvation. She also allegedly stated, “Little children will be seized with trembling and will die in the arms of those who are holding them…” This grim prophecy proved valid, too, when more than 75,000 people, mostly youngsters, died in an epidemic of ague—a malaria-like disease which produced fever and shivering and death.

  This was strong stuff in 1846, particularly because the children also reported that the Lady warned, “If my people will not submit, I shall be forced to let the army of my Son fall on them.” But, she added, “If sinners repent, the stones and rocks will turn into heaps of wheat, and potatoes will be sown by themselves.”

  Because it is very unlikely that the two children could have invented these prophecies, we can assume that their story was true, and in fact, it appears to conform to the now-familiar tactics of the ultraterrestrials. Their uncanny talents of precognition (ability to foresee our future) once again served to provide us with “proof” of contact. This tactic is still being used.

  The next year, 1847, that spirit moved into the little house in Hydesville, New York, and in 1848 the redoubtable Fox sisters began to communicate with it. Spiritualism began in earnest, and by 1852 there were thousands of adherents in the United States alone. From 1848 to 1851 there was a worldwide UFO flap, and poltergeist cases hit an interesting peak in 1849. Strange, isn’t it, that all these things should explode at once? The coming of the UFOs went unnoticed, but the poltergeists and hauntings created a sensation and gave added impetus to the spiritualist movement.

  In France, a man named Allen Kardec founded Revue Spirite in 1856, and spiritualism became the rage of Paris.

  And then, on February 11, 1858, a fourteen-year-old girl wandered into the French hillside and fell to her knees, her eyes filled with a vision of a beautiful woman. The girl’s name was Bernadette Soubirous. The hillside was a garbage dump outside the town of Lourdes.

  The miracle of Bernadette is so well known that we hardly need comment on it. A local skeptic, one Dr. Dozous, followed the girl on one of her pilgrimages and watched in amazement as she entered a trancelike state, lit a candle, and held her hand in the flame for fifteen minutes without seeming to feel it or harming her skin. Then she scraped away at the ground and a spring suddenly bubbled forth.

  Word of Bernadette’s visions spread across France, and although she was the only one who could see the Lady, those who accompanied her and watched her in trance experienced unquestioned miracles. Between March 5 and March 25, 1858, a series of miraculous cures took place at the grotto near Lourdes. Paralytics threw aside their crutches after drinking the water from that spring.

  The following year, 1859, the UFOs were busy again. And the year after that there was another outbreak of poltergeist cases in France and Switzerland.

  Forgetting the worldwide situation for the moment, we can draw some interesting conclusions from these French cases. Two “miracles” occurred in France within twelve years of each other. The incident at La Salette in 1846 was definitely ufological in nature. The events at Lourdes were more subtle and fit more into the “possessed” type of phenomenon. The simultaneous outbreak of poltergeist manifestations in France throughout that period, together with all kinds of aerial and meteorological phenomena (see Fort’s Book of the Damned for listings of these reports), tends to confirm the thesis that all of these things are interrelated. When and if French investigators burrow into the newspapers and journals of this period, they will undoubtedly uncover many other lost reports that will add to this evidence.

  The Curative Powers of UFOs

  On September 1, 1965, hundreds of citizens in the Kosice district of Czechoslovakia complained to their commissars about the glowing red and black spheres that were buzzing their towns and villages. A Reuters dispatch from Prague added that this was “the most recent of a series of artifacts of unknown origin which have been seen in the Czechoslovakian skies in recent months…” The Iron Curtain had sprung a leak, and U-2s from another world were pouring through.

  Two days later, on September 3, 1965, four metallic blue “plates” swooped out of the sky over the town of Cuzco, in southwest Peru. Hundreds of people, alerted by radio newscasts, went into the streets to stare at the strange formation. The objects entertained them for two hours, performing intricate maneuvers above the town. They made right-angle turns, hovered and skittered about in a manner impossible for any known type of aircraft. When they finally got bored with their audience, they sped away at incredible speed.

  Others were seeing lights in the sky that same night and weren’t quite so entertained by
them as the citizens of Cuzco. Officer Eugene Bertrand of Exeter, New Hampshire, on a routine patrol, came across a trembling woman driver who told him an elliptical red object had just pursued her car from Epping to Exeter. He calmed her but didn’t take the incident too seriously. After all, everyone knew that flying saucers were nonexistent, the product of hysteria and hallucination.

  A few hours later Officer Bertrand was called upon to investigate the report of an eighteen-year-old, Norman Muscarello, who had also seen something weird in the sky. Muscarello led him to a field near Exeter, and they both saw a large, dark object marked by a straight row of pulsating red lights lift above some nearby trees. It bore down on them and passed within 100 feet of their position. Bertrand started to draw his gun, thought better of it, and radioed for help instead. Another officer arrived shortly afterward, and the three of them watched the object as it silently moved away at treetop level. This was the beginning of the now famous book Incident at Exeter, which was carefully and thoroughly investigated by reporter John Fuller.

  That same night two other police officers more than 1,000 miles from Exeter were also making an unexpected visit to the twilight zone. It was shortly before midnight, and Chief Deputy Sheriff William McCoy and Deputy Robert Goode were cruising along a highway in Brasoria County, Texas (south of Houston). Goode, who was driving, was complaining to his partner about a sore and swollen finger. Earlier in the evening he helped his son move a pet alligator, and the creature had nipped him on the left index finger. He had bandaged it, but now it was throbbing painfully, and he expressed fear that an infection was setting in. The two men were discussing the need to wake up a doctor at the end of their patrol and have the finger tended when they suddenly noticed a large purple glow in the west, moving horizontally across the nearby oil fields. At first they thought it was just a light from the oil fields. Then it turned and began to move toward them; a great rectangular glob of purple light about 50 feet in height. It was accompanied by a smaller blue light, the men said later. Goode had his window rolled down and was waving his aching digit in the breeze. As the objects rushed toward their car, he said he felt a definite wave of heat on his arm and hand. Whatever the globs were, neither man felt inclined to stop and investigate. Goode jabbed his foot on the accelerator, and when they were some distance away, McCoy looked back and watched the lights rise upward, flare brilliantly, and go out altogether.

  The two admittedly frightened men sped back to Damon, Texas, and when their excitement subsided, Deputy Goode noticed that his finger was no longer swelling or bleeding, and the pain was gone. He removed the bandage and discovered that his wound was almost healed! Had he, he wondered, been cured by fright (unlikely, say the doctors) or by the heat from that eerie “something”?

  The wire services had a lot of fun with that story—”Alligator Bite Cured by Flying Saucer!” But somebody somewhere took the two men seriously. Low-flying light planes, apparently unmarked, flew back and forth over the area of the sighting for the next two days. Shortly after the incident, two strangers turned up at the sheriff’s office looking for Deputy Goode. They tracked the officer down in a local restaurant and immediately proceeded to describe in detail what the UFO looked like—even before Goode had an opportunity to tell them. Then they suggested that if he should encounter a similar machine in the future, he should cooperate with its occupants and keep any conversations with them to himself. The identities of these two mystery men have never been determined.

  There have been innumerable cases in which witnesses have felt heat radiating from low-flying unidentified flying objects, and there are several heavily documented cases in which people have suffered burns from the objects, but the Texas incident is one of the rare ones in which a wound was apparently healed by such radiation. When this story first appeared, it seemed so absurd that most ufologists neglected it and concentrated on the almost trivial sightings in Exeter. However, we now know that the absurd cases are the most important and that the endless aerial sightings are practically meaningless.

  A Major Miracle

  Giant winged beings, usually described as headless, are an integral part of the UFO phenomenon. On September 18, 1877 (the year that marked the beginning of Jessup’s Incredible Decade) a winged human form was seen cruising casually across the skies of Brooklyn. In 1922, there were two cases in Nebraska of 8-foot-tall winged creatures disembarking from circular flying machines and soaring away under their own power. Headless winged creatures were reported over Scandinavia in 1946, and on November 16, 1963, four teenagers in Kent, England, claimed that they had witnessed the landing of a spherical globe of light while returning home from a dance. A giant, headless figure with bat-like wings waddled from it and terrified them, they said. A decade earlier, a 6- to 7-foot-tall man with wings reportedly appeared in Houston, Texas. UFOs were also seen at the time.

  Starting in November 1966 and continuing throughout 1967, more than 100 people in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, insisted that they, too, had encountered a giant winged creature with blazing red eyes set deep in its shoulders. Most of these sightings took place around the TNT area, a World War II ammunition dump. I have interviewed many of these witnesses and am convinced that they did see something.

  Perhaps that something is the basis for many of our legends of angels and demons. And perhaps it was that same something that was flying around Portugal in 1915.

  There was a worldwide UFO flap from 1909 to 1914, encompassing Africa, Australia, Oklahoma, and other places. The poltergeist reports hit a peak in 1910 and 1913 and concentrated largely in France and Italy, although there was some activity in Portland, Oregon, during the period.

  We are concerned here with the headless winged beings, however. The flap of 1909-14 may have merely been a prelude to World War I and the astounding events which followed, or it may not have been connected with those events in any way. We have no way of knowing. Unfortunately, until more adequate research is done, we have to record much of this evidence as purely circumstantial.

  But in 1915, four girls were tending sheep at Cabeco, Portugal, when they allegedly saw a white figure hovering in the air. “It looked like somebody wrapped in a sheet. There were no eyes or hands on it,” the young girls reported to their families. (None of the witnesses of that West Virginia winged creature has reported seeing hands or arms on it.) These four children are supposed to have seen this white, headless entity twice again that summer. One of the girls was named Lucia Abobora. She was born on March 22, 1907, and she was to become one of the central figures in the earthshaking drama to follow.

  In the summer of 1916, this same Lucia Abobora was playing near a cave with some friends when they saw a light flying just above the nearby trees, moving slowly in their direction. As it drew closer, it became clear that it was a human figure. Later the children described it as “a transparent young man” of about fourteen or fifteen years of age. He settled in front of them near the cave and announced, “Don’t be afraid. I am the Angel of Peace. Pray with me.” The children knelt beside this “transparent young man” who glowed as brilliantly as crystal and prayed until he dissolved into nothingness.

  A few weeks later the angel appeared again before this same group in the same place, and again they prayed together. The initial contact was made. The stage was set.

  Europe was in flames and soldiers in the trenches were seeing strange omens in the sky. Blood was spilling needlessly in the most mismanaged war in history. Generals on both sides ordered suicidal attacks that cost thousands of lives without gaining an inch of ground. And men were learning to take to the air, carrying the carnage with them. At first pilots shot at one another with pistols and rifles, but later machine guns were brought into play. Spiritualism flourished as the relatives of the dead and the lost sought communication with their sons and husbands. Thousands of women woke up screaming in the middle of the night, always at the precise time that their men fell on the distant battlefields. This same phenomenon had shored up faith in spiritua
lism during the Civil War, and it was to be repeated during World War II and the Korean War. It happens still as our young men hurtle headlong into pools of their own blood in Vietnam.

  On April 6, 1917, the United States formally entered the Great War. One month later, on May 13, a Sunday, Lucia Abobora, ten, Francisco Marto, nine, and Jacinto Marto, seven, were in the meadows of a place called Cova da Iria outside of Fatima, Portugal, when they saw a flash of light in the clear sky. Thinking that it was lightning, they ran for shelter under an oak tree, and when they reached it, they stopped in amazement, for there, hovering just above a 3-foot-high evergreen nearby, a brilliant globe of light hung suspended. Within this globe there was an entity garbed in a luminous white robe with a face of light that “dazzled and hurt the eyes.”

  “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you,” the entity said gently in a low, musical voice. The awed children asked her (it was a feminine voice) where she came from.

  “I am from heaven,” she reportedly replied. “I come to ask you to come here for six months in succession, on the thirteenth day at this same hour. Then I will tell you who I am, and what I want. And afterward I will return here a seventh time.”

  She asked them to say the Rosary every day and to pray for peace. Then the globe silently rose and floated away. It is noteworthy that only Lucia and Jacinto claimed to hear the voice. Francisco saw the object but heard nothing.

  The excited trio rushed home and tried to tell their families about their vision, but the adults refused to take them seriously. Word spread, however, and on June 13, a small crowd of devout pilgrims followed the children to the Cova da Iria and watched from a distance. One of the witnesses, a woman named Maria Carreira, testified that she saw nothing when the children suddenly knelt and began talking to an unseen entity, but she did hear a peculiar sound—like the buzzing of a bee.