Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs

by John A. Keel

  Other predictions received that month began to come true right on the nose, however. There were predicted plane crashes; a jet airliner collided with a private plane over Henderson, North Carolina, killing, among others, J. T. McNaughton who had just been appointed U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and the next day, July 20, an identical accident occurred in Brazil, killing some leading Brazilian politicos.

  I started to get nervous.

  What astonished me most was that these predictions were coming in from a wide variety of sources. Trance mediums and automatic writers in touch with the spirit world were coming up with the same things as the UFO contactees. Often the prophecies were phrased identically in different sections of the country. Even when they failed to come off, we still could not overlook this peculiar set of correlative factors.

  So convincing were these demonstrations that I finally packed up my equipment, rented a car, and drove out to the flap area near Melville, Long Island, to await the assassination and the blackout.

  Just before I left Manhattan, I stopped in a local delicatessen and bought three quarts of distilled water. I figured that a three-day power failure would certainly be accompanied by a water shortage. On my way out to Long Island, I stopped in on a silent contactee, and he told me he had received a brief visit from a UFO entity a short time before. This entity had mentioned me, he said, and had given him a message to relay to me. The message didn’t make sense to the contactee. It was, “Tell John we’ll meet with him and help him drink all that water.” (The water was in the trunk of the car, and the contactee had no way of knowing I had it.)

  The Pope was not assassinated that weekend, happily, but I saw several UFOs. They seemed to follow me around, as usual. And I was stuck with all that distilled water.

  Throughout the fall the predictions continued to come in, and a surprisingly high percentage of them came true. Later in October I had a lengthy long-distance call from a being who was allegedly a UFO entity. He warned me that there would soon be a major disaster on the Ohio River and that many people would drown. He also told me to expect a startling development when President Johnson turned on the lights on the White House Christmas tree in December, implying that a huge blackout would take place as soon as the President pulled the switch. The warning about the Ohio disaster disturbed me enough so that I broke my own silence, and on November 3, I wrote to Mrs. Mary Hyre, a reporter in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and warned her that we might expect some sort of calamity in the coming weeks. She still has that letter.

  Around Thanksgiving I returned to West Virginia for a few days and discovered that a number of people, none of whom knew about my prophecy, had been having horrible dreams of a river disaster. Mrs. Virginia Thomas, who lived in the heart of the TNT area, an abandoned World War II ammunition dump, was one who told me in some detail about her nightmares of people drowning in the river. Mrs. Hyre told me that she had also been having disturbing dreams; dreams of pleading faces and brightly wrapped Christmas packages floating on the dark water of the Ohio.

  During my visit I saw more of those puzzling lights in the sky and listened to more eerie tales of monsters and poltergeists. As usual, I stayed in a motel across the river on the outskirts of Gallipolis, Ohio, and every day I drove my rented car across the rickety 700-foot span of the Silver Bridge which joined Point Pleasant with the Ohio side.

  There seemed to be an air of foreboding in Point Pleasant that November—something that no one could quite put his finger on. When I caught a plane for Washington, D.C., later I felt decidedly uneasy. I remembered that all of the UFO predictions for July 1967 had come true except the big one. There had been the plane crashes, and an earthquake had taken place in Turkey just before the Pope flew there. Several minor prophecies had also come true. Now, in December, I had a long list to check off. In October, I had been told that “the Hopi and Navajo Indians will make headlines shortly before Christmas.” Sure enough, early in December a blizzard struck the Indian reservations in the Southwest, and they did make the headlines as rescue efforts were launched to rush them supplies and medicine

  On the morning of December 11, I was awakened by a mysterious caller who informed me that there would be an airplane disaster in Tucson, Arizona. The next day an Air Force jet plowed into a shopping center in Tucson.

  On December 15, President Johnson held the usual Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the White House. Because I was expecting a major blackout, I warned a few close friends (who by now must have thought that I was quite balmy) and was joined in my New York apartment by Dan Drasin, the movie-TV producer, and another friend who is a police official. We nervously watched the tree-lighting ceremony on television. The President pushed the switch. The tree lit up, and the assembled crowd oooed and ahhhed. Everything went off as scheduled. The nation’s power systems did not blow a fuse.

  But thirty seconds after the tree was turned on, an announcer interrupted the news special with a sudden flash.

  “A bridge between Gallipolis, Ohio, and West Virginia has just collapsed,” he intoned soberly. “It was heavily laden with rush-hour traffic. There are no further details as yet.”

  I was stunned. There was only one bridge on that section of the river. The Silver Bridge between Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Ohio.

  Christmas packages were floating in the dark waters of the Ohio.

  The World Ended Last Night…

  A few hours after the collapse of the Silver Bridge, on the other side of the world the Prime Minister of Australia decided to go for a swim on his favorite beach. He vanished. His body was never washed ashore. The elementals had predicted this.

  In the Soviet Union, a series of explosions rocked Moscow that weekend. An apartment house blew up. A few blocks away, an automobile belonging to an American newspaperman also exploded into small pieces. There was no one near it at the time. Another prediction come true.

  This is the tiger behind the door of prophecy. Some of the predictions are unerringly accurate; so precise that there are no factors of coincidence or lucky guesswork. The ultraterrestrials or elementals are able to convince their friends (who sometimes also become victims) that they have complete foreknowledge of all human events. Then, when these people are totally sold, the ultraterrestrials introduce a joker into the deck. They had me buying distilled water and fleeing to Long Island in the summer of 1967, fully convinced that Pope Paul was going to be assassinated and that a worldwide blackout was going to punish the world for three terrible days.

  I was lucky. I didn’t cry their warning from the housetops. I didn’t surround myself with a wild-eyed cult impressed with the accuracy of the previous predictions.

  Others haven’t been so lucky.

  Dr. Charles A. Laughead, an MD on the staff of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, started communicating with assorted entities “from outer space” in 1954, largely through trance mediums who served as instruments for Ashtar and his cronies from that great intergalactic council in the sky. A number of minor prophecies were passed along, and as usual, they all came true on the nose. Then Ashtar tossed in his bombshell. The world was going to end on December 21, 1954, he announced convincingly. He spelled out the exact nature of the cataclysm: North America was going to split in two, and the Atlantic coast would sink into the sea. France, England, and Russia were also slated for a watery grave. However, all was not lost. A few chosen people would be rescued by spaceships. Naturally, Dr. Laughead and his friends were among that select group. Having been impressed by the validity of the earlier predictions of the entities, Dr. Laughead took this one most seriously, made sober declarations to the press, and on December 21, 1954, he and a group of his fellow believers clustered together in a garden to await rescue. They had been instructed to wear no metal, and they therefore discarded belt buckles, pens, clasps, cigarette lighters, and shoes with metal eyelets. Then they waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  That same year, another doctor named Wi
lhelm Reich was watching glittering star-like objects maneuver over his home in Rangeley, Maine. The “space people” had a little gift for him, too: a strange theory about cosmic energies called Orgone. Dr. Reich had studied and worked under Freud in Vienna and later held posts at several important educational institutions. He was a brilliant, highly educated man. But somehow he became convinced that Orgone was the vital life force of the universe and that it even powered the UFOs that were flooding the world’s skies in 1954. His colleagues and the Food and Drug Administration viewed his theories with some dismay. He was drummed out of the medical ranks, hauled into court, tried, and jailed. He died in prison eight months later, a broken man still convinced that he had unlocked a great cosmic secret.

  Two years earlier, in that grand UFO year of 1952, two men were driving through the mountains near Paranã, Brazil, in the state of Sao Paulo, when they encountered five saucer-shaped objects hovering in the air. Later one of these men, Aladino Felix, revisited the spot, and this time a UFO landed and he was invited aboard. He had a pleasant chat with the saucer captain, a being who looked very human and very ordinary, and he went away convinced that the Venusians were paying us a friendly visit.

  Then in March 1953, there was a knock at the door of Felix’s home, and his wife answered. She reported that there was “a priest” asking for him. Because Felix was an atheist at the time, he was a bit surprised. He was even more surprised when he walked out to meet the man. It was his old friend, the flying saucer pilot, now turned out in a cashmere suit, a white shirt with a stiff collar, and a neat blue tie.

  This was the first of a long series of visits during which the two men discussed flying saucers and their mechanics and the state of the universe at large. Mr. Felix kept careful notes of these conversations and later put them into an interesting little book titled My Contact with Flying Saucers, under the pseudonym of Dino Kraspedon. It was first published in 1959 and was largely dismissed as just another piece of crackpot literature. However, a careful reading reveals a thorough knowledge of both theology and science, and many of the ideas and phrases found only in most obscure occult and contactee literature appear here. Among other things, the book also discusses an impending cosmic disaster in lucid, almost convincing terms: the same kind of warning that is passed on to every contactee in one way or another.

  Dino Kraspedon’s real identity remained a mystery for years. The book ended up on shelves next to George Adamski’s works. (Like Adamski, Kraspedon claimed that he sometimes met the Venusians in the heart of cities, one such meeting taking place at a railroad station in Sao Paulo.) Then, in 1965, Dino Kraspedon surfaced as a self-styled prophet named Aladino Felix. He warned of a disaster about to take place in Rio de Janeiro. Sure enough, floods and landslides struck a month later, killing 600. In 1966, he warned that a Russian cosmonaut would soon die,[14] and in the fall of 1967 he appeared on television in Brazil to soberly discuss the forthcoming assassinations in the United States, naming Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy.

  The startling accuracy of his major and minor predictions impressed many people, of course. When he started predicting an outbreak of violence, bombings, and murders in Brazil in 1968, no one was too surprised when a wave of strange terrorist attacks actually began.

  Police stations and public buildings in São Paulo were dynamited. There was a wave of bank robberies, and an armored payroll train was heisted. The Brazilian police worked overtime and soon rounded up eighteen members of the gang. A twenty-five-year-old policeman named Jesse Morais proved to be the gang’s bomb expert. They had blown up Second Army Headquarters, a major newspaper, and even the American consulate. When the gang members started to sing, it was learned that they planned to assassinate top government officials and eventually take over the entire country of Brazil. Jesse Morais had been promised the job of police chief in the new government.

  The leader of this ring was… Aladino Felix!

  When he was arrested on August 22, 1968, the flying saucer prophet declared, “I was sent here as an ambassador to the Earth from Venus. My friends from space will come here and free me and avenge my arrest. You can look for tragic consequences to humanity when the flying saucers invade this planet.”

  Once again the classic, proven pattern had occurred. Another human being had been engulfed by the ultraterrestrials and led down the road to ruin. There is no clinical psychiatric explanation for these cases. These men (it has happened to women, too) experienced a succession of convincing events with flying saucers and the UTs. Then they were smothered with promises or ideas that destroyed them.

  In the fall of 1967, when Dino Kraspedon was publicly issuing his uncanny predictions in Brazil, another group was battening down the hatches in Denmark, preparing for the end of the world. A man named Knud Weiking began receiving telepathic flashes in May 1967, including a number of impressive prophecies that came true. (Just prior to the capture of the U.S. “spy” ship Pueblo off Korea in January 1968, Weiking warned, “Watch Korea.”) He was then instructed to build a lead-lined bomb shelter and prepare for a holocaust on December 24, 1967. This seemed like an impossible task because twenty-five tons of lead were needed and the total costs exceeded $30,000. But donations poured in, and voluntary labor materialized. The shelter was built in about three weeks. On December 22, Weiking and his friends were “told” to leave the shelter and lock it up. A telephone blackout next occurred, lasting throughout the Christmas holidays and cutting off all of the participants from one another.

  Meanwhile, mediums, telepaths, sensitives, and UFO contactees throughout the world were all reporting identical messages. There was definitely going to be an unprecedented event on December 24, 1967. Ashtar was talking through Ouija boards to people who had never before heard the name. Another busy entity named Orion was spreading the word. The curious thing about these messages was that they were all phrased in the same manner, no matter what language was being used. They all carried the same warning. People were reporting strange dreams that December, dreams involving symbols of Christmas (such as Christmas cards scattered through a room). There were also reports of dead telephones and glowing entities prowling through bedrooms and homes. Many of these messages, dreams, and prophecies were collected together by a British organization calling itself Universal Links. The stage was set for doomsday. Thousands, perhaps even millions, of people had been warned. At that time I didn’t know about Universal Links or many of these predictions. But that Christmas week I received one of those strange phone calls that had become part of my life. At midnight on December 24, I was told, a great light would appear in the sky, and then…

  Various contactees began to report in to me from all over the country, all with the same message. Christmas Eve was going to be it!

  The Danish cult locked themselves up in their bomb shelter that night while I sat by my phone, watching out the window of my apartment on Thirty-third Street in New York City. (I had a good view of the sky.)

  After the imaginary crisis had passed, the American wire services finally carried stories about the cowering Danes, ridiculing them, of course. But Mr. Weiking came up with a message that explained it all: “I told you two thousand years ago that a time would be given and even so I would not come. If you had read your Bible a little more carefully, you would have borne in mind the story of the bridegroom who did not come at the time he was expected. Be watchful so that you are not found without oil in your lamps. I have told you I will come with suddenness, and I shall be coming soon!”

  It was all a dry run! Actually, it was a rather impressive sequence of events, and it really proved something very important. Many predictions of the December 24 disaster had been documented well in advance of that date. These messages came through in many different countries, from people who had no knowledge of or communication with one another. The UFO contactees received the same identical messages as the trance mediums communing with spirits. A link had been established. It was now clear (to me anyway) that all of these
people were tuned into a central source. My earlier speculations seemed true—the UFO entities and the spirit entities were part of the same gigantic system. So more pieces of this tremendous puzzle were falling into place. A long series of events had apparently been staged to warn us of that tiger behind the door. Some of the entities were evil liars. They had ruined the lives of many by producing “proof” which led to false beliefs and irresponsible actions. Kraspedon, Dr. Laughead, and Knud Weiking had been victims in this enormous game.

  There were so many others.

  One night in the early 1960s (exact date undetermined) a young man named Fred Evans was out driving with his girlfriend when a glowing, saucer-shaped object silently soared out of the night sky and buzzed their car. This marked the beginning of Mr. Evans’ research into UFOs and astrology. By 1967, he had installed himself as a prophet and was predicting major black uprisings.

  In the spring of 1968, Fred Ahmed Evans moved into Cleveland, Ohio, and opened a storefront with a sign over the door declaring it to be “The New Libya.” Then, on the night of July 23, 1968, rioting broke out in Cleveland. Snipers dressed in African clothing killed ten and wounded nineteen before the police brought the situation under control. The leader of the ring of well-equipped, well-organized snipers was Fred Ahmed Evans.

  Another UFO prophet had gone wrong.

  In California, a man named Allen Noonan claims to have experienced still another variation of this peculiar mind-warping phenomenon. Soon after his discharge from the Army following World War II, Noonan went to work for a company handling outdoor billboards. One day, he says, he was working on a billboard when suddenly he was taken in astral form to a strange place. He found himself in a huge white building filled with light. A group of “elders” were situated around a glowing throne, and a great voice boomed from that throne and asked, “Will you agree to be the Savior of the World?”