Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (20 page)

It would, of course, be easy to discount the excited testimony of a 17-yr. old boy but, less than a month later, a medical doctor and his wife came face-to-face with the same kind of beings in the same locale. Dr. and Mrs. J. Gazcue were driving near Parana on Aug. 21, 1962 when they observed two “strange persons” walking towards the road and making signals for him and his wife to stop. The two approached from a “halo of light” near the roadside. They were over six feet tall and had light hair and huge, widely separated eyes. The doctor ignored their signals and stepped on the gas. Local newspapers reported that Mrs. Gazcue suffered a “nervous attack” over the incident and required several days to recover.

A retired longshoreman, John F. Reeves, 66, of Brooksville, Florida, swears he met this kind of being on the afternoon of March 2, 1963. He says that he was taking a long, solitary walk, as was his habit when, about 1:30 p.m., out on the dunes a mile-and-a-half from his home, he saw a circular craft standing on four legs in the sand. Later, he described it as being about 30 feet in diameter and eight feet thick. There was a small dome on top, and the whole thing was a reddish-purple color, “like a soap bubble,” glistening in the sun. Curious, he started to walk toward it when he was stunned to see a “space-suited being” step out of the bushes and turn stiffly toward him in a slow, mechanical manner. The creature was, he told reporters later, about five feet tall and appeared to be wearing a tight, grayish-silver garment with a transparent globe over its head. Its face, he noted, appeared normal, except that the eyes were unusually large and set wide apart, and its chin seemed to come to a point. It was wearing mittens of some pliable material.

As he stood paralyzed with fear, he saw the creature reach to its side and produce a small black box, which it raised to its face. There was a blinding flash, “like lightning in the night,” Reeves said. He turned and started to run, but stumbled and fell, knocking his glasses off in the process. A second flash of light went off behind him and, when he looked up, he saw the creature mounting a ladder on the craft. The ladder retracted, and the machine lifted with a high-pitched whine, shooting off at high speed. Holes were found in the sand where the object’s legs had supposedly stood, and there were several odd dumbbell-shaped footprints in the area. Reeves also found two pieces of thin paper, “like Kleenex” containing some strange hieroglyphics, which he turned over to Air Force investigators. The Air Force later classified the incident as a hoax, even though Reeves was given a series of lie-detector tests and passed them all.

Many other witnesses have reported the robotlike beings with melon-shaped heads and large, widely spaced eyes. On Aug. 3, 1966, at 5:30 in the morning, a 50-yr. old woman in Erie, PA was awakened by the sound of barking dogs. She looked out of her bedroom window, she says, and saw a very strange being. It was walking up the street away from the United Oil Storage tanks on W. 3rd St. She describes it as about 5’6” tall, with very broad shoulders and a slender build. It was dressed in a bright yellow garment with no visible pockets or seams. Its head was large, “moon-shaped,” and seemed to be covered with “straggly, muddy-colored hair.”

“He moved,” she said, “like a mechanical windup toy. The legs did not bend at the knees, and it held its arms tight against its sides.” Whatever it was, it frightened her enough so that she woke up her husband, and they decided to call the police. The police just laughed. But a few days later, another woman in the same area reported seeing an identical creature. She was driving down the street in the early morning when the being stepped into her path. She stopped her car and the thing “pounded on the hood.” Then it shuffled stiffly off into the darkness.

There have also been reports of small, black monsters. A luminous sphere blocked a street in Caracas, Venezuela early on the morning of Nov. 28, 1954, forcing two truck drivers to stop. When they got out of their cab to take a look, they were attacked by three dwarfs covered with bristly hair. One of the drivers, Gustavo Gonzales, pulled a knife and tried to stab one of the creatures. He later reported that his knife glanced off “as if it were hitting steel.” The truck drivers managed to escape. A local doctor, out on a late call, witnessed the whole episode and confirmed their story.

At 4 a.m. on the morning of Aug. 16, 1955, another truck driver, Ernest Sudard, 35, encountered a UFO on a street in Bradford, England and briefly glimpsed a small being, about four feet tall, wearing skintight black clothes with a silver disc on his chest. This one moved with a peculiar, jerky motion, holding its arms tightly against its sides.

The strangest being of all is probably the one sighted in Malvern, Arkansas, last summer. Fabar Mills, a local merchant who saw it, called it an “unidentified walking object.” He described the creature as being luminous, about eight feet tall, and changing in color from red to orange to yellow.

Unfortunately, each new ufonaut sighting only adds to the mystery, a mystery that the U.S government has now assigned scientists at the Univ. of Colorado to solve. Any immediate solution, however, seems improbable. The origins and motivations of these creatures, if they are real, can only be speculated about. But millions of people throughout the world are now convinced that something is going on, and that there is “somebody out there.” More and more respected scientists, too, are beginning to take the matter seriously as they delve into the question of life on other worlds.

In the spring of 1966, some 300 physicists, astronomers, and exobiologists met in California to discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial life. At that meeting, Dr. Lee A. DuBridge, president of the California Institute of Technology, said, “Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, it’s a staggering thought.”

CHAPTER 9

WEST VIRGINIA: A PLETHORA OF PARANORMAL - 1994 LECTURE

I made Point Pleasant, West Virginia my headquarters in 1966. I then fanned out to the rest of West Virginia investigating all these various things. It’s now gotten very expensive to do these kinds of trips. It was my procedure in those days to go up to the police station first and introduce myself. because I’m a Yankee. In those days, I carried a pile of press credentials. I would introduce myself to the police so that they knew I was just another harmless nut. My second step was to go up to the local newspaper and introduce myself there. They always – large and small – wanted to interview me, and I always turned them down. I didn’t want anything in the papers about me. I just wanted to know what was happening there. My third step would be to find the local historian. Every town – even a town of 500 people – has somebody who fancies themselves the local historian of the town. Sometimes it’s the local doctor; most often it’s the local librarian. Those are the three contacts I would make first, before I would go out and talk to witnesses and such.

I would always ask the police my usual list of peculiar questions. I still do this, and they always act astonished. One of my questions was, “Has anyone been killed by lightning here lately?” This doesn’t normally happen very often. It happens only 800 times a year, worldwide. But whenever I asked this to police where they were having a lot of UFO sightings, their mouths would drop and they’d say, “My God, how’d you know? Just last week somebody got killed by a lightning bolt.” It’s a very unusual occurrence. In one town in Ohio, I arrived at the police station just as they were bringing in a body that had been killed by a lightning bolt. This apparent link was odd. There was something
electrical
going on in these towns with UFO sightings.

Thirty years ago, somebody was cruising around West Virginia and Ohio in an old automobile, harassing young ladies in their cars, trying to drive them off the road and so on. This is not uncommon today, but it
was
uncommon then. Witnesses described this man (probably a man in his 30s) as wearing a “frightwig.” He was always driving what looked like a car that was 10 or 15 years old, but kept in very good condition. It didn’t take me long to figure out that there was some serial rapist on the loose in that area. I would approach my friends at the different police departments and say, “Hey, I’ve heard these stories. There’s a maniac on the loose here.” They would always pooh-pooh it. They’d say, “Oh no, Keel , these women are making things up,” and they would ignore these stories. I warned them that there was something out of the ordinary going on, and that there was one person in that area who should probably be arrested.

Gray Barker, who lived in West Virginia, also came across some of these stories on his own. In Braxton County, young people were disappearing in large numbers. These were mostly young men below the age of 20. They would be hitchhiking to, say, a local cinema or something, and just disappear off the face of the earth. Again, I told the police that there were too many of these disappearances – that they had a maniac on the loose. The police always assured me that I was wrong. I was an out-of-towner. What did I know?

In November of 1966, four young people in an old broken down car were driving through the local lovers’ lane – an area that was called the TNT Area. During the Second World War, there was a TNT plant there. Actually, it was more complicated than that. They were making parts for atom bombs there, but that’s a long, involved story. Anyway, there was an old building there that they called a “power plant.” It was a building that housed generators for these TNT factories. They were driving past this building and saw what looked like a very large man, 6 or 7 feet tall, standing next to this power plant. He scared the death out of them.

The boy who was driving hit the accelerator, and they drove out of there at a high speed. This thing rose up in the air and followed their car. They were going over 60 miles an hour out on the dirt road, and over 100 on the paved road. Still, this thing was flying right along with them. So they drove straight to the police station. You have to realize that in small towns, teenagers do not go to the police station voluntarily. But they were so scared that they went to the police and reported this. The police were so convinced by their behavior that they held a press conference the next day. Reporters from the local newspapers, from Charlotte and other cities around there, came to hear this very bizarre story of this flying man. The four teenagers gave a very convincing account of it, and the newspapers labeled this creature “Mothman.” That was the beginning of the Mothman “caper.” The television show
Batman
was popular at the time…

Some of these people had seen this creature walking around and making strange noises. But it didn’t leave footprints in the snow. All of the descriptions pretty much matched, except some people said the eyes were blazing red. Most people said they couldn’t see the face at all. It would be dark, and they could just see this giant figure bearing down on them. Then they’d see it fly away.

When I talked to some of the witnesses in depth, it was obvious that they had been in a trance state when they saw this creature. A banker had seen it. The banker heard a noise and went out on his front porch. He stood there for twenty minutes. His wife was inside watching television. Finally, twenty minutes later, he staggered into the house. She said he looked like he had seen a ghost. He was pale and shaking, and didn’t realize twenty minutes had passed. He claimed that during those twenty minutes when he was outside, this creature was standing on his lawn, staring at him. And he couldn’t move...

My Mothman book came out in 1975. That was the year that the police in West Virginia discovered a cave filled with bodies. All of the animals had been in there, and the bodies had been rotting for a long time. They couldn’t tell how many bodies there were. They think there were 20 or 30 bodies in the cave. So I was right about a serial killer being on the loose there. Now it even gets stickier. The police, after a rather short investigation,
dropped
the whole thing…

The reason our suicide rate in the United States is so high is because they often put murders down as “suicide” in small towns, because they don’t want unsolved murders on the books. Very often, they know who committed the murder, but they figure, “Well, the victim deserved getting murdered, so we’ll just forget about it.” It seemed like everyone in West Virginia
knew
who this killer was. I wouldn’t dare give his name here, but he belongs to a prominent family in West Virginia. The reason that they know he did it is because he was put away for a while in a mental institution. While he was in the mental institution, all of the disappearances stopped. When he was released from the mental institution, they started up again… I don’t know if those are still going on – if this fellow is still on the loose. I hope he’s not. As I say, for a New Yorker to get involved in West Virginia affairs like that is a pretty sticky wicket. It was smarter of me to stay out of it.

A lot of things are still going on in West Virginia. I still get mail from a lot of people down there, some that I knew 30 years ago. One of the mysteries that I tried to untangle – and found hopeless – was that there were a number of babies born during that period who seemed to be rather unusual. After the babies were born, they were surrounded by poltergeist activity, and other odd things…

THE INFRARED TOWER – 1990 LECTURE

People are always asking me what I expect next, and sometimes the answer is “more of the same.”

We had the animal mutilations in the 1960s and ‘70s that got a lot of attention. And they are
still
going on… We never did catch whoever was doing it. They would remove certain organs from these animals. Sometimes the animal, say a cow, would be tied down right next to the house where the whole farm family was sleeping. They’d wake up in the morning and their cow had been mutilated right next to the house. There was no way this could happen without the cow making noises, because cows (and horses) make a lot of noise if any unknown person starts prowling around them. If someone starts hurting them and drawing blood, there’s certainly going to be a lot of racket. These people didn’t hear a sound during the night.