Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (36 page)

One morning is April of 1969, Ernest Atkins stepped from his home on a farm near New Haven, WV (very close to Pt. Pleasant), and found his beagle pup dead in his yard. “There was no evidence that the pup died in a fight,” Adkins said. “But there was a large, very neat hole in its side, and the animal’s heart was lying outside the body. It looked as if something had chewed it out. There were no other marks on the body.”

But no known animal would, or could, neatly tear the heart out of a dog without leaving other marks on the carcass. And any animal that might attempt such a thing would certainly have eaten the heart or some part of the dog.

We investigated the situation in Pt. Pleasant as thoroughly and as carefully as was humanly possible. But after all of our interviews and all of our experiences, we were still left with the basic, disturbing question: What is really on the loose in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other isolated “window areas” of the world?

There is an ancient religious theory that contends that demons and gods need physical matter from this world to aid their own materializations. And once they have materialized in a physical form, they must replenish themselves frequently to retain that form. This, of course, is found in numerous variations in the vampire lore of Europe. The deaths and disappearances of animals and people during these mysterious invasions has always been carefully explained by some kind of phenomenon acceptable to the people of the period. We no longer believe in vampires, but millions of us now believe in flying saucers from outer space, and even in giant, red-eyed monsters.

Perhaps one of these days you will come face-to-face with one of these tall humanoids near your own hometown. If you can bring it in – alive or dead – don’t sell it to a sideshow. There are several top scientists who will want to talk to you.

But be careful. Wherever these monsters tread, the flying saucers (and the Men in Black) are never very far behind.

CHAPTER 19

THE FLYING SAUCER CRIME WAVE THEY CAN’T COVER UP –
SAGA
MAGAZINE, DEC. 1968

“It’s a science-fiction nightmare!” a burly sheriff in West Virginia groaned recently. “And there doesn’t seem to be anybody who can help us.”

“I don’t give a damn what the Air Force says,” another sheriff in Texas complained. “Something big is happening, and we need help.”

“We’ve been getting too many cases of people being hurt, burned, gassed, and paralyzed,” a public health official in New York State remarked grimly. “We asked the Air Force directly for advice, and they told us there was nothing to it – that it was all nonsense.”

These men, and many other responsible authorities throughout the United States, are trying to cope with the horrifying problems left in the wake of the eerie, nocturnal visitors known as flying saucers.

The record is long, appalling, and exceptionally well-documented. People all over the world have been pursued, injured, kidnapped, and even killed by UFOs. Automobiles have been wrecked, and planes have crashed because of flying saucers.

It is a lonely battle for most of the people involved. Twenty years of ridicule has made the subject of unidentified flying objects disreputable and largely unapproachable. No effective program on the federal government level has been created to deal with the situation. Only in the last year has the FBI cautiously begun to get its feet wet by studying, often secretly, some of the hair-raising UFO incidents now pouring in from everywhere.

The U.S. Air Force has confined its investigations largely to a public relations effort designed to discredit the problem. Astronomers and physicists have been assigned to investigate cases that should have been turned over to a high-level law enforcement agency or a branch of military intelligence.

The Air Force says unidentified flying objects are “weather balloons” and mirages. The astronomers blame meteors, lightning bolts, and “marsh gas.” Even the hardcore ufologists are sharply divided in their interpretations of the mass of hostile incidents now documented in their files. These cases rarely make headlines outside of the areas where they occurred because
there are so many of them.
An entire edition of a Sunday newspaper could be devoted to the new UFO cases of a single week, and there would still be cases left over!

As far back as 1953, there are records of UFO attacks. In November of that year, two men, Albert and James Grear, were standing in a field near Zanesville, OH when, according to their story (which not even the ufologists took seriously at the time), James started to rise into the air, seeming to levitate toward a shining object high above. His brother grabbed his legs and held on for dear life, hauling him back to the ground.

Had a UFO tried to kidnap James Grear?

Scores of other cases involve attacks on motorists who have sworn that the control of their vehicles had somehow been wrested from them. Two young men in Idaho, Will Begay and Clyde Soccie, burst into the office of the Sheriff of Bonneville County on the night of Nov. 2, 1967. They said they had been driving near Ririe, Idaho when something seemed to land on the roof of their car. Then, as they put it, “a power bigger than they could cope with” forced them off the road. They leaped out of their vehicle and were astounded to see a saucer-shaped object perched on the roof. Two men, both “about three feet tall,” appeared and addressed them in some incomprehensible language. Unable to communicate, the little men finally got back into the object and flew off.

These things have been going on largely unnoticed for years. Whatever these objects are, they not only can paralyze people, but they can also cause automobiles to stall. They can jam radios and knock telephones out. They have even reportedly picked up trucks from highways and hoisted them into the air. Local police have found themselves totally helpless when a UFO flap hits their area. And they haven’t been able to find anyone in the federal government who will even listen to their tales of horror. Deputy Sheriff A.N. Perkins and Patrolman C.F. Bell of Williston, FL claimed that they were engulfed with an intolerable wave of heat and became temporarily paralyzed as a group of objects flew over a line of stalled autos on Dec. 5, 1966. Other police officers have claimed that they reached for their guns to fire on “flying saucers,” yet found themselves unable to pull their weapons from their holsters.

One of the many apparent patterns emerging from this mass of data is the consistent reappearance of the objects in the same isolated, thinly populated areas year after year. These sectors, known as “flap areas,” have become inundated with other bizarre problems in the last two years. Giant “prowlers” or “peeping Toms,” always described as being at least six-feet, six-inches tall with shiny silver hair, have sparked police searches all over the country. Identical “prowlers” have appeared in West Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, and in New York State. Farmers in New York’s Delaware County have been pursuing these elusive giants with shotguns. They soberly describe how the “prowlers” are able to run with incredible swiftness in total darkness, and seem to leap over high obstructions with astounding ease.

In Ohio, the author was told similar stories of “cattle rustlers” in shiny white coveralls, who performed feats of running and jumping that were impossible for a human being. Local law enforcement officials everywhere have been perturbed over the sharp increase in “cattle rustling” in “flap areas” in Florida, Ohio, and other states. Often the mutilated carcasses of the animals are found drained of blood. One cow was found in Ohio in December of 1967, cleanly cut in half “as if it had been snipped by a giant pair of scissors.” These UFO “cattle rustlers” never leave any footprints or other clues behind.

After a futile search for footprints and truck tracks, a sheriff’s deputy in Florida asked ufologist Joan Whritenour, “Just where does a rustler put a full-grown cow? Sure as hell not in his back pocket!”

In the fall of 1967, the story of Snippy, a horse found mutilated in Colorado, was given considerable newspaper space. But there have been hundreds of “Snippys” in the past few years. And hundreds – if not thousands – of dogs have also disappeared or been found inexplicably dead and bloodless in “flap areas.” Mutilated animals have also turned up in Canada and South America. In Condona, Peru, a farmer named Alphonso Perez reported that six of his prize heifers had been slaughtered in the spring of 1968 by parties unknown. Veterinarians who examined the carcasses said the animals had slit throats, and the wounds appeared to have been cauterized. The blood had been drained from all of them (or had dried up inside). Old fashioned, western-style cattle rustlers often butchered animals in the field, but they made off with the prize steak cuts, not the blood or soft tissue.

It looks as if UFOs are interested in, or have a serious need for, animal blood. But what about human blood?

Here’s a case that may offer a clue. Early on a rainy morning in March 1967, a Red Cross Bloodmobile, laden with fresh blood collected from human volunteers, was driving along Route 2, next to the Ohio River, en route to Red Cross headquarters in Huntington, West Virginia. The driver was Beau Shertzer, 21. He was accompanied by a young nurse. As they hit a completely deserted stretch of road, a large glowing object lifted from a nearby hill and sailed silently toward the vehicle. Shertzer rolled down his window and looked up.

He was panic-stricken to see some kind of arm or extension being lowered from the glistening machine, which was cruising only a few feet above his bloodmobile. The nurse looked out her window and saw another arm reaching down on her side of the truck. It looked as if the flying saucer was trying to wrap a pincer-like device around the vehicle. The nurse went into hysterics, understandably, and Shertzer opened the engine up wide, trying desperately to outrun the thing. Apparently they were saved by the sudden appearance of headlights from oncoming traffic. As the other cars neared, the object retracted the arms and hastily flew off.

To this day, Beau Shertzer refuses to drive along that highway.

Other puzzling incidents have had far more serious consequences. One man died of drowning after jumping into Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela together with dozens of other terrified fisherman, when a huge luminous object flew low over them on Oct. 6, 1961. Another man, Francis Bedel, Jr., lost control of his car five miles north of Freetown, Indiana on the night of Jan. 17, 1967, when a bright glowing object swooped out of the sky and made a low-level approach. Bedel’s car swerved off the highway and ended up in a creek, badly damaged.

There are growing numbers of cases in which innocent people have been badly burned, blinded, or given a near-lethal dose of radiation poisoning by the mysterious objects. “Sonny” Desvergers, a scoutmaster, was reportedly burned and knocked unconscious by a “ball of fire” that came from a circular object near Boynton Beach, FL in August of 1952. Desvergers said there was the “smell of rotten eggs” around the object. The Air Force said his whole story was a hoax.

A young boy near Hobbs, NM, Charles Davis, was “burned bald” by a low-flying UFO on June 2, 1964. His grandmother saw the object shoot away as the boy screamed with pain. His face began to swell until his eyes were closed, and his ears “looked like pieces of raw meat.” Another child, an 11-yr. old girl, was allegedly burned in an identical manner by “a flying ashtray” near Oklahoma City, OK in the fall of 1964. When Robert Stiff, a local ufologist, tried to investigate the case, he found the Air Force had whisked the girl away to a military hospital. He was never able to get to the bottom of the story.

A 45-yr. old woman near Fleming, NY was struck by a “ball of fire” from a UFO while riding in a car in the spring of 1966. She was hospitalized and remained partially paralyzed for weeks afterwards. But one of the severest of all “burn” cases took place in Canada on May 20, 1967. Steve Michalak, 52, was gathering rock samples near a place called Falcon Lake when he blundered upon a circular object that looked like stainless steel.

He watched it land, he claims, and heard voices coming from it. He called out but received no reply, so he walked up to the thing and actually touched it. As he did so, the disc began to revolve and a blast of heat struck him, burning his chest under his clothes, leaving an odd checkerboard pattern. He became ill immediately and has not been well since, apparently suffering with all the symptoms of radiation poisoning. His case has been thoroughly investigated by both Canadian and American scientists and medical men.

A 12-yr. old boy named Gregory Wells became involved in this undercover nightmare on March 19, 1968. Gregory had gone outside his home near Beallsville, OH to get a thermos jug of water. Suddenly a reddish, football-shaped object appeared low over the trees, making a noise like a generator. A tube projected from the object and flashed a beam of red light at the boy, knocking him to the ground and setting his jacket aflame. A local investigator for APRO, Dennis Jones, filed a careful report in which he said he felt the witnesses involved were “telling merely what they saw.” He felt that “Gregory was telling the truth.” Young Wells required serious medical attention.

A beam of light from an object “as big as a baseball diamond” paralyzed and partially deafened another Ohio boy on Aug. 19, 1966. Chris Ward, 14, and three young friends were camping out in sleeping bags on the back porch of a home in East Liverpool, OH, when around 12:40 a.m., Ryan Reed, 12, woke up and became aware of something hovering over the porch. He woke up the others and they excitedly left the porch to watch the enormous object hanging low over the house. Suddenly a beam of light shot out from underneath the craft, striking Ward and rendering him immobile.

Terror swept over the small group. The others grabbed Chris, but found they couldn’t move him. It was as if he were rooted to the spot. The object turned bright red and shot upwards. As it disappeared eastward, Chris was able to move again – and move he did. All four boys scrambled desperately around to the front of the house. Chris had the key to the front door, and he twisted it in the lock so violently that it actually broke in two.