Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (6 page)

A total of 20% of all 1966 Type 1 sightings took place on Wednesdays, while only 7% were reported on Tuesdays. Thursdays were the second most “popular” day for sightings, with 17% of the total.

The largest number of sightings was reported during the 4
^th
week of March, the 4
^th
week of July, the 3
^rd
week in August, and the 3
^rd
week in September. This pattern was established in 1964 and repeated in 1965-66. There was a massive flap in the 4
^th
week of March 1967, but the data has not yet been analyzed. (A new precedent was set in 1967 when there was a large flap throughout the 3
^rd
week of January.)

The largest single “flap” of 1966 took place on the evening of Aug. 16, between the hours of 9 and 11. So many reports were published for this flap that we have analyzed them separately. The sightings for that evening were concentrated in the states of Minnesota, Arkansas, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and New Jersey. Several auto pursuits were recorded that evening, and a number of pilots claim that a UFO touched down briefly at the Flying Cloud Airport outside of Minneapolis.

Overall, the most sightings in 1966 were recorded in the states of Ohio, Nebraska, Oregon, California, and Minnesota – in that order. However, UFO reports were published in all 50 states. As the intensity of the phenomenon increased, the number of published reports has declined. In many areas, residents now take “flying saucers” for granted, and no longer report them. In spot checks conducted in areas where local newspapers have not published
any
reports, we discovered large numbers of witnesses who had failed to report their observations to any authority.

On the basis of this study and my personal investigations in many areas, it appears that UFO activity is most intense in isolated, thinly populated sections of the country. Places such as Kentucky and West Virginia, neither of which has any Air Force bases or large military installations, have had almost continuous UFO sightings since the summer of 1966.

If this were a purely psychological phenomenon, one would assume that the number of sightings would increase in areas where the population is
larger.
However, the reverse is true. Areas of dense population (with, therefore, a greater number of psychologically disturbed persons) produce the
fewest
reports.

If the UFOs were merely natural phenomena, such as bolides and meteors, reports on a given date would be distributed across several states, and all sightings would occur at approximately the same time. However, the geographical distribution of sightings, and notable time differences, tend to rule out this easy (and frequently used) explanation.

WHAT ARE THEY?

There is absolutely no evidence that UFOs are extraterrestrial or interplanetary in nature. All substances and “hardware” alleged to have come from UFOs have been composed of earthly materials. Since 1896, there have been 2,500 recorded cases in which witnesses have claimed to have seen the UFO pilots. In 92% of these cases, the observers claimed that the “ufonauts” were humanoid. The major differences were in size only.

Thus, these objects seem to be manufactured of earthly materials, and seem to be operated by people not too distant from ourselves. Furthermore, they seem to appear more frequently over the same areas, year after year. (Ohio led the country in 1952 and 1966.)

In thousands of well-documented cases since 1896, these objects have reportedly carried out maneuvers that indicated they were under intelligent control. There are now hundreds of cases in which law enforcement officers and other reliable witnesses claim that the objects responded to, and even returned, light signals flashed from the ground.

We conclude that the majority of the unidentified flying objects reported are manned vehicles of undetermined origin, operating illegally in our atmosphere, in order to transport personnel and material from one surface point to another for an unknown purpose. This is a blatant violation of our airspace, as well as an open violation of all of our licensing and aircraft zoning laws.

NORTH AMERICA 1966: THE GREAT WAVE

During 1966, I traveled over ten thousand miles, visiting the areas of concentrated UFO reports and interviewing scores of ordinary citizens who suddenly found themselves living in a science-fiction nightmare. Something strange is happening in the United States. Rural dwellers are sitting in stunned silence around their kitchen tables after witnessing UFO landings, and glimpsing strange creatures, which they assume to be UFO occupants. Most of these people are reluctant to talk about what they have seen, and it is obvious that only a small percentage of these incidents are reported to the local authorities or to the press.

Newspapers across the country did, however, struggle valiantly to report on what was happening in their immediate vicinity. However, some were so inundated with UFO stories that they abandoned all pretense of being objective. Many, such as
The Democrat-Herald
of Albany, Oregon, dropped the terms “UFO” and “flying saucers” and began to refer openly to “spaceships from another world.” In one news clip after another, we find the chilling phrase: “He (or she) has been a changed person since he saw that thing the other night.” The press had begun to concentrate largely on the sober reports of police officers and sheriffs. The clipping in my files of March 1966 bear witness to this, for they name over 50 policemen and law enforcement officials who reported observing UFOs.

The most significant trend in 1966 was the fantastic number of low-level and touchdown reports. These came in from every state in the union, and many of the witnesses complained of eye ailments following a sighting. I interviewed a number of people while their eyes were still swollen, red, and watery. We now have many stories of UFOs pursuing people on the ground and coming directly up to the doors and windows of homes. It is almost as if they are
singling out certain individuals and observing them closely…

Generally speaking, we can break the 1966 flap down into the following categories:

Geographical: Sightings that followed a geographical and chronological pattern along rivers and interstate highways, moving progressively from point to point along those features.

Technical: The usual pattern of sightings around technically interesting areas such as Air Force bases, arsenals, military installations of all kinds, chemical factories, power plants, dams, transformer stations, radio and TV antennae, etc.

“Monitoring” flights: Pursuits of automobiles, airplanes, and individuals on foot, plus hovering activities around individual homes.

Reservoir sightings: These continued on a large scale throughout the U.S. in 1966.

Landing and direct contact reports: There were more of these in 1966 than in any previous year.

Altogether, these thousands of reports mount up to an alarming picture. Perhaps they indicate that the UFOs are now engaged in a massive “final stage” of operations.

Tad Jones, the witness of the January 19
^th
, 1966 landing outside of Charleston, West Virginia, reported that the object he saw had
wheels.
If this is true, then we have a new development that would suggest that the UFOs are going to abandon their old tripod-type landing gear, and replace it with something that will give them ground mobility.

My repeated visits to the Pentagon have convinced me that the USAF is not genuinely interested in this problem. They have made no real attempt to interfere with the UFO activity in the flap areas, and they have shown no real interest in the complaints from citizens living in those areas.

At the same time, I should add, I have not tried to keep my research secret, and I have not been approached by any agency or individual intent on hampering my efforts. The Air Force, NASA, and other official agencies have actually granted me limited cooperation and have, in fact, gone to considerable trouble to supply me with specific information when I have requested it. John Fuller recently told me that certain officers in the Pentagon actually encouraged his research. Fuller certainly paved the way for public acceptance of flying saucers.

The intensive UFO activity seems to support APRO’s theory that our population is now being rapidly prepared to accept the existence of UFOs and to deal emotionally with the fantastic social changes that their arrival is sure to foster.

CHAPTER 2

INVESTIGATING UFOS: PROBING A PHENOMENON WRAPPED IN MYSTERY –
SAGA
MAGAZINE, AUGUST 1977

“The average UFO report isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” an Air Force officer in the Pentagon told me back in 1966. At the time, I scoffed at the statement, assuming it was just part of the sinister conspiracy to downgrade and dismiss the UFO phenomenon. But gradually, I came to realize that the statement was painfully accurate. Few UFO reports, even today, contain enough substantive information for a valid analysis. The art of writing reports is still a puzzle to many civilian UFO investigators. The result is a flood of paper and red tape that tells us nothing whatsoever about the UFO witnesses themselves, and very little about the actual case being investigated. Before Project Blue Book was dismantled in 1969, Air Force investigators often dismissed baffling cases with the terse remark: “insufficient information.”

A major part of the problem was created by the Air Force’s own official questionnaire (form FTD 164), which was closely copied by most of the civilian UFO investigators and their various organizations. The form is practically worthless. It looked impressive in its seven-page format, but it was obviously designed by pilots and astronomers for a singular purpose: to extract only information that would make it possible to identify the “unknown” as a conventional object or mundane astronomical phenomenon. It asked the witness to make impossible estimates of speed, altitude, angle from the horizon, etc., without defining important factors such as the exact position of the witness and the local terrain.

Early in my own investigations, I discovered that the average witness could not even pinpoint true north – even when he or she had lived in the area all their life. It is common for a witness to say that the object appeared in the east, say, and traveled to the southwest when, actually, I found that it had appeared in the west and traveled northeast! Estimates of altitude are much more difficult to make, even for experienced pilots. And at night, it is almost impossible to judge the altitude of an object (usually just a light) of unknown size. Everything becomes relative. For example, a jet airliner traveling at 500 miles per hour at 30,000 feet appears to be moving rather slowly to a witness on the ground, while a Piper Cub rattling along at 60 miles per hour, at treetop level, seems to be moving at a much faster speed. In my files, I have reports by
police officers
that claimed the object they saw must have been traveling at a speed of at least 2000 miles per hours. One report by an elderly man in Florida claimed he saw an object take off at a speed of 5000 miles per hour!

If you are a battlefield veteran, you know that the experienced eye can actually see a cannon shell in flight and even estimate roughly where it is going to land. Artillery shells lumber along at a fairly slow speed – 700 to 800 miles per hour. Bullets and high velocity shells travel much faster and can’t be seen with the naked eye. In order to see a fast-moving object, particularly at night, it must either be gigantic in size or it must be a great distance from the observer. An orbiting satellite, for example, can be traveling several thousand miles per hour but is visible because it is hundreds or thousands of miles from the observer.

Therefore, estimates of UFO speeds are usually inaccurate, and altitude estimates are questionable unless the object appears near something of a known altitude – such as a mountain or a conventional aircraft. The knowledgeable investigator also carefully checks direction with a compass, allowing for normal magnetic variations in the area, from the exact position of the original sighting. (It is surprising how few investigators bother to do this.) Ninety percent of the time you will find that the witnesses were completely wrong in all their estimates, particularly if they were in a moving vehicle at the time of their sighting. We are on safe ground only in the comparatively rare cases in which a local radar station got a reading on the object or when – as has happened in several instances over the years – the witnesses were able to track the object with a theodolite, a surveying instrument that measures angles and directions accurately.

While Air Force investigators were bent on “proving” that the witness had seen the planet Venus or a weather balloon, the average civilian investigator is biased in the opposite direction. He’s usually trying to prove that the witness saw some type of alien spaceship. This bias leads to all kinds of misrepresentations in his report. The witness may have just seen a bluish light with a red glow on the upper parts but the investigator gets him to admit that the light was circular or discoid (all lights seen from a distance are circular in appearance), asks many leading questions, and ultimately ends up putting together his own version of the event. The final report is apt to read: “Witness saw a solid object surrounded by a blue haze, with a red flashing light on top.” When the report is later translated into magazine articles and books, it becomes “a disc-shaped object with blue lights and a red strobe light on the upper surface.” The strange blue light has become a metallic flying saucer from outer space!

Unfortunately, the Air Force debunkers were often correct when they claimed that a large percentage of UFO sightings were of natural phenomena – weather balloons and conventional aircraft. But, oddly, none of the astronomers and physicists associated with Project Blue Book
ever
bothered to study the sources of these misinterpretations. For example, a phenomenon known as noctilucent clouds has produced many spurious UFO reports – but the only real study of these clouds has been made in the Soviet Union.

Noctilucent clouds are brilliantly glowing masses of self-luminous gas that orbit the Earth at altitudes ranging from 80 to 500 miles. Some are gigantic in size, and a ground observer can easily think they are much lower in the atmosphere. They appear in a variety of shapes from spherical to spiral and saw-toothed forms. Back in the mid-1960s, Soviet scientists discovered that these clouds reflect radio and television waves. The USAF attempted to fire instrument-laden rockets into them from isolated bases in Alaska, but the results of these experiments were never released. We really know very little about how these clouds are formed. Some scientists think they are related to the Air Glow phenomenon.