| Fw: UFO
UpDate: Keel vs. Ufology |
 Terry Colvin |
 Feb 14, 2008 18:32 PST
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Keel Vs.
Ufology
By Jerome Clark
[published in Fortean
Times 156 (2002), pp. 39-42]
On March 17, 1969,
John A. Keel, occult journalist, composed a
three-page
letter to James E. McDonald, atmospheric physicist.
Except
for their mutual fascination with the UFO phenomenon
and
their outsized personalities, it would be difficult to
imagine
two men less alike. Between them they personified
the extremes
of 1960s ufology.
One addressing
himself almost exclusively to radical ufologists
and
Forteans itching for an exciting alternative to
the
extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) harked back to the
1940s, to
Richard S. Shaver and N. Meade Layne, and, even
earlier, to
classical demonology and supernatural folk
belief. The other
allying himself with the most
conservative ufologists and
speaking to his fellow
scientists and to elite institutions
possessing the
wherewithal to fund UFO research and to overcome
entrenched
resistance to the phenomenon sought to drag ufology
out of
its marginality and to transform it into a branch of
normal
science. Barely more than two years later, McDonald
would
be dead by his own hand, and Keel would live on to
write The
Mothman Prophecies and other books and to remain
an active
presence into the 1980s and an enduring influence
even now.
It can be fairly said that if McDonald wanted
to domesticate
UFOs and place them in the mainstream, Keel
preferred them so
wild and woolly that the ETH would pale
into banality by
comparison. The whole structure of
post-Enlightenment
civilization itself would collapse
before Keel's shape-changing
ultraterrestrials demons with
a fancy new moniker became a
generally recognized species.
In Keel's view, McDonald, an
accomplished and (at least
until he took up UFO advocacy) well-
regarded member of the
University of Arizona's Institute of
Atmospheric Physics,
needed educating and not just about the
supernatural
reality underlying UFOs and allegedly
related
manifestations: poltergeists, fairies, Sasquatch,
Republicans,
in short just about anything else not
immediately explainable.
Keel, using a rhetorical technique
that over the years would
become wearily familiar, remarked
that McDonald suffered from a
regretable [sic] emotionalism
& apparent in many of your
public
statements.
Moreover, Keel observed, You
often tend to substitute
speculation for facts. McDonald
was associating with the wrong
people, for example the
ufologists associated with NICAP
(National Investigations
Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a
relatively cautious,
pro-ETH private group headed by UFO author
and retired U.S.
Marine Corps Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe). These
sorts were buffs
who adopted a conclusion before they had any
evidence.
Keel, on the other hand, drew on extensive field
studies
and personal experiences, not to mention the
valid,
independent studies he had conducted outside the
buffery s
sphere of reference. Among other things, he had
established
conclusively that known poltergeist cases and
known UFO waves &
correlate precisely with each other,
thus substantiating Keel s
theory that the poltergeist
phenomenon is a UFO effect.
Keel declared that his
comprehensive study of all religious
traditions proved
divine miracles and UFO contacts also to be
identical at
their root. No specifics accompanied these
assertions,
though he did urge McDonald to look up recent Keel
articles
in such august journals as the pulp
cheesecake-and-
adventure magazine Male and Ray Palmer's
pulp hollow-earth-
championing Flying Saucers. On the last
of his three pages, he
did mention West Virginia contactee
Woodrow Derenberger. Highly
qualified psychiatrists had
given Derenberger a completely clean
bill of health. Even
more revealingly, one of the doctors
involved experienced
direct contact himself!
McDonald's restrained response,
written on March 24, observes
mildly that you re not in a
particularly strong position to
criticize someone like
myself for speculating on the UFO
problem. I might tick
off, but won't take time to, a pretty long
list of your own
speculations that are not well supported in
your
writings&. As a matter of fact, it is not your
own
speculations that I find disquieting, but your
practiced style
of writing as if you had some deep insights
into baffling
mysteries that no one else has
plumbed.
Writing back with a long letter dated April 2,
Keel portrayed
himself as the one man who had broken
through all the buffery
myths and nonsense, conducted not
just the field work but the
statistical and scientific
studies others (such as McDonald, who
had only emotional
involvement, or NICAP's obsessive-compulsive
paranoid
schizophrenics ) had not even thought to try, and found
a
definite conclusion based upon hard facts& The UFOs
are
transmogrifications&. The UFO entities are &
variations on the
age-old elemental types.
In a much
shorter reply McDonald, refusing to rise to the bait,
remarked that Keel simply was not making himself clear.
When he
talked about transmogrifications and age-old
elemental
phenomena, he wrote, "I simply do not understand
you. You just
spin one mystery inside another and never
get anything across in
any concrete terms." In a note to
himself McDonald was a
compulsive note-taker he said that
he was disinclined to engage
in further
correspondence.
It was a wise decision. Keel had
already declared that the
celebrated scientific method has
proven to be totally unworkable
where UFO investigation and
interpretation are concerned.[i]
Those who have had access
to McDonald's massive UFO files
(housed at the University
of Arizona in Tucson) have seen
abundant evidence of his
commitment to the scientific
method.[ii] McDonald, alas,
merely a passive observer; could
only interview witnesses,
weigh testimony, study radar records,
consider alternative
explanations for sightings, and all the
rest. Keel, on the
other hand, could actually control UFO
events. Once, he
claimed, he had conjured up the notion of
gillmen, and not
long afterwards according to Keel anyway
someone actually
encountered a gillman. Who, where, or when Keel
never let
on.
If you believe John Keel, you also believe
this:
Supernatural gods (ultraterrestrials, hereafter
UTs) once ruled
directly over the earth but then returned
to their abode, the
superspectrum (the upper reaches of the
electro-magnetic
spectrum ), after human beings began to
populate the planet.
Displeased with the intrusion, the UTs
engaged in protracted
conflict with Homo sapiens in an
effort to resolve this
territorial dispute. (Keel does not
explain why such presumably
superior entities would have to
wage the dispute over thousands
of years.) The UTs also
battled each other, and one group
assumed human form so
that it could more easily communicate with
the
Neanderthals, whom it sought to enlist in its physical
army.
The unintended result was sexual intercourse and the
creation of
the human race as we know it.[iii] This
produced strange
responses in [the offsprings ]
materialized nervous system, Keel
wrote. Emotions were
born. Frequencies were changed. The direct
control of the
superintelligence was driven from their bodies.
They were
trapped on Earth, unable to ascend the
electromagnetic
scale and reenter their etheric world. With
the loss of control,
they became animals, albeit highly
intelligent animals. [iv]
According to Keel, humanity's
long interaction with the
supernatural, as well as the
timely intervention of enigmatic,
unearthly strangers in
the lives of historical personages such
as Thomas Jefferson
and Malcolm X, testifies to the continuing
presence of the
gods of old, including God, who dwell in the
superspectrum.
Its manifestations include UFOs and their
occupants,
monsters, demons, angels, poltergeists, ghosts, and
voices
in the head.
The Devil's emissaries of yesterday have
been replaced by the
mysterious men in black, he stated.
The quasi-angels of Biblical
times have become magnificent
spacemen. The demons, devils, and
false angels were
recognized as liars and plunderers by early
man. The same
impostors now appear as long-haired Venusians. [v]
Thus
you swallow all but the benign slant of testimony from
such
notorious characters as George Adamski, Howard Menger,
Aladino
Felix (aka Dino Kraspedon), and Ernest Arthur
Bryant (of the
notorious Scoriton episode, in which a
reincarnated Adamski
returned via spacecraft to rural
Devonshire), all contactees of
the 1950s and 1960s, all of
them with at least to other
observers - very serious, some
might say fatal, credibility
problems.[vi]And then there's
the already-mentioned Woodrow
Derenberger and, on the other
side of him, Thomas F. Monteleone.
| |
From
November 1966 until he dropped out of sight a few years
| later, Derenberger, a
late-middle-aged sewing-machine salesman,
challenged the
credulity of even the most slack-jawed with ever
more
expansive fables of interactions with space people and
of
jaunts to their home planet, Lanulos ( near the Ganymede
star
cluster [vii]). Given conservative ufology's antipathy
to
contactees, NICAP's Pittsburgh Subcommittee led a
remarkably
vigorous, open-minded field investigation into
Derenberger s
early claims as they were occurring - or,
more accurately,
evolving - until it arrived at the only
conclusion possible:
that Derenberger's yarns owed
everything to human invention,
nothing to extraterrestrial
intervention. A local psychologist
drawn into the probe the
one who, Keel told McDonald,
experienced direct contact
himself! suffered something of a
breakdown, seeing saucers
invisible to other family members,
meanwhile channeling
failed prophecies.
Derenberger's tall tales figure
largely in Mothman Prophecies
(1975). Keel, who spent time
with Derenberger, rejects any
notion that the man was just
making it up as he went along. He
also cites as supporting
evidence the adventures of a University
of Maryland
student, Tom Monteleone, who claimed also to have
met
denizens of Lanulos and to have traveled to the home
planet,
whose inhabitants cavort about it in the nude.
Monteleone
surfaced after he called a Washington, D.C.,
radio station on
which Derenberger was appearing. As Keel
writes in Mothman, Even
Woody was surprised by such direct
confirmation of his own
experiences. After meeting
Monteleone personally, Keel
determined that Monteleone was
privy to subtle details about
such things that only true UT
encounterers would know about;
thus, I finally had to
conclude Tom was on the level.
Except he wasn't.
Monteleone was, one, a psychology major -
that alone ought
to have raised a red flag or at least a
Keelian eyebrow -
and, two, an aspiring (and later
successful)
science-fiction writer. He had conjured up the
story on a lark,
as a hoax on a hoaxer. Writing in the May
1979 issue of Omni, he
crowed, I contradicted Mr.
Derenberger's story on purpose,
claiming to have seen
totally different things on my visit to
Lanulos. But on
each occasion, he would give ground, make up a
hasty
explanation, and in the end corroborate my
own
falsifications. He even claimed to know personally the
UFOnaut
who contacted me! [viii]
When these
revelations saw print,[ix] Keel did not, no
surprise,
graciously concede that all those conservative
ufologists buffs
and cultists in Keelian had been right all
along. Keel insisted
not only that he had known Monteleone
was lying from the start,
but that anybody who read what he
had written on the subject
could see that.[x] Well, not so.
To the contrary, Keel had been
so wowed by Monteleone's
Lanulosian friend Vadig's customary
farewell I ll see you
in time that he cited it as evidence that
UFOs come from
outside our time frame and [Keel's italics] _from
outside
the environment of the known universe_. [xi]
It should
be stressed, too, that Keel does not always use the
word
hoax as the rest of us do, to denote humans fooling,
or
attempting to fool, other humans. In Keelian, hoaxing
more often
represents what UTs do to us. Since UTs are
virtually all
powerful, they can represent themselves as
just about anything.
Consequently, even the most manifestly
preposterous encounter
claims are real paranormal events,
even if not what they seem to
witnesses. Thus, Adamski and
Derenberger are telling the truth
as they saw it; thus,
too, the airship inventors of 1896/97 were
disguised UTs
(even though practically every sober investigator
of the
airship period has deduced that such figures did not
exist
outside the fictions of journalist-pranksters).
Thus,
anything, and I mean _anything_, goes.
I
_have_ a personal history with Keel, whom I have known since
if memory serves early 1967, when Charles Bowen, then
editor of
Flying Saucer Review, brought us together. We
entered into
correspondence. I was young, impressionable,
modestly read,
uncritically minded, and in the fashion of
the period
susceptible to paranoia. In Forbidden Science:
Journals
1957-1969 (1992) Jacques Vallee records the
following from his
entry of April 3, 1969: Don [Hanlon]
believes that Jerome Clark,
a young ufologist from Chicago
[sic],[xii] has become so
convinced that an
extraterrestrial [sic] invasion was imminent
that he has
been driven close to a breakdown.
Well, not quite - in
April 1969 I was more upset about a break-
up with a girl
friend than about invading UTs - but it is
certainly true
that I suffered both an unhealthy degree of
fright and an
overblown imagination. I was hardly alone.
Earlier, in
December 1967, I had visited Keel at his
Manhattan
apartment, where he and a young couple caught up
in the
excitement were trying on gas masks, anticipating an
imminent UT
strike on New York City. Reading the
correspondence I had with
Keel and others back then, I can
only cringe at the youthful
folly painfully in evidence. At
least, I suppose I could say in
my defense, I had the
excuse of being rather younger than Keel.
In any event,
I grew up, and away from Keel, though once he had
confided
his hope that one day I would be the next generation's
John A. Keel. Though I had thought the parting was
amicable, I
was wrong. As late as the 1990s, long after
our personal
interaction consisted in its entirety of no
more than the rare
pleasant note and the even rarer
crossing of paths, he was madly
spreading slanders whose
subject was lapsed Keelist Jerome
Clark. When at last I
confronted Keel on the matter, he replied
that he was only
pointing out the obvious, which is that I...
"live in a
world of paranoid conspiracies and illiterate
misconceptions. To curb this you may need extensive
psychotherapy, coupled with drug treatment. You are ill
and have
been haunted by this illness all your life." And
so on. In
short, the usual charming way of dispatching
critics: they say
those things because they're crazy, in
the most clinical sense
of the adjective. For good
measure, he added the to-me-amusing
observation that I
have fallen for hoax after hoax. [xiii]
None of this
matters matter much, and my annoyance over this
strange
little episode passed quickly. Still, besides
demonstrating Keel's often-shown preference for
vituperation
over reasoned discourse, it underscores his
crankiness, in both
senses of the word. It's not that Keel
will not lightly abide
fools; it's _colleagues_ he objects
to. And come to think of it,
why given his
medieval-demonologist outlook, his relentless
credulity,
his charm-challenged anti-intellectualism, and, well,
his
bad manners - would anybody _want_ to be a colleague of
Keel's?
Contrary to general impression, which is
wont to credit him with
a more creative imagination than he
in fact has, he is not a
particularly original thinker. His
mentor Meade Layne, founder
of the occultish (the
uncharitable would say crackpotish)
Borderland Sciences
Research Associates, got many of his ideas
from medium Mark
Probert, who channeled teachings from, among
others, a
500,000-year-old Tibetan.[xiv] If this is your idea of
a
reliable source of information, God bless you, but I
suspect
most of you would elect to look elsewhere. Layne, I
might
mention, thought the etherians UTs were a generally
benign lot.
It was Trevor James Constable, a student of
Layne s, who first
discerned the dark reality beneath the
sunny exterior: The
spacemen finally begin to emerge as
coteries of unethical
invisibles, exerting a psychic
despotism over innocent and well-
meaning people.
[xv]
But Keel has been more widely read, and it is
largely through
him that ufologists and Forteans, or at
least some of them, have
plunged into the thickets of
occultism and obscurantism, into a
realm where words like
elemental and superspectrum and
ultraterrestrial and
transmogrification are actually supposed to
_mean_
something.[xvi] Into, in other words, a domain
of
incoherent theory and dubious data and, finally,
numbing
irrelevance. If Keel were a humorist like Charles
Fort rather
than a windmill-tilter like Tiffany
Thayer,[xvii] one could
smile and shrug it off as an
ongoing, offbeat joke. No Fortean,
to my knowledge, has
ever championed Fort's sky islands or
Ambrose-collectors,
knowing that Fort wasn't championing them,
either. But Keel
is deadly, gloomily, blusteringly, spittle-
spewingly in
earnest. Though usually politer and calmer about
it, so are
the legions of acolytes who since then have dropped a
ton
of Keelist doctrine on all our heads.
Let me close,
however, on a mostly positive note. To the best of
my
recollection, I have been in Keel's company three
times,
possibly four. Even with that limited exposure, I
think I can
safely testify that there are few more
entertaining dinner
companions. Though it's hardly
something one would infer from
his writing public or
private, in restaurants he has a dazzling
and wicked sense
of humor. I also think Mothman Prophecies is a
hugely fun
book, even if there are whole chunks of it no
sensible
human would take seriously for a nanosecond. I hope
that
the movie based on it is a huge success and that Keel
makes
a ton of money from it. He deserves to retire in
peace. And, if
the truth be told, the rest of us deserve to
be left in the
peace of Keel's retirement.
i. A
New Approach to UFO Witnesses, Flying Saucer Review,
May/June 1968.
ii. As well as McDonald's
correspondence with a dizzying range
of UFO personalities,
from the sane to the certifiable.
iii It is surely
pointless to mention here that no living
physical
anthropologist believes that Neanderthals were the
ancestors of Homo sapiens.
iv. Our Haunted Planet
(Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications,
1971).
v.
UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,
1970).
vi. Keel's explanation for conservative
ufologists rejection of
claims like these is
characteristically ad hominem. In The
Flying Saucer
Subculture, Journal of Popular Culture 8 (1975),
he
writes, Interestingly, the hard-core believer [sic] &
tends
to be over-skeptical & and has an extremely
suspicious nature,
perhaps because he/she has created an
imaginary self-image and
constructed the necessary lies to
maintain it. Thus they tend to
believe that everyone else
shares these personality flaws. They
often project or
transfer their own problems to the UFO
witnesses they
interview, and many sincere percipients and
contactees
have been branded liars by UFO enthusiasts who
thought
they detected their own behavioral problems in
them.
vii. Ganymede, of course, is usually thought to
be a moon of
Jupiter.
viii. Monteleone has his own
credibility problems. The Omni
confession, devoted chiefly
to the ridicule of those foolish
enough to believe him,
gives the impression that his role as
hoaxer was brief and
limited. In fact, as late as January 1970,
he was making
public appearances. In an August 11, 1970, letter
to Keel,
he stated that the experiences I had with Vadig [his
contact from Lanulos] were completely true. This was, of
course,
long after he had made whatever point he
originally intended to
make.
ix. Not only in Omni
but in a better (and more restrained) piece
by Karl T.
Pflock; see Anatomy of a UFO Hoax, Fate, November
1980.
x. For example, see Mark Opsasnick's amusing
account in Strange
Magazine (Spring 1995). Confronting
Keel on his curious
assertion that he d always known
Monteleone was a fraud,
Opsasnick asked, reasonably
enough, why, knowing as much, he had
still chosen to
present it in Mothman Prophecies. Keel snapped,
The
chapter is about hoaxes! Read the whole chapter! Don't read
one sentence! The whole book says it's all a crock of
shit!
Opsasnick notes, I decided to leave it at that. I
reread the
chapter&. It is not about hoaxes. I could
only hope that Keel s
statement the published word doesn't
mean anything applies only
to this chapter.
xi. The
Time Cycle Factor, Flying Saucer Review, May/June
1969.
xii If it matters, I was living in Moorhead,
Minnesota, at the
time.
xiii. Letter dated March
27, 1996.
xiv. See, for example, Layne's Mark Probert,
Baffling San Diego
Medium, Fate, May 1949.
xv.
Scientists, Contactees and Equilibrium, Flying Saucer
Review, January/February 1960.
xvi. As veteran
ufologist Richard Hall once wittily observed
(MUFON UFO
Journal, August 1977), for all the meaning terms such
as
these and extra-dimensional, psychical, Magonia, and the like
bear, one might as well say that UFOs emanate from the
chronosynclastic infindibulum.
xvii. The late James
Blish once wrote of Thayer, founder of the
Fortean
Society, that he advocated almost every imaginable crazy
belief. At bottom, he added, every one of these beliefs
& turned
out to rest on some form of personal devil
theory. Cited in
Damon Knight's Charles Fort: Prophet of
the Unexplained (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday and Company,
1970).
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_______________________________________________
|
Terry W.
Colvin
Sierra Vista, Arizona  |
|
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|
