Speaker 1: John Keel's methods and madness as presented in Anomaly Number
one by Charles Lear. John Keel, most well known as
the author of the nineteen seventy five book The Mothman Prophecies,
was a controversial figure in Flying Saucer Ufo world back
in the late nineteen sixties and throughout the seventies due
to his unorthodox views. He was first and foremost of
Fertien interested in all things strange, and it was his
view that whatever was behind the flying saucer Ufo phenomenon
was not extraterrestrial and might be behind other phenomena as well.
From May nineteen sixty nine to April nineteen seventy four,
Keel put out the irregular newsletter Anomaly. He asked those
wishing to receive a copy to send him a self addressed,
stamped Manila envelope, and the number of copies he printed
depended on the number of envelopes he received. For fans
of Keel, Issue number one provides a detailed look at
his views and investigative methods in the form of concrete
suggestions for investigating the phenomena. Just after his adventures in
West Virginia and New York that he conicled in the
Mothman prophecies. Keel's first foray in the UFO investigation was
thanks to an assignment from Playboy magazine in nineteen sixty
six to as Keele put it during his two thousand
two appearance on The Art Bell Show, kept to the
bottom of the Flying Saucer mystery. He ended up spending
a good deal of time in Point Pleasant, West Virginia,
after the November fifteenth, nineteen sixty six encounter with a
red eyed, winged humanoid creature that became known as the Mothman,
reported by two young couples, Roger and Linda Scarberry and
Steve and Mary Mollett. There were many reports of Mothman
encounters in the area in the year that followed, as
well as reports of UFOs and in Black Keel also,
along with Gray Barker, interviewed Parkersburg, West Virginia, resident Woodrow Dehrenberger,
who claimed to have had contact with a man named
Indrid Cold and others who came from the planet Landulos.
Keel divided his time between West Virginia in his home
area of New York City, Manhattan, where he got involved
with the long Island woman Joanne Pirano, who claimed she
was in contact with and could channel an entity who
called himself Apple. In the Mothman Prophecies, he describes all
of the above, as well as strange, robotic voices over
the phone and various entities giving him predictions that might
or might not come true. Keel's suggestions to researcher investigators
and his views as presented in Anomaly number one were
no doubt heavily influenced by his experiences, and he could
be forgiven for being a little keyed up. The first
two words in the first issue are flying saucers, and
Keel explained that this is the last time they will
be seen an anomaly and will be replaced with the
expression aerial anomaly. He then gets into what amounts to
a mission statement, We hope to establish Anomaly as an
irregular newsletter devoted entirely to the statistical and scientific analysis
of all the many neglected ecological, parapsychological and psychiatric aspects
surrounding the study of aerial anomalies. To help enable this study,
QL invites his readers to submit reports and he offers
some guidelines. He says he has found it is more
fruitful to shift the emphasis to the witnesses and certain
unusual manifestations which they frequently experience. He asks the transcripts
and summaries be made of tape recordings, as he doesn't
have the time to go through hundreds of hours of tapes.
As for photos, he says this study is interested only
in superbly detailed photographs taken in the presence of two
or more witnesses who are willing to sign notarized AFFI davits.
Keel tells investigators to get their emotions out of the
way and just collect all the facts and report them
without jumping to conclusions. According to him, thousands of important
cases have been slighted in the past because unqualified investigators
have made hasty negative judgments. Keel then presents an example
of information formatted using a system he developed that he
calls the data Reduction System. He suggests that all UFO
publications print the DRS code for all sightings reported in
each issue. He argues that quantitative studies have been sorely
lacking in the UFO field, and that reports are so
numerous that they become unimportant unless they are reduced to
valid statistical form. He expresses the hope that the DRS
will fill the need for or common methodology for everyone
in the field. Kiel then goes into some more guidelines,
including being objective and getting a detailed account of the
witness's emotional and psychological reactions. He explains that sometimes these
reactions are more important than the citing itself. Keil advises
against using any one other than a qualified psychiatrist for hypnosis.
This is interesting as he describes hypnotizing a witness in
the book and recommends that medical records be obtained in
cases where the witnesses suffer eyeburn, which is as symptom
he notes in the Mothman prophecies, where one witness is
described as suffering from it after an encounter with the creature.
Then comes some advice that more deeply reflects the experiences
Kiel wrote about in the book. He starts off with
the divergence. According to him, a large part of the
UFO phenomenon is deliberately deceptive. He explains that since eighteen
ninety seven, UFOs have left behind ordinary debris commonly found
on earth, such as newspapers, pieces of metal, articles of
ordinary clothing, mundane chemicals, et cetera that give UFO incidents
the appearance of a hoax. Keel suggests that investigators study
Greek mythology. According to him, entities often give Greek names
for themselves and their non existent planets. A unique idea
of Keels is that UFOs often employ our own techniques
of psychological warfare. One technique, he mentions, is to stage
a landing or seemingly important incidents to divert our attention
away from important activity. At this point, Keel tells the
readers that they need to get rid of all preconceptions
before they can even begin to understand any of this,
and urges them to reject the extraterrestrial hypothesis that, in
his view, keeps the phenomenon and its source free from interference.
He explains that hoaxes had been deliberately staged to make
the government believe the phenomenon was non real. He says
that the UFO buffery has served to bring ridicule on
the subject by advocating the etch, and that this has
served to allow the UFO source to operate unhindered for
twenty years. Keel goes on as he was wont to
do in a section titled Hallucinatory Effects. There he points
out that some contact cases have proven to be hallucinatory,
and he introduces the term induced hallucination and says it
seems that the effects were produced in the witness's minds
by an exterior influence. He closes this section with this
cryptic statement, the method and purpose of this effect is
now known to a select handful of competent researchers. Following
this is a section titled the DRS Procedure, a section
on how to format and submit UFO reports. In a
section titled the Men in Black, where Keel describes the
MiB as they had been reported, he cautions against alarming
witnesses by displaying unusual interest in such visitors and trying
to apprehend one. The remaining five pages consist of what
one would expect of a Flying Saucer UFO newsletter, with
news and listings of books on the subject, as well
as what Keel calls rush off letters, replies to letters
he wrote to prominent figures regarding the UFO mystery from
Robert F. Kennedy, the office of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and
the National Director of the Society for the Propagation of faith.
Keel's DRS never took hold in Flying Saucer Ufo World
An Anomaly became mostly a collection of news clippings covering
subjects ranging from Bigfoot to cattle mutilation. Keel refined his
ideas regarding the mystery in his future writings, and in
particular his nightighteen seventy book Operation Trojan Horse and his
nineteen seventy five book The Eighth Tower. Charles Lear is
the author of Crashed Saucers and Malevolent Aliens, available at
Amazon dot com.