JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

Bormujos Back in 2002, I interviewed John for the Fortean Times, for a special issue prompted by the film adaptation of The Mothman Prophecies. To make the occasion more convivial, I invited John’s old friend George Kuchar and my girlfriend Mamie Caton, since John liked both of them (and who didn’t?). The issue in question was #156, March 2002 in the UK and April 2002 in the US.

A couple of corrections to the bibliography: the correct title for Two Women is Three Women; Kiss My Gun was never published; Bed of Nails was the original title for Three Women; The Hoodwinkers never got beyond the proposal stage; Pattern for Adventure was the original title for Jadoo. John’s memory was never particularly reliable. I’ve never seen a copy of How to Build an Atom Bomb in Your Basement, although John repeatedly mentioned it, and even cited it in one of his columns for Fate. It may have been a joke, in which case I hope it’s included in all lists of his books.

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In 1964, John was between books. After Jadoo, he suffered from writer’s block awhile (which he wrote about in 1959), and hadn’t yet started to investigate ufology. He took on a number of TV and movie jobs, many of which never made it to production. He collected his work for that year in a bound volume. And, as usual with John, it’s filled with surprises and puzzles.

It begins with The Keystone Kops, a pilot script for a TV show. Some rummaging around the internet tells me that an animated show was considered in the ’60s, but this script calls for live action. It was never made, and there’s no indication of who was considering it.

It’s followed by a skit for “The Cole Bin,” a regular segment on the Clay Cole Show. Cole was a New York DJ who did a music show on WPIX-11 on Saturday nights; the last 15 minutes were devoted to “The Cole Bin,” in which musical guests did comedy bits. I assume Chuck McCann, who often worked with him, was also involved (no episodes survive). John’s script has a safecracker contending with a safe that’s also a radio, emitting blasts of music when the dial is turned.

Next is an article intended for the magazine Better Home Movie Making, on “Editing 8mm Sound-on-Film.” In the cover letter, John proposes a series on 8mm sound movies, with an eye to a future book. This, too, seems to have gone nowhere.

This is followed by ten episodes of Snooper Scope, a cartoon featuring “the greatest detective in the world,” and his assistants Billy Venture, Pokey, and Flutter, as they battle the evil Professor Disc Spicable. It was intended for Copri Films, but seems never to have been made. I asked animation historian Jerry Beck about it, and he had never heard of it. Copri sometimes imported and dubbed foreign cartoons, so maybe that was what Snooper Scope was meant for. At any rate, John wrote them ten scripts, with exact timings.

“Nosey” is another puzzle. It’s another comedy sketch, this time for two puppets, Nosey and Dosey, and two humans, Dan and Mr. Pumpernickel. Maybe this was also meant for Clay Cole and Chuck McCann; they often worked with the puppeteer Paul Ashley, who created several big-nosed characters.

“How Man Learned to Fly” is the script for a children’s record on one of John’s favorite subjects, aviation. Again, I haven’t found any indication it was ever produced.

How to Murder Your Wife was indeed produced, and starred Jack Lemmon. John wrote a trailer for it, which, again, seems not to have been used.

One of the more curious projects in this file is The World of the Living Dead, a treatment for a remake of the 1932 movie White Zombie. John dutifully turned in 34 pages of zombie story; according to his agreement with the producer Sherman S. Krellberg, he was paid $250 for it.

There are two more brief scripts: a series of skits for Candid Camera, and a brief treatment for a film to be called The Nudists from Outer Space, which I posted here, way back when.

Tucked in among all these is a curious article called “The Year 2000,” in which John imagines the world of the future. Like most prophecies, it often misses the mark, but remains a fascinating look at the dystopia that John (and no doubt others) thought lay ahead. And after all these unrealized projects, there may also be some wishful thinking in his prediction that future audiences will “demand high quality entertainment,” and that “painters, writers, and entertainers will be in the highest income group.”

At the request of reader Jon Robinson, I’m posting one of Jaye Paro’s articles from Beyond magazine (I listed them here, and posted her first article here.). This one is “Manifestations 0f Indians Appear to Long Island Family,” and appeared in the February 1970 issue.

Beyond billed itself as “Documented Truths About the Strange Phenomena of Our Times.” It was published in the late ’60s and early ’70s, first as a digest and then in standard format. This issue featured articles on UFOs, astrology, handwriting analysis, channeled messages from Martin Luther King, and the healing powers of Pacolite clay. It was published by Bernard S. Adelman, about whom I can find nothing. The Executive Editor was Keith Ayling, who seems to have written mostly books about aviation, and, if it’s the same Keith Ayling, smutty novels like Key Club Girl and Sex Peddler, under the name of Arthur Adlon. However, veteran Fortean Vincent Gaddis was also one of the contributing editors. Beyond was published in Hicksville, NY, in Nassau County on Long Island, only six miles from Farmingdale, where Jaye Paro lived.

Her article collects ghosts sightings from the Harmon family in Huntington, as well as a few tales from Princess Sum Tam of the Mattinecock tribe. So, here, for your Halloween enjoyment, are some Long Island ghost stories, from the enigmatic Jaye Paro.

Parts 7 and 8 of “The Answer” are one page each. Part 7, “The Ten Men,” concerns a council of white-robed Androids. The plan John mentions here was a suggestion that he made for a public display of UFOs. You can read about it in the “Special Cases” file here. Part 8, “Methods of Infiltration,” claims that the Androids pass as “Indians,” and are taking over “the Montessori system of parochial schools.” I must point out that Montessori schools are, in fact, not parochial schools.

And this concludes John’s puzzling 1967 document “The Answer.” These last parts are very short; he may have had second thoughts about this file, or simply said all he wanted to say. He had come to some rather wild conclusions; he moved on to other explanations and speculations later.

Some questions remain for me. This was apparently not written just for himself, since he addresses the reader at times; who did he plan to share this with? How many of these beliefs informed his public writing of the time? And how many of them did he still hold later?

Well, thanks for reading this along with me; it’s puzzled me ever since I found it.

Part 6 of “The Answer,” John’s private file of his conclusions about the UFO enigma, as of 1967, is only two pages. He describes the “Supreme Leader” and the leader’s identification as “God,” and speculates about the original and location of the Androids, stressing that “it is only a theory.” The questions he cites were asked in a number of questionnaires to “Apol,” communicated through Jaye Paro.

Here are the last two pages of Part 5 of “The Answer,” John’s private summation of his conclusions as of 1967. There’s more on the organization of the Androids, their reliance on contactees for supplies, the “Plus Machine,” and strangeness with his telephone. Although John says, “If all of this sounds unbelievable to you, just wait… we are only beginning,” he continued for only a few more pages.

In Part 5 of his 1967 document “The Answer,” John describes the Android bases, complete with a flow chart of their chain of command. For those of you coming to this just now, let me add that it’s a private file that John assembled from his interviews with contactees. It should be read as a phase in his early development, superseded by later research, and as a summary of contactee beliefs. Please don’t take it as representative of his later thinking, or as a reliable guide to Androids!

We return to “The Answer,” John’s private file of his conclusions about the UFO puzzle, as of 1967. In this part, he considers the Androids’ habit of lying to contactees, their dependence on “orders from higher up,” and other curious aspects of their behavior.

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I interrupt my posting of “The Answer” for a couple of Keelian tidbits.

The first is that YouTube has informed me that the second part of “On Exhibition,” a film that John and Ed Lord made in 1963, violates community standards. In this comic short, John plays a drunk bewildered by the paintings in the Museum of Modern Art. The first part, in which he gets thrown out of several bars, is apparently fine, but the artwork in the Museum must have offended someone. Anthony Matt and I posted it back in 2011, so it took ten years for it to become objectionable.

I also note that an early piece by John has cropped up on eBay: a humorous article on songwriting, published in the April 23, 1946 edition of Hobo News. John was only 16 at the time. The seller is asking $400, which is more than I can afford, but if any of you snap it up, let me know. I took a screen shot, and added the article to the bibliography.

And next week, we’ll return to “The Answer.”

John’s private file “The Answer” continues. The third part is entitled “Where Are They From?” It’s preceded by a list of “UFO bases on Long Island.” In later years John said he realized some places he thought were UFO bases were actually military sites; I assume that includes this list.

A couple of things to note: he says in the first paragraph that he had face-to-face meetings with the Androids. This surprises me; in the “Special Cases” file that this is based on, he mentions letters and phone calls, but not in-person interactions. (One of the letters he mentions is here.) Also, this may be his first use of the term “ultra-terrestrial”: he originally used “ultra-dimensional,” and then changed it.