Bormujos From the same file as those last few posts, here’s an article from Jan. 25, 1967, written for the North American Newspaper Alliance. John reports on a curious subset of MIB reports, imposters in military uniforms, and discusses the reactions of Colonel George Freeman of Project Bluebook and the experiences of two UFO photographers, Rex Heflin and Joe Perry.
And here’s the second part of John’s article on the 1965 Virginia flap, picking up from the bottom of page 4. As usual, we get UFO sightings, creature reports, hoaxes, questionable confessions, and general confusion.
I’d like to note the death of Timothy Green Beckley, who died on May 31 in Manhattan at the age of 73. He was. of course, a noted polymath: not only an indefatigable publisher of forteana, but the producer of such cinematic gems as Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires. I only met him a couple of times, but he struck me as a hard-working entrepreneur who enjoyed life. John was astonished at his ability to go out partying every night. Here’s a picture of John giving him the prestigious Falling Frog Award, and here’s a letter from him about a number of investigations from 1967.
Here’s an interesting little article about a Virginia flap from 1965. John wrote it in 1967. I think it appeared in the second issue of the Dell magazine Flying Saucers: UFO Reports, under the title “Occupants: Yes or No?” I haven’t been able to check a copy; maybe some of the Keel fans out there know. The article is eight pages; here are the first four.
As a supplement to the last post, and, I hope, a treat for Jadoo fans, here’s one of the first stories John sent to Alex Jackinson. As I mentioned, he bound all the stories he wrote that year in a volume he just labeled “1955,” with all sales and prices noted. The first entry is dated January 16, and, as the scrawled “Shelved!” indicates, didn’t sell. “Creeping Death of the Nile” is plainly fiction (John was not, in fact, planning to go big-game hunting in South Africa), and as pulpy as it gets. In the course of it, John and Jock escape from a flooded pyramid, only to end in a ruined temple swarming with scorpions. As you can imagine, they barely escape with their lives. He hadn’t caught the formula yet, but four days later, he wrote another one, “End of the Hunt,” which he sold to Sport Life for $200.
Here’s the beginning of “Creeping Death of the Nile,” which is probably sufficient!
As John said in the letter I posted last week, he was mentioned in several books, including Cocktail Party for the Author by Alex Jackinson. Jackinson’s book is a memoir of his ten years as a literary agent, published by Challenge Press in 1964. He was John’s agent in the ’50s; he advised John on writing for men’s magazines, and eventually sold Jadoo to Julian Messner. I found a copy of the book (it’s not rare) and read it. He devotes the third chapter to John, heading it with a question that must occur to many readers of Jadoo: “How True Are the True Adventures?” The answer, not surprisingly, is rather complicated.
Jackinson seems to have been an interesting character. He came from a Russian Jewish family, who emigrated to the Bronx in 1913. His father was a garment cutter; his uncle, Morris Terman, was an editor and writer active in left-wing politics and Yiddish literature. Young Alex became a cutter like his father (he specialized in furs), but was inspired by his uncle’s literary interests. He wrote (and sold) work in many genres: poetry, song lyrics, romance and detective stories. He opened a literary agency in 1953, and was particularly sympathetic to small publishers and young writers. He began by helping his fellow poets to write commercially.
John contacted Jackinson in 1954, fresh from the army, and determined to travel and write. Jackinson thought John’s travel articles weren’t polished enough for the slick magazines like Post or Collier’s, and that he needed “an apprenticeship in the lesser books. For him that meant the men’s group.” There was, he told him, a ready market “for authentic and exciting first-person adventure yarns, so that armchair-tied clerks might turn into Lowell Thomases.”
John was willing, asking, “How much must be true? How much can be invented?” Jackinson replied “with what knowledge I had. Nothing must be offered which could be proven wrong. Each adventure had to read as though it might have happened.”
John set to work, writing and rewriting. “Keel caught the ‘formula’ very ably, and there is most definitely a formula involved. Because he wrote in a way that generated excitement, and because he was meeting a market need, editors were ready to meet him halfway.” After several pieces had been published, Jackinson suggested a book, which John first called Pattern for Adventure. An early pitch went nowhere; a year later, Jackinson felt he had “something submittable,” and set up a meeting with Howard Goodkind of Julian Messner.
Goodkind was interested, but asked, “How do we know this guy isn’t lying?” He was understandably wary; some popular books had turned out to be hoaxes, much to their publishers’ embarrassment: the memoirs of Joan Lowell and Trader Horn, for example. Jackinson explained that John mixed fact and fiction: “No incident is invented, just built dramatically from something that happened.” Goodkind decided to take the book, adding, “I’ll say this–he’s certainly a good writer.”
Jackinson stresses, “Keel achieved in months what most writers do not achieve in years,” although, of course, John had been writing seriously for much longer.
When John returned to NY, Jackinson set up lunch with Goodkind, who was surprised that the supposed swashbuckler was quiet and “skinny enough to be compared to a banana.” Goodkind returned to the question of the book’s veracity.
So, the percentage of Jadoo that is true is either sixty or eighty per cent; take your choice. But the other per cent is the embroidery; he really did have those adventures. Jackinson also reveals how much money Jadoo made. Comparing it to his other clients’ books, he says: “Jadoo did much better, but far short of expectations. With all the extra [magazine] sales, total income for Keel was around three thousand.” In the last chapter, he sums up John’s career after that: his subsequent dry spell, his plans to travel to Timbuctu or Yemen, and his work for television. His interest in UFOs was yet to come.
John himself wrote about this period in his article “Bosoms, Blood, and Baloney.” He also kept a binder labeled “1955,” in which he kept all the stories he wrote that year, with notes on the magazines that bought them and what they paid, as well as feedback from editors. Here’s a note from Jackinson about “The Men with the X-Ray Eyes,” which had been rejected by True. John rewrote it, and did eventually sell it to Man’s Challenge for $150. As Jackinson notes about John’s success in the book, “It was not easy. Nothing pertaining to writing is.”
This letter of John’s was published in the Spring 1968 issue of Saucer News, at that time edited by Gray Barker. John is, understandably, exasperated at all of the rumors circulating about him. The books he mentions deserve a few footnotes.
Gardner Soule wrote on many subjects, including Columbus, Eisenhower, the West, and cryptozoology, for both adults and children. Trail of the Abominable Snowman was published by Putnam in 1966; I haven’t read it.
J. Mortimer Sheppard had met John in Baghdad; as usual, John kept his business card. Sheppard wrote for a number of magazines, including Fate. He had a particular interest in the Sahara, and at one point crossed part of it in a land yacht. The original title for the proposed book was Sailing Sahara’s Sands, but it was eventually published as Sahara Adventure (Adventurer’s Club, 1959), since his wind-sailing exploits only filled a few chapters.
Alex Jackinson was a literary agent, whose clients included both Sheppard and John. Cocktail Party for the Author (Challenge Press, 1964) is a memoir of his career. I took the trouble to find a copy (it’s not rare) and read it. He devotes a chapter to John, since Jackinson coached him on writing for the men’s adventure market, placed the stories that John sent from his travels, and found a publisher for Jadoo. He has some interesting things to say about that phase of John’s career, so I’ll post some excerpts nest week.
John interviewed the Brazilian ufologist Dr. Olavo T. Fontes for the North American Newspaper Alliance in November, 1966. Dr. Fontes was the Brazilian correspondent for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (Here is Coral Lorenzen’s letter to John about his upcoming visit), and is perhaps best remembered for his investigation of Antônio Villas Boas, who reported a sexual encounter with an alien (although that’s not mentioned here). An online search found that this interview was reprinted in Daniel Fry’s magazine Understanding, January 1967, where it was credited to the Maywood, NY Record, Nov. 16, 1966. The version there is much shorter, so it must have been cut down by NANA, the Record, Daniel Fry, or perhaps all three.
John reviewed John Fuller’s book The Interrupted Journey for the Spring 1967 issue of Saucer News, edited by James Moseley. The fifth paragraph (“While his wife…”) and tenth paragraph (“Certainly, we have now had…”) were cut, I assume for space rather than content. It was followed by a review of Coral Lorenzen’s book Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space. Here it is as printed, since John apparently didn’t keep a carbon of it.
John wrote this letter home when he was 20. He describes working around the clock to finish his first film script, an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun. He doesn’t mention the title in the letter, but here’s a clipping about it; I don’t think it was ever filmed. He also reflects on his past three years in NYC, after he had left home and hitch-hiked to Greenwich Village to make it as a writer. He didn’t have an easy time of it!
Here is the last part of John’s talk for a MENSA convention in NYC, 10/29/72. Charles Fort’s statement “I think we are property,” which John quotes at the end, can be found in Chapter 12 of The Book of the Damned (p. 163 in the old Henry Holt omnibus).
