Bormujos In 1988, Ivan Stang, founder of the Church of the SubGenius, compiled High Weirdness by Mail: A Directory of the Fringe: Mad Prophets, Crackpots, Kooks & True Visionaries. Amid the torrent of oddities was a plug for the curious ad sheets and booklets that John peddled in the ’80s. The Big Apple News and How to Rob the Mail are posted here and here. Does anyone have one of those Interplanetary Passports?
And here’s the conclusion of “The Devil’s Knife.” You’ll be glad to know that John didn’t die in that khanjer fight!
John Keel was born March 25, 1930; he would have been 94 today.
Here he is with Mamie Caton and me, clowning around in a photo booth in Coney Island many years ago. Happy birthday, John! We’re still reading your books!
We have another story for Jadoo fans. John wrote “The Devil’s Knife” in Bagdad on March 17, 1955. He didn’t note any sale on the typescript, so it’s likely his agent Alex Jackinson couldn’t sell it. It’s a gripping tale in which John is accused of seducing an Izeide (that is, Yazidi) woman and must defend his life with a khanjer. Like many of his submissions to the men’s magazines at the time, it mixes fiction and fact, as the market demanded: a fictional story in a factual setting.
Here’s another puzzle from John’s files: the script for a children’s record about the history of aviation. Aviation was one of his favorite subjects; he learned to fly, but had to give it up when he was diagnosed with diabetes. For one of his birthdays, I gave him a “Spotter Deck,” a pack of playing cards with silhouettes of Allied and Axis aircraft, distributed to GIs in World War II. He said he could still identify most of them.
The script seems to be unfinished. There’s no indication of whether it was commissioned or was his own idea. It’s in a file with other material from 1964 and 1965, so I assume it was also written around then.
Here’s another clipping from John’s file of his work for the North American Newspaper Alliance, from August 16, 1968. Here, he objects to all the money taxpayers have shelled out to the Air Force for UFO research. He used to say that what the government really wanted to keep secret was how much money it wasted.
I hope you can read this; rubber cement doesn’t age well.
After that screed from John’s later years, let’s go back to one of his earlier articles. In 1967, at the beginning of his interest in UFOs, he wrote a number of pieces for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). “Thousands See ‘Visitors,’ But Won’t Tell Air Force” appeared in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch on June 18, 1967. It was announced as the first of seven articles, but this is the only one I’ve seen. His NANA articles were distributed under another titles; a search tells me this one appeared in the Scranton (Pennsylvania) Times-Tribune as “Anyone Lying About UFOs?”
Happy Belated New Year! And here, to start 2024, is John’s afterword to his 1994 pamphlet “The Flying Saucer Subculture.”
I’ve been doing this blog since 2009, posting every week unless I’m too busy (like recently, unfortunately). I know many of John’s fans are most interested in his work on UFOs. I have to point out, though, that John didn’t consider himself a ufologist, The main reason was economic: UFO books didn’t make much money. He also used to complain about the polemics in the field, the recycling of old stories and rumors, and the fact that publishers wanted simplistic books that either believed everything or debunked everything.
In his later years, he tried to distance himself from the field. He wrote novels and plays (none of which made it to production or publication). He wrote humor pieces for National Lampoon and High Times. He discussed writing a book about the Wright Brothers and a children’s book about the Loch Ness Monster.
He started the New York Fortean Society in the ’90s, a revival, in a way, of the old Fortean Society directed by Tiffany Thayer. He published a few booklets, including “The Flying Saucer Subculture,” which reprinted an article he’d written in 1973. So, as we head into another year of Keeliana, I’ll post this, as a reminder that John’s attitude to ufology was conflicted at best!
Here’s the conclusion to “I Rode the Death Train to Calcutta,” the first story John wrote after moving to Barcelona in 1955. It’s action-packed!
Happy 2024! Be careful on those trains!
Here’s one for all the Jadoo fans. This lively little story is obviously fictional, but based on some of John’s real experiences in India. The combination of fact and fiction in some of his work for the men’s magazines became somewhat of a problem for his agent. For more on that, see this excerpt from Alex Jackinson’s Cocktail Party for the Author. And for John’s own reflections on that part of his career, see this article from Writer’s Digest.
John labeled this “#1” because it was the first article he wrote after moving to Barcelona. It was, of course, too fictional to be included in Jadoo.
I’ll post this in two parts. Meanwhile, Happy, Merry, and New!
