JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

John Keel died fifteen years ago, on July 3, 2009. Rest in Peace, John! The rest of us will keep reading your books and articles.

Here’s John, looking uncharacteristically cheerful, in 1974.

We have an exchange of letters between John and one Harold L. James, Chief Geologist at the Department of the Interior. It seems that Richard Toronto had requested some “magnetic fault maps” from the Department of the Interior, and received a cranky reply from one John Henderson. I assume the book Henderson is rude about is UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse. John replies to Harold L. James, doing his best to separate himself from the “paranoid bunch” of UFO buffs.

I also assume the Richard Toronto here is the former editor of Shavertron, and the author of several fine books on that fascinating character, Richard Shaver. Read his books!

Bob Warth, then director of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, wrote John a letter, including some clippings on bears and on the unusual behavior of an Orbiting Space Observatory. I’m not sure why John was interested in bears at the time; he might have been working on something about out-of-place animals.

In 1991, Bob Rickard invited John to write a regular column for Fortean Times. The magazine had just joined with a new publisher, and was looking for more material. Unfortunately, John didn’t take him up on it. Here’s Bob Rickard’s letter, as well as the “general notice” he mentioned, showing the venerable Fortean journal mutating into a more professional periodical.

The prolific Fortean writer Brad Steiger wrote John back on July 25, 1974, with news about his upcoming book Mysteries of Time and Space. He also makes a few observations about shattering windshields (a puzzling phenomenon at the time), Atlantis, and Men In Black. And he appeared none too happy with the FortFests held by the International Fortean Organization!

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.