JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

Bormujos John follows up on a visit to NASA, with a letter to Les Gaver, in the Public Information Division. He asks permission to keep some photos longer, for his projected Playboy article, and asks if NASA analyzed the photo Mariner 4 took of Mars. Gaver gives permission, and encloses independent analyses of the Mariner 4 images (“the television experiment”), which John didn’t keep in this file. I’m curious which astronomers claimed to have found the canals in the photos. Mariner 4 is usually cited as ending the speculations about the canals, which were even shown on NASA’s maps until then.

I’m continuing with John’s “official correspondence” for 1966. Here. by the way, is a look at the file folder…

As he entered ufology, and worked on his ill-fated Playboy article, he contacted other researchers with his usual thoroughness. In April, he visited the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, and met with Major Keyhoe and Richard Hall. He apparently spent more time with Hall than with Keyhoe. There are no replies in the folder, so these letters may have gone unanswered. The book for Fawcett that he mentions was his Batman spoof, The Fickle Finger of Fate.

Coral Lorenzen responds to John’s letter, and he is officially enrolled in APRO. He had quite a correspondence with the Lorenzens that year. Most of it is more interesting than this simple business letter, but this is how it began, and I didn’t want to leave it out. One of the hallmarks of early UFO researchers was their desire for respectability; in this letter, Lorenzen mentions her “heavy emphasis on College Professor types” and “the various professions, including Doctors and lawyers,” and cites A. E. Brown and Richard C. Gerdes. John, it should be mentioned, didn’t fit this category; he was a high school dropout who wrote for men’s magazines and TV, and whose latest work was a Batman spoof. He was apparently not what APRO was looking for!

John writes a letter to A. M. Rosenthal, then managing editor of the New York Times. He reminds Rosenthal of an earlier acquaintance, offers a brief update of his career, and requests a statement on the paper’s possible censorship of UFO stories. Rosenthal apparently never wrote back. I suspect letters about UFO censorship may have not been appreciated at the Times.

I also note, sadly, the passing of two of John’s friends, Rosemary Ellen Guiley and Paul Krassner.

Ms. Guiley was a prolific writer of books on the paranormal, and most recently the executive editor of Fate. I posted pictures of her and John here.

Paul Krassner had a long career as a satirist, and for many years published that exemplary magazine The Realist. I posted a note on my chance discovery of John’s back issues here. Krassner also appears as a minor character in The Fickle Finger of Fate, which John mentions in his letter to Rosenthal. “Klaw Krassner” is cast as the “token atheist” on a boat piloted by Captain Bartolo, that is, Mad writer Dick DeBartolo; here are his two appearances.

On May 1, 1966, John wrote to Jim Templeton, who had taken a photo of his daughter that seemed to show a spaceman in the background. The photo was much discussed among UFO buffs at the time; the most popular explanation is that the spaceman is an overexposed image of Templeton’s wife. If you don’t know the story, Wikipedia is one place to start. John ordered copies of the photo; Templeton replied with some details, and, in a homey touch, asked if John could send him some stamps for his collection.

The “Official Correspondence” file continues with a letter from Curtis Fuller, the editor of Fate. Fuller declines a proposed article on swamp gas, and remarks that John’s “theory about methane” is “pretty far out.” John didn’t file his own letter, so I don’t know what that theory was. This appears to be his first contact with Fate; he wrote often for it in later years.

The next item in John’s “Official Correspondence, ’66” file is a letter to Coral Lorenzen, of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. John introduces himself, and asks for her help with his proposed article on UFOs for Playboy. His description includes some wishful thinking: Playboy did not assign him to do a long “definitive article,” but agreed to look at a short piece on spec. The final piece was rejected as too long and too credulous. I posted his visit to Project Bluebook here.

John Keel died ten years ago, on July 3, 2009. His friends still miss him, and those who didn’t know him will, I hope, keep reading his books. Anthony Matt and I started this blog a few months later; I’ll keep posting here as well. Rest in Peace, John!

I’ll now start posting material from John’s file “Official Correspondence, ’66.” Included are business letters to and from editors, discussions of UFO news with fellow researchers, and requests for interviews. He had a particularly active correspondence with Jim and Coral Lorenzen (of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization) and with tireless clip collector June Larson.

The file opens with a letter to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, requesting an interview for John’s proposed UFO article for Playboy. Bishop Sheen was then 71, a noted theologian, writer, and television personality. At the time he was Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of New York; later that year he was to become Archbishop of Rochester. There’s no reply in the file. Maybe it would have helped if John had spelled his name correctly!

Here are the last four pages of John’s meticulous list of UFO sightings for January 15-21, 1967. For some reason, he filed it in his Reeves Code folder. As I said before, he may have meant it as a model for organizing data about sightings, and may have circulated it among other researchers.