JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

Bormujos We continue with John’s article, “The Reeves Papers: A Modern Rosetta Stone?” As I said before, I don’t know if this was published. I don’t know what the red numerals indicate; I assume they refer to illustrations, but they don’t correspond to the supplementary pages of drawings.

John links the symbols reported by UFO witnesses to the “Unified Symbolism for World Understanding in Science” developed by C. K. Bliss and Oliver L. Reiser in the early 1950s. Here are the next two pages, followed by the relevant illustrations. The Socorro insignia was reported by Lonnie Zamorra in two sightings in Socorro, NM in 1964. There’s more to come!

We continue with John’s article on the “Reeves Papers,” two sheets of supposedly alien writing reported by contactee John Reeves. I don’t know if the article was published; it may be unfinished. The red numbers may indicate footnotes, but there are no footnotes in the folder. The article is ten pages; I’m posting two pages at a time.

John’s birthday was yesterday, the 25th. Happy belated and posthumous birthday, John!

John kept a file on the “Reeves papers,” the two sheets of supposedly alien writing found by John Reeves after a 1965 UFO sighting in Florida. John (Keel, that is) made an attempt to decipher them, and to relate them to other reports of alien symbols. He was also intrigued by their similarities to the “Unified Symbolism” system developed by C. K. Bliss and  Oliver R. Reiser in the 1950s.

We’ll start with the first two pages of a 10-page article. I don’t know if he ever published it, but he probably sent copies to other researchers. The red numbers seem to indicate footnotes; they don’t correspond to the six pages of drawings mentioned at the top, which are referred to later in the text. Following this are photocopies of the two Reeves sheets.

In a sort of postscript to his last letter, John tracks down Alex Theoharous and his wife (whom he doesn’t name), and convinces them not to pirate Bowen’s book The Humanoids. Bowen was grateful, as you can see here. As we can see from John’s letter, Bowen’s remark about Frank Edwards was prompted by Alex Theoharous’s defense that he and his wife were only doing what Edwards had done.

This is the last letter I’ve found from John’s correspondence with Charles Bowen. After this, I plan to post John’s notes on the “Reeves code,” and then some material about his experimental films, and then some of his correspondence from the 60s with Jim and Coral Lorenzen, Ivan Sanderson, and Lynn Catoe. There’s more to come!

Prompted by a call from Jim Lorenzen (of APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization), John investigates a plan to sell copies of Bowen’s book The Humanoids at an inflated price. Bowen’s reply is here; I only found this letter later. John is quite the detective here!

John responds to Charles Bowen’s letter of September 16. He asks that some information be deleted from his report on the Erie incident, sends the bio Bowen had requested, discusses the current state of ufology, and mentions a recent spate of “hairy-being” sightings.

John thanks Charles Bowen for lending him a UFO photo, and writes more about his anticipated Playboy article, which was eventually refused. This is his carbon copy; he notes that he added a postscript to the original, asking Gordon Creighton about Antônio Villas Boas’s supposed sexual encounter with an alien, and about Jim Templeton’s “Solway Spaceman” photograph.

John thanks Bowen for Lou Zinsstag’s address, and requests a bio of Flying Saucer Review contributor Bernard E. Finch and a copy of a photo of the San Miguel Object. The UFO in question was reported in Argentina in January 1965; Bowen wrote about it in the May 1965 article of his magazine. (Here’s a link to it.) Bowen responds with a detailed bio of Finch, the news that C. Maxwell Cade is joining the staff, and the photo. Cade is mostly remembered for his work in biofeedback, but he was apparently interested in UFOs as well.

John did indeed write Lou Zinsstag to order copies of the Monguzzi photos (see the last post). Their exchange is not particularly notable, but they do trade a few optimistic remarks on the upcoming end of UFO secrecy, and we learn that seven UFO photos cost five dollars in 1966, and that both John and Ms. Zinsstag firmly believed in them. From what I understand, Monguzzi had confessed to a hoax back in 1952, but many people didn’t accept his confession.