JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

Bormujos Here’s the second part of John’s story “End of the Hunt,” the second story he wrote for the men’s magazine market back in 1955, and the first he was able to sell. Next: the thrilling conclusion!

John died on July 3, 2009, in NYC. I mark the occasion by posting an unfamiliar picture of him. Here he is in Barcelona in 1956, at Christmas, taking a break from writing Jadoo. Rest in peace, John! We’re still reading your books!

In 1955, John left the army and started wandering through the Middle East. He was badly in need of money, and so he also started sending articles to his agent in the US, Alex Jackinson, to sell to men’s adventure magazines. He carefully kept all of his submissions, with notes on sales and rejections. His first attempt, “Creeping Death of the Nile,” was abandoned, but he had better luck with the second, “End of the Hunt,” which sold to Sport Life. Here, then, is the first installment  of John’s first sale to the men’s magazine market. He was not, by the way, “somewhere in Africa,” and certainly not in Tanganyika, but typing away in a hotel in Cairo.

John writes a letter home, a few months after he’d left and hitchhiked to Greenwich Village to seek fame and fortune as a writer. He was 18 at the time. He notes Truman’s surprising election, and mentions work on a script and a novel. The script was for WJZ-TV, which had started broadcasting only a few months before. The novel was West of Washington Square, which he later told me was thrown out by his landlord. (He mentions it in this bio from that year.) And, like any teenager, he’s been quarreling with his girlfriend.

These last pages bring us to the end of John’s “Mothman Casebook,” his file of his early articles on Point Pleasant. (Here’s the overview.) To be noted: John Love, who gets the final word here, didn’t make it into The Mothman Prophecies; nor did four of the pilots–Eddie Adkins, Henry Upton, Leo Edwards, and Ernie Thompson.

John’s early Mothman article continues, with more sightings, eye burn for Connie Carpenter and John himself, and the absence of sandhill cranes. Paul Yoder and Benjamin Enochs, by the way, didn’t make it into The Mothman Prophecies. I apologize for the incomplete line at the bottom of p. 12. I guess John put his carbon in wrong.

John continues with more classic Mothman sightings, in this next installment from his “Mothman Casebook.” Richard West and Steve Farrell, incidentally, do not appear in The Mothman Prophecies.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Phyllis Galde, editor and publisher of FATE and director of Galde Press, suffered a serious stroke recently, and is now slowly recovering. She published a lot of John’s work, and was one of his favorite people (and one of mine too, incidentally). Her friend Meg Tobin has organized a fundraiser for her, which you can contribute to here.

After a break for John’s birthday, we continue with this article from his “Mothman Casebook.” He gives a few sightings of unusual winged creatures, and continues with the first reports from Point Pleasant.

John Keel would have been 93 on March 25. Happy posthumous birthday, John! And all you Keel fans out there, keep reading his books!

The last item in John’s “Mothman Casebook” is this article, cartoonishly entitled “It’s a bird.. it’s a plane… No, No, it’s ‘Mothman’ (gulp!)” It ran in Saga, November 1968, under the more sedate title of “Mothman Monster.” Here are the first three pages, beginning with previous sightings of strange creatures in West Virginia, and a history of “winged human beings.”