JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

Bormujos I’m giving you ten entries this time, since John never got around to defining five of them. The undefined terms may be frustrating, but I include them since they show what he thought was relevant. In this batch, among other things, he decisively equates ghosts with elementals and gives the first term taken from Richard Shaver’s vocabulary.

I’ve long been fascinated by Shaver’s elaborate mythology, particularly his paintings, based on the images he saw in rocks (long story). I’m one of the few discriminating art-lovers that owns one, so I’ll include a photo of it here as a footnote.

And here’s the Shaver painting:

It’s back to John’s dictionary, for another five provocative definitions of terms pertinent to ufology. In this batch, he never got around to defining “mind control.”

The next five definitions in John’s unfinished UFO dictionary are mostly concerned with the classification of contactees. The term “contacter” is new to me. I suppose it never caught on, or was superseded by Hynek’s “close encounter” categories.

Here are five more definitions for you to ponder. For a look at some of the chaff that John collected, see here. For more on Korsakoff’s psychosis (also known as Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome) see here. And it’s too bad John never got around to defining what exactly constitutes “contact.”

Here are the next five definitions in John’s unfinished UFO Dictionary. “Breakout” is a new one to me. John didn’t get around to defining “Bolide,” but did include a joke about Project Blue Book.

The next five entries in John’s unfinished dictionary take us from “aura” to “black-out,” with a few interesting points along the way. I haven’t found much about Dr. John E. Jacobs or AURA. The mention of Beelzebub is curious; I haven’t found any mention of it as an ancient name for Venus. (Wikipedia claims Beelzebub is associated with Venus in the apocryphal Testament of Solomon, but that’s not in any of the translations I checked.) It would be an interesting correlation, given the number of contactees who claimed to have met Venusians.

John was born on March 25, 1930. I’m sure he’d be glad to know his fans are still reading him 92 years later.

I thought I’d mark the occasion by posting a letter he wrote home a month before his 19th birthday. He had dropped out of high school and gone to NYC to make a career as a writer. As the letter shows, it wasn’t easy!

The next five definitions in John’s proposed UFO dictionary include some interesting bits, including an unorthodox definition of an angel and the possible ingredients of UFO angel hair. Unfortunately, we’ll never know what he had to say about asteroids.

At some point, John started compiling a dictionary of UFO terms. I don’t know if he planned to publish it, or just to use it for his own reference. At any rate, he left a small box filled with 199 index cards. Not all cards are complete, and there are a few extra blanks at the end, so it’s obviously unfinished.

I’m calling it a “UFO Dictionary,” but, as you’ll see, it also includes pertinent military, scientific and paranormal terms. I posted a few of these several years ago, but now I’ll go through all of them, in batches of five, with notes, if they seem called for.

George Adamski was one of the first contactees; readers unfamiliar with him can hear an interview with Long John Nebel here.

I don’t know which faction of ufology used the term “Alpha Group.” Nor do I understand the reference to Genesis. Perhaps he means the Elohim, who have sometimes been identified as aliens (by the Raelians, for example).

What a pity John didn’t get around to defining “android”!

In 1966, John pitched a few articles to Playboy, including one on science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback and one on The Hobo News. Playboy opted instead for an article on UFOs, which they eventually rejected, and which became the basis of the book Operation Trojan Horse.

I assume these notes were intended for the proposed article on The Hobo News. It was one of the first papers he wrote for, back in his teens, and he looked back on it, and on his first years in New York in the ’40s, with some nostalgia. The Waldorf Cafeteria, by the way, was one of his hangouts.