JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

http://sargeantstudios.net/?p=1835

In 1967, Jaye Paro put John in contact with Mr. Apol, or Appell, a supposed ultraterrestrial. John exchanged several letters with him; I posted one of them a while ago, here.

John also sent him a series of questionnaires, which he filled out with his customary red pencil. There were five of them; I’ll post the second, only because the pencil is darker on this one.

All of John’s contact with Apol was through Paro; as far as I can tell, she was channeling him. Apol’s answers are interesting; but John’s questions intrigue me more: these are the things that he wanted to know. He clearly valued the correspondence at the time, and believed he was getting valuable information. But, of course, these damned ultraterrestrials, whether imaginary or not, are not to be trusted…

John’s foray into mail order and ad sheets in the ’80s puzzled many Keel-watchers. However, his articles weren’t selling, and his attempts at novels and plays were no more successful. The ad sheets were a way to have a little harmless fun, and maybe pick up a few bucks. He put out nine issues of the Big Apple News, from 1984 to 1986.  It was usually a two-sided sheet, although a couple were four pages. It contained small ads, usually for other ad sheets, John’s own ads, and a sprinkling of cartoons and clippings. Here are some representative samples; the article on snakes was one he did for High Times in 1980.

Well, this is a curious thing. In the same little plastic box with the wooden plugs from a telephone in Point Pleasant, John kept this pill. And he had this to say about it, in his unfinished dictionary:

In fact, sulfa or sulpha is a common antimicrobial, and the most popular antibiotic before the discovery of penicillin. Roche still produces it. The idea that aliens might want to protect themselves from microbes recalls, inevitably, The War of the Worlds, in which microbes were the downfall of those nasty Martians.

Several of John’s “silent contactees” (UFO experiencers who shunned publicity) reported that aliens and/or Men In Black took pills. I suppose this one was given to John by one of them. (ADDENDUM: It was given to him by Jaye Paro, one of the contactees he was investigating, in 1967.)

I’ll point out that John doesn’t seem to have had direct contact with anyone claiming to be an alien; phone conversations and correspondence were always through the contactees, sometimes by channeling. To me, that suggests that the supposed UTs (ultraterrestrials) had no independent existence. But, for all of us intrigued by those persistent tales of pill-popping aliens, well, this is what the pills looked like.

I’m happy to announce that a new edition of John Keel’s Jadoo, edited by Patrick Huyghe, is now available from Anomalist Books.

Jadoo was John’s first book, published in 1957.  It’s an account of the year he spent traveling through Egypt and India, investigating magicians, tracking down legends, and getting into trouble.  He visited a mummy-maker, played Russian roulette with a notorious bandit, chased the yeti, and gave a spectacularly unsuccessful performance of the Indian rope trick.

This edition also includes some new material: a chapter cut by the publisher (about John’s romantic difficulties during that year), travel notes written while sailing to India, a book review written under one of his pseudonyms, a pitch for a sequel, and photos from the period.

Here, to whet your appetite, is the song written for the original publication.  Jadoo!

John included this sighting of a hairy creature in his 1970 book Strange Creatures From Time and Space.  He may have written the initial report for SITU (the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained), or simply for his own files.