JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

http://sunsationalhomeimprovement.com/tag/front-yard/ One of John’s odder unrealized projects was a short diet book, known as either The Invisible Diet or How to Turn Yourself Inside Out.  He wrote it in the ’80s under his favorite pseudonym, Randolph Halsey-Quince, and imagined it illustrated with cartoons.  Although written in John’s usual humorous style, it offered serious advice: cut out white bread, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco; keep track of what you eat; get more exercise.  It also recommended changing your eating habits by changing your other habits: read a different newspaper, go to a different church, watch different TV shows.  As he put it, “you must change everything.”

Publishers were confused, since it was neither a standard diet book nor a parody, so he was never able to sell it.  Here are the first few pages.  The “Dachau diet” of the chapter title, by the way, is the starvation diet that was given prisoners — a bad way to lose weight.

Mary Hyre’s next letter to John discussed UFO sightings, phone troubles, and “space grass.”  John wrote “phones” on the envelope, so that was probably the part that most interested him.  The clipping was not in the envelope; he must have filed it elsewhere.  He did, by the way, save some of the “space grass” (radar chaff) that he collected from a UFO landing site in Point Pleasant 1n 1966.  Here it is.

Andy Colvin has edited and published a third collection of John Keel’s lectures and magazine articles, Searching for the String, which is now available on Amazon.

He has also published new editions of Disneyland of the Gods, Strange Creatures from Time and Space, and The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings (those last two being different versions of the same book).

Jadoo, Operation Trojan Horse, and The Eighth Tower are available from Anomalist Books; and This Haunted Planet and The Best of John Keel are available from Galde Press (the latter only in a Kindle edition).

All of John’s books are now in print, then — except for the novels, Three Women, Town Tease, and The Fickle Finger of Fate.  Stock up!