JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

http://crochet247.com/ocean-kiss-summer-scarf/ The last letter in this file is one from Bowen, written on January 30, 1967. I don’t know why it’s the last; maybe they kept in touch by phone after that; maybe John kept more letters in another file. Bowen had apparently called John out of the blue, to “keep up to date.” It was the first time they’d spoken; he comments on their respective accents. Most of the letter is taken up with his thoughts on Colonel Freeman. George P. Freeman, of Project Blue Book, had made a surprising statement about UFO witnesses being interviewed by people impersonating USAF officers, which is now, I believe, often cited in books on the Men In Black. He also mentions a report about “supermarkets going up in smoke in Florida,” and that he gave John’s address to Jerome Clark.

John writes to Charles Bowen (editor of the British magazine Flying Saucer Review), responding to a phone call. Apparently, Bowen had asked him to write an article on the 1966 UFO flap, and John is rather apologetic about the result. He also mentions his attempt to decipher the papers produced by UFO contactee John Reeves, which contain symbols that remind him of others reported by Antônio Vilas Boas, George Adamski, and Lonnie Zamora (in Socorro, NM). He did keep a file on his research, and published a booklet called The Reeves Papers: A Modern Rosetta Stone? There doesn’t seem to be much mention of it online, so I’ll have to dig it out… He also mentions a story about “a vast complex of underground chambers at the Cape Kennedy launching site.”

Bowen’s next letter, from January 19, 1967, thanks John for a package of ufological material, especially a copy of Saga in which John had apparently plugged the Flying Saucer Review.

He accepts an article of John’s, but asks for more references, and discusses his desire to avoid duplicating material that had appeared in other UFO publications, since many readers read several of them. He doesn’t mention payment; there may have been none. In addition, he notes that FSR‘s circulation in North America had topped a thousand, and suggests that some of the stigma of ufology was waning, particularly for the work of Gordon Creighton, Jacques Vallee, Aimé Michel, Coral Lorenzen, John, and himself. The “Waveney” mentioned in passing is Ian Waveney Girvan, the founder of FSR.

Charles Bowen wrote his next air letter to John on January 11, 1967. He responds to a “stunner” of a UFO sighting John sent him, dismissing the idea that it was a “secret US project.” He also passes on a report from a correspondent, about a newspaper ad for the OS (I assume that’s the Ordnance Survey, the government mapping agency), using the Socorro symbol. The symbol, supposedly spotted on a UFO in Socorro, NM in 1964, had, understandably, intrigued ufologists. Bowen also invites John to contribute to the Flying Saucer Review.

ADDENDUM: As Ozinor notes in the comments, that’s probably “US,” not “OS.”

Happy New Year! We continue with John’s correspondence with Charles Bowen, editor of Flying Saucer Review. Bowen’s next letter was written the day after the last one. He reports meeting with his lawyer to discuss legal action against the Theoharouses, a couple in the US selling pirated copies of Bowen’s book The Humanoids. It’s not clear from the letter if they planned to reprint it, or simply order copies and sell them at a profit. In any case, John alerted Bowen, who was understandably grateful. One provocative detail: Bowen says “what they proposed to do was far worse than anything even Frank Edwards has done.” Apparently Edwards had a bad reputation among some of his colleagues!