JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

buy Pregabalin online usa John continues his correspondence with Jim and Coral Lorenzen; Carol seems to be the one writing the letters. John stresses the need for sources, asks for a photo of the Lorenzens, an explanatory brochure, and a UFO witness form. He plans to list all the sightings for one date, and to stress APRO, NICAP, and The Flying Saucer Review, and to ignore Ray Palmer (who published Flying Saucers) and Jim Moseley (of Saucer News). The “Bolas story” refers to Antônio Villas Boas, who reported a sexual encounter with an alien. I’m puzzled by John’s use of “the Geniac system.” The only Geniac I could find was a computer toy from the ’50s. Does anyone know of a “manual system” by that name?

Coral Lorenzen replies, promising to send material on Villas Boas, and to take a picture of herself and Jim. She defends not citing sources in the bulletins, mentions a report from Peter Norris on a flap in Australia, and recommends the “IGY” photos: UFO photos taken by Almirs Barauna in Trindade, Brazil, in January, 1958, during the International Geophysical Year. She also adds, rather ominously, “it is in the interest of the people of this world to begin to accept the reality of these things as soon as possible. I doubt there is much time left.”

John follows up on a visit to NASA, with a letter to Les Gaver, in the Public Information Division. He asks permission to keep some photos longer, for his projected Playboy article, and asks if NASA analyzed the photo Mariner 4 took of Mars. Gaver gives permission, and encloses independent analyses of the Mariner 4 images (“the television experiment”), which John didn’t keep in this file. I’m curious which astronomers claimed to have found the canals in the photos. Mariner 4 is usually cited as ending the speculations about the canals, which were even shown on NASA’s maps until then.

I’m continuing with John’s “official correspondence” for 1966. Here. by the way, is a look at the file folder…

As he entered ufology, and worked on his ill-fated Playboy article, he contacted other researchers with his usual thoroughness. In April, he visited the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, and met with Major Keyhoe and Richard Hall. He apparently spent more time with Hall than with Keyhoe. There are no replies in the folder, so these letters may have gone unanswered. The book for Fawcett that he mentions was his Batman spoof, The Fickle Finger of Fate.

Coral Lorenzen responds to John’s letter, and he is officially enrolled in APRO. He had quite a correspondence with the Lorenzens that year. Most of it is more interesting than this simple business letter, but this is how it began, and I didn’t want to leave it out. One of the hallmarks of early UFO researchers was their desire for respectability; in this letter, Lorenzen mentions her “heavy emphasis on College Professor types” and “the various professions, including Doctors and lawyers,” and cites A. E. Brown and Richard C. Gerdes. John, it should be mentioned, didn’t fit this category; he was a high school dropout who wrote for men’s magazines and TV, and whose latest work was a Batman spoof. He was apparently not what APRO was looking for!