JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

Pilar In February 1968, John and Lynn Catoe started seeing each other more seriously, and their letters were mostly concerned with their relationship. Threaded throughout, however, are updates on the state of ufology. Also in February, the Condon Committee (a group at the University of Colorado, funded by the USAF to study UFOs) had a bit of a scandal. One of its members, Robert Low, wrote a memo to two administrators at the University, saying that the Committee would find that UFOs had no basis in reality. Two other members, Norman Levine and David Saunders, sent copies of the memo to NICAP and James McDonald, among others. On February 9, Condon fired Levine and Saunders over the incident.

In a letter to John on February 6, Lynn Catoe mentioned the brewing scandal, and said her recent long talk with McDonald had focused on it. She was also exasperated with Ivan Sanderson’s part in it.

In a formal letter to Ms. Catoe in her role as bibliographer, John catches her up to date.

John’s next letter to Lynn Catoe is certainly newsy. He mentions Ivan Sanderson (and John’s impatience with his rambling meetings), the Condon Report, a curious interaction with a UFO witness, a new report of a Man In Black in West Virginia, an exploding arsenal in Iowa, and unspecified “startling new things” about Gray Barker. He also responds to Ms. Catoe’s meeting with James McDonald and complaints about her dog. Bob Lowe and Dr. Condon were mentioned in a footnote in her last letter; Ivan Sanderson had confused the two.

A few more letters have passed, of a purely personal nature. Lynn Catoe returns to professional, or at least ufological, matters, in this letter. She discusses some reactions to the Colorado Project, whose findings were soon to be published as the Condon Report. She also reports on her conversations with James McDonald. He was one of the casualties of the UFO culture of the ’60s: a physicist whose interest in UFOs led to academic stigmatization, public ridicule, marital difficulties, and eventually suicide in 1971.

Well, nature is running its course, and Lynn Catoe has invited John to dinner in her apartment. So, his letter is both a response to her letter about the Gordon Evans case and to her invitation. I’ll cut the more personal paragraphs, and just post the former. He describes some of William Donovan’s erratic behavior, and adds an interesting note on the need for better terminology in ufology. “Tamper,” by the way, is a term popularized by Richard Shaver, for interference by the deros and their ray machines.