JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

http://gregorydowling.com/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=https://gregorydowling.com/podcast-a-reading-of-the-eve-of-st-agnes/ John reviewed John Fuller’s book The Interrupted Journey for the Spring 1967 issue of Saucer News, edited by James Moseley. The fifth paragraph (“While his wife…”) and tenth paragraph (“Certainly, we have now had…”) were cut, I assume for space rather than content. It was followed by a review of Coral Lorenzen’s book Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space. Here it is as printed, since John apparently didn’t keep a carbon of it.

John wrote this letter home when he was 20. He describes working around the clock to finish his first film script, an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun. He doesn’t mention the title in the letter, but here’s a clipping about it; I don’t think it was ever filmed. He also reflects on his past three years in NYC, after he had left home and hitch-hiked to Greenwich Village to make it as a writer. He didn’t have an easy time of it!

Here is the last part of John’s talk for a MENSA convention in NYC, 10/29/72. Charles Fort’s statement “I think we are property,” which John quotes at the end, can be found in Chapter 12 of The Book of the Damned (p. 163 in the old Henry Holt omnibus).

Here we have the second part of John’s 1970 speech to a MENSA convention. A few notes: The man at Giant Rock was George Van Tassel, who did eventually finish his “crazy structure,” the Integratron. Truman Bethurum wrote about meeting Aura Rhanes in Aboard a Flying Saucer (De Vorss & Co., 1954). The Englishman who met “Yamski” was Ernest Arthur Bryant, who claimed a UFO experience in Scoriton, Devonshire on April 24, 1965. The case was described in Eileen Buckle’s 1967 book The Scoriton Mystery. Norman Oliver, of the British UFO Research Association, later said that Bryant’s widow said the story was fiction. I think Itkonen was Veikko Itkonen, a Finnish director who was working on a UFO documentary in 1969; I haven’t been able to find more about it.