Menomonee Falls At this point, the Keel-Catoe correspondence becomes less frequent and more devoted to their relationship. I assume they were talking more on the phone or in person; John also may have written letters but not kept carbons. However, I’ll post a few excerpts from Ms. Catoe’s letters that concern John’s research and the murky world of ufology in 1968.
In this excerpt, Ms. Catoe is baffled about Gray Barker’s interest in whether she has a copy of the Varo edition. (The Varo edition, for readers new to it, was a copy of M. K. Jessup’s book The Case for the UFO, annotated by a certain Carl Allen, and published by a Texas company called Varo for the Office of Naval Research; it caused quite a stir at the time.) She also writes about her interest in the Kaspar Hauser case, recommends that John contact the British ufologist John Cleary Baker, and, most curiously, wants to know how to tell John from his rumored double.
Mainly because I shared the same hometown with Carl Allen/Carlos Allende, I researched the matter many years ago and spoke with several of his neighbors. They uniformly described him as an itinerant unstable fantasizer. When I forwarded this info to ITS’s SITU the response was, essentially, that Allen/Allende was one matter, the disappearing ship quite another.
Comment by Ronald Beaumont — September 3, 2020 @ 8:48 am
John corresponded with Allen/Allende, and kept his bizarre and rambling letters. Maybe I should post them, since he was an interesting character. At the time of this letter, very few people had seen the Varo edition, and some researchers doubted its existence.
Comment by Doug — September 6, 2020 @ 6:41 pm