JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

Kashima-shi Also in the spring and summer of 1968, a satirical monthly called Caricatour debuted and died. It was published by Art Pottier; Googling tells me he contributed to early issues of Cracked. Caricatour featured some fine cartoonists, including Jules Feiffer, Charles Rodrigues, Sid Harris, and Ed Harris, as well as pages of rather mild jokes about politics. It apparently lasted only three issues, from June to August. At any rate, John picked up the first issue, and wrote a jocular response, in the persona of an outraged conservative, which was published in the second issue.

And here’s the cover, featuring H. Rap Brown by the Argentine caricaturist Narciso Bayón.

This is the last letter I’ll post from John’s correspondence with Lynn Catoe. Their relationship was not easy, complicated by their differences: she went to the Sorbonne, he was a high school dropout; she grew up with servants, he came from a farm; she was black, he was white (all of these run through their letters). This last letter is not about their relationship, and mostly not about ufology. Ms. Catoe reports on the riots in Washington, D. C. following the assassination of Martin Luther King, on April 4. She also mentions some racial issues in NICAP, and a visit from J. Thomas Ratchford (of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research) and someone from the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information; Ratchford tells her Keyhoe claimed contact with space brothers. Finally, she enclosed two clippings: one a report of an early appearance by Stanton Friedman, later an active ufologist; the other a column by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, about dead sheep and rumors of germ warfare and mutated viruses. Riots, racism, and viruses, all from 1968.

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.

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.

Lynn Catoe, in her official capacity as bibliographer, replies to John’s letter about the Gordon Evans case. Evans certainly sounds like a troubled soul, but I haven’t been able to find anything on the Funt sighting or his investigation of it. Maybe it’s less of a mystery to some of the readers out there.

As the Catoe-Keel correspondence developed, it became more flirtatious, with each teasing, provoking, and shocking the other. All probably fun for both of them, but none of our business, so I’m omitting those letters. Here, though, John writes her in her official capacity to summarize “the Gordon Evans affair.” William Donovan was a member of NICAP; I can’t identify Robart.

I’m omitting some of John’s correspondence with Lynn Catoe, since it’s more personal than professional. However, this letter asks some interesting and pointed questions about John’s goals and methods in ufology. He gives the Gordon Evans story in detail in an upcoming letter; in brief, the ufologist Gordon Evans became frightened and abandoned his research. Operators and Things is a vivid memoir of schizophrenia by Barbara O’Brien (probably a pseudonym): the Operators are controlling voices, the Things their helpless victims. The book was much discussed at the time.