by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
John Keel, most well-known as the author of the 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies, was a controversial figure in flying saucer/UFO world back in the late 1960s and throughout the 70s due to his unorthodox views. He was first and foremost a fortean (interested in all things strange) and it was his view that whatever was behind the flying saucer/UFO phenomenon was not extraterrestrial and might be behind other phenomena as well. From May 1969 to April 1974, Keel put out the “irregular newsletter,” Anomaly. He asked those wishing to receive a copy to send him a self-addressed, stamped manila envelope, and the number of copies he printed depended on the number of envelopes he received. For fans of Keel, issue No. 1 provides a detailed look at his views and investigative methods (in the form of “concrete suggestions for investigating the phenomena”) just after his adventures in West Virginia and New York that he chronicled in The Mothman Prophecies.
Keel’s first foray into UFO investigation was thanks to an assignment from Playboy magazine in 1966 to, as Keel put it during his 2002 appearance on The Art Bell Show (9:10), “get to the bottom of the flying saucer mystery.” He ended up spending a good deal of time in Point Pleasant, WV, after the November 15, 1966, encounter with a red-eyed, winged humanoid creature that became known as the Mothman reported by two young couples, Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette.
There were many reports of Mothman encounters in the area in the year that followed as well as reports of UFOs and Men in Black. Keel also, along with Gray Barker, interviewed Parkersburg, WV, resident Woodrow Derenberger, who claimed to have had contact with a “man” named Indrid Cold and others who came from the planet Lanulos.
Keel divided his time between West Virginia and his home area of New York City (Manhattan), where he got involved with a Long Island woman, Joanne Perrano, who claimed she was in contact with and could channel an entity who called himself Apol. In The Mothman Prophecies, he describes all of the above as well as strange robotic voices over the phone and various entities giving him predictions that might or might not come true. Keel’s suggestions to researcher investigators and his views as presented in Anomaly No.1 were, no doubt, heavily influenced by his experiences, and he could be forgiven for being a little keyed up.
The first two words in the first issue are “FLYING SAUCERS,” and Keel explains that this is the last time they will be seen in Anomaly and will be replaced with the expression “Aerial Anomaly.” He then gets into what amounts to a mission statement: “We hope to establish Anomaly as an irregular newsletter devoted entirely to the statistical and scientific analysis of all the many neglected ecological, parapsychological and psychiatric aspects surrounding the study of aerial anomalies (AA).”
To help enable this study, Keel invites his readers to submit reports, and he offers some guidelines. He says he has “found that it is more fruitful to shift the emphasis to the witnesses and certain unusual manifestations which they frequently experience.” He asks that transcripts and summaries be made of tape recordings as he doesn’t have the time to go through “hundreds of hours of tapes.” As for photos, he says “This study is interested only in superbly detailed photographs taken in the presence of two or more witnesses who are willing to sign notarized affadavits [sic].”
Keel tells investigators to get their emotions out of the way and just “collect all the facts and report them” without jumping to conclusions. According to him, “Thousands of important cases have been slighted in the past because unqualified investigators have made hasty negative judgements.”
Keel then presents an example of information formatted using a system he developed that he calls the “Data Reduction System.” He suggests that all UFO publications print the DRS code for all sightings reported in each issue. He argues that “quantitative studies have been sorely lacking in the UFO field” and that reports are so “numerous” that they become unimportant “unless they are reduced to valid statistical form.” He expresses the hope that the DRS will fill the need for a common methodology for “everyone in the field.”
Keel then goes into some more guidelines including being objective and getting a detailed account of the witnesses’ emotional and psychological reactions. He explains that sometimes “these reactions are more important than the sighting itself.” Keel advises against using “anyone other than a qualified psychiatrist for hypnosis” (this is interesting, as he describes hypnotizing a witness in the book), and recommends that medical records be obtained in cases where the witnesses suffer “eyeburn,” which is a symptom he notes in The Mothman Prophecies where one witness is described as suffering from it after an encounter with the creature.
Then comes some advice that more deeply reflects the experiences Keel wrote about in the book. He starts off with “The Diversions.” According to him, “A large part of the UFO phenomenon is deliberately deceptive.” He explains that since 1897, UFOs have left behind ordinary debris commonly found on Earth such as “newspapers, pieces of metal, articles of ordinary clothing, mundane chemicals, etc.,” that give UFO incidents the appearance of a hoax.
Keel suggests that investigators study Greek mythology. According to him, entities often give Greek names for themselves and their “non-existent planets.”
A unique idea of Keel’s is that UFOs often employ “our own techniques of psychological warfare.” One technique he mentions is to “stage” a landing or “seemingly important incidents” to divert our attention away from “important activity.”
At this point, Keel tells the readers that they need to get rid of all “preconceptions” before they can “even begin to understand any of this,” and urges them to reject the extraterrestrial hypothesis that, in his view, keeps the “phenomenon and its source” free from interference. He explains that hoaxes had been deliberately staged to make the government believe the “phenomenon was non-real.” He says that “the UFO buffery” has served to bring ridicule on the subject by advocating the ETH and that this has served to allow “the UFO source . . . to operate unhindered for twenty years.”
Keel goes on (as he was wont to do) in a section titled “Hallucinatory Effects.” There, he points out that some contact cases “have proven to be hallucinatory” and he introduces the term “induced hallucination” and says “it seems that the effects were produced in the witnesses’ minds by an exterior influence. He closes this section with this cryptic statement: “The method and purpose of this effect is now known to a select handfull [sic] of competent researchers.”
Following this is a section titled “The DRS Procedure,” a section on how to format and submit UFO reports, and a section titled “The Men in Black,” where Keel describes the MiB as they had been reported. He cautions against alarming witnesses “by displaying unusual interest in such visitors,” and trying to apprehend one.
The remaining five pages consist of what one would expect of a flying saucer/UFO newsletter with news and listings of books on the subject as well as what Keel calls “brush-off letters” (replies to letters he wrote to prominent figures regarding the UFO mystery) from Robert F. Kennedy, the office of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the national director of The Society for the Propagation of Faith.
Keel’s DRS never took hold in flying saucer/UFO world, and Anomaly became mostly a collection of newsclippings covering subjects ranging from Bigfoot to Cattle Mutilation. Keel refined his ideas regarding the mystery in his future writings and in particular his 1970 book, Operation Trojan Horse, and his 1975 book, The Eighth Tower.