-16 - Interrupting Essays #2 - John Keels speech to the Congress of Scientific Ufologists, NYC 1967

Graham reads, Darren Interrupts. 

http://themothman.wikia.com/wiki/John_Keel

 

Keels speech to the Congress of scientific ufologists, NYC 1967

 

I’m sorry but this award and the Plaque you have given me really threw me off the track. This is a complete surprise to me, nonetheless, I have a very sensational speech. I’m going to tell you where the flying saucers come from and I'm going to tell you all the secrets of the saucers. I have been chasing these things for over a year. I've traveled in some 20 states, and talked to thousands of people who have seen these things and I have seen quite a few of them myself. One of them came down very close to the car I was in and scared the living daylights out of me on the night of April 3, down in West Virginia.

 

I spent a lot of time down there as some of you know chasing the Moth man, buuuut. never caught him. We may do a tv series on the Moth Man. I started out a year ago to apply the so-called scientific method to saucer sightings. I started checking out reports from all over the country. I ended up with 10,000 reports from the year 1966. I have tried and I am still trying to sort these into categories. The times that the objects were seen, the kind of objects seen, the type of witness and so on, in the hope that this information will give us some clue as to what they are. 

 

Buuttt as I plunge deeper into this mystery I discovered that the flying saucers are not the mystery. The mystery is something else. The mystery is more in what we call contactees and ufo landings. I think these objects are doing some things here stealthily at the low level all over the country, all over the world and that they are doing them constantly.

I would like to read to you a typical contactee story, from the daily tex arcananian of Tex Arcana Arkansas. 

 

The date is April 25,  it says that on Friday night, one Judge Lawrence Burn who was a distinguished man for his honesty among the community was driving along the bayou, outside of Tex Arcana. He saw what he described as a large aluminum disk on the ground. He went over to this things and there were three people there and he talked with them… or tried to talk with him. 

 

They couldn't understand him and he could not understand them. They were speaking in some kind of strange foreign language, they were slight in stature and they had oriental eyes, dark skin, and high cheekbones. He thought they were Japanese, even though he could not talk with him, they took him aboard this machine and allowed him to examine it. They gave him a guided tour through the machine and when they let him out the thing took off and flew away. Now, there is nothing too remarkable about this story because we have been hearing them all the time for the last 20 years.

 

But this story is dated April 25, 1897. It is but one of the hundreds of contact stories from 1897, and they all fall into the same category. It has only been in the last year that researchers around the country and around the world have begun to go back to old newspapers to try to find out what these dirigible shaped objects were. There were no dirigible’s then. A few years later Count Von Zeppelin came along with his Zeppelin.  The experiments with lighter than aircraft up until that time had been very unfortunate. They crashed or they weren't about 20 miles and blew up. So, you all have heard of these famous sightings, and we have all kinds of contact stories. Many of them compare favorably with each other even though they were not widely circulated at the time. The majority of contact stories describe the pilots as being normal looking people. 

 

The judge said he thought he ran into some Japanese people, but the majority of them had been described as being normal looking people who could speak English very well. At least in the united state's reports. There is a mysterious woman described in several of these. In fact, in a series of accounts ranging from Texas Arkansas, and into California we have 3 passengers described. One was an elderly man with a beard, another was a younger man and a third was a woman. These three people of three people like them were apparently seen all over the country during that flap. Now you know where this leads us. It sort of indicates that maybe Adamsky was telling the truth after all.

 

Maybe a lot of these people are telling the truth and yet their stories are contradictory. All of these witnesses in 1897 were told something different. Naturally, the whole world was in an uproar over this mysterious dirigible. Actually, there were a lot of them because on the same day you find a dirigible was seen over Chicago, one was seen over Texas and one over London. There were too many of them, there must have been several of these machines flying around. You find that when witnesses approached the pilots on the ground and asked them where they were from they all got a different answer. 

In only one case did the pilot mention outer space. 

 

And in that case, they said they had just built this thing and that they were going to try and fly to Mars in it. In all of the other cases, they claimed that they were local inventors from Indiana and/or Nebraska. In every case, they gave a different story and said that the full details of the invention would be released to the world any day now. In a couple of cases, they mentioned the world situation at the time in 1897.

 

They said, that as soon as Cuba is free they would release their information to the world. The point is that they were deliberately lying to the witnesses. Obviously all of the witnesses or some of them. The Judge, the police officers, and so on may not have been making up the stories, they may have made up some details as often happens, but I think these people were being lied to. And I think that these people today, the contactees are being lied to. There is an enormous contactee situation going on right now this week throughout the country. 

 

These are what are called silent contactees. You never hear about them. They never make any noise. In fact, their next-door neighbors don't know their stories. As I travel I dig out these people and sometimes it is a lot of hard work. Sometimes, two weeks of work to locate or track down one rumor and talk with people. They all tell me basically the same things, except for the content of the messages they have received. Woodrow derinburger in West Virginia says that he was told these spacemen come from Languorous. 

 

And you are familiar with other stories when the names of planets like Clarion and Mazer and so on have been mentioned. The truth is that the flying saucers don't want us to know where they come from. They are quite willing to contact us and they do contact us frequently. They contact individuals on a highway, they contact people on farms in isolated spots. And there is a lot of it going on… I can't prove any of this in a short talk but you have to believe that I have the documentation. I have talked to many people. 

 

I have fascinating tape recordings, some made in New Jersey and some made in West Virginia. If you play them side by side the people are telling the same story, although they have never heard of each other. their Story’s have never been published. These are not the kind of stories that people like George Adamsky have been telling. These are details about the craft, and about the type of beings that have approached them. There are other details as well. 

When I find a new contactee, I have a questionnaire of 8 questions. 

 

If they answer these questions right, I tend to believe their story. I find also, that the majority of these new contactees are women. There are very few men. I think this probably has been the case throughout, perhaps we usually think of women as being talkative, but I think women are also less skeptical and easier to approach. We also have a number of cases where people have become frightened and have gone police complaining that these things have landed in their backyards and that these spacemen were trying to talk to them. 

 

While the police keep a record of this they make fun of these people who report. When I walked into a police station (that is always my first stop) they say…. aaaahhhh we got a nut down the road that claims these things are landing in their backyard. So, I go and talk with that “nut” who is usually a woman and she usually has the same story that I heard a hundred times. I could practically recite it, but I won't. As I say these are details that I am keeping to myself, although now I am beginning to spread them among a few investigators. We are using these details to check out and possibly confirm these stories. 

 

An object landed in a rather desolate place in Long Island on April 14, 1967. The witness was driving an automobile and the car stalled. He saw a door open on the object and some kind of mechanical device got out of the object. It was not a person, but the witness was able to see inside the object. He said he saw dials and so on. There were a few details in this story that confirm the details we have heard elsewhere. He said the mechanical device got out and shoveled up some dirt. Just like the rover we sent to the moon. Two weeks earlier on March 31, something supposedly landed on a farm in Wellington Texas. 

 

The witness Carol Wayne Watts said he did not see anybody but that a door opened and he heard a voice that had invited him aboard. He walked aboard the thing and a voice told him they would take them for a ride if he would submit to a physical examination. He refused to submit to the physical examination, he got off the thing and it took off. There was one detail to his story that has gone unpublished. When I learned that one detail I tended to believe his story was true. 

 

I think we now have many thousands of these stories going unnoticed. Because nobody is investigating them. the Air Force investigation as it has been said here many times is a joke. If you report a sighting to the Air Force they will mail you a form that is idiotic. They will mail this form and expect you to fill it out and mail it back to them. And they will put it in their file. I you fail to come up with one little detail, like what the temperature was when you saw the object they classify it as insufficient and then put it in their “insufficient” file. 

 

They don't record it in their statistics. In some cases, and I have talked to people who have gone through it, they have reported a low-level sighting or have reported that their automobile has been pressed by these objects. In those cases, the air force may make several phone calls. These calls will usually come a long distance from Wright Patterson and sometimes be as long as 3 hours. Some person at Wright Patterson grills these people very carefully about detail. And it is obvious to the witness that a form is being filled out on the other end. A much more elaborate form that the one that is mailed out. 

I’ve gone to the Air Force and said “in not interested in this form that is mailed out and I would like to see the other one. 

 

The one you use on the phone calls. They say “oh we haven't got anything like that” so then I produce tapes of these people who told me the story and the questions they were asked. Maybe of the questions asked in these phone conversations seem quite relevant to the flying saucer problem. Obviously, the air force and the governments are aware of what is going on but they are not paying attention to the individual sightings. Nobody could afford to. They are, however, paying a great deal of attention to the areas where the sighings are constant. Sightings are constant in West Virginia, they are constant in Indiana, Kansas, and Nebraska. 

 

We sometimes have 150 sightings in one day around the country. The scope of this thing is unimaginable and it goes unreported by the major media. The local newspapers often carry headlines about saucer sightings and feature editorials asking why doesn't somebody tell us something. 

When I write articles they often carry them on the editorial page. Many newspapers have dropped the word UFO altogether and now call them spaceships and will say “another spaceship was seen last night by 89 people” in areas with sporadic UFO activity the air force pretends to be out of touch with the situations. 

 

However, when we have an area where sighting is constant we also have Constance air force activity in the air. This comes in the form of flying box cases. A very large cargo plane that looks rather weird. These air force box cars fly at treetop level and are loaded with instrumentation. I notice areas whether it be West Virginia, Indiana or long island these planes fly back and forth all night long over areas here ufos have landed. They are keeping an eye out they obviously have instrumentation. They seem to be trying to do something about the ufos. 

 

Trying to makes one determination but they don't want publicity. I have not written any articles on the aspect of this yet, but I’ve got a whopper coming up soon. Right now everybody is accusing the CIA of investigating the ufos. I wish the CIA would begin by investigating itself. AS you know they have a very big building outside of Washington DC. It has a sign pointing to the Bureau of public roads. Everybody knows this means it’s the CIA building. If you really want to go out to the CIA building. 

 

There is a limo that leaves every day from the front of the Soviet embassy, which will take you there. The CIA has denied to me personally that they have had any interest in the UFO subject since 1953. Ie since the Robertson Report. But some other agency, the NSA is VERY interested and they investigating these things in great detail. It is not the air force and it is not the CIA. This brings us to the Men in Black. 

MIB. 

Whoever they are. they were out in the state of Washington a month ago. They went through 8 communities. It was like a blitzkrieg. There was a tremendous UFO flap out there, including the disappearances of many of the dogs which goes hand in hand with all of this. You may have heard about it, we always have dognapping for some reason. God knows what the UFO’ are doing with Dogs. Whenever there is a really big flap these mystery men turn up. 

 

They went through several Washington communities and told the witnesses to keep quiet about what they had seen. When the local newspapers tried to do some UFO stories and went around to the witnesses, the witnesses said: “ we were told not to talk”. I talked to the reporter that carried out the investigation and I got the names of some of the witnesses and called them up. I tried to get something out of them. They would not deny that they had seen these things and it would have been easy for them to do that. they are honest people. They just said they could not say anything about it. They had been warned to keep quiet. 

 

The same thing has been happening out on Long Island and many of the other sectors. Within 30 miles of New York, there have been several Men in Black cases the last two weeks. I have come within a couple of hours of catching one of them impersonating an officer. I have reported this to the air force. I have given them the numbers that were on the phony identification cards this MIB carried. I practically demanded that the air force push this thing through. I have also been to the FBI with this and I, still running around out here trying to catch these MIB. I have high hopes that one of these days I will. Maybe then we will find out a little bit more about why they want to suppress the fact that something is happening not only in our skies but also on the ground where these things are landing. 

 

They must have a reason for it. The MIB were doing the same thing in 1897. IN one case an object fell out of one of the airship's when it flew over a field. the object was simply a piece of pottery with very strange writing on it. This object was displayed in a local store in Texas. A day or so later a man no one had seen in town before came through the town and bought the object. He paid a great deal of money for it and he looked like an oriental. His skin was dark, he had high cheekbones, he had narrow slanting eyes. 

 

The full report was in the newspapers of 1897. Today some of the drivers of these MIB cars, mostly black Cadillac have been described the same way. So, possibly we have been accusing the air force, the CIA, and the NSA unjustly. Maybe somebody else is interested in keeping these things quiet. I hope that very soon we will have some answers. 

 

MIB 1967/1968 saucer news spring summer 1969 - Speaking before a closed session of the Congress of the scientific ufologists in New York of June 1967 I warned that the MIB incidents were on the increase and that we could possibly expect to hear more from these mystery men in the coming months. Later in the pages of the Saucer News, I predicted that more and more UFO researchers would be having direct personal experience with the UFO phenomenon. I stressed that further silencings were likely to occur. 

 

Take a look at the record. I the past year an almost staggering number of longtime UFOlogists have suddenly quit the scene. Some have stopped answering mail altogether and two have refused to speak to any of their UFOLigical friends on the telephone. 6 important UFO personalities have died. Whole regional investigating organizations have collapsed and their leaders have publicly disavowed their interest in the phenomenon. They are now living in bewildered fear concerned over disappearing mail and perplexed by the antics of their telephones. The main topic at the 1968 congress of scientific UFOlogists held in Cleveland Ohio was the MIB. 

 

Some researchers were claiming that they have been followed by black Cadillacs and have even been shot at. unknown intruders broke into hotel rooms, automobiles private homes during this hectic year to steal only UFO research papers, documentation and photographs. There were literally scores of these incidents. Some of the people that were trapped in these bizarre situations were newspapermen, writers, and independent researchers not know to the UFOlgocial mainstream. A UFO chasing newsman in Philly was reportedly shot at while in a laundromat while another reporter in West Virginia was repeatedly harassed. 

 

Accounts of identical harassments came in from Canada, Mexico city, Sweden and even Germany. No place being safe. Even TV producers, writings and personalities concerned with UFO’s have admitted to me in confidence that they too have been undergoing all kinds of strange experiences. One changes his unlisted home number 3 times and still the harassment continued. Another had his phone taken out altogether. Those who have been on the outside of this have read the very reports with sarcasm and disbelief. But it has all been horrifyingly real to the hard-working researchers who have been probing into strange and revealing cases in their own areas. The old explanations for blaming the government may be invalid. It is abundantly clear that a mysterious third party is involved. 

 

A party who seems to be directly related to the UFO phenomenon itself. If you want to try to understand what is really going on you must shelve your personal beliefs and try base your conclusions upon the obvious elements now taking place among all over the world. The subject is most complicated and a simple explanation is not possible. You must prepare yourself to understand the complex big picture. The knowledge of history is more important than the knowledge of astronomy. 

 

Mankind lies at the core of the mystery. Man kinds past and future are directly involved and will be affected seriously affected, so try and broaden your general knowledge and base your speculations on the available facts. Not upon wishful thinking. When you are on the right track you will know it. Your phone will start ringing but their won't be anyone on the other end. or there may come a soft rap on your door in the middle of the night. 

 

Then you will howl with indignation “why didn't someone tell us what this was all about”. Somebody has been telling you, over and over and over again… but you haven't been listening.