Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (34 page)

A month later, on July 19, 1966, the command pilot of Gemini-10, John W. Young, radioed to ground control and reported: “We have two bright objects up here in our orbital path. I don’t think they’re stars. They look like we are going right along with them.”

The newsmen in the ground control center perked up their ears, but the loudspeaker suddenly went dead. NASA officials were apparently “censoring” Young’s descriptions of the objects. When the speakers cut in again, Young was saying, “They just disappeared. I guess they were satellites of some kind.”

Four hours later, a spokesman for the Dept. of Defense told reporters that a check had been made of all the known objects in space – 1,091 artificial satellites and pieces of rocket debris – and that one of them could have been the “two bright objects.”

“We have been unable to identify the two satellites,” the spokesman said.

The problem of unidentified flying objects is much more complex and worrisome than most UFO buffs would like to believe. The Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO) has been studying the mystery for 16 years, and L.J. Lorenzen, the electronics engineer who heads the organization, has expressed concern that the objects may ultimately prove to be hostile to us. If this is the case, then the government secrecy is understandable. It would be standard military procedure to study and try to understand any potential threat as quietly as possible. Premature disclosure of the nature and intent of the mysterious objects might very well lead to public panic.

A “false target,” in the form of the Air Force’s “Project Blue Book,” was established in 1952 to absorb the brunt of the UFO buffs’ anger and confusion. It is very probable that NASA and other organizations outside the Air Force are far more concerned with the problem and Know a great deal about it. Some well-informed observers, such as Frank Edwards, have suggested that somehow the UFOs may actually be trying to impede our space efforts and keep us bound to this pitiful little planet.

The evidence to support this uncomfortable theory mounts daily. Since 1964, there have been innumerable cases in which UFOs have not only jammed radios and stalled cars, but have also caused telephone systems to fail. There were over 1,000 unexplained “blackouts” in the U.S. last year. Most of these occurred in areas where UFO sightings had become commonplace. Another weird factor is the frequent outbreak of unexplained fires in such areas, and the discovery of abandoned, completely burned out automobiles. Some of these autos have been found in inaccessible places such as wooded hilltops, where they could not possibly have been driven or towed. How did they get there? No one knows.

Cape Kennedy and the Space Center in Houston, TX have not escaped these eerie problems. On Jan. 27, 1967, astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee were going through a dry run in an Apollo Command Module atop a rocket at Cape Kennedy. A telephone wire ran from the ground control center to the capsule. Grissom was talking to the center by wire, not by radio, yet unnatural static and weird noises were drowning out his voice.

“If I can’t talk to you from here,” Grissom complained, “how do you expect to hear me from the moon?”

Virgil Grissom never made it to the moon. A few minutes later, a sudden fire engulfed the interior of the module, and all three men died instantly.

Is somebody somewhere trying to tell us something?

CHAPTER 18

UFOS AND ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN: A NOTED AUTHORITY’S WEIRDEST CASES –
MALE
MAGAZINE, OCT. 1969

You are driving down a lonely country road late at night, with lively music from your radio helping to keep you alert. You haven’t been drinking. You just want to get home to bed. Suddenly, your headlights seem to go dim, and you fiddle with the switch to no avail. Then, heavy static drowns out the music on the radio. You feel an eerie, tingling sensation, and an indefinable fear tickles the back of your head and dries your throat. Then, a tall figure shambles out of the bushes alongside the road, and steps in front of your fading headlights. It is at least seven feet tall, maybe more, and it seems to be covered with long hair from head to foot. It opens its mouth and screams – a bloodcurdling cry. The face is demon-like, the eyes a fiery red. You are gripped with terror; you jam the accelerator to the floorboards, and speed off without looking back.

Later, when you try to tell your friends about it, they laugh out loud and kid you. So, you don’t dare mention it again.

In the past few years, hundreds of people in California, Michigan, Florida, New York, India, Brazil, Argentina, and dozens of other places have had identical experiences with these monsters and freaks, which appear out of nowhere and then disappear again into limbo. Posses using dogs and helicopters have searched in vain for these mysterious creatures. Zoologists and biologists have collected plaster casts of the gigantic footprints they often leave behind. Early in 1969, two world-famous scientists finally discovered what might have been the actual body of one of these half-human beasts. They examined it and photographed it.
And then someone stole the corpse.
It hasn’t been seen since.

Strangest of all, these hairy monsters have a disturbing habit of turning up in areas where flying saucers have been seen. Their brief appearances are often accompanied by manifestations that have long been associated with UFOs, such as the dimming of headlights, radio static, and the stalling of motor vehicles. Ufologists have labeled such phenomena “the electromagnetic (EM) effect,” assuming that flying saucers are sometimes surrounded by powerful magnetic fields that wreak havoc with electrical systems. There are thousands of cases of this. In 1966-68, a team of scientists at Colorado University studied the EM effect carefully as part of an overall UFO investigation financed by the U.S. Air Force. They were completely baffled.

“Of all the physical effects claimed to be due to the presence of UFOS,” the Colorado scientists stated in their final report, “the alleged malfunction of automobile motors is perhaps the most puzzling. This claim is frequently made in reports involving multiple, independent witnesses. Witnesses seem certain that the function of their cars was affected by the unidentified object, which sometimes reportedly was not seen until after the malfunction was noted. No satisfactory explanation for such effects, if indeed they occurred, is apparent.”

On Sunday evening, May 18, 1969, the lights went out in a small area outside rising sun, Indiana (in Ohio County). The home of Mr. and Mrs. Lester Kaiser was without power for about two hours. They thought nothing of the incident at the time, although strange lights and weird flying objects had occasionally been sighted along a nearby ridge.

At 7:30 p.m. on the following evening, May 19
^th
, young George Kaiser was walking towards a tractor on the farm, when his dog began to growl and bark. He looked up and saw a grotesque figure standing about 25 feet away. Whatever it was, it was the size of a man, and was covered with black fur.

“I watched it for about two minutes before it saw me,” young Kaiser told investigators later. “It stood in a fairly upright position, although it was bent over in the middle of its back, with arms about the same height as a normal human being, I’d say it was about 5’8” or so, and had a very muscular structure. The head sat directly on the shoulders and the face was black, with hair that stuck out on the back of its head. It had eyes set close together and a very short forehead. It was covered with hair, except for the back of the hands and the face. The hands looked like normal hands, not claws.”

George was transfixed with shock and fright for a moment. Then he made a move to get into the family automobile nearby. The creature made a “strange grunting sound,” turned, jumped over a ditch, and ran down the road at high speed, quickly disappearing out of sight. Footprints were found in the dirt by the ditch. They showed three toes plus a big toe. Plaster casts were later made of these prints.

A neighbor, Mr. Charles Rolfing, reportedly watched an unidentified flying object for about eight minutes, shortly after 10:15 p.m. on May 20
^th
, as it moved about the area. He studied it through binoculars and described it as being a glowing, greenish white.

So here we have a sequence of interesting coincidences: a local power failure on May 18
^th
; a creature sighting on May 19
^th
; and a UFO sighting on May 20
^th
. As Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger remarked, “Once is happen stance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action.”

Most of the modern ABSM (Abominable Snowman) sightings in the U.S. have been made by witnesses in automobiles on isolated backroads. It is rare for the creatures to openly approach a house or farm as one apparently did in Indiana. Canada has a long history of ABSM sightings dating back to the middle of the 19
^th
Century. California’s “Bigfoot” has been a local legend for decades. The mountainous, heavily forested state of West Virginia has produced a fascinating catalog of hairy bogeymen.

A West Virginian named W.C. “Doc” Priestley claimed that a hairy humanoid ruined the electrical system of his automobile in 1960. That summer, numerous people around Parsons, WV allegedly saw a gruesome eight-foot-tall thing covered with shaggy hair and graced with two huge eyes that “shone like big balls of fire.” In October 1960, “Doc” Priestley was driving through the Monongahela National Forest about three miles north of Marlinton, WV, when his car, which had been “purring like a kitten,” suddenly sputtered and stopped.

“Then I saw it,” Priestley said. “To my left, beside the road, stood this monster with long hair pointing straight up.”

A group of Priestley’s friends were driving on ahead in a bus. When they noticed that he was no longer directly behind them, they turned around and drove back.

“I don’t know how long I sat there,” Priestley continued, “until the boys missed me and backed up the bus to where I was. It seemed the monster was very much afraid of the bus and dropped his hair,” (which had been standing on end). “To my surprise, as soon as he did this, my car started to run again. I didn’t tell the boys what I had seen. The thing took off when the bus stopped.”

Priestley again started to follow along behind the bus, but his car started to act up a second time. “I could see the sparks flying from under the hood of my car as if it had a very bad short,” he noted. “And sure enough, there beside the road stood the monster again. The points were completely burned out of my car.”

The bus backed up again and, as soon as it appeared, the monster melted into the forest.

Two months later, on Dec. 31, 1960, Charles Stover, 25, was driving a bakery truck along a backwoods road near Hickory Flats, WV, when he rounded a curve and came face-to-face with a 6-foot tall creature “standing erect, with hair all over his body.” It was shaped like a man, he said, and he almost collided with it. He stopped a short distance away and took a brief second look at the thing. That was more than enough. He sped to the nearest filling station and a group of men formed a posse and went back to the spot. They found upturned rocks and strange marks on the ground, but the monster was gone.

Armed posses have been chasing these things without success for years. Back in 1940-41, scores of people saw a huge, hair-covered humanoid outside of Mt. Vernon, IL. It was said to be able to leap 20-foot wide ditches with apparent ease, and was reported to have killed at least one dog. Large posses of armed men searched the entire area repeatedly, but all they found were gigantic footprints.

Bears and other known animals simply don’t fit the descriptions of these mystery monsters. Nor do bears make a habit of attacking people in moving vehicles. The monsters do.

The pattern is always the same. Reliable witnesses report seeing the elusive ABSM. Massive searches are launched. Footprints are found. But the creatures themselves have seemingly vanished into thin air.

In Clanton, Alabama, in 1960, several witnesses observed a giant hairy creature prowling the local woods. It left behind huge tracks.

In Madison, Indiana, in 1962, several farmers glimpsed another hairy humanoid. Footprints were found. Posses were formed. No results.

In Lost Gap, Mississippi, in 1962, there were many reports of a giant nine-foot tall beast with glowing green eyes. Local police were convinced that it existed. Helicopters and bloodhounds were used in a massive search. The creature got away.

In 1964, another enormous “something” was seen by many witnesses near Sister Lakes, Michigan. Mobs of hunters tried in vain to track it down. It came back the next year, appearing in the vicinity of Monroe, Mi. Mrs. Rose Owen and her daughter, Christine Van Archer, said that a hairy monster that “grunted and growled like a mad dog,” jumped on the side of their car, and grabbed Christine by the hair. The girl suffered a black eye from the incident. Another girl, Shirley Morrin, 18, of Temperance, MI, said that a similar beast had leaped at her car, broken her windshield and scratched her arm. As usual, huge posses covered every square inch of ground in the area and found nothing. All of these incidents took place near the Enrico Fermi Atomic Power Plant. Flying saucer sightings are commonplace in the region. The famous UFO flap of March 1966 occurred nearby. UFOs have shown a decided interest in atomic installations all over the world.

The year 1966 was not only a peak period for UFO activity. It also marked a major outbreak of monsters all across the country. On May 21, 1966, a group of young people in an automobile encountered a giant, faceless creature in broad daylight in the Historical Park at Morristown, NJ. They told local police that it was well over six feet tall, had huge shoulders, and was covered with hair. It shuffled up to a parked car and thumped on the back of it. The head was either pulled down into the shoulders, or it was headless. The witnesses did not linger to examine it closely. During the past thirty years, a monster dubbed the “Jersey Devil” has been repeatedly seen all over the state.

In July 1966, a giant hairy monster reportedly prowled the streets of Jessore, East Pakistan.
It killed four people.
Witnesses swore that it was not a tiger or other known animal. The army was called out to search for it. It was never caught.