Chapter
List
Chapter II - The Creep Who Came in from
the Cold
(The
name for this chapter has its - quite obvious - origin in John Le
Carré's novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold)
One step further into the nightmarish town of Point Pleasant, that's
where Keel drives the reader in this chapter. UFO investigation,
like any other trade, also faces many hazards - even if it's done
in the most discrete way possible, there will always be one or another
person who will try to warn you not to print that article in the
newspaper, not to show it to anyone else, let alone the general
population. In short that's the idea one gets while reading the
first parts of this chapter.
We
are introduced to Mary Hyre (Mrs. Mary Hyre) who works at the Messenger,
the city journal. The author describes her as a
stout woman in her early fifties (...) blurred
with fatigue. At the time, Mary seemed to be having almost
no time to rest, or no will to do so: everyday her office is filled
with UFO sighting related paperwork, which she fought hard to print,
though there seemed to be a group of unknown people who tried to
convince not to:
Later that same afternoon, another stranger walked into Mrs Hyre's
office. He was slightly built, about five feet seven inches tall,
witch black, piercing eyes and unruly black hair, as if he had had
a brush cut and it was just growing back in. His complexion was
even darker than that of the two previous visitors and he looked
like a Korean or Oriental of some king. His hands were especially
unusual, she thought, with unduly long, tapering fingers. He wore
a cheap-looking, ill-fitting black suit, slightly out of fashion
and his tie was knotted in an odd old-fashioned way. Strangely he
was not wearing an overcoat despite the fierce cold outside. 'My
name is Jack Brown,' he announced in a hesitant manner. 'I'm a UFO
researcher.'
This strange, stuttering man asked Mary Hyre some strange questions,
such as if she knew John Keel, and then, continued with a strange
speech, calling Keel a liar. This strange experience was not unique,
since many people around the county have seen other people who fit
the same description.
This
is one of the first interesting points of the book, when Keel mentions
these men in black suits, that come out of nothing, asking the weirdest
questions, mostly to people who claim to have seen UFO and even
stranger things. What they are, we are still to know. Some say they
are government people, other say that their origin is the same from
the flying objects (which is to say they are aliens disguised as
humans). None of the explanations is anywhere close to be conclusive,
in any way. The government theory could be possible but does not
explain their uncommon behaviour. The other one, built upon the
belief of alien life visiting our planet, is highly improbable and
far from proven.
There
is nothing we know now that Keel didn't know then, 30 years ago
when he wrote the book. The fact is that these so-called MIB (nowadays
another component of the UFO folklore) only appear in places where
sightings have been reported, presenting themselves with common
names like Smith, Jones, Kelly, Allen or Brown.
Also quite peculiar
are their strange reactions to every-day objects. We
must have in mind that a town so small as Point Pleasant is not
very used to strangers, especially people with dark-toned skin and
oriental complexions.
In
the summer of 1967 an oddball character wandered into that restaurant
noted for its oddball clientele. He was tall and awkward, dressed
in an ill-fitting black suit that seemed out of style. His chin
came to a sharp point and his eyes bulged sharply like 'thyroid
eyes'. He sat down on a booth and gestured to the waitress with
his long, tapering fingers.
'Something to eat,' he mumbled. The waitress handed him a menu.
He stared at it uncomprehendingly, apparently unable to read. 'Food,'
he said almost pleadingly.
'How about a stake,' she offered.
'Good'. She brought him a steak with all the trimmings. He stared
at it for a long moment and then picked up his knife and fork, glancing
around at the other diners. It was obvious he did not know how to
handle the implements! The waitress watched him as he fumbled helplessly.
Finally she showed him how to cut the steak and spear with the fork.
He sawed away at the meat. Clearly he really was hungry.
'Where are you from?' She asked gently.
'Not from here.'
'Where?'
'Another world.'
Other
cases like this one are mentioned throughout the chapter: similar
people, dressed the same way, showing the strangest behaviours and
reactions. In one case, one of these men was offered Jello
(1)
and instead of eating, he drank it! All this seemed quite a put-on
for Keel when he heard it the first times, but the put-on theory
had to be ignored due to the evident similarities between the stories.
But who they are, what they stand for, no one knows for certain.
Mary's
niece Connie also said she had seen such an object. By the time
Keel interviewed her, her eyes were reddened, watery and almost
swollen shut - something called klieg conjunctivitis, very
common among UFO contactees. According to her experience, she had
a close encounter with a strange, grey, man-like creature that had
a pair of wings (about 10 feet wide when spanned), glowing red eyes
and that descended to the ground like an helicopter. Like Connie,
over a hundred people in Point Pleasant would see that creature
during the winter. What is the creature, in fact? Naturally, Keel
could not keep from associating all these different paranormal events
to a common origin.
Somewhere
in between, he presents (most of) us to a new concept that he finds
to be interesting in order to justify many of the cases he will
write about in the following chapters: the Tibetan concept of
tulpas, as a form of projection originated from the powerful
minds of the past that remained until our days. He questions himself
if all these ghosts, monsters and UFOs aren't, in fact, only visual
remnants of our ancestors. He adds: (...)
unidentified flying objects have been present since the dawn of
man (...) they are described repeatedly in the Bible, but were also
the subject of cave paintings made thousands of years before the
Bible was written.
Despite the von Däniken (2)
style,
I believe Keel does make some sense when he says that this sort
of phenomena has always been present throughout the history of Man.
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Chapter III - The Flutter of Black Wings
This
chapter striked me as one of the most important in the book. It
contains more than a dozen good accounts given by people from all
around the world who claim to have seen all sorts of flying creatures
they could not identify.
All
these cases have different nuances, for the flying creatures are
sometimes described as machines
(3),
sometimes as animal-like (resembling a bat or a big bird) and in
other obscure examples, human-like. Keel finds a relation between
all of them.
Winged
beings are an essential part of the folklore of every culture. From
the times of Babylonia and the Pharaoh, sculptors were preoccupied
with putting wings on lions and unidentifiable beasts. Although
the angels of biblical times were never described as being winged,
painters and sculptures have always persisted in giving them feathered
appendages. (Actually, the old-time angels appeared like ordinary
human beings. They even had supper with Lot.) When demons overran
the planet during the Dark ages they were also recorded as monstrous
entities with bats' wings.
Keel
then draws our attentions to a very strange case in Gobilli River,
from the distant year of 1908, where russian explorer V.K. Arsenyev
had an encounter, back in 1908. It seems that he and his faithful
dog saw an animal standing in front of them: in order to draw its
attention, Arsenyev threw a stone but, to his astoundment, the animal
lifted up in the air with the aid of a pair of black wings. At the
moment, his dog was scared and was sheltering at his feet (4).
The footprints found near the site were very similar to a man's.
Later on, the russian explorer told his fantastic story to the people
who lived in the region and was staggered to hear that such a creature
was already known to some of them, namely the hunters.
In Mexico there are stories of the Ikals, tiny black men
endowed with the power of flight who live in caves and kidnap humans.
In India the giant bird known as the Garuda is an important part
of the mythology (...) North American Indians gave extensive legends
about the Thunderbird, a huge bird said to carry off children and
old people (...) Known as Piasa to the Indians of the Dakotas, it
was supposed to have terrifying red eyes and a long tail. We are
dealing with three types of phenomena in these cases. The first
is the winged man; the second is a giant bird, so huge it is a biological
impossibility; third, we have a monstrous demon with red eyes, bat's
wings and a body closely human in form. All three are probably interrelated.
These
creatures are definitely not exclusive to our time, that is what
Keel believes in. But can we afford ourselves to believe that every
legend present in every mythology from every country has the pure
truth as its background? In any case, the author only uses these
examples in order to solidify the core of the book, which is the
West Virginia case. I believe that practically every each of us
has heard his share of stories that involved people with wings:
yet our first reaction to the concept of the "mothman" is one of
incredulity, disbelief, surprise, as if we've never heard of this
concept before. Keel's reminder to a background of sightings is
quite welcome, making his investigation somewhat... timeless.
This
is one of the most incredible cases I've heard in years, and I'm
bound to believe that it is true - whatever origin it may have -
due to its features:
Earl
Morrison, the witness, was serving as a private first class in the
marine corps in Vietnam in the summer of 1969. He and two buddies
were sitting on a top of a bunker near Da Nang on a warm summer
evening.
All of a sudden - I don't know why - we all three looked out there
in the sky and we saw this figure coming toward us,' he told Mr.
Worley (5).
'It had a kind of glow and we couldn't make
out what it was at first. It started coming toward us, real slowly.
All of a sudden we saw what looked like wings, like a bat's, only
it was gigantic compared to what a regular bat would be. After it
got close enough so we could see what it was, it looked like a woman.
A naked woman. She was black. Her skin was black, her body was black,
the wings were black, everything was black. But it glowed. It glowed
in the night - kind of a greenish cast to it. There was a glow on
her and around her. Everything glowed. Looked like she glowed and
threw off a radiance. We saw her arms towards the wings and they
looked like regular molded arms, each with a hand and fingers and
everything, but they had skin from the wings going over them. And
when she flapped her wings, there was no noise at first. It looked
like her arms didn't have any bones in them, because they were limber
just like a bat.
She started going over us, and we still didn't hear anything. She
was right above us and when she got over the top of our heads she
was maybe six or seven feet up.
We couldn't do anything. We didn't know what to do. We just froze.
We just watched what was going over because we couldn't believe
our eyes. . . . So we watched her go straight over the top of us,
and still she didn't make any noise flapping her wings. She blotted
out the moon once - that's how close she got to us. . . . As we
watched her - she got about ten feet or so away from us - we started
hearing her wings flapping. And she just started flying off and
we watched her for quite a while. The total time when we first saw
her and could almost define her until we lost sight of her and were
unable to define her was between three or four minutes.
There
are two sides to one possible truth behind the case described above:
there is a possibility that the creature the witnesses describe
was "real", tangible, and another one where the creature was only
real to the witnesses. Ever since I heard that the U.S. government
made experiments with drugs on their own soldiers during the Vietnam
war, I can but see a connection. These experiments are facts and
documented data that History has shamelessly chosen to cover up
- maybe fearing harsh consequences.
And from what I've understood, such experiments were not only limited
to the Vietnam War but also to many other military operations.
But one fact remains unexplained: this account is given not only
by one but by three different people. As far as experts can tell,
drug effects are subjective, so every "hallucination" provoked is
private and never collective.
Maybe not the most rational way to put it, but the case has features
so unbelievable that it becomes quite easy to believe in. It is
unique and yet similar to so many cases.
The
chapter finishes with some more interesting facts about these creatures
(?). Is there a relation between them and the luminous phenomena
also known as UFO sightings? There does not seem to be a well documented
"mothman" sighting that doesn't include UFO sightings before or
after these episodes. It also happens very often that these winged-creatures
appear during UFO sightings, increasing - if not confirming
- the plausibility of a direct relation.
Also,
there are some other interesting facts: the appearance of these
unidentified objects is described most of the times to be preceded
by a glow - usually reddish - that, according to Keel, marks the
emergence of the object from the invisible band of the spectrum
into infrared and then to the narrow band of visible light. Or,
if the object is passing through the visible band to the higher
frequencies it is cyan (bluish-green) before if fades to blue (hard
to see at night) and then enters the ultra-violet range.
Also puzzling is the total absence of any sort of odour related
to these creatures.
1973,
Sweden: a group of people spotted one of these flying creatures.
One of them actually had a camera ready to shoot - with telephoto
lenses - but the film jammed when he tried to use it. This case
is paradigmatic (due to the impossibility of the witness to use
his camera at that precise moment.)
It
would seem as if that which we try to capture with our cameras is
meant only to be seen by those who really see it, on the
place (and time) where such manifestations occur.
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Chapter
IV - Take the Train
'So
many airline pilots report seeing them, that's why I take the train.'
Dr.
Edward C. Walsh, executive secretary of the National Aeronautics
and Space Council, Baltimore 1966
Often ignored, air pilot's sightings are probably the most reliable
and precise. Not only do these pilots jeopardise their own professional
future when they come forward, but they spend hours and hours in
the air, piloting and observing the skies they know so well. Or
do they? It
is natural to say that they are more qualified than practically
anyone when it comes to report an unidentified flying object.
This
does not mean that every report that came from private airline or
military pilot is true, undeniably. But the fact remains that there
is no reason - whatsoever - to conceive a global conspiracy among
the members of this honourable trade, whose purpose would be the
misleading of the public and of the authorities.
Wherever
you were in the year 1966, you must have heard about the coming
of the flying saucers.
These
global waves of fear and wonder, spawned by fanatics and believers
all over the world, contributed for the poor image we hold today
of the UFO investigation. The big headlines filled with dubious
photographs and big letters turned a serious scientific matter into
a trifle, a subject for the light-headed to discuss in their homes,
bars or annual meetings. Thinking of it makes me nauseous. Science
is a public domain, that much is true, but does that mean that the
public can put at risk both the image and the researching activity
of professionals?
I
feel very reluctant when I tell anyone that I know that UFOs
do exist, that when I have the time I like to read about the subject,
that it is not a question of belief. The immediate response, the
first reaction or impression is always the same: "he believes in
aliens" (ironically this is said, most of the times, by people who
actually believe in God and Saints!)
It is only my fault that I mind such reactions. There is no reason
why I should.
In
March 1966, a shapely housewife, whom I will call Mrs. Kelly because
she asked that her name be withheld, was waiting in her car for
her children near the Point Pleasant school when she saw an unbelievable
apparition low in the sky. It looked like a glistening metal disk
and was hovering directly above the school playground. A doorlike
aperture was open and its rim and there was a man standing outside.
He was not standing in the doorway, he was standing outside
the object in midair! He wore a silvery skin-tight costume and had
very long silvery hair. He was looking down into the schoolyard
intently. She watched him for a long moment until her children bounded
up to the car. When she looked again, the man and object were gone.
She decided not to tell anyone about this strange vision, attaching
religious significance to it.
In
the previous chapter Keel mentioned a sighting in Vietnam where
three soldiers had observed a flying woman. The case described above
has only one eye-witness. To what extent can we believe the description
of just one witness? Is there any more truth in group reports? Anyway,
it is easier to spot a lie if a lie exists in a group report, through
the technique of individual interviews.
To
the regret of true believers, the majority of the witnesses to chimerical
(6)
events
were alone at the time of their experience. While the amateur investigators
tend to concentrate on the very subjective descriptions of the observers,
I probed deeper and studied the witnesses themselves. Many, I found,
suffered certain medical symptoms such as temporary amnesia, severe
headaches, muscular spasms, excessive thirst and other effects,
all of which have been observed throughout history in religious
miracles (the appearances of religious apparitions), demonology,
occult phenomena, and contacts with fairies. All of these manifestations
clearly share a common source or cause.
The
UFO phenomenon itself consists of seemingly intelligent aerial lights
(they don't seem to move randomly, that is) and often a searchlight,
a beam that the object casts. Contacted people describe over and
over the same reactions to the same phenomena: the natural feeling
of arrest, a sensation of extreme fear and paralysis; or, at times,
the opposite, a very strong feeling of inner peace. Seldom, memory
lacks tend to make the subject forget about his experience for the
following few hours or days after the episode. Even after remembering
the episode, there is a natural tendency for the subject to fill,
by himself, some of the gaps within his memory.
Long
term effects are indeed more interesting. As mentioned before, the
exposure to the light tends to create eye-related problems such
as conjunctivitis. When the contacted people claim to have been
illuminated with a beam of light, the verified consequences
are many: these people, mostly common people, see their I.Q. increase
drastically, they quit their jobs, leave their wives and start a
new life, becoming, in some cases, exceptional people like scientists
or poets. In religion, this process is known as mystical illumination.
One can even find it in the Bible: formerly a common, Jewish man,
Saul was hit by a light on the road to Damascus and, after being
blind for three full days, converted himself to Christianity and
became St. Paul (7).
The light is also understood in many different religions as a mean
of guidance and knowledge.
I
could go on and on, transcribing the paragraphs where Keel blends
UFO phenomena and old myths: vampires, demons in the middle ages,
witches that were seen flying in their brooms, etc. I think I got
a very clear perception about what this author meant by this exercise
of association: there is, indeed, a possible relationship between
the old myths and the new ones. If they all have the same origin,
we are still to learn.
What is, in fact, common to all is Man, his appetite for the unknown
or merely his weakness when it comes to believing in higher powers.
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(1)
- Jello - an american gelatine brand.
(2)
- Erich von Däniken is a dubious Swiss author who left his job
in a hotel and became an Archaeology-related investigator, although
he never was an archaeologist himself, I believe. Some say he even
forged evidence in order to prove his obsessive point of view, claiming
that extraterrestrials have established contact with ancient civilisations
(Egyptian, Mayan, Indian, among others).
(3)
- Though
it seems odder than the animal-like/human-like description of the
flying objects, some of the cases featured in this book actually tell
us of people who thought that what they saw over their heads was a
flying machine.
(4)
- Often these cases include the presence of dogs, which seem to show
a similar behaviour: they bark at first, but when the sighted object
or creature appears, they return to their owners as if scared. In
this book I recall one atypical case where a dog, barking at something
that the owner could not see, ran after it and disappeared. The owner
found out seconds later that the "something" he could not distinguish
in the dark was actually one of these strange, red-eyed, winged creatures
in his own backyard.
(5)
- This
case was not investigated by Keel: Mr. Worley (Don Worley) is the
name of the investigator who contacted with the witnesses.
(6)
- Chi·me·ra also Chi·mae·ra (kì-mîr¹e,
kî-) noun.
1. Greek Mythology. A fire-breathing she-monster usually represented
as a composite of a lion, goat, and serpent. 2. An imaginary monster
made up of grotesquely disparate parts.
(7)
- Paul, Saint (A.D. 5?-67?) - Apostle
to the Gentiles whose life and teachings are set forth in his epistles
and the Acts of the Apostles.
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