Keel, best known for The Mothman Prophecies, said that within 200 miles of your home, someone will have seen a hairy monster. Several others will experience ghosts, while others will have a UFO sighting. Even now, this minute, somewhere near you, someone is blinking their eyes in disbelief as they watch a fairy flit past their window, while another person has a precognitive dream.

That’s what we mean by “Six Degrees of John Keel.” You or someone you know has experienced something outside of the parameters of ordinary reality, much like the old “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” meme—only weirder. There’s a percentage of the population with ESP, precognition, the ability to see further into the light spectrum, and those don’t all overlap. Almost every person in the world has seen something once in their life.

Keel had his hands on the big picture. He knew high strangeness was the norm on earth: he knew that you couldn’t separate out the UFO’s from ghosts from poltergeist activity from precognition from demons from Bigfoot from Mothman from remote viewing from telepathy from cattle mutilations. They were all part of a strange spectrum of phenomena that have been experienced by humans on earth since before we could write it all down.

One of the greatest contributions he made to the study of paranormal phenomena was he said we needed to not just look at what witnesses saw and experienced—we had to look at the witnesses themselves. He knew millions of people saw things, and he came to the conclusion that some humans had the ability to see and interact and manipulate these entities and energies. While the people who are skilled in seeing beyond the generally accepted visual spectrum of light and manipulating energies are rare, there are many more who experience one or two unexplained things in their lives. These experiences are not out of the ordinary.

They are perfectly ordinary.

The man was a prophet.