Building a Mystery: John Keel and the Modern Paranormal Phenomena

Detail of “Belief is the Enemy” mixed media collage by Barbara Fisher

About thirteen years ago when I was re-reading John Keel,’s books, Mac Tonnies ‘ blog “Posthuman Blues,” and Greg Bishop and Nick Redfern’s posts on the UFOMystic site—as well as The Fortean Times, and a smattering of other blogs and UFO webzines and suchlike things, I realized something.

I wasn’t the only one of my generation of writers, thinkers and researchers whose paranormal worldview was shaped by the writings of Keel. Lots of us were. And as I wandered about the message boards, comment sections and online communities, I found that there were a significant number of very flexible, interesting thinkers out and about whose ideas and theories clearly had been strongly influenced by the Keelian concept of the superspectrum, ultraterrestrials, and the interrelated nature of all paranormal phenomena.

There were lots of us.

Used to be, Keel was the maverick, the one that folks poo-pooed with copious eye-rolls when his works were mentioned in UFO circles.

I was thrilled to see a difference—that among those my age, a bit older and then the younger generations—there was a respect for Keel’s ideas that had been totally lacking the last time I had made a serious foray out into shadowy world of paranormal research. (I never stopped reading, thinking, writing and theorizing—I just did it quietly, privately and on my own. )

And it got me to thinking.

You know how John talked about his experiments with the phenomena that he wrote about in The Mothman Prophesies? How he said belief was the enemy, because he realized in 1966-67 that whenever he came up with an idea about the phenomenon, or a theory, as to what was going on, the phenomena would shape itself to conform to that theory—or—would go out of its way to deny that theory? And how he also noticed that he didn’t have to either write down that theory or tell another person about it, but just -think- of it? And it would go out of its way to conform to that very idea?

Now, there is something to be said here for confirmation bias being at play here—that because Keel was thinking something, he saw evidence to back it up, but this kept happening, over and over, enough times that it really got his attention.

If confirmation bias wasn’t in play here, this could mean one of two things.

Either the intelligence that is responsible for UFO’s is telepathic and can just reach into any human’s mind and read what’s in there, or Greg Bishop’s co-creation theory is correct, and the witnessed phenomena is a chimera created at the axis of the meeting of a human consciousness and an intelligent non-human consciousness, more or less in partnership.

(This partnership can be formed with a fully willing human, or, it could be that the human’s unconscious mind is in partnership with the non-human intelligence without the everyday conscious mind being aware of it.)

There’s a video on YouTube of Keel which I bought on DVD around the same time as I was doing all of this reading. (That DVD of Keel’s lectures has since disappeared into the same black hole that seems to eat physical evidence of Bigfoot and UFO photographs. I probably lent it out and never got it back, but still, I can’t help but snicker.)

He’s giving a lecture at a FortFest in the 1990’s where he describes watching from a hilltop on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River, as boatmen flashed their bright lights up into the sky at the strange lights that were skittering about. He describes how the lights would dash away from the beams of the boat’s lights. Then, Keel tells how he used his own powerful flashlight to signal the aerial lights, in Morse code, telling them to flash, or descend or ascend, and they would do as requested.

Which gave him pause.

They either knew Morse code, or were reading his mind.

In order to see which possibility was correct, he made up his own code on the spot, and signaled them—and the lights reacted appropriately.

To my thinking, it’s clear that, the intelligence represented by the lights was in telepathic contact with him.

Keel wrote in various of his books about furthering his experimentation with the phenomena’s malleability. He wrote in The Mothman Prophesies that he would come up with an idea, and once again, not tell anyone and would give bits of it out to some of his contactee associates who claimed to be in communication with the UFO occupants, and then would later find it coming back to him from different contactees who were not known to the first set of contactees.

Or, he would get a story about a Man in Black experience from one UFO witness—who had not told anyone other than Keel about their sighting—and Keel would write down the story in his notes and not share it with any other researcher. Later, he’d end up hearing a story very similar from a different witness from a different part of the country, often with the same odd details.

What exactly am I getting at here?

Serious readers of Keel can see that he shaped his own interactions with what many of us now call The Other.

And many of his readers’ ideas have been intensely shaped by Keel’s theories and ideas.

What if he shaped the larger Phenomenon by shaping -our- ideas about how the Other acts and reacts to humanity?

What if, by recognizing fairly early on the links between UFOs, ghosts, poltergeists, monsters, apparitions, psychic phenomena and other paranormal activity, Keel made it more likely that the weirdness would not only continue, but grow in prevalence because more humans expect it to be there?

It’s kind of meta, I know—the idea that Keel has, by virtue of shaping younger minds, shaped the malleable non-human intelligence with which we interact.

However it doesn’t seem that far fetched, if we think on it for a minute.

If we accept the Keelian notion that we interact with protean a non-human-intelligence/the Other/ultraterrestrials/cryptoterrestrials/daimon or whatever you want to call it/them, and have done so throughout history, to go one step further and think that Keel may yet be shaping said intelligence from beyond the grave through the power of his words alone really isn’t that ridiculous.

This is just a blog post, not an article or paper or book, so it’s very much a “what if” kind of train of ideas. I’ll be developing it further in the coming months, with quotes and citations and all that proper official documentation, but I wanted to release my thoughts out into the wild now, in time for Keel’s birthday.

I turned out to be a day late and a dollar short of the goal, as my Dad would say, but that’s ok. It’s here for others to think and wonder about.