When Weirdness Calls….
“The FBI and the CIA hate each other, and they both hate the telephone company. The telephone company, in turn, seems to hate everybody.”
Last night, Morganna, Kendra and I were interviewed for the High Strangeness Factor with Steve Ward and Andy Mercer, talking about John Keel, pancakes and experiences of weirdness.
Steve had asked why the three of us decided to name our podcast after John Keel and we all had our answers, but what it really winds up being about is Keel was one of the first researchers to seriously look into the lives of experiencers, and he was the first to really understand that few people just see one UFO and that’s it.
There’s a whole raft of other weirdness that comes along with that UFO besides, and not just during and after the sighting.
Often, long before the UFO was even a glint in the experiencer’s eye—years before in many cases—they had encounters with any numbers of oddities: bedroom apparitions, hauntings, orbs of light, precognitive dreams and the like.
This is the sort of reality a lot of us experiencers live in.
A malleable world where strange things happen, just as an every day sort of thing. And these little things that happen, these oddities are likely the most common weird happenings that occur throughout the world. I’d bet that everyone has had one or two happen to them, and they’re so small, they just forget that they even happened.
One of the subjects we got to in the interview was the 2002 film, “The Mothman Prophesies.” Steve asked us what our favorite part of the film was and I answered that my favorite scene was the one where Indrid Cold calls John Klein at his hotel and tells him what’s on his bedside table. It sounds distinctly ordinary, but it’s scary and to me, that captures the essence of fear, paranoia and strangeness that is at the heart of the book upon which the movie is based.
And it brought up an oddity that I thought only applied to me, but later found out seems to be common among readers of the works of John Keel.
The phantom phone calls.
Keel once said “Everyone hates the phone company.”
Of course this was back when there was ONE monolithic phone company, back in the distant Stone Age of analog telephone lines, party lines, switchboard operators and physical wiretaps. (Yeah, I’m old enough to remember that shit.)
In chapter 17 of The Mothman Prophesies, entitled, “Even the Bedouins Hate Their Phone Company,” he talks about the weird phone harassment he was subject to while investigating the high strangeness that was swirling around Point Pleasant in 1966-67. He got all sorts of phone calls—his phone in New York would ring twice and then stop, or he’d answer the phone and no one would be there. He’d get phone calls with electronic beeps or whistles and clicks, odd voices speaking in foreign languages—the details of the types of phone harassment he and others endured at the time are detailed here.
The phone calls followed him wherever he travelled—he’d check into a hotel that he hadn’t planned on staying in and find messages left for him at the front desk. Or he’d check in and before he opened his suitcase, the phone would ring.
Mind you, some of these calls were likely practical jokes.
Fellow UFO investigator and editor of Saucer Smear, Jim Moseley, and Gray Barker, author of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, loved to prank Keel and they’d team up and try and pull one over on their friend fairly often. Keel eventually figured out their tricks, but still found that left plenty of anomalous telephone calls unaccounted for.
What does this have to do with me?
I found, from the age of about 14, that whenever I read John Keel’s books, our family telephone would start acting strangely.
We’d get calls with no one on the line. Over and over, to the point where my mother would slam the receiver down with enough force to make the cats jump and run away. Or, it would just ring twice or three times and then stop. Ten minutes later, it would do it again.
Or, Mom would answer the phone and it would be clicks and beeps. Or, she’d pick up the phone and there’s be no dial tone. She’d call the phone company and they’d come out and there’d be nothing wrong with the phone or the line.
If I stopped reading the book, the calls would stop. I’d wait a week, start reading again, and then it would start.
If Dad picked up the book and started reading, it’d start again.
Then, I’d lend the books out to my friend, Diane.
And she’d get the calls.
Decades later, it still happened. It happened to my friends who I lent books to. It happened when I’d reread Keel’s work. Not as much—I’d get one dead air call and maybe a couple of calls with two rings and silence in a row.
When Morganna read the books, it happened.
It has slowed down in the years of Caller ID and cell phones. It still happens, just not as often.
The funniest and most recent incident of the “John Keel Weirdness Calls” as I think of them, was the case of a Facebook friend who asked me what Keel book I liked best, because she’d only read The Mothman Prophesies. I told her to pick up The Eighth Tower because it’s the most mature iteration of his theories on Ultraterrestrials, and it lays out his ideas in a very concise and readable fashion.
She picked it up, started reading and came back to FB a week later with the question to our private group of High Strangeness Peeps, as I call them: “So, does anyone else get strange phone calls when you read John Keel?”
Bunches of folks in our merry band related stories of the times they got phone calls from no one when they read Keel. People I didn’t even know about. Story after story came out and I had to laugh.
I reckon that wherever John is right now he’s laughing too.
And he probably still hates the phone company.
