Why John Keel?
“...someone within two hundred miles of your home, no matter where you live on this planet, has had a direct personal confrontation with an Unbelievable... Next week, next month, or next year you may be driving along a deserted country road late at night and as you round a bend you will suddenly see...”
John Keel was a legendary author and investigator of all things weird and wonderful. Growing up, I read all of his books, starting in 1975 with his publication of The Mothman Prophesies, which delved deeply into his experiences chasing after UFOs and the flying horror with the deceptively cute name all over Point Pleasant West Virginia. This monster hunt happened before, during and just after the Silver Bridge Disaster, wherein 46 people lost their lives.
I started with that book, rather than his earlier ones, because it featured my home state, West Virginia, and my Dad brought it home from the library as soon as it came out. I remembered the collapse of the Silver Bridge appearing in the news on our little black and white television, and in somber reports on the radio.
But more than that, I remember the stories my family told all through my childhood. Of UFO’s seen by friends and family members and balls of light rolling around on the living room floor. A strange light seen from the deck of a US Navy destroyer on her maiden voyage that kept up with the ship’s every course change and velocity change. The tragic and mysterious loss of a dog that resulted in the only thing being left of him was a circle of bloody paw prints. on the kitchen floor of a locked house. A ghost seen in a mirror, and the song of angels heard wafting through a midnight sky filled with stars while hiking the wilderness of a state forest.
And then, there were the experiences I had that I seldom discussed with anyone. Strange lights in my bedroom at night. Shining figures that melted through the wall into and out of my room. A tiny creature made of fire. Lightning that tore out of the sky and nearly struck my mother and I, but unbelievably looped around and went back up to the clouds, striking no one and nothing. Voices in the night. Vivid recurring dreams of drowning—always in the same river. Flailing and going under the muddy, swift moving water, I thrashed as the silver bubbles of my breath burst from my lungs. As I sank deeper into the cold depths, I could see the sun shimmering gold above the water—a beautiful last sight.
And Mothman. We always talked about Mothman. No one we knew had seen him, but we had the newspaper clippings, and we all visited McClintic Wildlife Management Area. This was the environs of the former TNT manufacturing and containment facility where Mothman had often been seen in the years of 1966-67, before the bridge fell. One uncle described seeing claw marks inscribing the walls of one of the concrete igloos on a camping trip, and how his hair stood on end in the eerie silence there. Mothman was always on our minds, and our tongues.
So much so that one night on a camp out in my grandparent’s farm field, a cousin who had to answer the call of nature, let out a terrified yelp upon his flashlight illuminating a pair of glowing red eyes.
It turned out to be a cow, standing near the barbed wire fence, placidly chewing her cud. He luckily didn’t wet his shorts, because just yelling in terror about a cow was pretty hard to live down. The teasing would never have ended if he’d pissed himself.
John Keel’s books helped me make sense of this roiling morass of unearthly experiences from an early age.
It’s from him that I learned not to blindly trust what some creature said, whether it be a ghost conjured at a seance, a channeled entity or some supposed spaceman from Venus who stepped from a flying saucer. It was alright to listen to them, of course, and remember what was said, but to always check the veracity of their words through any means at hand. And never believe everything they said, because there’s always something up their metaphorical sleeve.
I learned to look beyond the idea of extraterrestrial explanations for UFO’s. I learned to question assumptions. I learned to listen to what people say and to write everything down, without rejecting any evidence, even when it didn’t fit with my preconceived notions. Especially when it didn’t conform to my expectations.
I learned that belief is the enemy.
And I learned one thing above all.
Weird shit happens, and reality is far stranger than we humans would ever like to know or let on.
It’s why I’m writing this blog and creating the podcast that will premier here October 1. Because I’m finally going to come out of the closet as an experiencer and let those folks out there who have seen and experienced strangeness that they’re not alone. That these things happen and they don’t just happen to you.
They happen to nearly everyone. And it’s ok.
John Keel taught me that. And that’s why we named this blog and podcast after him.
