Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (26 page)

In March 1966, there was a ‘saucer flap’ in America: sightings were reported from all over the country.
And the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, blandly assured the American public that UFOs were illusions.
Then, on 25 March, Allen Hynek told the assembled reporters in the Detroit Press Club that the hundred or more witnesses who had seen UFOs in Michigan had been misled by marsh gas.
All over America, a roar of outrage and derision went up.

Since Keel had himself seen a UFO, he regarded all this discussion of whether they existed as a waste of time.
Finally, he was irritated into a full-scale investigation.
After the television jobs, his bank account showed a healthy credit, and he now asked press-cutting agencies to send him every cutting they could find on UFO sightings.

The sheer quantity staggered him.
On 30 March, the day that McNamara announced that he did not believe in UFOs, hundreds of newspapers from coast to coast carried reports of close-up sightings of spinning discs whose radiation seemed capable of stopping car engines.
Keel rang the newspapers and was assured that, far from exaggerating the stories to manufacture news, they had selected only the more interesting ones.
He checked with witnesses, ringing them long distance, and learnt that, in fact, the newspapers had deliberately suppressed what they felt to be incredible.
People described being chased in their cars by UFOs, which had sometimes landed on the road and later reappeared over their homes.
They often reported that their eyes were red and swollen for days after a sighting, and a few males confessed to pains in the genitals.
Others had felt nauseating waves of heat.
Being a natural sceptic, Keel was at first inclined to dismiss much of this as hysteria.
But soon he was converted by the sheer quantity of the reports.

With the same obsessive thoroughness and curiosity he had displayed in his search for Oriental magic, he took to the road and spoke to thousands of people all over the country.
A few were obvious publicity seekers and hoaxers, but he found these easy to spot.
Most people were obviously ordinary and honest, and many were reluctant to discuss their experiences until he had won their confidence.

Keel collected ten thousand clippings in 1966, and a further two thousand in the month of March 1967 alone.
He set out to analyse this vast mass of data, and soon discovered one peculiar fact: that more than a fifth of the sightings took place on Wednesdays between 8 and 11 p.m.
Moreover, the ‘flaps’ were often in specific states: for example, he found hundreds of sightings in Arkansas on 16 August 1966, in two belts running north to south, but none at all in surrounding states.
He concluded that Martians—or meteors—would not group themselves so neatly.
The data suggested that the UFO denizens know about human calendars and geographical boundaries.

In other words, Keel was approaching the same conclusion that Jacques Vallee arrived at in
The Invisible College—
that the purpose of UFO activity is, to some extent, the effect it has on human beings.
They have every intention of being seen.
And when UFOs began to follow him around—like the one that accompanied him along the Long Island Expressway on 4 October 1967—he realised that they could somehow focus in on his own mind.

He had another reason for believing that UFOs possessed intelligence.
At the Washington Fortfest of 1995, Keel described how he had noticed that most of the press cuttings were not about flying saucers, but about lights—often green and purple blobs.
(According to Keel, similar light balls were beings seen at about this time—1964–68—all over the world.) He learnt that they descended on cargo boats navigating the Ohio River at night, and that the boatmen soon realised that the balls of light did not like their searchlights, and would quickly move out of the way when the lights were directed at them.
Keel himself sat on a hilltop near the Gallipolis Ferry in West Virginia, in early 1967, fascinated by the lights, which he describes as small clouds of glowing gas, purple in colour.
There were twenty or more, and at first he thought they were some kind of natural phenomenon.
But, when he directed his powerful torch at them, they skittered out of the way of the beam.
That argued that they could be alive.
So he tried flashing at them in Morse code, telling them to go left or right, or up or down; they followed his instructions precisely.
Then he decided to invent his own code—a circle for left, a triangle for right, and so on.
And, once again, the lights followed his instructions.
That could mean only one thing: the code was superfluous—they were reading his mind.

After three years of investigation of UFOs, Keel set down his conclusions in
Operation Trojan Horse
(1970).
By this time, he had gone back to all the source material, including the Bible and the ancient historians.
He unearthed many interesting stories from the past, including one from Alençon, France, dating back to June 1790, described in a report by a Paris police inspector named Liabeuf.
The witnesses, who included two mayors and a doctor, all told of an enormous globe that had crashed into a hilltop and started grass fires; then a door in its side opened, and a man came out, dressed in ‘clothes adhering completely to his body’ (i.e., a skin-tight suit), who, seeing the reception committee, ran away into the woods.
A few moments later, the globe exploded like a bubble, leaving only fine powder.

Keel was also intrigued by the strange series of ‘airship’ sightings of 1896–97, when there were fairly certainly no airships in the United States.
These began when a witness in Sacramento, California, heard a cry of ‘Throw her up higher—she’ll hit the steeple’, and saw a huge, cigar-shaped object, with a lighted glass cabin underneath, sailing slightly above the level of the rooftops.
Five nights later, on 22 November, it came back again, this time floating so high above Sacramento that it simply looked like a bright light, with something looming above it.
One man who looked at it through a telescope reported that it seemed to rise and fall as it moved, like a ship on the high seas—or, as Kenneth Arnold might have put it, like a saucer skipped over water.

More reports came from San Francisco—of some high-flying object with a bright light.
The mayor of San Francisco concluded that ‘some shrewd inventor has solved the problem of aerial navigation .
.
.’.
By February 1897, reports came from Nebraska, then Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Arkansas, before the phenomenon moved south to Texas.
By April, dozens of stories started to come in from all over Texas, and were reported in the newspapers.
Colonel W.
A.
Robertson of Mississippi saw it from a train approaching Dallas and reported that it was travelling faster than the train.

Many reports came from people who claimed to have seen the airship on the ground.
In April, Judge Lawrence A.
Byrne told a Texarkana newspaper that he had walked through a thicket, and found ‘the airship I have read so much about’.
It was manned by three men of vaguely Oriental appearance (the judge thought they might be Japanese) talking in a foreign language.
They obligingly showed the judge all over the ship.

A farmer named Alexander Hamilton, in Kansas, described in April how the airship stole one of his calves.
It was about three hundred feet long and had a brightly lit glass cabin underneath.
There were six occupants, who talked in a foreign language.
Then it rose off the ground, and seems to have lassoed a calf, which then became caught in a fence.
Farmer Hamilton found it was held by a cable.
He cut the wire of the fence to free the calf, and watched the animal sail away.
Later, its hide, legs and head—complete with Farmer Hamilton’s brand mark—were found on a farm four miles away.

The last people to report the airship were a couple called Captain and Mrs.
Scobie, of Fort Worth.
On 12 May 1897, after dark, Mrs.
Scobie called her husband to come and see something strange.
They both watched the large, dark object moving through the sky over Fort Worth, with a brilliant light underneath.
(Various witnesses had claimed the airship had an ‘electric searchlight’.) Then the airship vanished from history.
There had been 109 recorded sightings in Texas alone.

There were further ‘airship flaps’ in America in 1909 and South Africa in 1914.
And in Scandinavia, from 1932 to 1937, there was a wave of sightings of enormous aeroplanes, bigger than any commercial planes then in use—one was reported as having eight engines, twice the number on the largest plane of the time.
What was so odd was that these craft appeared—over Norway, Sweden and Finland—in appalling weather conditions that kept all normal aircraft on the ground.
Moreover, they would do something that would be regarded by most pilots as suicidal: cut their engines, then circle at increasingly low altitudes, often ‘gliding’ in this manner three or four times.
They frequently flew low, and a powerful searchlight raked the countryside.

The air forces of the countries concerned were baffled by the planes.
The only explanation seemed to be that a mad millionaire, like some villain out of a James Bond novel, had a secret base somewhere, with elaborate maintenance equipment and an army of skilled mechanics.
But why, in that case, was he also deploying red, green and white lights, which were often seen far above the phantom aeroplane?

On the mad-millionaire hypothesis—or perhaps of some unknown foreign power—the military and air forces of Norway and Sweden mounted an extensive search, losing two planes in the course of searching wild and distant places.
On 11 February 1937, there was a close-up sighting: a fishing boat called the
Fram
left the port of Kvalsik, Norway, for some night fishing, and, as it rounded a cape sticking out into the sea, the sailors saw the lights of a large seaplane on the water.
Assuming it might be in trouble, the
Fram
approached it.
As it did so, its lights went out, and it was enveloped by a cloud of mist.
Then it vanished.

This was, of course, the period between the wars, when nations like Germany were arming, so the phantom aircraft were assumed to be some form of spy plane—particularly since they were often sighted around military installations.
But there were no aircraft at that time capable of such manoeuvres, and, when World War Two came, it was soon clear that Germany simply did not have such planes.

Yet, just as in the great airship wave of 1897, there was a convenient explanation to satisfy the popular mind.
Only experts knew that large aircraft do not choose to fly in snowstorms or to cut out their engines and ‘glide’ in circles close to the ground.
It was as if the phenomenon wanted to remain ambiguous.

In 1946, objects like rockets were sighted over Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Greece—Sweden alone had more than two thousand sightings.
Rockets were seen to plunge into Lake Mjosa in Norway and Lake Kolmjary in Sweden, where something exploded.
Yet a military investigation revealed nothing whatsoever.
The Swedish military issued a statement declaring that 80 percent of the sightings were ‘celestial phenomena’ (i.e., meteors), although it did not explain how meteors can be mistaken for rockets.
In Greece, an investigation headed by Prof.
Paul Santorini concluded that the objects were not missiles.
To begin with, they occasionally changed direction in mid-flight.

But Keel also has his doubts about meteors.
He spends most of a chapter in
Operation Trojan Horse
talking about sightings that were explained as meteors, and pointing out that they could not possibly be meteors—for example, one of November 1779 ‘which appeared like a ball of fire’ and ‘was visible for near an hour’.
No meteors remain visible for an hour—the slowest speed ever recorded for a meteor is twenty-seven thousand miles an hour, which would take it right round Earth’s equator in less than an hour.

Keel details such anomalies for several chapters before returning to modern times, and demonstrating that all these sightings fit the same pattern of what he calls ‘flexible phantoms of the skies’.

After studying thousands of reports of sightings, Keel concluded that they tended to occur repeatedly in certain areas; he labelled these ‘window areas’.
He calculated that every state in the US has from two to ten window areas, where UFOs appear repeatedly for year after year.
A huge number lie along the arc of a circle drawn from northwest Canada, down through the central states of America, and back to northwest Canada.
Another is centred in the Gulf of Mexico and covers much of Mexico, Texas and the Southwest.
And a majority of these are over areas of magnetic deviation—that is, areas in which the Earth’s normal magnetism is distorted.
The famous disappearance of five planes on 5 December 1945—one of the great mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle—took place off the coast of Florida in one of Keel’s window areas.
(The flight leader reported over the radio that ‘his instruments were going crazy’.)