Keel and Mothman
by John Keel
I was pushed into the flying-saucer fracas in 1966 by a Playboy editor who wanted a “definitive” article on the subject. The first logical step was to seek
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out experts. I quickly discovered there weren’t any. There were people who called themselves experts, all wallowing in egocentric delusions of self-importance, all feuding with their fellow experts. Paranoia was rampant in the field and every teenager and little old lady in tennis shoes involved in UFO hunting was convinced the government, and particularly the Air Force and CIA, was spending millions to mess up their personal mail and telephones. There was a big overlap, too, of wild-eyed right-wingers, and many of the more bizarre beliefs of the John Birch Society and even the KKK were absorbed into the UFO lore.
A few UFO books, mostly in the crackpot category, had been published in the 1950s, but copies of them were now almost impossible to locate. (The average UFO book sells about 3,000 copies, even today—a pathetically small number when you consider how much publicity UFOs have received.) Ivan Sanderson, zoologist, author and well-known TV personality, had a library of some of the better books. He lived on a farm in the wilds of northern New Jersey. A charismatic Briton usually surrounded by hordes of visitors, Ivan had single-handedly introduced the subject of the Abominable Snowman and Bigfoot to the American public. We met originally because I had once tracked the elusive Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas and Ivan was preparing to write a massive book on those hairy horrors. He was also a longtime observer of the UFO scene and at the beginning of my quest he gave me the best advice I would receive. “Don’t take this flying saucer business too seriously,” he warned me. “Just think of the whole thing as an intellectual exercise.” Read the rest of this entry »
