John Keel

***"The unknown is out there. The universe does not exist as we think it exists and we don't exist as we think we exist."*** ***- John Keel, Search For The Mothman 2002***

* Keel67.PNGJohn Keel 1967
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## **John A. Keel**

**John Alva Keel**, born **Alva John Kiehle** (March 25th 1930 – July 3rd 2009 / Aged 79) was an influential American journalist and Fortean researcher who is best known as author of The Mothman Prophecies.

### **Further reading :**

* **Brief John Keel Biography on JohnKeel.com (Highly recommended!)**
* John Keel: Man, Myth and Ongoing Mysteries (2019) by Brent Raynes

### **Point Pleasant WV:**

After hearing about the Scarberry and Mallette Mothman Sighting, Keel made several visits from his home in New York to Point Pleasant, West Virginia to investigate reported monster and UFO sightings. (Visited on: *Wednesday, Dec 7th 1966 - Dec 8th 1966, Late March 1967 - April 6th 1967, November 1967 and more.)*

Reports of paranormal activity was overtaking the small town of Point Pleasant throughout 1966-1967 resulting in Keel adopting that area as his own research microcosm. Upon arriving in Pt Pleasant, Keel soon found strange coincidences and phenomena would follow him wherever he traveled. He would find the same thing to be happening with many of the eyewitnesses of the creature that was later dubbed "The Mothman". The result was one of his most popular books, *The Mothman Prophecies (1975).*

The book combined Keel's account of receiving strange phone calls with reports of mutilated pets and culminates with the December 15th 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge in West Virginia across the Ohio River. Keel's Follow-up book, *The Eighth Tower (1975)* was comprised of reworked material that was left out of *Mothman Prophecies* and delves further into Keel's ideas and possible explanations.

### **Perspectives:**

John Keel is often credited for popularized the term Men In Black and introduced the acronym MIB. He had many interesting ideas attempting to explain the nature of the odd things that people often report to see. He viewed these things as aspects of a larger connected phenomenon.

#### **Windows and The Superspectrum**

John Keel strongly disagreed with the "Extraterrestrial hypothesis" for Unidentified Flying Objects. In other words, he did not think that UFOs were from other planets and he was completely against this notion. He instead posited his own hypothetical explanations for where they might come from. He thought of UFOs as manifestations from an extradimensional force or state of energy beyond our current understanding. Many of his views on UFOs are printed in his book *Operation Trojan Horse (1970),* with ideas on monsters in *Strange Creatures From Time And Space (1970)* and spiritual perspectives in *Our Haunted Planet (1971).*

Keel analyzed what he called "window areas" or "zones of fear" which he viewed as areas of high strangeness in which strange otherworldly entities and creatures could enter our world. He favored this explanation for Mothman. He described them as "trickster beings" or "cosmic pranksters” here to "play simple minded games with simple minded humans."

He's quoted as saying: "From time to time the playful inhabitants of the other world climb through the curtain in the areas we call 'windows', and they stalk us to drink our blood and create all kinds of mischievous beliefs and misconceptions in our feeble little terrestrial minds."

And: "This planet is haunted by us; the other occupants just evade boredom by filling our skies and seas with monsters."

In *The Eight Tower (1975)* he wrote: "This is a hypothetical spectrum of energies that are known to exist but that cannot be accurately measured with present-day instruments."

Keel continues : “*This superspectrum is the **source of all paranormal manifestations** ... it is **extradimensional**, meaning that it exists outside our own space-time continuum yet influences every thing within our reality.*” John Keel considered what others thought of as different phenomenon to all be one in the same or at least connected.

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**Keelian**

*1. Adjective*
Related to the favored concepts and or methods of author John Keel

*2. Noun*
A person that is a proponent of the work and or ideas of author John Keel

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### **Books:**

* Jadoo (1957)
* The Fickle Finger of Fate (1966)
* Strange Creatures From Time And Space (1970)
* Operation Trojan Horse (1970)
* Our Haunted Planet (1971)
* The Mothman Prophecies (1975)
* The Eighth Tower (1975)
* Disneyland of the Gods (1988)
* Anomaly - The Irregular Newsletter by John Keel (Newsletters, 1969-1974)
* The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings (1994) (revised version of Strange Creatures)
* The Best of John Keel (2006) (Collection of Keel's FATE Magazine articles)

### **Posthumous Collections:**

* Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind (2013, edited by Andrew Colvin)

* The Outer Limits of the Twilight Zone ( 2013, Colvin)
* Searching For the String (2014, Colvin)
* The Great Phonograph in the Sky (2015, Colvin)

* The Book of Mothman: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Reality Distortion But Were Afraid to Ask (2015, Colvin)

* The Passionate Percipient: Illusions I Have Known and Loved (2015, Colvin)

* The Perspicacious Percipient: How to Investigate UFOs and Other Insane Urges (2015, Colvin)
* The Invisible Diet: Top-Secret Techniques For Turning Your Miserable Life Completely Around (2015, Colvin)
* Pursuing the Addenda: Supernatural Reports From the Natural World (2016, Colvin)
* The Big Breakthrough (2017, Colvin)

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**Source(s):**
http://www.johnkeel.com/?page\_id=3 - Bibliography
http://www.johnkeel.com/?page\_id=21 - Brief Biography
http://cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/keel-obit/ - Obit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John\_Keel - Wiki

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