by Gene Stewart
If you've seen the movie, you've seen the truth. So says John Keel in the afterword appended to this 1975 book. He says they managed to condense from his discursive, genial book the unsettling core of experience you get when you encounter the unknown and unknowable. And the movie leaves you baffled, unsettled, and questioning what is real.
The movie isn't the book, however, and Richard Gere isn't John Keel. Keel's book is more complex, as is the man.
His focus is ontology. That means the nature of reality and existence. Look past what happens toward why. Seek meaning. Don't let the pranksters fool you, whether they're from this world or not. He admits in the book to having been duped many times, often harmlessly, at other times with devastating effect.
The prophecies of the title fall into the latter category.
You should know this book is fun to read. It's written in a conversational style and reminds you of a visit from a favorite uncle who's traveled all over and knows great stories. Keel also writes with a novelist's flair for scenes, and in crisp style that gets to the point without spoiling the effect with too much bluntness. Nor does he belabor. He says what he means and moves on, making him the opposite of the strange beings he encounters.
His chapters are arranged around minor themes, but these overlap and are not meant to be hard-and-fast. Nothing in the book is pinned down. Ambiguity and, as Keel admits, Socratic irony hallmark his work.
It's not the ambiguity of the slick salesman, though. No paranormal merchandise is being peddled here. Keel simply keeps doubt close. He befriends uncertainty. He knows that almost nothing is what it seems, especially when the UFOs are flying and the MIB are prowling. All bets are off when the voice on the unplugged phone isn't human and speaks in riddles.
This isn't to say Keel doesn't indulge in the occasional tap-dance. On page 37, 2, sentence 4, he says: "...The chills experienced by John Flaxton and his group were probably caused by microwaves above the infrared (which produces heat), just as the very cold atmosphere accompanying ghosts is a radiation effect."
Huh?
Such double-talk is rare, however.
He makes many astute observations, such as that found on page 116, 3, S2: "...An interesting side effect of the flying saucer phenomenon is that many of the people attracted to the subject, people with very materialistic and pseudo-scientific outlooks, gradually drift into the study of psychic phenomena, abandoning the extraterrestrial theory along the way. In retrospect, flying saucers were partly responsible for the occult explosion."
He laments this regression toward superstition and credulity in his elegant afterward, dated August 2001.
In fact, Keel has become known over the years for his views that the ETH, or ExtraTerrestrial Hypothesis, simply obscures and disguises the real nature of many, if not most, fringe topics, which Keel views as metaphysical. Essentially the visions of a religious fanatic are no different from those of a UFO contactee, and seeing a ghost is the same as seeing a Sasquatch, as both occur in a trance state we don't fully understand.
He also believes this trance to be delivered by beings living with us on Earth, in different frequencies of the space-time continuum. He means the interdimensional multiverse many scientists use to explain reality is real, and inhabited, and with us always. We haunt them, perhaps, more than they haunt us.
His observations about how contactees, or experiencers as they prefer to be called these days, are reprogrammed in one of two ways are sadly accurate. A rare few come away from contact with the unknown better off. They become smarter, more confident, and more able to accomplish their goals. Many become famous; he cites several statesmen and prominent figures in history who admitted to having seen the light, talked with an angel, with a god, or visited the many-colored land, etc.
These received genuine enlightenment.
Most, however, come away worse off. They get false enlightenment, which actually darkens them. Their personalities decay. They become obsessed, and compulsive, and conspiratorial. Their friendships and marriages break up. They hang with cultists. Paranoia and schizophrenia lead often to squalor or even suicide.
It's not pretty, and I've known a few who have followed this pattern, so there is a personal note of authenticity here.
The lesson to be gleaned parallels the Zen Buddhist advice that, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. What they mean is, those claiming enlightenment haven't got it, and those with it move unnoticed and with grace among us.
Keel's animosity toward the forces, or beings, that caused so much chaos in his life during 1967-68, especially in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, shows through a few times. He feels betrayed when he can't warn people of impending disaster and resents the head-games the unknown plays.
Remember mischievous faeries, elves, and leprechauns? Remember angels confusing and demons capering as penitents knelt in self-abasement? Remember Coyote the Trickster, tricky deals with this or that devil, and getting burned by Tricky Dick?
Keel discusses how telephones were disrupted, ringing at all hours for no reason; delivering buzzes and beeping and mechanical hollow voices; channeling false messages from voices that sounded exactly like friends; cutting off mid-conversation; bleeding static to drown out the talk when certain things were mentioned; and so on. He even confirmed that his line was tapped, but never found out by whom, or why.
Telephones were the least of it, in many ways.
There were the lights, floating and bobbing, zooming and winking out all over the country that year. Most of Keel's observations in this book focus on Point Pleasant, where people in lonely farmhouses were bathed in eerie light, heard footsteps on the roof when no one was there, and witnessed glowing vehicles land and occupants get out.
Men in white jumpsuits were seen messing with downed cattle, which proved mutilated in the classic sense when the farmers chased them off. "And boy could they jump and run," it was reported. Remember Springheel Jack? And notice, too, that these cattle mutilators were seen, and even threatened with shotguns. Apparently today's crop of cattle mutilators have learned to stay invisible.
There were several reports of strange people walking up and puffing a powder or gas into surprised faces. In some instances, a loss of will resulted. Remember ketamine? Remember the date rape drug rohypnol? Poof, you lose time and will and wake up probed and sore.
On page 214 Keel relates how once, as he spoke to a subject he'd hypnotized, suddenly another control came through and spoke through her. Keel could only listen, and then the woman came out of the hypnosis spontaneously. His control had been usurped by an unseen presence, a distant mind of some sort, claiming to be a flying saucer occupant.
This parallels Aleister Crowley's experiences with Aiwass, incidentally, the being who came during meditations.
Did you know contactees all over the world report the same names and messages, time and again? If there's no contact among them, how does this happen? Does it point to Theosophy's Akashic Records, that cosmic tape recorder in the Otherness we can all tap into? Is it Carl Jung's Collective Unconscious reaching out to us? Is is meaningful to ask these questions?
Back to Point Pleasant's other problems.
Running around day and night were the Men In Black, MIB. They stopped by at odd hours, often delivered by a vintage black Cadillac in immaculate condition. License numbers proved bogus -- as Keel points out, with all the plates issued, it's actually difficult not to at least come up with a partial when inventing one, yet these had no official existence.
MIB would interview people, often asking about children, their ages, the number of kids in a household, and so on. They seemed to have trouble breathing, grew redder of face by the moment, and sometimes popped pills, once washing them down with a handful of salt. They moved robotically and spoke in stilted, speeded-up voices. Keel notes it was as if they had consciously to slow down in order to make themselves understood to us.
MIB warned people not to talk about UFOs they'd witnessed, but they also asked bizarre questions, or asked for small items such as pens, which they'd run off with as if delighted. They made strange mistakes, such as trying to drink Jell-O, or having no clue how to use a knife and fork.
And if this weren't enough, the dire predictions of disaster, the prophecies of the book's title, mostly came true. Keel was impressed as time and again an event, usually a bad thing, would be mentioned well ahead of time. Specific dates and times and locations were given, and proved accurate.
This led Keel to be convinced when he was warned of a national blackout to occur on 15 December during President Johnson's National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony.
Keel didn't need candles for light, though. When the ceremony was begun, a news bulletin cut in. The silver bridge at Point Pleasant had collapsed. Many died.
Again Keel felt betrayed. He'd been suckered by the Trickster, led to believe in one thing when in fact something both smaller and much worse was coming.
He ends his book with a haunting rhetorical question from Charles Fort. "If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?"
His afterword makes clear that he thinks most of us are crazy most of the time. Sanity lost, he says. What's happened to us since 1967, in his view, has only worsened things all around, and perhaps he can be forgiven an old man's bitterness, given our inarguable state of superstition and credulity today.
Keel writes in the afterword: "...UFOmania is no different from demonomania. Many forms of religious and political fanaticism are linked directly to these other manias and to paranoia and schizophrenia. We are meant to be crazy. It's an important part of the human condition. Otherwise there would be no wars, no Hitlers or Napoleons, no [contactees] and their unfortunate psychiatrists. This planet is haunted by us; the other occupants just evade boredom by filling out skies with lights and our seas with monsters..."
Consider the new state religion, C3, a fundamentalist approach to Conservatism, Christianity, and Consumerism, as begun with Newt's Go-Pac and refined by a Rush to judgment until the Bush League gained control of the duped voting blocs of true believers.
Yep, Keel's tormentors are still at it, all right.
From UFOs and ghosts to Spiritualism and fundamentalism, a progression or regression is seen. From the relatively innocent 1960s to the decadent world of bread-and-circuses we inhabit now seems a long, strange trip, but really it's the blink of a prankster's eye.
An eye in the sky?
Or is it a mind's eye we all share?
--end/ERS