The Evolution of an Enlightened Ufologist
By Dr. Raymond A. Keller, a.k.a. “Cosmic Ray,” author of the Venus Rising Trilogy
Note: Dr. Keller will be manning a Venus booth from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, 9 December at the Great Lakes Comic Expo, in the United Food and Commercial Workers Hall, 879 Horrace Brown Drive, Madison Heights, Michigan. This is located in the Greater Detroit area. Come and visit the “Cosmic Ray,” get your Venus book signed, and ask him anything you’ve always wanted to know about Venus, but were afraid to ask.
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John A. Keel (1930-2009), the author of Operation Trojan Horse (1970), Our Haunted Planet (1971), Mothman Prophecies (1975), and countless other books dealing with metaphysical and supernatural phenomena, set aside three years of his life, 1966-1969, to the exclusive investigation of the flying saucer enigma. The intrepid researcher came to some startling conclusions regarding these elusive objects, and prepared a detailed, audio-taped report from his residence at 334 West 85th Street, Apt. 1B, New York City, to be played to the leadership of the Congress of Scientific Ufologists assembled in a closed-door session at the Daniel Boone Hotel in downtown Charleston, West Virginia, on Sunday, 22 June 1969, the closing day of the convention. Fellow UFO investigator Gray Barker of Clarksburg, West Virginia, the prime organizer of the Charleston Congress, introduced Keel’s recorded discourse.
Keel’s gravelly voice came over the recording machine with a stern warning: “The following tape is not be reproduced in any fashion or resold, as some people seem to have a habit of making copies of tapes and trying to peddle them through the mail. This tape is intended for the closed session of the 1969 Congress of Scientific Ufologists at Charleston, West Virginia.”
The respected ufologist continued, “While individuals may copy it for their own use, I rather frown on anyone trying to sell it. This is John Keel in New York City this June 1969. I regret that I was unable to attend this year’s convention; but, my three-year safari into the never-never land of flying saucers will soon be ended.”
Paraphysical Realms Considered
John A. Keel’s interest in UFOs dated back to 1945, when he first read a newspaper account about the so-called “Foo Fighters” being reported in the European Theatre of Operations towards the end of World War II. But his full-time engagement with the phenomenon did not take place until February 1966, with a flap of sightings across the United States that eventually culminated in the rash of reports coming out of Michigan in the following month, the ones the Air Force quickly dismissed as resulting from “swamp gas.” In the three years since that time, up until the closed-door session of the Congress of Scientific Ufologists, Keel had personally, and thoroughly, investigated over 600 extraordinary UFO cases. These were not mere “lights in the sky,” however, for the ufologist declared, “Now, I am not talking about sightings. I have investigated thousands of those. I am talking about what I call cases of major events where a definite manifestation occurred.” So there was some connection to the supernatural in all of these events.
Keel readily admits that he began from the assumption that flying saucers were the product of an advanced technology from another planet. “But by the end of 1966,” he says, “I realized that the evidence I had collected pointed to another and far more complicated answer.” These findings are what he tried to present to his fellow scientific ufologists assembled.
From the UFO reports examined by Keel, he took note that the “objects,” if we can rightly call them thus, seemingly defied gravity and traveled faster than sound, but without producing sonic booms. Keel concluded that this was “not because they are superior mechanical devices, but because they are constituted of energies which are not affected by the natural laws which bind us to this planet.” In other words, the objects served merely as focal points. Keel concluded that the majority of UFOs that he was looking at “are merely transmogrifications of energy; they exist only temporarily as illusions and momentary condensations of energy.”
The imaginative Keel began his prolific writing career at the age of 12, when his first story was published in a magician’s magazine. Therefore, from an early age, the aspiring journalist exhibited the ability for “thinking outside the box.” In the closed-door session, Keel mused that, “They may come from beyond our space-time continuum….” He compared UFOs to ghosts. While they remain mostly invisible to us, occasionally they enter the narrow spectrum of human vision. There are plenty of examples of this type of phenomenon in the pages of the Bible and other ancient sources. Also, Keel emphasized that, “It is explained again and again to each new contactee; and there are thousands upon thousands of contactees that you never hear about.”
The Contactee Conundrum
Keel’s three-year, intensive study of the UFO phenomenon led him to conclude that “people who see exceptional UFOs close up, and contactees in particular, have all the same characteristics as people who have supernatural experiences, psychics and trance-mediums.” To this, he added that, “The two types of people are identical.” The ufologist took note that the family and personal history of both UFO experiencers and psychics ran along parallel tracks. “Therefore,” said Keel, “we are forced to assume that it takes a special kind of person to perceive these objects, at least to perceive them close up, to have a genuine experience with them.”
Even back in 1969, while the issue of UFO disclosure was taking center stage at the Congress of Scientific Ufologists, Keel warned the inner circle that perhaps they should “lay off” the government, and the Air Force, in particular. The ufologist surmised that, based on the available information he had garnered from his investigations, the authorities in the United States, at least, had been telling the truth all along. This is to say that they did not possess sufficient, hard evidence to prove that UFOs represented an advanced technology, that they came from a physical extraterrestrial source, or even that these objects in our skies posed an imminent threat to national security.
What’s a Ufologist to Do?
Keel stressed that his remarks should not be misconstrued. Ufologists should not simply hang up their hats and call it quits. The ground-breaking ufologist remarked that, “We must make a completely fresh start. It is absolutely impossible to prove that flying saucers are real and extraterrestrial (in a physical sense). If it were possible, someone would have done it a long, long time ago. What we must now do is completely reassess the situation and admit all of the previously inadmissible evidence. We must collect the details of all manifestations which surround UFO events, no matter how incomprehensible they seem. We must forget the absolutely fruitless and pointless campaign against the government and the Air Force. It has succeeded only in draining our strength, stirring the coals of controversy, and keeping the subject mired in ridicule. It has accomplished absolutely nothing.”
Of course, flying saucers are largely a visual and hence observational phenomenon. As such, Keel wrote that, “They could be the manifestation of another space time continuum;” and he added that, “We have probably never seen the objects, or their occupants, in their true form. We see only what they want us to see and, to a large extent, believe only what they want us to believe.” The ufologist lamented that many fellow investigators of this enigma have settled on a physical, extraterrestrial conclusion and then tried to fit the incoming data into this hasty paradigm.
Look to the Native Americans
As to the UFOnauts themselves, Keel’s amassed documentation revealed that, “They also pick out people with very interesting religious and racial backgrounds.” Of particular note, the ufologist comments that, “If you have Indian (Native American) blood in your veins, you are more apt to be contacted than any other type of person. This is, if your great, great grandfather was an Indian or a Gypsy, by the way.” Keel elaborated: “Gypsy or Indian blood is very important and the majority of contactees do have either Indian or Gypsy blood. But, if you are Jewish, your chances of being contacted are almost zero. We have very few Jewish contactees, for some reason; and on the other hand, we have a great many contactees. “So,” Keel surmised, “the religious factor seems to be of some significance, but the Indian factor is the most important of all.”
Keel believed that if you had the good fortune of living near an Indian reservation, with enough tact and persuasive ability you might be able to gain the confidence of some Native Americans to the point that they would tell you a great deal about the UFO phenomenon because, after all, “they know all about it.” Keel declared that, “A great many of them have been contactees for years and years.” But to find out more about UFOs, one would have to get a Native American to open up about their experiences, which most are somewhat reluctant to do. Keel continued, “You would have to spend some time there. You couldn’t do it in an afternoon. You would have to spend some time there to win their confidence. But, it would be very useful to you if you could do this because you would learn a great deal.”
Insofar as Gypsies are concerned, Keel cautioned that there were a lot of “phony” ones out there, trying to cash in on the Gypsy reputation for linkages to the UFO occupants. But much like the Native Americans, Keel was of the opinion that the Gypsies knew an awful lot about flying saucers. “It is no mystery or secret to them at all. They know the whole story. In fact, a great many people know the whole story because, as I said, there are thousands and thousands of contactees all over the country who never tell anyone of their experiences.” Interestingly, I uncovered documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that revealed Gypsy heritage in the famous contactee George Adamski’s genealogy, his paternal line, which I published in my second book in the Venus Rising series, Final Countdown: Rockets to Venus (Headline Books, 2017).
On Contactees, Generally
Keel noted that, usually, these contactees are “introduced to the whole secret, if you want to call it a secret, over a long period of time. He continued, “I have contactees, now, in my files, people that I am working with who were first contacted in 1961. But, they themselves were not fully aware of what was happening until 1965; and then gradually they were sort of trained and educated through contacts and told what it was all about and given some very useful information, information which could be proven.” Of this data, Keel notes that, “We have received information, scientific information which has been proven in the laboratories. At this time, there is a physicist on the West Coast, a highly qualified man in his field, who became a contactee in 1966. He has received information for a process, a metallurgical process, which he has proven out in the laboratory and he is now getting a patent on it.”
The intrepid ufologist then covers some specific cases of contactees, most notably that of Canada’s radio engineer Wilbur Smith, who headed up the Canadian top secret Project Magnet, the details of which I published in my third book in the Venus Rising series, Cosmic Ray’s Excellent Venus Adventure (Headline Books, 2017). In the first chapter of that book, I discovered a linkage to an event at the Shirley’s Bay Ontario Project Magnet station and the dematerialization of the Queen of Outer Space, Dolores Barrios, and her posse, on Mount Palomar in California on 8 August 1954.
Keel concluded his remarks by declaring, “So the whole bag is far more complicated than just sitting around waiting for the Venusians to land on the White House lawn. If they were going to do that, they would have landed at the Vatican in 1600; or they would have landed in London in 1200, or they would have landed in Jerusalem, or what have you.”
Venus Rising: A Concise History of the Second Planet
Final Countdown: Rockets to Venus
Cosmic Ray's Excellent Venus Adventure
Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs
The Mothman Prophecies: A True Story
Our Haunted Planet
