The UFO Community Experiences, Activities, and Agendas
Eyes Only: Some Notable UFOlogists of the Past (Part 2)
John Keel (1930–2009)
Influential and prolific American author, investigator, and lecturer whose conception of aliens as other-dimensional beings, rather than extraterrestrial, gives UFOlogists plenty to discuss.
Based in New York City by the mid-1950s, Keel was a working writer who traveled the Middle East and Asia before selling travel articles, men’s magazine adventure stories, and a nonfiction travel memoir, Jadoo, “[t]he astounding story of one man’s search into the mysteries of black magic in the Orient.” Keel wrote scripts for local NYC television and became a co-founder and editor of an audiophile magazine, Echo, in 1959.
A 1966 freelance assignment to do an article about UFOs sparked Keel’s interest in the subject. In his 1970 book Operation Trojan Horse, Keel abandoned the ET theory because of what he termed “an astonishing overlap between psychic phenomena and UFOs.” He brought forth his “ultraterrestrial” theory, by which alien visitors are supernatural, and arrived from other dimensions to plague us. Much in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft’s iniquitous Old Ones, the ultraterrestrials have visited us for eons, to shape human history while diverting attention from themselves by suggesting the outer-space origins of UFOs. In this sort of bleakly determinist scenario, humans are small indeed.
Helpless before our secret masters, our destinies mapped out and controlled by malevolent Others, we pursue what Lovecraft described as “common human laws and interests and emotions [that] have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.” Worse, the ultraterrestrials view us with contempt and scorn.
Shortly after Trojan Horse, Keel turned his focus to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where locals linked a terrible bridge collapse with UFOs and a dreadful alien called Mothman (see chapter ten). Keel spent considerable time in the area and interviewed scores of residents. His 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies turned Keel into a vigorous player in the UFO and paranormal worlds.
With a 1970 paperback original, Strange Creatures from Time and Space, Keel revisited Mothman and discussed accounts of Bigfoot, sea serpents, angels and demons, and Men in Black. Because Keel’s interests encompassed so much, he may have spread himself thin as a writer. Nevertheless, his work is reliably literate and intriguing.
Notable books: Operation Trojan Horse; Strange Creatures from Time and Space; The Mothman Prophecies; The Best of John Keel; Searching for the String: Selected Writings.
Donald Keyhoe (1897–1988)
Throughout the 1950s, this aviator, writer, and retired marine major gained fame as the public face of flying saucer studies. But Keyhoe had succeeded before then in other, quite different areas. His earlier successes gratified him, but invited harsh—and unwarranted—criticism of his saucer research.
Following pilot training and his first retirement from the Marines in the 1920s, Keyhoe accompanied aviator Charles Lindbergh on a forty-eight-state tour celebrating Lindy’s acclaimed 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic. Keyhoe chronicled that adventure in articles for Popular Science and National Geographic, and then elaborated with a best-selling 1928 book, Flying with Lindbergh (a puff piece that Lindy vetted closely).
During the 1930s, Keyhoe worked for the department of commerce and the national geodesic survey, while continuing to pursue his career as a writer of pulp-magazine short stories. Those lusty and fantastic tales, many centered on aviation, appeared in Flying Aces, the already legendary Weird Tales, and elsewhere.
Private aviator Kenneth Arnold made his saucer sighting in 1947; two years later, a True magazine editor who had already worked with Keyhoe reached out to the newly retired major (Keyhoe had returned to active duty, in Washington, during World War II) for a consequential article about the flying saucer phenomenon. True tapped into public interest at a propitious time, and the article’s enthusiastic reception inspired Keyhoe to write his first UFO book, The Flying Saucers Are Real.
Keyhoe’s belief that saucers were of extraterrestrial origin—and that the truth was suppressed by the U.S. government—not only excited readers but provided a keystone for the saucer-conspiracy subgroup.
At the close of 1956, inventor and antigravity researcher Thomas Townsend Brown founded the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), and tapped Keyhoe to be a director. Deficient finance management shuttled a pair of directors in and out, and Keyhoe assumed leadership of the group in 1957. Finances remained weak, and Keyhoe devoted a great deal of his time to fund-raising.
By the mid-1960s, the USAF felt itself losing control of the flying saucer narrative, and commissioned the University of Colorado to put together a UFO study. Keyhoe shortly grew disenchanted with the university’s so-called Condon Committee, and his involvement with NICAP lessened. Keyhoe’s disenchantment increased early in 1969, when the committee’s conclusions became public. In essence, the report declared that nothing in past UFO accounts suggested any scientific value whatever. further, neither Washington nor the military should support further UFO research.
For the remainder of 1969, NICAP struggled with waning membership, weak finances and a tangled payroll, and the barely veiled presence of CIA agents that had become members. Former NICAP associate director Gordon Lore told this writer that Keyhoe’s reputation as the UFO “gadfly” bothered the Air Force, which resented being publicly challenged by NICAP while USAF spokespersons insisted that UFOs amounted to nothing.
At the end of 1969, with Keyhoe given notice of just a day or two, NICAP’s files and physical office space were taken over by the CIA. The new leadership began to dismantle NICAP, and in 1973 the organization ceased to exist.
Keyhoe, by now seventy-five, briefly pursued something he called Project Lure, by which extraterrestrials might be encouraged to visit Earth.
In 1998, the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) announced plans to establish an extensive archive of Keyhoe’s papers in Washington. For more about Keyhoe and NICAP, see chapter nine.
Notable books: The Flying Saucers Are Real; Flying Saucers from Outer Space; The Flying Saucer Conspiracy; Flying Saucers: Top Secret; Aliens from Space: The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects.
Philip J. Klass (1919–2005)
American electrical engineer, aviation journalist, and alien-abduction researcher who investigated victims’ accounts for nearly forty years—and claimed never to have found one that could not be explained in conventional terms. He felt, in fact, that some victims of abduction had physically marked their bodies and inserted foreign objects in order to create “proof.” He also claimed that vital elements of abductee accounts (such as the aliens’ appearance) varied considerably, and did not, as proponents and media claimed, share many similarities.
Further, Klass insisted that he had seen no evidence to suggest alien visitation of any sort.
Shortly after investigating the famed Lonnie Zamora sighting near Socorro, New Mexico, in 1964 (see chapter ten), Klass stirred the pot with particular fierceness by offering what came to be called “The Phil Klass $10,000 Challenge.” He explained it this way during a November 2000 interview for the PBS series Nova:
I . . . offer to pay ten thousand dollars to any person who believes they’ve been abducted, to report it to the FBI. Let the FBI investigate it. If the FBI comes back and says, ‘We believe this person’s story,’ I will then go into my life savings and present this check for ten thousand dollars to that person.
And thereby, we will have alerted the federal government. We can enlist the defenses of this nation to defend our people. And if this is simply a cult where people are being needlessly manipulated, and alien abductions are fantasy, then we can free the public from worrying about a non-existent threat.
Klass never had to pay.
When the “secret” Majestic 12 documents (which supposedly confirmed a government cover-up of Roswell) surfaced in 1987, Klass went on record as doubting their authenticity. He famously argued against positons held by J. Allen Hynek, Stanton Friedman, Budd Hopkins, John Mack, and other high-profile UFOlogists, in a tone that veered between good-natured kidding and real animus. All of this naturally put Klass at odds with the abduction community, and the larger UFO culture, as well. Conspiracy theorists accused Klass of being a “disinformation agent” in the pay of Washington and/or the military-industrial complex, so that the USA might maintain its monopoly on alien technology.
As he approached eighty, Klass joked he hoped to be abducted, reasoning that alien medicine might restore his aging body to youthful health.
In addition to his activities as an author and lecturer, Klass published the Skeptics UFO Newsletter, and was a senior avionics editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine (he is credited with coining the word avionics).
Klass co-founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (later called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry). His 1971 book Secret Sentries in Space is an important early study of spy-satellite technology.
In 1999, the International Astronomical Union changed the name of Asteroid 1983 RM2/7277 to Klass.
Notable books: UFOs—Identified; UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game; Secret Sentries in Space; UFOs Explained; The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup.
Roger Leir (1934–2014)
American podiatric surgeon, author, and alien- abduction researcher who performed at least fifteen surgeries between 1995 and the end of his life to remove alien implants from abductees. Leir was encouraged to do his first implant removal by abductee researcher Derrell Sims. Leir operated only on victims’ feet; implants discovered in other parts of abductees’ bodies were extracted by his “surgical team.” Leir tested some implants on the spot, with gauss meters (which measure magnetic flux density) and radio frequency detectors.
Most implants removed by Leir came out of the victims encased within membranous sacs that were either parts of the alien implant process or immune responses by the victims’ bodies. Leir sent the implants to independent labs, where tests invariably revealed what Leir described as “metallurgic anomalies.” Leir acted as a consultant to the now-defunct National Institute for Discovery Science, a paranormal-studies group established and funded by Las Vegas developer, aerospace entrepreneur, and space enthusiast Robert Bigelow. Leir’s own organization, A&S Research, functioned as a nonprofit that investigated the physical and psychological implications of abduction and implantation.
Patient Seventeen, a documentary about Leir scheduled for 2016 release, became available for streaming in the fall of 2015.
Notable books: The Aliens and the Scalpel; Casebook: Alien Implants.
John E. Mack (1929–2004)
American psychiatrist, tenured Harvard Medical School professor, and author who studied alien-abduction cases from a psychological perspective. Mack typically believed the sincerity of the many abductees he interviewed, and although he proposed that the abductors might be beings “from another domain,” he could not say with certainty that UFOs or aliens are actual, physical things. Like some other academically inclined researchers, Mack linked UFOs to notions of myth, shared cultural consciousness, and a broadly spiritual and metaphysical world view.
In 1994, four years after publication of Mack’s Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, Harvard Medical School began a secret investigation of Mack’s abduction research and methodology. Conservative and “dignified,” the medical school fretted that Mack had interviewed people that had not been checked for “psychosis.” Mack’s discovery of the investigation damaged his professional and personal relationships, and precipitated a fourteen-month struggle between Mack and Harvard—a struggle that soon spilled into the media. Embarrassed by the investigatory body’s secrecy and presumption, the university ultimately affirmed that Mack was a faculty member in good standing, and free to pursue whatever research he wished.
John Mack died after being struck by a drunk driver in London. Predictably enough, a few voices suggest that he was killed to stop his abduction research.
Experiencers, a 2004 documentary that features Mack, is dedicated to his memory. At this writing, a feature film tentatively titled John Mack is in development. Mack’s 1976 book A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Notable UFO-related books: Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens; Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters.
James E. McDonald (1920–71)
American atmospheric physicist and academic (senior physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona), whose devotion to a scientific investigation of UFOs earned him the scorn of his peers, and probably contributed to his suicide.
McDonald attracted attention as a meteorological expert while a young PhD; some of his early research made use of funding from the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and NASA. The 1966–71 period accounted for McDonald’s most active and public work on behalf of UFO research, and he carried on even when the Office of Naval Research withdrew its funding. He maintained a close association with NICAP, where he was liked and respected. (McDonald declared NICAP chief Donald Keyhoe a key figure in responsible UFO investigation.)
A prolific writer of scientific papers, McDonald had published fifty by 1971, in such journals as Nature, Science, and The Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. His scientific pieces for lay readers appeared in Scientific American, Saturday Review, and other top magazines.
McDonald’s professional interest in UFOs began in the early 1950s, when he and two meteorologists witnessed a lighted object in the skies above the Arizona desert. At about the same time, McDonald attended a meteorological conference in Italy, where UFOs came up in conversation. After that, McDonald began to amass information about UFOs and UFO sightings, maintaining and adding to voluminous files (kept extant by his family to this day) until his death.
As a scientist, McDonald placed a premium on responsible observation and fact collection. He had little interest in anecdotal UFO information, and was wary of “eyewitness” accounts. McDonald’s biographer, Ann Druffel, reports that he was particularly “dismayed” by the friendly-aliens accounts of George Adamski, Gabriel Green (who ran for president in 1960 on the “Flying Saucer ticket”), George Van Tassel, and other contactees.
The USAF-commissioned Condon Report of 1969, which dismissed UFOs as having no scientific value as subjects of study, received outspoken criticism from McDonald. The committee, he complained, had looked at only a “minute fraction” of available cases, and conducted “sloppy research.” He testified to that effect in 1969, before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, describing the “scientifically ludicrous [Condon] explanations” that hampered UFO research. McDonald planned to set aside 1970 to write a book-length rebuttal to the Condon group, buttressed by a wealth of Project Blue Book files detailing ground-radar contact with UFOs. The book was never written.
Concurrent with McDonald’s criticism of the Condon Report—which he expressed in a series of formal lectures—was an FBI investigation of his activities. His criticism of government laziness and apparent disinterest in UFO study struck a nerve; likewise, McDonald’s open sympathy with America’s student left, including the SDS. One secret FBI memo complained that McDonald had a “young hippy [sic] protégé.” The FBI investigation ended after person after person informed FBI investigators about McDonald’s sterling reputation and Americanism.
In 1971, when McDonald testified before Congress about deleterious climatic effects of proposed supersonic transport (SST) aircraft, politicians on the panel attempted to discredit his testimony by mocking his UFO research. His chief tormentor was Massachusetts congressman Silvio Conte, who steered the SST discussion into a wholly unrelated discourse on UFOs and power blackouts.
Outwardly unbowed by the committee’s attitude, McDonald carried on with his SST testimony. But by the time Conte and others were done, committee members—and many persons in the audience—were laughing out loud.
Soon after, McDonald’s wife asked for a divorce. The failed marriage, the public humiliation, the disapproval of peers, all of it became burdensome to McDonald. He put a gun to his head on April 9, 1971, but only succeeded in taking his eyesight. With divorce plans suddenly suspended, McDonald returned to work. Slivers of his sight returned, and he felt a small optimism.
His wife was to pick him up at his office on Saturday, June 12, but she went on a sudden weekend getaway. Before his daughter could come for him, McDonald called a taxi. He purchased a revolver at a pawnshop and then directed the taxi to deliver him to an empty crossroads in the Arizona desert. Later, in a nearby wash, McDonald shot himself to death.
The circumstances of the death provoked the inevitable conspiracy talk, centered, of course, on UFOs, the government, and the military. None of the speculation bears up well under scrutiny.
Donald Howard Menzel (1901–76)
American theoretical astronomer and astrophysicist with teaching experience at the University of Iowa, Ohio State, and Harvard. While director of the Harvard College Observatory from 1952 to 1966, Menzel played a key role in the development of radioastronomy.
Fascinated by many things—particularly geology, chemistry, solar research, and radio technology—he observed the postwar interest in flying saucers with skepticism. He was an empiricist who insisted that virtually all UFO reports could be accounted for with real-world explanations, most often as clouds, reflections of light, temperature inversions, and other natural phenomena.
Menzel cited aircraft and satellites as frequent culprits. Further, because few UFO witnesses had scientific training, they were, in Menzel’s view, simply unable to usefully explain what they had seen.
This “establishment” view of UFOs fit neatly with explanations given by Washington and the military. When Menzel gave testimony before a House committee symposium looking into unidentified flying objects, his reasoned, unexcited rationales seemed as impressive as his credentials. He was well received on the Hill, but many UFOlogists, including noted atmospheric physicist James E. McDonald, called him out for ignoring compelling details about case after case.
Accomplished in astronomy, wave propagation, cryptanalysis, and quantum mechanics, Menzel was a precise, lucid writer who published widely in scientific journals and the popular press. He was a chess champion and ham radio operator. He played various musical instruments, collected neckties—and habitually made sketches of flying saucers and extraterrestrials. Throughout his career, he was an enthusiastic debunker of astrology.
For more about Menzel, and latter-day claims that he was in cahoots with the CIA to obscure the reality of unidentified flying objects, see chapter eight.
Notable books: Flying Saucers; The World of Flying Saucers (with Lyle G. Boyd); The UFO Enigma (with Ernest H. Taves); Stars and Planets: Exploring the Universe.
Edgar Mitchell (1930–2016)
As part of a field that longs for respectable spokespersons, retired American astronaut Edgar Mitchell proved invaluable. He held a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from MIT, and as the Apollo 14 lunar module pilot in 1971 he became the sixth human being to walk on the Moon. He was an outspoken advocate of future manned missions into space, and believed we are not alone in the universe. The aliens that crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, Mitchell said, had been observing American atomic testing at nearby White Sands. Today, the U.S. government likely hides evidence of alien technology, because that technology could adversely affect what Mitchell called “moneyed interests.” Although Mitchell never observed a UFO, he was receptive to reasonable accounts, and firm that mysterious craft have been observed throughout the years by U.S. military personnel, top-ranking people among them.
Notable books: The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds; The Space Less Traveled: Straight Talk from Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell.
James (Jim) W. Moseley (1931–2012)
Self-described American “skeptical believer” who published Nexus, Saucer News, and, later, the Saucer Smear newsletter, which focused on personalities and the UFO social scene. Writing in The UFO Verdict, author Robert Sheaffer described Moseley as “the Voltaire of the UFO movement, in light of his perceptive and witty satires.” In 1957, Moseley and UFO writer Gray Barker collaborated on the elaborate “Straith letter” hoax (see chapter fifteen) intended to give mock encouragement to ET contactee George Adamski.
Over time, Moseley leaned toward a made-by-humans explanation of UFOs, displaying a low tolerance for flimsy accounts and credulous UFO enthusiasts that readily accepted them; he took apparent delight in puncturing weak stories.
Still, Moseley remained sharply cognizant of UFO incidents that defied easy explanation. As if to underscore his simultaneous sense of mission and mirth, Moseley identified himself on the masthead of Saucer Smear as “Supreme Commander”; and occasionally published Saucer News as Saucer Booze and Saucer Jews (to acknowledge a Jewish friend).
Beginning in the 1960s and for thirty years thereafter, Moseley organized UFO conferences, many under the aegis of his National UFO Conference (NUFOC) organization.
Notable books: Shockingly Close to the Truth! Confessions of a Grave-Robbing UFOlogist (with the empirically minded UFOlogist Karl T. Pflock); Jim Moseley’s Book of Saucer News.
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