The Perspicacious Percipient: How to Investigate UFOs and Other Insane Urges - Selected Writings of John A. Keel

Keel is the thinking person's UFOlogist. The last of the great Forteans. The Mark Twain of high weirdness. This book is a great collection of essays. One of my favorites.

This is mostly new stuff, magazine articles etc. Some never before published, a few chapters I've seen elsewhere. If you like Keel, You won't be disappointed. A couple of very interesting chapters considering the nature of reality and consciousness. Mr. Keel was way ahead of his time and I believe his fame will keep on growing. Anyone interested in anything paranormal should read Keel.

As a fan of John Keel since the late 1960s, I enjoy reading anything and everything he has ever written!

This collection opens with two entertaining open letters to Gray Barker. In the first, Keel states that the rumors about him are true and that he was an employee of the CIA, FBI, NSA, CIC and Interpol. In the second he describes what went wrong with civilian/CIA UFO research group, NICAP, including bad financial mismanagement and poor pricing, marketing and distribution of its book The UFO Evidence. I disagree with him partly when he claimed that NICAP had to correct its own problems before it campaigned against Frank Stranges and Daniel Fry. Stranges and Fry were two alleged contactees who made fanciful claims about encounters with amiable human looking aliens. If their claims were stupid and brought the subject of UFO research into disrepute then it seems reasonable that NICAP would want to challenge them.The new material is an unpublished essay, New Perspectives. Keel appears to have been influenced by Trevor Constable's They Live in the Sky. He states that "invisible blobs of intelligent energy" might coexist with us and control us and guide our evolution without our being aware of it. He goes on to link this with his ideas about spiritualism. He states that 80% of the time, "controls" in spiritualist seances speak statements that are "utter nonsense". He doesn't say where he got that figure. It's utter nonsense to give a figure because it would depend on which spiritualist mediums he consults. In a previous book he revealed he was impressed with the performance of 19th century medium Daniel Dunglas Home. He didn't give the impression then that he thought 80% of Home's statements were nonsense. Keel reckons that statements made by mediums in seances and poltergeist manifestations are examples of "energy entities" displaying a sense of humor. As for theories of evolution, Keel states that Darwin might be wrong and that groups of people "may have literally been seeded here by various extraterrestrial groups" to make a "celestial farm" out of earth. He might have been influenced by his friend/colleague Otto Binder's book Flying Saucers Are Watching Us. Anyway, I'm not surprised that this material wasn't published as it's just speculation combined with misinformation about spiritualism.A highlight is chapter 10, an "Open Letter to All UFO Researchers: The MIB Are Hostile" from Jan 1969. He describes the scale of intimidation, beginning with hoaxes and building up to kidnappings, brainwashing and disappearances/murder. "The Men in Black are professional terrorists," Keel advises. "The menace is not in our skies; it is on the ground. And at this moment, it is spreading like a disease across the country and the world." Evidently Keel was shaken up by all this and from 1969 he appears to have abandoned his field work investigation and instead concentrated on developing his "ultraterrestrial" theory.Chapter 11 is interesting: "Time Waits for No Jell-o" from 1969. He recounts a couple of contactee cases and then mentions the case of Tom Monteleone, "an aspiring young science-fiction writer in Adelphi, Maryland" who "allegedly had a contact with a grounded UFO, and conversed with a man in 'shiny coveralls' who identified himself as 'Vadig.'" Keel says that Monteleone "made up a contactee story about traveling to a distant planet where everyone walked about nude." In a previous book in this series Keel uses Monteleone's claims as verification for Woodrow Derenberger's claim for having contact with an alleged being from "Lanulos". Also, in Derenberger's book Visitors from Lanulos, Derenberger uses Monteleone's claims as back-up for his own account. Monteleone described the same scenes that he saw himself, Derenberger claimed. So, if Monteleone "made up" his claim then that casts doubt on Derenberger's character too. Keel doesn't apologise for previously misleading his readers by suggesting that Derenberger's tale was true. Later in the chapter he revisits the case of Arthur Bryant and the charge that malevolent aliens come from Orion and the "good guys" reside in the Pleiades. But he only skirts the issue. He could have gone into more depth, as Stephen Jenkins did in his book The Undiscovered Country.Another highlight is chapter 12: Keel's review of the Condon Report. It's a detailed review and Keel concludes that it was "a gross waste of money and has made only a very small contribution to the subject."Chapter 14 is also of interest: "The Insane Urge to Do Mad and Wicked Things" from 1970. In this he describes some personal experiences, such as being "plagued by impossible coincidences", waking up in the night, unable to move, "with a huge, dark apparition standing over me", which led him to question his sanity, plus his experiences of premonitions. He goes on to say that some contactees become insane "when their minds are unable to translate the signal properly" Induced hallucinations, visits from Oriental gentleman in dark suits and black Cadillacs can cause contactees to "eventually suffer total deterioration of personality." He says he found this out the hard way, before going to say that psychic researcher Meade Layne beat him to it in the early 1950s. This chapter is concise, well written and in my opinion better than the entire Operation Trojan Horse book, which covers similar material.Chapter 15 is interesting too: "Mystery 'Air Force Officers' Seek to Silence UFO Spotters" from 1975. He includes in it the text of a 1967 article about MIB appearing to masquerade as defense officials, which mentioned the case of Rex Heflin, whose UFO photos were confiscated and never returned. Keel thought in 1975 that the Heflin story "was yet another classic hoax organized by Gray Barker", but he doesn't say why. He goes on to mention the collapse of the "Silver Bridge" and a strange visitor that investigator Mary Hyre received.Chapter 18, from 1988 is titled "Mysterious Crime Waves". Keel states that there are many disappearances of people every year. Keel suspects "modern vampires" from UFOs. He muses over his former friend Ivan Sanderson's theory that "earth is a farm, and we are the crop. Do UFOs raid us frequently to satisfy their thirst for blood, operating behind a smokescreen of deception and confusion?" He then goes on to discuss animal mutilations, explaining why they not the actions of people from cults.Chapter 19 is a 1989 interview. This is quite interesting too. Keel reveals that he considers he was harassed by government agents. He says that a couple of weeks after he wrote an article about J. Edgar Hoover, he "was suddenly inundated with harassment by the IRS, and had all sorts of other problems with my phone and mail." The interview also covers animal mutilations. Keel mentions a rumor that a crashed UFO was found filled with human body parts and states that "that would be one reason the government would suppress a crashed saucer story. They wouldn't want us to know it was filled with human body parts."As for whether he believes in the possibility of UFOs ever crashing to earth, the end of the book suggests not. Keel recounts at length why he believes the alleged Roswell incident was the landing of a Japanese Fugo balloon. Keel dismisses the claims of Stanton Friedman, saying: "Because of his obviously biased interest, he cannot be accused of being objective." The same argument could be applied to Keel: his biased interest in adhering to the belief that UFOs are entirely interdimension/ultraterrestrial means that he cannot be considered objective when it comes to assessing reports of UFO crashes. Roswell witnesses who reported that it was a UFO "had been 'contaminated' by all the subsequent UFO books, and the endless stream of UFO advocates who have visited the area since 1947."The final chapter is the afterword to the 1993 Illuminet Press edition of The Mothman Prophecies. Here states that up to his death in 1990 Woodrow Derenberger was charging people a few hundred dollars to attempt to meet the "friendly people" of Lanulos. Keel states, "So far as I know, none of these meetings ever successfully took place." The implication is that Derenberger was a fraudster. As for Tom Monteleone's claim also to have visited Lanulos, this is now considered by Keel to have been a "shaggy dog yarn" as Montelone "eventually did a flip-flop, and wrote confessions admitting that he had never been to that outer-space nudist colony".So far, all these collections of Keel's material have had their moments, and are worth a look on Kindle Unlimited. This one might be the best of them, (disregarding the ramblings on the supposed Roswell Fugo balloons).