From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, where 9 out of 10 dentists said, what the fuck
are you talking about when asked if they would recommend listening to Journey to the Fringe
on a daily basis.
We are your podcast hosts who, to get the bluntness of a dentist that you need in your
surveys, we had to contact them outside of the workplace and my god it is hard to track
down 10 dentists.
Anyhow, that's none of your business, we just need to know that stat.
We are your podcast hosts, Taylor and Chelsea.
Here today, I think looking at a historic asshole is, would that, I don't know, Chelsea
it's your person, so I, I don't need to.
I'm going to take you on a journey of asshole today and I might even redefine it.
Okay.
And I don't mean to get you excited right off the hop here, well I do a little because
we're here for a podcast.
And we gotta hook you for like 45 to 50 minutes.
Yeah, so I hope that got you excited enough to listen to the whole episode.
And here I am today feeling like I'm having deja vu after the last 48 hours.
We're going to take a look at John Keel today.
Who should be going by Alva John Keel, but instead he goes by John A. Keel.
And he's known probably best in my realm for the Mothman prophecies.
He's come up in a few episodes before.
Like he has come up originally in the Mothman episodes and in the Men in Black episodes.
Briefly, yeah.
This is going to be a two perter.
Today I'm going to look at John Keel and next episode I'm going to take a look at the Mothman
prophecies itself.
To get ready for this, I listened to a beautiful art bell, Coast to Coast AM episode in which
he interviews John Keel for the first time.
And boy was that boring listen.
The guy was a writer, not a talker.
Yeah, no, he sure was.
Anyway, from his Wikipedia quote, Keel is considered, I don't think the quote was supposed
to start here.
I think it was supposed to start here.
What?
No.
One of you apologies, most widely read and influential authors end quote.
As a researcher, he was both original and controversial.
Richard Hadham, the screenwriter for the Mothman prophecies, has described Keel as the hunter
S. Thompson of paranormal writers, which I reject by the way, just completely.
Why?
Did he have like a bone to pick with Nixon?
He just kind of travels all over the place and interviewing people and given his opinion
on things.
I don't know.
I don't see it.
I'm a huge Hunter S. Thompson fan.
I don't get that.
I just reject that.
I don't see any similarities between them.
So anyhow, that's that.
Keel was born in Hornel, New York, the son of a singer and band leader.
His parents divorced early on and Keel was raised by his grandparents in Perry, New York
until his mother remarried.
He was fascinated by magic from an early age and was known as Houdini by his friends.
He loved reading about magic, humor, science, travel, and aviation.
His first story was published in a Magicians magazine when he was 12 years old, which is
like super young.
At age 14, he was determined to become a writer.
He had a column in the Perry Herald named Scraping the Keel.
He published a science fiction fanzine named The Lunarite and he routinely sent stories
to magazines in New York.
At the age of 16, he had taken all of the science courses at his school and decided
to quit school and write full time.
As you do when you run out of science.
I am just curious.
How many science courses?
All of them.
Okay.
Both.
Yes.
All two of them.
And who even knows what grade those went up to in those days.
That's what I'm a little worried about.
I feel like that's maybe an exaggeration and spoiler alert.
I feel like this guy is known for his exaggerations.
Well, I don't know about that.
Okay.
At 17, he relocated to New York City to make a living as a writer and he lived in Greenwich
Village and became the editor of a poetry magazine.
He worked as a freelance contributor to newspapers, script writer for local radio and television
outlets and author of pulp articles such as Are You a Repressed Sex Fiend?
That actually makes a lot of sense.
The writings I've read at least.
Sorry, are you questioning yourself or is this with regards to John Keel?
regards to Keel.
Okay.
Thank you for allowing me to clarify that.
When he was 18, he had a strange but classic illumination experience in his furnished room
off Times Square.
He remembered the room filled with an indescribable light, a pinkish glow, and his mind flooded
with a torrent of information.
I actually can't find any more information on that at all other than that one or two
sentences.
Well, it would just be coming from him, right?
Like it doesn't seem like anybody else is involved, so there would be no other sources.
It would think.
In 1951, he was drafted into the US Army during the Korean War.
He spent his military years in Frankfurt of all places because he had worked with radio
and television working mostly for the American Forces Network.
Some of his programming ideas, a remote broadcast from the Great Pyramid, another from Frankenstein's
Castle, earned him a great deal of publicity.
Because he had worked with radio and television, he was assigned to the radio.
Within one year, he was the chief of productions for the network.
He claimed that while in the army, he was trained in psychological warfare as a propaganda
writer.
It seems to me, from what I was able to find, that that is the claim.
Everything else just stated that he was in like broadcasting in the army, so I don't
know what to do with that information.
After this time with the military, he was a foreign radio correspondent in Paris, Berlin,
Rome, and Egypt.
When his two years of military service ended, he was offered and accepted a civilian job
for the army.
At the age of 24, he resigned and traveled for four years around the Middle East and
Southeast Asia, similar to Billy Meyer, but I believe Keel keeps both of his arms.
Pretty sure he died with both of them.
Oh, that was a spoiler.
Well, maybe he got it back at some point.
Maybe.
I mean, who's to say, given the shit that he's seen, he tried to find performers of
the Indian rope trick, investigate Akirs and Yogis, and he even tried to track the Yeti.
The journey became his first published book, Jadu.
A lot of people really like this book.
That's all I have to say about that.
But it sounds like it's fiction though, right?
Like not true story.
Sounds like it is true.
Hold on, let's see.
Is Jadu fiction or non-fiction?
iPhone in Canada.ca.
I knew it.
It's non-fiction.
According to iPhone in Canada.ca.
It's a reliable source.
I don't know why we use any other websites.
You can get all your news.
You can buy his stuff.
And when Jadu was published in 1957, he moved back to NYC and promoted it by performing with
Cobras in the window of the Midtown Aquarium at Times Square.
I'm sorry, what?
He performed with Cobras in the window of the Midtown Aquarium at Times Square.
We know how he performed with the Cobras.
No, I would assume that it was similar to Britney Spears' famous performance of, what
was that, Toxic?
Sure, he's got a sexy getup.
I'm just like, in my mind, I'm picturing the Indian flute player, the snake charmer, like
that.
But I have no idea where he'd pick that up.
And also he was in Korea, which is not known for its Cobras.
Oh, he was in Korea.
Right.
That raises further questions.
I get it.
iPhone Canada.ca.
It's a huge distraction.
I get it.
Stop, turn, close the tab.
Intention.
He also did many TV and radio appearances.
He suffered a bit of writer's block after this and turned to editing the magazine Echo.
Could it be all the poison from the Cobras?
Could be.
Because he was just bitten constantly.
I have to assume.
He has no background for it.
Duncan Wagnalls also hired him as a science and geography editor.
What does that even mean?
During the 60s, he worked for television.
He was the chief writer for lots of shows I've never heard of, so I didn't even know
them because.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I thought it was just.
I thought the biography was vague and that he just worked for television.
This is of course my notes.
Right, right, right.
Yes, that's my vagueness.
He wrote some novels using the pseudo-nim, Harry Gibbs.
In 1966, he wrote a fiction novel named The Ficklefinger of Feet.
It sold an estimated 600,000 copies.
Okay, but that one has to be fiction.
Yeah, I would assume so.
It would have to be, but who's going to look and tell us?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if iPhone in Canada.ca has that kind of stuff.
In 1966, Playboy asked him to write an article about UFOs.
That's what he called them on the Art Bell Show.
The magazine, but the work was rejected and never printed.
Jay Allen Heineck actually ended up writing the article, and Keele had however become
hooked on the subject after this.
I feel like I would be too pissed to continue on with it if my article was rejected, but
that's all I got to say.
He then traveled around the country interviewing witnesses and writing dozens of articles.
The phenomenon he learned took its toll on its investigators.
He entered a shadowy world where black cars vanished on country roads.
Meaningless messages turned up in hotel rooms, and his phone and mail suffered strange interceptions.
In 1966, he made repeated visits to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, then the site of the
particularly active, monster and UFO flap.
The result was one of his most popular books, The Mothman Prophecies and Operation Trojan
Horse.
Along the way, he also put out a lively newsletter.
Anomaly wrote a regular column for SAGA and published several classic books on Fortiana.
It's Fortiana.
I've never heard of Fortiana because like Fortians is a thing.
No, Fortian, yeah, because of Charles Fort.
Yeah.
Fortian, but there's an A at the end of it.
Fortiana.
Could that just be a typo?
I don't know.
Okay.
The material was used in his book's Operation Trojan Horse.
He also made repeated visits to Point Pleasant, West Virginia and investigating...
Oh no, Fortiana is a thing.
It is.
The Charles Fort impetus.
Yeah, that's what they thought.
Fortiana.
His interviews and thoughts concerning UFOs were published in magazines such as Flying
Saucer Review, Flying Saucer, SAGA, and Saucer News.
He was a technical advisor to the Library of Congress 1968-69 and special consultant to
the Office of Scientific Research and Bureau of Radiology 1968-71 before becoming a consultant
to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Interesting turn at the end there.
He was a member of the Screenwriters Guild FYI, which makes sense because he had so much
background in the television.
Yeah, he worked long extensive hours in television.
Yeah, that's what I said.
So glad we're keeping up.
Keel actually invented the term Men in Black in an article for the Men's Adventure magazine
SAGA published 1967.
He was in Men's Adventure magazine?
Yeah.
I love those old ones.
Have you ever looked at the covers for these?
They're fantastic.
One second.
I'm going to take a look.
You keep talking.
I'm going to take a look.
I don't think it is.
On the back of my Mothman prophecies book, it just says, quote, John A. Keel was a prominent
journalist and ufologist credited with coining the term Men in Black.
He died in 2009, end quote.
I love that legacy for him.
That's literally all it says on the back of my book.
Okay, Chelsea, this is Men's Adventure magazine.
Let me take a look.
Most wanted Wild West issue.
Oh, that's nice.
Look at the Moth.
What's up with the guy with the ripped shirt?
The thing on the bottom.
Men's Conquest.
Hold on.
Go back to the main one.
Look at this guy with his ripped shirt third from the left.
Yeah, with the bats.
Yeah.
See, that's just Men's Magazine.
So that's not Men's Adventure magazine, but Bloodmad Mat of the Lost World.
Totally different magazine.
What's that look on his face?
Like, that's just somebody saying it's a living.
I make that face a lot.
Yeah.
Like, did the bats say something really awkward, but he still has to work beside them?
Yeah, that's it.
He didn't just say that, did he?
There's a cowboy in his bear.
OK, so the adventure ones like are more dangerous.
Oh, yeah, no, these are a lot of fun.
There's actually the Behind the Bastards episode that is just reading old Men's Adventure
magazine stories is pretty good.
That does sound like.
One word like this man has a love affair with this woman and she gets eaten by crabs and
yes.
No, I think I listened to that episode.
Yeah, look at that.
Look at that racism right there.
Oh, wow.
Martin O'Hare's House of Forbidden Women.
Murder is my job.
The kicked happy amateur versus the professional.
This is for the United Nations report.
That's all one title right there.
Oh, man, he just punched out an indigenous person.
That's a punch.
The woman chasing crew of the Pacific Stranges Convoy.
OK, sorry, you can continue.
I just I needed to show you some of that.
Oh, I really like these.
Is it pretty nice?
Look at this guy, bottom left.
There's something.
He said something on fire.
Who's Al?
How to prolong your sex life and Hemingway's private war with Adolf Hitler.
Oh, is that Hemingway that set that thing on fire?
Probably that's a Hemingway thing to do.
Oh, look at that guy.
He's a karate master.
Oh, no, he's a pirate.
Yeah.
OK, OK, back to your thing.
Keel really loves the topic because he writes these books that I haven't already mentioned.
Creatures from Time and Space 1970, reprinted as the complete guide to mysterious beings
1994.
Oh, I have that in my library.
My you call it wish list.
Want to read about it.
Which one?
Sorry, Chelsea.
I was too.
I was distracted by the spy trap they baited with sex.
It's either that or I can't.
It's not.
There's no one between.
There's so many distractions on the Internet now.
It's the complete guide to mysterious beings.
1994.
Our haunted planet.
He wrote the Flying Saucer subculture.
The Mothman.
Damn it.
After I just said that I haven't mentioned the 8th Tower, which he actually published,
I believe, of leftover stuff of the Mothman prophecies.
The cosmic question.
That's the 8th Tower as it was published in Britain and then Disneyland of the Gods, which
is probably young Frau, I would assume.
Yeah, that makes sense.
That makes a lot of sense.
So moving on, but I will say before we get into this next part, let's just have a conversation
about John Keel.
He does seem to be particularly well loved in the UFO community.
And while I do come across some criticism and I have some myself, I don't think that
he's necessarily on high asshole levels as we have seen in the past.
Don't honestly think that.
Really?
Yeah, he don't.
And it'll unfold.
We'll have some fun in the next episode.
We'll talk about some stuff.
I definitely have my feelings about him, but he's definitely not.
I don't know that I would throw him in the asshole.
I don't know.
At this point, he's definitely somebody we want to cover because of obviously the Mothman
prophecies and he's fairly prominent.
But I just wanted to get that out there.
From what I can put together, people love his storytelling ability and ability to bring
many high strangeness happenings and ideas into one.
So he's also one of the original UFOlogists to accept and report on high strangeness,
which the only one who really did it before him was Jacques Ville versus just a nuts
and bolts flying saucer as it was in the beginnings of the universal theory of weird.
So I can't hate on that.
He was one of the first original people actually reporting all the weird shit that was just
flowing into him, which is really hard to come by now because you see people segregating
into you know, what's this or that.
And this is the only theory that I'm going to adhere to and not look at all this other
stuff.
So from that, I do quite enjoy his works because it talks about so much weird stuff.
But yeah, like contemporary 1960s researchers such as J. Allen Heineck and Jacques Ville,
Keel was initially hopeful that he could somehow validate the prevailing extraterrestrial
visitation hypothesis.
However, after a year of investigations, Keel concluded that the extraterrestrial hypothesis
was untenable.
Indeed, both Heineck and Ville eventually had a similar conclusion as Keel himself wrote.
Quote, I abandoned the extraterrestrial hypothesis in 1967 when my own field investigations disclosed
an astonishing overlap between psychic phenomenon and UFOs.
The objects and apparitions do not necessarily originate on another planet and may not even
exist as permanent constructions of matter.
It is more likely that we see what we want to see and interpret such visions according
to our contemporary beliefs.
Quote, that is incredibly early for somebody to be coming to that conclusion.
He was very early.
He was around the same time as Jacques Ville in what he talks about.
And we've seen Jacques Ville actually be thrown under the bus by who was it?
Bill Moore.
Yeah, he did.
Yeah, I've never really looked into that.
But John Keel does appear.
Well, he is one of the original people that kind of has this unified theory of weird that
he concludes with.
So there are people who prefer John Keel to Jacques Ville.
I know I went into this after reading the Mothman prophecies and I was like, I don't
know about this because like I said, we'll talk about it next week.
But no, he's actually be loved, which you'll find with, you know, anybody that we talk about,
that's why we get so much hate.
That in the giggling.
It's just too inane for the average listener.
People love these assholes and they don't like to hear otherwise.
But John Keel, I haven't been able to find the opposite side of it.
Other than like I said, I came up with a few things and we'll talk about it.
The few things aren't really that bad, especially for how early he's around.
So yeah, that's my thought at this point.
I'm interested on where you'll land at it at the end because of course I put everything
in.
So in his books, UFOs Operation Trojan Horse and the eighth tower, Keel argues that a nonhuman
or spiritual intelligence source has staged whole events during a long period of time
in order to propagate and reinforce certain erroneous belief systems.
For example, monsters, ghosts and demons, the fairy faith of middle Europe, vampire legends,
mystery airships in 1897, mystery aeroplanes of the 1930s, mystery helicopters, anomalous
creature sightings, poltergeist phenomena, spheres of light and unidentified flying
objects.
Keel conjectured that ultimately all of these anomalies are a cover for the real phenomena.
He used the term ultra terrestrials to describe UFO occupants he believed to be nonhuman entities
capable of assuming whatever form they desire.
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 from where they might come from.
He thought of UFOs as manifestations from an extra dimensional force or state of energy
beyond our current understanding.
Well, Chelsea, I know he's saying this, but Corey Good introduced the blue avians and
those don't come from Earth, so he clearly is lying.
Like you just can't repeat that.
He may have got caught in his lie, but I'm pretty sure he died.
And Corey Good, in fact, was around.
That's a fair point.
And Corey Good copyrighted that so you know it's real.
Oh yeah.
You know, we've already fully discussed how Corey Good is not an asshole.
Chelsea, don't give away our future.
We've touched on this topic.
Okay.
Yeah.
Like, there's an alternate.
No, that's our timeline right now in the past.
Just go listen to it.
It's there is full of evidence.
That makes sense.
Sure, why not?
Okay, let's continue on.
In our haunted planet, Keel discussed the seldom considered possibility that the alien visitors
to Earth are not visitors at all.
An advanced Earth civilization, which may or may not be human.
Interdimensional life is also considered.
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.
I wonder if that's just certain humans or all humans.
Like if he was just trying to be an asshole here.
I like to think how that quote came off.
He was talking about humans in general.
Okay, it can be interpreted both ways.
Unless you just think everyone's listening to Mothman as an idiot.
He's quoted as saying quote from time to time the playful inhabitants of the otherworld
climb through the curtain in the areas we call windows and they stalk us to drink our
blood create all kinds of mischievous beliefs and misconceptions in our feeble little terrestrial
minds and quote.
This planet is haunted by us.
The other occupants just evade boredom by filling our skies and seas with monsters and
quote.
See like stuff like this.
Can you not?
Like that's some interesting stuff.
Especially for the time that this guy was working on this stuff.
Yeah.
I don't know that we've gotten any further than that.
No we were well it depends on who you ask.
There's definitely people who are making a profit of telling us other things.
That's true.
In the eighth tower in 1975 he wrote quote this is a hypothetical spectrum of energies
that are known to exist but that cannot be accurately measured with present day instruments
and quote.
Keel continues quote this super spectrum is the source of all paranormal manifestations.
It is extra dimensional meaning that it exists outside our own space time continuum yet
influences everything within our reality and quote.
John Keel considered what others thought of as different phenomenon to all be one in
the same or at least connected.
I like that.
I have to say that that really makes sense.
It does and it's come up in several episodes where these things kind of have touches with
other portions of high strangeness and it's kind of shunned by the rest of that group.
That's what I was going to say and it's these people that I like.
To this day it still gets cut.
That don't hold back certain portions because they're trying to it's like confirmation buys
they just want it to prove their point so they don't look at anything else but they
kind of touch on all this really super weird stuff.
To that point I do actually think the people who avoid that do have a good reason for it
in that they're trying to prove this phenomenon exists so they're only looking for the best
cases not the craziest ones that might connect to other crazy things within they have to
prove.
Does that make sense?
No that does make sense but such a weird crazy part of our reality that it's like what's
going to prove what?
I mean John Keels makes sense.
How are you going to prove that but how are you also going to prove UFOs are like nothing
bold things flying in the sky?
I don't know.
I think I have a fairly interesting viewpoint on that right now just because I'm finishing
up the research on an episode that came out prior to this one and it's different people
trying to justify their worldview against other people's worldviews that are contradicting
to theirs.
I was just going to say that differ from theirs that's so weird for an asshole episode.
Yeah.
And here we're seeing.
Who thought they would shit on others?
Here we're saying future and past collide.
Outside of the time phase continuum.
So we can just apply John Keels theory to this.
That's kind of the end of what he talks about.
I mean that's kind of where they make the connection to Hunter S. Thompson because he
like travels all over the world like just picking up different stories and stuff like
this.
He went a lot to drugs.
But then he yeah I don't know that he.
That was actually the only part that was the same.
You know it might make it a lot more interesting to be honest with you but yeah so that's kind
of what he talks about and so one thing is this what I want to leave it off with.
Yeah this is what I want to leave it off with.
So he'll dies at some point.
I can't remember what.
After his death one of his friends has started a website and they're publishing his letters
and writings still to which a lot of people are still invested in that are still coming
out and there's still.
Like new stuff is still coming out.
Yeah there's still a lot of unedited content from Point Pleasant coming out still today
from his notes that they're posting on his website.
I found a particular letter on his thoughts that I wanted to read here to close this out.
It's his thoughts on the Philadelphia experiment and it was too long for me.
So I went to AI and lit a light bulb for 20 minutes and had it summarize it here for me.
So let's see how it summarized this article on what Keele thinks about the Philadelphia
experiment.
And Chelsea to be fair if you did it in the dark you just canceled out the energy.
That's true net zero.
I didn't unfortunately but next time I will get that candle late taking it back to the
last century.
Keele writes to Robert A. Gorman and recalls their previous exchanges and Gorman's article
in Fate magazine.
I guess he was just you know writing a nice letter so you can't just jump right into business.
This is old school.
Letter discusses Morris K. Jessup's negative view of the Varo document which he considered
a joke and his pre-suicide letters that reflected his depressive personality.
Jessup's suicide was attributed to career setbacks and family problems.
The Jessup file was handed to Ivan Sanderson in 1966 for his book on UFOs and both Sanderson
and the author read the material concluded that the Varo document was the work of a
schizophrenic.
Keele received letters from Mr. Alende who provided proof of his identity and admitted
to writing the annotations in the Varo book.
The author claims that the real perpetrator of the hoax was the Varo secretary who typed
up the document not Allende.
The letter also mentions Allende's unstable personality evidenced by his erotic letters.
Keele researched the Philadelphia Naval Yards connection to the Manhattan Project suggesting
the garbled stories from this period's influenced Allende's claims.
Keele briefly mentions the magician Dunninger who claimed to make ships invisible during
the war which might have contributed to the legend.
The letter critiques the book The Philadelphia Experiment by Charles Berlitz and William Moore
asserting that the book was profitable but ignored much negative material.
The author believes that Allende was reportedly dying of cancer in 1970, may still be alive
in writing letters and views him as a victim rather than a conscious hoaxer.
So I thought that was fun.
If you need a refresher on the Philadelphia Experiment, go back.
We did a whole couple episodes on it I believe.
Well it was part 3 of the 4 part Bill Moore saga.
Yes it was.
Yeah it was.
Go back and listen to it.
Or was that Majestic 12?
No it's in there somewhere.
No Majestic 12 was in Bill Moore.
Go back and listen to Bill Moore by the way because that'll never disappoint unless it's
you know your high hopes that Bill Moore is a good guy.
In the case you know.
Yeah unless you hate your main laughter and like Bill Moore.
Philadelphia Experiment.
Go check it out.
Whether it's a 2 part or 1 part or 3 part.
That won't disappoint either.
Unless you like Bill Moore then it will.
Yeah so I thought that was an interesting take on it.
A lot more candid than Bill Moore.
Yeah I mean that AI summary was better than the.
It was better research than Bill Moore did into the entire thing.
Yes.
Thank you.
I try.
So let's get into a little bit of criticism.
Okay I lied that was a lost thing.
Criticism is the last thing and here we go.
He kept his sources mostly anonymous so no one could re-interview them.
He asked leading questions, introduced witnesses to ideas from other narratives and all in all
was a poor interviewer.
I'll probably agree with that based on I mean I've only read the Mothman prophecies.
I would like to read the other books.
Some of them not all of them.
But I will say just based on what I read you can kind of tell his interview skills.
He was a little bit a lot leading.
He did have very leading questions in his interviews.
I mean he didn't really have a journalist background.
He just kind of started writing and I mean he was one of the first people doing this
so I don't know other than just having an interest in it.
I can really blame him for that question Mark.
I don't know.
You feel I don't know.
I feel like if you wanted to make a career of it you probably should get the skills at
some point.
Yeah I mean look at what was being put out at that time.
We literally just talked about Bill Moore and the Philadelphia experiment.
Was anybody doing it good then?
They were way too drunk at the time from what I understand from Mad Men.
Probably yeah.
I mean you're definitely right.
You should be trying to I don't know.
I don't know what the standards were back then.
I don't even know what the standards are now to be honest with you.
And to be fair like they're just as bad as not worse today because they need the clicks.
There are people just straight up making shit up.
I mean technically there are people straight up making shit up at that time.
Depending on the day you catch them Alex Jones sometimes considers himself a journalist.
I don't know.
If you bring him to court he'll deny it profusely but sometimes journalism does in fact come
up as a thing he does on his show.
Yeah that he does.
In his own works he freely admits and explains how he interviews his witnesses.
He might not have even realized it but he implants false memories in the way he asks
questions, smells, sounds, placing importance on everyday experiences.
All of these things can change or color memories and lead to false connections.
The person being interviewed wants to please the interviewer so when they're asked if
they remember a strange phone call days before or after the incident they'll remember it
whether or not it happened.
The person goes on to say read the Mad Men prophecies and kill admits to stuff like this
freely with examples.
If you know anything about false memory implantation it's pretty easy to see white heels interviews
can't be trusted.
There's a ton of this in the Mad Men prophecies.
I don't know if it has to be he will just say I asked this person if they remember anyone
strange hanging around before their encounter.
He straight out just asked him that.
They'll be like why yeah now that I think about it there was this guy.
He was weird.
In addition, Keele claims hundreds of sightings but fails to name anyone so no one can follow
up.
It makes those claims worthless and drops the witnesses from hundreds to maybe a dozen.
He won't even name witnesses who believe both men to be a bird.
Again read his own works he claims to want to preserve their anonymity and protect them
from ridicule but at the same time with no ability to corroborate any of his sources we
might as well dismiss them as fake tea ops.
I don't know maybe fictitious shit.
Yep maybe that wasn't as spelling.
Yeah so that's the end of my episode.
I really feel I'm kind of on the I mean obviously these are the crit like this is what they
got for criticisms.
It's the same kind of criticisms of the Mothman prophecies which I'll go through when we do
the Mothman prophecies next week.
For someone who is on the leading edge of finding something in this field I find him
struggling with this interview process which is obviously erroneous but for having something
that's so like light years ahead with the way he kind of pulled it all together is on
kind of the forefront of it to kind of like he still ended up putting something together
that they still use to this day.
So I don't know I'm kind of on the obviously yeah he should have been better.
I don't think he pulled all of it completely out of his ass.
I do think he led witnesses.
He left stuff out.
He used other people's work we'll talk about it next week but he still pulled this all
together to come up with like a theory that seems to be fairly working for.
Well I wonder if it was kind of laziness that led him there and I just say that like he
doesn't seem to want to do a thorough investigation or have to give any of his research so he
can connect things by just kind of going into the story and kind of trying to get people
to say the things he wants.
Yeah I honestly it could be laziness.
I think he had things he was trying to connect throughout the process in which he was looking
to see if it came up in other other circumstances and just went about it the completely wrong
way.
It very well could have been laziness because he said he just kind of had an interest in
it.
It wasn't his full time gig like that he originally got into so he very well could have been you
know just winging it and I don't know that I would do any better if I was just like I
have an interest in it my whole life.
I don't know that I do any better going out there now to interview people if I just one
day was like you know what I'm just gonna give this a shot.
Yeah that's fair and yeah it could be too that he just wanted to connect these two things
so bad that he was leading the stories to kind of go that way but yeah it's kind of hard
to say especially I'm looking forward to hearing the next episode where we get a bit more
information so I can kind of make a better informed view on whether he's lazy or intentionally
misleading.
Yeah yeah I mean even listening to him on our bell I was just kind of like this guy's
kind of boring to listen to even though we saw all this like weird paranormal stuff and
let me tell you I listened to the Mothman prophecies on Audible I'm having trouble filtering
where I should put on what episode but I thought you know maybe it'd be better if John Keel
narrated himself and let me tell you no it wouldn't have because I found them equally
each is boring to listen to.
Well that's good and I can't wait to hear the second half of this but in the meantime
I have been Taylor here with Chelsea we are journey to the fringe thank you all for listening
we'll see you next week.
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