Fortean Doug Skinner’s (my interview here) one-man effort to preserve the archives of the late paranormal researcher John A. Keel has been nothing short of heroic. Skinner, a personal friend of Keel’s, inherited the writer’s notes and news clippings, and has been quietly scanning and posting them all at www.JohnKeel.com for three years now. His latest update includes an excerpt from Keel’s UFO Dictionary, an eclectic mix of neologisms, slang, paranormal language and repurposed words from fields like psychiatry and medicine.
My favorite from the excerpts thus far provided by Skinner:
“Skeptic: One who has not seen a UFO.”
Keel’s contributions to Forteana loom even now. Like Jacques Vallee, Keel eventually came to the conclusion that sightings of cryptids, UFOs and various folkloric characters like elves and demons were actually caused by “ultraterrestrials”: a hidden species that shares some aspect of the world with humanity. Call it a Universal Field Theory of the Weird, if you like.
Check out the rest of the list at JohnKeel.com.
If you’re interested in Keel’s “ultraterrestrials” theory, you might enjoy Our Haunted Planet or (if you can find it) Disneyland of the Gods. You can also try to find Vallee’s Passport to Magonia, but be prepared to spend a lot of money.
