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Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeart Radio in grim

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Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Mackey. For the best experience, listen

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Speaker 1: with headphones.

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Speaker 2: I would like to tell you a little bit about

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Speaker 2: tonight's speaker, mister John Keel. Mister Keele writes for approximately

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Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty newspapers in this country and all

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Speaker 2: over the world which deal exclusively with the problem of UFOs.

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Speaker 2: For the North American Newspaper Alliance that's NASA, he's traveled

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Speaker 2: over one hundred for a out of ten thousand miles

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Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty six alone. He personally has investigated scores

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Speaker 2: of UFO incidents, and he has interviewed scores of witnesses.

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Speaker 2: Mister Keel, I would say, at the present time, has

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Speaker 2: done more recently surely for the UFO subject than any

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Speaker 2: other writer or lecturer that I know of, and it

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Speaker 2: gives me personally a great deal of finessius faction to

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Speaker 2: bring him now to our microphonas mister John Keel.

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Speaker 3: I'm Toby Ball, and this is Strange Arrivals Episode ten,

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Speaker 3: Invasion of the Ultra Terrestrials. The difference between UFO stories

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Speaker 3: that become widely known and those that fall into obscurity

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Speaker 3: is often a product of the telling. Simply put, an

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Speaker 3: exciting story will gain traction and a less exciting one

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Speaker 3: will fade away. The classic example of this is the

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Speaker 3: nineteen forty seven Roswell Crash, which we covered in season two.

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Speaker 3: The incident largely disappeared from the UFO world soon after

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Speaker 3: it happened, only to resurface in nineteen eighty with the

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Speaker 3: publication of Charles Burlett's and William Moore's The Roswell Incident.

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Speaker 3: After that retelling, it became a staple of UFO lore.

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Speaker 3: Behind every famous citing or encounter, there is a storyteller

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Speaker 3: who made the experience captivating to the public, as we

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Speaker 3: saw with the moth Man encounters and all they went

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Speaker 3: with them. One such storyteller was John Keel.

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Speaker 4: It's interesting to me because I was attracted to his

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Speaker 4: books and writings from a very early age, and this

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Speaker 4: is when I was first sort of became interested in

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Speaker 4: weird stuff, and like him, I'd read the books of

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Speaker 4: Charles Forts. I was sort of subscribing to Fourteen Times

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Speaker 4: and to Flying Sourcer Reviews. I'm David Clark. I would

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Speaker 4: describe myself as a folklorist and journalist. I work at

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Speaker 4: Sheffield Heller from the University where I teach in the

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Speaker 4: journalism department, and for a couple of decades I worked

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Speaker 4: as a news reporter before I got into academia. But

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Speaker 4: I'm also the author of a lot of books and

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Speaker 4: articles on anomalous phenomena, UFOs, cryptozoology, and Footian subjects. The

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Speaker 4: issues of Flying Source Review that I was reading had

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Speaker 4: a lot of his articles in there, and what struck

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Speaker 4: me immediately because I was a budding writer myself and

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Speaker 4: I was trying to get break into writing and get

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Speaker 4: things published. I just loved his writing style. I put

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Speaker 4: me a finger on what it is about his writing

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Speaker 4: style today, I think it's fast paced, it's energetic, kits,

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Speaker 4: it draws you in, uses a lot of sort of

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Speaker 4: quote speech, and I didn't realize it at the time,

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Speaker 4: and now as a teach on the journalism course, I've

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Speaker 4: come to realize that he was writing in what became

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Speaker 4: known as the new journalism style, which was popularized by

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Speaker 4: in Hunter S. Thompson Tom Wolfe.

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Speaker 3: New journalis was a movement that developed in the nineteen

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Speaker 3: sixties and seventies. It featured a literary approach to reporting

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Speaker 3: and centered the journalist as both a character and the

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Speaker 3: story and a subjective narrator.

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Speaker 4: He sort of crafted his own version of it rather

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Speaker 4: than writing in the way that they were. He's incorporated

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Speaker 4: all this sort of forty and weirdness and mixing nonfiction

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Speaker 4: with fiction and with verbatim reportes, and I don't know

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Speaker 4: a real heady mix that to me as a I

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Speaker 4: think I must have been thirteen or fourteen years old

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Speaker 4: when I first read the Mothmann prophecies. Even today, it

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Speaker 4: just blew my mind.

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Speaker 3: John Keel was born in nineteen thirty in western New

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Speaker 3: York State. In nineteen fifty seven, he published a memoir

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Speaker 3: titled Jadu. It recounted his travels, mostly in Asia and

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Speaker 3: his strange experiences.

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Speaker 4: He'd gone to Egypt, where it's seen his first flying sorcerer,

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Speaker 4: I think, in nineteen fift fifty two. And he'd been

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Speaker 4: to Iraq, where I think he may have even met

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Speaker 4: someone that sounds very much like Sadam Hussein in the

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Speaker 4: mid nineteen fifties, and he crossed over into It, traveled

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Speaker 4: into India, into Kashmir, and actually managed to get over

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Speaker 4: the border into Tibet before the Chinese closed it. In

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Speaker 4: his autobiography Jadou, he talks about being led by these

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Speaker 4: people up into this remote valley where they were hearing

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Speaker 4: these crying noises, and he saw what we would describe

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Speaker 4: as the Yeti or the abominable snowman's.

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Speaker 3: This is from Jadou describing his encounter with the Yeri.

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Speaker 3: It gives you an idea of the sense of adventure

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Speaker 3: that he was able to convey through his writing.

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Speaker 5: The Lamas had given me a bare little monk's cell

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Speaker 5: for the night, and I was sitting there trying to

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Speaker 5: finish up some notes before going to bed. The cry

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Speaker 5: came drifting across the Yuksam Plateau on the low icy

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Speaker 5: wind sweeping down from the frosty head of Mount kanchun Junga,

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Speaker 5: only a few miles away. At first I thought it

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Speaker 5: was just a bird and didn't pay much attention to it.

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Speaker 5: Then a flurry of activity sounded in the dark, smelly

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Speaker 5: corridor in the old high Lama of Dutti. A wizard,

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Speaker 5: baggy eyed little man appeared in my doorway. You're here,

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Speaker 5: he asked excitedly. Here was just a bird, wasn't it?

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Speaker 4: No bird?

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Speaker 3: Shukba Kil and a guide set off to track the Yeddi.

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Speaker 3: Shukpa is another name for the same animal. They follow

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Speaker 3: its tracks for days, encountering strange things along the way,

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Speaker 3: including a kind of seance in a Buddhist temple high

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Speaker 3: in the Himalayas. Eventually he arrives in the village of Lachin,

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Speaker 3: which he says is eighty eight hundred feet above sea level.

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Speaker 3: Children had apparently seen the Yeddi just hours before his

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Speaker 3: arrival and take him to the spot, and that is

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Speaker 3: where Keel has his encounter.

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Speaker 5: Cautiously, I moved forward, staggering up and inclined paths strewn

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Speaker 5: with giant boulders. Finally I emerged onto the edge of

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Speaker 5: a sweeping cavity filled with water, where broken trees and

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Speaker 5: decayed bushes poked up like skeletons. That was where I

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Speaker 5: saw it. Maybe it wasn't a YETI I wasn't close

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Speaker 5: enough to be absolutely sure. But something was out there

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Speaker 5: across the lake, something big, breathtakingly big and brown and

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Speaker 5: moving swiftly, splashing through the shallow, icy waters toward a

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Speaker 5: pile of boulders. As it neared them, another brown blur

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Speaker 5: moved out to meet it, and together they disappeared beyond

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Speaker 5: the debris of a landfall.

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Speaker 3: Keel also read the works of Charles Fort. Fort wrote

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Speaker 3: a series of books in the early twentieth century that

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Speaker 3: defined the realm of the paranormal. He was a collector

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Speaker 3: of facts and stories that he related to show the

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Speaker 3: pervasiveness of things and events that were not explained by

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Speaker 3: current science, things like spontaneous human combustion, rains of frogs, poltergeists,

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Speaker 3: unexplained disappearances, and of course UFOs.

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Speaker 6: I think the influence from Fort was mostly just this

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Speaker 6: idea that there are a lot of weird things happening.

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Speaker 6: It's not just one thing or another. To my understanding,

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Speaker 6: Fort did not necessarily theorize about what might be causing

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Speaker 6: various things.

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Speaker 3: Aaron Gullias, host of the Saucer Life podcast.

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Speaker 6: He was more of a collector of stories and a

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Speaker 6: coalator of stories, and Keel takes that idea of looking

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Speaker 6: at a wide array of strange things that's happening and

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Speaker 6: then theorizing about what might be going on. And one

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Speaker 6: phrase from Fort that Keel mentions at least a few

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Speaker 6: times in various writings is this idea that humans on earth,

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Speaker 6: that we are property, that we belong to somebody. There's

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Speaker 6: something out there that We're not much different from the

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Speaker 6: other animals. We're just part of the collection. So what

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Speaker 6: Keil does is he'll take little phrases like that and

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Speaker 6: sort of spin them into theories. Kills an interesting guy,

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Speaker 6: and he came up with these various ideas and never

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Speaker 6: you'd never really get a huge impression about what he

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Speaker 6: actually comes down on the side of as far as

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Speaker 6: believing any of this, But there's a lot of wild

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Speaker 6: thought and speculation and things like that in his writing.

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Speaker 4: I think he was described as the olmful terrible of vieupology,

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Speaker 4: you know, terrible French pronunciation, And I think he just

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Speaker 4: enjoyed disrupting the whole scene.

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Speaker 3: Keel especially like poking at what are called the nuts

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Speaker 3: and bolts researchers, the ones who wanted to use scientific

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Speaker 3: methods to find evidence and proof of metallic craft flying

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Speaker 3: through our skies.

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Speaker 4: He described them as serious in inverted comma, serious euthologists,

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Speaker 4: the type that I mean. I do this. I'm someone

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Speaker 4: who spends lots of times looking at government documents and things,

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Speaker 4: but I do think there's a group that take themselves

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Speaker 4: very very seriously and the whole thing about contact tees,

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Speaker 4: for instance, and the more esoteric aspects of upology which

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Speaker 4: Kiele loved to talk about and to write about. There

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Speaker 4: is a group of people who just want that not

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Speaker 4: to be part of the UFO myth.

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Speaker 3: In fact, the nuts and Bolts people found the contactees

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Speaker 3: and esoteric thinking to be embarrassing and to undermine what

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Speaker 3: they considered the importance of the topic. Here's Aaron Gollias

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Speaker 3: again talking about Keel. He mentions NICAP and APRO, which

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Speaker 3: were two prominent civilian in UFO research organizations that tended

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Speaker 3: towards the nuts and Bolt school of ufology.

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Speaker 6: He was a UFO person, but he was not somebody

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Speaker 6: that would go to NICAP or APRO meetings and sort

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Speaker 6: of get excited about convincing the Air Force to release

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Speaker 6: all of its paperwork. I think it was Keel who

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Speaker 6: had this line in one of his articles where he

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Speaker 6: sort of reversed the way things are normally presented and

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Speaker 6: he says the UFO research community is not telling the

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Speaker 6: Air Force what it knows about flying saucers and basically saying, look, look,

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Speaker 6: the Air Force probably doesn't know any more than we do,

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Speaker 6: and probably they know less. We just think they have

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Speaker 6: the answer because we think they're physical objects in the air.

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Speaker 6: But if it's stranger than that, then the Air Force

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Speaker 6: isn't going to have a clue one way or the other.

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Speaker 6: So that sort of puts him at odds with the

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Speaker 6: nuts and bolts flying saucer people who dominated the scene

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Speaker 6: in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Where Keel was probably

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Speaker 6: the most popular was with those other flying saucer people

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Speaker 6: that weren't necessarily part of that mainstream.

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Speaker 3: In an open letter to all UFO researchers released on

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Speaker 3: January first, nineteen sixty eight, Keel blasted the UFO community

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Speaker 3: for not generating any substantial research. He writes about the

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Speaker 3: vast number of appearances of these objects in nineteen sixty

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Speaker 3: seven and believes it important that a better understanding of

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Speaker 3: their appearance is necessary.

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Speaker 5: The UFO activity is far greater than the UFO reports.

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Speaker 5: Each report probably represents thousands of non reported sightings. The

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Speaker 5: sightings are therefore unimportant to the big picture, and their

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Speaker 5: only value is to provide a statistical springboard. It may

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Speaker 5: be that the objects themselves are irrelevant to the basic

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Speaker 5: problems inherent in the phenomenon if they are are merely

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Speaker 5: vehicles of some type, then we must determine the actual

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Speaker 5: purposes of their many landings and covert activities in isolated,

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Speaker 5: thinly populated sections of the world. Later, he writes, remember this,

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Speaker 5: sightings are generally irrelevant, even misleading. Why do you suppose

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Speaker 5: the Air Force spends so little time and effort investigating

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Speaker 5: routine sightings.

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Speaker 4: So anyone who's trying to find evidence of physical UFOs,

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Speaker 4: you know not and Baltz craft are on a hiding

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Speaker 4: to nothing. They're never going to find them. It's like

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Speaker 4: trying to find the end of a rainbow. You know

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Speaker 4: you're never going to find that. And I think he

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Speaker 4: will realize that, and that's why he came up with

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Speaker 4: the concept of ultraterrestrials.

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Speaker 3: Rejecting the idea that UFOs were from outer space, Keel

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Speaker 3: put forward a theory involving what he called the super

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Speaker 3: spectrum and ultraterrestrials, a theory that was expansive, engrounded in

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Speaker 3: an eccentric reading of history, and well unusual. After the break,

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Speaker 3: strange arrivals will return in a moment. I think if

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Speaker 3: you talk to most people about UFOs, even if they

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Speaker 3: aren't believers or have any interest in the subject, their

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Speaker 3: understanding will be that UFOs come from outer space. This

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Speaker 3: is called the extraterrestrial hypothesis or ETCH, and this is

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Speaker 3: where most researchers start. But some researchers get frustrated by

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Speaker 3: their inability to approach an answer to the phenomenon. This

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Speaker 3: group included j Allen Heinek, the in house scientists for

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Speaker 3: Project Blue Book and the best known UFO researcher in

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Speaker 3: the sixties and seventies again David clark Well.

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Speaker 4: Heinech, like lots of other people who've gone through that stage,

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Speaker 4: was trying to make the subject scientifically respectable. He was

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Speaker 4: using a lot of scientific language to use a phrase

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Speaker 4: that Keile used to use, the people just tilting at

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Speaker 4: the same windmills over and over again and reinventing the wheel,

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Speaker 4: and trying to put something into a box and make

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Speaker 4: people take it seriously in a scientific way that it's

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Speaker 4: impossible to categorize in that way, because the UFO is

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Speaker 4: what is it.

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Speaker 3: Heineck eventually distanced himself from et and became more interested

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Speaker 3: in stranger explanations. John Keel was already there.

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Speaker 6: And what Keel does is he begins to look at

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Speaker 6: UFOs and other paranoral phenomenon not as necessarily discrete things,

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Speaker 6: but maybe all being various expressions of one phenomenon. And

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Speaker 6: one of the ideas he discusses quite a bit is

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Speaker 6: this almost ultradimensional theory of UFOs and other paranormal phenomenon,

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Speaker 6: where perhaps there are entities, objects, things in dimensions that

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Speaker 6: exist above ours, sort of like an overlay to our

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Speaker 6: dimension that at various times and in various places or

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Speaker 6: to various people, these things break through, and people on

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Speaker 6: our side perceive something that might be completely normal in

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Speaker 6: this other dimension, but for us in our dimension seems

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Speaker 6: amazing or strange or physically impossible.

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Speaker 3: Kiel lays out this theory in his nineteen seventy five

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Speaker 3: book The Eighth Tower.

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Speaker 4: And he came up with this amazing, as I thought

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Speaker 4: at the time, amazing idea about the supersprum of these

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Speaker 4: things were from some sort of higher vibration, and that

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Speaker 4: they came into our will via this all of the

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Speaker 4: ultraviolet frequencies, and that the vibration so that they came

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Speaker 4: into the visible light spectrum. This is set out in

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Speaker 4: his final book, The Eighth Tower, which is just Bulker's.

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Speaker 3: The Eighth Tower is the book that lays out Kiel's

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Speaker 3: theory of what he calls the super spectrum and ultra terrestrials.

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Speaker 3: He talks about both of these ideas in an incredibly

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Speaker 3: broad context, involving the entire world and going back to

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Speaker 3: deep prehistoric times. Trying to summarize the entire book would

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Speaker 3: be impossible, but we can get at some of the

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Speaker 3: basic ideas. First, Kiel says that there's a super spectrum

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Speaker 3: of vibrations that we are unable to detect, but which

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Speaker 3: definitely exist. The easiest way to understand this is probably

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Speaker 3: the idea that there are colors that exist but not

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Speaker 3: within the spec visible to humans. Ultraviolet light, for instance,

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Speaker 3: is below the frequency that we can detect. Keel's theory

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Speaker 3: is that there is an entire reality that exists in

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Speaker 3: the same place that we do, but that we can't detect.

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Speaker 3: Paranormal events, he says, are when that reality interacts with ours.

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Speaker 3: He gives an example of a boy who is looking

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Speaker 3: through a microscope at a drop of water he sees

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Speaker 3: a microbe. The microbe, if it was capable of awareness,

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Speaker 3: would have no idea that the boy even existed. Kiel

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Speaker 3: then says that if the boy used the point of

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Speaker 3: a needle to manipulate the microbe, the microbe would quote

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Speaker 3: have no frame of reference for such an object, so

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Speaker 3: it would have to speculate and theorize and invent an explanation.

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Speaker 3: He further says that if you explain to the microbe

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Speaker 3: that a world exists outside of its under standing, it

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Speaker 3: would not believe you and tell you that everyone knows

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Speaker 3: that the universe is made of liquid. He goes on

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Speaker 3: to say.

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Speaker 5: The plastic masses of energy that form the nucleus of

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Speaker 5: the UFO phenomenon exist outside our time in the same way,

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Speaker 5: and like the boy's needle, only passed through our dimension occasionally.

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Speaker 3: And later.

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Speaker 5: The energy field of the super spectrum shares the space

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Speaker 5: of our solar system, define another one of our physical laws.

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Speaker 5: Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

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Speaker 5: Because the energy of the super spectrum is markedly different

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Speaker 5: from the energy of the electromagnetic spectrum, the two can

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Speaker 5: occupy a single space.

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Speaker 3: As Arengolius said earlier, the super spectrum exists as kind

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Speaker 3: of an overlay over our own reality, and because these

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Speaker 3: visional breakthroughs from the super spectrum are not really from

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Speaker 3: our reality. The physical laws that we experience don't apply

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Speaker 3: to them. Thus, UFOs can move in ways that seem

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Speaker 3: to defy the laws of physics, and cryptids can just

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Speaker 3: disappear into thin air. Speaking of which, the other part

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Speaker 3: of this theory is the idea of ultraterrestrials. These are

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Speaker 3: beings from the super spectrum that occasionally end up in

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Speaker 3: our reality. Kiel puts this in a historical context of

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Speaker 3: priests of ancient civilizations communing with gods. He theorizes that

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Speaker 3: these priests are people with enhanced psychic abilities that allow

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Speaker 3: them to more easily perceive the super spectrum. Are you

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Speaker 3: still with me?

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Speaker 4: Keel?

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Speaker 3: Rights?

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Speaker 5: The religious orders conjure angels, even great luminous blobs purporting

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Speaker 5: to be God himself. The magical crafts called up demons

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Speaker 5: and great spirits. The spiritualists summon the shades of the

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Speaker 5: deer departed.

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Speaker 3: He says that these rights can summon altraterrestrials from the

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Speaker 3: super spectrum, and when the altraterrestrials interact with humans, their

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Speaker 3: substance changes from pure energy to atomic reality, and they

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Speaker 3: are now in our physical world. Kiel says, that they

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Speaker 3: are adrift without a mind of their own.

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Speaker 5: Some of these transmogrifications attain a degree of independence once

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Speaker 5: they have been created, but they are mindless and lost.

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Speaker 5: They wander around our dimension as ghosts and goblins, harmless

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Speaker 5: until they find a believer. Then they feed off the

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Speaker 5: mind and emotions of that believer, assuming the identity subconsciously

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Speaker 5: chosen by the believer, and creating manifestations within the context

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Speaker 5: of the belief or frame of reference.

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Speaker 4: I think I know what it means in that there

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Speaker 4: is no external agency that's creating this, and that we

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Speaker 4: are the phenomenon. That's how we phrased it. And I

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Speaker 4: think it means that all the stories, all the experiences,

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Speaker 4: are all things that are happening to us that appear

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Speaker 4: to be external. There's an external source, but they're actually

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Speaker 4: generated by us that were almost like a dream that

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Speaker 4: we're living.

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Speaker 3: This theory explains why paranormal experiences change over the centuries,

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Speaker 3: from fairies and werewolves to the Yeddi and aliens or angels,

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Speaker 3: to giant airships to UFOs. While the altra terrestrials are

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Speaker 3: separate from us, our minds give them their form, and

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Speaker 3: so the paranormal phenomena comes in large part from inside us.

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Speaker 3: This was broadly speaking, fairly close to theories put forward

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Speaker 3: by most notably prominent UFO researcher Jacques Valet, who laid

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Speaker 3: out a similar vision in his nineteen sixty nine book

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Speaker 3: Passport to Magonia. But Keil had been working on this

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Speaker 3: for years and claimed that he was the originator of

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Speaker 3: these ideas. This is from a letter to the editor

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Speaker 3: that appeared in Gray Barker's Newsletter in March nineteen seventy six.

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Speaker 3: Keel begins by referencing a drawing of him that appeared

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Speaker 3: on the cover of a previous edition.

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Speaker 5: Dear Gray, my usual fee for allowing my handsome countenance

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Speaker 5: to be used on the cover of scurrilous publications is

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Speaker 5: five thousand dollars. However, in this case you will be

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Speaker 5: an exception. I have instructed my lawyer to sue you

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Speaker 5: for everything you've got.

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Speaker 3: He then claims that Alan Heinez and especially Jacques Valet's

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Speaker 3: recent works were essentially restating things that he had theori

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Speaker 3: rised and written about in the nineteen sixties, in which

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Speaker 3: those two men had criticized at the time. He refers

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Speaker 3: to Valet's nineteen seventy five book The Invisible College as

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Speaker 3: part Valat, part Keel, and part bullshit.

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Speaker 5: Then he writes, the simple truth is this, there is

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Speaker 5: nothing whatsoever to the UFO phenomenon. There is nothing to

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Speaker 5: be gained by a scientific study of the matter. The

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00:24:29,680 --> 00:24:34,800
Speaker 5: etch is nothing but a trick, a propaganda device that

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Speaker 5: has been foisted upon us historically. The overall phenomenon has

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Speaker 5: done considerable damage to the human race and is responsible

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Speaker 5: for the deaths of millions of people. It is human

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Speaker 5: to indulge in wishful thinking and hope that it is

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Speaker 5: leading us somewhere, but it has always let us down

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Speaker 5: dead ends to destruction. I don't think that's situation is

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Speaker 5: suddenly going to change.

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Speaker 3: Barker replied that he was glad Keel was suing him

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Speaker 3: for everything he had, because his net worth was about

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00:25:10,320 --> 00:25:13,800
Speaker 3: minus thirty seven cents, and Keel would end up owing

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Speaker 3: him money, but that he'd settle for a beer. Clearly

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Speaker 3: a couple of jokers. You might have noticed that Keel

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Speaker 3: claimed that the phenomenon is responsible for millions of deaths.

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Speaker 3: He doesn't explain that statement, but in the Eighth Tower

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Speaker 3: he ties the phenomenon to all sorts of historical events,

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Speaker 3: including the Black Plague, which did kill millions in Europe

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Speaker 3: during the Middle Ages. So I think that's what he means.

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Speaker 3: So how should we take all of this? Keiel was

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Speaker 3: such a character. It's not clear how serious or exacting

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Speaker 3: he was compared with, say Alan Heinek.

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Speaker 4: To paraphrase the xpiles, I think I definitely think he

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Speaker 4: wants it to believe. It was difficult to divine what

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Speaker 4: he actually believed from his writings because there's a lot

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Speaker 4: of contradictory material in there. And there's no doubt that

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Speaker 4: even in his repetage of events that we knew we

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Speaker 4: know took place, you know, like with the mofman out

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Speaker 4: sightings in West Virginia. I mean, there's no doubt about

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00:26:20,160 --> 00:26:23,240
Speaker 4: it that a lot of his descriptions of that, although

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00:26:23,280 --> 00:26:28,400
Speaker 4: it's factual, it's exaggerated, it's done for effect. The way

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Speaker 4: he's presented it. You do wonder did those events really

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Speaker 4: happen in the way that he described them, And I

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Speaker 4: think some of them didn't, and I think he knew

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Speaker 4: they didn't happen in that way, But because he needed

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Speaker 4: to write a good story, he cunningly sort of combined

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Speaker 4: real happenings with fictional happenings.

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Speaker 3: And this might be a product of keel self image,

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Speaker 3: because unlike Heinek or John Mack or Cynthia Hind, he

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Speaker 3: didn't see himself first and foremost as a researcher.

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00:27:00,440 --> 00:27:02,960
Speaker 4: They actually asked him that question, and they said, what

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00:27:03,040 --> 00:27:06,160
Speaker 4: would you like to be remembered as? And rather than being,

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00:27:06,240 --> 00:27:09,719
Speaker 4: you know, remembered as a euthologist or you know, a

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00:27:09,760 --> 00:27:12,520
Speaker 4: new age person or the author of the mouth and prophecies,

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00:27:12,680 --> 00:27:15,119
Speaker 4: he just wanted to be remembered as an effective writer.

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00:27:16,760 --> 00:27:19,840
Speaker 3: And being an effective writer in his case at least

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00:27:20,359 --> 00:27:23,439
Speaker 3: meant that he didn't necessarily intend for every word he

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Speaker 3: wrote to be taken literally.

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Speaker 4: I thought he believed all this. I thought he was

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Speaker 4: convinced that these altra terrestrials were real. The big sort

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Speaker 4: of thing, the blow, as he was at the time

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Speaker 4: when I met him and we had this long discussion,

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Speaker 4: was he just told me that he'd invented the whole thing.

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Speaker 4: You know, it was a literary device.

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Speaker 3: Now many years later, the folklorist and Clark isn't so

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Speaker 3: much concerned with the truth of the story as in

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Speaker 3: the story itself and the storyteller.

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Speaker 4: Attracted te Kiel's writings because he was a storyteller, a

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Speaker 4: very effective storyteller, and his writings will live on long

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Speaker 4: after a lot of these serious upologists have been long forgotten.

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Speaker 3: If he seems to be talking about these ideas in

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Speaker 3: the present tense, it's because the ideas are still around

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Speaker 3: today and they're influencing some of the highest profile UFO

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Speaker 3: research being conducted right now. Next time on Strange Rivals.

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Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and

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Speaker 1: Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted

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Speaker 1: by Toby Ball and produced by rima Il Kali, Jesse Funk,

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00:28:46,680 --> 00:28:51,880
Speaker 1: and Noemi Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick,

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00:28:52,080 --> 00:28:56,600
Speaker 1: and Aaron Manke, and supervising producer Josh Thain, with voice

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00:28:56,640 --> 00:29:00,760
Speaker 1: acting by Ben Bolin. Learn more more about the show

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Speaker 1: at Grimminmild dot com, slash Strange Arrivals, and find more

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Speaker 1: podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.