John A. Keel WHY UFOS

tions. The governmental attitude has succeeded in maintainingskepticism among those who have never seena UFO and has helped foster the general disinterest of thepress in the subject. As a result, most of the reported UFOactivity has gone unnoticed, and the alarming scope of thephenomenon is unknown except to the relatively smallhandful of organizations and individuals who have tried tokeep tabs on the sightings.When I first decided to look into these matters, inMarch, 1966, I subscribed to several newspaper clippingservices, and I was stunned by the results. I often receivedas many as 150 clippings for a single day! My immediatereaction, of course, was one of disbelief. 1 thought that allof the newspapers in the country had thrown objectivityout the window and were participating in some kind ofgigantic put-on. It seemed impossible that so manyunidentifiable things were flying around our sacred skieswithout being seriously noticed by both the military andthe scientific community.Reliability of ReportsMy first task, therefore, was to determine just howreliable all of these reports were. I began by placingfrequent long-distance calls to the reporters and editors ofsome of the newspapers which seemed to be carrying UFOstories week after week. Not only did they sound likereasonable men, but they all assured me that they were onlypublishing the more interesting or best-validated storiesthat were being reported to them. Many were concentratingonly on those sightings reported by police officers andlocal officials. It quickly became clear that literallythousands of sightings were being reported by ordinarycitizens but were going completely unpublished. Thepublished sightings represented only a fraction of thewhole!I also called many of the witnesses in the publishedaccounts and learned, to my further dismay, that thenewspaper stories had only outlined a part of their totalexperiences. Some of them claimed the objects hadpursued their cars, had landed briefly beside the road nearthem, or had even reappeared later over their homes.Innumerable witnesses complained that their eyes hadbecome red and swollen after their sighting and had