John A. Keel WHY UFOS

emained that way for days afterward. Others said they hadexperienced peculiar tingling sensations or waves of heat asthe objects passed over. I must admit that I experienced anemotional reaction to all of this at first, trying to convincemyself that the phenomenon was more hysterical in naturethan physical, but the more I heard the more 1 was forcedto realize that all of these people were coming up with thesame incredible details.It became apparent that the only way to properlyinvestigate this situation was to travel to the various flapareas personally and interview the witnesses in depth,applying the standard journalistic techniques that I hadlearned from being a reporter and writer for two longdecades. So in the spring of 1966 I began a long series oftreks which eventually took me through twenty states,where I interviewed thousands of people, hundreds of themin depth. Occasionally I encountered a publicity seeker oran outright liar, but such people were easy to spot. Themajority of the people I met were ordinary, honest humanbeings. Many were reluctant to discuss their experienceswith me at all until I had won their confidence and assuredthem that I was not going to ridicule or slander them. Somehad had such unusual and unbelievable sightings that theywere afraid to recount them until they were certain that Iwould give them a sincere hearing. In my typical reporterfashion I only extracted information and gave little or nonein return. I seldom let the witnesses know that other peoplein other sections of the country had told me identicalstories which seemed to corroborate their own experiences.The details of many of these stories were unpublished andunknown to even hard-core UFO buffs. By maintainingthis secrecy, I was able to make unique correlations thatmight not otherwise have been possible.As I traveled, 1 naturally visited local newspapers andspent time with the editors and reporters who had beenhandling the UFO reports in their area. They were allcompetent newsmen, many with years of experiencebehind them, and when I met the witnesses whose storiesthey had written and published, I realized what a skillfuland objective job they had done. So I developed a newrespect for the clippings that were pouring into mymailbox. Most newspaper stories were reliable sources forbasic information.Likewise, I found that most of the material beingpublished by the various civilian UFO organizations had