John A. Keel WHY UFOS

expensive procedure, and we can seriously question theneed or justification for the Air Force or CIA maintainingtaps on the phones of teen-agers and little old ladiesinvolved in UFO research. But if the phenomenon itself iselectromagnetic in nature, it might be able to manipulateour telephone systems just as it seems to manipulateautomobile ignition systems.The real truth is that the UFO cultists have been playedfor suckers for years, not by the government, but by thephenomenon. Mischievous, even malicious rumors andnonsense have been passed on to them through thecontactees, and they have accepted this rubbish as fact.Other classic UFO stories had their beginnings as clearlylabeled fiction in cheap men's magazines. One such storytold how a reporter saw officials conducting a hairyspaceman through the White House. A newspapercolumnist wryly printed excerpts from it without comment,and it created a sensation among the UFO cultistsfor years. Irresponsible tabloid newspapers have cashed inon the temporary waves of UFO interest by publishingcompletely fictitious flying saucer stories as fact. Thecelebrated tale of a UFO crashing on the island ofSpitsbergen in the early 1950's was spawned by such anewspaper and is still being republished as an example of"government suppression." (The Norwegian governmentdenied the story, naturally.)Situations have been engineered by the phenomenon tomake the UFO cultists suspicious of the government andeven of one another. The in-fighting between the variousgroups deserves special study by itself. Many cultists areliving in genuine terror. Some no longer trust their ownfamilies. Several have suffered nervous breakdowns.Ironically, the UFO organizations have, themselves,suppressed and censored more UFO reports than the AirForce. When the National Investigation Committees onAerial Phenomena received a report from one of theirmembers on the sighting of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961,in which they suffered extraordinary effects after they sawhumanlike figures in the window of a UFO, they hid thefull report in their office. The whole story would never havebecome public knowledge if author John Fuller had notstumbled across the Hills years later during his ownindependent UFO investigations.The demonological events discussed in this book haveso baffled and confused the UFO organizations that theyhave dismissed most of them as hoaxes without any kind of276