Disposable Lit Reviews

Fawcett Gold Medal, 1971
222 pp.
No ISBN

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Being an exceedingly precocious child, I was rapidly disheartened by the mundanity of my residence, on Prince Edward Island in Maritime Canada. (Most people think their childhoods were boring, but I think P.E.I. takes the cake for sheer dullness for the inquisitive child. Great place to visit, though.) So it’s not surprising that I made myself the local authority on everything that was fascinating about everywhere else in the world, to wit, The Unexplained. The Loch Ness Monster, UFO’s, Sasquatch and his cousins, you name it: I devoured every one of those books until I could explain to anyone who asked (no one ever did) why it was perfectly reasonable that a colony of plesiosaurs was alive and well in the Scottish Highlands, or why the white-furred Abominable Snowman that showed up occasionally on Saturday morning cartoons was inaccurate.

I was about eleven when I first chanced upon John A. Keel’s Our Haunted Planet, and it blew me away. Because Keel didn’t just try to prove the existence or nonexistence of flying saucers; he accepted the phenomena, but then showed that it was essentially the same as the fairy abductions of former centuries, that the messages of the Kirbyesque “Space Brothers” differed from visions of angels and demigods only in the trappings and costuming. The whole arena of unexplained phenomena was one big whole, not unlike the old parable of the blind men trying to identify an elephant by examining its parts; there’s a Big Something from which it all stems, and nobody knows what it looks like.

Now, another of Keel’s books, The Mothman Prophecies, will be showing up as a movie come February, so I thought it appropriate to crack the covers on Our Haunted Planet for the first time in twenty years. (Although I own several of Keel’s books, The Mothman Prophecies isn’t one of them; it’s currently out of print, though it’s supposed to be re-issued to coincide with the movie. I coulda gotten myself a trade paperback copy ten years ago when it was last in print, complete with a nifty Frazetta cover, but noooo…)

So how has one of the great formative influences of my adolescence fared?

Hoo boy…

Let’s start with the good news: Keel is still head and shoulders over most of his contemporaries, as far as moving from the facts to the hypothesis is concerned. And he certainly blows away most of the modern crop of UFO writers, both the “secret bases in Nevada” school and the “alien Greys are doing biological experiments on our women” variety, both of which fall completely into the trap of examining their part of the elephant and ignoring the rest.

But… Well… See, I’ve got a degree in English Lit. I also read the occasional history volume. I know what it means to support your case: You gotta have footnotes. You have to reference your primary source material, and quote from it directly as often as possible; and if you absolutely have to summarize, you make damned sure that the reader can tell where a simple summary ends and where the author’s supposition starts.

Now, I know that Keel wasn’t writing for an academic audience, and lay readers find nothing so off-putting as a thick batch of footnotes at the bottom of every page. But the fact remains: On almost everything that Keel references, I simply can’t track down the primary source because I don’t know what it is. (Hey, the mysterious “Branton” may be a UFO crank, but at least I know where he got all of his information!)

This wouldn’t be so bad, except every summary is recounted complete with Keel’s suppositions. He makes some noises in the introduction about objectivity and reporting “just the facts.” Don’t you believe it; Keel has a thesis, and it comes out everywhere. Granted, his thesis isn’t as ironbound as Budd Hopkins’ or Commander X’s; in general, it is that the Big Something (he terms them “ultraterrestrials,” a more ambiguous version of the “Wings Over the World” organization from H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come) are and have been messing with humanity since the dawn of time, mysteriously engendering competing belief systems the world over, none of which is necessarily true. And in support of this, he starts throwing things at us: Easter Island, the Oahspe book, changelings, angelic manifestations, Velikovsky, the Great Pyramid, channeled messages about Atlantis, the Piri Re’is map, Sirhan Sirhan, Trickster gods, the Men in Black, Stonehenge, Swedenborg, fairy ships, Freemasonry, tektites, Hitler, and a rogues’ gallery of contactees and “experiencers.” All of it whips by so fast that it would probably convince the average reader by pure quantity, though not by rationality.

Naturally, Mormonism gets a mention, as well it should, being a religion whose beginnings involve angelic visitors, lost civilizations, and a spiritually-transmitted text. It also happens to be my religion, by heritage and by choice. So when I see several simple factual errors in his two-page treatment of a subject I know well, it doesn’t inspire confidence in the author. I’m not talking about his interpretation of the experiences of Joseph Smith; I’m talking about wrong dates and misplaced timeframes. If there are so many easily-correctable errors on the two pages of data that I know intimately, how well can I trust his accuracy on the other 220 pages?

Now, I will admit, it’s a little unfair to recognize the coming release of The Mothman Prophecies by reviewing Our Haunted Planet. As much as this book is a summary, the other book is an in-depth examination of a particular case, that involving sightings of a mysterious winged creature in the Ohio Valley in 1966-67 and some addendant psychic phenomena. And I’m sure with an entire book to dissect a single case in detail, rather than firing off dozens of accounts in rapid-fire succession, the result would be a lot more convincing. (But the damned powers-that-be aren’t reissuing The Mothman Prophecies until the very eve of the movie’s premiere, and copies on eBay are going for upwards of thirty bucks apiece.)

Nathan Shumate