Guy Lochhead, 05/09/10
American ‘Fortean’ best known for his books on UFOs and the ‘Mothman’. Keel’s conclusion in 1967 was that he could not prove the existence of extraterrestrials. He used his investigations into the unexplained instead as a sort of anthropology, believing that people “interpret such visions according to our contemporary beliefs”. If Keel doesn’t believe in aliens, I don’t see the point in writing about them. It’s a waste of time. People are more interesting than their beliefs in aliens/the unexplained – religious thought, for example, is more widely held, and widely destructive. If, as Keel writes, peoples’ belief in aliens stems from historically-held beliefs in myth or religion, uprooting those beliefs seems like a logical progression, but he never went that far.