John Keel, longtime investigator of the paranormal and author of The Mothman Prophecies and many other books, has died.
In his decades-spanning career, Keel chronicled much of the weirdness that didn’t make the headlines. People might know names like “Bigfoot” and “Nessie,” or look to the skies for flying saucers, but Keel searched for the unknown parts of the unknown. He went to spots where our reality gets thin, and probed the cracks.
As far as his theories went, Keel seemed convinced that there weren’t actually wild ape-men in the forest, or aliens visiting the earth like a tourist spot. He studied history and myth, and found that the names have changed, but the phenomena have been with humans as long as we’ve been telling stories and writing stuff down. We’ve called them fairies, demons, angels and monsters, but they have always been there, out at the edge of the light.
Keel himself posited that there were beings on this planet, much older than us, who enjoyed toying with us. Occasionally, they show up, whether as a hairy monster or a silver-suited spaceman, just to play havoc with our lives.
He formed this theory after the events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which ended in the Silver Bridge collapse that killed 46 people. From his writing after that, he seemed fairly convinced that whatever these things were, they didn’t have our best interests at heart.
People can differ about the reality of the paranormal. I go back and forth on it myself, all the time. But Keel produced volumes of fascinating, challenging work that forever altered the way I look at the world. My writing would be a lot emptier and duller if I hadn’t been exposed to Keel at an early age, and if I didn’t go back to him often, looking for the strangest parts of the strange.
He introduced me to some amazing concepts. Now I get to play with them full-time, and I’m in his debt.
