The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings
John A. Keel
Doubleday
Nonfiction, Paranormal
Themes: Aliens, Cryptids
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Description
From sasquatch sightings to reported alien abductions, and through even stranger phenomena - winged cats, flying humanoids, and other impossible abominations - the world is full of unexplained incidents. Some may be hysteria, some may be misidentification, but the same things keep being seen again and again around the world. The author shares some of his vast collection of UFO-related events and other unusual things, providing some of his own theories.
Review
Hold your breath, we're going off the deep end here! Keel is a dedicated believer in his theories, and is willing to accept most every tale as true with little
reservation. Reading it, I couldn't help but make mental comparisons with Agent Fox Mulder of The X-Files. Without Scully's stabilizing force, he could
easily have written this book in a few years, when he's finally booted out of the FBI. The author's own zeal, like Mulder's, tends to be blinding. Keel does comment
that, to a paranoid, every black car is a CIA agent watching you, perhaps an acknowledgement of his own faults. His very unwillingness to go deeper detracts from his
arguments; he simply says what he's heard or been told, and expects the readers to have the same faith that he does. Still, I gave it an "Okay" rating because it's a
different perspective on events covered in other books, and it's nice to see that other opinions exist. What good would it be to just read the "mainstream" viewpoints,
especially on subjects like UFO's and Bigfoot? It doesn't mean I agree with the man, I just like to see another side of things once in a while. (And any X-phile knows
that Mulder's usually right, despite Scully's skepticism!)
I do think his idea about many reported encounters – with both UFO aliens and creatures such as those beasts he dubs Abominable Swamp Slobs - is intriguing. I don’t
recall all the details, and picking through the text I can’t locate it offhand, but it has to do with people seeing something their minds can’t translate, and so they
invent their own Swamp Slobs and improbable aliens. They have encountered a real event, but not what they report. What they describe to a skeptical world is just a
by-product of their reaction to the event, which he describes as some sort of transdimensional phenomenon. Of course, as yet there's no way to prove it, but that means
there's no way to disprove it, either. I didn't say I necessarily believed it... I just found the idea interesting. Wouldn't it be strange to find out that all of these
"otherworldly" visitors aren't from across the stars, after all, but simply across a dimensional barrier? (If nothing else, it's excellent story fodder...)