{"id":1173,"date":"2009-07-07T04:19:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-07T04:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1173"},"modified":"2009-07-07T04:19:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-07T04:19:00","slug":"john-keel-has-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1173","title":{"rendered":"John Keel Has Died"},"content":{"rendered":"

Author and Fortean<\/a> John Keel died Friday in New York.<\/a><\/p>\n

Not long after his signature book, The Mothman Prophecies<\/a>\"\"<\/em> was published, I saw on the Colorado Springs downtown library’s new-books shelf and passed it by–repeatedly–because the title sounded too weird.<\/p>\n

From the Cryptomundo obituary<\/a>:<\/p>\n

After years of writing parts of the story in various articles and other books, in 1975, Keel published<\/em> The Mothman Prophecies, an account of his 1966-1967 investigation of sightings of the Mothman, a \u201cwinged weirdie\u201d reported in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia.<\/p>\n

Keel corresponded with Ivan T. Sanderson quietly for months, trying to determine what kind of bird might be involved with the sightings. It was later, as Keel more fully revealed the tale of the sightings and concurrent phenomena, that other elements came into the mix.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Other elements” is putting it mildly. When I finally read The Mothman Prophecies<\/em>, I realized that it offers a vivid depiction of the strangeness that any investigator of the paranormal encounters, the feeling that part of your body or part of your consciousness is sliding into an unfriendly parallel universe. Never mind the Mothman, read it for the psychology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author and Fortean John Keel died Friday in New York. Not long after his signature book, The Mothman Prophecies was published, I saw on the Colorado Springs downtown library’s new-books shelf and passed it by–repeatedly–because the title sounded too weird. From the Cryptomundo obituary: After years of writing parts of the story in various articles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[57,22],"class_list":["post-1173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-books","tag-weirdness"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-iV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2885,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2885","url_meta":{"origin":1173,"position":0},"title":"Mothman, John Keel, and Weirdness","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 10, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Io9,com offers a reflection by Ed Grabianowski on the \"Mothman Prophecies,\" both the 1975 book by John Keel and the subsequent 2002 movie with Richard Gere, which has little in common except the title and infamous bridge collapse. Grabianowski's article is a level-headed examination of the \"flap\" of 1967, about\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"weirdness\"","block_context":{"text":"weirdness","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=weirdness"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4548,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4548","url_meta":{"origin":1173,"position":1},"title":"Mothman: High Strangeness in 1967","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 27, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The Mothman Prophecies, the late John Keel's first-person account of a paranormal investigation in West Virginia, may not answer the question of exactly what the Mothman phenomenon was, but it remains one of the best accounts of the shadowy world of paranormal investigation itself. (Skip the movie, except for laughs.)\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1335,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1335","url_meta":{"origin":1173,"position":2},"title":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 17, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence Jesse Walker writes from Reason Online that \"We're living in Robert Anton Wilson's world.\" The co-author of the Illuminatus! triology, he says, is \"the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":121,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=121","url_meta":{"origin":1173,"position":3},"title":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 17, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence Jesse Walker writes from Reason Online that \"We're living in Robert Anton Wilson's world.\" The co-author of the Illuminatus! triology, he says, is \"the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1350,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1350","url_meta":{"origin":1173,"position":4},"title":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 17, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence Jesse Walker writes from Reason Online that \"We're living in Robert Anton Wilson's world.\" The co-author of the Illuminatus! triology, he says, is \"the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1365,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1365","url_meta":{"origin":1173,"position":5},"title":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 17, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Robert Anton Wilson's cultural influence Jesse Walker writes from Reason Online that \"We're living in Robert Anton Wilson's world.\" The co-author of the Illuminatus! triology, he says, is \"the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}