As part of my routine exploration of sources and commentary regarding Elizondo's "Imminent" (2024), I came across Richard Dolan's video review of the book. Early in his comments I was astonished to hear Dolan compare the significance of "Imminent" to Edward Ruppelt's "classic" 1956 book, "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects".
Dolan's seems to focus on the testimony of an "insider source" as the reason to judge Ruppelt's book as comparable to Elizondo's. But that is a false premise. As an "insider" Ruppelt was also a provable public liar and a dutiful disinformation agent, so it strikes me that Dolan fits a useful historical comparison to the wrong figure.
By far the most important and influential book in the early years of modern ufology was "The Flying Saucers Are Real" (1950) by retired Marine Corps aviator Major Donald Keyhoe. The fact that Keyhoe can be glibly overlooked by someone as knowledgeable as Dolan, and overlooked in favor of someone as meritless as Ruppelt, suggests a dissent and retrospective tribute is needful.
Keyhoe's January, 1950 article and book are important for many reasons:
- Both Keyhoe and Elizondo have a single basic message, clearly stated in Keyhoe's title: don't kid yourself, UFO are real. They validate that interest in the topic is not "kooky" or "psychotic".
- Both Keyhoe and Elizondo, seven decades apart, describe UFO stigma and the motivation to hide the "truth" about UFO by elements in the USAF "for religious reasons". ("Religion" here means christianity.)
- Both describe the evolution of personal views on UFO from someone who is at best agnostic (if not skeptical) of the idea that UFO are real to someone who believes they are not only real but are an "interplanetary" or interstellar in origin and a fact of enormous significance.
- The story itself is a lucid and highly readable gumshoe saga of investigation and discovery. Bit by bit, source by source, Keyhoe describes his search for factual information about landmark UFO events such as the "Mantell Incident", the "Gorman Dogfight" and the "Chiles/Whitted Incident".
- Keyhoe clearly describes the murk of contradictory and tactically misleading information put out by the Department of Defense, including the red herrings cast his way by the mysterious source "John Steele" and culminating in a verbatim account of his interview with the official "sphinx" on the topic, General Boggs, who serenely affirms that Mantell was only chasing the planet Venus.
- Keyhoe describes the efforts of aeronautical engineers and scientists to explain UFO performance as a "vehicle" — a "secret weapon" or "rocket" of human design — their failure to do so, and the importance of this failure, along with historical sightings back to 1870, to support an interplanetary interpretation. But he also demonstrates the inherent bias of ignorance as he tries to fit the information to scientific preconceptions of the era, which seem limiting to a reader today.
Keyhoe is a remarkable figure in his own right, as the biography by Linda Powell documents. Balding, bony, with thin lips, pugnacious chin and drag chute ears, factotum for Charles Lindbergh and science fiction novelist before he became an investigative journalist for True magazine, Keyhoe might be a character out of Dickens. But once personally convinced by the evidence, he pursued "disclosure" with aplomb, persistence (as demonstrated in the Mike Wallace interview) and full command of the facts.
He established the first citizen organization to address the topic, the National Investigative Committee on Aerial Phenomena, and supported Richard Hall's (and other's) efforts to investigate and publicize observational facts about UFO (summarized in the invaluable "The UFO Evidence"). He pressed the topic tirelessly in various public statements, and worked (but ultimately failed) to get the US congress to take the matter seriously in open hearings and an official investigation. The AAF/USAF tried in several ways to "manage" Keyhoe; eventually they resorted to flagrant attempts to muzzle or discredit him.
"TFSAR" is a fun read, but also instructive on several levels. Already, in 1949, the DoD was fumbling around with different tactics to control the UFO topic, which required separate investigation to unravel. Already, in 1949, Keyhoe cites most of the major observational criteria of a UFO — high velocity, rapid acceleration, "zigzag" or reversing trajectories, brilliant whiteness or mirrorlike reflectivity, hover, vertical ascent, evasion from pursuit, occasional enormous size — and altitudes reported at or above 50 miles (about 90 kilometers).
This is also a personal book. Keyhoe narrates his own mental evolution from scoffing indifference to the UFO topic to passionate conviction that "the secret" lay behind feckless USAF tactics to manage his inquiries. And he shows how current knowledge leads to misguided conclusions about UFO (which he explicitly assumes originate from Mars), which influenced the many 1950's Hollywood fictions based on that premise.
Keyhoe was less than satisfactory as the leader of NICAP and arguably contributed to its eventual decline. His ultimate failure to wrest "the secret" from the US government or motivate Congress to do its job seemed implicit validation of the official "nothing to see here."
But none of that should justify putting a fabricating Edward Ruppelt ahead of the integrity, insight and foundational influence in ufology of Major Donald E. Keyhoe (ret.). More than an American original, he remains an American hero.
LINKS
Dolan review of "Imminent": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uazfN6CqUeQ&t=188s
Keyhoe's January, 1950 True article: https://www.project1947.com/fig/truejan1950.htm
Keyhoe's book: https://sacred-texts.com/ufo/fsar/index.htm
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Keyhoe
Powell biography: https://www.amazon.com/Against-Odds-Donald-Keyhoe-Secrecy/dp/1949501329/
Mike Wallace interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoIPv4vCSsU&t=156s
Don Neble interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRN8lcZ7pK0
NICAP "The UFO Evidence" (.pdf): http://www.nicap.org/ufoe/UFO%20Evidence%201964.pdf
by drollere