Keel, John A(lva) (1930-)

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Keel, John A(lva) (1930-)

Conjuring magician and writer on the subjects of magic, mysteries, and UFOs. Keel was born in Hornell, New York, on March 25, 1930, the son of Harry Eli Kiehle, a musician. From an early age he was interested in magic tricks and idolized the great Houdini. After the divorce of his parents he lived with his grandparents until age ten, then returned to his mother and stepfather, working on their farm near Perry, New York. At Perry High School he edited a mimeographed one-sheet journal called The Jester. At age 14 he edited a column in the local weekly paper, the Perry Herald, using the name John A. Keel. Meanwhile he studied at Perry Public Library and planned to be a professional writer.

In 1947 he left home, hitchhiking to New York, where he earned a meager living as a writer in Greenwich Village for four years before being drafted during the Korean War. Later, while quartered in West Germany, Keel contributed to the Armed Forces Network and was responsible for a Halloween broadcast from Frankenstein Castle, which started a monster scare similar to the scare caused by Orson Welles's famous radio broadcast about a Martian invasion in 1938.

Several years later he produced another Halloween broadcast from the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Attracted by the mystery of the East, he resigned from the Armed Forces Network and, at age 24, started a series of adventurous world travels, hoping to write his way around the world, earning a living as a journalist.

Keel's travels in search of mysteries took him from Egypt to India and Tibet, searching out mystics, fakirs, lamas, and magicians. In India he discovered the secrets of snake charming, being buried alive, walking on water, the basket trick, and the Indian rope trick, as well as other feats of Jadoo, or conjuring illusion.

However, he also admitted there were mysteries that were not tricks. In Darjeeling he met Sherpa Tensing Norgay, hero of the Everest expeditions, who talked about the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman. Keel went on to Sikkim, where he saw what he believed to be the Yeti's footprints and heard the creature's strange cry. All these adventures are recounted in his entertaining book Jadoo (1957).

Keel came out of obscurity at the beginning of the 1970s when his series of books on UFOs and Forteana (see Fort, Charles ) began to appear. He wrote articles both for UFO periodicals and the popular men's magazines of the period, such as Saga and True. He considered as source material many stories that were generally dismissed because they were so strange.

After a flurry of writing, Keel faded from the scene in the late 1970s but reappeared with a new book in 1988 and also became a columnist for Fate magazine.