Operation Trojan Horse: A Much-Maligned Masterpiece

If you could look up “serious UFO investigator” in the dictionary, which you can’t, you might find Richard Hall’s picture next to the entry. Hall harkens back to the days of NICAP, has compiled important collections of hard evidence for UFOs, and is currently a higher-up with the Fund for UFO Research. I mention this because in 1997 Mr. Hall composed a list of the worst saucer books ever written, giving prominent mention to John A. Keel’s “Operation Trojan Horse.” Who is John Keel, and why don’t people appreciate him? For starters, Keel is not “serious” in the Donald Keyhoe sense of the word. He’s a Fortean gadfly who offended the UFO establishment by standing the extra-terrestrial hypothesis on its head while simultaneously producing the most compelling UFO book ever published. “UFOs Operation Trojan Horse” is Keel’s masterpiece. It is far from the most “scientific” UFO book available, and few would call it the most objective, but it is, ounce-for-ounce, the best saucer book around-- first, because Keel writes well (which is nearly unique among ufologists), and also because he is the first UFO writer to knit the bewildering array of saucer-related phenomena into a tidy gestalt—-a kind of unified-field theory that explains everything, not just the cases that fit particular worldviews. To put it simply, Keel maintains that UFOs are a hoax, but a hoax of cosmic proportions played on earthly percipients by extra-dimensional intelligences who manipulate our perceptions, imaginations, and beliefs. This has been going on forever, Keel argues, which accounts for the book’s interweave of UFOs, electronic anomalies, monsters, demons, poltergeists, and religious manifestations. Frankly, this is a scary book—a kind of gothic, Lovecraftian tome with an overlay of devious aliens, glowing discs, and black helicopters. It would all seem preposterous if it weren’t so intricately, almost poetically, crafted. Keel’s narrative is nearly Dostoyevskian in it’s portrayal of the hero-researcher who begins rationally enough, but finds himself inexorably sucked, page by page, deeper into a twilit world of Men in Black, terrifying nocturnal presences, and unearthly voices on the phone—and the reader is lured down the same path. By chapter 14, Keel admits questioning his own sanity. Caught up in the vortex of his subject matter, he admonishes his readers to avoid entanglements with the dark forces that underlie the UFO façade. Of course, ever since “Trojan Horse” first appeared in 1970, plenty of people besides Keel have questioned Keel’s sanity--but no other UFO researcher has offered a book of equal vibrancy, nor of such magisterial scope. Sure, Keel stretches a fact here and there, and he often asserts the undocumentable, but that’s the price of admission. While Jacques Vallee’s “Passport to Magonia” pioneered some of the insights Keel draws on, and despite the fact that Keel’s own “Mothman Prophecies” is far better known (since Hollywood mutilated it), “Trojan Horse” remains the UFO book to read if you are only going to read one...unless of course you are rigidly sober-minded. Such readers may prefer to sample Hynek, or Hall—-good men offering volumes of seriously empirical data. But if you feel like chasing phantom-black Cadillacs down the moonlit alleyways of infinity, grab “Trojan Horse.” I predict you’ll be about halfway through it, and the phone will ring...and you’ll find yourself wondering, despite yourself, just for a moment...is it safe to answer?