Donald Keyhoe in National Geographic-Part Two

As I was paging through Donald E. Keyhoe's article "Seeing America with Lindbergh," published in The National Geographic Magazine in January 1928, I was struck by an oblique aerial photograph, and its caption, of the new airport at Oakland, California:

The caption reads:

A GLIMPSE OF THE CROWD AT OAKLAND (SEE, ALSO, PAGE 39)

     This modern airport when completed will cover 825 acres and will be one of the largest in the world. At present it has one runway 7,000 feet long and 250 feet wide. There is also a square area, part of which is here shown, now ready for use. This is 1,700 by 2,500 feet. The white circle and the name "Oakland" are made permanent by the use of crushed stone. These markings are a very great help to the airman who is flying cross-country over strange territory. Hangars, night lighting equipment, and other apparatus are being installed.

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Pay special attention to the word "Oakland," the white circle with its stem, and the white square with its longer stem to the left. These features, along with the words of the caption--"These markings are a very great help to the airman who is flying cross-country over strange territory"--reminded me of other images and other ideas . . .

The idea pointed out by Keyhoe in his picture and caption is that large symbols made on the ground can be used to communicate with viewers in the air. If you read works of Forteana, you have probably encountered this idea before. I know I have, and I might have a date for my first such encounter: January 5, 1973, when the documentary In Search of Ancient Astronauts was first broadcast on NBC-TV. Or maybe it was on September 6, 1973, when "one of the most talked-about television specials of the past season" was repeated. The source of the quote is a syndicated feature article from various American newspapers published in September 1973. I suspect the documentary was repeated at later dates, too.

In Search of Ancient Astronauts is based on the book Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken, published in 1968 and adapted to film in 1970. One segment of In Search of Ancient Astronauts is about the lines graven into the plains of Nazca in southern Peru. The "conclusion reached by von Däniken," says the narrator Rod Serling, using his best Twilight Zone/Night Gallery voice, is that these lines "represent a landing field: the Plain of Nazca is a gigantic abandoned airport."

Here are two images, with captions, from a double-page spread in Mr. von Däniken's book (Bantam Books, 1971):

The captions read:

(Above:)

Another of the strange markings on the Plain of Nazca. This is very reminiscent of the aircraft parking areas in a modern airport.

(It's also reminiscent of the circle and stem at the Oakland airport in 1927.)

(Below:)

This huge 820-foot figure above the Bay of Pisco points to the Plain of Nazca. Could this be an aerial direction indicator rather than a symbol of religious significance?

(In other words, could this figure have been put into place to help "the airman who is flying cross-country over strange territory"?)

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The idea of communicating with people in the air from signals on the ground predated In Search of Ancient Astronauts, Chariots of the Gods?, and Donald Keyhoe's article from 1928, for in its issue of April 1920, Popular Mechanics published an article by Paul H. Woodruff called "Perhaps Mars Is Signaling Earth." The article begins with a recounting of events from January 1920, when "Marconi commercial-wireless stations at New York and London reported the receipt of certain strange and undecipherable signals." (p. 495) The author of the article quoted several prominent astronomers and physicists, including Albert Einstein, regarding these signals. An idea bandied about was that they were from people on another planet. A further idea was how we of Earth might signal them back.

There were different ways of doing that according to the men quoted in the article. Here is an illustration of one to go along with today's theme:

The caption reads:

Sir Oliver Lodge's Simple Suggestion Is to Form a Gigantic Geometrical Figure on the Surface of the Sahara Desert, Which Would Be Visible to a Martian Observer through a Telescope as Powerful as Those Used on Earth. It would be Understood as a Sign Because Geometry Is a Science of the Universe.

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We have encountered Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940) before. Although he was a physicist, he was also the opposite of a physicist, that is, a spiritualist. I first wrote about him in an article called "Dr. Dorp by Otis Adelbert Kline," posted on September 4, 2023. You can read what I wrote by clicking here. Although Lodge, as a physicist, would have been interested in other planets and possible signals from outer space, I sense that his interest here had more to do with his beliefs in the paranormal and other things outside the realm of science. His geometric shape here might be a triangle, but it's also the shape of a pyramid in profile. (So now we have three basic shapes, circle, square, and triangle.) And look at that, there are four pyramids in the foreground. These are no doubt for scale, but they also introduce a connection to these ancient, mysterious, and some would say occult structures. Remember that proponents of the ancient astronauts hypothesis believe that the pyramids of Egypt were constructed with the help of extraterrestrial knowledge and technology. In the 1920s, there were paranormal and weird-fictional connections, for example in "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" by Houdini, ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft and published in the May/June/July issue of Weird Tales magazine. I'll have more on Egypt before too much longer.

The idea that people on other planets are watching those of Earth was older still. Here is the opening of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1897; 1898):

     No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

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If Sir Oliver Lodge felt like Martians were watching us, maybe he had that idea from H.G. Wells in his work of less than a quarter-century before that April 1920 issue of Popular Mechanics.

But if Martians were watching us, we were watching them, too, and we believed we could see shapes and lines on the surface of their planet as well. In the 1880s and 1890s, American astronomers reported seeing canals and other strange and mysterious features on the surface of Mars. Among them was William H. Pickering (1858-1938), part of whose work was carried out at Arequipa, Peru, which is not very close at all to Nazca. By the way, there are pyramids near Nazca, too. These are called the Cahuachi pyramids.

The so-called Canals of Mars are most closely associated with Percival Lowell (1855-1916), though, who watched Mars for years and wrote three books about his observations. I can only assume that his first, Mars (1895), excited the imaginations of people all over the world and was an influence upon Wells in the composition of his novel of interplanetary invasion. Lowell no doubt inspired other authors of science fiction, too. From Wikipedia:

     Lowell's influence on science fiction remains strong. The canals figure prominently in Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein (1949) and The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950). The canals, and even Lowell's mausoleum, heavily influence[d] The Gods of Mars (1918) by Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as all other books in the Barsoom series.

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Like the circle at the Oakland airport, we come back to beginnings, namely Donald E. Keyhoe. In his last book, Aliens from Space . . . The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects, published in 1973, Major Keyhoe devoted a whole chapter to what he called Operation Lure. Originally developed by--but not really, as we have seen--Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994), Operation Lure would have been designed to lure space aliens to land as if they were ducks landing on a pond stocked with decoys. Here is Keyhoe's one-sentence summary of Operation Lure:

     The Lure will be an isolated base with unusual structures and novel displays, designed to attract the UFO aliens' attention. (p. 291)

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The main observation post for Earthmen would have been called Control, like in Get Smart. A communications station twenty-five miles distance from Control would have been called "Relay," like in Pete Townshend's never-completed project, Lifehouse. If you have never heard The Who song "Relay," you might want to give it a listen. In it, Mr. Townshend invented the Internet. Listen for the lyric, "The word is getting out about control."

The circle is getting tighter still: in Aliens from Space, Keyhoe wrote about ancient aliens, mentioning the Piri Reis map, the Theosophical Book of Dzyan, the plains at Nazca, the pyramids of Egypt, and even Carl Sagan!

Next: Miscellany about Keyhoe, Lindbergh, Heinlein, and other things.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Donald Keyhoe in National Geographic-Part One

Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988) had four stories in Weird Tales from April 1925 to May 1927. Two months after his last story for "The Unique Magazine" was published--at 12 o'clock noon on July 20, 1927, to be exact--Keyhoe took off on an aerial tour of the United States. That tour would take about three months and cover more than 22,000 miles in all. Keyhoe, referred to as Lieutenant Keyhoe for his previous rank in the U.S. Marine Corps, flew in an advance airplane piloted by Philip R. Love (1903-1943). Also on board was mechanic Theodore R. Sorenson. Following along behind them was the most renowned aviator of his day, Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-1974), piloting the most renowned of aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis. Keyhoe, who had previously been connected with the Byrd Polar Plane Tour of 1926, served as manager of Lindbergh's tour, and he wrote about it in The National Geographic Magazine of January 1928. Over the years, there were tellers of weird tales in the pages of The New Yorker, but could Lieutenant Donald E. Keyhoe, U.S.M.C. (Retired), have been the only one to have written for or had his picture in National Geographic?

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Many years ago, the man who lived upstairs from me walked away from his apartment and left it like the cabin of the Mary Celeste. It remained that way, pretty well undisturbed, for years. Then, last year, he died, and earlier this year his heir came and cleaned out what we wanted--and left the rest. That was over a weekend. On Monday morning, I saw that there were workmen cleaning out the apartment and throwing things into the bed of a pickup truck for delivery to the landfill. I saw a box of books go in the bed, and that was enough for me. I went out to talk to them. They said I could have anything I wanted of what remained in the apartment. I said I would take the books at least. They replied, "There are a lot more of them upstairs." I had to go to work. I asked, if I were to leave boxes and containers for them, would they save the books for me? They said yes. I think they were happy not to take books to the dump.

When I came home that afternoon, the whole front of my house was piled with books and magazines--hundreds of them. Could there have been a thousand or more? Anyway, included in those piles were hundreds of National Geographic magazines going back to 1915. And in those piles within piles was The National Geographic Magazine for January 1928 with a lead story, "Seeing America with Lindbergh," by Donald E. Keyhoe, forty-six pages in all and with dozens of photographs, most of them aerial views of the American landscape. Others are of members of the tour, as well as of spectators and dignitaries they met along the way. One of these photos includes a young Lieutenant Keyhoe, seated in front of Colonel Lindbergh:

Donald E. Keyhoe, shown at the bottom right, in The National Geographic Magazine, January 1928, page 11. He had just turned thirty years old when this picture was taken. Charles A. Lindbergh, who sat just behind him, was five years his junior. On Lindbergh's right is Philip Love, pilot of the advance plane. Love was later killed in an airplane crash in Nevada. The others in this picture are not identified, but I believe the woman on the lower left is Lindbergh's mother, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh (1876-1954). The man on the far right may be mechanic Theodore R. Sorenson, who flew with Love and Keyhoe in the advance airplane during their tour.

Pulp magazines have had a reputation for being a lowly form, made by undistinguished writers or just plain hacks for a simple, working-class, or barely literate readership. One of the reasons I have written about those who wrote letters in "The Eyrie" is to show that the readership of Weird Tales at least came from all walks of life and all levels of society, even from prominent and well-respected men and women. As for the writers, they, too, came from all walks of life. They, too, could be prominent, well-respected, able and active in other fields besides just writing. I have to tell you, it was a thrill for me to discover a writer for Weird Tales in a mainstream magazine of the 1920s. In fact, I would call this extraordinary. And I wonder if there is any equal in the pages of other magazines of that time.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Nictzin Dyalhis & Donald Edward Keyhoe

Nictzin Dyalhis (1873?-1942) had his first story in Weird Tales in April 1925. So did Donald Edward Keyhoe (1897-1988). Dyalhis' story was of course "When the Green Star Waned," a science-fantasy set in the solar system of the future. Keyhoe's story was "The Grim Passenger," a tale of Egyptian archaeology and a pharaoh's curse. "The Grim Passenger" is, then, about the past. As it turns out, it is also set in the past, the past, that is, of 1925. You'll have to read the story to find out the year. I don't want to give away Keyhoe's twist ending.

"When the Green Star Waned" is in the prose style of the pulps. Dyalhis seems to have been influenced by H.G. Wells, but it looks like the greater influence came from Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Martian tales. In contrast, "The Grim Passenger" is almost journalistic or documentary in its tone and style. It could almost be an article rather than a story. In fact, it's barely a story as we understand and enjoy works of fiction. It seems to exist mainly for its twist ending and the occult connection made between one event and another. It's a somewhat Fortean construction, or like an expanded vignette from Ripley's Believe It or Not! If it had been true or mostly true, it would have found a place in later books by Frank Edwards or Vincent Gaddis.

Nictzin Dyalhis had eight stories in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1940 and five more in other magazines during those same decades. These proved very popular with readers. It's a shame there weren't more, even if, as I suspect, they were revised or even rewritten by authors within Farnsworth Wright's stable. (Maybe Dyalhis was the Richard Shaver of Weird Tales.) Despite the popularity and success of his stories and the powers of imagination behind them, Dyalhis worked as a common laborer and a hardscrabble farmer. He lived in poverty and died in almost complete obscurity. He was survived by his wife and daughter. The daughter died not long ago. She had children of her own, and so the enigmatic Nictzin Dyalhis still has living descendants. I doubt that anyone knows his real name. The facts of his life are extremely scanty. At least one of the supposed facts in his obituary is wrong. 

Donald E. Keyhoe moved in different circles. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1919 and served as a pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps, eventually attaining the rank of major (with his service during World War II). Although he wrote scads of stories for the lowly pulps, he was also an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce and an associate of the most famous aviator of his time, Charles Lindbergh, for whom he managed a 22,000-mile aerial tour of the United States in 1927. I'll have more on that next time.

Keyhoe was born on June 20, 1897. Four days after his fiftieth birthday, on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, another airplane pilot, saw a flight of unidentified flying objects over Mount Rainier in Washington State. These and other such objects of course became known as flying saucers, named for Arnold's description of the way they flew. (The original description was of crescent-shaped or flying wing-type aircraft. They were decidedly not discs.) Keyhoe became deeply interested in--eventually obsessed with--the flying saucer phenomena. In January 1950, True magazine published his article "The Flying Saucers Are Real." It proved a sensation, and Keyhoe expanded it into a book of the same name, published shortly thereafter.

Several more flying saucer books flew from his typewriter. The last came in 1973, which can be considered the last year of the flying saucer era. In 1957, he took over as director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), founded the previous year. Also in 1956, the film Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, based on Keyhoe's Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953), was released. In this one, Hugh Marlowe played the hero instead of a louse, as he did in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is still a very watchable and enjoyable movie. Look for an alien abduction scene as a precursor to later, supposedly real-life abductions, such as in the case of Betty and Barney Hill.

Donald Keyhoe was a conspiracy theorist, though probably not the original conspiracy theorist when it came to flying saucers. On March 8, 1958, he appeared on ABC-TV on The Mike Wallace Interview, starring Mike Wallace and a Parliament cigarette. Keyhoe did pretty well in the interview, I think. Mike Wallace was not the savage interviewer of later years. Listen for the word "misinformation." The point of this is that Keyhoe and his subject, flying saucers, were taken seriously enough to have appeared on national television, where he was interviewed at length by a prominent and well-respected journalist. There has been recent media coverage of flying saucers, but this doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Recent witnesses might long for the 1950s.

In his last book, Aliens from Space . . . The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects (1973), Keyhoe covered the whole phenomenon and its various (human) actors. He speculated on the physical appearance of aliens from space. He also suggested that aliens might be up to no good. It's interesting that his first story in Weird Tales appeared in an issue in which a tale of an alien invasion of Earth was so prominent. In his own story of April 1925, Keyhoe looked to the past. In Nictzin Dyalhis' story, maybe Keyhoe saw the future.

I think Donald Keyhoe went to his grave believing in what he saw as the truth behind flying saucers. He died at age ninety-one on November 29, 1988. His obituary appeared in the Washington Post. Major Keyhoe was survived by his wife and three children. I don't know whether he has any living descendants.

In looking through Aliens from Space, I came upon the name of another teller of weird tales. He was Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994). By a strange coincidence, Carr also had his first story in Weird Tales in 1925. Entitled "The Composite Brain," it was published in the March issue. As it turned out, Carr became special advisor to NICAP, and so his path crossed that of Major Keyhoe three decades or more after they had had their stories in Weird Tales. Carr had lots of ideas, one of which was called Operation Lure. But this idea wasn't new at all. It had first been proposed in that decade of origins, the 1920s, in the pages of Popular Mechanics. It, too, seems to have been influenced by H.G. Wells in that Martians have been watching us and we have in turn observed phenomena on the surface of their Red Planet. It seems there is always watching and listening going on . . .

Next: Donald E. Keyhoe in National Geographic.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley