This is the UFO book that, when first released, terrified me into the middle of next week. It's wonderful to see it reissued more than forty years later - and learn how well it holds up.
In 1970 I was a UFO-curious ten-year-old consuming drugstore paperbacks extolling our benevolent space brothers. I checked out "Operation Trojan Horse" from the New York City Public Library, read the big intimidating hardback under the covers after lights out, and didn't sleep for a week.
This book was a defiantly different deal, and still is.
Keel's thesis flies in the face -- convincingly -- of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and the whole spaceships-from-beyond explanation of the phenomenon fiercely defended to this day. For that Keel was more or less excommunicated in the 1970s by the UFO true believers, who at the time brutally suppressed many reported aspects of UFO sightings that failed to fit their preconceptions.
Keel points out that UFOs come in too many "form factors," and apparently break down or crash too often, to be sensibly attributed to advanced space explorers. Contact experiences are too often absurd or nonsensical, percipients too often lied to. UFOs too often mimic the characteristics of paranormal phenomena reported since ancient times, from the Bible's wheels of fire and angelic visitations to fairies and leprechauns. Most likely, deduces Keel, the UFO phenomenon is perpetrated by a trickster intelligence occupying a different reality frequency. Not from the Pleiades, but from right here - this intelligence, sometimes helpful, sometimes hostile, but most often indifferent, has always been with us, but adopts new frames of reference to relate to humanity as it evolves. Angels in ancient days, spindly Victorian-looking airships in the 1890s, sleek flying saucers crewed with "spacemen" as we became a spacefaring species. They can project as solid objects when they want to, but the flood of reports of UFOs vanishing on the spot, fading away through the color spectrum or acting like biological ("soft") objects suggest there's more to this than nuts and bolts.
Keel's laborious research methods (in the pre-Internet 1960s he was dependent on clipping services and long-distance phone calls) seem slow and quaint now. But he assembled UFO data as no other non-government researcher had to that point. And what really makes your hair stand on end is his personal testimony about how the trickster phenomenon began to mess with him. As rewards for his investigative zeal he got: cryptic havoc on his phone line; weird predictive messages passed to him by contactees from "spacemen"; terrifying nighttime visitations. No shortage of things to consider for a small boy reading "Operation Trojan Horse" in bed late at night, especially when Keel urges parents to forbid psychologically vulnerable kids from getting wrapped up in UFOs. (Mine were wholly oblivious.)
This is a landmark book in the UFO field, genuinely mind-expanding, from one of the two or three best writer-researchers ever to crack the topic. Keel's best-known book is "The Mothman Prophecies" owing to the Richard Gere movie, but "Operation Trojan Horse" is his best work, period.
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