13 - On the Mothman, God, and other monsters: The demonology of John A. Keel

Summary

Monsters are in the world but not of the world. They are paradoxical personifications of otherness within sameness. That is, they are threatening figures of anomaly within the well-established and accepted order of things. They represent the outside that has gotten inside, the beyond-the-pale that, much to our horror, has gotten into the pale.

Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters

What is a monster? A being whose duration is incompatible with the existing order.

Diderot, Elements of Physiology

Houstonians, myself included, are very proud of the fact that Houston was the first word spoken on the surface of the moon, by Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, on July 20, 1969, to be precise: “Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” NASA is just down the road from where I sit and write, in Clear Lake. Our professional baseball team is called the Astros, our basketball team the Rockets. In the present essay, I would like to extend this local space culture (“the outside that has gotten inside”) and explore a few of the very extensive ways that pulp fiction, science fiction, and the cold war space race have entered modern occultism and a contemporary living mythology that I have been tracing through a two-volume study of the paranormal and American popular culture. More specifically, I would like to dwell here on a writer that I could only summarize there, the American journalist, UFO specialist, monster hunter, and self-described demonologist John A. Keel.