The Name Game
It has been noted that names of witnesses to UFOs and other strange phenomena sometimes repeat themselves. An article by Frank Altomonte references an obscure 1957 case from my local area which is significant in this regard.
The original account was related by Coral and Jim Lorenzen in their 1967 book Flying Saucer Occupants (which is actually one of my favorite UFO books.)
A strange story about stalled cars and little men was told to authorities and the press on the morning of November 6, 1957, when Richard Kehoe, an employee of the General Telephone Company of Santa Monica, related his early-morning experience. This is another tale which has fallen into ill repute because of the reluctance of researchers to accept human-like occupants as real, and the lack of corroborating witnesses.
Kehoe claimed that while driving along Vista del Mar at Playa del Rey in California (a beach area) at 5:40 a.m. his engine stopped as did the engines of the two other cars. When the drivers got out to see what was wrong they saw an egg-shaped spaceship wrapped ‘in a blue haze’ on the beach. Kehoe claimed two “little men” (about 5 feet 5 inches, which isn’t really small) got out of the object and asked questions of him and the two other drivers, such as: ‘Where we were going? Who we were? What time it was? etc.’ He said their skin appeared to be yellowish-green in the early morning light, but that otherwise they looked normal. He said they were wearing black leather pants, white belts, and light-colored jerseys.
The two other drivers were identified as Ronald Burke of Redondo Beach and Joe Thomas of Torrance, and Kehoe claimed Thomas called the police. He said they sounded as though they were talking English but he couldn’t understand them, and said simply that he had to go to work. The men got back into their ship and disappeared into the sky, whereupon his car started up immediately. The ship was oval, tan or cream in color, with two metal rings around it upon which the object apparently rested, according to Kehoe.
Of course “Keyhoe” is a name famous in UFO circles. Major Donald Keyhoe was an early ufological force who in 1950 wrote The Flying Saucers Are Real, probably the first important book about the subject, which was based on his wildly popular article of the same name in True magazine from December of 1949. He was also the co-founder (in 1956) of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP.)
Another witness to strange things in the sky on November 6th of 1957 was Mrs. Charles Weitzel, who looked out of her kitchen window in Corona Del Mar (some 40 miles down the coast from the Kehoe encounter) to see something hovering over the ocean that looked like “an orange jack-o-lantern.”
Just over a year later on the night of November 8th of 1958, another witness, Charles Wetzel (essentially the same name) encountered a strange creature with “scaly skin, like leaves” and a “round, scarecrowish head like something out of Halloween” skulking in the seasonally dry Santa Ana river in Riverside, California. It climbed on the windshield of his car as he drove through the riverbed, clawing at the glass, and then slipped down the hood and under the car, where Wetzel ran it over.
The Weird California website has more on this, as well as a story on another Charles Wetzel, who sighted a six foot kangaroo in the wilds of Nebraska on July 28th of the same year. Both Wetzels (who were not related) had sons named Charles. Did Mr. and Mrs. Charles Weitzel of Corona Del Mar also have a son named Charles? Was the person who encountered the same goblin the next night in Riverside named Keyhoe or Kehoe?
Adding to this gordian knot is a letter received at the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization’s (APRO) headquarters in July of 1980. It described a dramatic UFO sighting involving eleven Air Force personnel on a training exercise. Bill Moore, who was on the governing board of APRO at the time, called the witness and found out that he hadn’t written it and that most of the details in the letter had been made up by someone else. It turned out to be a baiting exercise designed to hook in gullible UFO researchers and later resulted in Moore’s controversial involvement with elements of Air Force Intelligence.
The witness’ name was Craig Weitzel.
Loren Coleman, writing in his 1983 book Mysterious America said:
“Wetzel” is a German name, a corrupted form of “little Varin,” from “warin,” meaning “protector.” Should we therefore assume some elemental insight from a name that literally means “little protector or guardian?”
Are the Wetzels/ Weitzels protecting us from strange creatures from time, space and other dimensions? The Keyhoes/ Kehoes appear to be attractors for the UFO phenomenon. Idle speculation perhaps, but the “name game” may be evidence of a larger pattern that is inscutable to us as yet.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 12:23 am and is filed under Alien Encounters, Anomalous Phenomena, Close Encounters, Eyewitness Accounts, Strange Creatures, UFO Sightings, Wake Up Down There. You can follow responses via RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response or trackback from your site.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit BlinkList Google Ma.gnolia StumbleUpon Technorati Yahoo! Help
- Related News Stories:
- Don’t Tase Me, Space Bro! »
- Baseball Abducted In Mid-Flight »
- The Trowbridge Interview »
- MJ12, UFOs and the FBI »
- The UFOMystics Interview »
- The Culture of Lies »
- Video Of “Captured Alien” »
- Sutton, UK UFO Photo and the Name Game »
- Alien Autopsy - The End? »
- Two Podcast Appearances »
|
Jul 23 2009 
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Hey Greg, have you seen this bit of weirdness?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDIXvpjnRws&eurl
Buzz Aldrin is playing a name game of sorts.
Let me quote:
“…visit the moon of Mars. There’s a monolith there. A very unusual structure on this little potato shaped object that goes around Mars once in 7 hrs. When people find out about that they’re gonna say “Who put that there? Who put that there?”
“Well…uh…the universe put it there, if you choose, or God put it there.”
Is he talking artificial construction or Monument Valley style “monolith?”
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Greg,
According to ancestry.com, Kehoe Name Meaning and History: English (of Norman origin): habitational name from Caieu, a lost place near Boulogne-sur-Mer, Pas-de-Calais.
Weitzel: German: from the personal name Weitzel, a pet form of Wizo, a short form of any of various Germanic compound personal names beginning with wig ‘battle’ or wid ‘wood’.
I also looked up “weit” on an online German-English dictionary. It is one of those words with lots of meanings. Some of the more interesting are: far, way, and wide.
July 24th, 2009 at 4:02 am
@ Joseph,
I’m doing a bit of a Google search, and apparently there’s this unusual feature on the surface of Phobos. Some people (including our own Mac Tonnies) have speculated if this monolith could be an artificial structure. IMO I don’t think that’s what Aldrin is suggesting; he’s merely pointing out that going to Mars to study these unknown features would be more interesting than returning to the Moon.
I’m sure that soon he will find the opportunity to dismiss the use of his words by UFO buffs, since he has never wanted anything to do with us
July 24th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Thanks RPJ. Aldrin’s use of the phrase, “When people find out about that they’re gonna say “Who put that there,” led me to believe that he was talking about a different structure. Maybe Buzz should Google a bit before he chooses his words.
Sorry for wasting your time.
July 24th, 2009 at 9:50 am
“Sorry for wasting your time.”
You did no such thing!
In fact I think we all here thank you for pointing that Youtube clip. It is certainly interesting to hear Aldrin talk about something that NASA hasn’t promoted that much; I’m already seeing that this story is making the rounds among the Fortean crowd, so it was definitely pertinent to discuss.
July 24th, 2009 at 10:04 am
RE: The Name Game
I have had experiences as a child, where I have seen the Grey aliens. In thinking about the significance of names…my middle name is “ALLEN”. When spelled out phoenetically, it is A-LLE-N” or ALIEN.
Kind of disturbing, that there could be any correlation.
July 24th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Just when I thought the Center for Reichian Crypto-Anthropology had been disappeared, our motto is invoked — the great words of parapsychologist Nandor Fodor:
Numen Est Omen
Name Is the Prediction
July 25th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Perhaps this will be buried as reply number eight, but sometimes I think that everything you need to know about the ufo phenomena can be found in the movie, “Buckaroo Banzai, Across The Eighth Dimension”. Rather like everything you need to know about human psychology and spiritual development can be found in the “Tales of Mullah Nasrudin”.
I think it’s scandalous that Steven Spielberg stole his idea of the “flux capacitor” from W.D. Richter’s “overthruster”.
July 25th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Perhaps it’s the family blood line that is really significant.
July 26th, 2009 at 4:14 am
Euphemystic- Is “Tales of Mullah Nasrudin” a book?
July 27th, 2009 at 11:40 am
Joseph,
I think what Aldrin is advocating is exploration to find out what anomalous things are. He looked to be careful in his statement, significantly not mentioning the Mars “structures.”
July 27th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Curious,
It appears that there are multiple definitions of the origin of “weitzel.” Keyhoe appears to be an English name with French roots. Now what significance does “Boulogne-sur-Mer, Pas-de-Calais” have, apart from the location on the shore?
July 27th, 2009 at 11:47 am
starsof12,
I would think and hope that there is no real correlation with your name.
Pazzaglini once pointed out to me that the Hale-Bopp comet (the alleged cause of the Heaven’s Gate suicides) contained the phrase “Hail Bo-Peep.” “Bo” and “Peep” were aliases used by the cult’s leaders for a time. Perhaps they saw some significance in that coincidence.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Drew,
That’s why I’ve never had a good UFO sighting!
July 27th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
euphemystic,
Buckaroo Banzai is one of my favorite movies. I actually have the soundtrack and the screenplay. The similarities to Back to the Future are probably due to Neil Canton, who produced both films. The 88 mph that the BTTF car needed to time travel was also a reference to Banzai’s initials “BB.”
I don’t tend to invest my opinions about subjects in one book. Diverse sources make me feel better. Insights into human psychology can be found everywhere. How about Shakespeare’s plays? Greek Mythology? The Mahabarata? Timothy Leary’s Neuropolitique? Zen koans? Lots of others.
I’d like to find a copy of the book you mention. I think it’s titled 600 Mulla Nasreddin Tales or Tales of the Mullah Nasrudin. Like esoteric Buddhism, Christianity, or Western occultism, the texts all seem to agree on basic principles. Sufism (esoteric Islam) should be no different.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
gentian,
That idea has been suggested to me, strangely enough, by more than one government intelligence employee.