An anthropological Fortean.
(I think.)
There’s a speculative bridge between the name in Doubt and the man in life. The name in Doubt (and in doubt, I guess) is Dave Kelley. He has an interest in Atlantis. He writes about Mexico (and Canada, to be fair) in 1949. In 1954, he is in Mexico with an archeological team.
It’s not much to go on, but I submit that the name in Doubt also refers to this man:
David Humiston Kelley was born in Albany, New York, on 1 April 1924. (Not the first Fortean to have been born on April Fool’s Day.) His father was Gilbert David Kelley. An Irish-Catholic born in New York, his history is hard to follow; there’s a long gap between about 1880 and the 1910s, and he is not in either the 1920 or 1930 census that I can find. He seems to have worked himself up to an accountant. David’s mother was Helen Ensworth Humiston, a New York Yankee descended from Amos Humiston, the famous soldier killed during the Battle of Gettysburg. Helen was about 32 and Gilbert 44 when David was born. He was the only child living with them in 1925 according to the New York State census.
(I think.)
There’s a speculative bridge between the name in Doubt and the man in life. The name in Doubt (and in doubt, I guess) is Dave Kelley. He has an interest in Atlantis. He writes about Mexico (and Canada, to be fair) in 1949. In 1954, he is in Mexico with an archeological team.
It’s not much to go on, but I submit that the name in Doubt also refers to this man:
David Humiston Kelley was born in Albany, New York, on 1 April 1924. (Not the first Fortean to have been born on April Fool’s Day.) His father was Gilbert David Kelley. An Irish-Catholic born in New York, his history is hard to follow; there’s a long gap between about 1880 and the 1910s, and he is not in either the 1920 or 1930 census that I can find. He seems to have worked himself up to an accountant. David’s mother was Helen Ensworth Humiston, a New York Yankee descended from Amos Humiston, the famous soldier killed during the Battle of Gettysburg. Helen was about 32 and Gilbert 44 when David was born. He was the only child living with them in 1925 according to the New York State census.
In 1940, according to the US census, they family lived in Albany. Gilbert, who had finished three years of college, was an accountant for “court welfare”—which seems to have referred to the Albany County Welfare Department; at least that’s the job Gilbert listed on his World War II draft card. Helen had no employment listed, though she was credited with finishing two years of college. David was in high school. It was around this time—age 15, actually—that David became interested in archeology. His aunt had given him Ann Morris’s “Digging in Yucatan,” with its plates showing a mound of dirt that was systematically sifted to reveal the Temple of the Thousand Columns encased within. “I thought, hey, that’s something I’d like to be doing,” he later said. It was around this time, as well, that he developed an interest in genealogy, receiving a copy of Turton’s “Plantagenet Ancestry,” from an interlocutor who wanted him to track down the descendants of a mutual ancestor.
On 23 November 1942—a Monday, three days before Thanksgiving, and a little more than six months after he had turned 18—Kelley enlisted in the war effort. He was a slim 5’11 and 148 pounds. Kelley joined the army air force and spent his time in Kettering, England, which means he was likely part of the Eighth Air Force, which had come into being earlier that year. I do not know any more exactly what he did during the war, but the service allowed him to enter college. He had been in correspondence with the archeologist Alfred Tozzer, at Harvard, and when he finished his time in the army air force used the G.I. Bill to go to school there and become Tozzer’s last sudent.
Kelley’s time at Harvard was busy one. He entered about 1946, as best as I can figure; a year later, he had published a genealogical paper, “A New Consideration of the Carolingians.” He also immersed himself in Meso-American history, anthropology, and archeology: his senior thesis was “A History of Pre-Spanish Meso-America.” In addition, he had an interest in astronomy, which he combined with his fascination for Central America in his second academic publication, 1954’s “On Ancient Mexican Stellar Beliefs.” His dissertation showed his maverick side—it argued for a connection between Mexican history and Polynesian culture: “Our Elder Brother Coyote: Evidence for a Mexican Element int he Formation of Polynesian Culture.”
By accounts, Kelley was a quick and voracious reader, who looked for underworked areas where he could learn the literature and speculate on potential solutions to the problems there. These were not always within the strictures of accepted academic formulations, but apparently they still showed erudition and a familiarity with the relevant literature—hence his controversial dissertation. This seems to have been true—to an extent-for his genealogical research, though he didn’t publish in the field for decades after his first paper; but was certainly true of his studies of Meso-American history.
However much or little Kelley’s dissertation was out of the mainstream,his graduate work and pedigree got him a job at Texas Tech. He had married by this time, an archeologist named Jane Holden, and together they moved to Lubbock. In time, Jane would give birth to four children. At the time he moved from the Northeast to the Southwest, he won a Fulbright scholarship, and spent the year 1957-1958 teaching and researching in Peru. He continued to publish during this time. In 1964, after a year in Uruguay on another Fulbright, he moved to the University of Nebraska, where he stayed for four years before heading further north, to the University of Calgary, where he stayed for the rest of his academic career. (Jane was also a professor there.)
A polymath, no doubt, Kelley’s work still fell into a couple of broad areas, and in each of them he was willing to push for controversial conclusions, sometimes to his credit, other times without much pay-off. These were Mayan hieroglyphics, transoceanic exchange, and astronomy. The first interest—hieroglyphics—had him confirming some ideas outside the mainstream. Back in 1956, at a conference, Kelley met the Soviet archeologist Yuri Knorozov, who was arguing that Mayan hieroglyphics should be understood as a phonetic system. Leading Mayanists disagreed. As it happened, Knorozov and Kelley were broadly correct, and their ideas allowed for the deciphering of Maya writing. In the course of Kelley’s research—which led to a number of important papers in the 1960s and a book on Mayan writing in the 1970s—Kelley supported another Soviet idea, that Classical period Mayan writing was primarily historical texts. It is worth noting that this support for Soviet ideas came during the Cold War.
Kelley’s two other major archeological interests did not lead to the same kinds of pay offs. His interest in astronomy was connected to an interest in differing calendar systems. Kelley spent much of his academic career trying different correlations between the Mayan calendar and European systems, not convinced that the reigning interpretation was correct. His student counted four different systems that Kelley championed over the years, eventually settling on one. But I have no evidence that his ideas have been influential, at all, in academic circles. The earliest of his published forays into this topic was 1960’s “Calendar Animals and Deities” which compared elements from European, Polynesian, and Meso-American calendars.
Connected with both the astronomical and linguistic studies were Kelley’s interest in diffusionism—his third major area of research and another which did not pan out so well. Diffusionism was, even by the time Kelley received his Ph.D., an outmoded idea: it was the belief that because there were parallel ideas in two geographically separated places, there must have been, at some point in history, a connection between peoples. Thus, similarities in Polynesian culture and Meso-American culture meant that there was evidence of contact, his dissertation had argued. Even Kelley’s student, in a obituary, could only say of this work that is led to articles with colorful titles. Not a ringing endorsement.
Commitment to these various research agendas—but mostly diffusionism—led Kelley to stake out a number of positions that received support not from fellow academics but, rather, those on the fringe. For example, in the 1970s marine biologist and maverick archeologist Dr. Barry Fell argued that America is home rocks inscribed with Old World scripts, rocks whose age proves that Europeans had been visiting North America for thousands of years. Kelley gave him some support—which carried weight, given that Kelley’s own maverick interpretation of the Mayan script had been important to its deciphering. Kelley conceded that Fell was wrong in his examples, but that the thrust of his research is worth considering—that is to say, that European culture had diffused to America several times and had a written history prior to 1492, one just not correctly interpreted yet.
Kelley’s diffusionism and calendrical speculations have provided comfort and support to advocates of dissent archaeological theories. The 1969 book “Hamlet’s Mill,” which argued that myths from across the world all encoded knowledge about the precession of the equinoxes—evidence of global diffusion or a planet-wide civilization—made some reference to Kelley’s work. Those with an interest in Atlantis similarly turned to Kelley as a celebrated academic whose ideas about the spread of calendrical ideas across half the globe could be used as evidence that Atlantean ideas were similarly diffused—prhaps explaining the presence of pyramids in such far-flung places as Egypt and . . . Meso-America.
In 2005, Kelley and Eugene F. Milone published “Exploring Ancient Skies: An Encyclopedic Survey of Archeoastronomy” that culminated this line of research. In the ancient past, he argues, there was a worldwide system of communication that allowed for the spread of knowledge around the globe. The Meso-American astronomy that he studied for half a century, he argues, derived from Old World systems. He thought there was merit in the ideas put forward in “Hamlet’s Mill.” Kelley was insisting that prehistory is completely different than we think—and it does not take very much imagination to see how Atlantis might be the heart of this old system, though, as far as I know, Kelley himself did not support theories about Atlantis in his academic writing.
David Kelley died 19 May 2011, some six weeks after he had turned 87.
*****
Kelley was associated with the Fortean Society for a few years—but, as is clear from his biography, his interests continued to intersect with Fortean ones throughout his life. I cannot say exactly when Kelley first read Fort—or if he read Fort at all—or how he came to the Fortean Society, but theirs one avenue of speculation worth mentioning. In the fall of 1948, Tiffany Thayer published the 22nd issue of Doubt, the Fortean Society magazine. It was devoted to a bibliography of books on pre-Columbian contact with North America. Kelley’s interest in the subject—expressed later in his writings—may have led him to the magazine. Similarly, a few issues earlier—Doubt 18, July 1947—Thayer had written about Reider T. Sherwin, who argued that certain Native American languages had been taken from Old Norse—diffusionism at its best, or worst, depending.
Certainly, the timing of Kelley’s appearance within Doubt supports these suggestions. He was named in Doubt 24, April 1949, having contributed a letter—one that sheds some light on Forteanism as it developed out of and away from the same movements that birthed skepticism. The first paragraph of the (excerpted?) letter read:
“What have [Joseph] McCabe or [Emanuel] Haldeman-Julius ever done to deserve even to be members of the Fortean Society? It is certainly not unorthodox in this day and age to belabor organized religion and probably the most unorthodox thing any scientist could do would be to affirm a belief in God or deny that evolution was the answer to our presence here. I have seen [Haldeman-Julius’s newspaper] the Freeman but it seems to me that a negative political and religious attitude should not be sufficient to balance such things as their attitude toward Atlantis, for example, where Haldeman-Julius writes strongly against a proposed expedition looking for Atlantis on the grounds that the story is just a fable—this is not a Fortean attitude—I rather incline to believe that there is little or no basis for the Atlantis story myself, but I’m all in favor of looking.”
One gets the sense that Kelley was trying too hard, here, to mark himself as a freethinker. He doubted the possibility of Atlantis—but he was the one who brought up the subject in the first place—and he wanted a search party sent out anyway. It is impossible that Kelley did not know the story of Heinrich Schliemann, another archeological maverick, and his discovery of the ancient city of Troy, back in the 19th century, when everyone else thought it was only a land of fable. I think he wanted Atlantis to be found. His dismissal of Haldeman-Julius, on the contrary, seems to forceful. His Blue Books and newspapers gave voice to dissenters throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as well as providing a place for a number of Forteans to publish. May be he was hidebound in some areas—who isn’t?—but he’d proved his bona fides.
The second paragraph took up with McCabe:
“Again McCabe’s pamphlet on Ancient America is more positively orthodox than the most orthodox professor at Harvard, for they will admit they may be wrong—McCabe says they are right and have ‘proven’ that they are right—for example, the old saw that man can not have originated in America because there are are not great apes there—only [John Lloyd] Stephens shot a 6 foot monkey near Palenque. Also, McC. says that America has been more thoroughly explored than any area on earth and scientists would certainly know if man were present before the last glacial—I have never seen such a foolish and un-Fortean statement made even by the most orthodox Americanist I know.”
Here, Kelley touches on an interesting bit of Fortean intellectual history. McCabe was an English free-thinker who had given up his Catholicism and become a rationalist. (He debated Arthur Conan Doyle over the merits of spiritualism.) In time, he branched out from writing for rationalist publications to write for Haldeman-Julius’s “Blue Books” series. “Doubt” and the Fortean Society belonged to this tradition, as well, even as Thayer separated his Society from secularism, rationalism, and early skeptical movement by refusing the authority of science—McCabe, on the contrary, was a firm supporter of scientific enterprise. That Kelley found fault with McCabe’s theories, and kept open the possibility that humanity arose (independently) in North America says more about his own heterodox views than anything about McCabe or his orthodoxy.
The letter’s final paragraph—or the last published bit—was short, but suggests that this was the same Keely who would grow to become the archeologist, and that he had shed whatever religious tradition he had been born to. It read,
“That’s my two-cents worth—incidentally, I’m not a Catholic, and I couldn’t afford to stay at Harvard without the GI Bill, so I’m not a fat Capitalist.”
Further corroboration of Kelley’s identity came in over the years. All told, he appeared in five more issues of Doubt, running to August 1955. (One imagines this marriage, dissertation, family, relocation, and research took up any spare time.) He next appeared in the following issue, 25, with a report that a certain valley in Mexico had received no rain between 1452 and 1456. Either Thayer or Kelly—the write-up is unclear—was asking for conformation, and methodology: was it based on tree-ring studies, or something else. Things from the sky continued to intrigued him. There was then a break, before Kelley—styled Kelly—appeared in issue 34, October 1951, credited with sending in a report about an Ottawa naturalist who had issued a reward for a bird big enough to carry off small cows. He was credited with sending in something—exactly what is unspecified—on flying saucers (which could be any kind of aerial phenomenon) for 49 (August 1955).
Mexico was also an object of interest, of course, and the his final report combined the two, falls and Mexico. It came in issue 44 (April 1954): “MFS Dave Kelley, now in Mexico with an archeological expedition writes—in a letter which we hope to find room for—that one native assistant who owns a ranch near Tamaulipas, Mexico, claims ‘that two years do not pass without a fall of fish’ on his ranch, and ‘sometimes they fall more than once in a single year.’”
I have no more information on this report, and Thayer never did get around the running Kelley’s complete letter. Again, I do not know why. There doesn’t seem to have been any animosity, and Kelley fit well within a particular Fortean niche. His work was congruent with Thayer’s interest in Pre-Columbian contacts with North America; it fit with Reider Sherwin’s publications, at least in broad outline; and his interest in diffusionism and Polynesian culture also went hand-in-hand with the speculations of Guy Powell, if not in detail then in tendency. Work that supported Atlantis as the organizing force of pre-historic earth obviously tied in with the Theosophical ideas of so many Forteans—what with the Atlanteans being one of the root races, and ideas about mythology encoding ancient knowledge—rudimentary in Kelley’s early work, admittedly—had an elective affinity with the catastrophism of Immanuel Velikovsky’s and his “Worlds in Collision.”
Underlying a lot of this archeological speculation was, as well, one of the Ur-ideas of Thayer’s Fortean Society: that is, the Drayson Problem. The idea here is that the earth’s poles slowly move around a circle; and that the timing of the equinoxes slowly changes over the course of some 26,000 years. The authors of “Hamlet’s Mill” argued that knowledge of these astronomical changes were written into the world’s mythologies. Others might say this knowledge was invented by Atlanteans and transmitted to later civilizations. Or that calendrical markings of this astronomical phenomena were diffused from one culture to another.
And underlying all of _this_, there is Fort. He criticized astronomers as mountebanks, and offered his own cosmology, one with the planets nearby: they were the titular “New Lands,” not distant worlds. There’s nothing in Fort, that I can remember, which is supportive of Drayson or ideas about various ideas about the precession of the equinoxes. But that’s not really the point. The point is this: that astronomers got something wrong. That calendars and history are not as we thought them to be. That the story of our species is much different—and much weirder—than we ever knew.
Kelley, I think, could get behind the intent of such an idea, even if he didn’t accept the details. He was a maverick, offering a history of the world different than the one accepted by most professionals. And in that, he felt kinship with other Forteans.
On 23 November 1942—a Monday, three days before Thanksgiving, and a little more than six months after he had turned 18—Kelley enlisted in the war effort. He was a slim 5’11 and 148 pounds. Kelley joined the army air force and spent his time in Kettering, England, which means he was likely part of the Eighth Air Force, which had come into being earlier that year. I do not know any more exactly what he did during the war, but the service allowed him to enter college. He had been in correspondence with the archeologist Alfred Tozzer, at Harvard, and when he finished his time in the army air force used the G.I. Bill to go to school there and become Tozzer’s last sudent.
Kelley’s time at Harvard was busy one. He entered about 1946, as best as I can figure; a year later, he had published a genealogical paper, “A New Consideration of the Carolingians.” He also immersed himself in Meso-American history, anthropology, and archeology: his senior thesis was “A History of Pre-Spanish Meso-America.” In addition, he had an interest in astronomy, which he combined with his fascination for Central America in his second academic publication, 1954’s “On Ancient Mexican Stellar Beliefs.” His dissertation showed his maverick side—it argued for a connection between Mexican history and Polynesian culture: “Our Elder Brother Coyote: Evidence for a Mexican Element int he Formation of Polynesian Culture.”
By accounts, Kelley was a quick and voracious reader, who looked for underworked areas where he could learn the literature and speculate on potential solutions to the problems there. These were not always within the strictures of accepted academic formulations, but apparently they still showed erudition and a familiarity with the relevant literature—hence his controversial dissertation. This seems to have been true—to an extent-for his genealogical research, though he didn’t publish in the field for decades after his first paper; but was certainly true of his studies of Meso-American history.
However much or little Kelley’s dissertation was out of the mainstream,his graduate work and pedigree got him a job at Texas Tech. He had married by this time, an archeologist named Jane Holden, and together they moved to Lubbock. In time, Jane would give birth to four children. At the time he moved from the Northeast to the Southwest, he won a Fulbright scholarship, and spent the year 1957-1958 teaching and researching in Peru. He continued to publish during this time. In 1964, after a year in Uruguay on another Fulbright, he moved to the University of Nebraska, where he stayed for four years before heading further north, to the University of Calgary, where he stayed for the rest of his academic career. (Jane was also a professor there.)
A polymath, no doubt, Kelley’s work still fell into a couple of broad areas, and in each of them he was willing to push for controversial conclusions, sometimes to his credit, other times without much pay-off. These were Mayan hieroglyphics, transoceanic exchange, and astronomy. The first interest—hieroglyphics—had him confirming some ideas outside the mainstream. Back in 1956, at a conference, Kelley met the Soviet archeologist Yuri Knorozov, who was arguing that Mayan hieroglyphics should be understood as a phonetic system. Leading Mayanists disagreed. As it happened, Knorozov and Kelley were broadly correct, and their ideas allowed for the deciphering of Maya writing. In the course of Kelley’s research—which led to a number of important papers in the 1960s and a book on Mayan writing in the 1970s—Kelley supported another Soviet idea, that Classical period Mayan writing was primarily historical texts. It is worth noting that this support for Soviet ideas came during the Cold War.
Kelley’s two other major archeological interests did not lead to the same kinds of pay offs. His interest in astronomy was connected to an interest in differing calendar systems. Kelley spent much of his academic career trying different correlations between the Mayan calendar and European systems, not convinced that the reigning interpretation was correct. His student counted four different systems that Kelley championed over the years, eventually settling on one. But I have no evidence that his ideas have been influential, at all, in academic circles. The earliest of his published forays into this topic was 1960’s “Calendar Animals and Deities” which compared elements from European, Polynesian, and Meso-American calendars.
Connected with both the astronomical and linguistic studies were Kelley’s interest in diffusionism—his third major area of research and another which did not pan out so well. Diffusionism was, even by the time Kelley received his Ph.D., an outmoded idea: it was the belief that because there were parallel ideas in two geographically separated places, there must have been, at some point in history, a connection between peoples. Thus, similarities in Polynesian culture and Meso-American culture meant that there was evidence of contact, his dissertation had argued. Even Kelley’s student, in a obituary, could only say of this work that is led to articles with colorful titles. Not a ringing endorsement.
Commitment to these various research agendas—but mostly diffusionism—led Kelley to stake out a number of positions that received support not from fellow academics but, rather, those on the fringe. For example, in the 1970s marine biologist and maverick archeologist Dr. Barry Fell argued that America is home rocks inscribed with Old World scripts, rocks whose age proves that Europeans had been visiting North America for thousands of years. Kelley gave him some support—which carried weight, given that Kelley’s own maverick interpretation of the Mayan script had been important to its deciphering. Kelley conceded that Fell was wrong in his examples, but that the thrust of his research is worth considering—that is to say, that European culture had diffused to America several times and had a written history prior to 1492, one just not correctly interpreted yet.
Kelley’s diffusionism and calendrical speculations have provided comfort and support to advocates of dissent archaeological theories. The 1969 book “Hamlet’s Mill,” which argued that myths from across the world all encoded knowledge about the precession of the equinoxes—evidence of global diffusion or a planet-wide civilization—made some reference to Kelley’s work. Those with an interest in Atlantis similarly turned to Kelley as a celebrated academic whose ideas about the spread of calendrical ideas across half the globe could be used as evidence that Atlantean ideas were similarly diffused—prhaps explaining the presence of pyramids in such far-flung places as Egypt and . . . Meso-America.
In 2005, Kelley and Eugene F. Milone published “Exploring Ancient Skies: An Encyclopedic Survey of Archeoastronomy” that culminated this line of research. In the ancient past, he argues, there was a worldwide system of communication that allowed for the spread of knowledge around the globe. The Meso-American astronomy that he studied for half a century, he argues, derived from Old World systems. He thought there was merit in the ideas put forward in “Hamlet’s Mill.” Kelley was insisting that prehistory is completely different than we think—and it does not take very much imagination to see how Atlantis might be the heart of this old system, though, as far as I know, Kelley himself did not support theories about Atlantis in his academic writing.
David Kelley died 19 May 2011, some six weeks after he had turned 87.
*****
Kelley was associated with the Fortean Society for a few years—but, as is clear from his biography, his interests continued to intersect with Fortean ones throughout his life. I cannot say exactly when Kelley first read Fort—or if he read Fort at all—or how he came to the Fortean Society, but theirs one avenue of speculation worth mentioning. In the fall of 1948, Tiffany Thayer published the 22nd issue of Doubt, the Fortean Society magazine. It was devoted to a bibliography of books on pre-Columbian contact with North America. Kelley’s interest in the subject—expressed later in his writings—may have led him to the magazine. Similarly, a few issues earlier—Doubt 18, July 1947—Thayer had written about Reider T. Sherwin, who argued that certain Native American languages had been taken from Old Norse—diffusionism at its best, or worst, depending.
Certainly, the timing of Kelley’s appearance within Doubt supports these suggestions. He was named in Doubt 24, April 1949, having contributed a letter—one that sheds some light on Forteanism as it developed out of and away from the same movements that birthed skepticism. The first paragraph of the (excerpted?) letter read:
“What have [Joseph] McCabe or [Emanuel] Haldeman-Julius ever done to deserve even to be members of the Fortean Society? It is certainly not unorthodox in this day and age to belabor organized religion and probably the most unorthodox thing any scientist could do would be to affirm a belief in God or deny that evolution was the answer to our presence here. I have seen [Haldeman-Julius’s newspaper] the Freeman but it seems to me that a negative political and religious attitude should not be sufficient to balance such things as their attitude toward Atlantis, for example, where Haldeman-Julius writes strongly against a proposed expedition looking for Atlantis on the grounds that the story is just a fable—this is not a Fortean attitude—I rather incline to believe that there is little or no basis for the Atlantis story myself, but I’m all in favor of looking.”
One gets the sense that Kelley was trying too hard, here, to mark himself as a freethinker. He doubted the possibility of Atlantis—but he was the one who brought up the subject in the first place—and he wanted a search party sent out anyway. It is impossible that Kelley did not know the story of Heinrich Schliemann, another archeological maverick, and his discovery of the ancient city of Troy, back in the 19th century, when everyone else thought it was only a land of fable. I think he wanted Atlantis to be found. His dismissal of Haldeman-Julius, on the contrary, seems to forceful. His Blue Books and newspapers gave voice to dissenters throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as well as providing a place for a number of Forteans to publish. May be he was hidebound in some areas—who isn’t?—but he’d proved his bona fides.
The second paragraph took up with McCabe:
“Again McCabe’s pamphlet on Ancient America is more positively orthodox than the most orthodox professor at Harvard, for they will admit they may be wrong—McCabe says they are right and have ‘proven’ that they are right—for example, the old saw that man can not have originated in America because there are are not great apes there—only [John Lloyd] Stephens shot a 6 foot monkey near Palenque. Also, McC. says that America has been more thoroughly explored than any area on earth and scientists would certainly know if man were present before the last glacial—I have never seen such a foolish and un-Fortean statement made even by the most orthodox Americanist I know.”
Here, Kelley touches on an interesting bit of Fortean intellectual history. McCabe was an English free-thinker who had given up his Catholicism and become a rationalist. (He debated Arthur Conan Doyle over the merits of spiritualism.) In time, he branched out from writing for rationalist publications to write for Haldeman-Julius’s “Blue Books” series. “Doubt” and the Fortean Society belonged to this tradition, as well, even as Thayer separated his Society from secularism, rationalism, and early skeptical movement by refusing the authority of science—McCabe, on the contrary, was a firm supporter of scientific enterprise. That Kelley found fault with McCabe’s theories, and kept open the possibility that humanity arose (independently) in North America says more about his own heterodox views than anything about McCabe or his orthodoxy.
The letter’s final paragraph—or the last published bit—was short, but suggests that this was the same Keely who would grow to become the archeologist, and that he had shed whatever religious tradition he had been born to. It read,
“That’s my two-cents worth—incidentally, I’m not a Catholic, and I couldn’t afford to stay at Harvard without the GI Bill, so I’m not a fat Capitalist.”
Further corroboration of Kelley’s identity came in over the years. All told, he appeared in five more issues of Doubt, running to August 1955. (One imagines this marriage, dissertation, family, relocation, and research took up any spare time.) He next appeared in the following issue, 25, with a report that a certain valley in Mexico had received no rain between 1452 and 1456. Either Thayer or Kelly—the write-up is unclear—was asking for conformation, and methodology: was it based on tree-ring studies, or something else. Things from the sky continued to intrigued him. There was then a break, before Kelley—styled Kelly—appeared in issue 34, October 1951, credited with sending in a report about an Ottawa naturalist who had issued a reward for a bird big enough to carry off small cows. He was credited with sending in something—exactly what is unspecified—on flying saucers (which could be any kind of aerial phenomenon) for 49 (August 1955).
Mexico was also an object of interest, of course, and the his final report combined the two, falls and Mexico. It came in issue 44 (April 1954): “MFS Dave Kelley, now in Mexico with an archeological expedition writes—in a letter which we hope to find room for—that one native assistant who owns a ranch near Tamaulipas, Mexico, claims ‘that two years do not pass without a fall of fish’ on his ranch, and ‘sometimes they fall more than once in a single year.’”
I have no more information on this report, and Thayer never did get around the running Kelley’s complete letter. Again, I do not know why. There doesn’t seem to have been any animosity, and Kelley fit well within a particular Fortean niche. His work was congruent with Thayer’s interest in Pre-Columbian contacts with North America; it fit with Reider Sherwin’s publications, at least in broad outline; and his interest in diffusionism and Polynesian culture also went hand-in-hand with the speculations of Guy Powell, if not in detail then in tendency. Work that supported Atlantis as the organizing force of pre-historic earth obviously tied in with the Theosophical ideas of so many Forteans—what with the Atlanteans being one of the root races, and ideas about mythology encoding ancient knowledge—rudimentary in Kelley’s early work, admittedly—had an elective affinity with the catastrophism of Immanuel Velikovsky’s and his “Worlds in Collision.”
Underlying a lot of this archeological speculation was, as well, one of the Ur-ideas of Thayer’s Fortean Society: that is, the Drayson Problem. The idea here is that the earth’s poles slowly move around a circle; and that the timing of the equinoxes slowly changes over the course of some 26,000 years. The authors of “Hamlet’s Mill” argued that knowledge of these astronomical changes were written into the world’s mythologies. Others might say this knowledge was invented by Atlanteans and transmitted to later civilizations. Or that calendrical markings of this astronomical phenomena were diffused from one culture to another.
And underlying all of _this_, there is Fort. He criticized astronomers as mountebanks, and offered his own cosmology, one with the planets nearby: they were the titular “New Lands,” not distant worlds. There’s nothing in Fort, that I can remember, which is supportive of Drayson or ideas about various ideas about the precession of the equinoxes. But that’s not really the point. The point is this: that astronomers got something wrong. That calendars and history are not as we thought them to be. That the story of our species is much different—and much weirder—than we ever knew.
Kelley, I think, could get behind the intent of such an idea, even if he didn’t accept the details. He was a maverick, offering a history of the world different than the one accepted by most professionals. And in that, he felt kinship with other Forteans.
