Keel's personal journey into the paranormal started in childhood at his farm home in Perry, New York. "Something" started rapping on the walls, and Keel found he could communicate with it, much like the Fox sisters who launched the Spiritualism movement in the 19th century. Keel never learned who the communicator was, but this and other psychic experiences drew him into the paranormal.

His first book, Jadoo (1957), is an international adventure story of Keel's encounters with the weird and mysterious — such as the snake charming he learned while in India. He never intended to focus his media career as a journalist and author on the paranormal — but his books and thousands articles on the paranormal have made him famous.

Along the way he has maintained considerable skepticism about the paranormal, and holds some unorthodox views.

Take extraterrestrials. Keel agrees with the late Ivan Sanderson on just where humans might fit in the spectrum of encounters with beings who seem off-world. "We think we're at the top of the food chain, but we may be at the bottom," said Keel. "Earth may be a farm and we're the crop."

Aliens dining on human may explain the large numbers of people who go missing without a trace every year, Keel said. They may like us, he said, because we're salty.

As for UFOs, both mysterious lights in the sky and a few famous alleged crashes are misunderstood. "UFOs are bundles of energy, not spaceships," he said. "I've seen them by the dozens. They seem to have a mind of their own. The UFO buffs have turned them into something they're not. There's a trickster element to them that's part of everything paranormal."

Keel says the famous crashes at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania in 1965 have natural explanations. He is firmly convinced that the Roswell crash is "an open and shut case" of a weather balloon. That story, put forward by the Air Force, had been derided by believers for years. But Keel says the proof is in the documentation. "No one wants to believe it," he said. "Denial is a big deal in the UFO field."

Kecksburg was an undeployed hydrogen bomb that accidentally fell off a U.S. bomber, Keel said. Planes armed with atom bombs were in the skies during those Cold War times. After the bomb fell off, the plane crashed. The military showed up right away to cart the bomb off. But the UFO buffs — and the public — are more interested in the glamor of a "crashed space ship."

Keel is probably most famous for his book The Mothman Prophecies (1976), about a wave of mysterious phenomena that plagued an area around the Ohio River in 1966-67. The focal point of the activity was Pt. Pleasant, West Virginia, where sightings of a large dark, winged humanoid with red eyes terrified people. The entity was dubbed Mothman. In addition, there were numerous sightings of UFOs, encounters with ETS, poltergeist activity, Men in Black, and strange behavior by animals and people. Keel had phone conversations with someone who claimed to be an ET. The wave ended when a bridge across the river collapsed, killing 42 people.

"I was astonished to find so much psychic phenomena in West Virginia," Keel said. "People were living in great fear. I decided not to write about it because of the bridge disaster." After a decade went by, Keel did write the book — which became a film in 2002 starring Richard Gere as Keel.

Mothman, Bigfoot and other mysterious creatures are entities that "defy all reason," Keel said. There are many sightings and descriptions, but never hard evidence. Keel coined the term "ultraterrestrial" in an attempt to explain them — beings who live in other, usually invisible dimensions on our planet. Like UFOs, ultraterrestrials are hard to understand because of the trickster nature of the paranormal.

The trickster element is the biggest unknown of all, Keel said. The paranormal is plagued by it — proof is always elusive, and phenomena end as abruptly as they start, without explanation. Perhaps there is an unknown energy, force, or even group of beings who pull strings and keep human beings chasing something they can never capture.

"Who or what the tricksters are, we may never know," said Keel. Ivan Sanderson once said they have the mentality of a 4-year-old. It's like dealing with monkeys. They play a lot of cosmic jokes on us. But who are they — that's the big question. I don't know if they even have an identity, or if we'll ever find out. I have no hope of that."

But one thing is for certain, he said. "There's a lot of weirdness out there."