Book Review

Operation Trojan Horse — A Review

John Keel’s 1970 book on UFOs asks questions that remain today

Ryan Sprague
5 min readAug 12, 2024

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After years of reading UFO books, I admittedly had never read anything by the late John Keel. That recently changed when I picked up a used copy of his 1970 book, Operation Trojan Horse. Before delving into my review of the book, here’s a little back ground on Keel for the uninitiated.

John Keel was a journalist and well-known figure in both the UFO and paranormal research communities. He began his career as a writer and radio broadcaster before delving into the unknown. His most famous work, The Mothman Prophecies (1975), is a chilling account of strange occurrences in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and has since become a cult classic, inspiring a movie adaptation and numerous investigations into the Mothman legend. But before Mothman, Keel dove heavily into UFOs. And as I soon discovered, in reading Operation Trojan Horse… the connections between Mothman, UFOs, and high strangeness was stronger than ever.

Review

First published in 1970, the book is both a deep dive into the history of UFO sightings and an exploration of the author’s provocative theory that these phenomena are not simply visits from extraterrestrial beings but are instead manifestations of a…

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