ABSTRACT
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.”1 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.2 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.
