Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Check out the origins of the Grinning Man or how one journalist became the the focal point of the legend.

As has become apparent to any frustrated readers who would prefer insane stories of paranormal weirdness over weird stories of insane journalists, the tale of the Grinning Man says a lot more about reporter John Keel than it does about any sort of alien visitors or psychic
census takers. Looking at Internet assessments of Grinning Man facts and guesses, then, it’s hard to ignore that, in many cases, Keel is missing. The Wikipedia article at least mentions that Keel recorded all three sightings. (The opening blurb says that ufologist John Moseley also investigated the Grinning Man, which is sort of true… he tagged along on Keel’s initial trip to gather testimony from the Jersey witnesses.) Meanwhile, other sites simply paraphrase accounts of the stories without so much as a tip of the hat to the intrepid reporter, save for, in some cases, a brief walk-on appearance as Interviewer 1.

As one of Weird Things’ major preoccupations is examining the ways in which legends like that of the Grinning Man are able to proliferate and thrive outside the slipshod pretenses of their primary sources, it’s important to understand the significance of Keel’s relative absence from
the this whole smiling, green-suited clustercuss. I think we can all agree that, without Keel’s badgering insistence, it would be pretty difficult to make the case that the entities encountered in all three sightings are one in the same, or even distantly related. In fact, the only real link between them (aside from an affinity for easily donned green haberdashery) is the ancillary UFO activity that allegedly preceded each encounter. It’s no surprise, then, that these supposed
(by Keel no less!) unearthly airspace incursions provide the basis for the Grinning Man’s continued legacy.

From ProfilingtheUnexplained.com: “He usually appears around the time of UFO sightings.” Also – “He couldn’t be associated with the Men in Black, since he supposedly wears a shimmering green outfit.” (I just enjoy the latter quote because a.) It’s the concluding sentence in the site’s article and b.) you’d think cryptid-rabid Web publishers would immediately conclude that the green suit is precisely why he might be Men in Black, as not wearing black would be a great way for him to hide his affiliation. Come on guys, I’m not even a paranoid maniac and I figured that one out.)

Find the rest, AFTER THE JUMP…

On his blog “The Truth,” UFO enthusiast “Zapruder” described driving past the Grinning Man, who was creepily loitering among some bushes in Roswell, NM. He asserts that “The grinning man is often said to be brutal, beating people up.” Well… all right. His account also includes
this even more ridiculous assessment of the chorus to “Easy Lover”- “I was listening to the radio at the time, Phil Collins and Phillip Bailey’s Easy Lover. However, before the amazing chorus, the radio cut out… ”

What’s interesting about this image of the Grinning Man as some sort of otherworldly, perhaps even governmentally employed, UFO chaser is that, while based on Keel’s three disparate accounts of Indrid Cold, it doesn’t match Keel’s actual theory at all. Keel believed that UFO
activity, The Grinning Man, the Mothman, Bigfoot, etc. are all physical manifestations of an “ultraterrestrial” force that asserts its presence on Earth by taking the physical form of popular folkloric/legendary figures. He posits, for example, that demon sightings in the middle
ages were more prevalent than demon sightings today because a majority of ye olde citizenry accepted the notion of living, tangible demons, a belief that allowed the “ultraterrestrial” power to take on the visible characteristics of said demons. In the 1960s, when everyone believed in
UFOs (and Mothmen and Grinning Men… I guess????), the super magic alien aura physically emulated the antagonists of those stories. Hence, all the various oogity boogitys that Keel encountered.

See? Maybe he was a bit of a nut. Aside from the argument’s inherent logical catch-22 (an otherwordly power is responsible for sightings of well-known phenomena when said phenomena are only well known because of previous sightings), what the hell is he talking about?

All well-meaning Keel mocking aside, the larger point here is that because The Grinning Man legend only attained “legend” status in the first place because Keel was intent on taking three similar stories and playing narrative connect-the-dots, without Keel’s interpretation, it falls on readers of the accounts (accounts that are still being treated as legitimately linked related occurrences) to formulate their own conclusions. Today’s theories about the so-called Grinning Man are based on a slanted correlation between three accounts sans any acknowledgement of the slant or its eccentrically biased architect. And so the stories begin to form a fresh, though equally baseless, legend – a legend linked to wild government conspiracy, alien abduction and UFO sightings.

Next time you read an eye-witness account of a paranormal encounter or supernatural happenstance, don’t just consider the witness. Consider the writer. Most of them – me included – have far more decisive agendas than the blurry creatures and sinister lens smudges that they aim to uncover.

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