The John Palifox Key Mystery/Hoax Part 1

The John Palifox Key Mystery/Hoax

I have been known to take my interests and curiosities to the extreme. This is not something that I feel deserves reproach or praise. It’s just how my brain does business. Those same business practices started a two year odyssey of stupidity/revelation revolving around a little known internet hoax/game that went by the name of John Palifox Key.

At the time I first heard of Key and the mysterious tome he had aledgedly written while teaching at Emory University, I was working data entry for a small German camera manufacturer. The job was an exercise in repetition and although the menial, thought robbing clicks of my tasks drained me of most thought and ambition, the work load was ebb and flow and I was afforded time to randomly search the internet. A good deal of this was spent meandering lazily through stock photo sites as I was going to school for design at the time. NOTE: I was actually going to school for animation, but seeing as I am now a designer by necessity saying that I went for design lessens the blow a little. This usually resulted in me putting in softcore porn phrases and ogling the models on any number of stock photography sites….all in the name of art, you have to understand.

When I wasn’t concealing my little searches for “muscular female calves” I was also visiting paranormal forum sites…because we all know that softcore fetish porn and alien abduction accounts go together like pb&j. What I found, besides the fact that 3 out of 4 fashion photographers prefer ball gags to good lighting, was an interesting thread concerning a man named John Palifox Key. The Key immediately stuck out as an allusion to the actual work of the man himself and you’ll see why.

Key, for all of his lack of googleness, was pretty popular in small circles for penning a book entitled Proofs of My Return. The book supposedly served as an autobiographical account of Key’s journeys into parallel dimensions, his return and details of “portal” areas where the die-hard interdimensional daytripper could jump ship and live amongst the denizens of the Secondary Alternate realm; aforementioned inhabitants being gnomelike creatures that instantly sparked my interest. I am known to be a little of a Tolkien nerd, so talk of dwarves always sets my nerd phaser to stunned. So stunned I was to learn that a few of these portals were within map’s reach right here in the continental United States. Stunned further was I to learn that I was spending hours of my day researching this. (mind you that data entry is so mind numbingly boring that I would’ve joined Amway or the Jehova’s Witnesses for a brief reprieve) I chose however to scour the message boards for anything that I could find to bring this mystery a little closer to closed for myself.

A central figure emerged… (continued in part 2)

Ash
The Parafactor