Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, July 2020
The Heart and Soul of Ufology
by: Brent Raynes
A few years back, a woman and her 7-year-old daughter in Illinois, went to a psychic medium after this mother had a strange and vivid dream that her deceased husband’s spirit was trying to reach her. An apparition, believed to have been that of the husband, appeared within the mediumistic circle. After returning home, paranormal phenomena began to erupt around the mother and daughter.
“Twice a red light, nearly the size of a balloon came up to my daughter and disappeared,” the mother wrote me. “We both saw it. White and gold lights settled around the plants on the table in front of the dining room windows and blinked off and on. Green and purple ones took turns in the empty bathtub. One night I held my daughter in my arms and stated out loud that while we appreciated their interest, we didn’t want to frighten her, and I asked them to leave, which they did.”
“One night as I was washing dishes in the kitchen she [daughter] saw and spoke to me in the livingoom. When I didn’t answer, and then disappeared, puzzled and disturbed she went about the apartment looking for me to find me in the kitchen washing dishes, where I had been all along as far as I knew. And she has seen a young boy behind a curtain in our house and a few faces of grown ups she doesn’t recognize, and just legs walking near me. I have been concerned, wondering at times if she might be mentally ill, but she shows no signs of mental problems otherwise. And I must say that once I saw just legs wafting through the air near the floor near the kitchen sink. One night, on my way to the bathroom to prepare for bed, walking through the hallway and absentmindedly glancing into the dark dining room I saw a glowing cloud which had a human face rising up out of the floor. It scared me half to death and I slept with my light on for several nights thereafter.”
The medium offered to teach the daughter mediumship, at no charge, saying that she had the potential to become a powerful one. The mother, however, declined the offer due to her daughter’s young age. The mother herself, incidentally, had possessed some psychic awareness since her youth, she told me, having lived in a house with her parents where unexplained footsteps and other unexplained noises were fairly common, and having had an apparent out-of-body experience.
In the explosion of peculiar psychic disturbances that had erupted with both mother and daughter, another odd turn of events occurred that really puzzled the mother. Her daughter began seeing UFOs!
“I haven’t understood how that came about since I have never really been interested in them, and I had never talked about them,” the mother explained. She recalled how the first UFO sighting had happened on September 5, 1986l “It was egg-shaped. She saw this UFO through the dining room windows. Whizzed by about three feet outside the windows. The UFO was bright white and enveloped in a pale glow, but cast no light on objects nearby, and made no sound. About the size of a pick-up truck. This very puzzled eleven-year-old came to me and asked, ‘Mom, do you start seeing things when you get your period?’ She began her first menses that day.”
When I shared this story with my long-time friend and colleague in the UFO and paranormal field, psychiatrist Berthold Eric Schwarz, the author of UFO Dynamics, he remarked that such cases were the very “heart and soul” of ufology. “Yet how few care to notice and study this aspect,” he lamented. As I also explained in my Reality Checking column in this same issue, Bert would often refer people to the late Dr. Nandor Fodor’s Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, for it contains numerous historical examples of mysterious psychic lights and apparitions that are very similar to our modern UFO phenomena.
Karen, a computer consultant in Michigan, described to me a series of UFO sightings she had had back in March 1977, that culminated in a spectacular close encounter. “It first zipped toward us, then slowed and seemed to float until it stopped and hovered above us, within 50 feet. The gun-metal grey metallic ship was scratched and dusty. A circular row of multi-colored lights in a glass like casing rotated like a strobe along its bottom. The saucer was roughly 14 feet in diameter with a depth of no less than 8 feet. While the ship silently hovered I noticed a seam with large round rivets that ran along its rear from top to bottom. It amazed me how similar alien construction techniques were to ours. After about 60 seconds, the ship slowly turned to the right and accelerated until it disappeared beyond a clump of trees.” Karen shared that she had two sisters and a brother, all of whom have had their own separate UFO sightings. One of her sisters, she noted, had seen “odd creatures” and that sister and a brother have had “abduction dreams.”
“Poltergeist activity exited at the house before and after the sighting,” Karen added. “The phenomenon began shortly after we moved into our new house. One night when the entire family was upstairs, we began to hear pool balls clacking together, and it seemed to come from the basement. So we lowered the TV volume, and were shocked to hear what seemed to be a game of eight ball being played. After checking out the basement, we found no one, and the pool table was covered. The phantom pool shark continued playing for at least a year, sporadically. Other events included loud pounding within walls, door slamming, lights turning off, and other such minor annoyances. Our two dogs also heard the noises and would bark or howl at the ceiling or wall. It was not typical behavior for the Black Lab and Manchester Toy.”
Two friends in psychic synch after childhood encounter?
A young 22-year-old female model and freelance writer in Jefferson County, Missouri wrote me of how she shared an unusual UFO experience with a girl friend of hers back in 1976. They were both only ten at the time. “What happened to us is driving us both crazy for we have no answers,” she exclaimed. Her friend was spending the night. “I, for some unknown reason, was drawn to my parent’s bedroom,” she recalled. “I went to the window and there, hovering outside, was what appeared to be, for lack of a better word, a fireball. Bright orange in the center and surrounded by a white halo. Oddly, I wasn’t scared. I went into my bedroom, looked at my friend and said nothing. She just got up and followed me back to my parent’s room where we stood watching this fireball for about five minutes – five minutes where we felt peaceful and lost. Suddenly the fireball moved out from the alcove and shot up into the night sky where it disappeared.”
“Jokingly we now say that it was something that took half of my brain and put it into her head and half of her brain and put it into my head for we are almost identical in our personalities, and events that happen in our lives are almost always on identical tracks. We have ‘freaked’ people out for we always know what the other is thinking. We communicate silently oftentimes. I suppose a mild form of mental telepathy. And when we’re together the oddest events occur. Unexplained phenomena has surrounded our lives even when we’re not together. For instance, a male friend and I were working together and we both heard the back door open, someone enter the house, footsteps coming down the main hall and stopping at the door to the room where we were working. We both went out and no one was there. These instances are commonplace. The same with my friend, her music box suddenly starts to play, her locked door opening, etc.”
She claimed that the house where this orange “fireball” incident occurred was in a subdivision located over a Fox Indian gravesite. After I had briefed Bert Schwarz on this case, he urged me to write researcher and author Greg Long, who had been investigating similar phenomena at the Yakima Indian Reservation in Washington state. Mr. Long wrote me, “I’ve wrestled now for years with the question: Are the orange balls a natural non-sentient geophysically derived phenomenon with no ‘connection’ to Indian culture, beliefs, etc., or are they intelligent and either ET-derived or other-dimensionally derived and somehow intimately connected to Indian belief, practices, culture, and history?” Alan, a medical technician in Massachusetts, described how early in the fall of 1974 he, along with four high school friends, had a close-range UFO encounter. “It was enormous and shaped somewhat like a triangle,” he explained to me. “The thing was covered with round blinking lights of red, green, blue and yellow. It made a buzzing sound that I can only compare to a million bees. This sound kept a rhythmic pulse with the lights. The UFO was moving very slow and descending at first to the river. Then it slightly altered its course and began ‘floating’ towards us. It was perhaps 40 feet (at most) above us when we simultaneously screamed, ‘Let’s get out of here!’ I was transfixed, gazing at it, and felt as though it was watching me. There was a strange feeling throughout my body, not unlike the feeling one has when his foot ‘falls asleep.’ I also became sick throughout and wanted to go home.”
Two policemen had also sighted the UFO from another nearby vantage point. Alan remembers them, knows their names, and the name of one of his high school companions, but the part that really puzzles and disturbs him is that neither he nor his friend can remember who the other three “friends” were who had been with them. “I asked each old-time high school buddy that I used to befriend if he was there and each does not ever remember any such night or UFO!”
Are the three “friends” some sort of “screen memory” for something/someone else? Were the other three not supposed to remember what occurred?
The mysterious black ball and MIB-types
“The encounter took place at one of my most popular fishing spots,” Alan continued. It was about three weeks later. “I ran out of worms and figured I’d lift rocks and catch salamanders or hellgrammites for bait. When I climbed to the bottom of the steep hill I found a small metal black ball. It was as smooth as any smoothness can be and dense as any blackness I’ve ever seen. This ball was slightly smaller than a baseball but heavy as a bowling ball. When I picked up this little black ball I became very dizzy and almost fell into the drink. It gave off a powerful smell. It doesn’t always smell, but that first encounter almost knocked me out. On a couple of occasions, I could have sworn it made noises, very faint noises.” Alan also described MIBish encounters too. “Sometimes they show up in the most baffling way. Once when I was fishing they showed up. I didn’t tell my wife where I was going or anyone else for that matter. How they discovered my secluded fishing spot really makes me wonder if these jokers are human or what?” Alan also shared how he’d had apparent “out of body” experiences, poltergeist-type and other “paranormal” experiences. He said he once had a “missing time” episode where, feeling tired one afternoon, he went into his bedroom at 3 p.m. to rest and came back around at 3 p.m. the following day. His mother was startled to see him. “She asked me where I had been all night and day, and said she called all my friends to discover my whereabouts. According to her, I was not in bed all that time and nobody knew where I was.”
“I have had perhaps 40 different jobs in my life. It seems that I can’t stay in one place long. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not lazy or shiftless, but for some unknown reason I get very anxious and must impulsively move on. I look around me and everyone else seems to have a normal life with a course to take. At one time, I was the spelling champ in school, but those abilities have degenerated. I was an art student with wonderful innate potential. It seems that whenever I try to draw now I draw powerful creatures bent on destruction.”
When Martha first wrote me she was a 49-year-old Kentucky housewife. She wrote poetry and occasionally even songs. She and her husband seem happily married, have six children and live on a farm. “At one time we milked 125 cows and have had as many as 10,000 hogs,” she noted.
Martha described how she felt powerfully drawn to the stars. In fact, at an early age something happened that may have foreshadowed later events in her life. She wrote: “When I was five or six years old, I was playing in a field behind our house. It was in the late afternoon I’m sure. I heard something. He looked very tall to me. I was always small and still am. I am only five feet tall. So I think now he was about six feet tall. He was in a one piece suit I think. It makes me think of a jumpsuit. It was white and shiny. He wore a belt. It was silver. He told me not to be afraid, that he was there to see if I was alight. I had been sick for about 2 or 3 weeks about a month before.”
“He took a shiny silver colored tool, as I called it at the time, from the belt and told me to hold it. It was about the size of a pencil, but a little longer. He held a little box in his hand and watched it as I held the ‘tool.’ He told me I would be okay, and to read a lot and learn all I could and he would see me again someday.” “After this happened, I learned to read on my own. I also could tell my mother and dad when something was about to happen. After I told them two or three things and they happened, mother and dad made me stop telling things.”
Woman reports how alien visitor from childhood returns and predicts death of father
One night in November 1975, Martha had a UFO close encounter. “It was just above the treetops. It was a very large saucer shaped craft. There were lights all around the outside and a very bright one under it. The front dome was glass like. I could see inside. They looked like me and you. It stayed put for a while. The light shined on us standing below. Then it began to move up and to the east and was just a tiny speck in no time.”
“I guess it was about a week or two after. I saw a man in my house. There was the outline of a man at the basement door. I searched the house. No one was there. My dad was in the hospital about 50 miles away and I visited him 2 or 3 times a week, so I put this down as just being tired. A few days later, at 3 a.m., something woke me, a noise of some kind. I looked up and a man was standing in my bedroom door. There was a floodlight on each side of the house and I could see him real good. He walked toward me and sat on my bed. He told me to take care of my mother and sister, that my dad was dead. Twenty minutes later the hospital called. Dad had died.” “Everyone I know has changed over the years, but I’m sure this was the same man I have seen since I was a little girl. He hadn’t changed. He looked just the same as the first time I saw him.”