Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, October 2020
Close Encounters of the Spiritual and Archetypal Kind
by: Brent Raynes
Madeline Teagle of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, just outside of Akron, was a wife, mother, and a grandmother. However, outside of that context she was far removed from the ordinary and regular social norms of a society for women. Madeline was a metaphysical minister, a therapist, a ufologist, a UFO contactee, with a wide range of interests – interests that many would regard as rather unique and unorthodox – including transpersonal psychology, parapsychology, meditation, ufology, and even shamanism – to name but a few.
I first ended up on Madeline’s doorstep in July 1975. I had previously read a series of articles that she had written regarding her investigations and experiences in the UFO field. I found Madeline’s home to be a hubbub of activity. I would dare say her home was something akin to the grand central station of UFO reporting in northeastern Ohio, and a gathering place for fellow researchers and experiencers to come together. But as I indicated at the beginning, there was more. There were the weekly meditation classes, occasional skywatches, psychic experiments – with a constant flow of people coming and going. That summer, Madeline introduced me to nearly a dozen other UFO contactees in her area, as well as sharing details of some of her most unique and unusual experiences.
The one whose story impressed me the most was an Akron businessman named Al Roush. Through Al, with whom Madeline had some extraordinary experiences that she shared with me in great detail, I was thoroughly intrigued with his fascinating story.
But first let me begin with Madeline’s description of Al. She became acquainted with him back late in the 1950s. Working with Al she once observed a small, silvery-white ball of light rolling across the front lawn of her home. On another occasion, she encountered a mysterious “patch of fog” from which something resembling “tentacles” lashed out and wrapped around her. Then moments later, the clouds in the night sky above seemed to come together and form the perfect image of a man – a man, that is, with what resembled the head and wings of an eagle!
Others also described having had unusual experiences in Al’s presence. For example, the late Larry Moyers of Akron, a respected MUFON investigator, recalled for me an episode that he had personally witnessed. He stated that he and several others were at a location near Cleveland with Al when Larry saw three small “football-shaped lights” hovering near a bush. “They were transparent,” he said. “You could see the leaves through them.” But when he tried to touch them they simply vanished.
Al himself told me that his initial UFO contact experience happened back in August 1958, although his first UFO sighting occurred while he was in the service, when he and the entire crew of the U.S.S. Tidewater, a tanker, saw a bright orange disc at a point east of the Florida Keys.
After that experience, he had no choice but to believe. He began to read up on UFO literature and decided to attempt telepathic contact with these beings he was reading about. From what he had been reading it seemed possible that such a thing could be achieved.
On August 6, 1958, sitting alone at his home, he struck paydirt. He said that for two days prior he had been seeing brilliant “yellow globes” of enormous size maneuvering in the skies outside of his home in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. He was amused, he said, as he watched military jets engage the UFOs in an aerial cat and mouse game. Thus it was on the sixth that Al began to feel an intense “spinning sensation” and sat down to rest. Next he noticed how the walls of his home, in various places, began to look as though they were somehow not solid! It was as though he could see through them, but then he blacked out. Next things got really strange.
“Within seconds I was trying to regain consciousness. I saw everything in that house, in my neighbors houses, that street, and that neighborhood, completely different than I’ve ever seen it before, and I could not believe what I saw. Because what I saw was nothing but black and white, and what is ordinarily people became white dots spinning around in kind of a black void. In other words, a human being looked not only transparent but white, like a white light within a black field.”
I asked him how he knew that the “white dots” were human. “Because they were screaming,” he replied. “They were making noises. They were yelling and they were cursing, and they were cussing, and they were communicating.”
Pretty strange and dark stuff. Then the aliens appeared! Al said that to the right of his chair shone a vertical beam of light and how he reached for it “as if it was a matter of life and death.” He stood up and walked into it. Then two humanoid beings just seemed to materialize on opposite sides of him. They were dressed in “yellow-white robes,” had large heads, slanted eyebrows, large chest areas, and stood a towering eight feet or so. As they silently stood on each side of him, Al was unable to distinguish whether they were male or female. Then Al felt as though he was going up a very fast elevator and soon found himself on the inside of an “enormous green translucent sphere,” and finding himself in the company of three of these humanoid beings. Immediately the craft took off for the deep ocean of space. “The planet looked like a dot behind us in a few seconds,” he added.
Within a short time, Al and his small alien crew had reached their intergalactic destination. “This green sphere jettisoned itself up to a mass of land and all of us were instantaneously ejected from this green sphere and beached.” He then said he found himself face-to-face with an alien race of another world. “The first thing I saw were little kids. Five, six, seven, eight, nine years of age. I’d say male and female on a quick judgement. The adults were all standing there, and everybody was moving. Not on their feet, but above the ground. And I can recall then we were taken to the left and I was permitted to see what their architecture was. They were humble buildings in contrast to our own, made out of slabs of stone and rock, and what looked like metallic silver and gold.”
Throughout his entire tour of the planet the three humanoids from the sphere remained nearby. He called them the “reinforcing beings.” Soon he found himself standing in the center of a large stone octagonal structure. The entities announced to him that they were going to demonstrate their construction process for him. As Al watched two beings went over to a large rock and cut themselves a slab simply by extending their two arms out from their bodies. Al was amazed at this. He had not observed them use any tools to do this.
Next the beings allowed Al to see a seething red sphere hovering by the two entities. “That is god energy,” he said they explained. “We know how to use it. But to us that’s god and energy and god and energy are one and we know how to use it.”
Al heard himself immediately respond, “Where is the Great White Father?” He then admitted, “I don’t know why I said this. This made them mad. They took me to another place where they had a stone octagonal court with gates in it and they put me in the middle. And they said ‘You stand it.’ They opened the gates and a lion would come out. A real honest to God lion. So they said, ‘Watch this force that contains the lion.’ Because they had a force that kept that lion from moving. I was led to understand that evolution can occur in different directions at this point. That is, we can have thought forms that are lions and bodies of men. That is, the thought forms that constitute the spirit are not the same as the thought forms that constitute the appearance of the body. At any rate, they called this the lion test. They were showing that this force contained these lions, or held the balance of nature so that nature does not attack.” Al’s story contains a rich harvest of deeply symbolic language. When pondering all of its curious elements I reflected on how it seemed to me as though he was perceiving humanity as existing largely in dark despair of some sort, existing in a “black void” where humanity was “cussing” and “cursing.” A light from heaven appears and he instinctively reaches for it “as if it was a matter of life and death.” He’s taken to an otherworldly realm in the heavens above, where he’s given a spiritual lesson about maintaining the “balance of nature.”
After reading my report on this case, my friend and colleague Dr. Greg Little, a Tennessee psychologist and author, who is very familiar with symbols of all kinds, and tackled Jungian material in such works as The Archetype Experience, People of the Web, and Grand Illusions, wrote the following: “This complex report encompasses the entirety of the UFO field as well as parapsychology, religion and psychology. It is a vast puzzle in itself. The modern UFO myth now overlaps virtually all the ‘paranormal world’ of phenomena.”
Another experiencer Madeline introduced me to was a 25-year-old resident of Akron named Wayne. He told me how when he was around six living in Brownstown, Indiana, one night he had this inexplicable urge to step outside. When he did he was surprised to see a barn-sized sphere composed of white light hovering an estimated 300 feet away in the sky. When he was 14, living in nearby Medora, he again felt compelled to step outside and again saw the very same looking barn-sized sphere of light. “When this ball came over me I couldn’t move and I didn’t want to move,” he said. “I don’t think I could have even if I would have wanted to.”
As a boy, Wayne said that he had numerous occasions where a strange sensation of detachment would come over him. He would lose feeling in his hands and would feel somehow as though he were separated in some way from his physical body. He had always fought off this foreign sensation, until Christmas 1971 when he decided to give in to it. Suddenly he said his body was surrounded by a “beautiful light” and it was as though his “body was part of the whole universe.” It was then that he felt his sphere encounters were somehow related. “I felt that it was all tied in,” he said.
Madeline knew from her own personal experiences just how complex and unusual the UFO contact syndrome could be. Her own contact with a being identified as Amana, a “Sun of God” [yes, Sun with a U], was a kind of symbolic and apparitional figure. “When he appears there is generally a brilliant white tube of light first. Then he just seems to ‘form’ within it. When I have touched him the process of deforming something like a sharp electrical shock runs through the area of my own body that is touching him. [1] Amana told me long ago that every cell within the body had its own keynote and when we were able to harmonize all of our various notes we would discover perfection. Do believe this, for he and those with him emanated music.”
After that Madeline studied different musical techniques, instruments and how their sounds seemed to affect one’s consciousness. At one point, she was even sharing with me some interesting things she had read about the pre-Columbian Whistling Vessels of Peru and years later I came to experiment with several of those very powerful shamanic-type instruments of sound, finding contact experiencers seemed to be especially very sensitive to them.
Madeline was very attuned to metaphysical, spiritual and shamanic concepts and approaches. Part Iroquois she seemed especially interested in the shamanic and Native American areas and introduced me to a Native American medicine man of Susquehannock ancestry over in southeastern Pennsylvania who I visited twice, back in 1976 and 1977. Madeline had strongly recommended that I meet with him as he too was another contactee who had proven himself to her. She called him Lightfoot. She recalled how he had once conducted a rain dance ceremony during a dry spell. She described how a cloud had appeared in the sky, then it split in half and what looked like four beings appeared. One appeared to her “almost like a half bird, half human” she stated. “They did not look Indian.” “One time, since I was unable to go to him for instructions, a friend of mine went, and when he came back he had a special ritual he was to do with me. We went back to the big Hickory and he followed Lightfoot’s instructions – in about 5 minutes. I looked up and saw two very real white wolves observing us. We did not do anything, except what Don had been told to do, and those wolves were there, moving back and forth until we were finished. Then they took off and were gone. And I never forgot the ritual nor its purpose. Lightfoot had connections to energies and worlds that we just read about.”
The shaman described to me how the UFO pilots that he had met were tall humanoid beings that his people called the Yuh-dush-gwa. He explained how they were the ancient protectors of his people going back many centuries. He pointed out how UFOs were not only interplanetary but were also manifestations of spirit “as are the spirits, powers, forces and beings who ride them, materializing to whom they will.” He described how one of the Yud-dush-gwa ships had landed in their backyard once. His wife was the first to see it coming down. She grabbed a piece of paper and drew on it what it looked like to her. Next the tall beings entered their home to visit them.
Visits from non-human beings seemed almost a regular part of their lives. I was told one time of a visit from a four foot tall olive skinned being with pointed ears that “rose above its head.” “They never have clothes because they’re sexless,” Lightfoot explained. Others arrived too that day, more diminutive beings as well as beings who appeared to be nine foot tall, with silver hats with wings, and a light shining out from the forehead like a flashlight, and another out from the back, between the shoulder blades. Curiously, the light beams suddenly ended about a foot distance from the body. [2] After their visit, the beings left through a closed door [something both “ghosts,” “elementals,” and “ufonauts” are quite adept at].
References: 1. “Sometimes people feel as if they are coming apart in these UFO beams,” stated researcher and experiencer Kathleen Marden, the niece of famous alien abductee Betty Hill.
2. UFO and entity light beams can reportedly be very strange. They may bend around corners, cause invisibility of physical objects or parts of people in their presence, pass through solid objects like a roof or wall, and, as in the case just cited, stop unexpectedly without some sort of physical obstruction being responsible. For example, a witness described to me seeing a UFO one night in Falls Church, Virginia that projected a light beam coming down near his home. He stated: “The light was like a spotlight except it had a pointed end and was slowly coming down. I knew this was strange as light would immediately hit the ground but this was coming down slowly and was cone shaped. I got up to go outside from the porch and opening the door looked up at a football shaped disk that was a solid bright orange with the white beam of light that came down to about three feet off the ground. I looked at this but it seemed as soon as I came out, the light started back up to the disk. Once it reached the disk, the craft floated away very slowly and made no sound whatsoever.”
