Alternate Perceptions Magazine, June 2022
Aliens, Angels, and Archetypes?
by: Brent Raynes
Zeitoun, Egypt
An Overview of the history of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Contact Paradigms takes the reader on a seldom discussed and acknowledged review of a wide-range of bewildering aspects and otherworldly encounter descriptions selected from globally reported contact experiences with Non-Human Intelligent Beings (NHIB). Such accounts cut across all historical epochs from modern accounts of “alien abductees” and “contactees” to earlier experiencer descriptions of religious apparitions, ghost-like specters, shamanic encounters, out-of-body journeys, all the way back to the earliest reaches of recorded history. This is a detailed, connect-the-dots exploration of relevant data that demonstrates the interrelated characteristics that an objective analysis of the evidence should seek to reveal. In addition, it should help to further illuminate the direction that needs to be undertaken in a serious, objective, and fully committed study of what have previously been perceived as multiple and very different phenomena. I shall herein seek to demonstrate that for way too long such reports have been unnecessarily broken down into many separate and isolated categories, compiled by separate and distinct disciplines, instead of being tasked in a multidisciplinary way that focused on and recognized their potential commonalities, exploring the possible implications of what UAP contact encounters could tell us when brought together under the broad umbrella of parapsychological data and the emerging theories and science of quantum physics.
Marian Contacts?
Did one of the most spectacular “flying saucer” sightings occur before an estimated 70,000 shocked and astonished people in the small village of Fatima, Portugal, on October 13, 1917, some thirty years before the birth of the modern “flying saucer age”? Some “ufologists” believe so, but to the Catholic Church it was a deeply religious event that involved the appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary who descended from the sky in a mysterious globe of light, appearing initially to young shepherd children.
Of this dramatic spectacle, scientist and noted UFO/UAP researcher and author Jacques Vallee wrote in his book, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact (1988), “The final 'miracle' had come at the culmination of a precise series of apparitions combined with contacts and messages that place it very clearly, in my opinion, in the perspective of UAP phenomena. Not only was a flying disk or globe consistently involved, but its motion, its falling-leaf trajectory, its light effects, the thunderclaps, the buzzing sounds, the strange fragrance, the fall of 'angel hair' that dissolves upon reaching the ground, the heat wave associated with the close approach of the disk – all of these are frequent parameters of UAP sightings everywhere. And so are the paralysis, the amnesia, the conversions, and the healings.”
Journalist John Keel, in his book UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), delved quite heavily into Fatima and other similar religious apparitional reports attributed to the Blessed Virgin Mary, arguing that most authors made the mistake of concentrating mainly just on the similarities of the October 13th Fatima event to classic UAP cases while ignoring the many strange and significant happenings that were reported in the months and, in fact, two years prior. These details, Keel noted, offered important insights into the complex and controversial UAP contactee syndrome.
“Fatima was a modern event, yet it is already clouded with the distortions of belief,” Keel wrote. “As the years passed, the object was turned into a 'dancing sun,' the angel hair became 'rose petals,' and the entire phenomenon was removed from the field of science and entrusted to the religionists.”
Keel carefully reviewed the data and reconstructed it from beginning to end. Two years earlier, in 1915, four young girls were tending sheep at Cabeco, Portugal, when they allegedly observed a white figure hovering in the air. “It looked like somebody wrapped in a sheet,” was the description. “There were no eyes or hands on it.” [Keel noted how West Virginia's legendary Mothman had no hands or arms either] In addition, also twice again that year, the four children once again reported what resembled a “white, headless entity.” One of those girls (who would later play a very prominent role in the Fatima saga) was Lucia Abobora.
In the summer of 1916, Lucia and friends were near a cave playing when a strange light appeared over a nearby tree and a “transparent young man” came down near the cave. “Don't be afraid,” the apparition reportedly told the children. “I am the Angel of Peace. Pray with me.” Several weeks later, the same children, location, and apparition appeared once again and again prayed with the children. Then on May 13, 1917, Lucia, then 10, and Francisco Marto, 9, and Jacinto Marto, 7, were in the meadows of Cova da Iria outside of Fatima when their attention was drawn to a flash of light from a clear sky. Then they saw a brilliant globe of light hovering just over a three-foot-tall evergreen. Inside the globe, the children claimed that they saw a luminous, white robed being, with a face that emanated light that “dazzled and hurt the eyes.” “Don't be afraid,” a soft feminine voice, with a kind of musical quality to her speech, stated. “I won't hurt you.” The voice was heard by Lucia and Jacinto, while Francisco claimed that he only saw the object and heard no voice. The being was asked where she came from, and allegedly she replied, “I am from heaven. I come to ask you to come here for six months in succession, on the 13th day at this same hour. Then I will tell you who I am, and what I want. And afterward I will return here a seventh time.” In addition, the being asked the children to daily say the Rosary and to pray for peace. Then the globe rose into the air and floated away.
According to Keel, “small children often have a high degree of ESP, but as they grow older and develop reason – and skepticism – and their minds become more disciplined to the material world around them, these powers seem to slip away. It is probable that small children make excellent contactee material because of these factors, and that may explain why so much UFO, ghost, and poltergeist activity seems to surround children.” The parents, understandably, were skeptical when their children excitedly described to them their experience. But it wasn't long before the story spread throughout the area. And so, on June 13, a small crowd of devout pilgrims followed the children to watch and see what was to happen. Watching from a distance, a Maria Carreira would later describe how as the children knelt and were presumably communicating with a being neither she nor the others in the crowd could see, she did notice an odd noise she compared to the buzzing of a bee.
On July 13th, a much larger crowd followed the children, and again the three children knelt and spoke to a being no one else could see and hear, although again some felt that they did hear something. Ti Marto, an adult, described hearing something “like a horsefly in an empty waterpot.” In the crowd were cripples and blind people who urged the children to ask for a miracle. Lucia relayed their request to “the Lady,” who allegedly replied: “Continue to come here every month. In October, I will tell you who I am and what I wish and will perform a miracle that everyone will have to believe.”
In August, due to growing concern among local church officials about the children's claims, that were increasingly garnering widespread attention, the Administration of Qurem seized and imprisoned the children for a time, threatening them (even with death), trying to get them to confess that they had simply been making all of this up. However, the young children did not break and refused to change anything in their accounts, and while they were being detained in Qurem on August 13th, a crowd estimated at 6,000 had nonetheless gathered at Cova da Iria and reported a flash of light followed by the appearance of a small transparent cloud-like thing that slowly floated down and came to rest briefly on top of an evergreen tree. At some point, everyone's face in the crowd became bathed in a strange multicolored illumination. The children were later released and on August 19th returned to the meadow and again claimed that they met and conversed with “the Lady.”
By September 13th, the roads coming into Fatima were heavily congested with many thousands of people. A Reverend Doctor Manuel Nunes Fromigao, who was the canon of the cathedral at Lisbon and a professor at the Seminary of Santarem, would go on record testifying that as the children were entranced there was an unusual dimming of the sun, even though it was a cloudless day.
October 13th, as already written, was the day thousands had gathered at Fatima hoping to witness a miracle. There was a heavy rain and the ground was covered in mud, but the faithful and curious stood their ground huddled under their umbrellas. The three children approached the small tree where these manifestations had occurred before and waited. Then, shortly after noon, Lucia was heard to gasp and it was noted that her face became flushed as she entered a trance. The children described to the gathered crowd (who couldn't see the apparition) how “the Lady” held an infant in her arms and, for the first time, revealed her identity as “the Lady of the Rosary.” She gave a message to the children that the war would soon end, though it continued for another year. Then people screamed and fell to their knees! “Something was coming through the clouds: a huge silver disk which rotated rapidly as it descended toward the mob,” Keel wrote of this remarkable incident. “Fragile strands of silvery 'angel hair' showered from the sky, melting away before any of it could be collected. The object bobbed up and down, waltzing under the cloud layer, and as it whirled faster, it seemed to change color, going through the whole spectrum. It swooped down and passed low over the terrified people; then it bobbed upward again. These gyrations were continued for a full ten minutes.”
This was a momentous, well-witnessed event. The massive crowd included priests, scientists, and journalists. A Professor Almeida Garrett, a scientist with Coimbra University, would describe what he saw as the hard rain unexpectedly gave way to a break in a dense cloud cover above and everyone looked up at the bright sun, and then, in his own words he was suddenly looking at “a disk, of very definite contour” and how it “possessed a clear, changing brightness, which one could compare to a pearl...It looked like a polished wheel....This clear-shaped disk suddenly began turning. It rotated with increasing speed....Suddenly, the crowd began crying with anguish. The 'sun,' revolving all the time, began falling toward the earth, [now] reddish and bloody, threatening to crush everybody under its fiery weight...” The crowd reportedly felt a wave of heat sweep over them and described how their clothing, which had moments before been soaked, were suddenly dry. Miraculous healings were also reported.
During the initial appearance of this mysterious revolving “disk” it was reported later how it had cast beams of colored lights in all directions, illuminating the clouds, the landscape below, including the people. When the “disk” plunged toward the earth, it reportedly came down in a zig-zag motion, which is a classic UFO flight pattern, and the disk had even reportedly been described by some as flat, not as a globe. Many knelt down in the mud in fear and confessing sins – even former debunkers.
Joaquim Fernandeas, a professor of history at the University of Fernando Pessoa in Porto, Portugal, and author Fina D' Armada have both spent years digging deeply into the Fatima story. Together they produced a pretty comprehensive examination of the subject in their book, Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fatima Incident (2006), that actually took into consideration the UAP aspect as well, and at one point in this remarkable volume, as the authors were describing some notes that they had studied that detailed records of eyewitness descriptions from October 1917, that had been recorded by a Father Jose Ferreira de Lacerda, they read of how the apparition that descended from the sky had been described as just a little over a meter tall, wearing checkered clothing, and was wearing a tight, knee-length skirt, which back at that time was a very scandelous thing. In fact, the authors pointed out that even “ladies of the night” didn't wear such skirts back at that time! “In these notes, we observe that the closer to the time of the apparitions that the notes are written, the more similar to contemporary 'contactee' reports the Fatima accounts are,” the authors declared.
These two noted Portuguese authors have been investigating the Fatima incident for many years. In fact, back in July 1978, they located and interviewed one Carolina Carreira, who they call “the Fourth Witness” of Fatima. She had, we could say, slipped through the cracks and, as a result, lived a normal life, got married, her husband still alive at the time of their interview, and she still lived in Fatima. In what the authors describe as an “utterly forgotten” document entitled The Official Interrogation of 1923, one Viscount of Montelo recounted how Lucia had been asked to inquire of “Our Lady” of a 12-year-old girl named Carolina who had reported seeing a mysterious being; had it been her (Our Lady) that she and a 7-year-old girl had both allegedly seen on July 28, 1917, at Cova da Iria, in the vicinity of the holm oak tree where “Our Lady” had been reported several times. Lucia claimed that “Our Lady” would communicate it was not her, it was an angel. Carolina claimed that she and the other girl, who were herding sheep that morning, saw this being, who was of small stature, appearing to be perhaps 9 or 10 years old, and appeared to have near shoulder length blond hair, once walking near the tree and then a little later a being (this time with a small crown on its head; she wasn't sure if it was same being) floating it seemed over the oak tree. She felt that she was receiving a mental message, something like: “Come here, say three Hail Marys; come here, say three Hail Marys.” The other girl did not have any such impression, though she presumably did see the apparition as well.
The authors also cite a document called Memorias, wherein Lucia was quoted about a 1915 incident that happened around noon when she had invited some young friends to pray the Rosary with her. “We had only just started praying, when in front of our eyes, suspended in the air over a small tree, there appeared a small figure, that looked like a statue made of snow,” Lucia reported. “When struck by the rays of the sun, it became somewhat transparent.” As soon as the children stopped praying, Lucia stated that the figure disappeared. “As was my custom, I did not discuss this with anybody, but as soon as my friends got home they told their families about what had happened.”
From Lucia's testimony, it was in the spring of 1916 when for the first time Francisco and Jacinta, who hadn't yet seen an apparition with her, nor had she told them about her prior experiences, saw an apparition with Lucia. Again it was a figure resembling someone shrouded in a sheet, looking as though it was a young person 14 to 15 years of age. It was described as whiter than snow and “as transparent as crystal in the sun.” It identified itself as the “Angel of Peace.” Also Lucia described how it appeared also early summer 1916, urging them to continue their prayers. Lucia added that it appeared to the children around late September or October of that year as well, again praying with them and then simply disappearing.
Canon Formigao, who interrogated Lucia about those three encounters in 1916, counseled her to remain silent about them. He obviously felt that the public focus should remain on the major 1917 events that best comformed to the Catholic Churches religious expectations of such occurrences.
While most of the children would also see the apparitions along with Lucia, Lucia admitted that a young boy named Joao Marto claimed he didn't see the apparition during their shared encounter in 1916. This is something (as you continue to read this feature) that you will come across again. John Keel speculated that an exterior intelligent force was capable of making us see what it wants us to see. “It is likely that an outsider trespassing on the scene of a UFO contact would see the contactee standing in a rigid trance, just as the witnesses to miracles see only the children in a blind trance state,” he wrote. “The contactee's real experience is in his or her mind as some powerful beam of electromagnetic energy is broadcasting to that mind, bypassing the biological sensory channels.”
The authors of Celestial Secrets noted that in the Fatima encounters “the Being was originally described as having a ball at her waist, which she took in her hand from time to time. It was a ball that shined a bright light.” Lucia in Memoria IV described how as “Our Lady” opened her hands an “immense light” shined upon them. She added, “At the front of Our Lady's right palm there was a heart surrounded by thorns, which appeared to be driven into it. We understood that this was the Immaculate Heart of Mary, outraged by the sins of humanity.” Interestingly, regarding the Blessed Mary ball of light artifact the authors included, with a very brief description, an artist illustration from a case near Cordola, Argentina, back on June 14, 1968, shortly after 1 a.m., where a Maria Elodia Pretzel, 19 at the time, an employee at the Motel La Cuesta, claimed that she encountered a tall and constantly smiling humanoid figure inside the building that was carrying a glassy-looking ball that projected what was described as a coherent faint pale blue, almost white colored beam of light. The ball of light had what resembled pens or needles (resemblance to thorns?) sticking out of it, that appeared to cover the entire object.
Hemispheric Brain Shifts?
I myself became interested in these cases involving apparent ufonauts carrying balls of light in their hands – lights that seemed capable of multiple functions – with a suggestion in some cases of controlling experiencer consciousness, and perhaps even aiding in the communications process – back in 2009 when I just happened to interview two separate alien contact experiencers who also claimed something very specific and odd. One claimed that a humanoid being from a UAP approached him in the desert outside Las Vegas. As he was demonstrating how the humanoid produced a grapefruit sized silver sphere, he used his left hand. Since I was interested in handedness of UAP experiencers themselves (whether they were right or left handed) I caught this and asked him if indeed it was the non-human being's left hand that the sphere had been in. He assured me it was. As the being held it out for the witness to observe, it grew into the size of a basketball. “Then he let go of it and it began to rotate,” the witness told me. “As it did that he would put his fingers over the top of it and like firecrackers would go off on top of this ball.” At that point, the being, he said, claimed that this was to represent nuclear explosions on our planet that could cause problems outside of earth, claiming it would “upset the balance of everything that we intend for the future” if we didn't stop setting off such explosives.
A few months later, I was interviewing another witness who claimed that while he was hunting in Cherry Creek, New York, back around December 2009, he saw a humanoid being a short distance away who raised his left arm and there in his left hand was a shiny silver metallic looking ball. “I watched this silver ball rise up out of his hand and then it was almost instantaneously in my face,” he said. He said it was about the size of a golf ball, was at eye level, a mere 6 to 8 inches away from his face. Then the next thing he knew he was coming to. He had blacked out, it seemed. The humanoid and silver ball were gone. This experiencer claimed a number of UAP encounters, and also seemed prone to encounters with ghosts. “My left hand shakes for some unknown reason when I have had those experiences,” he told me. “It also gets hard to breath, like I'm trying to catch my breath.” He is right handed.
After this, I began pouring through UAP literature looking for any other accounts of humanoids with mysterious spheres carried in their left hands, and I was surprised when I began coming across others too, notably in back issues of England's Flying Saucer Review. One of them was the Argentine case from 1968, just cited above. In that case, I had noticed that the strange grinning humanoid had been described and pictured holding the sphere in his left hand!
In another FSR article, there was yet another humanoid sighting reported in Santa Isabel, Argentina, around 3:40 a.m., on September 28, 1972. According to investigator and lawyer Dr. Oscar A. Galindez [who had investigated the other Argentine case just cited above]: “In his left hand he displayed something that looked like a billiard-ball, which was permanently emitting a very white light.”
Then, in even yet another FSR article, by Swedish author Anders Liljegren, there is the case on January 7, 1970, of two skiers near Imjarvi, Finland, who alleged that they unexpectedly came upon a metallic looking domed saucer that came to hover low over the ground. It produced a temporary beam to the ground where they soon observed a short three foot tall thin humanoid wearing a light green coverall and darker green knee boots, and a conical metallic looking helmet on its head. The being was holding in its hands a black box with a pulsating yellow light. Later, one of the witnesses, Aarno Heinonen, twice encountered a strange woman, on May 5, 1972 and again on June 18, 1972. Reportedly this woman held a silvery ball-like object in her left hand, on both occasions. The witness claimed that the ball had three antennae on it, each approximately 30 cm in length, and these were pointed in his direction. At the conclusion of each incident, the woman would seem to float away and soon disappear from sight.
Now let me explain why left-handedness even caught my attention, which will further demonstrate and explain why I think that it could be significant. “The left-handedness seems to indicate the increased participation of the right lobe of the brain in mediumistic states,” Nandor Fodor, a New York psychoanalyst, noted in his exhaustive volume An Encylopedia of Psychic Science (1966). In the investigations and reports of individuals with alleged mediumistic abilities it was noted in quite a number of instances that during their entrancements that they would switch from being right-handed to left-handed, with other symptoms that reflected hemispheric shifts of consciousness as well. California “contactee” Brian Scott was reportedly observed in a spontaneous trance state (4:20 PM, November 5, 1975) by a lady named Lou Savage, who noted: “He looked strange: facial features were taut, like a semi-solid rock. His eyes had a fixed stare. Not on the paper, but on the wall in front of his desk, and his facial color was a dull gray; nothing even resembling skin tone as I know it. All the while Brian’s eyes were fixed on the wall his left hand continued writing. BRIAN IS NOT LEFT HANDED…” Noted journalist and UAP researcher John Keel explained that it was downright scandalous in his view that the only full-scale psychological study of a “contactee” had been conducted back in the 1890's by a Swiss psychologist Theodor Flournoy of the University of Geneva. A popular medium known as Helene Smith, who produced a complex “Martian” language, was often found by Professor Flournoy, when in a trance state, to look for her pocket on the left side instead of the right, and if one of her fingers was pinched or pricked from her view behind a screen, it would be the corresponding finger on the opposite hand that would be agitated.
In 1973, I met Ramona Clark, both a serious UAP researcher and an experiencer. Within only four days following a close-range encounter with a domed, disc-shaped object in Mayport, Florida, back in July 1967, her home was besieged with poltergeist activity [something that gets reported by quite a few UAP experiencers]. She described how she began hearing a loud male voice that would occasionally call out her first name. Oddly, it was always, she said, off to her left side. “Just behind the left ear,” she told me. “I'd turn around to look and there was nobody there.”
Then things got even stranger and even more frightening as she and her then teenaged son (who had also witnessed the UAP) began to have entity and light orb visitations in their bedrooms, always it seemed around 3 a.m.
British “direct voice” medium Leslie Flint described “voices” that appeared to him above his head and off to the left side. Arigo, the famed Brazilian psychic healer, was reportedly guided by a spirit “doctor” who would speak into his left ear. Fodor noted how the spirits of a well-known medium Leonore Piper always communicated with her on her left side.
British author and researcher Anthony Peake, in his book The Daemon (2008), described the case of a man named Albert Tanner who for some 30 years had been hearing a voice whisper in his left ear. He had initially dismissed the voice as merely something from his own subconscious mind, until one day in April 1960, when he was about to board a plane to go on a business trip to North Africa, the voice told him not to do so. It was very insistent and so Tanner decided to cancel the trip. Soon afterwards an earthquake hit the city he was to be in and a tidal wave destroyed a good deal of what was left. He began to pay more serious attention after that to this voice, and discovered it indeed had an uncanny way of knowing things in a paranormal way.
“The simplest explanation for these is that they are hallucinations that were dominated by activity on one side of the brain or the other,” Canadian brain researcher Todd Murphy, who has worked closely with the well-known Dr. Michael Persinger, told me in a phone interview. “Most commonly, if the voice is appearing on the left side, it’s following a hallucination on the right side.”
However, how does one explain the very precise and accurate information that some report comes through on their left side? This sounds like no simple and ordinary “hallucination.”
In his book Beyond Telepathy (1962, 1973), Dr. Andrija Puharich describes his laboratory testing of psychics and how the highest scores were found to be associated with breathing through the left nostril. As with handedness, the left nostril relates to the right hemisphere of the brain. Puharich had checked mouth-breathing [with nostrils sealed] and breathing through just the left or right nostril. He also noted that psychic “mediums” usually develop what he stated was left-sided upper respiratory pathology. Some even believe that with the art of psychometry, wherein a person picks up impressions of a person by holding an object from that person that if you're right handed then you should hold the object in your left hand, and vice versa, again based on the hemispheric shift concept. You can find this technique described in Harold Sherman's book You Can Communicate with the Unseen World (1974).
In a phone interview with Kathleen Marden back in March 2012 she told me: “In my research into hypnosis…I did find that people who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are more prone to going into the deepest states of hypnosis. I was very curious about this because my uncle Barney was such a terrific hypnotic subject he could go into the deepest state, and Betty nearly as deep as Barney. I don’t know if that was PTSD that was the cause of that or if it was something else having to do with their abduction experiences but I have worked with abductees who can go into a very, very deep level of hypnosis as well, and they’re some of my best subjects because they can remember so much detailed information that others cannot remember.”
Other researchers in the UAP field have also commented upon the seemingly higher than normal percentage of UAP abductees/experiencers who prove to be exceptionally deep hypnotic subjects. J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee discussed this matter with a hypnosis expert from Chicago, a Dr. Larry Garrett. Berthold Schwarz, a psychiatrist who personally investigated many of these experiencers also noted this in his two volume book, UFO Dynamics (1983), a point that I also discussed with him in our extensive correspondence as well. “It has impressed me in the study of several (UAP) contactees that they were all excellent hypnotic subjects,” Dr. Schwarz noted. “This is contrary to the usual clinical experience, where people do not go into deep somnambulistic trance the first time and stay there.”
I found the following statement (regarding very enlarged corpus callosum’s in the brains of highly hypnotizable subjects) on Kathleen’s website (http://www.kathleen-marden.com/a-primer-on-hypnosis.php) quite interesting. Perhaps there is an important clue lurking here. It read: “A 2005 article by Michael R. Nash and Grant Bentham in Scientific American Mind discussed 'The Truth and Hype of Hypnosis.' They said that new hypnosis studies have shown not everyone is susceptible to hypnotic suggestion and motivation does not necessarily play a role in the success of induction. It seems to relate more to an individual's ability to concentrate and to become absorbed in activities such as reading or listening to music. It is unrelated to gullibility, hysteria, psychopathology, submissiveness or imagination. Nash and Bentham discussed a 2004 study by James E. Horton of the University of Virginia's College at Wise and Helen J. Crawford of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Using magnetic resonance imaging they attempted to determine whether or not brain structures play a part in an individual's responsiveness to hypnosis. They observed that the anterior part of the corpus callosum, the large white matter structure that connects the left and right brain, was thirty-two percent larger in highly hypnotizable subjects. This part of the brain inhibits unwanted stimuli and plays an important role in focusing attention. It would be interesting to image the corpus callosum of patients with PTSD to test this finding. If this group is more suggestible, it would seem to follow that this area of their brain is more highly developed.”
Elsewhere I have read that Albert Einstein and America's acclaimed Sleeping Prophet Edgar Cayce both reportedly had an unusually large corpus callosum.
It was Sunday, June 18, 1961, when playing marbles on the outskirts of the small village of Garabandal, located in the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain, four young girls, ages 11 through 12, claimed that they encountered an “angel” dressed in a long blue robe, with a small face with black eyes, looking like a 9-year-old boy. However, he was surrounded by a dazzling light and, as the children watched spellbound, he faded away into invisibility without uttering a word. As often happens in these incidents, the girls ran back to the village and begin excitedly sharing with everyone how they had seen an angel. A couple of days later, as the same four girls were walking on a path outside the village, they were frightened when a brilliant white explosion of light temporarily blinded them.
Not long after these two unusual episodes, the children began entering deep trance states in which they claimed to encounter the Blessed Virgin Mary. Hundreds of people would come to observe what was happening and described how the children would enter a state of religious ecstasy where they'd be kneeling with their heads thrown back as they stared upward, transfixed in a visionary state that sometimes lasted hours and certainly should have been very uncomfortable and awkward for children. During one of the first episodes, on July 2, 1961, the girls described how the Lady was accompanied by two angels who were dressed alike “as if they were twins.” Off to the Lady's right the girls said that saw “a square of red fire framing a triangle with an eye and some writing. The lettering was in an old Oriental script!”
Keel found the description of the eye and triangle symbol very interesting, noting that it had come up in many UAP contactee accounts, alleged MIB (Men In Black) encounters, which some identify with a symbol of the Third Eye, and is even pictured on the American dollar bill as the Great Seal of the United States.
The children came to have hundreds of these visions and were frequently photographed in these ecstasy states. It was even described how all four would spontaneously awaken at times in the night, in their separate homes, and rush out into the darkness to visit the sacred spot where these manifestations would often unfold.
Witnesses had seen the entranced girls fall forcefully to their knees or bodily to the ground, in an ecstatic trance, on rocky surfaces without leaving any marks or wounds. Doctors would prick them with pins and shine lights in their eyes during these ecstatic states without the girls so much as flinching, and their pupils remained dilated as they starred skyward. The absence of injuries from running up a mountain across sharp-edged stones and thorny thickets barefooted, even kneeling in a thorn bush, was reported by amazed witnesses who observed young Marian visionaries in Medjugorje, Bosnia, in 1981.
John Keel was aware of this aspect within the UAP experience too, writing in Saga's UFO Report (January 1978): “When a human is exposed to a religious 'vision' he or she is frequently overcome by a pleasurable sensation known as 'ecstasy' which is very similar to a sexual experience. Eyewitnesses in low-level UFO cases report the same thing – a series of sensations so delightful that they are willing, even anxious, to have repeated experiences with flying saucers.”
The Medjugorje events began on June 24, 1981, when reportedly the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to one Mirjana Dragicevic, 16, while walking near a hilltop called Podprado with her friend Ivanka Ivankovic, 17. After that, they and four other young friends of theirs, in ages ranging from 10 to 17, began to have frequent visions of the Virgin Mary, often daily. This group of seers was made up of four girls and two boys. It was reported in March 1986 that nearly 2000 apparitional appearances had been reported there at that point.
An American newspaper publisher and columnist, Wayne Weible, became quite interested in the Medjugorje reports and traveled there and interviewed many of the participants in this remarkable story. He also shared what he had himself experienced. He wrote: “What I saw and what I felt is not easily put into words. It will be difficult for others to accept it or believe it. Yet, I was there and I know what I saw and what I felt. I saw the sun dance and move and whirl and pale so that I could look directly at it with the naked eye. That is impossible, but I saw it. It was the same sun you and I see every day.
“I also saw a huge, 14 ton cement cross mounted high on a mountain that stands behind the church at Medjugorje totally disappear on a cloudless, bright morning. This same cross was observed by me early in the black of morning to glow and shine as though it was covered with lights. That also is impossible. There is no electricity on that mountain, but I saw it. There was more, but the point is, there is no explanation for these phenomena. They usually occur at the time the Blessed Virgin is appearing to the children. Some see them. Some do not. Others saw them at times when I did not.”
From Scott Corrales's excellent article in FATE magazine (Dec 1996) "Angels or Aliens?" we read this of one of the six Medjugorje children (Vicka Ivankovic) observing a white ball of light on the rocky hillside where the apparition of the Virgin Mary had appeared. Scott wrote: "Vicka reported this detail of her sighting to her sister, who remarked simply: 'That was a flying saucer.'"
A well-known researcher named Max Edwards of Victoria, British Columbia, an amazing linguist, concert pianist and a composer, and a man deeply interested in UAP (he used to contribute scholarly material to England's acclaimed Flying Saucer Review, and up until his passing my magazine Alternate Perceptions) wrote me in 1996 how years earlier a professor he knew from the University of Victoria went on a vacation to see relatives in the Medjugorge area. He explained in a letter to me: "I requested him kindly to bring me back the fullest possible information on Medjugorje - without mentioning UFOs to him. When he returned, I asked him what he had found out; and he replied: 'I am confused, because all I could find out, is that all around that village, in the fields, there are countless circles of burnt grass, and UFOs have been landing there in numbers.' I thanked him, and told him that he had completely confirmed my suspicions!"
Two of the Medjugorge seers, Mirjana Dragicevic and Ivanka Ivankovic, claim that they were given by Our Lady a parchment that “looks like paper,” however, whatever it is, it allegedly cannot be destroyed “even by fire.” The parchment contains ten “secrets” given to each of the girls, “secrets” that have to do with significant future world events, and each girl only is able to read their own secrets.
“Each of these two seers is told by Mary to select a priest to whom they will give that material on which the secrets are written ten days before the secrets are to happen. The priest, in turn, with the help of The Madonna, will be able to read the message of each secret and will announce it three days before it happens. He will describe the full nature of the secret, its time and even minute, and the place. The priest will then return the paper to the seer from whom he received it. The priest will not be able to read all ten secrets at once, but just one by one when the time comes for it to be announced.”
Another time when questioned about the mysterious parchment, Mirjana stated: “Yes, the parchment exists, you heard well: it is a parchment in which all the ten secrets are written. For now, only I can read what is really written on it. I don't have to hide it in secret places, because only I can see what is really written on it. Once I showed that parchment to a cousin and to a girlfriend of mine, at the same time, and they couldn't see the same thing. One saw a prayer and the other saw a sort of letter where someone was asking for help.”
Mysterious written messages, often in unusual symbols and unknown languages, turn up occasionally at UAP sites, though sometimes they are the product of an experiencer's “automatic writing.” In Brooksville, Florida, on March 2, 1965, a John F. Reeves, 65, a retired longshoreman from New York, claimed that following a face-to-face encounter with a humanoid being in a tight-fitting silver suit, with a glass-like helmet, that he retrieved physical evidence of his encounter. From its side, the being produced a small black object that it held up to its chin, and pointed it at Reeves, after which a flash of light like a camera was produced. The humanoid allegedly promised to return later, and then climbed aboard a dull metallic gray saucer-shaped craft, estimated at 40 feet in diameter, with a clear dome on top. The craft quickly shot straight up into the air. Soon afterwards, Reeves came upon two sheets of odd paper-like material with strange writings on them. The paper was loaned to the Air Force, but what was returned later Reeves claimed was not the original, for the original, he claimed, could not be cut or burned. The duplicate was on regular paper.
Here's an extra little odd wrinkle to this story. A Norman Bean, a Florida engineer in radio broadcasting in Miami, had told my friend Dr. Schwarz that his 9-year-old daughter had done, while in a state of entrancement, some automatic writing on a torn envelope prior to the Reeves case. Dr. Schwarz explained to me: “The wife saved this stuff that the girl did on the back of an old torn envelope and then years later, because by a miracle she didn't throw the data out, there was an article which the husband tossed on the wife's dresser and she read it, and, lo and behold, there inside was the same precise sequential arrangement of coded configurations sent or given to John Reeves of Brooksville.”
Folklorist W.Y. Evans-Wentz interviewed in his time an Oxford student who described an experience near Listowel, Ireland, back in 1910, that was also similar to our modern UAP accounts. The student and a friend, the account went, were on horseback at the time when they saw two yellow “lights,” each with a “radiant being having human form” in their midst. Since that night the student claimed other sightings of “lights” and “beings,” in both Ireland and England. He said that he regarded these personal experiences as proof of the “spiritual world.”
In the remarkable apparitional events witnessed by many at the Coptic Orthodox Virgin Mary Church in Zeitoun, a small suburb of Cairo, Egypt from 1968 to 1970, where over a quarter of a million people are estimated to have gathered and witnessed frequent religious apparitions – notably the Blessed Virgin Mary. “The Zeitoun case is arguably the most credible and believable of all Marian apparitions,” psychologist Greg Little (2001) wrote: “As such, it represents nearly irrefutable proof that some sort of unexplainable manifestations can and do intrude into the physical world in a form that is recognizable and photographable.”
That's correct, photographable! In addition to a massive amount of testimonial evidence, dozens of photographs of these phenomena taken by witnesses at Zeitoun were made available for public inspection as well.
It began on April 2, 1968, when two Moslem mechanics noticed a glowing, white robed female figure up on top of the large dome of the Catholic Church. At first, the men feared it was a nun contemplating suicide and notified a priest and police. Upon their return, the figure was no longer there. Soon people were arriving outside the church nightly to watch for the mysterious woman, and it seems they were seldom disappointed. “For the next two years, the apparitions appeared frequently – often appearing every night for months,” Little wrote. “The apparitions lasted for 15 minutes to 8 hours at a time. Literally hundreds of thousands of people witnessed the apparitions with thousands of photographs and videotape taken.”
G. Little gave the following overview of these remarkable appearances: “The apparitions typically appeared after a brilliant series of light bursts around the church's domes. These bursts lasted about 15 minutes followed by showers of sparkling lights and glowing globs of light floating around the domes. These globs of light often took on the form and shapes of large doves circling the domes. This display was, at times, so bright, that the witnesses couldn't look directly at it. Then, atop or around the glowing dome a visible female form began moving. It appeared to be a young woman who had an intense, brilliant glow emanating from her. She wore a vail and full robe. She floated and moved around the dome for hours at a time occasionally bowing, holding out an olive branch, and blowing kisses. Sometimes she appeared to be holding an infant and, at times, she sat atop a dome cradling the infant in her arms.”
Florida ufologist Albert S. Rosales wrote an article based on a remarkable wave of humanoid encounter cases in Canada back in 1968, which can be found in the May 2014 issue of Alternate Perceptions (apmagazine.info) magazine. July seemed to peak with the heaviest concentration of activity in Quebec, which included six young girls on the evening of July 22nd near St. Bruno, ages 7 to 13, who claimed that they saw a luminous white figure in a white veil, presumably the “Virgin Mary,” hovering in the air in a dark hexagonal object. Only two though, Manon Saint-Jean and Line Grise, claimed to hear a “soft and slow” voice that advised them to pray, spoke of peace, and promised a return visit on October 7th. Others in the area reported odd things in the sky, including neighboring St. Basile, where a young boy told his dad that same evening that he had seen “a man walking in the sky.” There seemed to be a lot of reports too that month in the neighboring province of Ontario. In August 1971, I followed up on one interesting case up in Toronto, Ontario, where I met Joan Howard, who described herself to me as psychic since childhood, claiming that in that July of 1968 she became a UAP contactee. She described how one night it felt as though a “powerful beam...bored into my head like a mild laser” and how she became aware of an alien presence that enabled two-way communication. For several weeks, she had visions of “spacecraft, inside and outside...gadgets of all kinds,” and much more. “In the ensuing years I have seen UFOs (in the daytime yet); had 'physical contacts'; experienced hostile attacks (two on my life) by 'Their” enemies,' she would claim. “The Opposites, the 'bad guys'; astral trips on board spacecraft; taken down reams of dictated communications (not automatic writing); everything but a ride in a 'flying saucer' in my physical body.”
Fernandes and D'Armada noted in Celestial Secrets that “it is interesting that the places visited by 'Our Lady' are often places where unexplained shining aerial objects manifest.” They point out how for years following the Fatima events of 1917, many people continued to observe strange phenomena at Cova da Iria and other locations nearby, all the way up until 1957, that included more “miracles of the sun,” “angel hair,” and UAP phenomena. There was even a photograph taken in 1957 of the “angel hair” at Cova da Iria that matches in appearance a similar, if not identical substance, reported globally being discharged from UAP, which evaporates shortly before or soon after reaching the ground.
Keel carefully studied UAP cases involving powerful beams of light and the strange effects those can have upon humans. “In religious lore, being belted by one of these light beams causes 'mystical illumination,'” he wrote. “When Saul, a Jewish tentmaker, was zapped by one of these beams on the road to Damascus it blinded him for three days and he was converted to Christianity on the spot and became St. Paul.”
Keel wrote about a most peculiar light beam case from an account prepared by one J. J. Cornish, that occurred late on the evening of December 29, 1875, in London, Ontario, Canada, where two people were being baptized by Cornish in the River Thames when suddenly “a very beautiful light from heaven” that was described as “brighter than the sun at noonday” came down upon the gathering. “It came down with a sound like a mighty rushing wind,” he wrote. “We could hear it far above in the distance, and as it reached the place where we stood we were enveloped in the brightest and most beautiful light I ever saw...The light was round, straight up and down, like a shaft from heaven to earth, and just as bright on the inside edge as it was in the center, and so far as we could see it was just as dark on the outer edge as it was a mile away....After baptism and dismissal the light did not go out, but gradually went up until it vanished from our sight.”
Keel pointed out how in the well-known Presque Isle, Pennsylvania UAP landing case of July 31, 1966, we again have a description of very odd behaving light beams; this time, projecting out from a UAP in various directions. “The peculiar thing about these beams was that they seemed to go out from the object and extend to different lengths, not fading into the darkness but terminating suddenly like poles or rods of light,” Keel noted.
I interviewed a man who described an experience that he had one night in 1967 at the age of 14 while he was sleeping in a screened in porch area in Falls Church, Virginia. “It was in the summer and I remember waking up and sitting up I noticed a light coming down in the shape of a cone,” he explained. “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.”
On September 12, 1965, at approximately 5 a.m., a man named Philip, who lived on the Island of Timor, in Indonesia, walked into his garden and encountered a shining human-like figure with long white hair, standing a mere five yards in front of him. Suddenly, his chickens exhibited great fear as they dropped out of the trees that they commonly roost in and his dog began to bark in alarm. Scared, Philip ran back to his house where he met his cousin at the door who exclaimed, “I've just seen a star fall into the garden.” When Philip asked where, his cousin pointed straight to the spot where he had just seen the mysterious figure a moment before.
After Philip had calmed down, he returned to his garden and began watering his apple trees. Then he heard an unseen voice say, “Water people.” He didn't understand, and the voice explained about the spiritual “water of life,” to renew people with the Holy Spirit. Then he experienced a powerful vision where he was preaching the Christian message to many, many people. When the vision ended, he was covered in sweat. His concerned mother and brothers were standing around him. He was surprised to learn that five hours had passed. Thus his spiritual mission began, and in the weeks and months that followed he trekked from village to village in the interior of the island preaching the gospel.
1965 was the beginning of an intense spiritual revival in Indonesia that continued up into the 1970s. Dr. Kurt E. Koch, a Protestant theologian, missionary worker, and author visited Indonesia and documented many remarkable stories. Another account was of native Christians who were preaching to a tribe of sun-worshippers when after a heavy rain they stepped outside and a vision of Jesus in the sky above the sun appeared. Dr. Koch wrote: “Taking their opportunity from the vision which was witnessed in full daylight by everyone present, they began to preach, 'The Lord Jesus,' they said, 'stands before the sun which he has made. You must worship him and not the object that he created.' As a result of their testimony 20 of the natives were converted. When an account of what had happened was told in a nearby village, some of the sick people there were at once healed.”
In another man's conversion, he was very ill when the angel Gabriel appeared to him and took him up into the seventh heaven itself, where he was said to have seen many beautiful and remarkable sights. When he was returned to his home afterwards, he was healed, along with his children and his wife, who had been ill for a number of years.
An intense religious revival broke out in Wales back during the winter of 1904-05 where many observed mysterious lights in the sky. A 38-year-old Welsh woman named Mary Jones, described as an ordinary, happily married peasant woman who was deeply religious, became a central figure in this revival. Reporters from the Liverpool Echo, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, and London Daily News travelled to these gathering, that were garnering a great deal of attention, to see what was going on. These reporters even wrote about seeing unexplained light phenomena that they couldn't explain. Beriah G. Evans, who was writing for the London Daily News (February 9, 1905) described how while being in the company of Mrs. Jones, he observed pretty phenomenal things. He wrote: “'We cannot start yet,' she told me on the occasion of my visit, 'the lights have not yet come. I never go without them.' A few minutes later, on going out to see, she returned saying: 'Come. It is time to go. The lights have come!'”
It was about 6:15 p.m., Tuesday, January 31, 1905. There was Evans, Mrs. Jones, and three others. All of them witnessed a brilliant star-like object to the south emitting “diamond-like sparklets.” “It took a sudden leap of considerable distance towards the mountains, then back again to its first position, and again rushing towards us,” Evans reported. Next it disappeared from sight and then reappeared much closer to their position, and then it went out. “Following the disappearance of the star came immediately two brilliant and distinct flash-lights, illuminating the stone dykes and heather on the mountain side, the first flash two miles away, the second immediately following a mile higher up the valley, and in the direction we should have to travel. 'Come,' said Mrs. Jones, recognizing the omens, 'We shall have a glorious meeting!' And we did.”
Though up to that point, all five had seen the same things, the next two anomalous displays were only witnessed by Mrs. Jones and Mr. Evans, even though all five of them were still walking in the road together and all five should have seen what followed next. Evans wrote: “Three bars of clear white light crossing the road in front from right to left, climbing up the stone wall to the left, showing every interstice and bit of moss as clearly as though a searchlight had been turned upon it. There was no house, or human being other than our party, near, and no conceivable human agency could have produced this effect.'”
Next a “blood-red light” appeared about a foot off the ground, in the middle of the roadway. Interestingly, Evans noted that it “did not illumine surrounding objects.” Evans was surprised when he later learned that the others had not seen what he and Mrs. Jones had seen, and wrote that those others were equally astounded. “Mrs. Jones, without any suggestion from me, described there and then the appearances precisely as they had presented themselves to me.”
Evans came to learn of another similar instance involving a London journalist who witnessed, along with a woman standing near him, a white light that swept along the ground, near a chapel, stopping on a wall. Half a dozen other witnesses present said they didn't see it.
The late Swiss psychologist Dr. Carl G. Jung struggled to understand such anomalies. He wrote: “...I was once at a spiritualistic séance where four of the five people present saw a object like a moon floating above the abdomen of the medium. They showed me, the fifth person present, exactly where it was, and it was absolutely incomprehensible to them that I could see nothing of the sort.”
Jung knew of a few other cases like this and could not determine for certain what the explanation for such occurrences was. Jung proposed that UAP, psychic, and religious apparitional and visionary phenomena might be something he called “psychoid.” Psychoid represented something that existed on the borders of what we perceive as mental and physical; a third order of reality with overlapping characteristics. On this point, quantum physicists and parapsychologists should find themselves treading upon fairly common ground. Jung's concept of synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) operated on the premise that ideas (mental) and events (physical), though demonstrating no causally direct connection as perceived in terms of standard classic physics, could no doubt be linked as psychoid-related phenomena. Obviously Jung perceived the UAP phenomenon as something of deep potential importance, having devoted the last years of his life to writing a book exploring this very complex and controversial subject, including parapsychology in on the conversation, intimately entangled with his pioneering theories of archetypes and a collective unconscious, and engaging in extensive dialogue over these issues with one of the early pioneers and founders of quantum physics, Wolfgang Pauli.
And so, in my mind, FREE's serious and committed focus and deep interest in the roles of consciousness and quantum physics resonates on various key levels with Jung's ideas and concepts.
Subjective Encounters?
Back in the 1970s, J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee, viewed by many in the UAP field as two of the most high-profile and respected scientists in ufology, sat down together (sometimes with others) and engaged in an open interactive discussion on the UAP phenomenon, documented in their book The Edge of Reality (1975). Together they thoughtfully commented on many different areas of this subject, including even various paranormal and occult aspects, doing their very best to cover everything relevant and under serious discussion in the field comprehensively. Regarding “ghosts” and apparitions, Hynek pointed out that in the “great, great, majority of UFO cases, if one person sees it, they all see it. It attests to a solid reality. In a room of five people, if three people said, 'We saw it,' and two people said, 'We looked and couldn't see it,' that would be damning. But that doesn't happen.”
Is that true?
In 1992, John Keel described in a Fortean lecture a UAP case back in the 1960s, where he and zoologist and author Ivan Sanderson had investigated a family in New Jersey who had reported seeing a huge “flying saucer” with windows, judged to have been a mile across in size, located between two mountains at perhaps 2,000 feet. The husband had been a really reliable witness, the president of a fairly large company. “They were not about to make up flying saucer stories to entertain Ivan Sanderson and John Keel,” he said. “Ivan put articles in the newspapers there in New Jersey asking if anybody else had seen anything unusual on that day.” But no one else reported it. “Why didn't 3,000 other people see the same thing?” Keel asked.
Increasingly, ufologists seem to be noticing more and more reports of miniature-type UAP, or small orbs, objects some have speculated might be like our drones. However, some reports even described tiny occupants just inches tall, and even stranger, if that's possible, some describe how they can change size, becoming human sized, and how humans can be shrunk down to fit into tiny saucers. Back in the late 1960s, I talked with a man and his elderly mother in Maine about strange pulsating balls of light, generally about the size of a “ten quart water pail” I was told, and how they had observed them on several occasions back in the 1930s. On one occasion, they observed from a distance one of these balls of light near the ground where a farmer was working crops with two horses and a two row cultivator. “He worked down from above it on the hillside two rows at a time until he entered the row where it was,” the man told me. “He nor the team, showing no signs of anything abnormal, ran over it. As the horses walked over it, it grew small until about the size of a baseball. When the cultivator teeth went over it it rolled with the dirt and regained its former size behind the machine.”
Sandy Nichols, a self-described “alien abductee” from Thompsons Station, Tennessee, periodically visits Florida's well-known UAP hotspot Gulf Breeze. One night back in 2,000, while sky-watching along the beach at Shoreline Park, with about nineteen others, it was around 10 p.m., when one member of the group named Celina spotted a “white ball of light about dime sized at arm's length, making a curving, zig-zag pattern downward from the west.” She called it to everyone’s attention and soon all of them were watching it. It came down just over the water, not more than half a mile away, heading towards them on the shore. Soon it arrived low over the beach about 20 feet to the west of Celina. It was about the size of a ping pong ball at this point, Sandy stated. Much smaller than what they had observed earlier, which Sandy judged had to have been several feet across initially. Sandy recalled:
“We could all see the light, at this point about tennis ball size, right before it passed in front of Celina, but no one could see the light as it passed directly in front of Celina, except for Celina. Then as it began to pass in front of the second person in line, Celina could not see it anymore, but now only the second person in line could see the light as it passed directly in front of them. In other words, the only person that could see the light as it passed in front of each one of us, was the person that the light was directly in front of at the time...even though we were all standing just mere inches and no more than a foot away from each other along the entire length of our line. The only exception to this pattern was when it passed by me and in front of (a lady named) Lisa. Lisa continued to see the light as it passed her, then it made a sharp, right-hand turn over the three steps that led from the sand to the pier, and then down the length of the pier and out over the Sound a couple of hundred feet where it suddenly flared up a bit and simply vanished.”
“A great number of UFO sightings are entirely subjective,” Keel (1969) wrote in a privately circulated newsletter. “RAF Air Marshall Sir Victor Goddard [involved in the UK's Royal Air Force's UFO investigations back in the early 1950s] has suggested that such sightings are made by persons with latent or active psychic abilities, but that when non-psychics stand within the 'aura' of the psychic percipients they are also able to see objects which would normally be invisible to them.” Keel went on to speculate that when a person or persons with the appropriate psychic qualifications was at a site of elevated UAP activity “when specific electromagnetic conditions” were just right, then they might perceive things beyond the visible EM spectrum, or even possibly, he furthered speculated, “intercept a 'signal' which plants an image in his or her mind.”
Mary Jones described to Evans how she was returning home from a revival one night. The driver let her off near her home. She thought her brother was coming down the lane to meet her, as he often did. She walked toward him, but he turned and began walking just ahead of her. She called out to him and then the figure looked back over its shoulder, at which point she realized it wasn't her brother. She began softly singing a revival hymn. Her suspicion was confirmed when the human like figure transformed into an enormous black dog that began to run back and forth across the road before her. “And then,” she told Evans,” I knew it was the Devil himself, angered at my assault upon his kingdom. I prayed for strength – and as I prayed he rushed growling into this very hillock,” which Mrs. Jones pointed to on the side of the lane, as they were outside at the location of this encounter.
During a visit to Brynerug, a neighborhood of Towyn, what was described as a local professional man and a farmer of good standing saw one of these mysterious black figures. One of the men uttered a prayer and suddenly one of Mrs. Jones's “lights” appeared above and, Evans wrote, “a white ray darting from which pierced the figure, which thereupon vanished.”
“In the neighborhood dwells an exceptionally intelligent young woman of the peasant class, whose bedroom has been visited three nights in succession at midnight by a man dressed in black, whose appearance corresponds with that of the person seen by Mrs. Jones,” Evans wrote. “This figure has delivered a message to the girl, which, however, she is forbidden to relate.”
So much of this sort of thing seems to get played out in the modern UAP contact scenarios as well. Stanley Ingram, a columnist for The Pulaski Citizen, back in 1982 introduced me to a country preacher near Bunker Hill, Tennessee. He described having a recent contact with alien beings. It began with a car-sized craft, the preacher said, coming in from a northerly direction, a few feet off the ground and just clearing the roof of his automobile. Surrounded by blue lights around the edge and a brilliant yellow light shining downward, he feared it was going to collide with his two story home. Afterwards, his home became haunted it seemed. He heard what sounded like a dog walking across the front porch, but there was nothing to be seen. His wife heard a knocking at the front door, but there was no one there. A crashing noise was heard upstairs, like something had fallen over, but there was nothing to be found. In addition, this preacher claimed that several humanoid beings appeared to him one night. The one who was doing all the talking was dressed in dark clothing, was short, about five foot tall. He conveyed a message to the preacher, but told us he was forbidden to reveal the contents of that message at that time. He was told that “they” could get him his own church, but he said that unless it was full gospel he didn't want anything to do with it.
“If we want to believe that the mysterious light forms are heavenly messengers of God, then this is what we will see in their name,” long-time UAP researcher, historian, and British author Andrew Collins notes in his book LightQuest (2012). “Yet today such religious conviction has mostly given way to mechanistic views of the world, in which phenomena of this sort are the vehicles of space aliens, the reason why we have come to consider that manifesting light forms, so-called UFOs, are nuts-and-bolts spacecraft.”
Meanwhile, back in early 20th century Wales, not far away, at Abergynolwyn, there is again a description of something quite strange and decidedly outside the box of mainstream “nuts and bolts” ufology. At an area center of mining, there was yet another report of “an apparition, appearing first as a man and then transforming itself into a large black dog.”
There were a number of similar reports. One of Mrs. Jones's converts had been an aged Welsh man who, had it not been, it was said, for the “temptations of the tavern and its accompaniments of cup and bottle,” that he had the potential talent to have been a poet. Crossing some fields in broad daylight that December he suddenly found himself in an unfamiliar place where “a number of ravening beasts,” Evans wrote, allegedly began to attack him. However, the man said, a figure in white garments came to his aid whereupon the “beasts” backed off. Then, once again, he was back on the path he had been on before. Afterwards, confused by what had happened, he relapsed into drinking again, quite severely for a couple of days. Then again, in the daylight, he was once more crossing a field when it happened again and he was in a strange land. The man in the white garments appeared again too, this time leading him to the banks of a great river. Beyond the river, on the other side, was a crowd of people in white happily singing songs. The stranger told him that that was where he should be and that he had work to do. “Thou must first conquer the beasts – and to do that I give thee my help.” After this, Evans wrote, the man had given up drinking and threw himself into “revivalist work.”
These black beasts that generally resemble very large dogs have, down through the centuries, figured into many frightful religious accounts. One very well-known one, that Keel pointed out was recorded in numerous historical documents, happened back on Sunday, August 4, 1577, over in England. It began when lightning struck a church in Bliborough, in Suffolk, killing two people and injuring several others. That same day, a number of parishioners reportedly died when “a thing like a black dog” materialized at a church in Bungay. Seven miles from there, at a church in Blythburgh, a creature resembling a giant dog allegedly attacked and killed two men and a boy, leaving deep claw marks in church masonry.
“Lightning often accompanies these manifestations,” Keel noted, and provided additional examples in his book Strange Creatures from Time and Space (1970). For example, back in 856 A.D., at a church in Trier, Prussia, “a dog of immense size” appeared in the midst of a storm. The floor of the church seemed to open up and a huge creature rose up and ran back and forth to the altar.
At Christmas Eve, in 1171 A.D., at a church in Andover, Hunts, England, a “gigantic pig-like creature” allegedly dashed around the altar as the priest was struck and killed by lightning. But, alas, here's the catch. The lightning appeared from within the church itself! Reports of such creatures continue to be made to this day. Michael Craft, in his book Alien Impact (1996), described a personal encounter back in 1976. He and fellow graduating high school classmates were sorrowing over the suicide of one of their own. After attending the funeral, he and a group of friends headed over to an abandoned house nearby in Towson, Maryland, where they had in the past often hung out with their friend. The location had a reputation for being “haunted,” and this night would validate that notion completely. Originally fourteen teenagers eventually dwindled down to five. It was Craft and his four friends who, while getting ready to leave, suddenly noticed a strange glowing “green fog” pouring out of an empty fireplace. The fog carried a pungent, chemical odor, and though there was no wind, it became very cold suddenly. The teenagers were terrified at this point. Craft even described how this was his first experience of having his hair “standing on end.”
“As we descended the front steps of the house, we glanced behind us and saw the shape of a huge, black dog with burning red eyes standing in the doorway we had just left!” Craft wrote. “Though there was little light except for the stars and we had no flashlight, the dog's brightly glowing eyes were clearly seen.”
Cynthia Newby Luce, an American with a master’s degree in experimental psychology and anthropology, for years lived in Brazil and investigated UAP cases there. She described a family in Petropolis, a large city where a chupacabra outbreak was being reported in the local newspapers. At the same time, this family was seeing a low level UAP flying around. Luce shared with me how the husband and his younger sister described seeing a “black, furry, dog-like creature with red-glowing eyes between two houses on several occasions. It seemed menacing.”
“The most common trait of UFOs is their vanishing act,” Lyn Halper, Ph.D., a New York transpersonal psychologist and a professor of psychology at Mercy College told me. Halper, the author of Adventures of a Suburban Mystic (2001), which recounts her personal experiences with kundalini, worked for years with noted Polish born parapsychologist Dr. Alex Imich, who was a good friend of John Keel. “Yeti's leave tracks that end abruptly as though they've disappeared into thin air,” Halper noted. “My friend and interviewee, Heshheru, a Jamaican shaman, tells me that Jamaica vibrates with paranormal phenomena. He describes a rolling calf with glowing red eyes seen for decades by islanders that is always accompanied by a noxious odor like burning chemicals or electrical wiring. This same phenomenon, the chemical-burn odor, is commonly reported around UFO close encounters.”
It has been claimed that locations where these phantom Black Dogs have appeared scorched earth and a strong smell of brimstone lingered. “Mothman, like phantom kangaroos and the redoubtable Bigfoot, [belonged] to that class of beasties known to the ancient Greeks as Chimeras,” Keel once wrote. “The Greeks noted that such animals usually had fiery red eyes, were often surrounded by the smell of 'fire and brimstone' (hydrogen sulfide) and often disappeared as suddenly and mysteriously as they had come. In countless UFO cases we also find all of these characteristics. The UFO is surrounded by a terrible smell, like the smell of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide again), sometimes making the witnesses ill.”
Theory of Apparitions
Back in 1971, then a teenaged ufologist all of 19 years of age, I sought John Keel's advice on looking into the UAP contactee syndrome. “Essentially, the contactee experience is identical to religious apparition phenomenon and probably is caused by the same factors,” he wrote. “It might be best to familiarize yourself with the medical and psychiatric studies of the religious cases before you tackle the UFO variation.” I took his suggestion to heart. I even purchased a book he had referred to me about a “superb study of apparitions” with detailed material that had been done by a “brilliant parapsychologist named G.N.M. Tyrrell.” Jacques Vallee had also cited Tyrrell's Theory of Apparitions in regards to UAP contact phenomena in his book Dimensions (1988).
“His study was actually very relevant to the UFO phenomenon and many UFO cases meet the criteria he established,” Keel also wrote me. In 1973, I began a correspondence with psychiatrist Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz, who had a rarely found and intense interest (especially among professionals) in both ufology and parapsychology, and who had also corresponded pretty extensively with Keel. In fact, it was Keel who had put the UAP-psi syndrome firmly on Schwarz's radar. Previously, Schwarz had largely been focused on just the paranormal aspect. However, in 1968, Schwarz had his first article on UAP published in the journal Medical Times, which he confessed was to be his “swan song” on the subject, but then John Keel came across the article and forwarded it on to the editor (which was then one Charles Bowen) of the highly respected (in ufology anyway) British publication Flying Saucer Review. That article, which reviewed four different UAP cases that Schwarz had personally looked into, ended up being reprinted in FSR's special edition number two, June 1969, entitled Beyond Condon. From 1973 until his passing in 2010, I engaged in extensive correspondence with Schwarz, meeting him twice in person, contributing a chapter to his two volume book, entitled UFO Dynamics (1983) on a reported UAP contact case in Maine involving two young men (a case with plenty of psychic dynamics) that we had both worked on. But sadly, the book was pretty much overlooked by the ufological mainstream. “It was a very good book, and again the UFO buffs underrated it,” Keel once complained in one of our phone conversations. “That was one of the better books.” In fact, in an article in FATE magazine, Keel rated it as one of the best UAP books published!
Ghost in the Machine?
British author Antony Milne noted how a variety of “ghostly analogies” could be drawn from “the apparitional nature of UFOs, similar to ghosts that walk through walls, or the way people can be levitated at seances, and the way UFOs materialize from nowhere.” Milne (2011) also added in his book, Fireballs, Skyquakes and Hums: “UFO sightings seem too often to be similar to the mind-created worlds that shamans encounter during their journeys through the subtler dimensions.”
Michael Grosso, in Experiencing the Next World Now (2004), a book that primarily explored the evidence for an afterlife, noted how UAP and their occupants, a subject that he had delved into quite extensively, were “maddeningly elusive and surreal” in a way wherein their manifestations compared more with the “antics of ghosts than machines from outer space,” mentioning frequently reported case details like telepathy, levitation, apports, teleportation, and odd light and heat phenomena. “Are ghosts really UFOs and UFO entities, or are UFOs really ghosts?” Keel wrote (1970). “Take your choice.”
Some of the UAP are indeed very ghost-like. Ufologist Bob Teets described to me an experience he had as a young boy on a farm in Terra Alta, West Virginia, one early morning in the summer of 1958. A typical farm family they were early risers, but on this one morning a loud sound woke young Bob (perhaps about age 8 at the time) before the others. Looking out his bedroom window, he clearly saw a silver colored disc-shaped object, about 30-35 feet across, with “two glowing orange-red orifices” that seemed to be propelling it. “Even with my hands over my ears it still penetrated my head,” he told me in a phone interview. “It was just unbelievable. It was like if you were standing right beside a freight train that was going full throttle.”
Next the most amazing thing happened. The craft (or whatever it was) headed straight for a nearby hill and while young Bob was fearing that his sighting was going to end in an explosive crash it (the UAP) instead “went into the hill.” Yes, like a ghost. “I had a very clear view,” Bob told me. “I could see everything.”
Bob Teets investigated more than 150 eyewitness accounts for his book West Virginia UFOs: Close Encounters in The Mountain State (1995). One of my favorite UAP “hocus pocus” ghost-like cases was recounted to Bob in an interview with one Gregg Knight, a deputy with the Harrison County Police Department. Gregg had described an old man named Brian (pseudonym) who he stated was quite a “mentally disturbed individual” who had “quit work because of events in his life and in his daughter’s life in Louisiana because of contact with aliens.”
Gregg’s story is that one clear afternoon back in 1990, he and Brian were just standing outside at a trailer park in Belmont, West Virginia, engaged in conversation. Brian was known to be very knowledgeable about Biblical matters and, in their conversation, Gregg said words to the effect, “If I ask my Dad a question, he answers. If I ask God the Father something, he won’t answer, sometimes for years. Now why is that?”
Gregg recalled that Brian responded, “It depends on what you ask.” Gregg came back with, “Like UFOs, what could they be? I want to see an alien craft not of this world.” Brian then simply said, “Look there,” and Gregg looked to the west, and what he saw, he admits, “took my breath away.”
Bob’s account of this story continues as follows:
“It was a massive craft, so huge it 'blocked out the sun, and yet it didn’t cast a shadow.'” Gregg estimates it was more than 2,000 feet in length, with a finish like that of “a Chrysler 426 hemi engine, that’s it exactly.” Its features resembled “a battleship turned upside down.”
“I yelled for my wife as loud as I could, or at least I thought I did,” he recalls, “but no one came out.” After it was gone, Gregg looked at Brian. “Did you see that!” he asked, incredulously. “Sure,” Brian answered. “That ain’t nothing, that’s just a mother ship. You ought to see a colony ship. And then wait ‘til you talk to ‘em.”
Gregg says Brian’s son, who was 20 miles away in Parkersburg, saw it too. From his perspective, it appeared to be about the size of a baseball on the horizon.” Bob Teets adds that Gregg afterwards became an active member of the Mutual UFO Network, as a direct result of his dramatic encounter that strange afternoon in 1990.
This isn’t the only UAP case where a small group of people presumably observed something quite spectacular and massive in size that hundreds of others should have been quite startled by – something that should have resulted in a media sensation. Despite Gregg yelling to his wife at the top of his lungs, no one else ventured outside to observe the huge object with them. Indeed, often witnesses to UAP close encounters seem to become somehow isolated from others. The neighborhood, the streets, the highway suddenly become eerily quiet and devoid of normal human activity or automobile traffic. British ufologist Jenny Randles coined the term “The Oz Effect” for such situations. Have such witnesses become unknowingly and temporarily pulled into a parallel world that outwardly resembles our own on the surface? Or is this an experience similar to religious visionary phenomena, induced perhaps by an alien intelligence of some sort that floods our consciousness with powerful imagery through altered states.
In 2005, I met an American researcher named Cynthia Newby Luce who had a Master’s Degree in experimental psychology and anthropology, and who had lived for many years in the mountain village of Sao Jose do Vale do Rio Preto, located northwest of Rio de Janeuro, Brazil. It was here that she said that she one day witnessed something very peculiar near her village. “I was driving along the road that has the river on one side of me (the left) and on my right is a steep embankment as the river is in a narrow valley and the road is cut from the hill that comes right down to the river,” Mrs. Luce explained. “It was in the middle of the day and the sun was bright and clear. I was going along at about 25 miles an hour. The road winds and suddenly I saw this metallic object with windows half-way into the hillside. It was around 8 feet up from the road and about 10 feet of the object was protruding and it just slid into the hillside of bare red earth. It went in fast and so it really startled me but happened so fast I did not have time to stop.”
Later she found a drawing depicting exactly what she felt she had seen in an illustration, based on eyewitness testimony described as a curious “comet” observed in Arabia...back in 1479 AD! She found the illustration in William Bramley's book The Gods of Eden (1989, 1990), where it explained that this rendering had been published initially back in 1557.
In his book, Confrontations (1990), Jacques Vallee described a UAP witness who said she had seen an oval-shaped object rise up off the ground a few feet, pause briefly and then shoot off up a canyon at high speed, passing directly through several trees, as if the trees weren't even there.
In addition to the ghost-like quality of UAP-related phenomena, sometimes it almost seems as though its the human experiencers who take on almost ghost-like qualities. A UAP contact experiencer who lives in the Chicago area shared some very puzzling experiences with me. For example, she said that a small “golden ball of light” appeared a mere three feet in front of her face one night. “As I swept my hand across the light, the ball was not blocked by my hand,” she told me. “Instead, my hand disappeared as it moved across the light.” On another night, a thing she described as a pinkish cloud floated into her window and appeared over her head. She decided again to see what would happen if she reached her hand up into the odd cloud. “I did so and my hand and part of my arm disappeared from view in the cloud,” she explained. “The cloud really didn't feel like anything except some very subtle vibrations.”
Such anomalous light phenomenon is not unheard of. Near Cluj, Romania, back in the summer of 1953, a young biology student, age 17, reported seeing a glowing ball of light drop from the sky into a bush. He poked a stick into the bush in search of the light orb and was startled to observe that he could no longer see the stick, as well as part of his hand. In addition, he was aware of a tingling sensation throughout his hand and a great heat in the soles of his feet, soon followed by a cold sensation pressing down over his entire body. Fleeing from the site, he later suffered from vomiting and “mental disturbances.”
On May 22, 1973, around 3 a.m., Onilson Patero, 40, a salesman traveling home to Catanduva, in the northern part of Sao Paulo, Brazil, was shocked when a UAP shined a tube of light down upon his car, causing it to become transparent! His skin suddenly felt as though it were on fire. Thinking that he was burning, he got out of the vehicle and began running away, and then fainted.
Dr. Schwarz often mentioned in person, in his writings and in interviews, that there was one book on psychic phenomena that he found most relevant in the UAP discussion. In his book UFO Dynamics (1983) he wrote: “For example, numerous accounts of UFO-like data – without the term 'UFO' – can be found in famed psychoanalyst and parapsychologist Nandor Fodor's Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science ...” John Keel was likewise impressed in this regard with Fodor's writings. “The late Dr. Nandor Fodor, a leading New York psychiatrist, made an extensive study of seemingly genuine trance mediums and even attempted to psychoanalyze their spirit guides, or alter egos,” Keel wrote. “He also performed an outstanding study of the poltergeist phenomenon. In his book Haunted People written in collaboration with Hereward Carrington, he presented 375 typical poltergeist cases from A.D. 355 to A.D. 1947. A great many of these cases are identical to our modern UFO incidents.”
Keel cited several examples. For instance, in 1824 small “symmetric objects of metal” falling from the sky near Orenburg, Russia. In 1836, globular looking lights being seen around the home of one Captain Lamber in Szeged, Hungary, with strange sounds heard in the home and sightings of a “woman in white” who would inexplicably appear and disappear. A thing described as a “floating, vaporous body shaped like a football” was observed around a boardinghouse in New York back in 1882, along with reports of dogs reacting in terror, unexplained rapping sounds, bedclothes being yanked from beds by unseen hands, along with many people claiming that they awakened in the night to find elusive dark forms standing over them.
Keel pointed out that one of the most celebrated poltergeist cases was that of the Bell Witch in the 1820's in Robertson County, Tennessee, that included strange lights that were frequently observed that resembled a “a candle or lamp flitting across the yard and through the field.”
How far back in history might we delve to uncover roots to UAP-type contact phenomena? Some students of this field believe we can go back to the Bible with its Ezekiel's wheel-within-a-wheel account and beyond, and so I've been interested in any clues that shamanism might provide. “In many of the shamanic traditions there are stories of extraterrestrials who come to earth and who interact in one way or another,” psychologist and parapsychologist Stanley Krippner told a large group of us at the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach, Virginia, back on December 2, 2005. “There’s not much on that in the literature...and the reason that there’s not much in the literature is because people haven’t asked that question. Anthropologists simply haven’t gone into that area of experience with the shamans.”
Krippner has personally traveled extensively in many parts of the world studying shamanic cultures, learning about their beliefs, their practices, and their histories. Shamanism goes back before all organized religions it seems. The earliest undisputed shaman burial is in the Czech Republic, and is said to be dated to the Upper Paleolithic era (c. 30,000 BP).
Shamanic Encounters
Back in the latter part of the 1970s, I engaged in correspondence with and paid two visits to an elder Native American medicine man of Susquehannock ancestry who lived in southeastern Pennsylvania. To him, as with other Amerind groups, UFOs were piloted by extraterrestrials known to his ancestors. Called the “Yuh-dush-gwa,” he described them as “one of the giant race that dwelt with my people before and after the glacial age.” He claimed that they lived in west central Pennsylvania, in what today is the Allegheny National Forest, and that they protected his people against “giant prehistoric creatures.” “They came to earth on Sky Canoes,” he added. He had a visit from these ancestors, he claimed, back on December 5, 1961, around 12:30 p.m., while he was living in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania at the time. He described their craft as a “Fire Canoe,” which had lights and flames issuing from it. His wife was the first to see it landing in the backyard. She grabbed an envelope and drew what it looked like to her. They showed me the envelope and I rendered a copy of it as best I could on a notepad I had. (see illustration) Soon these very tall beings entered their home. “We are the Yuh-dush-gwa,” they announced.
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,” the shaman 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. [Sound familiar?] After their visit, the beings left through a closed door [again a familiar occurrence in alien encounter reports where the so-called “ufonauts” often enter and depart through closed doors, solid walls, and closed windows, much like we'd expect a ghost to do].
This shaman described to me how at age four he was given guidance in the construction of his own personal prayer mound that was in the form of a tortoise. “I am Turtle Clain,” he explained to me. “My Family Totem is a Rattlesnake.”
“I pray on mounds and commune with the Great Spirit and the Spirit of Mother Earth on them,” he added. “Sometimes with sisters and brothers from the Sky Garden.” Sky Garden was his version of heaven, the afterlife. He described how Native Americans could “communicate with powers, forces, spirits, and elementals, even the spirits of trees, vegetation, stones, waters, storms, etc. Often they manifest to us in physical form. Sometimes only a voice.” He shared how he had an uncle who taught him much about the Indian ways. When he was only eight years old, back in 1916, he claimed that he and his uncle were walking up a mountain when they shared a remarkable experience. “About two-thirds the way up the mountain we saw before us a huge coiled rattlesnake,” he recalled in a letter to me. “The coil was about as tall as uncle Tall Willow who was 6 feet 1 inch tall. As we approached about 20 feet to the rattlesnake it uncoiled and began gliding up the mountain... Then the huge snake (about 150 feet long) began to fade out like dying embers of a log fire and disappear. It was the Spirit of The Great Serpent in the Sky Garden. Serpent Mounds are replicas of it. ….At uncle Tall Willow's instruction I sat for about an hour on the spot where the Big Rattlesnake Spirit had been coiled.”
During my first visit with the Pennsylvania shaman in 1976, he shared with me details of a craft encounter that his uncle had described having on the night of November 23, 1923. The story goes that Tall Willow was walking through a marshy area with tall beautiful white pines that was the pride and joy of members of his clan. It was around 11 o'clock at night when suddenly the area became as light as day. He looked up. “There was some sort of craft,” the shaman told me. “He judged it to be about four miles wide and eight miles long. It was flat on the bottom and it hovered over him and he said a beautiful light came from it (and) beautiful voices singing a song that he couldn't understand the language. He said that it made no noise except this song. He said it was silent... and a being – a beautiful looking thing, leaned over. This being looked over and he said, 'I have two messages for you. Fifty years from this night the end of the world will begin.'”
50 years would have been 1973, when a massive UAP wave was being reported all over the nation. Allegedly the 1973 wave peaked on Wednesday, October 17th, the month before the world was supposedly said to begin to come to an end. The second message had to do with the white pine trees, that they were going to die, and within a year a devastating disease attacked those trees.
Madeline Teagle of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, a UAP contactee with some Iroquois ancestry, who was the one who put me in touch with the Pennsylvania medicine man, shared with me how she had witnessed some rather unusual things in his presence. She described how she witnessed him once performing a rain dance ceremony for some children during a local dry spell when she said a cloud in the sky appeared to simply split in half and what looked like four beings appeared in the sky. She said that one being looked “almost like a half bird, half human.” Madeline was even having constructed one of the shaman's “prayer mounds” on her property, at a spot under a pine tree where years earlier she had had one of her first alien encounters – a basketball-sized lemon-colored ball of light that had given her a message. She stated that “this tree has experienced many things” and she was going to have the tree in the center of the mound. This makes me think of Fatima and other Marian apparitions that seem to appear around a certain tree.
Madeline was describing to me, as regarding her own contact experiences, about the handsome humanoid named Amana in her own encounters. “When he appears, however, there is generally a brilliant white tube of light first,” she told me. “Then he just seems to form within it. When I have touched him in the process of deforming something like a sharp electrical shock runs through the area of my own body that is touching him. And I feel sort of as though the cells of my body at that place are separated, that they are apart and loose. Can see that this is not so, but it feels as though whatever part of me is touching him is not very well tried together.”
Although Madeline was the first experiencer to describe to me this aspect, I later found out something similar had been reported by others. “Sometimes people feel as if they are coming apart in these beams,” abduction researcher Kathleen Marden, co-author of The Alien Abduction Files (2013), and the niece of Betty Hill, told me. Kathleen was referring to experiencers allegedly caught in beams of light from UAP.
In 2014, my wife Joan and I accompanied Greg and Lora Little on a trip up to South Charleston, West Virginia, not far up the Kanawha River from Point Pleasant, an area famous because of its association with John Keel's writings on UFOs, Men-In-Black, and Mothman. The Little's have written much on ancient Native American beliefs and had visited more Indian Mounds and ancient earthworks across the US than perhaps any archaeologist out there. It seems Charleston area was also active with many strange happenings back during the whole UFO/Mothman ruckus of the 1960s, along with many other places around Point Pleasant and up and down the Kanawha River Valley. “There is solid and indisputable evidence that a lot of tall skeletons were recovered during the Smithsonian's 1800s excavations,” G. Little explained to me. “In general, all of them were between 7 and 8 feet tall. In South Charleston, the Smith Mound, now completely destroyed, was one that turned up several 7-footers. Another three mounds there also turned up several 7-footers. There were others found in Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and elsewhere, but it's clear that the greatest concentration was in West Virginia, especially in the Kanawha Valley. In our evaluation of all of the Smithsonian's large skeleton reports, it became obvious that there were far more of them than would be likely by chance.”
Greg agrees with his friend Andrew Collins, a well-known British author and historian, that there once was an elite race of exceedingly tall people, who held positions like priests and chiefs among their people. But could there have been a connection with the ancient “giant race” that the Susquehannock medicine man in Pennsylvania talked about and the tall skeletal remains found in West Virginia? Well, I can't honestly say, though I have learned that ancient Susquehannock ceramics have turned up in northern West Virginia, in Grant, Hampshire, and Hardy counties.
Like so many ancient aboriginal cultures, what beliefs and connections may they have had or associated with the Upper World, the heavens above? Among Hopi Indians of the Southwest, they have linked the starry realms above with “flying saucers,” which they believe are piloted by spirit beings known as kachinas. Many Hopi have had their own UAP encounters. Back in 1969 and 1970, a contactee named Paul Solem was causing quite a stir around Indian Reservations from Idaho to Arizona by quoting the Hopi prophecy about the return of the “True White Brother.” There were quite a few reports where it seemed he would successfully concentrate mentally on the UAP beings and strange lights would appear in the sky. Even a reporter named Barbara Boren, who worked for the Idaho State Journal, admitted seeing a couple of odd looking “star like moving lights” high in the sky one of those times Solem was attempting to “call” them down. “This man speaks the truth,” Hopi Chief Katchongva was quoted. “This is all part of our religion.” One Hopi named Titus Lamson needed no convincing. He claimed that a few months earlier he had observed a domed saucer-shaped craft flying low over Hotevilla, Arizona, that at one point became transparent and on the inside, he claimed, he saw a man with long blond hair dressed in a gray “ski-jump outfit.”
Tibetans and Hindus of the east believe in psychic energy centers of the human body they call chakras. Curiously, the Hopi believe in the same five that they do, being the solar plexus, heart, throat, forehead, and the crown of the head. In addition, they all believe that at birth and death consciousness enters and leaves through the crown, which is seen as the highest center of all, even though they have different names for them. The Hopi even have an ancient story of how their ancestors were once led on a journey by a cloud by day and a certain star by night that only the “chosen” could see. Those “chosen,” it is stated, had their kopavi vision (located at the crown) open, while most people do not. It is also described how Hopi medicine men would use a small quartz crystal that they would move over a person's five psychic centers in order to determine things about them.
Kundalini
In the eastern belief systems, when the chakras are opened a powerful psychic energy called kundalini or “serpent power” may be released. As with the Kung shaman of the Kalahari Desert it will often travel up the spinal column, to the top of the head. To the Kung it is a fiery energy they call Num, and when it reaches the skull it results in a transformative state called Kia. This energy is released by special ceremonial dance movements. Yoga and meditation can reportedly generate this energy also.
The UAP contact experience at times seems connected with this kundalini energy also. In Brad Steiger’s Gods of Aquarius (1976) he quotes a statement given to him by one Gene Kieffer of New York’s Kundalini Research Foundation who explored the area of UAP and Kundalini. Kieffer had concluded that “Kundalini is responsible for most of the UFOs that abound in our times.” He recalled a personal experience back in December 1968, while when meditating (and before he had any knowledge about kundalini) he observed a “luminous green, slightly pulsating, amorphous vehicle.” Though he initially believed that this was a true visual sighting, he later concluded that it was a “projection of my own self.” He was also given instructions, he felt, to contact a certain person at NASA in Alabama and inform him that astronauts who were about to embark upon a lunar mission were going to have a “spiritual experience” when they entered lunar orbit.
Hans Lauritzen of Copenhagen, Denmark, contracted a severe case of liver hepatitis in February 1966, when traveling in Africa. It became chronic and he had to stop working and was put on invalid pension. Then on the evening of December 7, 1967, Lauritzen went with four friends to a wooded area in Copenhagen to look for UAP activity, and sure enough, at one point he observed “two great, dim, yellow globes” at an estimated distance of 100 meters. One of his friends also saw one of the “globes.” For some reason, he felt compelled to walk into the forest alone, felt a “presence,” and also felt as though he were in a “semi-trance like” state. He also felt as though he was in telepathic contact with this “presence,” for when he sensed this “presence” he mentally asked that they let him help humanity. They told him that he had a “very strong power,” Lauritzen recalled, and that it would become stronger. Then he came to the place where he had seen the two yellow spheres, suddenly found himself standing in another spot nearby, looked at his watch and discovered that over an hour had inexplicably elapsed. His friends at this point were calling for him, so he ran to meet with them. He noticed he wasn’t tired anymore, he had lots of energy. Later he returned to his medical doctor who discovered that the liver condition had disappeared and the liver was of normal size again. Lauritzen wrote, “The blood tests showed that it functioned now as any normal healthy liver.”
Soon after this Lauritzen began to experience classic kundalini symptoms. “Something was moving up along the spine from the bottom to the neck and back head,” he wrote. “It was accompanied by a pleasurable feeling and made me stand up and make strange movements and turns. Because of the semi-trance state I just had to follow it, but afterwards I became extremely afraid what it could be. It was like something spreading in the whole nervous system.” This went on for months, with a variety of different physical and psychological symptoms.
Farah Yurdozu, a noted ufologist from Turkey claims to be a multi-generational “alien contact percipient,” beginning with her great-grandfather, a teacher at Istanbul University, who back in the late 1890s described how he was visited by two humanoid beings with reptilian features (most disturbing were the vertical pupils) who communicated with him telepathically. “When I was a high school student I had a dream about a UFO landing on the shore where our apartment was located in Istanbul,” Yurdozu shared with me. “It was a very vivid dream. In fact, I would call it an 'astral dream' with amazing details. Ten days later, in the same spot, I had a UFO sighting just like it happened in my dream.”
A Native American medicine man shared with me something similar. “During the late part of winter 1974, I began to have a series of unusual dreams about silver-colored eagles,” Medicine Grizzlybear Lake recalled. On three occasions he dreamed how the four eagles appeared from the four cardinal directions and flew around in a circular pattern for a time, and then flew out of sight. But then there was a fourth dream, again with the eagles coming in from the four directions. However, there was a new twist. “They all flew in a circle but began to change form,” he explained. “In place of the eagles appeared four silver-colored discs. The four silver discs then merged into one very large silver-colored flying saucer. All of the dreams were accompanied by a tremendous humming sound, and although I was asleep in each situation, I would feel my entire body vibrate to the point that it became unbearable. I would awake from the dreams shaking, exhausted, bewildered, and dizzy.”
In February 1975, he consulted a Seneca medicine man named Beeman Logan, who doctored him and explained that the dream was some kind of shamanic vision and contact with the spiritual realm, and added that it might be a premonition that he would be taken up in a flying saucer by the “ancient ones.” “As a college professor, and as a half-breed, assimilated Indian, I could not help but to laugh in his face,” Lake stated. “'You've got to be joking,' I reacted. “Flying saucers, beings from outer space, and UFOs spiritual?'”
Shortly after his March 6th birthday the dreams began again. One night, he had the dream again, but this time there was a voice. “Get ready my son, it is time to go.”
“Suddenly, I found myself standing next to my bed and I felt compelled to walk into the front room,” he explained. “Outside the large window hovered a huge, silver disc-shaped vehicle approximately 45 feet in diameter. Soft blue lights pulsated on it in a hypnotic fashion. I felt as though I was in a trance. This thing was pulling me closer and closer, and I couldn't seem to get away.” Next he was hit by a beam of white light and then found himself onboard with flashing lights of various colors, computer looking instruments and four beings, the “ancient ones.” They were Native American elders!
John Keel wrote that sacred locations known by occultists as “gateways,” as well as Native American Indian Mounds and ancient earthworks, often seemed to be locations where UAP and paranormal manifestations occurred with some higher than normal degree of frequency, sites he referred to as “windows,” and other authors like Paul Devereux, in his book Shamanism and the Mystery Lines (1993), have related how mysterious lights that often appeared at such places were believed by some to be shaman in astral flight, and how in India and China temples had been built on sites frequented by such mysterious lights. A high percentage of non-human contact experiencers describe having out-of-body experiences. John Keel speculated that some UAP seen as faint blobs of light flying across the sky at night might indeed actually be “astral travelers.” A Native American practitioner named Page Bryant, who was once a teacher at the late Sun Bear's Medicine Wheel Gatherings, called it “star-walking” and claimed that ancient medicine men used to “walk among the stars” by engaging in various ceremonial practices that involved sacred plants, dancing, and/or drumming.
Devereux also pointed out how common the concept of shamanic astral flight was in ancient times. He cited a study done by one Dean Shiels where no less than 67 indigenous societies, located on every continent in the world, had traditions that revolved around out-of-body travel. Devereux further explained that today there exist three variations of this experience. 1) The near-death experience, 2) out-of-body projection, and 3) the modern “alien abduction” or contact experiences. To make his point regarding this third category, Devereux described a UAP case that reportedly occurred on the Yakima Indian reservation in Washington State back in 1967. There have been a lot of reports of UAP and even Bigfoot on and around this reservation. In this particular instance, five people described how they had become stranded on an isolated road when the car they were in together broke down. During that UAP sighting five suffered a period of some amnesia. However, one of them had a peculiar memory of being outside of his body, seeing himself and the others unable to move and looking up into the sky.
While such reports don't settle well with many students of the “nuts and bolts” ufological mainstream, these kinds of accounts are not that uncommon. Here is one I came across from one of the thousands of survey submissions received by FREE from an experiencer of alleged non-human contact: “I was a passenger in my then girlfriend's car. We were driving the motorway to the southeast of London. The radio was on and she was driving. There were no other passengers. She was talking to me about something when out of thin air a ball of light emerged. It was about the size of grapefruit. It was suspended stationary in thin air between my chest and the car dashboard. I starred at it transfixed for a while, then I turned to my girlfriend and asked her if she could see it. It was strange for it was as if she could not hear me talking to her and she just kept on talking and I could not get her to look my way. I returned to look again at the ball of light when suddenly I was conscious of rising up out of the top of the car as we continued to travel along the motorway. As I rose up I saw that the car had no roof then. I was just immersed in white light. I had no body, there was nothing to see. It was all just loving comfortable warm light. It felt safe and somehow heavenly. Next something was communicating with me telepathically.”
This person described having “my whole life recalled. The communication was putting me right on things that had passed. I received a lesson on spiritual arrogance and other awkward matters. I felt complete love and complete fear. Suddenly, I was back in the car and I could hear the radio, my girlfriend was still talking as if I had not missed a thing, yet for me I had been somewhere else for eons.”
The Afterlife
Many experiencers connect their encounters with the afterlife. “A New York psychiatrist once asked me if I'd ever heard of deceased people appearing in flying saucers,” Keel wrote in Saga magazine's March 1976 edition. “He told me how a young patient, a teenaged boy, claimed to have witnessed a UFO landing and was astonished to see his late father emerge from the object. The psychiatrist knew nothing of UFOs and assumed the whole thing was nothing but a childish fantasy. Actually, however, there have been hundreds of similar reports although they are usually ignored by the hard core believers in extraterrestrial spaceships.”
Shirley Fickett of Portland, Maine was undergoing a series of out-of-body experiences back in 1969. She felt that some intelligence was “training” her in “astral projection.” One time, while she was partially out of her body, she thinks she glimpsed her trainer – a non-human being about four feet tall, with a coconut-shaped head, two slits for eyes, a tiny slit where the nose should be, and no visible mouth. In one instance, she was transported down the road from her home to another house, where she perceived her father embracing a young boy. Then she was transported back to her house, back into her body, whereupon the boy's “astral” appeared to her.
“I held my physical hand out in acceptance to receive him, or let him know I did,” Mrs. Fickett told me. “He then vanished.” Not long afterwards, in a conversation with a stranger, she learned how he believed that his son was having psychic experiences, and as it turned out, she became convinced that it was the same boy she met astrally. She felt her late father's presence was connected with this young man. She suspected reincarnation.
Then something happened that caused her to speculate about UAP. One morning around 5:30 a.m., in late November 1972, this boy was understandably alarmed when he claimed that a beam of light, coming through a wall in his bedroom, pinned him to his bed while the hands on his electric clock spun wildly around, and while a high frequency noise filled the air. The boy stated, “I felt like it was robbers but they kept saying it was from Christ.” Not long afterwards, Mrs. Fickett read the story of Israeli psychic Uri Geller's alleged childhood experience of being struck by a beam of light from a UAP.
As we all know today, in 1995 it was big news when it was revealed by major media outlets like CNN and Newsweek that, over a two decade period, $20 million dollars had been invested in a joint project of the Defense Department and the CIA to employ and study sixteen “remote viewers.” A decade earlier, in 1985, physicist Russell Targ and experimental psychologist Keith Harary revealed details of a “remote viewing” program at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) in their book The Mind Race. These authors described then how the government had been supporting a “multi-million-dollar program” at SRI International to experiment with “remote viewing” techniques, though the media hardly took much notice at that time.
The Parapsychology Connection
Jacques Vallee discovered that many gifted remote viewers had also had UAP-type experiences going back to their childhoods. “When it turned out that many of their subjects had experienced UFOs, they brought me into the project on a strictly confidential basis to document that aspect of the problem,” Vallee told me in an interview. We were both giving talks at a UAP conference sponsored by the ARE (Association for Research and Enlightenment) at Virginia Beach, Virginia, back in December 2005. This organization was founded by the late “Sleeping Prophet” Edgar Cayce, who had a heavily documented history of very accurate psychic readings. “Edgar Cayce himself had mentioned that some of his gifts came after an incident when he was a teenager,” Dr. Vallee told his audience. “There was a globe of light and inside the globe of light there was a figure that he took I think to be a lady who asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted the power to help people, to heal, and after that incident his life started changing. That is a fairly common occurrence among people with special psychic gifts.” In our interview, Vallee told me that the phenomenon of UAP was “far larger than current speculation” allowed. “It raises questions about consciousness, about the nature of reality, and about human history on the earth.”
The evolution of ufology has been a torturously and agonizingly slow and gradual process, long viewed by the academic community and establishment science as fringe-related pseudoscience. For seven decades now, since the dawning of the modern “flying saucer era” beginning in 1947, civilian “ufologists” have struggled to be heard and to be taken seriously. One would not think that it would take this long for science to come to the rescue. Sadly though, I am afraid that many early UAP researchers (and still many even now) have grossly underestimated the great complexity and high-strangeness of this very perplexing and controversial enigma. Surface appearances are quite misleading and deceptive. John Keel was so right on when he wrote that ufology should be a branch of parapsychology, and he saw the intelligence operating behind the UAP phenomenon as something that likely was interacting with us from a “parallel world.”
I have long been aware that we're dealing with something that seems far more bizarre and complex than we earlier thought and were often led to believe. Fortunately, we've had bold, thoughtful, and visionary pioneers like Vallee and Keel who had the insight and fortitude to personally venture out into the field and question the mainstream party-line and seriously seek out more than one possible explanation. I am most encouraged to see that FREE has assembled a good number of serious and responsible people from the academic community to delve deeply and seriously into the potential implications of possible parapsychological components and the implications of quantum physics as possible inroads into revealing, hopefully at long last, the true core nature and long hidden reality that has concealed the ultimate answers of UAP and so much more for far too long.
As a matter of fact, for far too long the field of ufology has been dominated by armchair types who conduct conversations more than investigations, and spout their opinions more than engaging in useful research to find real answers. Of course, it's long been this way. Keel was complaining loudly about this sorry state of affairs back in the 1960s. Major organizations were formed early on but suffered major flaws. When J. Allen Hynek, who served for many years as the U.S. Air Force's astronomical consultant, discovered when he met Vallee in late 1963 that the French data on UAP landings and occupant encounters was something he had an opportunity here in the United States to study. “We had some landing cases, but time and again, what today I would regard as a good physical trace case they would have marked 'hoax'; it couldn't be real, it just had to be a hoax,” Hynek told Vallee. “If somebody said they had three triangular markings, then the kids must have put those in there to make a good story out of it - that was just standard technique! And if it weren't a landing this was simply automatically labeled – I saw it with my own eyes – 'psychological.'” Meanwhile the large civilian UAP organization in Washington, D.C., NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) overlooked much evidence too. “In an effort to downplay the apparently ludicrous claims of the contactees, NICAP made arbitrary rules as to what kind of UFO cases it would 'allow,'” early ufologist James W. Moseley once wrote. “At first a saucer could come close to the ground, as long as it didn't land; then the unwritten rules were eased so that it could land as long as no one got out; and finally, under continuing pressure from us and from the Phenomenon itself, NICAP was forced to accept the 'little men' stories, though they still neglected the contactees.”
Of the neglected landings and such, Vallee told Hynek, “It was there, it was there in NICAP's files, but NICAP was too afraid of it to publish it, and there's a lot in those files that hasn't come out yet that is of that nature.” Vallee confessed “great puzzlement” as to “why this sort of thing wasn't known in the United States.”
Keel had commented a number of times that it wasn't necessary to blame our lack of progress in ufology on a government cover-up. We cover-up a good deal on our own! Many need to disengage from all the unproductive conversation and get back out into the field (assuming they ever were out there to begin with) and try to contribute some meaningful evidence to a conversation that's actually constructive. Locate and interview witnesses, write up and share reports with other serious researchers and any organizations that you feel are on the correct path. But always keep your own copies, and be as detailed and thorough as you can be, and be objective in your approach.
Also make an effort to see if you can personally witness any activity yourself; especially when you're in an area where activity has recently been reported. Some investigators have reported having had some pretty noteworthy observations in the field themselves, and on occasion actually get lucky enough to capture something anomalous in a photograph. Dr. Harley Rutledge, a physicist with the Southeast Missouri State University, during the 1973 UAP flap became curious when people he knew had reported seeing UAP, so he formed a capable and well-equipped team that came to be called Project Identification. They went out into the field to try and observe and gather evidence, and they did this for seven years. They had 157 observations, and in 1981, Rutledge wrote a book entitled, of course, “Project Identification.” A resident of Cape Girardeau, Rutledge began seeing UAP from his own yard. Rutledge concluded that he and his team were observing some sort of plasma energy that he felt had intelligence! Greg Little wrote in his introduction to Andrew Collins's LightQuest (2012): “As the project began to wind down, Rutledge noted in later interviews that some balls of plasma, 2-6 inches (5-15 cm) in diameter, would actually follow him around and even appear inside buildings on the university campus. He found, as do many people who become intrigued by the UAP phenomenon, that the deeper you go into it, strange things begin happening. Keel mentioned that if you notice and become interested in the phenomenon, it can notice you and become interested in you.”
In Alien Energy (1994, 2003), again by author Andrew Collins, he describes how he and others often concentrated on crop circle sites and ancient ceremonial landscapes like Avebury and Silbury Hill, where anomalous light phenomena frequently appeared quite active, and in 1993 and 1994 initiated what they called the Orgone Research Project – orgone being an energy that the Austrian-born biophysicist and psychologist Wilhelm Reich conceived as being a vital life force energy, similar to the ancient ideas of chi and prana – which he eventually even connected with UAP, and claimed in the 1950s that from a laboratory he had established in Rangeley, Maine, his metal tubed instrument he called a “cloud buster” (which he felt could affect weather and help produce rain during dry spells) could also interact with UAP! The British group had a good number of very inexplicable observations, from aerial objects to paranormal occurrences, capturing some pretty anomalous infrared pictures with their camera equipment, in addition using other instruments like a Geiger counter, ultrasound detector, electro-static volt meter, VLF radio receiver, and even a modified “mini-cloudbuster.” During their sky-watches and investigations in the field they even engaged in meditational exercises, in an effort to perhaps stimulate anomalous energies at these sites, at times recording increases in Geiger counter readings, low frequency oscillations on a local EM channel, and participants reporting things like strange lights, unexplained sounds such as horn-like noises, voices, and even an odd chanting sound at one time. Collins's book is certainly a fascinating volume and, for anyone wishing to initiate similar field studies, skywatches and experiments, it is, along with LightQuest, highly recommended reading.
Before a long series of remarkable experiences suddenly entered his life in March 2012, Reinerio (Rey) Hernandez, the core co-founder of FREE, says he was previously a complete hard-bitten UAP skeptic and had no knowledge nor interests in these topics. But after an initial encounter with a NHI with his wife in their living room, the pendulum has now swung in the opposite direction. After seeing what he describes as a “Plasma Energy Being” in his living and interacting with a football stadium size UAP less than 30 feet away from him, his daughter and several adults, Rey now affirms the existence of “Non Human Intelligent” life visiting earth. His wife, a devout Catholic from Mexico, also had her unique up close UAP encounters witnessed by family members. She also had her own personal encounter with several 7 foot tall humanoid beings dressed in what resembled white monks robes, but she insists that they are angelic visitations.
All around the world, credible men and women from all walks of life are describing extraordinary, incredible experiences. In spite of the long list of amazing commonalities shared within the descriptions and symptoms reported by these thousands and thousands of experiencers, we have developed a wide range of different categories and disciplines within which to file and deal with them. Much of this is based on shallow though impressive surface appearances that are largely subjective, leaving a sizeable chasm between science and religion.
Mr. Hernandez became obsessed with trying to get to the proverbial bottom of this huge mystery, greatly disappointed and unsatisfied with his search through the existing literature. He noticed right off that there was very little existing academic, scientific work that had been done on the matter that adequately addressed the situation. Then one day, while sitting in Miami traffic, he had like a brief out-of-body experience and saw (as Keel and Vallee did) that many of these different manmade categories were actually and significantly interrelated.
Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non Human Intelligence, is about that vision and the resulting pursuit to explore in-depth the full spectrum of this gigantic puzzle.
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Website: http://www.web-us.com/BRAIN/Visual_Test_Hemispheric_Dominance.htm
Author’s Note: This article originally appeared as chapter 13 in Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non-Human Intelligence, Volume 1, published by the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences (FREE) in 2018. Permission for its reproduction here was given by its editor Rey Hernandez, JD, MCP.