Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, September 2022
Ohio Women haunted by UFOs, Silver Suited Men, and Odd Psychic Experiences
by: Brent Raynes
During the summer of 1975, I periodically dropped in on Saturdays at the residence of Madeline Teagle of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, both a UFO researcher and contactee, whose home on weekends often filled up with a variety of people attending her meditation sessions, open discussions, and UFO sky watches. My portable cassette recorder was always close by and it was a great place to meet and hear firsthand many unusual stories from attendees. From time to time, Madeline would even personally guide me to the homes of local experiencers, and there were many.
Madeline’s stories themselves were quite fascinating and others who had described similar encounters certainly seemed to identify with her, and many opened up to me because Madeline had. Madeline’s main contact was a handsome humanoid being named Amana. “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 tied together.”
I was later to learn how others had reported similar things. “Sometimes people feel as if they are coming apart in these UFO beams,” Kathleen Marden, a UFO researcher, author, and experiencer herself [as well as niece of the late Betty Hill] explained to me.
As John Keel revealed to me in correspondence back in 1971, if one is to investigate the contactee phenomena it would be wise to familiarize oneself first with literature on apparitions and religious visionary phenomena as the contactee syndrome shared the same characteristics. It was just a different frame of reference.
I certainly found that to be the case as I traveled about meeting these experiencers for myself that year from Maine to Florida and out west as far as Indiana. This was not this field’s mainstream version of “nuts and bolts” ufology. I met one contactee from Akron who Madeline and others described how he could sometimes call in the UFOs. Madeline also had me venturing over to eastern Pennsylvania to meet with a Native American medicine man who shared ET type encounters and could also make phenomena happen. “I have tried the same approach you describe and feel that a sort of modified séance takes place out in nature between the human batteries, as you call them, and the UFOs, or whatever X factor is,” a noted parapsychologist told me. I was even finding how some former hardline “nuts and bolts” ufologists were being forced to switch tracks when the phenomenon they were investigating turned reflective and they themselves were experiencing the high strange psychic anomalies. Keel would even later tell me that he believed that 1975 was even a more active year for UFO manifestations than 1973.
On Saturday, September 6th, Madeline accompanied me to the home of a young mother and housewife in nearby Akron who had been describing a series of bizarre experiences.
Back in November 1974, around 1 a.m., she was with a group of people when they saw something odd in the sky. “Everybody else said they had seen a red-light zip across the sky but what I saw wasn’t no light,” Dietra explained. “There was no lights on it. It was oval, or round, and it had four holes, or windows, and had the dome on it and it just zoomed.” This she explained happened a short distance outside of Akron, in Wadsworth, at an area she and others went to because there had been reported the sighting of a “big bright orange light” there that seemed to “sit down” in a field, where the next day a “triangular shaped burned place” was allegedly found. [These subjective episodes, sometimes referred to as “psychoid” or “Oz” type sightings, wherein experiencers are puzzled over their differing descriptions of seeing things quite differently from others present, or even how some fail to even see what is plain to see by another, or others, is not uncommon among many close encounter experiencers.]
At any rate, not long afterwards, late on the night of January 4, 1975, Dietra was sitting at the kitchen table when she was suddenly hit with extreme tiredness. “I was so tired I just laid down in the middle of the kitchen floor,” she recounted. “I couldn’t make it to the bedroom. My husband came in and took me to the bedroom where I just laid down crossways on my belly. I was laying there about half asleep when I felt someone get hold of me from behind. They got me around the lower part of my back. I felt real funny. Kind of numb with a tingling all over. I raised my head to see who it was and there was a man behind me. He was dressed in a white suit that gave off a silver effect. His head it seemed was flat on top. Around his waist was some kind of sash. He didn’t seem to have a neck, as if he did it was very short. His hands were huge and very hairy and his arms were long. His feet were huge and he was wearing some kind of silver shoes. The room was filled with some kind of energy force. I could feel it all over. I could almost see it. It was so strong.”
“I was frightened, but I felt as though he wanted something but almost at the same time I felt this my cat started acting up. She threw herself against the door and the hair on her head and back stood straight up. That’s when I got scared. I jumped up off the bed and ran and opened the door. The cat ran out of the room and fast. She hit the hall wall. I ran into the livingroom and stayed in there for a while. After all this had happened, I wasn’t tired or sleepy anymore. I was up for about two hours after this.”
On January 6, 1975, Dietra experienced this unusual and vivid dream. “I saw a man in a silver suit lying on a table. Then I saw a door with a silver glow around it. Then I saw a pair of shoes. Great big shoes and they had a silver glow to them too. Then I saw a light. Odd shaped and blurry. There was a man sitting down under a big tree, leaned back against the base of it. The light came down over him, starting at the top and going all the way to the bottom of his feet. When the light had passed the man was horrible looking. All of his facial features had changed. I saw another man and the same thing happened to him. Their faces were all wrinkled up as if they had been burned real bad and their eyes were huge and they didn’t have any pupils. Just big black holes. Their mouths were all twisted out of shape. They looked as if they were dead and when I saw this happen I thought of radiation burns. These men also had some kind of suit on that looked silvery. Then I saw the man that grabbed hold of me and this time I knew who he was and what he wanted, but almost right away it was gone. I do remember thinking, ‘So that’s what this is all about.’ But then everything was blank again.”
Then on February 20, 1975, around 8:30-9 a.m., Dietra said she felt a “tingly” and “numb” sensation. “My eyes were closed and it was like I was off somewhere watching all of this on a movie or something. I saw the same man in a silver suit and he bent over my bed and picked me up. Then I seen us going down this path. The trees had come together to make a tunnel. The branches had interlocked to form the dome of the tunnel and he was carrying me but though he was walking I had the sensation of floating. I remember I was angry and frustrated because I wanted to know where we were going and he wouldn’t tell me. I was so angry at him for this but I was not scared. Then my baby made a sound and I was by her bed, without remembering how I had come from my bed to her bed, not remembering walking there.” Dietra also mentioned one time looking in her baby’s bed, after hearing her baby make a noise, and when she checked she said she saw another baby next to hers. “I looked at that baby’s eyes and I got scared,” she stated. “I said it was the most evil thing I ever saw in my life.” Madeline tried to reassure her that it was simply because she didn’t understand what she saw; that there was “power in the eyes” of the baby. Dietra told us how a few weeks later she was rocking her little child when she looked down at her baby and realized she now resembled the phantom baby. “I almost dropped her.”
After January and February, the visionary type episodes with the silver suited being ended,. “I felt real close to him,” Dietra told us. “I wonder quite often what happened to him. In a way, I miss him.” Dietra also described how she had been haunted by psychic phenomena. She’d have the feeling at times “like somebody is watching me.” Once she heard a dog barking. She turned over in bed and glanced in the direction of the sound. “I saw this big, huge black dog sitting there with this big diamond collar,” she said. “It was so real. I reached out to grab him and he wasn’t there.” She laid back down and then she heard the barking again (“right in my ear”). Raising back up a nearby hall appeared to be filled with smoke. Thinking the house was on fire she jumped up and hadn’t gone more than 6-8 feet and “the smoke was completely gone.” She noticed no smell. On another occasion she and a girl friend were sitting in the kitchen and heard what “sounded like somebody took ahold of the top of the screen and just ripped it right off of the screen door.” After quickly investigating they found the screen door was in perfect shape. “It didn’t happen.” She couldn’t account for the sound, or other sounds she had heard on other occasions. That same year of 1975, New Jersey psychiatrist Dr. Berthold Schwarz, who delved heavily into parapsychology and ufology put me in touch with a husband and wife UFO investigative team who lived a short distance outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. He had visited them the previous year. They were a serious-minded husband and wife UFO investigative team who had covered many amazing cases, particularly during the 1973 UFO wave, some of which are detailed in Len Stringfield’s Situation Red: The UFO Siege (1977). They also had experienced quite a number of strange paranormal episodes and had seen UFOs themselves.
The wife’s experiences became the strangest of all. “It happened at 4 a.m.,” Geri began, as she described her most remarkable encounter in July 1973. “I had gotten up to give the baby her bottle. I went downstairs to warm the bottle in a glass and running hot water over it for a few minutes. All of a sudden, I had this urge to go upstairs to our bedroom and look out the window. When I came to the window this huge saucer-shaped object was hovering above the telephone wires. The craft covered the entire parking lot. The windows were long rectangular (shaped). I could see the fine ridges which reminded me of stainless steel.”
The following year, Geri began to see a strange being that would materialize in her home. “He seemed solid enough but he disappeared at will. He had high cheekbones, blue eyes, a high forehead. His hair was white and stood high, which could have made his forehead seem higher. He had square shoulders and stood about six foot two. His silver suit looked very soft and seemed to be in one piece. He gave me the feeling of being very old but appeared to be only in his fifties. He projected peace and love with the smile of an angel. He comes whenever there is going to be a flurry of sightings.” I spent quite a bit of time with the family and got to know them well. Dr. Schwarz met Geri’s mother during his visit with the family in September 1974, as did I during my many weeks visiting with the family during the summer of 1975, and we both considered her credible and sincere. Geri told Dr. Schwarz that her mother had had one of those curious “phone calls from the dead” (1) experiences, and so he proceeded to interview her too. Over a year earlier in 1973, on a January evening, Geri’s mother received a phone call from her favorite Aunt Lorraine.
“She was four years older than I,” the mother told Dr. Schwarz. “We were like sisters. We talked about different things we had done in the past, places we had been together, just sort of reminiscing. I was home alone. This went on for about half an hour, but when I hung up, I thought ‘It was Lorraine! But she’s dead. She was killed instantly in an automobile accident six or seven months ago!’ I even get chills now, talking about it. In fact, I was so upset, I dialed her number but nobody answered.”
Their home had some spooky things allegedly going on. Geri told me how she was in the laundry room one day when she was startled to see a Clorox bottle float about 5 feet through the air before simply dropping to the floor. Angel, who was just a little girl back when I spent much time with this family, years later as an adult recalled some of the unusual, spooky memories she had of those past events as a child. She also had a memory of the “silver suited man.”
“I remember waking up. I remember him telling me not to be afraid, and that he was there to protect me. I remember closing my door, for some reason. He told me he was from the sky. Took me to my window and pointed up. He said that he will always watch over me. I don’t remember much of anything after that. He was tall, thin, white hair and piercing blue eyes. Belt buckle in a triangle with, I think, blue stones at each point.”
John Keel once wrote that ufology should be a branch of parapsychology. While the majority in psychical research poo pooed the notion of studying UFOs, a certain few nonetheless braved against the wall of psychological resistance and contributed significantly to the approach Keel had recommended. For example, clinical psychologist and parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove of New Thinking Allowed, with his well-researched book The PK Man, about the contactee Ted Owens, who it seemed had remarkable psychic abilities. Jeffrey was greatly assisted in that research by his distant cousin, also a noted author and parapsychologist, D. Scott Rogo, who co-authored The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (1980) with Ann Druffel about several women and their alien abduction claims, and he also authored The Haunted Universe (1977) that detailed many UFO cases, examining the psychic components of such accounts. Both parapsychologists were also friends with and assisted in various instances by my friend psychiatrist and parapsychologist Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz, who authored the two-volume book UFO Dynamics (1983), which also contains a feature I wrote on a Maine “alien abduction” case.
References:
1. Phone Calls From the Dead by D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless (1979) was one of the first of its kind, detailing many cases similar to Geri’s mother’s account. In fact, that story was included in this book via Dr. Schwarz.