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Reality Checking


Early UFO Cases with Paranormal Twists



By Brent Raynes


In the March 2012 (# 170) edition of Alternate Perceptions, in the Classic Mysteries section, I posted an intriguing series of stories regarding a ghost named Hannah, who plagued the home of Janet, a sister of Betty Hill, the legendary UFO abductee. These stories had been compiled by Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz, a noted psychiatrist and investigator of UFOs and the paranormal, and are documented in his book UFO Dynamics. It so happens too, that in July 1976, Betty Hill had invited me to visit with her and her mother over in Kingston, New Hampshire, to spend a few days visiting with witnesses and doing some skywatching. It was at this time that I met Janet and heard first-hand some details about Hannah, the child ghost that she said haunted her home. She believed that it was a child named Hannah, who died at age five back on November 9, 1849.

Recently I did a radio show with Janet’s daughter Kathleen Marden, who co-authored with Stan Friedman Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. Betty is also the niece of Betty Hill, and so naturally I questioned her about the Hannah account. She explained that she was “well aware of the story” but, she added, “I’m not convinced that she was the spirit of a child.”

“Hannah was not present in my childhood home and only made her presence known when Betty was engaged in psychophysics experiments with Robert Hohmann and C.D. Jackson during the mid to late 1960s. I was already away at college when paranormal activity began to occur at my mother’s house. My first husband (then fiancé) and I were staying with my mother for the weekend when a strange and frightening event occurred. I was sleeping in my own bedroom and he was next door in my brother’s bedroom, when suddenly in the middle of the night the coat hangers lifted out of the closet and flew across the room striking him and the bed. He was so distressed by this that he refused to re-enter the room. Baseball size light orbs were also observed floating in the house. Doors opened and closed on their own accord. It was distressing for those who lived in the house.

“After my divorce, my two children and I stayed with my mother, while I was getting back on my feet. I was again in my childhood bedroom and my 5-year-old son was in my brother’s bedroom. One night I was awoken by a ruckus coming from his room, so I went next door to check on him. I was shocked by what I saw. He was romping around the room attempting to bat a light orb out of the air. I quickly picked him up and took him to my bedroom for the remainder of the night. It was 1983. This was the only paranormal activity that I personally observed in the house, with the exception of seeing the coat hangers and the impact that it had upon my fiancé.”

Kathleen has in recent years been conducting a survey of people with alien abduction experiences, and she has been interested in any paranormal aspects that emerged from such accounts. “The majority of abduction experiencers reported that they witnessed paranormal activity in their homes for the first time after their first abduction experience,” she explained. “A small percentage reported to me that it was already occurring prior to their first abduction event.”

“I don’t have a strong background in paranormal phenomena, but wrote a chapter about medical intuitives and academic telepathy experiments in my book, with Stan Friedman, Science was Wrong. My interest was aroused when one of the abductees that I work with (a long history of abduction experiences), reported a very perplexing experience to me. She awoke to find a non-human entity standing at the foot of her bed. But he was not alone. There was a negative energy there that spoke to her in a gruff voice. Suddenly she was swept up to a craft feet first. She was terrified by this memory. I had asked a paranormal investigator to assist me in the investigation because the negative energy seemed to have remained in the house and was shoving family members. The problem was later resolved.”

Going back even further in the annals of ufology we return to Kenneth Arnold’s historic sighting on June 24, 1947, of nine mysterious objects traveling at high speed through the sky near Mount Rainer in Washington state. In a recent interview with Ken Arnold’s daughter Kim Arnold, with Mike Clelland of the Eyewitness Radio Network, she revealed that shortly after that historic sighting a mysterious “ball of light” appeared inside their home. “That was shortly after he had seen the flying saucers and it first appeared in my older sister’s bedroom,” Kim revealed. “Then I guess it went down the hall and then it appeared in my mother and dad’s bedroom, and my dad was so frightened he fell to his knees and started reciting the Lord’s prayer.”

It has even been reported that Kenneth Arnold had claimed that he had detected the presence of ‘invisible visitors’ in his home. Reportedly, “he claimed to detect the presence by noting deformations of his armchairs cushions.”

“The most interesting sighting he had was in 1952,” Kim noted in her radio interview. “It was of two flying saucers over Susanville, California. He described one was as solid as a Chevrolet car and the other one, that flew under his plane, he could see the pine trees through the center of the other craft and that then he concluded that whatever these things were they had the ability to change their density, and that really was very thought-provoking to him. So the only way that he could really describe that in a way that was very physical and very solid…was that they were possibly like jellyfish in the ocean. You know, jellyfish can look perfectly solid one minute but yet (then) they can be invisible.”

“At the end of my dad’s life he did an interview in 1982,” Kim added. “He actually believed it was possible that the flying saucers were the connection between the living and the dead. …He believed that possibly at the time of our death that maybe this is just a different way we travel. That’s kind of what he believed.”

As I described in my book Visitors From Hidden Realms, when ufologist Greg Long interviewed Kenneth Arnold (MUFON UFO Journal, Nov. 1981) he shared similar details. For example, when Arnold was a young boy of seven, he said that he and others saw a globe of light in the same room where the body of his great-grandmother lay in state. As a pilot, who had been involved in search and rescue missions, he noted that such mysterious lights also show up at airplane crash sites where there had been fatalities. He described one that he had personally been involved with where a family at a ranch in California had sighted two basketball sized balls of light soon after a nearby fatal plane crash that claimed the lives of both young men.

In the paranormal field, researchers frequently come across such accounts. Recently a woman here in Tennessee described to me how her grandmother on her father’s side had described to her “a ball of light that followed her and some others while they were walking back home from a funeral.” She added, “My mom’s mom told me about how at a wake for an infant (back when they would sit up at someone’s home with the body) that right outside the window from where the coffin was that there was a small light that floated for quite awhile. She said that it was like the flame of a candle.”

She further added, “It’s kind of strange. In a lot of ways it seems like people were a lot more accepting of things like that a long time ago verses how they are now.” This woman is originally from West Virginia, and it’s where these incidents just described had occurred.

The discovery of these psychic elements happening in conjunction with UFO close encounters is certainly nothing new. Dr. Edith Fiore, in her book Encounters: A Psychologist Reveals Case Studies of Abductions by Extraterrestrials, which was published back in 1989, reported: “People often develop psychic abilities (telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, etc.)”, as well as “seeing a beam of light or balls of light in the house,” in conjunction with such experiences.

Since a large proportion of “ufonaut” interactions with humans seem to occur at a psychic/telepathic type level of communication, perhaps neural brain circuit functions are elevated or activated whereby increased psychic functioning overall may be a byproduct. Once those brain functions are modified and perhaps reprogrammed for psychic awareness, then it may not be something that can just be easily switched off once opened.

“This is all extremely interesting to me as I have long believed in the correlation of increased paranormal activity with abductees,” an “abductee” and fellow “paranormal” investigator himself shared with me after learning about what Kathleen Marden had revealed to me about her experiences and research. “I know for me that the paranormal activity did begin after my first abduction experience at age five and has continued ever since. As a child I could never understand why so many spirits came to me and I only wanted them to leave me alone. But as I got older and became aware of my abductions I then began to consider the hypothesis that somehow my energy level in my body had been changed or increased by these abduction experiences and/or something in my psychic awareness had.”


Friday, March 29, 2024