Reality Checking
Healings Versus Headgames?
Edgar Cayce and the Power of IntentionBy Brent Raynes
America’s legendary “Sleeping Prophet,” Edgar Cayce, is an excellent example of the significant difference and distinction that can be made between the majority of individuals out there with psychic abilities and his own extensively documented life history. Cayce’s abilities reached an extremely advanced level and the primary reason doubtless boils down to the power of intention.
Cayce’s over 9,000 documented and extraordinary health readings were reportedly found to be over 80 percent accurate. His readings regarding ancient America, the mound builders and their history, have been described as being at least 77% accurate, with 20% remaining to be proven correct, with a mere 3% appearing to be wrong. (1)
“Edgar Cayce had numerous encounters with ‘little people’ during his childhood and it was far more than what most people might call an imaginary friend,” Dr. Greg Little explained to me awhile back. “Cayce saw and interacted with what we would call fairies and entities, which he later described as elementals energized through electromagnetic forces. At times he seems to have been plagued by these elementals, apparently because he was able to interact with them. It actually reminds me of one of John Keel’s ideas, which was expressed in the Mothman Prophecy movie. I’ll rephrase it here: ‘Cayce noticed these energies and they noticed that he noticed.’ I also think of it like this: ‘The more you see, the more you will see.’ Cayce also had a famous encounter with an angelic being on his 13th birthday. This appears to have been a major turning point in his life and it foreshadowed his eventual health readings. He also was able to see ghosts and this aspect was well documented by his family and others. When he was a teenager in Hopkinsville, he was famous locally because of these sorts of things. All of this happened before he started doing any hypnotic trances or psychic readings.”
“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,” Dr. Jacques Vallee explained to an audience at a 2005 ARE sponsored UFO conference. “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.”
Dr. Little noted how when Cayce strayed from the message of the angel that he would be allowed to heal others, his accuracy level dropped. “The repeated failures via the readings to find buried treasure and hit oil deposits were major cases in point,” he wrote. (1)
In Brad Steiger’s 1971 book The Aquarian Revelations he wrote: “Edgar Cayce told of having seen some kind of aerial object hovering above his Hopkinsville, Kentucky, farm during June of 1936. A figure in white descended from the vehicle and identified himself to the man who would become one of the greatest of contemporary mystics as a horseman from a ‘chariot of the Lord.’”
Do some walk among us? If so, what might their motives be? In fact, are some of “them” actually “us”? According to popular ARE author and speaker John Van Auken, Cayce’s readings indicated that we all are! “We were once, and we are forever, whether you like it or not, star travelers,” John once told his audience. He explained, “Arcturus is a star that according to Edgar Cayce, is the stargate to this solar system. All souls and soul minds coming to this realm come through the stargate Arcturus.” John explained that from Cayce’s readings it is revealed that we’ve been around from the beginning of creation, that we’re “really celestial beings,” have reincarnated many times on earth, that we’ve traveled “through the entire cosmos,” and that we have lived in different dimensional forms. While our present physical earth form is three dimensional, John points out that the ufonauts appear to be very familiar with fourth dimensional reality. He described how in his wonderful personal chats with famous ancient astronauts author Zecharia Sitchin that he tried to convince him that the ancient Anunnaki were in fact previous incarnations of us! “We call it mythology, but that mythology is the story of us,” John added.
New York journalist/UFO hunter John Keel expressed that catching up with an actual “alien” was gonna be quite unlikely, but that catching up with an MIB (Man In Black) was more possible. “In the 1960s the Men in Black led me on many merry chases,” Keel once wrote. “I reasoned that I would never be able to catch a flying saucer, but if the MIB were real (and the testimony of many people indicated they were), I might be able to head them off at some cosmic pass and force their big black automobile to the side of the road.” In the April-May 1970 edition of the mimeographed Scientific Sauceritis Review, then edited by an 18-year-old “teenaged UFO buff” from Maine named Brent Raynes (yup, one and the same!) a portion of a letter Keel had written to another teenaged UFO buff out in Oklahoma contained the following chilling remarks:
“Most (not all) MIB manifestations are merely a variation on ‘psychic attack’ and the well-known phenomenon of demonology. This phenomenon can manipulate reality and the human mind. There are extensive, well-documented records of this throughout history. Belief can lead to demonomania (possession), paranoid-schizophrenia and even insanity and suicide. The MIB’s bark is worse than their bite. If you adopt a position of skepticism and disbelief the pressure will be lifted. If you continue to believe everything they say you will sink deeper and deeper into a morass of nonsensical ‘games’ augmented by convincing hallucinations. There are no physical ‘bases’ but they can convinced you otherwise.
The MIB are controlled gypsies who are controlled (possessed) and don’t know what they are doing when they silence people for the real MIB and UFO occupants. A few have (which are possessed) have been coming out of the trance and are beginning to realize what is happening. Later they mysteriously disappear.
Don’t let this scare you. Keep up the work, for eventually we are going to beat their deadly game. Be careful and don’t try to trick or outsmart them. They know every move we make….even before we make it.
Many contactee stories are in truth real. But they have tricked the contactees into believing that they are ‘space brothers’ here to help us. They’re not. They also wish for us to believe they are coming from outer space, but they aren’t. The UFOs are just a small part of a much larger and complicated phenomenon. They’re trying to fool us until they’re ready.”
Shortly afterwards Keel wrote me: “Allen Greenfield (2) has published a list of references from books on witchcraft and the like, all describing rather typical MIB types…. The MIB stuff is not confined to UFOs at all. I do wish you hadn’t printed my letter to TK out of context. Gypsies are involved only as part of the possessed type of phenomenon. A majority of our MIB seem to be three-dimensional apparitions. While possessed persons can be made to play an MIB role, the 3-D apparitions are not biochemical entities. They are projections of a most sophisticated sort.”
A few months later, Keel opened up to me a little more on the gypsy issue and stated: “…I discovered cases in which real gypsies were the MIB culprits. A friend of mine, a social worker, worked with a gypsy tribe in New York and learned some truly astounding things. I did a long chapter on gypsies for OTH (Operation Trojan Horse) but, alas, it was one of the things that had to be deleted because there wasn’t space. Ivan [Sanderson] has also written about gypsies in his UNINVITED VISITORS. We’ve discussed the matter a number of times. And if you wade into the more authentic books on gypsies you will learn even more amazing things about them. So I was quite intrigued when one clipping about Crisman (3) mentioned that he was ‘working with gypsies.’”
“The Gypsy religion is a curious mixture of witchcraft, Black Magic, and elementalism,” Keel wrote in his book Our Haunted Planet (1971). “Periodically, all the Gypsies will spring into their Cadillacs in the middle of the night and drive off to some isolated forest or hilltop where, according to reliable sources, they converse with materializations. Gypsies also have a curious habit of turning up in Window areas during UFO flaps.”
Dr. Peter Rojcewicz described in a report for the MUFON UFO Journal (Mar. 1990, #263) a case that took place near Philadelphia (PA) wherein an MIB-type character unexpectedly appeared, as if out of thin air, in a bookstore. Then after police arrived he then just seemed to vanish. The main witness complained of suddenly becoming nauseated, light-headed and weak, for no apparent reason. This witness, a store clerk, had been transcribing several audiotapes of MIB narratives for a local ufologist. He felt that his MIB was in fact an “earthly military man in a possession state.”
This event occurred in 1983, and the main witness, a man named Robert Yates, stated that he was disturbed as to how the man could inexplicably appear and disappear from the store as he did. The mystery man reportedly left behind various papers that indicated that he held a governmental intelligence and security background. Dr. Rocewicz noted that unlike “other MIB narratives,” he had pretty reliable information on this so-called MIB’s name, occupation, phone number, and post office box.
I don’t know if Dr. Rojcewicz or anyone ever followed up and tried to contact this mystery man. It would certainly have been interesting to have known what that individual’s side of the story would have been.
I ran into an interesting situation myself, also near Philadelphia, back in 1972. There were a couple of unusual and charismatic “MIBish” individuals involved who were active in the local metaphysical community. Two ufologists in the area, who I had come to know rather well, became my best informants on them. I was told that the two men had “much in common” with MIBs, although they were “much more socially acceptable.” I was informed that they seemed to be “awakening latent awareness in humans”, but at the same time I was also warned that they were “often charming liars.” One of them, in fact, used to send along secret messages and warnings to John Keel in the mail through one of the ufologists. It seemed they wanted to talk with Keel before it was “too late” (whatever that meant).
One of the ufologists, who had a background in psychiatric social work, recalled: “My son had MIB dreams at a period when I was deeply involved in the physical investigation of UFOs. …(he) would wake up sweating and glassy eyed, crying that ‘they’ had come for him…sometimes he would come downstairs and stare out of the window, shaking and resisting efforts to move him. On one occasion, a large black car parked outside the house, without lights. …Only when it drove off did (he) calm down. He had no memory of any of this. We also had weird phone calls, a real MIB visiting the house and talking to my daughter, bad smells and TV interference…all the classic manifestations.”
She shared with me how her family’s “problems with MIB manifestations were resolved” thanks to the two MIBish gentlemen she came to call “genies.” “I do not say that they gave us all the answers or all true answers because lying (or creative truth as they prefer to call it) and confusion all seem to be part of this ‘game with humans.’”
Dr. Little once pointed out to me that in the Native American belief system that when you try to engage in contact with the spirit realm “you’ll usually encounter trickster forces first.” He added: “The trickster forces are there to essentially test you, to see how balanced you are, to see how serious you are, to see if your inquiry into the spiritual world is full of good motives or negative motives. The tricksters are designed to delude people, to mislead them. There’s no doubt that a lot of people get unbalanced in the UFO field. Their involvement in it leads to just tremendous life problems and deterioration. John Keel said that again and again in all of his books. If you get by the tricksters-even in Native American lore-if you can see through them, then you can get to the next level of the spiritual world. There are more levels, of course, and with each level comes deepening truth.”
Thus the Trickster can also be a teacher, of sorts.
The other ufologist awakened one night to a strange paralysis. He felt that he had a psychic “awakening”, saying that it was “identical to what advanced Yogis call the ‘awakening of the kundalini nerve’” After this experience, he found his mind “ able to soar to heights of abstract thought” which he felt “were quite advanced.” Later he approached one of the two men and got involved in a heavy metaphysics discussion and was surprised that he could keep up with it all (as previously he had not). “The fact that I was able to keep up with him so well on most points startled me,” the ufologist explained. “It’s a strange feeling to have your mind dive deep into the ultimate.”
One of the MIBish men, who had been described once as looking the most like a classic MIB, right down to a monotone voice, supposedly possessed much knowledge on the subject and was also, I was told, presumably quite psychic, and had ties with local practitioners of witchcraft and other fringe metaphysical movements. I met some of these people and heard some strange stories, including a woman who claimed that she had met him on the astral plane where he appeared as a dark hooded figure.
I briefly met this character myself on the evening of April 17, 1972. We both just happened to be at the same place at the same time – an area metaphysical study group. I was invited to sit in his car and chat awhile (one of those ufologist friends/informants of mine had kindly put in a good word for me when he spotted him; told him how I had traveled all the way from Maine and had a lot of interest in such things as the paranormal and UFOs). Honestly I wasn’t quite sure at the time who it was I was suddenly being thrust headlong into an interview with. Naturally my first question was who he was to which he replied it didn’t matter; to “call me anything you like.” Then he added that I would need to ask a lot of direct questions though in order to get anything meaningful from our conversation. I took a stab at it, beginning with something like whether he had ever had an out-of-body experience, to which he simply replied “yes.” I asked what it was like and he said it was a pure energy state. He began to talk about medical explanations, like secondary personalities and such, while I was attempting to direct his focus more onto the paranormal/spiritual areas. Then he said he realized what I was trying to do and that if I would allow him to take the lead with the questions then we could move on with this. I agreed, and soon we went into a variety of interesting and odd areas of discussion. He explained that UFOs, astral projection, and all sorts of other mysterious events, as far as me simply and dutifully documenting case after case, was not my absolute goal; that I was looking for something deeper and buried below the surface of it all. He explained that I could continue to delve deeply into the investigation and documentation of case after case and still get no where. He told me that I had to be careful not to waste my valuable time as so many other potentially “beautiful” souls are doing. He explored my interest in UFOs and got me to talking about my interest and studies into the contactee and MIB aspects. He seemed particularly interested in the MIB aspect and displayed what I felt was obvious knowledge as to how it was supposed to work, saying it was a psychological game (things which, if you were familiar with John Keel’s studies, which he obviously was, fit well with what he was saying). Whether he was doing a good “cold reading” or a genuine psychic reading of me, he did seem to be telling me things about myself that seemed true. Regarding the psychological game playing, he also said that he could be, at that very moment, diverting my attention from some other area (where something significant might be going on). I thought that was interesting as we had planned to spend the night inside the home used for these metaphysical gatherings as it was reportedly haunted. But we hadn’t gotten permission, and the place was now closed.
Then things turned rather weird. It was a nice temperature outside, a star-studded night, but suddenly this man decided to put the top up on his convertible, roll up the automatic windows, and turned on the heater. I was forced to roll my window down, while he continued to talk in a monotone voice, sounding as calm and cool as a cucumber, so to speak. Next he got into a silly mood, quite a departure from our conversation just moments before. We were talking about the possibility of robot-mechanical MIBs and he began to talk about how fun it would be to torture an MIB and cut one of its fingers off to see if it had blood, at which he laughed.
Gypsy ancestry was suspected of this person, but absolute proof was never obtained.
Three years later, in October 1975, I came to investigate an alleged UFO/missing time incident up in Oxford, Maine, that involved two young men. A number of MIBish episodes were reported. One of the young men was hypnotically regressed several times by a physician (who was also a spiritualist minister) who later claimed an MIB visitation on September 11, 1976, at his home in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Although maybe a mere “coincidence,” but this MIB, the doctor claimed, put a gloved hand to his lips and smeared red onto his gloved fingers. “This is some kind of a queer,” the doctor said he thought to himself. As he was leaving, the MIB’s movements and speech slowed down, and he said, “M y e n e r g y i s r u n n i n g l o w - m u s t g o n o w - g o o d – b y e.” To me that sounds kind of like a robot, plus the red (the color of blood) on his fingers, in my original report I wrote about how he produced a “queer sort of laugh” when talking about torturing an MIB, and I even mentioned how I was somewhat uncomfortable being alone in the car with him as I had also been told that, in addition to his odd behavior and such, he was bi-sexual.
In 1973, in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, I tracked down a mystery man that a Navy friend of mine (I was in the US Navy at this time) had met earlier at a bus station. This man, who would go out dressed in a black suit coat, black pants and shoes (with a white turtleneck) had, from an early age, practiced witchcraft. He claimed that he was a walk-in for two space aliens, a male and a female. He would chatter on for hours about these beings, their reality. He described to me how two Adamski-type scout ships had come to his home and the entities came to him in their “true astral form,” resembling glowing white bowling pins! His mother told me how she had once seen two “ferris wheel” looking objects, large and “quite lit up,” sort of “rolling across the sky,” witnessed also by a neighbor.
As a fellow Navy man and I questioned him about his alleged dual identity, he added that he was an MIB himself. He described how one time he felt that the space beings tried to contact him through his black and white television, as an insect like head appeared, with housefly type eyes, and a mother ship with smaller UFOs surrounding it at the top of the TV screen.
The following year, I was investigating the claims of a nearby Jacksonville man who claimed that while fishing alone on the St. Johns River, in the early morning hours in January 1972, a domed disk had hovered directly over his small boat. Later the tide went out and he was stuck, so walking along the beach on Blount Island he ran upon “the darnest looking humanoid creature one could ever imagine,” whereupon he was struck by a “brilliant white light” that caused him to collapse. His arms and legs went numb. “For the first hour I was sure I would die,” he stated. “But I prayed and prayed, and then the numbness began going away. About day break I was able to get on my knees and crawl.”
Soon after he began to have strange “dreams” of an underground UFO base, of being on another planet, etc. He predicted that on Mars, we would discover statues, pyramids, and mounds, similar to those on earth. I learned that this wasn’t the first time he had seen the humanoid. He had seen three such creatures back in 1947, while exploring a cave in Georgia. At the time, it shook him up pretty bad and he thought that he had quite literally encountered demons from hell!
He admitted that he had dabbled into black magick for years. He described techniques he had used to magically influence humans and dogs. In my notes I had written: “He told me that in the human species that females are very curious animals. They love to gossip. …he said to demonstrate and experiment with this aspect he had actually dressed in a black outfit (hair, suitcoat, pants, tie, shoes) and just drove into a certain section of Jacksonville and acted peculiar…to stir up gossip and watch it develop.”
Not far from this man’s harrowing encounter on the St. Johns River, at Mayport, a UFO friend and colleague named Ramona Hibner had a close encounter with a domed disc-shaped object in July 1967, followed by poltergeist activity and 3 a.m. episodes of paralysis like the fisherman, including also an “evil” humanoid entity with a cat-like face that appeared to her in her bedroom. For Ramona, prayer was a crucial defense mechanism against those terrifying nocturnal occurrences. She also had MIBish incidents as well.
The St. Johns River may have been part of a “window” for unexplained paranormal manifestations. It may have even had a water monster! On May 10, 1975, around 10:30 a.m., five friends were on a boat fishing on the river when they had a truly unexpected encounter. “We were fishing and at the time a storm was coming up and it was a real dark cloud,” Dorothy Abram explained to me. They were about to head to shore, but before they did it happened. “This thing came up two times and then it come up by the boat and I don’t know what it was,” Brenda Langley told me. “It was about three or four feet out of the water and about the color – a pinkish color – like boiled shrimp. It had a real ugly looking face on it. It was pitiful looking, and it had snail like horns. And it had this little jagged thing going down its back – scales or little horns going down its back, like a dinosaur. The head turned on it. It just turned and looked around at us.”
The story appeared in the newspapers, and Langley added: “I know this man called from Atlanta, Georgia, and he said in 1971…he spotted something off the coast of Florida that come up out of the water and it had a hump on its back. He said he figured what we saw could have been the baby one because he said the one he saw was huge and was a dark color.”
The St. Johns River empties into the Atlantic Ocean at Mayport, which is also the location of a large Navy base where my ship was homeported. The sea creature sighting was a short distance from Blount Island.
Obviously there is no single and final answer or explanation for what lurks behind these complex, bewildering – and at times disturbing - situations. But hopefully as more facts are gleaned and more dots are connected the proverbial “big picture” will more clearly come into focus and we’ll reach a point of eventual breakthrough and a far more comprehensive level of understanding for which a wider audience of mutual agreement may be reached.
Footnotes:
1. Mound Builders: Edgar Cayce’s Forgotten Record of Ancient America, by Gregory L. Little, Ed.D, John Van Auken, and Lora Little, Ed.D. Eagle Wing Books, Inc., PO Box 9972, Memphis, TN 38190. ISBN: 0-940829-36-3. 2001.
2. I wrote researcher Allen Greenfield, mentioned in John Keel’s letter, to get his current views on the MIB phenomenon. He replied (07/05/13): “Here's the deal. There is a myth that MIB cases have diminished. They have not. What has happened is that the core people who investigated this type of case have, unfortunately, died off, some under mysterious circumstances (Ron Bonds of IllumiNet Press and Jim Keith the author a/k/a Jay Katz). Others, as with Keel, just got old and passed on AFAIK. Those of us who keep tabs on the broad range of strange phenomena find MIB cases about as often in 2013 as they did in 1953 or 1968-69, or as Keel alludes, throughout history under only slightly different guises. Taken as a whole though there are a few hoaxes and a number of government investigators taken to be men in black, but for the most part they appear to be a quasi-physical phenomenon attempting with some success to "seem human" apparently with difficulty and only briefly. They may require some "material basis" as is the case with certain Workings known for centuries in the occult world.”
Mr. Greenfield had also, at my request, shared a personal MIB experience he had had years ago: “Yes, in Charleston W VA on or about June 25, 1969, at the National UFO Conference that year. This was, be it noted, in "Mothman Country" during the Mothman/UFO/MIB wave in that area. I noticed this atypical - guy - hanging around the convention but not directly involved. He fit the MIB description. When he followed us the last day of the convention across the street from the hotel and hovered behind us when a number of delegates were dining, I decided to take matters into my hands, so I jumped up without warning, knocking over my chair in the process, and he slowly walked to the door of the restaurant and outside, but not before I got in front of him. He paused – his movements seemed 'artificial' and I took a sunlit photo of him with my 35 mm camera (see attachments). On Sunday in downtown Charleston, be it noted, it was truly quiet and dead. He rounded a corner and I followed, not more than two seconds behind him or it or whatever, and he was - gone. I have no opinion other than others have apparently seen the photo years later and say it’s the same young, pasty-faced MIB I saw, no sign of aging.”
3. Keel’s reference here is to Fred Lee Crisman of the famous Maury Island incident of June 21, 1947. Allegedly Crisman and another man named Harold Dahl were operating a salvage boat in Washington state’s Puget Sound, near what as known as Maury Island, when six doughnut shaped 100 foot diameter objects appeared in the sky. One appeared to be having mechanical difficulties, they claimed, and discharged a large quantity of silvery foil and hot slag fragments, both onto the beach of the island and into the water. Supposedly, in this shower of metal, Dahl’s 15-year-old son, who was onboard the boat, suffered an injury to his arm and a dog was killed from the metal hail. Later two USAF intelligence officers died when their B-25 crashed near Kelso, Washington. It was returning to Hamilton Air Force Base in California with fragments of the Maury Island slag, and after an interrogation of Crisman and Dahl. The Air Force came to dismiss the case as a hoax, but a number of ufologists (including Ray Palmer and Kenneth Arnold, the famous UFO sighter whose experience on June 24th of that same year ignited a worldwide media sensation about this phenomenon) feel there was more to it.
Interestingly, shortly after the incident, Dahl claimed an MIB type encounter. Crisman, of all things, was subpoenaed by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in November 1968, as he had been identified as one of the three “mystery tramps” in Dallas on the day of John Kennedy’s assassination. Garrison’s investigators implied that Crisman had been part of an “undercover” operation that may have involved the CIA! And Crisman was no stranger to strange stories and involvements it seems, and as Palmer pointed out, back in June 1946, in a sci fi magazine called Amazing Stories (edited by Palmer), he published a letter then (a year before the Maury Island caper) describing how he and another airman nearly lost their lives in a cave in Burma fending off some sort of alien machine that fired strange rays at them! Though the magazine was sci fi, the letter’s contents were allegedly about a real event.
