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Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, February 2017





The Alien Contact Syndrome and the Eye Archetype

by: Brent Raynes


In The Eighth Tower (1975) John Keel described a common archetype of the contact experience which was something resembling a “floating eye.” He wrote how Barney Hill had “reported seeing a huge eye seemingly suspended in space in front of his windshield before he halted for the little men in black leather jackets...” In skimming through John Fuller's classic work The Interrupted Journey I failed to come across any reference of a single floating eye, although I came across references like how Barney had described “the eyes [two] don't have a body,” even comparing them to the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. I found this interesting as Albert Bender of MIB (Men In Black) fame (beginning back in 1953, in Bridgeport, Conn.) claimed that when those entities dematerialized “two glowing eyes lingered for a moment”, and he even himself remarked on how this reminded him of the Cheshire cat. In these cases the “eyes” often seem telepathic and may seemingly excert a control over the experiencer, as certainly described by Bender. “They beckoned me to approach them, and without hesitation I rose from the chair and walked to where they stood, for again I was helplessly controlled by their shining eyes.”

I contacted researcher Kathleen Marden, the neice of Betty Hill, about the “floating eye” detail and she confirmed that Keel had been wrong about the single eye aspect, that it was two eyes. But other contact experiencers have described similar things, like Charles Hickson, 45, a shipyard worker in Pascagoula, Mississippi who claimed that back on the evening of October 11, 1973, he and a friend, Calvin Parker, 19, had their fishing along the Pascagoula River interrupted when both were forcibly taken aboard a low hovering oval-shaped object with bright flashing blue lights. Hickson said he was taken into a room where he said he saw a thing that was “big and round that looked like a big eye moved back and forth across my body.” Unable to move, two alien beings moved him around as the eye-like object seemed to check him over in different positions. “I just kind of floated without touching anything,” he said. “I didn't see any attachments for the eye. It was just kind of suspended in air.” When I met Hickson at his home in Gautier ten days after the alleged incident, he told me that he had come to feel his abductors may have been robots. I also got to meet Parker too. Hickson drew a map for me, and afterwards New Orleans ufologist Milton Scott and myself proceeded down to the location where the encounter had reportedly happened. We found the pier they had been fishing at when the strangeness ocurred. There was an old abandoned building nearby, and some junk cars and machinery. Otherwise everything looked pretty ordinary and of this world, although I have always wondered about that bare footprint I saw on the ground nearby, which I could only discern four toes. There was a heel, and from heel to the toes it appeared to be a footprint approximately 14 inches in length and looked to be about 6 inches wide. (Bigfoot??) The ufonauts had been floating gray beings with wrinkled looking skin, appearing to be about 5 ft. 2 in. tall. They had lobster-like claws, three carrot-like protrusions where the nose and ears should have been, no visible eyes, and only a slit where the mouth would have been located.

A few months ago, I was talking on the phone with an experiencer here in Tennessee who described how he chased an orb, that reminded him of an eye, through his house, and how he watched it disappear through the kitchen wall.

In the well-known report of a January 6, 1976 alien abduction of three women from Liberty, Kentucky, which I described in the January issue of this magazine, one of the experiencers named Mona Stafford later had an extraordinary apparitional type experience that began initially with a series of inner eye visions. Ohio ufologist Jim Miller, who I had discussed this case with at length, wrote an article about his investigation into this case for The Ohio Sky Watcher (now defunct) back in 1976 (Oct.-Nov.-Dec. Issue) in which he described: “The story behind the face started January 9. Mona would close her eyes to go to sleep, and with her eyes closed the one eye appeared. It looked like an ordinary eye, but it would scare her so she would open her eyes quickly.”

“July 7 was the first time that she saw two eyes. They also appeared as she closed her eyes, when she was about to go to sleep. Then, the night of July 19, Mona had been watching television and the last program went off the air. Mona sat starring at the snowy pattern when she felt as if someone was looking at her. She turned and saw a man's face with bright red hair and red beard, about five feet away looking at her. She turned away afraid to look again. She felt as if the man wanted her to look again. This time as she turned and saw it, she jumped up and the being vanished.”

Keel seemed to take the “eye” motif of this phenomenon quite seriously and wrote about it more than once. In his Anomaly journal, #7, back in the Fall of 1971, he offered the following: “The case of Betty and Barney Hill began (with) the common (in psychic lore) impression of hypnotic eyes floating bodiless in front of the witnesses. ...When complete details of a contact experience are collected it is usually found that the witness either observed a flash of light or the bodiless eye at the outset. This is also extremely common in religious lore, in those cases in which angels and entities have appeared. The hypnotic eye is usually translated into the 'eye of God.'”

Last year, while interviewing a contact experiencer over in West Tennessee [who had described having experiences with the “greys”], he shared how when he was 16 years old he was returning home one night, in a country setting, when something very odd happened to him. “When I was going inside the backdoor I felt an overwhelming presence starring at me and I knew exactly where it was without seeing it. When I looked in its direction all of a sudden I was looking through its eyes seeing me looking at it. It was like something in a movie. When I could see through my eyes again I heard it running at me. I ran inside and locked the door, collapsing on the floor. When I was looking through its eyes it lasted about 10 seconds.”

Is the “eye” motif of some contact experiencers part of the telepathic process itself?

On the research committee for Dr. Edgar Mitchell's FREE (Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Encounters) I have access to hundreds of intriguing survey accounts. In one the experiencer described how back in the Spring of 1977, at age 10, a similar episode happened as just described with the Tennessee experiencer. Around midnight this person reportedly awoke (“felt like I was floating above the bed”), unable to move. A blinding light was coming in the bedoom window on the west side of the house. Suddenly this subject became aware of seeing through someone elses eyes, approaching the house from the forest to the west. “I have come to understand it as a two-way channel that once open cannot work one way,” this subject noted. “I am speaking about telepathy.” Eventually this inner visual perception showed entry into the room. Subject then saw what they looked like. Didn't realize till then that there was more than one. Thin, large heads, black eyes. “They marched in perfect unison...”

“When I was in the corridor, I was surprised that the leader didn't follow me into the room,” Barney Hill later told his hypnotist, Dr. Benjamin Simon, a Boston psychiatrist, describing what he had relived under hypnosis. “But again-the eyes seemed to follow me. It was as if I knew the leader was elsewhere, but his effectiveness was there with me. Wherever he was, he was still able to convey messages to me, such as recognizing when I would become more fearful or needed calming down. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but it's the only way I can describe it.” [The Interrupted Journey, by John G. Fuller]

When Dr. Hynek arrived in the San Luis Valley of Colorado in 1970 he learned of the enormity of the situation there. “Why haven't I been shown this before? I never knew such evidence existed.” That insider quote came to me from a long time UFO friend Tom Adams, who first visited the San Luis Valley in March of that year, and later became best known for his work on the cattle mutilation phenomenon. Without doubt it was the find of the horse Snippy's mutilated body in Alamosa in 1967 that first drew his attention to this area. It seemed to be a genuine “window” location with much ongoing UFO and paranormal events and manifestations being reported in the region.

In that initial investigation of the area in March 1970, Tom and others came across many cases. Relevant perhaps to our current subject matter now, Tom happened upon a telepathic contactee in the area--a man who was well-known and highly respected in the region. In Tom's report it stated: “Once the contactee was again driving alone on a highway when he was contacted and told that a dead dog was lying on the highway ahead and obstructing traffic. About a mile later, after slowing down to watch the road, he passed the dog, lying as the contact had indicated. He was then told that the entities had the ability to look through the eyes of a motorist on a highway, as they were curious about experiencing the sensation of traveling down a highway in an automobile. They had done this as an oncoming driver had passed the dead dog. They noticed the dog and informed the contactee thusly.”

The mesmerizing alien eyes are again and again a strong point of focus in many UFO contact reports. “She had those amazing, electrifying eyes...the huge, staring eyes of the old gods,” Whitley Strieber wrote of his own encounter in Communion (1987). “Their eyes are often described as 'limitless,' 'haunting,' and 'baring the soul.'”

“Their eyes were very large,” an experiencer in Virginia wrote me. “They were dark and glowed. These beings have a power through their eyes.”

“They communicated with me telepathically, through the eyes,” another FREE experiencer who had described several encounters with “grey beings” noted

I have long wondered, but very seldom spoken of, a curious early childhood memory that I eventually decided had to have simply been a lucid fantasy. I still vividly remember it. I was awakened in the night, in my baby bed. I could see my parents bed, off to my right side. I believe they were both asleep there. But at the foot of my bed, looking down at me, was the head of what I saw as a human skeleton's head! It reached down and picked me up, holding me up in front of its face, looking at me with those dark, shadowy eyes. I recall trying to pretend perhaps that I was asleep, peeking at it through nearly closed eyelids. I remember being very afraid, although I didn't want to let on. I really wished to be somewhere else! Then, I found myself back in bed, but the covers were tucked in all around me. I panicked and started flailing about trying to escape, eventually realizing that my head was under the covers at the end of the bed where ones feet should be instead! I quickly backed out. What a relief. The sun was shining. My normal world had returned.

For sometime I literally believed that skeletons roamed about at night, till finally I reached an age where I realized how unrealistic that belief was. Now fast forward years later, I'm an adult and newly married. I'm watching a TV show about some serial killer, as I recall, and at the crime scene he leaves an image on the wall in this house. When I first see it I think “alien” - no hair, the dark eyes – then I realize it's a skull. Then eventually I recall my early childhood memory and wonder, would a young child (me?) see a “grey” type alien perhaps and without any other available frame of reference perceive it instead as a human skull?

I don't know if it was some twisted archetypal fantasy or if it indeed had some basis in what we call reality, but those dark eyes still haunt me to this day. Perhaps it is, in some way, why these various “eye” reports intrigue me so much.


Electromagnetic Experiencers?




It's been found that around half of all UFO contact experiencers report electrical systems, electronics and watches seem to malfunction more often it seems than they did prior to their alien related encounters. Abduction researcher/hypnotherapist (plus the niece of famous alien abductee Betty Hill) Kathleen Marden has used a TriField Natural EM Meter in working with experiencers that seems to provide confirmation of this change. She explained to me recently that she and fellow researcher Denise Stoner had found "strong electrical ...fields" with five experiencers within days of a contact incident. In fact, she explained how she had picked up 1000 VPM [volts per meter] with Denise (who is herself an experiencer) at a distance of some 10 feet. That would definitely be a very strong reading indeed. Control individuals tested the same day and at the same time "registered normal." In fact, she added: "We checked the ambient environment prior to our test and discovered that it had a normal reading."

Albert Budden's “UFOs-Psychic Close Encounters: The Electromagnetic Indictment” (1995) and “Electric UFOs: fireballs, electromagnetics and abnormal states” (1998) provide a lot of data that could prove most helpful in studying such matters.


Electronic Voice Communications with Otherworld Intelligences?

Recently with some of my friends and associates of Dr. Edgar Mitchell's FREE (Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Encounters) I shared several of my more impressive, evidential electronic voice recordings of apparent intelligences demonstrating interactive responses coming through the AM frequencies of a digital radio whose scanner had been deactivated and that would thus run on continous scan. With the people I have worked with on this, we have found that we could get very interactive responses whether we were requesting communications through our guides (commonly called technicians) to connect us with spirits of the departed or possible extraterrestrials. For me, the journey began early in 2010, when contact experiencer Bret Oldham, also a paranormal investigator, introduced myself and others, including experiencer Sandy Nichols, to what has commonly become referred to as the “ghost box.” Initially, I admit that I was quite skeptical. But it was one night in particular, when we did two sessions with the box at Sandy's home in Thompsons Station, Tennessee, which happened to be the one year anniversary of UFO researcher/writer John Keel's death (someone who had been a huge influence on my own interest and direction in the UFO field and who I had corresponded with off and on going back to 1969), that I asked the group if they would mind me reaching out to him. They thought it was a great idea, and so much happened that night I could no longer deny that something quite anomalous seemed to be occurring. We asked to speak to John Keel and a male voice almost immediately said “John Keel”! Clearly the first and last name. [This was not the only time that this would happen!] Bret asked the “box” what maybe Keel now knew about Bigfoot, a subject he had been quite interested in while on this side of the veil, and again almost immediately a male voice declared what we heard as “Smuck Bigfoot, see?” And soon this was followed by two others voices that said “see.” That's just a couple of examples of the activity we had that night.

And so that's how it began, and after that I was off and running, and eventually had my own box and was recording sessions from my home, as well as using the box on investigations; often sites said to be “haunted.” We also got other first and last names both and other interactive type responses. FREE researchers, who are looking into quantum physics and non-local reality, have been receptive to the data on this that I have shared. “Remarkable,” Rey Hernendez, FREE's co-founder, wrote me back. “Very clear.” He immediately contacted a medical doctor he knows near him in Florida who has been studying the EVP mystery now for some three decades, suggesting that we work together. Jon Klimo, Ph.D., a co-chair of FREE and a retired professor of psychology, thanked me for the audio files and information and described to me his own deep interest in ITC (instrumental trans-communication) and the EVP (electronic voice phenomena). He explained to me how he had actually spoken on this at the International UFO Congress at one time, how over a three year period he had been given $30,000 by the Vanguard Foundation of San Francisco to support his research into this subject. In an article in UFO Magazine back in 2001, he had written of his strong desire to initiate an effort to “record extraterrestrial as well as human spirit presence.” He added, “At least some of these extraterrestrials appear by their feats to be inhabiting a set of dimensions, levels or kinds of reality other than our own physically-based one, and by visiting us they seem to lend a cross-world or interdimensional quality to our experience.”




“This is incredible,” Bob Davis, Ph.D., another FREE co-chair and retired professor of neuroscience replied regarding the samples of audio that I had submitted to him. One audio so impressed him he wrote, “Yes, I heard it!!!! Wow.” We've had quite a few exchanges at this point and have talked on the phone. Dr. Davis is interested in doing some experiments himself along these lines. Bret Oldham has agreed to help me locate more evidential EVP audio and I and others continue occasionally to meet at Sandy Nichols's home in Thompsons Station for further group communications attempts with the box. Sandy's home seems an ideal location for such work, as he and others have claimed experiences with ghosts, aliens, and strange lights in and around his residence.


Check out this sampling of eight audio files:

Audio 1 – May 3, 2013. The group had occasionally been hearing a voice that seemed to identify itself as Enoch or Enik. In this audio, I ask it: Enoch(?). I think I heard O. Is that right? O or I? Then a male voice, at second 4, can be heard saying: “Enoch with an O.”
Audio 1



Audio 2 – February 25, 2012. At the end of each session with the box, we'd ask that the spirits needed to stay in their dimension, no one gets followed home or anything, and we'd then say “Clear,” meaning to terminate the session. Often we hear a voice reply clear back and then we shut off the radio. In this case after I say clear listen around second 1 to a voice say, “This cannot clear. This is energy.” Hmmm. A misunderstanding?
Audio 2



Audio 3 – February 13, 2012. My daughter Chandra and I had done an audio recorded interview with Alabama UFO investigator Rich Hoffman for this magazine. There had been noted some odd background noises during the “program,” and afterwards Chandra wanted to do a “box” session to see if it was spirits. So I set up the radio, speakers and recorder and gave it a try. At first we didn't hear anything, and so I said if someone wanted to say Richard Hoffman, I'd make sure that he got a copy of the audio. Well sure enough, a female sounding voice said “Rich Hoffman.” Later I found out that while I was calling him Richard, most his friends called him Rich!
Audio 3



Audio 4 – July 3, 2010. Bret Oldham asks if John Keel can say his name, and at second 8 you can quite clearly hear a male voice say what sounds like “John Keel.” Although easily missed, at second 2 there seems to be a faint “John Keel” there as well.
Audio 4



Audio 5 – May 16, 2011. John Keel.
Audio 5



Audio 6 – February 19, 2012. Sounds like “John Keel, Brent,” immediately followed by another voice, “Bert here,” which I believe was or represented my late friend and correspondent Dr. Bert Schwarz, a psychiatrist who was vitally interested in UFOs and the paranormal both, and who from time to time seems to drop in on these sessions.
Audio 6



Audio 7 – July 3, 2010. Bret Oldham asked if John Keel could tell us, now that he was on the other side, what he knew about Bigfoot. A male voice came over the speaker saying what sounding like “Smuck, Bigfoot, see?” And then two other male voices seemed to respond in the background “see,” as though acknowleding that statement.
Audio 7



Audio 8 – July 3, 2010. Back in 1957, John Keel had a book published entitled, “Mysteries of the Orient: JADOO.” It describes his fascinating journey, often on foot, from Egypt to India, in which he endured great hardships and dangers, seeking out the truth about the proverbial magic and mysteries of the East, like “Jadoo,” a word meaning “black magic.” Suspecting that I was the only one in the group that night who knew about Keel's interest in and understanding of the word Jadoo, I asked “John, what is Jadoo?” I thought it would be quite interesting to see what might come from such a question. At second 7, it sounds like a male voice says, “Jadoo, eh?” Bret asked in surprise if the voice had just said the word and Sandy Nichols replied (sec. 12) “He did.” I repeat the question again at second 15. At second 18, the same voice seems to say, “Into the fire, into the fire.” Which seems appropriate to me if you're talking about black magic! Then at sec. 29, again same voice, I hear “Teach me outside.”
Audio 8


Thursday, March 28, 2024