Encounters with the Unknown—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, April 2024
When "Crazy" Might Be Something More – Maybe something Crazy Strange!
by: Brent Raynes
Back in August 2019, I began to hit the road to promote my third book John A. Keel: The Man, The Myths, and the Ongoing Mysteries. At the huge Alien Xpo conference held that month in Knoxville, Tennessee, I had the unique opportunity not only to be a speaker but also to be an MC and to introduce other speakers to the podium. It was also great to finally meet in person others in the field who I had known only by reputation or by email or doing a podcast with. Travis Walton, for example, is a name familiar to anyone in ufology due to his alleged and highly publicized "alien abduction" account back in 1975. Kathleen Marden was another well-known speaker (a researcher, author, and experiencer too) who I had not only corresponded and done a podcast with previously, but I had spent much time with her famous aunt Betty Hill and had met her mother, but this too was my first meeting with Kathleen in person. I got to have a vendor table between her and Travis.
Rey Hernandez, who I had spent many Zoom meetings with while working with the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences, was yet another I had not yet met in person. Not only did I get to introduce him to the podium, but since I felt it would have been a bit awkward for the MC to have to introduce himself, I talked Rey into introducing me to the stage. He gave me a glowing introduction!
One of the best things about attending these conferences, for me anyway, is getting to share things up close and personal with fellow researchers, and also to meet in person people who have had UFO and other anomalous experiences that they've never shared with anyone else before.
At this conference, attendees were invited to walk into a private room and ask any questions that they might have of the speakers, as well as any experiences too that they might care to share. A family man and his mother joined Rey and I at a table and wanted to share about a possible orb they had caught on their outside security camera. Rey and I listened with interest and it was decided that I would follow-up later on the matter.
Well as it later evolved, while I wasn't 100 percent sure what they had caught on their camera, the story that ultimately unfolded and evolved ended up being far more extraordinary in nature. The reason was because it represented a long and involved interactive, apparent psychical activity with the family man, who I'll simply call Fred.
Fred says that over the years, going back to a young age, he has had a variety of psychic experiences. He had a strong religious upbringing and felt an inner guidance from early on. His mom was a devout Pentacostal. While on a mission trip to Mexico around age 15-16, after a couple of weeks he became real homesick and having heard about out-of-body travel, he decided to give it a try. Closing his eyes and concentrating he suddenly found himself a few hundred feet above his home in the states! He began moving closer but then panicked, and immediately came to experiencing difficulty in breathing it seemed. "I was kind of scared," he confessed. "I didn't know who to talk to, so I talked to our translator guy. He was way excited. He said, 'Oh, you should do it again. I'll be there. You'll be fine.' So, Fred closed his eyes again and then suddenly he was back. This time he came all the way down to the house. "I go to my room and I'm sticking my arm through the wall, and I'm like, 'This is amazing!' Then it occurs to me. How do I get back? Then I panic. I really panic! The next thing I know I'm back sitting in a hotel room in the Yucatan, deep breathing and the guy I'm with is freaking out. He thought I was dead. I've avoided ever, ever, ever trying anything like that again. It scared the hell out of me."
"I think I've got some genetic mutation that allows me to hear something in the ether, the akashic field, or whatever you want to call it," Fred told me. He feels a lot of people probably have these visionary, artistic, creative gifts. He studied martial arts and later became an instructor for law enforcement, military, and private contractors. His wife is a professional engineer. They have three children together. What he calls the "outside thought" has guided him to make many decisions that have greatly helped himself and his family. Even gave specific instructions for her to follow to get a well-paying job. In the beginning Fred thought this inner guidance was the holy spirit, but it's behavior became quite unusual, though he admits, "I think he's some part of that mechanism." "He has a really good grasp of most religions," Fred added. "He's a hell of a lot smarter than I am." But it disturbs him that with this presence there's "an absence of free will." He has suffered severe consequences when he goes against it.
But on the other hand, it's been a life safer and taken care of him and his family. He even believes it saved his wife's life one time. "She was by the road and she was on a work trip," he explained. "She said she heard my voice in her head telling her to get away from the car. 'Get away from the car! Get off the road! Get off the road!' She got off the road because the car she was in had a flat tire and they were waiting and a salesman in his nice BMW pulled in behind them to help. A guy flew off the road and hit the BMW and their car. If they'd all been standing there they'd all have been dead."
"The outside thought told me my mom was having a heart attack. I called my stepdad. We had just left my mom and stepdad. I was concerned with some bruising she'd had on her arm and some other things, and I was worrying that probably that was not good, and the outside thought said, 'You dumb mother f----er. Your mom's having a heart attack. You need to have your stepfather to call 911.' That was really specific. So, I called my stepfather and told him. I got him in a panic and sure enough she was having a heart attack."
"I was at a beach outside of Lebanon, Tennessee when I was a teenager, about 14. The outside thought said, 'You need to run to the other side of the embankment. Run now. Run fast!' I took off running." His mom tried grabbing his arm asking him what was going on, but he broke free and ran off. "I'm running through glass and everything," he recalled. "A minivan that nobody saw went off an embankment. A dad and a kid were inside and I busted out the window and dragged them out."
"I was working in Nashville late at night and it told me to take a different route." Even though it was going to take an extra hour doing so, Fred felt he needed to once again obey the "outside thought." "My buddy was like, 'What the hell are you doing? We're not supposed to go this way!' I said, 'I made a mistake.' Sure enough, some girl at 2 a.m. had wrapped her car around a guardrail and the car was on fire. "I ran over and pulled her out," he said, and he recalls his fellow passenger exclaiming, "Oh my God, that was like the Hulk," because of the way he had peeled the door open to get the girl out of her vehicle. He no longer rode with Fred anymore.
Despite all of the good he feels the "outside thought" has given him and his family, Fred has mixed emotions. "Why can't I find out things for myself? Am I incompetent? Am I not capable? At the same time that voice, that path, has led me to a level of success in my life and in my wife's life. It helps with her career as well."
I tried to make Fred feel better about his experiences. I mentioned the studies being done by British researcher and author Anthony Peake, for example, with his deja vu research and the inner psychic guidance that some people, like himself, seem capable of tapping into. But it was a tough sale on my part. He was living with it, saying it made him feel like a crazy person, even though he attributed successful and positive outcomes from his interactions with it.
I spoke at length with his mother. "I've had experiences my whole life since I was a little girl," she said. "I came from a really strong Pentacostal family." A hairdresser for forty years she met and talked with a lot of people, but she kept quiet about her supernatural experiences. They were deeply private and personal. She told me she had spiritual discernment and prophetic abilities and how a couple of times she had heard what she felt was the voice of God. One of those times was after her husband had committed suicide. She had heard people say that people who do such things don't go to heaven, but the voice told her, "He's not hurting anymore, and you will see him again." She said the voice was "crystal clear" to her. She also admitted to having had a couple of UFO sightings. One was a round looking object at a distance flying at a high speed and that then just vanished. The other incident was much more interesting. She said that she and her granddaughter, who was around 9-10 at the time, were relaxing one day along a creek here in Tennesse. Suddenly they both observed a "silver cigar" silently flying over and following along the creek. "I want you to remember this the rest of your life," she told her granddaughter. "As we watched it as it goes over it was like all these dots appeared and it just went inside this circular (area) with all these dots around it and just went in and disappeared."
"Fred just walked into it and it explodes because he's more open to it than I ever was," she added.
Fred told me how a number of times this "outside thought" had given psychic proof and insight to some people that helped them. But then he emphasized, "He's not a monkey that performs. If anyone's a monkey in this relationship I am."
"I have been following your podcasts and interviews," he said. "When we first met, I had no idea who John Keel was. It was only after our first chat that I looked into him. Then I felt as though I understood why I was to talk with you." The so-called "outside thought" can guide Fred into uncomfortable, concerning situations, but it always seems to know what it's doing. "I've got a lot to lose," Fred explained. "My family has a lot to lose. We have a business. My wife has a professional career and I have other training obligations that would look crazy to people who hire me to do certain things." After our first meeting and I was working on following up with him, Fred was concerned. "I had this dream a month ago and that was the exact thing I had today when I got thinking about how I got that call with Brent to do. I need to do that. Do I need to look crazy? I have everything to lose by looking crazy. I was like f--k it, I guess I'm supposed to." Usually in a dream state he will be shown something 3-4 times. There may also be like a temporary paralysis associated with it. "Then you're shown a thing you can't possibly understand or comprehend and then you kind of come out of it. And you're like, 'What the hell was that?' Those happened to me when I was younger. In looking back on them I understand them more now, if that makes sense."
Fred has some concern that his children will be inheriting some of these abilities. He wrote me one day about a "shared dreaming" event that he seemed to share with his 4-year-old daughter. He wrote, "My wife told me about my daughter's dream. I recognized events about the dream I had. Storms, closed windows, uniforms, and monsters looking for children. It was unnerving. This is a first for me. In the dream the young girl I was in charge of protecting looked to be between 13 and 17. I asked my daughter if she was the same or older in her dream. She said 'bigger.'"
Why the resentment, the discontentment with the "outside thought"?
I'd say, because he has only a partial memory of how he agreed to it, without really knowing exactly how that happened, is a strong reason. He told me, "I don't remember reading the contract, but I have had that distinct discussion and we had that in a nice long dream, and they took me back to the exact dream that I still remember to this day. He said, 'You chose to walk through this door instead of that door,' and I was the one standing here asking what door did you want me to take.' I was a young man, 13, and had I chosen the left instead of the right he would have just faded into the background, except for emergencies." Fred described a scene from the dream memory of a hospital looking place with two wings. On the left was white halls. Very normal looking. On the right however there was a white door which had a porthole, through which he said, "It was very horror movie like. Lights flickering, dark things moving and then there was what I assumed was a doctor and he was like, 'Pick a path. Pick a path. Can't go anywhere till you pick a path.' I was like, 'I'll go through the door.' He was, 'Sure you want to do that?' We had a whole back and forth. This was before he was a real ass. I was like, 'Yeah, yeah. I can do that. I can bear that burden.'" Fred told me that he has asked why this situation, this burden, was placed upon him, and the only answer he got was a Biblical reference, “many are called and few are chosen.”
