Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, March 2023
Not Strangers to High Strangeness
by: Brent Raynes
A few days ago, in a crowded downtown restaurant, bustling with the clanging of dishes, silverware, glasses, and the chatter of numerous conversations, my focus was on the gentleman across from me. An accomplished and prolific author, he also had previously shared his interest in UFOs and the paranormal, and the fact that in his youth he had witnessed a classic domed flying disc-shaped craft, and had even experienced some odd poltergeist activity over the years. Then he began to confess that there was one episode that he had only shared with his wife as, well, sometimes people begin to look at you like maybe there’s something wrong with you if you have had too many odd experiences in your life.
In my case, however, from reading my writings, and from our conversations, he knew that I was not one to look at him like he had a third eye on his forehead just because he had had yet another encounter with the unexplained. It happens, for whatever reason. In ufology it was called being a “repeater,” and at one time it was severely frowned upon. But then eventually the ufo community matured a little and realized that while some of those people were questionable and overreacting to planes, Venus, and so forth, others were not necessarily. Some repeaters seem to have been lucky. Maybe it had something to do with their neighborhood, or maybe they had a kind of antenna for the paranormal. In my friend’s case, it was also seeing a reddish-brown hair-covered upright walking hominoid figure crossing the country road ahead one night in front of himself and a lady who was operating the vehicle he was in.
There are a growing number of people who are coming to recognize the complexity of these paranormal observations; people whose belief systems have been turned tupsey turvy by such experiences and are no longer strangers to high-strangeness. Peter Jordan, who has been wrestling with high-strange cases for several decades now, just recently sent me some video of ufologist Ted Phillips. Well known and respected in the field of ufology for his dedicated research in UFO landing and physical trace cases, he began as quite “nuts and bolts” mainstream as they come. But then out in the field, in what has become known as the Marley Woods of Missouri, he witnessed himself the high-strange.
At a conference, he was explaining his own personal experiences in the field, along with photographs of mysterious lights. “That began a change in my outlook on some of this phenomenon,” he explained. “And its been pretty profound for me. For many years, I was the nuts and bolts guy and after seeing some of this stuff its cut a little shorter to just the nuts guy. I do believe UFOs are solid objects with mass because we were able to determine weights of 7 to 14 tons at landing sites, from the landing imprints and so on. So I have no doubt that they are solid, in the observations or in their being visible, and I also believe that something maybe as simple as a change in frequency brings them to another point.”
This sounds a bit like John Keel’s superspectrum theory, does it not?
I just had a five-hour phone conversation with a gentleman who was once very active in ufology and other high-strange arenas, working closely with some of the top dogs in the field. Hynek, Vallee, Puthoff, Bigelo, Kit Green, etc., etc. On a personal level he himself was no stranger to the high-strange, drawn into it from childhood beginning with strange premonitions. He recalled how around age 7 while his dad and an uncle were out fishing he suddenly before him saw a 3D hologram type display of them out on a river and their boat capsized and they were being swept down river, desperately trying to grab branches as they were being swept along. Shocked he told his mother what he was seeing. “Shut up!” was her reply. He said his premonitions used to scare the hell out of her. Later, upon his dad and uncle’s return home, they confirmed the accuracy of his vision. He became a UFO investigator because where he lived in Texas was inundated with intense activity. He wrote me in 1971 of a remarkable UFO experience that he and a friend had had. We corresponded a while, and then lost touch. I would read articles he had written and he would see articles by me over the years. Now, a little over half a century we finally reconnected. At three hours I pointed out how long we had been talking. He laughed and said, “Hey, it’s been a good half a century. We’re entitled.” He even told me how one night he and his wife were out camping by a river and a Bigfoot came out of the woods, bent down and seemed to cup its hands in the river and get him a drink. Then looked at them for a moment, and then turned around and reentered the forest.
He told me if he and his wife ever saw one again, they’d never report it. They felt an empathy for it. They felt it wants to be left alone and live its own life and we should respect that. He felt that mysteries like UFOs and so many other things that fall beneath that broad umbrella we tend to call the paranormal have been around from the beginning of recorded history, and that they’re a part of reality that we may never ultimately get to the bottom of.
