• AP Magazine

    An alternative way to explore and explain the mysteries of our world. "Published since 1985, online since 2001."

  • 1
Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, February 2016





A Ufological Landscape filled with “Madness” and “Charming Liars”?

by: Brent Raynes






I was recently watching a Youtube video wherein an alleged experiencer to a high level of weirdness was telling a chilling and albeit entertaining tale of alien intervention that he and two others had experienced. It had all of the classic elements of high-strangeness, like a mysterious “voice,” a small neon blue light moving about the inside of the cabin under intelligent control, mind and body manipulation, and much more. “Madness is such drama,” he stated. He admitted that it was a series of basically nonsensical type events that existed quite outside the norm of conventional and sound logic and reason. He hesitated for years to share his bizarre tale with anyone, because, as he admitted, others would have such varied and potentially emotional reactions to it, from the positive to the negative ends of the reactive human belief spectrum.

This madness can certainly be a contagion, and it can also be quite entertaining at the same time. As I mentioned in my last column, back in the early 1970s, during my time as a Navyman, my fellow shipmates occasionally would join me on liberty call on explorations into the outer limits of conventional mainstream human beliefs. I at least provided some unique entertainment as a tour guide of sorts to the outer edges of reality, and it was good to have someone else’s company on such sojourns, even if they were somewhat doubtful or skeptical about the subject matter. It at least provided an intellectual diversion from the sailor’s adventures on liberty call that all too frequently consisted of bars and women, which can prove to be another form of madness with much drama in its own right.

On a Wednesday evening, December 26, 1973, one of those sailor’s accompanied me a second time on one of my unorthodox excursions, perhaps out of curiosity, or else he had nothing better to do that night. Either way, the location was Jacksonville Beach, Florida. I knocked on the door of a modest but well-kept residential home and soon its occupant was nervously peering out the window in the door at us. Although I had spoken with her earlier at an area metaphysical group where myself and Ramona Clark, both a local researcher and experiencer, had given a talk (she is mentioned in my last column), this woman seemed uncertain about letting us in. She had spoken since the meeting with Ramona, and had Ramona come with us, she probably would have been less nervous. However, Ramona was unable to accompany us, for some reason, and here were suddenly two young sailor men on her doorstep.

An attractive, blond single woman in her 30s, Betty allowed us into the kitchen. I tried to reassure her as best I could that we were seriously interested in simply hearing her story, a tale that she had earlier alluded to at the meeting site and on the phone with Ramona. She seemed to relax some and then began to recall for us her strange story – a story in itself so unusual that it alone would make the average person nervous to recall to people one didn’t really know well.

Over the years, I’ve heard a great number of strange tales, so no one ever needs to feel nervous and self-conscious around me for sharing something that the average uninitiated Joe might well make a frowning facial expression over. Once she began to reconstruct for us her unusual memories, the story quickly poured out of her. It seemed to have a slightly therapeutic effect, as she seemed more relaxed with us after she completed her recollections, got it all out, so to speak, and realized that we weren’t there to ridicule her in any way.

It happened on a Friday night, back in March of 1967, she said. She and a girl friend named Linda were driving through an intersection in Lubbock, Texas, when an unidentified white light that Betty described as being “as big as a house” seemed to be about to land on the roof of a garage. She could hear no sound. Then it gained altitude and seemed to hover in the sky for a while. Then it moved off, stopped, moved again and stopped, and did this several times. It seemed odd. Then when they came to an area with three towers, and as they were passing an open field, there was a bright flash on the ground and they both, during that flash, were certain (at that time) that they saw a UFO. Betty described it to us as a gray metallic object with red and blue lights, with openings that resembled windows. She explained that Linda said she had seen about the same thing. However, while they were convinced at that time that it was real, later they began to wonder. They did turn around and went back and checked out the field near a farm house, where they had perceived it, but found nothing unusual there. Next an odd white light appeared near one of the towers, and then appeared over another one, and soon after that a jet came into the area, at which time the mystery light blinked out. Once the jet had disappeared from view, the light reappeared, whereupon it began to approach the two women who were standing outside their car. Both were terrified. In fact, Betty admitted that she was so traumatized she couldn’t talk or even cry tears.

Betty confessed to us that she had had psychic awareness most of her life. She mentioned having premonitions, and how for her those experiences felt good. However, the UFO incident had been very rough psychologically for her. Nights for a week or two afterwards, Betty said that she felt fearful, feeling as though the UFO was still lurking nearby.

Betty added that she and Linda had met a man named Bill and how they all had become very close and had all, coincidentally, moved to Lubbock about the same time. For some strange reason, Betty explained, they all had a very strong bond between them. In fact, she said that when they’d seat themselves in like a triangle facing each other that there was like an invisible “vibration” that would pull Betty towards Bill. Later, Bill moved to Berkley, California to get a higher education and he met up with some strangers there who introduced him to some metaphysical beliefs, like reincarnation and the godhead, and who performed impressive psychic feats. Bill began writing Linda some letters about the odd experiences he was having. She decided to pay him a surprise visit and even move close to him, but even though Bill didn’t know she was in the area, she was visited by one or more of these strangers who identified her by name. Linda even revealed to Betty that these people could enter Bill’s home even when all the doors were locked. Allegedly, they could walk through walls. He would unlock the front door and enter his home, and he’d find a batch of material that they had left for him to read.

Although Bill had earned himself a Masters degree he didn’t do anything with it. He had presumably become so preoccupied with matters of the cosmos and metaphysics that little else mattered to him. Betty showed us some of his rather eccentric sounding letters that he had written to her.

Madness is such drama indeed. Does it not sometimes seem to permeate the ufological landscape like the proverbial plague? Was John Keel right, that paranoids and others aren’t necessarily born that way, but that sometimes they’re made that way? Was he also right that some people become “controlled” or “manipulated” by alien, or elemental (what he preferred to call ultraterrestrial) intelligences, or someone with a sophisticated knowledge of how to do such? Are some cults made up of individuals who misuse genuine psychic potentials, or is it all cunning and complex psychological manipulation? Perhaps it’s time to brush the dust off of and crack open Jacques Vallee’s Messengers of Deception again for another reading, not to mention Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse, The Eighth Tower, and The Mothman Prophecies.

Over the years, I have come upon quite a variety of peculiar situations wherein claims of possible mind control, MIB-type scenarios and psychological manipulation emerged. Back in April 1972, I was visiting a community near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, investigating the stories of a couple of gentlemen who played a major role in a local metaphysical movement, or cult if you prefer. One of them in particular, I was told, had characteristics in common with the MIB (Men In Black). One of my informants, a psychiatric social worker, 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.’” 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 this social worker. They presumably wanted to talk with Keel before it was “too late” (whatever that meant). 

Another local informant described to me how he had undergone a cosmic consciousness type experience. A ufologist, he had awakened one night to a strange paralysis. He felt that he had 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. 

People considered him pretty psychic and also someone to be a bit weary of. By coincidence, or synchronicity if you prefer, while I was discreetly trying to follow-up on leads about him at a local paranormal study center, he showed up, and before I knew just what was going on, the ufologist who had had the kundalini type experience had essentially, the way it felt, shoved me into the front seat of this man’s large dark car so that we could have an up close and personal chit chat.

From my personal front seat encounter, I came to understand why people could be so enchanted, intrigued, and yet freaked out by his presence. Initially our conversation began routinely enough, or so I felt, with me trying to ask questions that would target areas related to my investigation. Eventually I described to him my interest in contactee and MIB cases. He began directing questions at me, questioning my methodology and investigative direction, actually addressed the subject of MIB and with a creepy laugh talked about what it would be like to try pulling a finger off one to see if it was robot or a flesh and blood human. I admit that he kind of creeped me out at that point.

I learned later of an MIB incident somewhere also near Philadelphia that allegedly occurred in 1983, where 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.” 

The main witness, a man named Robert Yates, stated that he was disturbed as 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. In this case, investigators felt that they had pretty reliable information on this so-called MIB’s name, occupation, phone number, and post office box.  Are military intelligence operatives part of these MIB scenarios? How might strange psychic influences come into play? We know, after all, our military’s strong past interest and work in remote viewing. It’s certainly no surprise that mind control and psychological manipulation would also be of interest to the military too.

“On March 11, 1975, I left Fabens, Texas, for the small town of Maybrook, New York,” Lee Walsh, a columnist/writer for a newsstand magazine called UFO Update back in the 1970s and early 1980s, explained to me. “I was ‘directed’ to go to New York, to actually make a move there, by a friend who has a yoga center in LA. I was told that I would have an alien contact if I moved. I was born and spent most of my life in upstate New York, but I do not like it and didn’t want to return. Every instinct told me not to. In fact, many physical things were hindering my getting ready for the move and I cancelled plane reservations three times before finally leaving.”

After several weeks in New York she began to worry that she had made a big mistake, as there seemed no interest in the subject or UFO activity reported in the area. “Needless to say, I felt I was victim of an expensive hoax,” Lee confessed.

Then suddenly all of that changed. “It came as a surprise then that an interesting story was reported to the news media,” she explained. “(Two) police officers, in the nearby town of Walden, had reported a ‘strange man’ they had encountered while stopped for a traffic light. They stated that the man was crossing the street on the red light and when he passed by their patrol car all power stopped for a moment, and the officers reported they ‘could feel the hair of their body stand on end’! The traffic light went out, their patrol car stalled, and their radio went dead. As if this wasn’t unnerving enough, they also reported that the man seemed to ‘vanish right before their eyes.’ A waitress, in a nearby delicatessen, reported some odd behavior by this man, noting in particular his odd eyes.”

Lee had begun contributing articles to a local paper (the Citizen Herald) and appeared as a guest several times on local cable TV. In the months that followed, many UFO sightings came to be reported. “Residents were having experiences they had never before thought were possible,” she noted. “I made a plea, on Cable TV, for this man to contact me,” Lee stated. “He did. The policemen warned me to stay away from him, feeling he was dangerous.” Lee found the officers reluctant to discuss any further their encounter with the strange man. She went to the home of one of them. “His wife, surrounded by several of their children, answered the door,” Lee recalled. “She was very cordial and sympathetic, but I was not invited in. However, she did confirm the story as it had been related, and the fact that they (the officers) had felt they had done the wrong thing by reporting the incident.”

In time they, her and this man, became very close, Lee told me. They even talked of marriage. She had written author Gray Barker about what was happening and he forwarded her letter onto John Keel. “Mr. Keel was coming to see me but circumstances in New York became so unbearable that I decided to return to Fabens, which I did,” Lee noted. “Several months later the ‘man’, or someone I believed to be him, came to Fabens. He left me a note in some sort of code saying that it would be deciphered by someone else, in time. I must tell you here that for many reasons I do not believe that the man who came here was the same man I knew in New York, although they did look alike there were some distinct differences that wouldn’t be noticed unless someone was close to him.” “There were rumors and more rumors about him,” Lee added. “One odd thing was that a particular friend in New York, with a close association to him (the three of us were together constantly in New York, and he called her Venus) swore she saw him in New York when I knew he was still in Fabens.”

Lee has shared with me details of many strange paranormal episodes that she and her daughters had with this man. She had three young daughters. Two were twins who were around 10-11 years of age at the time. This man used to take them down to a drugstore in Fabens (located just a few blocks away) for ice cream sodas. “I never let the girls out of my sight (and) go off with anyone for any length of time,” Lee reassured me. “At the time, my German girlfriend (who knew R [I won’t present his last name here] and didn’t like him) was working part-time in the drugstore. She came one night and asked me why I let the girls stay so long with R downtown. They even went over to the Catholic church and played the organ (this is the one thing that R did several times in Fabens that the R did in Maybrook…only difference is that the R in Maybrook would promptly go at 2 every afternoon and play this odd melody on the church organ. I mean promptly. He didn’t have a watch, but whether in the middle of a conversation or not, he would get up and go to the church) I always believed it was some sort of communication, for I am a strong believer in the harmonics of the ancients and that way to communicate messages. In any case, I wasn’t aware of a time difference. It seemed to me they were gone a short while.”

“One day after R left, the twins started telling me (remembering) about the walks R used to take them on (this is in Fabens) l-o-n-g walks, way out into the desert. I said they were crazy, there would not have been time. They said they moved very swiftly…seemed to glide or something. They really couldn’t explain it. Frankly, so many odd (worse than odd) things had happened in those two years that I just shrugged it off.”

“One Sunday my friend who works at the post office suggested we take a ride out the back roads around Fabens. We had been in the car for about half an hour I guess when the twins said, ‘Oh, up around the next corner is where we walked with R. There is a little old building with a stream next to it and a few trees. We rested and it was cool. Only we came this way.’ And they pointed to the desert at the left, indicating they had cut through the desert. Around the corner, on the left, was what used to be some sort of small adobe building. It was crumbling away. Next to it was a small irrigation ditch with water and there were trees around. My friend and I were dumbfounded to say the least.”

One of the twins came to have an apparitional double, a kind of ghostly doppelganger. “She seems to fade away, perhaps going into another dimension,” Lee wrote me in November 1977. “She is fair skinned, blond haired (shoulder length) and has on a light blue nightgown (to the knees). She is the exact image of one of my twin daughters who is 13. That is why I thought it was her walking through the hallway. The image was that clear as to appear as a solid figure. However, when I checked, the twins were both sleeping soundly as was my other daughter J----, in the next bedroom. Several days later, J---- was coming her hair in the bathroom. The mirror faces the hallway. She saw the girl through the mirror. I have seen her twice in the past week. First a shadow catches my eye and then I see her. This morning (4:30 a.m.) J---- called me and she was sitting up in bed. Something had tried to pull the blanket from her bed (this is not a new experience) and she was clutching it. She said she told ‘her’ to let go and immediately ‘she’ started smoothing out the blanket.” I eventually got to meet Lee Walsh in person, after she had moved to Maine, and I also, along the way, visited the office of her publisher in New York City as well, meeting the editor of UFO Update (and Beyond Reality) Harry Belil, and one of his assistants. I even got to write a couple of articles for them, just before, unfortunately enough, they discontinued publishing in 1981. I learned how a janitor had reportedly once seen some men in “black suits” wearing “dark glasses” hanging around the office door, after which a lot of material turned up missing in Mr. Belil’s office. Some of it was some important material Mr. Belil was going to use from NASA. Believe me, there’s more to this story, but for now we must stick with the main details relevant to the issues at hand.

Are there indeed people who walk among us, who have highly developed psychic abilities, able to influence our thoughts, possibly some able to alter our perceptions, who somehow seem mysteriously connected in some way with the forces, the intelligences, that interface in some way with what we call the UFO phenomenon? We know that many experiencers do claim that they strongly affect electrical/electronic equipment, and that they seem to just “know” things in a paranormal way, have elevated precognitive and telepathic awareness and impressions about people and things around them. I recently talked with an experiencer who had seen mysterious humanoid entities, had missing time, had UFO encounters, and a variety of the other classic alien type memories, who also told of meeting a woman who could enter his and his mother’s dream world, telling him things about himself and his dreams that she, a total stranger, could not possibly have known about him. She seemed inexplicably tied into his alien experiences, but he could not figure out how or why.

As Keel unsuccessfully tried to do back in the 1960s, perhaps we need to continue what he was trying to do in instances where possible human controlled or influenced MIB-types were turning up at the homes of his witnesses. He wanted to try and catch up to them, question them and learn as much as he could about who they were, what was there story, and what could they share. He figured his odds at catching and interviewing an alien from a saucer was unlikely, but he thought he might eventually be successful at cornering and interrogating one of these odd human characters who would show up on the doorsteps of UFO experiencers. Were they people under some sort of psychic influence, mind control; were they the theoretical alien/human hybrids; military intelligence personnel; or what? What would be their mission? Their motives? Can all of these cases merely be the products of mental delusions, misinterpreted happenings, or hoaxes?


Friday, March 29, 2024