Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, July 2024
Another Arizona UFO Flap
by: Brent Raynes
Picture of Jeremiah Hortsman at the Bradshaw Ranch
It seems that the region in and around Sedona, Arizona, beginning around early June, is once again experiencing another surge of UFO activity, from Sedona to Cottonwood, 22 miles apart, and the Verde Valley. Some of the activity has appeared near the abandoned Bradshaw Ranch, a well-known site of high strange anomalous activity.
Sedona has long been known as a hotbed for UFO and various other forms of high strange activity. Area author, Sedona tour guide, and authority on the mysteries of Sedona, Tom Dongo, recently remarked on a site near the Bradshaw Ranch known as Robbers Roost or Shaman's Cave, where he says he used to see lights regularly. "I miss them," he stated. "It was spheres of basketball sized white light that used to chase each other around above the bush tops in the high desert. They were always there at night, and they were so much fun to watch. They were playing like kittens at a hundred miles an hour. They were last seen out there at my spot fifteen years ago. I think the nightly mob of campers drove them away; crowded them out. Sometimes there were six or seven of these very bright things chasing each other."
Tom has written such books on the Sedona mysteries as The Alien Tide (1990), Mysterious Sedona (2000), and Merging Dimensions, co-authored with Linda Bradshaw, who lived at the Bradshaw Ranch. These three books, all autographed by Tom himself, share an honored spot on one of my bookshelves.
One Jade Wah'oo Grigori recalled: "I spent many a night, weeks even up at Shaman's Cave/Robbers Roost back in the late '80s through the mid-90s. I would often see the balls of light dancing, diving 'into' the ground, only to pop up out of the ground a couple hundred yards to a quarter of a mile away."
As some of our readers may remember, back in this column's October and November issue I gave a good deal of coverage on numerous high strange events and manifestations connected with Sedona and the Bradshaw Ranch. Arizona investigator Jeremiah Horstmann provided a great deal of information on the situation there. He's been very actively involved for over a decade at the Bradshaw site. As to the location that Tom Dongo and Jade Wah'oo Grigori mentioned, Jeremiah just informed me: "We've seen them on several occasions. We even caught them in a photo from Bradshaw knoll, looking toward Robbers Roost. On one of our very first seasons investigating Bradshaw Ranch, we were driving out. As we drove through the flood plain below the first switchback, we saw what looked like a huge bonfire just above us on the lane. I told Alexandra, 'How are we going to get out of here if a huge bonfire is blocking the way?' Within seconds, we rounded the hairpin turn and our headlights were illuminating the spot. There was no fire, no smoke, no embers. It vanished."
"That was the closest I've been to the infamous trickster known as the 'fireball orb.'"
Link
Here’s a video Benjamin Lonetree captured of a mysterious light anomaly.
"As for the lights and craft around Sedona and Cottonwood lately I have seen them," electrical engineer Benjamin Lonetree explained to me. "I have been watching orbs come out of the ground in that area and fly around for over 20 years. The orbs are plasma in origin, and they are sentient. I have been to Shamans Cave many times back when its location was unknown to tourists. I do not go there anymore because word got out and it is mobbed by thrill seekers who are destroying the cave.
"There's a distinct possibility that some of the recent sightings are human piloted test craft," Jeremiah added. "No doubt some of it is non-human piloted craft, but many of the sightings near the Sycamore Basin include Blackhawk helicopters intercepting these balls of light, then escorting them over Woodchute Mountain in the southwest."
I was told that people have observed a rectangular portal near the Bradshaw Ranch. "I had only been able to view it through a radiation spectrometer camera that a well-financed investigation team brought with them," Jeremiah explained. He told me to look in the book Merging Dimensions by Tom Dongo and Linda Bradshaw, which happens to have a lot of anomalous photographs in it. He said Linda's two photos of the portal were in it. I found them right off. "She photographed it looking east," he explained. "We saw it with the spectrometer from the opposite direction, looking west. It was spitting gamma rays, which seemed to bound out from it and arch down into the ground. There's another portal on the north end of the ranch, not far from Rey Canyon. It's a truly fascinating phenomenon."
In the book Merging Dimensions, Tom Dongo wrote how Linda Bradshaw took two quick photos of an unusual light. "The scene, or TV-screenlike picture, is about fifteen feet off the ground, judging by the outline of a thirty-foot-tall juniper tree just to the right of the screenlike depiction in the center of the photo." Captured is what looks like a "perfect disk shape with a rounded dome on the top." Then too, in both prints, in the lower left corner, is what appears to be a "humanoid in a space-type suit," along with a number of other odd things. Tom noted how "the time looks to be between 2 p.m. and sunset on a clear day" in the strange rectangular image.
I'm reminded of the case of Dorothy Wilkinson-Izatt of Richmond, British Columbia, detailed in Contact with Beings of Light by Peter Guttilla. With super-8mm movie cameras she captured not only images of strange lights, craft, and beings, but also a possible portal. Guttilla wrote: "Dorothy was filming a bright light in the sky when it suddenly vanished in a dazzling burst. The developed film showed this apparent 'landscape' with lights in the background, and a 'sea' or body of water with lights in the background. Dr. J. Allen Hynek suggested it might be a glimpse of the object's home world as it passed through a 'window' or portal in time and space."
"About 14 years ago, before I retired, I was visiting a friend in Sedona," Benjamin recalled. "I did not own a house yet, so I stayed at a motel in Cottonwood. While at my friend's house I noticed it was 1 a.m. and said I need to get back to my motel. Cottonwood is only 18 miles from Sedona. A 20-minute drive. A short trip at that time of the morning as there is no traffic. While driving I reached the outskirts of Sedona and I felt weird. All of a sudden. I looked at the landscape in my headlights and I thought I had gotten lost. Everything looked different. That is the last thing I remember. When I came to, I was sitting in my Jeep in Cottonwood at the motel. I was in the parking lot right in front of my room door. Engine still running. I wondered how I got there. No memory of the drive. I turned off the Jeep and went inside my room. I looked at the clock and it was 3:30 a.m. I lost over two hours. What should have been a 20-minute drive took two and a half hours. I felt exhausted and went to bed. The next morning, after I got out of the shower and looked in the wall mirror, I had a mark on my left shoulder that looked like I was branded. It is shaped like an Asterisk symbol. It was bright red and you could tell it was just made. Like a tool was pushed against my shoulder. I still have it. You can still see the Asterisk shape but over the years the mark has turned brown and slightly changed shape. Since that night I have had more than a few UFO encounters."
I asked Benjamin to tell me more about that weird feeling he mentioned and the landscape seemingly becoming unrecognizable. He replied, "I do not know how else to describe what I felt so I used the word weird. Disoriented would be a better choice though with a bit of confusion mixed in. The feeling came over me before I noticed the landscape looked different. That is the last thing I remember until I came to in the motel parking lot."
I discovered seeing UFOs wasn't a new thing to him. "I had my first UFO encounter when I was 18 years old, Brent. An in my face encounter. A ship 200 feet away from me and roughly 150 feet or so in the air. No mistake as to what it was."
I asked if he could give me a description of what he saw. He replied: "The craft I saw way back when was a typical saucer shape. But it had 5 portals or windows near the top of it and 4 portals or windows below the 5. There was an intense, bright white light coming from inside and it was shining out through the windows. Back then they looked like windows to me, but they could have been something else. Unknown. I could not see anything inside or through the portals/windows. The light emanating from them was too bright. I would estimate the craft was 100 feet in diameter and approximately 20 to 30 feet in height. The encounter was one of the most impressive ones I have ever had."
In response to my inquiring of any way these experiences may have changed him, Benjamin added, "I had no special changes in thought patterns before the Sedona encounter. Since then, I know how to build electronic things better than I had before. For lack of a better word, I get downloads. The idea for something comes first and if I do not know how to build it the download comes...I have had craft show up here at my house which is over on Mingus Mountain. I just do not tell all this publicly. As odd as it sounds, I have had UFO encounters my entire life."
