Encounters of the Unknown—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, February 2020
An Extraordinary Ohio Contactee
by: Brent Raynes
Here Al borrowed my super 8mm movie camera to try and capture ethric orbs or something. People testified strange things happen around him.
Madeline Teagle of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, just outside of Akron, was no regular housewife. She also considered herself a minister, a therapist, a ufologist, a contactee, and her many interests included transpersonal psychology, parapsychology, meditation, and even shamanism – to name just a few. On weekends quite a few people would flock to her home for either meditational circles, skywatches out behind her home [often accompanied by a blazing bonfire], presentations, or simply to chat with others who shared similar interests. I first visited Madeline at her home in July 1975. I visited a number of times and always found it a hubbub of activity. There seemed a constant flow of people coming and going, and it was a great place to meet and talk with a variety of people with interesting stories to share, and on occasion Madeline and I would take to the road together and visit past sighting locations and meet with witnesses who claimed some extraordinary experiences.
The person whose story was at the top of my high-strangeness list was an Akron businessman named Al. Madeline first met Al back in the late 1950s. A contactee, she had some rather extraordinary experiences when in his presence. In one instance, she saw a small round silvery-white orb rolling across her front lawn. On another occasion, she encountered what at first she thought was simply a “patch of fog,” that is until she said “tentacles” lashed out from it and temporarily wrapped themselves around her. Moments later, the clouds in the night sky above seemed to merge together and form the appearance of a man, but one with the head and wings of an eagle.
Larry Moyers of Akron, a respected MUFON [Mutual UFO Network] investigator, recalled for me a time when he had personally witnessed something in Al’s presence also. He said that he, Al, and several others were together when they observed three small “football-shaped lights” hovering near a bush. “They were transparent,” he told me. “You could see the leaves through them.” When he tried to touch them they simply vanished.
I sat down with Al and got his story on my tape recorder and what a story it was. Although some parts of it sounded very much like visionary experiences, he insisted it was quite real and physical to him, even though he admitted it was spiritual too.
He was clearly a firm UFO believer. His first experience happened back in 1945 he said, while he was on a tanker at a location east of the Florida Keys. He and several other crewmen observed a bright orange disc. By 1958, he had read a good deal of UFO literature and decided to attempt telepathic contact with UFO beings. From what he was learning it sounded like such communication, according to some accounts, was in fact possible. So on August 6, 1958, Al says he gave it a try. What happened next was that in some places the walls of his home didn’t somehow look quite solid anymore. He experienced an intense “spinning sensation” and then he “blanked out.” Moments later he came to again and he claimed that what he saw then really shocked him.
“I saw everything in that house, in my neighbors’ houses, that street and that neighborhood completely different than I’ve ever seen it before. I could not believe what I saw because what I saw was nothing but black and white, and what is ordinarily people became white dots spinning around in kind of a black void. In other words, human beings not only looked transparent but white – like a white light – within a black field.”
I interrupted Al at that point to ask him how he could be sure the lights he saw were in fact people. His reply was, “Because they were screaming. They were making noises. They were yelling and they were cursing and they were cussing, and they were communicating.”
Though it was hard to imagine such an experience, I shut my mouth and let Al continue. He said a vertical shaft of light then appeared to the right of his chair. He reached out to it, he said, “as if it was a matter of life and death.” He then got up and walked into it, he said, and then suddenly he was joined by two tall, approximately 8 foot humanoid beings with large heads, slanted eyebrows, wearing yellow-white robes. They were then beamed up into an “enormous green translucent sphere” where he found himself next in the company of three of these beings. “The planet looked like a dot behind us in a few seconds,” he said. Then, before long, they arrived at their destination. The home planet of these aliens. Rather than finding their home planet with advanced signs of construction and design, Al noted immediately that their homes were “humble buildings by contrast to our own.,” made up of slabs of stone. Al said he was taken into the center of a large octagonal stone court where the beings explained to him that they would demonstrate their method of construction. As he watches, two of the beings move over to a large rock and cut themselves a slab off of it simply by extending their two arms out from their bodies. Al, having not seen any tools or machinery used in the process, is amazed. Al is then allowed to see a seething, red sphere hovering nearby. “That is god energy,” Al said they told him. “We know how to use it. But to us that’s god and energy, and god and energy are one and we know how to use it.”
Suddenly from his own lips Al heard himself say, “Where is the Great White Father?” He admitted he didn’t know why he said it but added that it made them mad. “They took me to another place where they had a stone octagonal court with gates in it and they put me in the middle and then they said, ‘You stand it.” They opened the gates and a lion came out. A real, honest-to-God lion. So they said, ‘Watch this force that contains the lion.’ Because they had a force that kept that lion from moving. I was led to understand that evolution can occur in different directions at this point. That is, we can have thought forms that are lions and bodies of men. That is, the thought forms that constitute the spirit are not the same as the thought forms that constitute the appearance of the body. At any rate, they called this the lion test. They were showing that this force contained these lions or held the balance of nature so that nature does not attack.”
“This complex report encompasses the entirety of the UFO field as well as parapsychology, religion and psychology,” my friend and colleague Dr. Greg Little, the author of The Archetype Experience, People of the Web, and Grand Illusions once noted. “It is a vast puzzle in itself. The modern UFO myth now overlaps virtually all the ‘paranormal world’ of phenomena.”
I certainly came to feel that Al’s experience contained a complicated and very symbolic message. Perhaps it compares to Vallee’s “metalogic,” to some extent, which I touched upon in my Reality Checking column last month. To me it sounds like in a sense Al awakened to a level of consciousness where he perceived the world and its humanity as existing or surrounded amidst dark despair, thus the “white dots” that he saw as “cursing” and “cussing” in a “black void.” A light shines down from heaven and Al, in his own words, instinctively reaches out for it “as if it was a matter of life and death.” Three robed, guardian beings (symbolic of angels?) escorted him to their home in the heavens, where he is given symbolic, spiritual lessons, centering on maintaining a “balance of nature.” They became angry with him when he brought up his acculturated, archetypal “Great White Father” view as opposed to “god energy,” which may represent a more psychologically acceptable view of God for Al in this age of science.
Madeline described to me how she had attended an interesting workshop a few years earlier that was conducted by a Louise Mahdi, a Jungian psychologist from Switzerland who talked about “rites of passage” and how in today’s society there was a serious breakdown in graduating our young to higher levels of expression. The psychologist stated that if we failed to do so then “she indicated this would occur through extraordinary mysticism. Space encounters. How about that? She also said this was why there was so much return to earth religions, to Native American ways, or African, because inside we needed this connection and this permission to get on with out lives.”
Greg Little in his The Archetype Experience perceived Jung’s archetypes on two different levels, the internal and the external. The internal were the psychological phenomena of the “collective unconscious” while the external archetypes represented “pure energy” that is “capable of assuming a solid, physical form.” He added that there are two basic archetypes – the splinter and the mandala. The splinter archetypes are the polar opposites of the higher level mandala archetypes that represent wholeness, unity and a balanced totality. Thus, by way of contrast, the splinter archetypes would be the unbalancing ones that would be instead “facilitators of conflict.”
The symbolic language of the mind, of the “collective unconscious” and our numinous interactions with both these internal and external archetypal forms perhaps represents our evolving and transformational future development, though ultimately I’d say it’s like we read in the good book (Ecclesiastes 1:9) “there is nothing new under the sun.” Appearances and forms may change and evolve but essentially I’d say it’s all a repeat performance designed to compel us to take notice of where we are on this life journey – and hopefully we’ll have managed to traverse this curious landscape well to our individual best conclusions.
