Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, June 2015
From Pre-Birth Memories, UFOs, Exobiology,
Quantum Physics, to Magonia and Back,
Let’s venture together down the Paranormal Rabbit Hole
by: Brent Raynes
While most of us are quite familiar with the fascinating near-death experiences described by men, women, and even children who came back from the very teetering edge of death itself with vivid descriptions of luminous angelic figures and loved ones, a great light at the end of a mysterious tunnel, memories of their lives flashing before their eyes, and in most cases an emotional resistance to returning once again to their physical lives instead of continuing on to an afterlife, seldom are heard the equally intriguing pre-birth paranormal memories and communications that women have been known to describe prior to giving birth as well.
Admittedly, this is a subject for which I was quite unfamiliar with when one recent Saturday evening early in May I was gathered with a group of friends in the paranormal field, with whom I share a great deal of admiration and respect, when the ladies of this group, gathered around our large table at a haunted mansion located south of Nashville, in Thompson Station, began talking about their own personal pre-birth memories. I sat in complete fascination listening to their individual stories.
A few days later, I asked these ladies if they would mind recounting their stories for me so that I could share them here with you my readers. “At a recent paranormal gathering that I attended, the conversation turned to when does the soul enter the body?” Gina recalled. “Is it at birth? Is it at conception? Is it when the fetus is completely formed? This is one of those questions that we all ponder and one that I usually shy away from discussing since this is a controversial subject. Since I am a mother and I was around good friends, I did share my own personal experiences with my two children. With my first child, my daughter, I felt that her soul or spirit, or whatever you want to call it, was there from the beginning. I believe her soul may have been inside me from the moment of conception. I never felt alone from the moment I felt I was pregnant with her. As soon as I could feel her move, she had already developed a little personality. Inside my body she moved constantly and reacted to sounds, light and darkness. If I was being too over active or too loud, this would disturb her and she would violently roll over as if she was saying, ‘Please shut up, you are disturbing my beauty sleep.’ That haughty personality describes my daughter to a T!”
“My pregnancy with my son was totally different. I did not feel his presence, his essence again or whatever you personally want to call it. I just did not feel him there. Sure, he would move occasionally or kick occasionally but I truly believe his soul had not entered his body while he was in utero.”
“The day he was born, I will never forget. The moment I gave birth to him and he entered this world, it was as if I had some kind of spiritual experience. I remember time seem to slow down or almost stop. For just a split second, I felt that I understood all the answers to life and then within that second, the knowledge was taken from me. In that moment that the doctor pulled my son from my body, I had such a feeling of love and peace come over me and I believe my son's soul entered his body at that precise moment. I know what you are thinking, that it was whatever drugs that I was given during the labor had some sort of effect on me. I did have an epidural but no other drugs that could give me that kind of effect. The birth of my daughter was by cesarean and I had way more drugs in my system during her birth and I never remember feeling the way I felt with the birth of my son.”
“It is an age old question that we may never truly know the answer but it is interesting to hear a mother's psychic impressions on this subject.”
“When I became pregnant with Kelley in 1997, our family was going through a financially tough time and we were under a great deal of stress,” a group member named Cathy shared. “It just was not the right time to add a new baby to our family. I remember one day when I was still in my first trimester being so distraught and depressed, I decided to have a ‘conversation’ with this baby; I mentally told them it was okay if they wanted to leave, that they didn’t have to be born in this situation.”
“The next morning, I woke up with some spotting. I was terrified that I was miscarrying and realized how very much I did want this baby to stay! So I again mentally connected with them, telling them how much I loved him/her and told them it was okay to stay. I rested in bed for the next few days and the spotting stopped.”
“However, this baby never seemed to be around much during the pregnancy. I never had much communication with them – they seemed to come around sometimes as though checking up on their newly developing body, but mostly they were away. It wasn’t until a few days before I went into labor that I felt and saw the baby’s spirit/essence enter my body. It was a bright, bluish light that appeared up and to the left of my body and slowly descended into my abdomen.”
“With my last pregnancy (which was a total ‘uh-oh!’) we were again in a lot of conflict and strife. Financial problems, differences in religious beliefs between my husband and myself and a 9 month old baby to care for already was really putting things over the top. When I discovered I was pregnant, I was angry. Since I feel as though pregnancy is an agreement between all parties involved, I felt that this new baby was not respecting my wishes and I told it in no uncertain terms to leave. I explained our situation and that a new baby would only compound the problems and that it was definitely not a good environment to be born into right now.”
“But this baby was having none of it. I felt very strongly the communication that ‘It’s okay, it’s going to be alright.’ This child seemed to have everything under control and it definitely was not leaving. And she stayed within my body from day one. We had a constant communication between us – not with words or thoughts but with feelings. During the birth, we worked together, especially when she indicated that she was under stress and needed to be delivered as quickly as possible. Within two contractions, she was out and safe.”
Cathy shared with me that she had previously told her story to author and researcher Elizabeth Hallett, the author of Soul Trek: Meeting Our Children on the Way to Birth and, the one in which Cathy’s own account appeared in, Stories of the Unborn Soul. Hallett maintains a website at: http://www.light-hearts.com. It contains quite a few stories of other women recalling pre-birth encounters of their own as well.
My old friend, colleague, and former contributor to this magazine, Shirley C. Fickett of Maine, described a very interesting spiritual/visionary birth experience she had in an article she wrote for us in the Spring 1996 (#34) edition of Alternate Perceptions. She wrote:
“May 27, 1953, the labor pains for my fourth child began and it was to be a home delivery. Circumstances surrounding the family had thrown me into a deep depression. My friend Elaine [Plummer] came to be with me and, when the time was right, the doctor and nurse came. My husband Dick also joined the ‘party.’”
“Under the anesthesia my mind seemed to be in a dual consciousness. My mind knew where everyone in the room was but another part of my being was experiencing something else. I observed some vague darkness but was aware that I was traveling in motion along a white line. Then there was a horizontal line and these two lines met. Before I reached the horizontal line, the motion stopped and I observed a pinpoint of light where the white line met the horizontal one! As I watched, the light grew larger and larger. It was pure white and more brilliant than I had ever seen! Filled with awe, somehow I knew within that light was love and knowledge, the knowledge of all the questions in the universe! I thought, ‘Oh! So this is what it’s like. I’ve got to tell the others!’ I brought myself to consciousness saying, ‘I’ve got to tell you this!” But knew that wasn’t the time or place to tell anyone the experiences.”
“At the time, I knew nothing about ‘near-death experiences.’ But I did know that this seal of knowledge was ‘locked in heaven’ until death. I also knew that in spite of the burden of having this child at this time, it was indeed a gift from God!”
“At that time, there was one person I could turn to who would listen and not ridicule the circumstances. It was my friend Elaine. I named this child ‘Leanne Dawn’ – my daughter of light.”
If you have heard of a similar account, or personally had a similar experience, this columnist would be interested in hearing from you about it. I would like to keep this thread going for a bit, if possible. Write to me at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
UFOs, Extraterrestrials versus Elementals,
Cosmic Consciousness experience at the core of Spirituality,
and saving our World from Us!
Surface appearances can be extremely misleading. In the beginning of my research into UFOs, I had an admittedly rather overly simplistic, albeit teenagers outlook on the phenomenon. However, forty-eight (48) years later mainstream ufology’s almost exclusive theoretical focus remains centered on the “nuts and bolts” interstellar extraterrestrial visitation theory that I myself initially leaned towards back in 1967. It seems the “science” of ufology hasn’t progressed significantly much since.
The U.S. Air Force, our astronomers, and a variety of practical and logical sounding scientists, brainiacs, as well as a variety of self-appointed, educated smart asses produced almost unanimous public statements to the media that for one of our spacecraft to reach light years out into space, to a habitable, civilized planet was going to be an extraordinarily difficult, challenging, and daunting accomplishment, whether for aliens or us. Using vehicles of our current design and technology, the task of a single interstellar journey might take many generations for the onboard occupants, and what they might discover at the end of such a terribly long and drawn out journey could be very disappointing in the end.
In the last couple of decades though, theoretical physicists have invoked the still infant, mathematically entangled (whether quantum entangled or not) science of quantum physics and the notion of using “worm holes” to potentially and greatly speed up the travel process across the vast distances of space. Science fiction has certainly taken much creative license and advantage of this concept as with the recent movie Interstellar starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway.
Nonetheless, real science often seems to move at a snails pace. I’ve been imagining mankind strolling across the Martian landscape since I was a young boy. NASA has certainly dreamed and schemed of a manned flight to the planet Mars for several decades. “NASA had appointed me to be the first to go to Mars back in 1967 until the program was cancelled in 1968 by Lyndon Johnson because of the Vietnam War,” Dr. Brian O’Leary, a former NASA scientist, told me in a phone interview back in 2008 from his home in Ecuador. Currently, it appears that NASA predicts we’ll send men to the surface of Mars sometime in the 2030s.
Dr. O’Leary was very interested in the UFO question. “Obviously all over the world the UFO phenomenon is very real and the truth embargo needs to stop,” he told me. “Let’s get on with what realities are out there.” Dr. O’Leary was also deeply concerned with environmental issues, global warming, climate change, and ways to cease our dependence on fossil fuels, and stopping all of the unrest and wars in the world. Like others, he began looking at the ancient wisdom of previous indigenous cultures who believed in the importance of living in peace and harmony with their environment. I have heard and read that some Native Americans believed in preparing for it’s people, in whatever undertaking they did, for a future wherein no harm to the land, water, wildlife and humans would occur over a period of seven generations. In fact, this was said to have been a part of the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy. Do any of our leaders in Washington today have any hint of such a foresight? “The shamans and medicine men knew a lot more than we give them credit for,” Dr. O’Leary told me.
Earlier that same year, I also interviewed Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man in NASA’s Apollo program early in 1971, to walk on the moon. He is also a strong believer in UFOs and the greater human potential as expressed and known by ancient shamanic cultures. During his return flight to earth from the moon, Dr. Mitchell had an experience that has often been described as a cosmic consciousness or spiritual experience of, as he called it, “a perception of unity accompanied by ecstasy.”
For two years after the moon mission, Dr. Mitchell traveled extensively. “I had a chance to talk with spiritual masters and leadership of different cultures of the world,” he explained to me. “From the South Pacific Islands to medicine men of Indian tribes, with shamans, witchdoctors, kuhunas, and somewhere in each of these cultures there would be a similar description of a transcendental experience in which they felt a oneness with nature. It was just universal.”
‘Basically, the fundamental aspects and descriptions of the experience are virtually the same, but the explanation is the basis of each religion,” he concluded. “We have often ended up fighting over whose explanation is right and who has got the best God, when it’s really based upon this initial perception that’s anything but hostile.”
Back in April 1976, I spent several hours recording a conversation I had with a Susquehannock medicine man in eastern Pennsylvania. We talked about many unusual and interesting things. He described to me how his ancient people, back in prehistoric days, were protected by beings he called the Yuh-dush-gwa, and that they were very tall. Some 12 to 18 feet in height, he said. Furthermore, he added, that he had even been visited by these beings who landed in his backyard in a fiery UFO.
Too far out? Maybe so, but consider that in our present day and time serious researchers are earnestly looking for evidence of so-called “giants” [or at least groups of concentrations of some unusually tall ancient people] on our planet in the ancient past. Last year, my wife Joan and I accompanied our good friends Doctors Greg and Lora Little to the West Virginia Kanawha Valley region, from Point Pleasant to South Charleston, regions that since 1966 have had hundreds of mysterious and giant bird-man (commonly called Mothman) and UFO encounters. The Little’s recently revisited this region with England’s acclaimed historian and author Andrew Collins. Native Americans had a lot of legends and stories about giant Thunderbirds and supernatural winged beings. However, our main focus on the trip with the Little’s was on documented Indian Mound excavations (with past Smithsonian involvement) of unusually tall human skeletal remains. [I highly recommend Dr. Gregory Little’s book Path of Souls, with a foreword and afterword by Andrew Collins] “There is solid and indisputable evidence that a lot of tall skeletons were recovered during the Smithsonian’s 1800’s excavations,” Greg Little told me in 2014. “In general, all of them were between 7 and 8 feet tall. There were surely some that were taller but we didn’t look at all of the old reports. Basically we evaluated the Smithsonian reports and several others from archaeology publications. In South Charleston, the Smith Mound, now completely destroyed, was one that turned up several 7-footers. Another three mounds there also turned up several 7-footers. There were others found in Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and elsewhere, but it’s clear that the greatest concentration was in West Virginia, especially in the Kanawha Valley. In our evaluation of all of the Smithsonian’s large skeleton reports, it became obvious that there were far more of them than would be likely by chance.”
Although our Native American contact in Pennsylvania had associated the “Yud-dush-gwa” with an extraterrestrial origin, he also described experiences with “elemental” entities, nature spirits of our planet, and added that the UFOs were also “spirit.” Noted New York journalist, UFO author John Keel referred to the intelligences behind the UFOs as “elementals” in a letter to me as early as 1970 and encouraged me to study parapsychological material on apparitions. “Essentially, the contactee experience is identical to religious apparition phenomena and probably is caused by the same factors,” he wrote.
Is it possible that mythology, folklore, shamanic and religious legends and lore could hold vital insights and clues into the modern “flying saucer” mystery? Back in 1969, French born scientist Dr. Jacques Vallee, a noted and respected UFO author, risked his hard-earned professional reputation even further by writing his book, Passport to Magonia, a book that delved deeply into the similarities between modern UFO alien reports and the fairies, elves, gnomes, and various other elemental forms chronicled throughout past centuries. Known in France as Magonia, elsewhere it was Fairyland, Elfland, etc. In his recent book Lightquest (2012), British author Andrew Collins reviewed some of the same aspects and questions. He marveled at how just as with the mysterious time-lapses, the “missing time” episodes associated with our modern UFO/alien encounters, the ancient Rip Van Winkle style “little people” stories were again and again associated with mysterious time-lapses as well. “So how did the ancient story-tellers come to believe that simply by entering enchanted, otherworldly realms, time passes at a much quicker rate creating huge temporal discrepancies upon the victim’s return to normality?” Collins pondered. In addition, just as with modern alien contact cases, we find historic fairy/elemental lore contained details of mysterious aerial light forms, sexual encounters, shape shifting beings, portals to underground realms, and mysterious circles on the ground.
A few years ago, long time California ufologist Ann Druffel explained to me in a phone interview the similarities she also perceived between elemental forms of the Buddhist religion, the Jinn of the Muslim faith, and the modern abducting aliens. “In every major culture of the world, and in many minor cultures, they all have these same folkloric stories, and even religious and philosophical texts in some of the countries talk about this ‘third order of creation,’ as the Muslim’s call it,” Mrs. Druffel explained to me. “They aren’t angels, they aren’t devils, they aren’t human beings. They’re something in between that share our world with us in a hidden state.”
Collins referred to a significant book published back in 1890, entitled The Science of Fairy Tales, by the late British folklore writer Edwin Sidney Hartland. From Hartland’s book Collins cites such stories as a man in Wales who encountered “little beings like men” who thought his encounter had lasted three hours, but upon returning home in Brecknockshire discovered that three weeks instead had passed; in Germany a man who encountered a “little grey man,” was taken through a gateway into a mountain peak, where he allegedly saw an illuminated castle filled with people, and who upon his release was surprised to discover that an entire year had elapsed; two fiddlers in the Scottish highlands were allegedly invited into a fairy hill where they played music for the little people, but then after what had seemed like only a few hours they afterwards discovered, the story goes, that a hundred years had gone bye; in Denmark there was the story of a bride on her wedding day who happened to be walking by a mysterious “hillock” that was standing on “red pillars,” and enticed to join the little elves in a dance she afterwards continued on home only to discover, once again, a time lapse of a hundred years had transpired; and the stories just continue.
A few years ago, myself and other American UFO authors like Sean Casteel and Tim R Swartz collaborated with New Jersey author and publisher Timothy Green Beckley in another release of Hartland’s book in 2008, re-entitled UFOs, Time Slips, Other Realms and The Science of Fairies, an expanded addition that included new material that explored the comparative UFO-related aspects. My own contribution to this body of work concentrated on Peruvian UFO cases involving “little men,” along with shamanic hallucinogens like ayahuasca that some felt gave such users visions of these other realms that were populated by these mysterious elemental-type beings.
Is another intelligence visiting our world and residing in a “hidden state,” largely undetected and below the radar, so to speak, of our modern and Western culture and science? Hopefully, as we research, investigate and come to better comprehend all of the various and complex elements and implications perceived in these anomalous human experiences, embodied in everything from UFO encounter testimony to shamanic spirituality, and many more detours and stops here, there, and betwixt and between along the way, we will eventually come to see the much bigger reality picture and we will hopefully be able to chart a far a more meaningful, holistic and eco friendly course for not only ourselves, but this planet and all of its inhabitants.
Considering the destruction happy ISIS mentality on the current world scene and myopic detours to the truth campaign about UFOs like the overly hyped Roswell Alien Slides that turned out to be a child’s mummy in old museum photos, inroads to real truth and a better world health plan for the global population await to be unveiled; hopefully very, very soon. In the meantime, think for yourself and don’t be afraid to think outside the proverbial box a little more.
