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Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, March 2018


Many Encounters

by: Brent Raynes

Way back on January 9, 1974, I was once again the guest of Jim Shaw in the studio of WFAU radio out of Augusta, Maine, once again blabbering on about all that I didn't know regarding UFOs, when a lady named Louise called into the station to share details of her recent UFO encounter. It was the Saturday before, January 5th, around sunset, at her home in Chelsea. A daughter of hers, who was 13, came into the house excitedly describing how there was something odd in the sky. She assured the daughter that it was nothing and not to fret. Then a 14-year-old nephew ventured outside and he returned claiming there was an odd noise. Again she assured him as well that there was nothing to it. Then a few minutes later, still inside the house, Louise heard an unusual hissing or wind like noise. She then looked out the kitchen window and herself saw a strange looking object descending from the sky, at a slight angle, rotating around, with what “looked like a dozen windows in the thing.” She said it flashed all red lights, then all white, and then red again. It looked as though it may have landed behind some nearby trees.

The noise Louise heard made her wonder if the craft was suffering some sort of mechanical trouble, as it sounded to her “like it was trying to go up.”

This was interesting as my aunt, Dorothy Smith, who lived a short distance down the hill from my parents in Hallowell, on Greenville Street, had gotten up to go to the bathroom in the early morning of either Saturday, January 5th, or Sunday, the 6th, when she claimed she saw a concentric ring of white lights moving slowly, at what seemed like a low altitude, flying from the east headed towards the southwest. She noted that there seemed to be some sort of sound, but she felt it was different than a plane or helicopter noise. It seemed she had difficulty describing it. After she got back into bed, she thought she heard the odd sound again, moving it seemed from west to east.

I thought it interesting that around 5 a.m., Sunday morning, January 6th, my friend Jim Carey and I had just returned to my parents home from an excursion we had made to Palmer, Massachusetts, to meet famed UFO experiencer Stella Lansing. I couldn't help but wonder, was it possible that my aunt's sighting and our visit to see Mrs. Lansing, an experiencer who claimed to be rather haunted by UFOs, were somehow interrelated?

Meanwhile, Louise claimed how back in the summer of 1971, she had lived in Augusta near the State Mental Hospital when she and many others saw seven objects in a row, coming from out of the south, making a course change to the east. She added that they seemed to land in the woods near the hospital. She said that these lights were “really beautiful,” had “shiny” surfaces, and appeared to be flat on the bottom. She stated that not many days after that, a mother-in-law of hers who worked then at the facility, claimed that a young nurse was coming to work there, when on Highway 95, a UFO landed right in front of her car. She was badly shaken and allegedly her husband came to drive her back home to recuperate, and that she had been given tranquilizers to calm down.

“I have seen many drawings of complicated computer type circuits and drawings of space ships which the patients have done,” one lady who worked there with mental patients shared with me. She openly wondered if maybe “some patients have had encounters with UFOs.” A psychologist from the hospital had also contacted me and visited me, wanting to discuss how UFO contactees get their information compared to how schizophrenics hear voices in their heads.

Louise told me she was a full-blooded Native American Indian, and how she seemed particularly sensitive to psychic phenomena. She described how one day she and her sister were riding together down Western Avenue in Augusta when they were both quite startled to see the face of their late father appear to them in the windowshield at which point the sister, who was driving, hit her brakes, discovering that she had none – a discovery she felt may have saved their lives! She said that she had had a number of precogitive dreams and psychic impressions while wide awake. She had also described experiences she had in haunted houses, one time seeing the apparition of a man dressed in dark clothing who came down the stairs of this one house as she was battling smoke coming out of a fireplace. Once she got it under control, the mysterious figure returned up the stairs.


Friday, March 29, 2024