Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, October 2019
by: Brent Raynes
“He’s a schmuck”
It was a fun time! I actually got to be the first speaker of the day at 11 a.m. at the historic theater on Mainstreet. Joan manned our assigned vendors table, located near the Mothman statue. I sold and autographed ten of my John Keel books and a few others. I didn’t make a killing, but we covered our gas and overnight lodging. It’s never been my intention to pursue this weird stuff to get rich anyway. Which is certainly a good thing.
Early in 2010, a paranormal investigator and contact experiencer named Bret Oldham introduced myself and others to an instrument commonly called a “ghost box,” essentially an AM/FM digital radio whose scanner has been altered so that it goes on continuous scan when activated. In doing so spirit “voices” are said to utilize the “white noise” in order to communicate. I admit that initially I was rather skeptical. But one night in particular proved to be my turning point, when we did two sessions with the box at the home of Sandy Nichols of Thompsons Station, Tennessee. It was July 3, 2010, the one-year anniversary of John Keel's passing. I asked the group if they would mind me reaching out to him. They thought it was a great idea. So much happened that night I could no longer deny that something quite anomalous was occurring. We asked to speak to John Keel and a male voice quickly and clearly said, “John Keel”! (Incredibly, this continued to happen again on other dates) Bret asked the “box” what Keel now knew about Bigfoot, a subject he had been quite interested in while on this side of the veil. Again, almost immediately a male voice declared, “Smuck Bigfoot, see?” Soon this was followed by two voices that said, “See,” as though acknowledging the presumed “Keel” voice.
Just recently, on September 21, 2019, I was discussing the “ghost box” and the subject of EVP manifestations with paranormal researcher John Frick, who along with his brother Tim, had spent about eight hours with Keel at the Mothman Festival back in 2003. John and Tim have read Keel’s works extensively, are regulars at the annual Mothman Festival, even dressing up as MIBs at the festival events and launching a Mothman model with glowing eyes on a wire over the heads of hayriders at night in the TNT Area. However, all fun aside, John and Tim are dead serious about Keel, UFOs, Mothman, MIBs, and the paranormal, Anyway, as I was sharing with John about some of our strangest EVP episodes with the “ghost box,” I told him about what I and others have heard as “Smuck Bigfoot,” at which he seemed to have confirmed something that I had long wondered about. “Back in 2003, me and my brother had many talks with John Keel,” John recalled, “and one of the times we were talking with him we asked Keel what he thought about a certain researcher (that will go unnamed). Keel’s response was short and to the point – ‘He’s a schmuck.’” John even felt that the EVP voice “even sounds similar to Keel.” Finally, I felt I had probable confirmation that Keel did talk that way!
At any rate, that same July night back in 2010, I even asked what Keel could tell us about Jadoo and a voice clearly replied back with the same word, saying what sounded like “Jadoo, eh?” All this was recorded on our digital recorders. The “ghost box” was hooked up to two stereo speakers. We obtained some nice recordings.
I quickly repeated the Jadoo question. Immediately what sounded like the same voice replied, “Into the fire, into the fire.” That seemed appropriate enough if you're talking about black magic! Then a few seconds later, the same voice said, “Teach me outside.”
As I thought about it later, “teach me outside” could have referred to Keel's preferred mode of learning. He was well-known for his extensive research and his ability to devour many, many books. However, his real passion was clearly his taste for travel and adventure. As he wrote in his 1957 book Jadoo, Keel had a burning desire to “go around the world, to see India and get a first-hand look at the celebrated feats of the fakirs, to explore the Himalayas, to investigate the fire-walkers of the Pacific Islands.”
I soon had my own “ghost box” and it continued to work with or without Bret being present. I was flabbergasted! We even began, when asking who our spirit guide was, we’d hear (and continue to do so) the name “Bishop,” which also was Bret’s spirit guide for the box. On February 19, 2012, here at my own home in Waynesboro, Tennessee, I clearly got “John Keel, Brent. Bert here.” We’d seemingly been picking up Bert Schwarz it seemed for months after his passing in September 2010. Bert was a long-time friend and colleague in this field, both a psychiatrist and parapsychologist, who was also a good friend of John Keel!
Bret, Sandy, and I had been getting a name with different sessions and we wondered if it was Enoch or Enik. So on May 3, 2013, I decided to do a session myself to maybe find out. After several minutes of asking which one, was it with an O or an I, a male voice came through clearly saying, “Enoch with an O.” While not everyone was necessarily convinced about the name/word from the previous sessions, certainly the response I heard and recorded was again an intelligent and interactive reply. That’s what certainly impressed me quite immensely!
At the end of each session with the box, we’d ask that the spirits needed to stay in their realm, no one get followed home or bothered afterwards, and we’d say “clear,” meaning to end the session. Then we’d wait to hear a voice agree by replying “clear” back. Then we’d shut off the radio. However, on February 25, 2012, a voice instead stated: “This cannot clear. This is energy.” Apparently that particular “spirit” wasn’t familiar with how we’d been operating.
Interestingly if these “voices” weren’t who they claimed to be, then they instead somehow had access at times to the correct information. For example, on March 19, 2011, my daughter Chandra and I spent the night with a group of “ghost hunters” at the notorious Sloss Furnace of Birmingham, Alabama. We broke up into individual teams and the young lady who was the team leader of my small group said she wanted to test the reliability of the “ghost box” I was carrying around with me. So at one point she asked, “What holiday did my grandfather and his father die on?” I certainly had no idea. She heard the answer almost immediately. I didn’t catch it, but on playback there it was – “Father’s Day.”
As I suspected, Bret and Sandy did a couple of sessions on their own and found that they could communicate with supposed “aliens” about as well as the “spirits.” “I have gotten numerous communications from entities who identify themselves as Djinn,” Rosemary told me. “Are they who they say they are? Proving so is difficult if not impossible. That applies across the board to all communicators, including the dead.” I had shared with Rosemary a “ghost box” session [October 16, 2014] where I asked if the Djinn were pretending to be aliens and immediately got a male sounding voice replying “You’re an alien.” Rosemary remarked that that was a very Djinn type of response.
“We need to reexamine abduction experiences, as well as most (if not all) of our paranormal experiences to take into account beings like the Djinn who have been operating below our radar,” Rosemary also stated. “I cannot say that the Djinn account for everything, but I believe they play major roles, and for purposes we have yet to uncover.”
“These creatures, the Djinn of the Muslim religion and the elementals in the Buddhist religion, reportedly can materialize and dematerialize, and so can our Western culture's abducting creatures,” California's ufologist Ann Druffel explained to me a few years back. “They shape-shift in various forms, they delight in harassing and traumatizing human beings. They reportedly abduct human beings. They reportedly abduct human beings and transport them long distances in a matter of seconds. And the Djinn, the elementals, and our own abducting greys [have taken] a sexual interest in human beings down through the millennia. 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 Muslims call it. 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.”
Early UFO contactee George Hunt Williamson, a follower of George Adamski for a time, claimed that in 1952 he and others established communication with UFO beings through a ham radio operator. One night, a UFO was seen hovering over the ham radio tower. The “voices” over the radio knew things that the group was talking about in the radio shack even when reportedly the microphone wasn’t even turned on. Keel described how back in the 1950s, amateur radio operators started receiving mysterious voices that they couldn't explain over their ham radio sets. Some of these voices would claim to be from outer space. “Ham operators in flap areas have cautiously reported all kinds of manifestations, including the materialization of entities in their radio shacks,” Keel wrote in Our Haunted Planet (1971). Keel wrote how instead of trying to do it themselves, the vast majority of the “serious” ufologists of the time simply heaped ridicule upon the notion.
Jon Klimo, Ph.D., a co-editor and contributor to Beyond UFOs (2018) and a retired professor of psychology, thanked me for the audio files and information I had shared with him and described his own deep interest in ITC (instrumental transcommunication) and the EVP (electronic voice phenomena) matters. Klimo had been funded by the Vanguard Foundation of San Francisco for three years to support his own research into this subject. In an article in UFO Magazine in 2001, he expressed his strong desire to initiate an effort to “record extraterrestrial as well as human spirit presence.” He added, “At least some of these extraterrestrials appear by their feats to be inhabiting a set of dimensions, levels or kinds of reality other than our own physically-based one, and by visiting us they seem to lend a cross-world or interdimensional quality to our experience.” As they say at the conclusion of their investigations on TV’s Ghost Hunters, on to the next!
