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Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2020





by: Brent Raynes






UFOs and the multiple Frames of Reference embodied within the “Contact Modalities”



Back in 1989, I corresponded with a UFO experiencer who, like so many, recalled what sounded like encounters going all the way back to her childhood. There was one vivid and very unusual dream-like memory, from back around 1963-66, maybe age 6, 7, or 8, when her family lived in Whitman, Massachusetts. She wrote: “It was early in the morning, probably around 1 or 2 a.m. A light came in through my second story bedroom window. It rested on my body as I was laying on my bed. It then lifted my entire body up and out the window into a hovering space craft. The next thing I remember was being on the craft’s bottom floor. As I looked up I saw many open levels. Each level had a metal railing with space people leaning over these railings looking down at me. There were many more levels than I drew in my picture. As I was looking up I heard someone speak to me. ‘He’ said, ‘We are your friends. We care for you. We love you very much!’ I turned to my right and there was this little male with huge eyes staring at me. He never used his mouth, which by the way was nothing but a slit. He was about my height.”

One evening in 1975, at age 18, in Boston, Massachusetts, she and some friends were shocked to see a large “silver metallic disc” rising up from behind the Science Museum at closing time. “I first thought, along with my friends, that it was something kind of like a last showing of the Science Museum,” she recalled. “It slowly moved over the building and stopped right above the telephone poles and streetlights. There it hovered without making any sound. My God, it was right there in plain view of about 200 people. The crowd just stopped and stared at it. When it took off a few minutes later it left in a ‘Z’ pattern, as if it were cutting the air.” Later that night, alone in her small studio apartment, she had a nagging feeling that she was being watched. She was unable to shake it. “It got so bad that I, like a scared little child, went running to my landlady’s door for comfort,” she wrote. “She was an elderly woman who served me a cup of tea and listened to me. After a short while, I realized she was getting very tired so I felt my welcome was about to run out. I reluctantly went back to my room. After I stepped back in my room I again felt watched. The last thing I remember is sitting in a chair over by the window with my knees up to my chest. The next thing I remember after that is waking up naked, laying face down on my bed – on the opposite side of the room. I looked to my left and saw two gray skinned beings standing right next to me. They were wearing thin silver, one-piece jumpsuits. The outfits were trimmed in red. On the chest was a symbol, a triangle inside of a circle. The circle line was red. The entire triangle was red too. Their skin was rough looking. Their eyes were huge. The female was taller than the male. The male was closest to me.”

“I felt I knew the male. I felt I met him before. He told me telepathically that he loved me and cared for me very much. It touched me deeply. He said he didn’t want to hurt me. He then had a huge gold needle in his hand. He then put the needle in the fleshy cheek of my derriere. Oh boy, did it hurt and I screamed out in my head because I couldn’t move my mouth – I screamed ‘You lied to me! You said it wasn’t going to hurt and it did.’ They evidentially didn’t like hurting me or being yelled at, or being called a liar – perhaps all three. Regardless of which reason, they put me to sleep.”

She felt that her experiences had changed her in a positive way as to how she looked at spiritual matters. She described how she prayed regularly and read the Bible and besides alien encounters she felt at times that she received divine guidance and insights, even hearing voices that would give her spiritual messages.

Back around this period of time around 1989, I had found a growing number of UFO researchers delving into the “abduction” phenomenon who were coming across experiencers who were describing interactions with caring beings, or at least beings who allegedly claimed to care about them, as opposed to the emotionless alien medical examiners who outright treated their subjects like mere lab rats.

UFO researcher and hypnotherapist Joe Nyman wrote me [12/08/89]: “It is very sad, I think, that the widely accepted paradigm of the encounter experience is that of physical alien beings from another planet who are randomly grabbing individuals to perform uncaring and harmful experiments. Unfortunately, this model is now cast in concrete and it will be difficult to dispel, but I think our work shows that people believe that their experiences originate at another level of being, a positive and caring level. Let me give an example from someone I worked with last Monday. R went back to age 2. He said in the regression that he realized that he had, at that age, been having almost weekly encounters and that explained why he had been running into his parent’s bedroom not wanting to sleep alone [I have heard this complaint from child experiencers so often that now it is commonplace]. R was anxious for a short time [at age two] until he realized that an entity was there and was picking him up out of bed – except it wasn’t R’s physical body that was being lifted, it was his spirit body that was being separated. R’s physical body jolted on the couch as he related that his spiritual body went to a craft hovering outside the window and occupied a different body inside the craft. This body inside the craft was R’s real body, an alien body, and the two entities with him were familiar. They took him to a convocation of aliens in a place that was not physical. He realized that his repeated encounters as a baby were taking place so that the influence of our physical world on his spiritual nature could be assessed. He felt a kinship with all the other people in our support group and a sense that all the different types of beings with him at the convocation were all part of the Universal One and that all there were working for the benefit of mankind. R then returned to his physical 2-year-old body.” “Really Brent, I feel that he had had a mystical experience. It was tough for me to hold back a tear.”



Many of these UFO contact experiencers describe encounters of a mystical, psycho-spiritual quality. Sometimes the two are clearly both a part of their described life experiences as in this testimony from a man in Manassas, Virginia. “The four aliens I encountered were humanoid of two different types. Three being identical in appearance, although individual vibrations or personalities. The fourth, the leader, a substantial difference. They were physical beings. The craft was a structured vessel having highly advanced instrumentation. Their skin color was white. Such as the bottom of a fish white. The appearance of the skin was such as the hide of an elephant. The texture of the skin was as soft leather. Their eyes were very large. They were dark and glowed. These beings have a power through their eyes. Their heads were huge, bulging at the forehead. They were shorter in height than the average man, with the exception of the leader. I am approximately six feet. The leader was only a few inches shorter than I, but quite taller than the other three. The leader’s head was of a different shape, having a crevice from the top of his head down through the forehead with huge bulges on each side, such as a double sized brain. He did most of the communicating by the means of telepathy only. At no time did they open their mouths. Their lips were thin. They had no hair. The leader’s power is great. When I was on the table he put his hands on my shoulders to calm and relax me. I could sense a strong feeling of compassion in him and he did calm me.”

“There were many spiritual events in my life prior to the abduction. The most significant event was the appearance of the Lord Jesus Christ. This took place in my home. There appeared before me waves of bright and radiant white light. His image manifested in the midst of the light. Through his eyes I was aware that He knows all things. There was a love that poured from him that is beyond description or comprehension. It overwhelmed me.” Increasingly a greater number of scientists seem to be seriously looking into the UFO contact syndrome and noting the apparent significance of so-called crossover phenomena – what some are seeing as interrelated “contact modalities” – be it out-of-body phenomena, near-death experiences, shamanic journeys, encounters with aliens, ghosts, Bigfoot, elementals, angels, djinn, demons, etc. It’s a pretty long list.

A few decades back, a British researcher named Jenny Randles came up with the term “Oz Factor” as she noted how quite a number of UFO close encounter experiencers described how it was as though they temporarily would find themselves in almost like a parallel dimension where things closely resembled their usual everyday reality but there seemed a curious absence of normal human company and activity. Streets and malls usually filled with people would be empty, and the same for roads and parking lots usually filled with running motor vehicle traffic.

Budd Hopkins came up with another term. His was “screen memories,” as he was receiving experiencer reports wherein the experiencer’s perceptions were distorted, like seeing a scene with a deer or a large owl that presumably was instead an alien presence.

Experiencers have also described how beings could, to borrow from a shaman’s vocabulary, “shape shift” from one appearance to that of another. Maybe in one instance being someone, a human friend - someone known to the experiencer – and in another moment changing into an alien presence, perhaps a so-called gray, or maybe a ball of light even.

It looks like appearances can be deceptive, or should I say misleading. In addition, while some people seem oddly prone to these experiences, it’s all too often not just “craft” they perceive but “ghosts” and other things to be found under the broad umbrella of the paranormal world.

Back in 1971, at age 19, I wrote the noted journalist John Keel for advice on how to investigate the contactee syndrome. He replied, “Essentially, the contactee experience is identical to religious apparition phenomenon and probably is caused by the same factors. It might be best to familiarize yourself with the medical and psychiatric studies of the religious cases before you tackle the UFO variation.” In another letter, Keel even urged me to check out a “superb study of apparitions” that had been done by a “brilliant parapsychologist named G.N.M. Tyrrell,” which I did. I had my marching orders. It’s been a challenging assignment, to put it mildly! When it came to ghosts and aliens, Keel was like take your pick. His academic friend Michael Grosso, Ph.D., found the whole UFO/alien question quite questionable. He too found their manifestations to compare more with the “antics of ghosts than machines from outer space.” (1)

The great Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung, the man who was once a student of Sigmund Freud and came up with such revolutionary and insightful terms and concepts as introvert, extravert, and archetypes of the collective unconscious, speculated that UFOs might belong to a difficult to comprehend phenomenon he called “psychoid.” Like an apparition, some people might see it, while others might not, and he recalled a personal instance where five people were at a spiritualistic séance and four people said they could see a moon looking object floating in the air over a medium’s abdomen, while a fifth person present [Jung himself] couldn’t see it. The others showed Jung “exactly where it was, and it was absolutely incomprehensible to them that I could see nothing of the sort.” (2)

UFOs also play this hide-and-seek game with people. “A great number of UFO sightings are entirely subjective,” Keel wrote early on. “RAF Air Marshall Sir Victor Goddard [involved in the UK’s Royal Air Force’s UFO Investigations in the early 1950s] has suggested that such sightings are made by persons with latent or active psychic abilities, but that when non-psychics stand within the ‘aura’ of the psychic percipients they are also able to see objects which would normally be invisible to them.” (3)

Acclaimed prolific author, researcher and investigator of virtually all things paranormal, Rosemary Ellen Guiley wrote in the Forward to my book on John Keel: “Keel recognized that certain individuals were ‘wired’ differently from others and thus were more likely to encounter the strange beings and entities that exist in a netherworld on this planet. Keel never said that about himself, but I always thought that he too was one of those wired persons, for he had a great many paranormal experiences – and highly unusual ones, such as those that happened to him while he was investigating the Mothman wave. From the get go, Keel had an antenna tuned to the frequencies of parallel worlds, alternate realities and interdimensional realms. And that attunement is what led him – perhaps even drove him – into the investigation and study of all things paranormal. Who else but a wired person would travel around the world in his twenties looking into things spooky and write a book like Jadoo?” (4)

The study of physics, whether classical or quantum, has long been an evolving mainstay of the ufological mainstream, while consciousness has been treated rather like a redheaded stepchild. Distinguished medical scientists Christopher “Kit” Green, formerly a CIA analyst and handler for psychics and scientists working for the Stanford Research Institute’s “remote viewing” program beginning back in the early ‘70s, and Garry Nolan, of Stanford’s Nolan Lab, spoke not long ago at Harvard Medical School [11/30/2018] about how they’re studying experiences [a number who claim to have been hit by UFO light beams], using fMRI brain scanning to see how they’re neurologically wired, and finding a higher density of neuronal connection between the head of the caudate and the putamen with these experiencers that appears absent with non-experiencers.

Inner space may prove just as important in this research – perhaps even more so – than all of the fuss we’ve made over outer space. Shamanic cultures of yesteryear as well as parapsychologists of today have learned ways to identify those who may possess the gift, who are “wired” in such a way as to tap into other realities beyond our five physical senses.

I recently spoke at length about all of this in an interview posted in the July issue of this magazine with Robert Davis, the author of Unseen Forces: The Integration of Science, Reality and You, and The UFO Phenomenon: Should I Believe? Robert has a Ph.D. in sensory neuroscience and was a professor at the State University of New York for over 30 years. I wanted to get his thoughts on the recent April 28th publication of a survey of 2,561 DMT (dimethyltryptamine) users [DMT being a very powerful shamanic mixture long used by Peruvians] as described in the Journal of Psychopharmacology presented by researchers with John Hopkins University. Of paramount interest was the fact that these researchers had noted that entity encounters triggered by DMT had “many similarities to non-drug entity encounter experiences such as those described by religious, alien abduction, and near-death contexts.” It was also noted in this study “descriptions” of entities “somewhat similar to those in the non-drug alien encounter and abduction literature,” which also noted “communication was most often telepathic or visual and most respondents considered the experience to be positive, reporting increases in appreciation for life, self-worth, compassion for others, and a decreased fear of death.”

It was a psychiatrist named Rick Strassman whose book DMT: The Spirit Molecule [2001] that really opened up the discussion on DMT experiences and a parallel in some cases to the alien abduction accounts of psychiatrist John Mack’s research as detailed in his books Abduction and Passport to the Cosmos. Between 1990 and 1995, Strassman had administered some 400 doses of DMT to 60 volunteers. While he had expected mystical and near-death experiences to be described by his volunteers, the results of his sessions were unexpected. There were volunteers who described beings who seemed to be waiting for them to arrive and then “got down to business with them.” “Some beings probed, had sex with, communicated with, demonstrated the future or how various complex processes work too, and requested help from volunteers,” Strassman told me in an interview. “A handful were more typical ‘alien abduction’ scenarios, with being transported through space into hypertechnological vessels or laboratories, being tested and probed, having things inserted, and the like.”

Strassman and Mack even discussed having some of Mack’s alien “experiencers” try DMT to see how similar that state would compare with them to the “abduction” or “contact” encounters that they had experienced. Unfortunately, Mack died unexpectedly before that study could occur.

Strassman also added in our interview: “In the thick of it, while reacting to people’s stories during research, I tried and then abandoned a number of different models to explain these experiences, both to me and to the volunteers. Psychological, brain chemistry, Jungian archetypes, and the like. However, interpreting these experiences, which the volunteers uniformly described as more real than real, as something ‘else’ closed down channels of communication. So, I started speculating about how DMT might provide our consciousness access to realms such as dark matter and parallel universes.”

I just recently corresponded with a woman who may have herself entered both worlds. Living in Arizona, she had worked for the Southernn Ute tribe with the Tribal Police. At one point, she underwent a 4-day healing ceremony in which she was given a “prepared tea” to drink. She suspected peyote was involved with it. Nonetheless, the language she used to described the experience was familiar. “It was more ‘real’ feeling than real life. I talked with a voice that was ancient and all-knowing and was shown visions of the world in its last phase. ….There were light orbs the entire time I was on the Mesa. Most of the conversations were telepathic and not in English, but I understood.”

The woman also had life-long alien experiences too. “I have come to the conclusion that I experienced abductions that started at about age 4, continuing until a few years ago. I only have a vivid memory of one time in 1994 when I was taken. Bright light and floating…small figures moving around [grey] and two tall luminous figures in white gowns. When I woke up in the morning, the ‘screen memory’ had failed. I remembered both. After my healing ceremony until now, I have revisited many things in my life and have realized that certain recurring dreams during childhood were definitely planted memories.”

The study of UFO contact experiencers done by the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences (FREE), that consisted of more than 3,200 survey respondents from over 100 countries[Beyond UFOs[, was cited at various points in the John Hopkins study for comparative purposes. The FREE book, Beyond UFOs [Vol. 1, 2018], provided the DMT researchers with much valuable and comparative information, along with the Journal of Scientific Exploration report [Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 298-348, 2018] on the FREE study prepared by Robert, in addition to Rey Hernandez, Russell Scalpone, and Rudolph Schild.

I was also involved for a couple of years in the FREE study and wrote chapter 13 for Beyond UFOs on the similarities between UFO contact experiences and religious experiences, with a good deal of emphasis on Marian apparitions.

My interview with Robert had covered the gamut of thoughts and speculations on consciousness, quantum physics, the behavioral and psychospiritual aspects of the reported UFO/UAP contact encounters, the DMT users, and more.

After its five year study, FREE has now been replaced with CCRI (Consciousness and Contact Research Institute), which will cover a wide range of the “contact modalities” [not just UFO contact] and as of a few months ago this new program had some 20 Ph.D. academics and 4 medical doctors onboard with it. By January 2021 Vol. 1 of a new book is expected to be published by CCRI, entitled A Greater Reality: The New Paradigm of Consciousness, The Paranormal & The Contact Modalities.



References:

1. Experiencing the Next World Now, 2004, by Michael Grosso, Ph.D.
2. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, 1958, by Carl G. Jung
3. Anomaly, No. 3, December 1969, editor John A. Keel
4. John A. Keel: The Man, The Myths, and The Ongoing Mysteries, 2019, by Brent Raynes


Thursday, March 28, 2024