Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, November 2020
UFOs and Religious Visionary Experiences
by: Brent Raynes
The legendary UFO photographer Stella Lansing once shared with me how her strange journey in all of this began. While many of her sightings contained the standard appearances and elements of regular UFO encounters, and involved other witnesses, including a distinguished psychiatrist, some of these experiences certainly had a visionary, religious quality mixed in with her UFO-related skywatching and photographic endeavors. [Interested readers may wish to review my article on Stella Lansing’s “clockwork” images in the last issue]
“I saw Jesus on the cross, in color, for a brief instant,” Stella told me in an interview on April 24, 1977, at the home of ufologist Stephen Putnam of Scituate, Massachusetts. “Then right after that this saucer-shaped thing amassed in light, which seemed to be gliding over the pretty thin ice, glided over to the beach, facing an empty cottage.” Her home was situated along a lake by her Palmer, Massachusetts home. It was around daybreak, sometime early in April 1967. Suddenly she described how she saw a man in short sleeves run out of the empty cottage and get into a white car and drive off around the lake. She loses sight of him for a while, and then spots him walking down and into the cold water, up to his knees. Meanwhile, what had looked like a saucer-shaped thing became a “huge cylindrical roll of mist,” which she said was “so white” and began to move “like a train,” eventually stopping in front of the man in the water. “I couldn’t see him and then he’s gone,” Stella told me. “I say it picked up this man!”
Next the thing moved up a nearby hill and over the trees, at which point Stella described how an area of the sky “opened up like a big eye, like a human eye shape” and how the “huge cylindrical thing went into the eye.”
“Before it did, I could see a city,” Stella added. “I said, ‘Oh my God.’ It was a beautiful city. All white with beautiful buildings, and this thing went into it and it closed up.”
Apparently the next morning, Stella felt compelled, dressed in her bathrobe and slippers, to walk over to the hill and ended up first in the woods near her home. “I knelt down. I just felt I had to kneel. I don’t know why. Then all these colors were coming down. I couldn’t seem to look up for some reason. It was all like purples, yellows – it was all beautiful colors. When I spoke my voice was going into the sun. …It was like going into an echo chamber, but not echoing back. But you could hear it.” She later began to wonder if she was really looking at the sun. “It looked like a polished mirror. You could look at it. It did not hurt the eyes, as bright as it was. But one thing it was doing. I could see it spinning. It was spinning one way, then it would spin another way, and then it would move to the right, and then it would move to the left.” She explained how it was making like a path on the ground that looked almost like it was composed of “gold dust,” and aloud she said she exclaimed, “Oh my God, I know you’re not the sun.” Afterwards she decided to mark the spot where this had occurred. “I went in the house and I got some tin foil and I marked the stone near where I knelt. I felt that I wanted to mark that spot where all of these colored lights came down.” Stella then said she followed the sparkling “gold dust” path up to the hill where she had observed the strange activity the day before. She said that a “shiny red helicopter” suddenly swooped low overhead. “It’s so low I could have touched it if I could have stepped on a car or something,” she added. She said she saw a man in it. “He’s waving at me. …He keeps right on going.” She comes to a pond and says something like, “Here I am God. What do you want? What am I supposed to do?” She looked around and said, “I looked at these like golden archways. Seven of them. I counted seven.” I assumed these were in the sky. But suddenly Stella says she looked at her watch and noticed it was 20 minutes to eight and her kids were going to be going to school. She had left the house at 6 a.m.
When she returned home her family was calling for her. “My husband thought I was in the lake!”
“Later on things got worse. There were things happening around there. Very frightening things and they thought I needed help, and off I went to a hospital, against my will. That’s a long story.”
In my notes from my first visit with Stella at her Massachusetts home back on January 5, 1974, I wrote: “…a friend recommended a book for her to read pertaining to the events of Fatima, so she was driving home (I assume) with this book in her car when suddenly a gust of wind lifted into the air a box that had been sitting alongside of the road and on the underside it had written the word Fatima!”
Stephen Putnam shared with me the following eyewitness account also describing a fascinating religious visionary type of experience that a visitor to Stella’s home also claimed that she had in 1967.
In this issue, there is an interview with former Brazilian Denise Uchoa Slater on a large number of highly unusual and fascinating UFO and paranormal experiences shared by her and members of her family in Brazil. However, it was her grandfather, Brazil’s distinguished General Alfredo Moacyr Uchoa, who was at the center of her family’s involvement with these high-strange manifestations. Following our interview, I questioned Denise specifically about how her grandfather became interested in the UFO subject, as there seemed to be some uncertainly. She checked into this further, contacted her father in Brazil, and wrote me back the following: He (grandfather) narrates it in his SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH - his autobiography, page 207: (translated/summarized by me here):
In 1960, as a colonel, attending the War College (Escola Superior de Guerra - ESG) in Rio de Janeiro, he and other students were invited to watch at the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABI), a documentary that was released for "reserved viewing" by the US Air Force. Each Brazilian officer could bring his spouse to attend the event. He brought my grandmother along. It consisted of a film made by the U.S. Airforce, based on the findings of the Blue Book Project, and at the end, it showed a recording of the radar tower in Washington DC, and the audio, of 14 UFOs over Washington DC. All official recordings and video. They showed in the video the emotional reaction of the people and technician on the tower. "We could clearly see the objects in the radar. Then we saw four more ‘points’ on the radar, the four US Air Force jet fighters, following the 14 points, in a recon flight. All of a sudden all UFOs disappear and we hear the tower audio 'it was like the objects disappeared at infinite speed.'"
The narrative of the video continued. But this is to show that it was the turning point on my grandfather's interest in UFOs.