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Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, November 2021



“The truth is out there!”

by: Brent Raynes








“…I’ve got my colleagues who say, ‘Oh my god, the aliens are here!’ I have Jacques Vallee telling me, ‘No, these are inter-dimensional,’ whatever, whatever. So I decided to write down all options and put it in a paper called ‘Ultraterrestrials’ and circulated it among my colleagues to say…we can’t overlook anything…we must not come to a conclusion before we looked at every possibility.”

• Dr. Harold Puthoff, Morgan Arts Council’s Ice House Theatre, Berkely Springs, West Virginia, 02/08/2020



“The truth is out there!”

Everyone should recognize that phrase from the popular TV series The X-Files. To mainstream ufologists it represents their battle cry. Keep looking up and keep investigating the cases. Extraterrestrials are coming to earth! While it may seem obvious to many in ufology, many may be oblivious to the full truth or the full implications embedded within the apparent truth! While the mainstreamers have begrudgingly given some lip service to such terms as “screen memories,” “missing time,” and the “Oz factor,” their interpretations in full usually betray an obstructionist’s state of confirmation bias. They have failed to go far enough into the very curious and anomalous nature of these reports. They too often adopt a belief-ridden perspective on “nuts and bolts” extraterrestrial visitations for which they become so committed to that they will frequently neglect and ignore evidence that doesn’t seem to fit with their beloved theories.

Many moons ago, when I was but a young 19-year-old UFO enthusiast back in 1971, I was given some pointers by noted journalist John Keel on how to best prepare myself to delve much deeper into the complex dimensions of this field. He recommended a book on apparitions by a parapsychologist named G.N.M. Tyrrell, which I quickly acquired, and that I familiarize myself with the medical and psychiatric studies of religious cases before I was to “tackle the UFO variation,” as he stated how he had found that “the contactee experience is identical to religious apparition phenomenon and probably is caused by the same factors.” In 1973, I met an experiencer in Florida who became a ufologist herself after a close-range encounter with a classic domed disk – an encounter soon followed by a series of poltergeist-type events. This lady introduced me to a lot of the very high-strange crossover phenomena that are a part of many of these experiences. It turned out that she too had been a correspondent of Keel’s, and introduced me to one of the psychiatrists who Keel frequently consulted with (one Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz, also a noted parapsychologist), who told me he didn’t see how you could really investigate the UFO enigma properly if you didn’t include the paranormal elements. In 1975, I came to launch my own field investigations in many different states from Maine to Florida, sharing my reports with Dr. Schwarz, and at times even getting recommendations of people to meet and cases to look into. Once I dropped in to see him while in his home state of New Jersey while I was investigating Bigfoot reports, during which time I not surprisingly came upon UFO and psychic things too, and on another occasion I called him from Maine, where I was born and raised, to come up and help investigate a UFO case that involved a lot of paranormal elements, which he did.

Thus years later I was well prepared to expound upon those very overlooked factors in a chapter in Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non-Human Intelligence (2018), released by the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences, and in my own book, John A. Keel: The Man, The Myths, and the Ongoing Mysteries (2019), as well as in my first book Visitors from Hidden Realms (2004).

The popular narrative is an acculturated byproduct of our present epoch that befits mainstream “nuts and bolts” ufology. But alas what really makes it so superior to previous beliefs and interpretations of earlier generations of such beings as fairies, angels, demons, djinn, and so many others which in our so-called modern mindset we dismiss as mere myths and fantasies of less intelligent and superstitious ancestors. But what if underlying our modern space-age based “educated” assumptions about UFOs we’re actually experiencing something uniquely different here – something that represents equally misleading surface appearances. And what if those appearances eventually, let us say in future generations, will also be dismissed as just myths, but of a slightly different order and time.

Our time. This present time that we define as “modern times.” But beware of future “modern times.”

As I’m hammering away on this feature, I just happened to listen to some snippets of a recent Fade to Black podcast by Jimmy Church where he was interviewing my friend Bob Davis, a respected sensory neuroscientist who has been delving deeply into the UFO/UAP question for a number of years now. He made these points that resonate to some degree with what I’m trying to say here. “We’re interacting with a UAP. We can’t explain it. Well, a thousand years ago, they were probably interacting with this same phenomenon. They couldn’t explain it. …The thing is they explained it in the manner that they were only capable of explaining, given the science of the time – given their ability to express themselves at the time. We’re doing the same thing now, at this time, in 2021.” Too many of us are emboldened with an over-confident sense of being part of an era of such superior intellect, insight and science that we fail to adequately recognize and correlate implications and anomalous historical data and place it within its potential frame of reference. Many prefer to distance themselves from such possibilities. Ours, after all, is an age founded, we like to believe and reason, upon sound science and technology that gives us something of a leading edge on the perceived inferior accomplishments of those previous generations.

Have we not, to some degree, developed an over-confident, rather arrogant attitude?

I suspect so.

Our sciences are vital, they reveal many things, and our findings are intended to be founded upon precise terms and definitions that hold a firm grasp on truth and our reality. Objective truth and nothing but the truth. Otherwise, there is that fear that all will collapse into semantic chaos, a seriously flawed state of science if that control isn’t properly maintained and defined. However, science is intended as a tool, not a crutch, and method versus theory and interpretation at various steps along the way. Ultimate and complete conclusions are not magically arrived at overnight. Much experimentation, comparative studies and analysis, peer review, and repeated testing of theory and hypothesis are the necessary ingredients of good and sound science. It often takes a while to arrive at a solid understanding about many things, and ufology is one very tough nut to crack! How scientific and responsible is the civilian ufological community itself?

Half a century ago, John Keel referred to it as an “infant pseudoscience,” a largely belief-ridden field that contributed very little of credible substance. Science is only as good as those who properly use it and possess the necessary qualifications to implement it properly. Sadly however, our so-called modern world has become overrun by irresponsible social media platforms and media outlets that spread confusing and distorted information and views, on many critical issues, as though they were revealing hard and sound facts, where in reality – sadly all too often - there exist no critical checks and balances. And. to further compound the situation, many holding official positions wherein they’re supposed to be looking out for our best interests are instead deliberately misleading the masses for political, religious, and various forms of social and economic gain, a very deplorable but very real situation that makes the circulation of the real and untarnished truth often distorted and not easily available as it should be to the masses. Did one of the most spectacular “flying saucer” sightings occur some thirty years prior to the birth of the “modern” flying saucer era, becoming shelved into a rigid religious context by the Catholic Church? In and around the small village of Fatima, Portugal, a huge crowd, some estimated at 70,00, gathered to watch a miracle predicted by several shepherd children who claimed to have had a number of encounters with the Blessed Virgin Mary. The date was October 13, 1917. Of this event, French-born scientist and noted UFO author and investigator Dr. Jacques Vallee described in his book Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact (1988): “The final ‘miracle’ had come at the culmination of a precise series of apparitions combined with contacts and messages that place it very clearly, in my opinion, in the perspective of UFO phenomena. Not only was a flying disk or globe consistently involved, but its motion, its falling-leaf trajectory, its light effects, the thunderclaps, the buzzing sounds, the strange fragrance, the fall of ‘angel hair’ that dissolves upon reaching the ground, the heat wave associated with the close approach of the disk – all of these are frequent parameters of UFO sightings everywhere. And so are the paralysis, the amnesia, the conversions, and the healings.”

John Keel, in his book UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), delved quite heavily into the Fatima incidents and other similar religious apparitional reports attributed to the Virgin Mary, arguing that most authors made the mistake of concentrating mainly just on the similarities of the October 13th event while ignoring the many strange and significant happenings that were leading up to it in the two years prior. These details, Keel explained, offered significant and comparative insights into the complex UFO syndrome.

“Fatima was a modern event, yet it is already clouded with the distortions of belief,” Keel noted. “As the years passed, the object was turned into a ‘dancing sun,’ the angel hair become ‘rose petals,’ and the entire phenomenon was removed from the field of science and entrusted to the religionists.”

Another highly significant series of Marian events occurred at the Coptic Orthodox Virgin Mary Church in Zeitoun, a small suburb of Cairo, Egypt where from 1968 to 1970, over a quarter of a million people are estimated to have witnessed frequent apparitions – notably of the Blessed Virgin Mary.



Author and psychologist Gregory Little, who has been to Zeitoun and spoken with several of these witnesses, notes: “The Zeitoun case is arguably the most credible and believable of all Marian apparitions. As such, it represents nearly irrefutable proof that some sort of unexplainable manifestations can and do intrude into the physical world in a form that is recognizable and photographable.”

“The apparitions typically appeared after a brilliant series of light bursts around the church’s domes. These bursts lasted about 15 minutes followed by showers of sparkling lights and glowing globs of light floating around the domes. These globs of light often took on the form and shapes of large doves circling the domes. This display was, at times, so bright, that the witnesses couldn’t look directly at it. Then, atop or around the glowing dome a visible female form began moving. It appeared to be a young woman who had an intense, brilliant glow emanating from her. She wore a vail and full robe. She floated and moved around the dome for hours at a time occasionally bowing, holding out an olive branch, and blowing kisses. Sometimes she appeared to be holding an infant and, at times, sat atop a dome cradling the infant in her arms.”

Poltergeist phenomena reported in conjunction with UFO-type events is another area that mainstream ufology often glosses over. It too is another neglected, overlooked aspect within ufology. I found this rare gem of a quote from a 2018 Coast to Coast AM interview with physicist Dr. Eric Davis: “They just threw it out of any of their field investigations and case studies because it did not fit the model of what they believed UFOs or what they hypothesized UFOs to be. And that is extraterrestrials from another planet. And unfortunately, that’s not the truth. The truth is every time you have UFOs, you’re going to have poltergeist associated with them. And I personally experienced it every time I came home from my field trips to the Utah ranch (Skinwalker), and I brought that poltergeist phenomenon home. A couple of the DIA military, uniformed officers who went to the ranch to get a feel for it, to see it and investigate it, also brought poltergeist phenomena home with them.”

Dr. Davis works with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, which was founded by Dr. Harold Puthoff [who was quoted at the beginning of this column on his paper “Ultraterrestrials”]. Davis has also worked with AATIP [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program] and AWSAP [Advanced Weapons Special Application Program].

Speaking of truth and all, I am reminded of a remark Keel wrote me way back in 1970, as he was outlining assorted high-strangeness aspects he was coming upon in the UFO field, complaining how “you have to peel away layers and layers of nonsense to get at the ‘truth.’ And that ‘truth’ is very disappointing indeed. Rather like finding out that the magician performs a marvelous magic trick with a piece of black thread.” Keel was the one who had popularized the term “ultraterrestrial.” In the end though, he wasn’t sure what the hell it was all about, but he certainly felt that it was made up of parts that were more strange and complex than the myopic mainstream seemed capable of processing.


Thursday, March 28, 2024