Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2022
Encounters with the Unknown
Alien Encounters
by: Patsy Wingate
Patsy Wingate's illustration of a Fleur-de-lis symbol (left) and the mysterious snow symbols (right)
Sometimes I feel like a lonely little cricket in a field full of spiders. I guess that sums up most of my existence after having a lifetime of spiritual and UFO experiences. After marriage and the birth of my oldest son, my husband and I moved to a remote area of Eastern Kentucky. A job opportunity for my husband is what brought us there. While this area is very beautiful, it is a very lonely place with stark hills that rise sharply and dark hollows that lead to caves and underground springs. Having grown up in an urban area, I was accustomed to going regularly to shopping malls and stores of all variety, so I found this new home to be extremely lonely.
One day two girls came by the house where we lived to ask me to join their Christian group. While I did not accept their offer, I did decide to reaffirm my personal relationship with God. Something happened to me prior to my marriage which had led me away from God. I now felt a desperate need to have His presence return into my life.
It was at this time that my husband began directing my attention to strange lights appearing over the steep hills behind our house. My husband expressed how these odd lights seemed to be alive and aware of our presence there. At this time, I had no interest whatsoever in UFOs nor did it even occur to me that these lights were UFOs.
A few nights after encountering the lights, the footsteps and whisperings began – small, soft footsteps and quiet, disturbing whispers within our home at night. I want the world and everyone to know that I will never sleep in the dark again! I consider myself a brave person, but those small, soft footsteps and quiet, disturbing whispers in a dark house miles from anyone or anything cured me completely of any desire to ever sleep in the dark again. My son would be sleeping in the next room, so I would creep cautiously to his door and peep inside, fully expecting to catch him up and awake, but he was always sound asleep. After many nights and even months of these sounds and happenings, I informed my husband that we had to move. I just couldn’t live there anymore. I had to be closer to other people. I needed some rest and I thought all of the strangeness would finally stop.
We moved into a house in nearby Prestonsburg, which is a small town of about three thousand people. The house we rented was situated right on the Big Sandy River with the railroad track directly across on the opposite bank. At first, I felt completely safe again in this house. But after about one year, that all changed.
In fact, it was here that my life changed forever! It was here that the aliens (or whatever they are) became intricately involved with me – the real person inside. I had learned how to separate myself from everyone except God. I grew closer to His presence and love. Somehow, the aliens became aware of these close ties to my Creator. I believe they realized just how strong a person can become if he or she can touch God with their heart and soul.
During one of their nocturnal visits, I was asked this question by them: What is Love? It is when you care more about someone than yourself and the giving of your life for another. They asked if I was willing myself and I responded yes. Then, on the ceiling there appeared a symbol. They said this (meaning the symbol) is you and you are one with it. All in gold, it radiated from above my head. It was an image I did not know.
Upon my coming back into this everyday world, I sketched a picture of this symbol for my husband. He told me it was a fleur-de-lis and represented the French royal family. They had brought it from the Middle East during the wars of Palestine. Its true meaning is the Royal Blood of Christ. I knew in an instant that I was being contacted because of my bloodline, one that came from Christ himself. It was also during these nightly visits that I learned the meaning of the Bible’s Last Supper: When Christ offered up his body and blood in place of ours, then the (alien) consumers of man’s flesh and soul were unable to consume the Spirit of God and could no longer consume us spiritually because of Christ’s truth and love. Living within our hearts, his soul becomes a protecting barrier between us and them. God’s mysteries are open to us and He had revealed many things to me. Christ, his Holy Name, held a new meaning within my heart and gave me a new life.
After these new spiritual revelations from God, there came more strange visits from the aliens. Late one night, during the winter of 1986, I suddenly awoke to the sound of bumping near the eaves of our house. It made a weird metallic sound, going back and forth. You could tell it was a solid object. I tried hard to wake my husband, but all he would do is whisper go back to sleep. This was out of character for him because he had learned to be a light sleeper in the Army. I can’t explain his actions or mine because the sound became quite loud. I obeyed him and went back to sleep. During the night, inside my head a voice instructed me they would leave me a clue to their presence.
The next morning, I felt ill and did not get our children ready for school, but my husband did. There had been a heavy snow a couple of nights earlier. Soon, my husband left with our children. When the house was very quiet, I remembered what the aliens had said. I rushed out to the chimney near where the sound had been. There, I discovered left in the snow was a strange round imprint. It looked about the size of a garbage can lid and was cupped under where the snow had been crystalized like something hot had been suddenly placed there and then froze back again. The symbol of three lightning bolt type markings was in the center of the circle with small round marks also near the lightning bolts. There were absolutely no footprints leading up to this imprint in the snow except my own. I knew that whatever caused it had to land there and then take off again.
Recently, after many years had passed, I discovered that same symbol. My daughter came to me and said she had seen a picture of my symbol on television. It was embossed on a small coin type object made of gold that had been entombed in grave sites found at Stonehenge. She said that researchers had stated that the people buried there were very important because of these solid gold objects found buried with them.
[Editor’s Note: Patsy’s article above appeared in the Spring 1997, No. 38 edition of this magazine, back when we were a print publication. Notice that her experiences happened in and near the small community of Prestonsburg, Kentucky. This is interesting as there are other fascinating stories from that particular region. For example, in Preston Dennett’s book Schoolyard UFO Encounters (2019) he recounted how back on March 15, 1950 the Prestonburg Elementary School had a very dramatic UFO encounter.
It began shortly before 1 p.m. All of the children, 35 total, were out on the schoolgrounds for their recess. Mrs. Alpharetta Kendrick Holbrook was the only teacher watching over them at the time. Suddenly there was what Mrs. Holbrook would later describe as a “terrible deafening roar,” originating from overhead. Everyone looked up into the sky at that point and saw three strange objects approaching. “The children scattered, screaming in terror,” Dennett wrote. “One little girl became violently ill. Several of them, Holbrook said, were convinced that the world was ending. ‘We were all pop-eyed with amazement,’ she said.
“The three objects slowed down as they approached. Then one of the objects crossed over the first two and moved behind them. A strange mist enveloped them. Then, without warning, all three objects accelerated and shot off into the sky.
“Holbrook gathered all the children, calmed them down and ushered them back into the school. She tried to resume teaching, but the children were too excited to learn. Almost an hour later, she was still trying to calm them down when there was another terrifying roaring sound. The UFOs were back.
“Holbrook and her class rushed outside and saw two objects approaching at very high speed. They suddenly slowed down and two more objects dropped down out of the sky, slowed down and joined the other two. “The four objects moved at a slow pace over the school at a very low altitude, and were close and low enough for Holbook and her thirty-one students to ‘study the objects in awe.’ “Holbrook and her students all agree that the objects were not planes or helicopter. They had no wings, tail or other protrusions. They were silver and appeared to be disc-shaped or star-shaped. The objects roared loud enough to shake everything around them. They moved slowly for a short distance before suddenly taking off at an ‘unbelievable speed’ and disappearing into the sky.”
Returning again to Patsy Wingate and her family’s highly unusual experiences, here’s one that she described happened back in 1985:
Patsy was pregnant at the time and the alien visitations had become a “nightly torture.” On this particular occasion there were three entities who had entered her room. “I had planned for days that when they came in that room that I was going to grab it and see what happened,” Patsy Wingate told me in an interview. “I got up out of that bed in a flash when they came through that door and I grabbed that one in the middle. I swear its neck just snapped like a twig. It sounded exactly like a small twig breaking when it broke. That’s how I knew that I had broken its neck. I never had expected to break anything’s neck. The other two that were with that thing, they just put their arms under its arms and dragged it back into this light that came through the window area in the bathroom, above the bathtub. And when they did that they went right back in there and then they went up, like swooshed back up, and of like in a walking fashion but at the same time like they went up. What is so strange is how could they go right through the wall like that?”
“Those two that were with it, they had the funniest kind of look suddenly when I grabbed that particular one,” Patsy recalled. “They seemed surprised. When these things walked in that room they walked together in unison. I’ve never seen anything walk more perfectly together.”
Mothman, or what?
One day Patsy was home with her three young children who had gone upstairs to play. They came back down, pointing upstairs. She investigated and was shocked at what she saw. “It was big about seven feet in length, and it had wings,” she said. “It was lying on the floor. It had these weird bug reflector eyeballs that looked like bicycle reflectors...You know, in a fly's eyes you can see those crisscross things? Well, you could see those little crisscross things when it moved slightly and the light reflected in those eyes.”
Her initial reaction was one of being “horrified...It was like, 'Oh my God, I've got to get out of the house!’” Then she decided she wasn't going to let the creature think she was afraid, so she sat down on a couch and said a prayer while looking at it “in mortal terror.” At some point she decided to leave the warmth of the house and step outside (it was February, and about 25-30 degrees outdoors). “So we [she and the children] ran out the front door and stood out there on that porch in the cold,” she said. They were all barefoot. “Finally, I gave up, I was freezing to death and they were too. When we went back in the house it was gone. My husband was teaching at a community college at that time. When he came home we told him about it.”
She was puzzled how such a thing could have gotten into the house and then somehow gotten back out.
Later the Wingate’s moved to Bristol, Tennessee for a while, where strange things continued to happen. The day before the family moved out of the city they gathered at a local park. Suddenly, Patsy’s husband told her to look up at the sky. There she saw a large clear bubble and floating inside it was the winged thing she had seen in the upstairs of their Kentucky home. Its legs were spread apart and its bat-like wings were stretched out. The bubble floated away over the city and disappeared.
The husband corroborated his wife’s bizarre story, adding that it looked like a gargoyle or winged devil. “I had never seen anything like that before,” he stated. A couple years ago, I was talking with another woman who herself claimed that she has had many strange experiences herself through the years, and vividly recalled one instance back around 1970/1971, when she would have been 7 or 8 years old, where her family was returning home to Pikeville, after a visit with family over in nearby (coincidentally) Prestonsburg, and as she was following family into their home that night she says she saw a very peculiar winged creature flying nearby at a mere 20-30 feet off the ground. “Each of the wings were 4 to 5 foot long,” she recalled. “It was HUGE. No sound, but there were streetlights so it was not pitch black. …I did not get a good look at the head as the creature was moving away from me so my view was from behind. The head was large and bopped up and down as the wings flapped. I thought I was looking at a dinosaur and still do. It was a pterodactyl. Perhaps I saw a glimpse of the past.”