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Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, November 2022



Alleged Alien Devices, interactive technologies, and Consciousness

by: Brent Raynes






Back in 2009, I interviewed two separate UFO experiencers who described encountering an alien humanoid figure carrying a very mysterious sphere in their left hand. In one case, the witness was out deer hunting in Cherry Creek, New York. It was winter, around December, perhaps 1991. Suddenly, he spotted a deer with antlers perhaps 50 yards away. It was the perfect opportunity to take a clean shot of this deer, but oddly he was unable to bring himself to shoot it. Then after about 30 seconds a human-like figure dressed in shiny tight-fitting attire took the deer’s place! He said that it’s clothing glistened in the sunlight with a mother of pearl quality. “It’s funny though that I can remember those details but can’t see the face of the person,” he added. [It’s noteworthy that other witnesses have also had a similar problem remembering the face in other entity encounters] The figure raised his left arm and there in his left hand was a shiny silver metallic ball with a chrome looking finish. “I watched this silver ball rise up out of his hand and then it was almost instantaneously in my face,” he told me, explaining how it was about the size of a golf ball, was suddenly at eye level, and was a mere six to eight inches from his face!

“That’s all I can remember,” he added. “Then I woke up.”

I feel I should mention that the Cherry Creek hunter has a twin brother, and like many twins, they have shared a psychic type bond going back to childhood. Both have many memories of a psychic nature, along with incidents with strange entities – some ghostly and others seemingly UFO related. And, I should add, the twin brother also had a very odd hunting experience too. He had been an avid hunter who loved bow hunting but lost his desire to continue the practice after an incident where the deer suffered greatly in its death, its final vocalizations “reaching into my soul” he declared. Also, during that same hunt he heard, for about five minutes an odd “low resonating hum” similar to a didgeridoo coming at him from all directions. “I sold my bow, gave my tree stands away, and asked the spirits for forgiveness,” he told me.

In addition, the Cherry Creek twin told me that many times something very peculiar happens to him with other people he’s with, though he seldom mentions it to the person. He will become light-headed he says, and he’ll see a kind of a haze around a person he’s with, and then clear psychic images may come to him. “the image then begins to tell me things or show me pictures in my head.” His wife’s deceased father appeared to him before they were married. “She was crying,” he recalled. “She wanted to know how I knew such intimate details of her life with him.”

“My left hand shakes for some unknown reason when I have had those experiences,” he noted. “It also gets hard to breathe, like I’m trying to catch my breath.” He is right-handed, while his twin is left-handed. Doing research on this matter, I found a few other documented cases involving experiencers who claimed to have encountered meeting up with humanoids who had these mysterious power spheres that they manipulated with in their left hands. Two in Argentina and one in Finland. [I described all of these cases in my book John A. Keel: The Man, The Myths, and the Ongoing Mysteries, 2019].

“The left-handedness seems to indicate the increased participation of the right lobe of the brain in mediumistic states,” the late Dr. Nando Fodor, a New York psychoanalyst, wrote in his exhaustive An Encyclopedia of Psychic Science. In reviewing the literature on mediums, he found that there were quite a number of instances of reported mediumistic entrancements where the mediums would switch from being right-handed to becoming left-handed. UFO contactee Brian Scott of California was reportedly seen by a witness while in a state of like automatic writing. The witness claimed: “He looked strange: facial features were taut, like a semi-solid rock. His eyes had a fixed stare. Not on the paper, but on the wall in front of his desk, and his facial color was a full gray; nothing even resembling skin tone as I know it. All the while Brian’s eyes were fixed on the wall his left-hand continued writing. Brian is not left handed.”

Back in the 1890s Swiss psychologist Theodor Flournoy of the University of Geneva was studying a popular medium of the time known as Helene Smith, who produced a complex kind of “Martian” language, interestingly enough, while in trance. When she would be in a trance state, Smith would often look for her pocket on the left side instead of the right and if one of her fingers was pinched or pricked behind a screen, the corresponding finger on the opposite hand would be agitated.

I found there are a prominent number of mediums/psychics who have had voice phenomena that they consistently heard out of their left ear, meaning it was quite possibly a psychic process being generated though their right brain hemisphere. I was awakened to this kind of event in 1973 when a Florida experiencer described a classic domed disk close encounter, soon after which she was subject to poltergeist activity, that involved a voice speaking her name, always on her left side.

Hopefully, the readers will forgive me for venturing from the subject of alleged alien devices to matters of consciousness, though to my mind it’s all potentially interconnected. At any rate, I’ll now return to the “devices.”

In the second case I mentioned earlier, the other person was Johnny Sands, a country singer and stuntman who claimed that during a visit to Las Vegas he had driven a short distance out into the desert on the night of January 29, 1976, and encountered a UFO and was approached by a humanoid being who likewise produced a mysterious silver colored grapefruit sized sphere from its left hand that quickly grew in size to a basketball. “Then he let go of it and it began to rotate,” Sands told me. “As it did he would put his fingers over the top of it and like firecrackers would go off on top of this ball.”

Sands claimed the alien gave him a message, which he recalled as something like this: “Nuclear explosions are causing a problem in the solar system. These things that you’re setting off on this earth are causing troubles not only for you but for us and we cannot have this kind of thing to continue because it is going to upset the balance of everything that we intend for the future.”

“The opening story reminds me a great deal of the Higdon abduction, and the didgeridoo sound (that persistent buzz!) has been reported in lots of Bigfoot reports,” Ecology of Souls author Joshua Cutchin remarked when I gave him a sneak preview of this column. “I suspect it’s somehow tied to altered states of consciousness! Which hands holds the devices is a great question, and exactly the sort of thing that too often goes overlooked.”

Back in 2016, while volunteering to assist the UFO contactee survey program of the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences (FREE), I decided to approach its founder Rey Hernandez about creating an additional survey instrument requesting experiencers share their personal accounts and experiences with “alien devices.” I was interested to see what other accounts might emerge and what additional similarities might also present themselves. Over a hundred different accounts soon came in and though I didn’t see any left-handed sphere descriptions, several different categories of “alien devices” did nonetheless soon present themselves, that also had their own unique psychic signatures too.



The Mysterious Wands



Case 1

One night in early November 2011, at approximately 9:45 p.m., a young man was driving to his father’s house. When he was just a few miles distance, he noticed a very bright light behind a tree line. “It was bright white and casting shadows all the way to the road,” he noted. “I stopped, got out of my truck, and began walking to see what it was. My mind was running through the things it could be as I walked. At first I thought it was a fire truck due to the size and color of light I was seeing. Red, white, amber, etc. Then I thought maybe it could be deer poachers shining for deer with spotlights, but as I rounded the corner tree line and got into sight of this object, I got a new thought that permeated my mind. The best way I can sum it up in English is, ‘This is not how this is supposed to happen.’ Like this was off protocol.”

As he approached it was sleeting. He described how he came so close to it that he could have hit it with a rock. He stated it was a craft about 50 feet in diameter. “It looked black or like matte or brushed black aluminum,” he explained. “The left and right edges of this craft is where the light was emitting from. Not from bulbs, but like electric/plasma discharge.” He had been kneeling by a large bush and then stood up, removing his hood to hear better. He heard a “low humming” noise. “I pulled my sleeves to my coat up to see my long hair on my arm standing up. I felt like a bass in my chest, like at a concert.”

His heart had been pounding. He began to worry he might die. He noticed it had stopped sleeting. Then the light from the craft died down and suddenly it was dark, though soon there was a light behind the craft was all he could see at that point. “Then there was the silhouette of a person not unlike me, tall, lanky, thin. They held a wand, or what looked like a rod with a soft bright white light on the end. Next thing I know I’m alone standing in the dark. I turn in fright and begin to run. I slip on the cold wet grass and jam my pinky. I run back to the truck, lock the door, and put the key in.”

He continues on to his father’s house. Later he discovers that he had two and a half hours missing that he couldn’t fully account for. He remembered how it only took a few minutes to walk out to the craft. However, he then adds the following: “There is a lot I can’t remember about that night. I had bits and pieces of that gap in time, but just small things. The entrance in was octagonal in shape. I remember curved hallways with rooms on one side. I remember the floating metal table that molded a hold for me when placed on my belly. I remember a room where I could observe the earth from a low earth orbit. The walls could become windows, like transparent. That changed me. That feeling is what helped me remember.”



Case 2

Another subject recalled his encounter with a “typical lightbulb headed ‘alien’”. He explained: “It was wearing a white body suit and carrying a rod that was about two inches in diameter and 9-12 inches long. I was in the saucer, which had landed. There were other landed saucers too. We were landed near a very small body of water in the Huachuca Mountains. I could see the lights from the military base I was stationed at for military intelligence school. I was on the second floor of the craft and saw the being out of the window on the ground. My father was semi-conscious in the room and I became angry. I yelled and cursed at the entity and said something like, ‘Come up here so I can kick your ass!’ Then he pointed the rod at me and it started to light up and I lost consciousness.”

He couldn’t recall exactly when this incident occurred, but felt that it was either in the fall of 1999, or the spring of 2000.



Case 3

In another account, a subject claimed he had been brought onboard a craft back in September 2012 by two small greys. He was then taken by a large being that resembled a typical grey, but actually had darker, almost brown skin. He was taken to a room where he met a “mantis type” alien who was waiting for him. “I heard its voice in my head very softy say, ‘Don’t be scared my child.’ I then got a feeling that I knew this being. I was no longer scared.”

In the being’s left hand was what the subject called a “light rod,” which he described as a thin, pencil like rod where half of it would glow light blue. “When something was commanded with the light rod, the end would become exponentially brighter for a split second.” He claimed the ship he was onboard was in the air over Lake Superior, on the Ontario side.

French born scientist Dr. Jacques Vallee, in his 1969 classic Passport to Magonia, detailed an interesting rod type case. It was from Jalapa, Mexico, from sometime early in September 1965, involving a hovering UFO and a black-clad being with eyes gleaming like a cat holding a shining metal rod who then vanished from sight in the presence of a local reporter, two taxicab drivers, and a bullfighter.

Vallee noted, “According to the Western cabalists, the sylphs flew through the air with the speed of lightning, riding a ‘peculiar cloud.’ It is noteworthy. too, that in France some fairies are supposed to bear a luminous stone. an object that is often part of the equipment of flying saucer occupants. Many a ‘little man’ has a light on either his belt, chest, or helmet. In a French tradition that survives in modern novels, the fortunate mortal who can steal the fairy’s luminous stone is sure of lifelong happiness.”



Case 4

Here’s an interesting case that also references the rod aspect. The subject described how in the Spring of 1977, at age 10, around midnight, he awoke to the feeling that he was “floating above the bed” and was unable to move. A blinding light was coming in the window from outside. Suddenly, it was as though he was seeing through another person’s eyes – someone who was approaching his house from the forest. Eventually it physically entered his room, at which point he realized there was more than one, and that they had black eyes, large heads, and were thin. “They marched in perfect unison,” he noted. A silver rod, producing a ‘buzzing sound,’ was held up to the subject, at which point he went unconscious for about an hour. Last memory was of falling into the bed from what seemed like 3 feet above the mattress.

Years later, in his early 20s, in a different location, he described a second conscious memory with alien beings. He was laying awake on his back when he noticed a blue flash of light through a window. “I had this strange sensation again of something entering my mind,” he noted. Then he saw three of them and was attempting to fight and run when suddenly a fourth one appeared who had come from the other side of him. “As soon as I saw this fourth one he had this silver buzzing rod in his hand….It struck my neck and I was incapacitated. It seemed like smart electricity as it seemed to shut my body down system by system.” He explained how he thought he was going to die. “My life flashed before my eyes…I was pretty certain I was going to die and maybe that is why I got the life review. In itself it was profound. I watched the rest of the event from outside my body somehow. It was like my soul was watching what was happening now. Very strange. Everything after this point was cloudy. They moved me out my window…through it! And up to some aircraft. I knew in the journey upwards where I was going and I was in dread. There was nothing holding me up at all. I was floating upwards and had whatever was holding me let go, I would be dead. I was placed on a table. I don’t remember how I got inside this craft. Cold metal table again and sperm extraction by a machine. …I was there for a while and there were taller creatures of the same type that seemed to be controlling everything.”

I found this report especially interesting as I had spoken on the phone with an experiencer in west Tennessee who claimed he had experienced seeing through the eyes of an alien approaching his house. I’ve also heard of three greys walking into a woman’s bedroom in “perfect unison” from another Tennessee experiencer.

As I was writing this article, I mentioned what I was writing about to Barbara Fisher of the Six Degrees of John Keel podcast. She reminded me of the Maurice Masse case over in Valensole, France back in 1965. It was July 1, around 6 a.m., as Masse, a farmer, had been out in his lavender field when he heard a strange noise. He thought it was perhaps a military helicopter but instead he discovered that an egg-shaped craft with two 4-foot-tall humanoid beings with abnormally large bald heads and pale skin, wearing green one-piece suits, were standing near the landed craft. One of the beings reportedly pointed a small tube at him which produced a light that paralyzed him temporarily, after which the two entities soon boarded the craft which quickly took off and was soon out of sight. Masse’s paralysis lasted about 15 minutes.



Case 5

In the next account, the subject described how the rod might not only have controlled him but perhaps others in the neighborhood. His experience occurred in the Fall of 2008. He recalled: “I was lying in bed reading. I suddenly had the urge to go outside. My wife was asleep beside me. My son was asleep in his bedroom. I got up and went out the back door without putting on shoes, my pants or anything. Just my underwear and T-shirt. I was struggling to kick my brain into gear as I walked down the back porch steps to the driveway. It was about 2 o’clock in the morning but I could hear distant occasional traffic on the main road about half a block away down on our quiet suburban street. It’s still so clear because it was so wrong. I turned around the corner of the house onto the driveway and started down and that’s when I saw the craft hovering there waiting. And it all came flooding back like it always did. I kept walking. As I passed the front porch, I could see five or six other people approaching from neighboring houses, walking leisurely toward the craft. It just floated there about two or three feet off the ground, right in the middle of the road. It was glowing, dull silver-gray. The shape of an inverted contact lens, but slightly elongated, about 30 feet long by about 20 feet wide. By no means small. I stopped for a moment and just looked at it thinking, what if someone looks out their window, what if a car comes along? But of course, no one would look, and if they did they wouldn’t see anything. And no cars would come down the street. They would just take another route for this for that reason.”

“I had been standing too long. There was a mantis-like being standing next to a short ramp leading to the side of the craft. I could feel a wave of annoyance and I didn’t know if that came from him or someone inside. I thought it was coming from him. I didn’t’ remember ever coming into contact with one of the mantis like beings before.”

“People were filing their way inside and I was still standing there just looking. He had a metallic rod in his hand. It was a dull silver color. He was standing to the left, but I believe the rod was also in his left hand. It was about 12 inches long or so. He seemed to touch it or tap it to a slim rectangle in his other hand (made me think of a clipboard or tablet. Could only see the back. Maybe ¼ inch thick, opaque gray) as people arrived, but he also pointed to at each one, matter of factly, not in a greeting way (no one acknowledged). He looked back at me and I walked to the edge of the ramp and stopped. His body shifted and though there was no change of facial expressions, the sense of annoyance became very strong. He motioned toward me with the rod and that’s all I remember until awaking hours later in my bed. I cannot recall any flash of light.”

He did however recall an incident in early spring of 2008 when there was a light associated with a rod like object. He claimed he was onboard a craft well above the earth. He was able to see outside and noticed the curve of the earth, estimating the ship was perhaps about 200 miles up. He was in the presence of a tall Grey. A tiny crystal, estimated at perhaps 1/32 inch in diameter, was removed from a mandibular bicuspid tooth. He claimed it was a “tracking/information device” of sorts. “He (Grey) had me open my mouth and placed a small like rod against my tooth,” he wrote. “It was about the size of a small ball point pen. I could see a brief glow transferred up through my cheeks, just a couple of seconds. When he withdrew it, the crystal was on the tip of the rod.”



The East Side Zombies

In 1975, I paid a visit to noted ufologist Don Worley of Connersville, Indiana. I immediately discovered that he was vitally interested in alien contactee and abductee accounts and for a good number of years afterwards we shared extensive correspondence. He also came upon a story similar to the Case 5 one just cited. Nicknamed the East Side Zombies of his own hometown of Connersville, it involved a female abductee, her sister, and her daughter who had allegedly seen a group of people from an adjacent street assembled and standing “like zombies” near a low hovering UFO.



Historical and modern archetypes of the Magic Wand

I’ve been reading up some on magic wands and read that the first known references to them appears in the writings of the Greek writer Homer in his Iliad and The Odyssey. I thought it interesting that in the Iliad that the wand was used by the god Hermes to put people to sleep, as that’s what the aliens in our contactee accounts can reportedly use it for too. Magic wands are also described in the 13th century Latin grimoire The Oathbound Book of Honorius, along with the 1862 Philosopie Occulte by French occultist Eliphas Levi. Czech occultist Franz Bardon wrote in the 1950, “The most important aid in ritual magic is, and always will be, the magic wand.”

Magic wands appear as magical instruments also in today’s science fiction fantasies like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of O, and C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and one would be completely remiss if one left out the Harry Potter series.

As with the wand/rod presence in a more technological guise as with the modern contactees, I can see the BBC’s Doctor Who’s handy little ultrasonic screwdriver as also an archetypal upgrade to the magic wand.

I discussed the “wand” matter with Joshua Cutchin, who replied, “Regarding wands, I’d add that, much to my surprise, it isn’t a modern fairy accoutrement either—it actually appears in some of the earliest aos sidhe myths as well. I suspect that, should you broaden your definition of ‘wand,’ you’ll find it even earlier than the Homer—lots of the staves, rods, maces, keys, even oars of these old psychopomps are, to my mind, variations on the wand theme. It seems that in these older mythologies, they seemed to facilitate travel to the Otherworld. Then it was physical; I suspect today, among UFO experiencers, this travel is mental.”

“If you want to go back even further, things resembling wands all over shamanic practice (which likely predates Homer by orders of magnitude). For example, Altaic shamans shake birch branches over horses’ backs in preparation of riding them into the Otherworld. Again, transportation is emphasized (and UFOs are nothing if not a transportation-obsessed phenomenon).”

Some FREE survey respondents associated a rod type instrument with medical sounding procedures. However, according to the accounts, the beings weren’t always too keen on the use of anesthesia. One person described a small Grey with a thin 8-10 inch long silver cylinder that was inserted into the subject’s right nostril. “It was very, very painful. He was pushing and pushing. It was very traumatic.” A woman described how her being took something about 13.5 inches long, about the width of like a thick piece of spaghetti, with an orange glow at the tip, that she claimed was inserted into the inner corner of her right eye. Another person described a short Grey coming into their bedroom and inserting a long and very sharp needle like object into their left eye, for about 10 minutes! “It hurt a lot but I couldn’t do anything.” One woman described a unique and non-invasive method of bodily probing. “I saw many times a Grey man wave his hand over my abdomen and a hologram of my organs appeared above me. When I asked him he said he had a microchip in his hand. He opened doors the same way.” However, she also noted, “Thin long silver surgical instruments were used in my uterus to remove and reimplant my fetus. Then again with a different instrument to inject something into the wall of my uterus.” She did describe pain from this.



The Black Boxes

Then there are the mysterious “black boxes” that many contact experiencers have reported. Abductee Jim Sparks described in his book The Keepers (2006) how two Greys presented him with a small black “perfect cube” they called “a gift,” which contained about a half dozen long glass tubes. At the bottom of each tube he found a “thick, dark brown, sticky, smelly fluid, about two inches deep.” When Sparks asked one of the Greys what the “dark stuff” was, the being replied, “It’s your gifts. We extracted it from your lungs.” Sparks, a smoker at the time, came to wonder if that was what it was about.

Sparks account reminded me of a Native American medicine woman who described to me how following vision quests she began to have strange memories about clear foot long tubes, about 3 inches around, that seemed to have something “like electricity running back and forth inside.” She recalled a memory of a being holding one of these tubes and moving it around on various parts of her body. “When he takes it away he looks at it and it’s filling up with green slime. Seriously, it was weird! It was like it was picking up negativity out from me. All of this green slime was filling up this tube. He took this tube and he put it in a box and he sealed it.”

In a skype interview with life-long contact experiencer Mike Stevens of New Hampshire, he described how a female being presented him with a small box that contained an object that resembled an arrowhead composed of what looked rather like crystal or perhaps glass. “She said it was the key and I have no idea what that means, if that was a metaphor of if that was a physical key,” Stevens explained. “I really don’t know what it means at all.” [Maine author Nomar Slevik covers much more about this story in his book Granite Skies]

From 1981 to 1995, I worked closely with an organization called the UFO Contact Center International (UFOCCI) out of Washington state. The black box came to our attention then too. “Once a black box was placed at my feet and another placed at my head,” one person wrote. “A blue lightning like spark passed through my body. I was told I was receiving treatment for hepatitis, something I never knew I had. I got myself tested and found there were indeed antibodies to hepatitis.”

Sandy Nichols, of Thompsons Station, Tennessee, who formed the Alien Research Group (ARG) claims to have had three separate experiences with a mysterious “box.” The first one was back in June 1979, around 3 a.m., on a country road returning home after visiting a friend. Suddenly, he says he became nauseated and pulled over. He told me he laid his arms and head on the steering wheel. Then at some point he noticed “three short Grey’s” emerging from the woods nearby. He concludes that he was in an out-of-body state as he stated, “I could see through the roof of my car and also saw myself with my arms and head still lying on the steering wheel.” Next the Greys floated him through the woods into a large field where a car was parked and a ranch style house in the distance. Taken to the car, a tall male Grey was standing by an open trunk. “He then handed me a black, square box and said, ‘This is yours. Carry it to the one behind you.’ I turned around, and the ranch style home was now a fairly large, circular UFO, about a hundred feet away, resting on four, thin legs, with a solid looking, smooth ramp angled down from the middle of the UFO and touching the ground.” Standing near the ramp was another tall male Grey. “I then floated over to this Grey and handed him the box, and he said, ‘You learned. You did well!’”

Next it was the mid-80s, Sandy was on vacation with family just outside of Tampa, Florida. By himself, around 1 p.m., he pulled over onto a peninsula, in a very isolated location, and did some fishing for a couple of hours. Since he had to return to family to go out to eat around 6 p.m., he was about to begin packing things up when he heard a man’s voice from behind him. He turned and faced an elderly man, who appeared to be in his early 70s, who was dressed in casual clothing, asking Sandy if he had had any luck fishing. They talked fishing for about ten minutes and then Sandy told the man he needed to pack up and leave. The man’s car was parked about 10 feet behind Sandy’s station wagon and he said he wanted to show him something that was in his trunk. “I thought fishing gear,” Sandy explained. “So we walked to the back of his car and he opened the trunk. The trunk was empty except for a black square box, about 20 inches square. I asked him what was the box and he said I already knew what it was. It was for me. This whole thing scared me and I thought he was going to knock me over the head and throw me in the trunk with the box, and only God knew what kind of shit was in the box. The next thing I knew I was opening my eyes and sitting behind the steering wheel of my car. My car clock read a little after 6 p.m.”

Then sometime later, at a home in Brentwood, TN., around 2 a.m. he went out to the back deck to smoke a cigarette when he saw something very curious in the back yard. “Out in the yard I saw about 15 to 20 small Greys running all around the back yard and looking as if they were playing tag,” Sandy described. “Three more Greys were standing in the yard around a black, square box sitting on tripod legs about 20 or so feet away from the deck and to the left of where I was standing.”

Sandy’s wife even had a dream of seeing a black square box, about the size of a small television, resting on tripod legs.

One male FREE experiencer respondent found the black box encounters occurring in a rather synchronistic way to many experiencers he was meeting. Rey Hernandez kindly provided us an introduction. “In 1990, I talked with a girl who was abducted by the Greys and she was shown a black box that scared her,” he recalled. “Then in 2001, I met another woman with similar experiences with the Greys as me, who had more memories of a similar black box, which contained symbols and puzzles to solve. Not all were logic puzzles but involved feeling and thinking a particular way. Then in 2002 this topic came up with another female friend and she also recalled a black box but not much more. Also in 2002 a female friend was leaving the state. And while she told people it was temporary, I felt it was for good and made a gift and put it in a box. When I gave it to her she was afraid of it and she had a dream that night of me giving her a box. In the dream she did not open it just like in real life. She gave it to a friend and he opened the gift. Lastly, in 2007, a girlfriend was visited by three Greys and also presented a box which made her full of fear. She recalls nothing more. In these examples the closed box was a test. And most were too afraid to open it. The one that did open it only found other puzzles to solve.”

“I don’t recall being shown any black box by the Greys,” this male experiencer noted about himself. “But I was tested and shown images. How this was done I don’t recall. But many of the times the images invoked strong emotions. It could have been love, fear, or anger. But it was always very deep. One image was of a nuclear war and that one was shown around 1975.”

One female FREE respondent reviewing the above observations, wrote, “I have been shown and tested with a black box. It shows them the human’s emotional response to specific visions shown in that box.”

Of course, black boxes, or any other shade of boxes, could possess different purposes or meanings for so-called “aliens” as they would for us, unless of course it’s some deep psychological, archetypal, or psychoid type projection or artifact of consciousness – perhaps a combination of ours and a collective source (personal, genetic, or psychic?) - like synchronicity, something that may connect beyond regular consciousness. Non-causal, non-local quantum science perhaps? What might the connecting X-Factor be?

Another FREE instrumentation survey respondent described how back in July 1989 they encountered three Greys. “One of them handed me a black box with a red light on the top. It was the same size as a size 10 shoe box. It was smooth. There was a slight electrical discharge when I had my hands on the left and right side (shorter size of the box). I started having visions from that box.”

Back in 2019, I happened upon, while thumbing through various issues of my collection of Fate magazines, details on the work of Sarah Estep, the founder of the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena. This was in the May 1996 edition of that magazine, by the way. What really caught my attention was when she mentioned not only spirit communication but what she also had experienced herself which she felt was alien contact. She said those beings had a mechanical tonality and articulated some unknown words. She stated that these entities made reference to a black box they brought down to help them in their communications, and she added, “The archives of ufology outline multitudinous accounts of contactees and abduction experiments, which include the black-box toting alien.”

A small group I had been working with since 2010 with the black box known commonly as a “ghost box,” which often is a Radio Shack digital AM/FM radio modified to operate on continuous scan, with considerable success. We had come upon some pretty odd, and at times downright remarkable receptions, that we even managed to record. While I was rather astounded to receive apparent radio messages from a voice seemingly identifying itself as the late “John Keel,” and even saying my name, as well as other very unusual receptions, UFO abductees Bret Oldham and Sandy Nichols tried to contact aliens. “We got a number of replies that not only sounded very distinct and unique from the usual spirit voices but also knew many things about both of our abduction experiences,” Bret Oldham noted.

Bret speculated, “They generate the speech through computers which is why it sounds synthesized and monotone. I think they were using us as an experiment too. They wanted to monitor our emotional reactions to their replies.”

The rule of thumb in investigative work is to objectively follow the evidence wherever it may lead. But these are not ordinary and normal everyday kinds of experiences that we routinely encounter. I recall John Keel writing me long ago, of how the noted Fortean Ivan Sanderson warned him to treat his efforts to figure it all out as “an intellectual exercise.” As Keel himself was to later learn, it can become like “emotional quicksand” and an obsession that has been the ruin of a good number of marriages, jobs and lives as well.


Thursday, March 28, 2024