Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2023
From Sweat Lodge to Flying Saucer
by: Brent Raynes
People search for deep truths and answers in many ways. My journey has introduced me to many individuals who have sought those truths and answers along many different pathways. I came across these people as I myself have often found myself in rather unique settings whereby the odds of such encounters were greatly enhanced.
Some years back (1999 to be exact), we had a Native American sweat lodge that was constructed on the hillside behind our home. We had a variety of interesting guests who would show up for sweats, from near and far. I recall one very friendly, cordial older gentleman named Harold from Alabama who had been on his journey, his spiritual quest for answers, for quite some time. “I had gotten disillusioned with religion,” he began. “So, I started seeking answers. I had some Native American experiences that took me to the spirit world.” Harold recalled how he would from time to time find himself in out-of-body states. The first time it happened he said he had ended up a coma from double pneumonia at age 16. “I looked down on my body and did not want to go back into that painful body.” But he said he realized that he “had to come back to this world and get it right before I could leave again. That’s what was more painful than the physical pain.”
One time in meditation he told me how in one of these out-of-body states he found himself onboard a UFO. “I had the freedom to do anything I wanted to. There was no communications as far as talking.” It seemed like he was in the ship for about three hours. “The beings that I was with were humanoid,” he said. “They were very light skinned. They had blue like uniforms on, and it was not like they were dirty, but they weren’t clean.” He felt they had been traveling among the stars for a good number of years. He remarked on a kind of burnt smell and a high-pitched vibration that hurt his head. His astral head I gathered.
Though Harold said there was no communication with the beings, he somehow knew the craft he was on was traveling through space and that “they were too busy doing their things. Taking care of this journey.” Of the experience he said, “I did it once and never cared to go back. I don’t even talk too much about it to people.” “They may be advanced technologically, but they’re not spiritually advanced as we can do here,” he declared. “You can grow spiritually faster here than any other place there is.” Harold told me he had a brother down in northern Alabama named Ron who, along with his family, was having some pretty strange things going on. He told me that I should contact him, which I did, and it was pretty strange indeed. Involved not only himself but his whole family too. Ron began telling me first about his very odd healing experience. They had recently moved to a home on a bluff that overlooked the Tennessee River. Ron was cutting some trees with a chainsaw when, as he was cutting down a wild cherry tree a large limb struck him in the chest. “It broke two ribs,” he said. He visited a doctor who warned him that because he was a smoker he was likely to develop pneumonia. “One night I was asleep in my recliner in the living room, in front of the open windows,” Ron recalled. “I woke up. It was about 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. I still had my shirt on. My ink pen was in my shirt pocket. I got up to use the bathroom and when I did I instinctively grabbed my chest and was going to make this cough. I did, and it didn’t hurt, and it surprised me because there was no pain whatsoever. So I did it again and there was no pain. I grabbed my chest and I looked and my shirt was burned. It wasn’t really burned like a hole, like fire. It was like heated, right over those two ribs. It just happened to be that my pen was in my pocket right over those two ribs where they were broken and there was no pain. But I saw the brown on my shirt pocket. I pulled my pen out. The plastic was melted, on that area, and the ribs were healed. I never had another pain out of it. I’ve still got the lumps, calcification from where they were broken.”
The family began to see puzzling lights at night. “The river was about a mile or less away, and the river itself was like approximately 2 1/2 miles wide at that area and then on the other side there’s a forest area. It went up another mountain adjacent to the mountain that we lived on, which was Sand Mountain, but that wooded area had little inlets and stuff from the river and you could see the lights go down in those trees and disappear. You could see the light beyond the trees and then it would raise up and at times it would get so bright, like an arc welder, even being four miles away, and then at times it actually moved over the river and go down like it would disappear under the water – barely see a little glow – because you could watch it go up and down, and it would go straight up in the air, like 300 feet or so and then it would become real bright, like an arc welder, and then it would flicker and get real dim and move around in just erratic patterns, and then just almost disappear. It would move so fast it would almost look like it disappeared.” “Then one night I heard this loud noise right over our house. I woke up and I had this feeling like somebody was looking at me or something. And this noise, it’s hard to describe. Electronic noise. It was like directly over our house. We were in a real secluded area. I wasn’t the only one that heard this. Afterwards I could hear dogs everywhere barking. And several things happened. Like one night my wife went downstairs and our downstairs door we kept locked and bolted and my son, who is now 15 – he was about 9 I’d say – she said the back door was open and the wind was blowing in and he was laying on the floor in front of the open door. She doesn’t know what woke her up, but she went downstairs and there he was laying on the floor.”
“He and my wife had a dream and when they compared dreams they were identical. He drew a picture about a craft landing. A UFO type craft. My wife confirmed that that was what she had dreamed.” Interestingly, I was told they both had this dream on the same night.
“I have a daughter, and she said that men would walk around in the back of the house, which there was nothing but bluffs there, with these flashlights. Because lights would shine through the windows.”
“It really started before we moved there. We lived in Guntersville, Alabama. We lived in a regular neighborhood. It’s a small town. I was with my brother and his son. We stopped at like a little VFW club – American Legion or something. They closed at 10 I believe. So we left and we went directly up the causeway up to the mountain where he lived and went to his house and got out of his van. We were going to install a headlight. One of his headlights was out and she (brother’s wife?) said, ‘You’re all doing this in the middle of the night?’ and we said, ‘Well, no it’s not late,’ and it was like 12:30 and we couldn’t believe it. You know like an hour and a half or more. I retraced it. It upset me so much that I took my car and I timed it – our exact route. The only thing we did was we stopped in a rural area, walked over into some bushes and urinated, and got right back in the van and went right on to his house. I reproduced our actions several times and timed it and it was always in 2 or 3 minutes of each other, around 12 to 15 minutes is all it took. But we were missing like over an hour and a half. And right after that I had this real vivid dream that I was laying on something – it wasn’t a table – it was like a bed or whatever, but there was an area to my right arm with some instrumentation and directly to my lower right was these two or three tall, slim beings, and there was a bright light – but it wasn’t actually like a light bulb. It was just a bright light and these two or three tall, slim beings were like examining me and to my left, across a small expansion, was several of these smaller, darker beings, and they were a lot shorter in stature and shorter in status. It was like they were learning or whatever. They were observing. These taller ones were standing to my right, below my right arm.”
“The next day I had two identical scars above the heel, between the ankle and the Achilles tendon, on each foot. Exact location. Duplicate location. Exact same size and they were like a fresh pink scar that I had never had before, on both feet. I’d say in a month they healed up. Month or six weeks. They were about half the size, or maybe a third of the size of a pencil eraser in circumference, and they were identically on my left and my right, on the inside, between the ankle and my Achilles tendon. I took a ruler and measured and they were exactly identical. And that’s when all this activity started.”
