Alternate Perceptions Magazine, February 2025
Diary of a Lifelong Anomalist
by: Daniel Drasin

You might say I became an anomalist early on.
It was the mid-1940s, and the curtain of ridicule around the UFO issue hadn't come down yet. As a kid growing up in rural New Jersey, I was fascinated by the UFO\ reports often broadcast by Frank Edwards, an evening newscaster at a major New York radio station. When he reported a sighting and landing near the Ft. Dix military reservation, not far from where I lived, my first thought was "my people are coming back!" So where did that come from? I also thought humans were funny looking -- among other things, our hands and feet were too asymmetrical. Where did THAT come from?
At about the age of five I started having precognitive dreams. This didn't make sense to me, but it was enough to demonstrate to me that "in the theatre of life, things go on backstage." I.e., that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
After moving to Brooklyn about 1950 I became an aficionado of Long John Nebel, who hosted a midnight-to-dawn radio show called "The Party Line" -- on WOR, a powerful AM station that covered half the country at night. Long John -- the Art Bell or George Noory of his time -- covered all things paranormal with his interviews of researchers, authors and experiencers. Nothing was off the table, including a fair number of dubious claims. But for the most part Long John's guests were articulate, informative, and eager to challenge the dominant paradigm. I couldn't get enough of them. My stepmother couldn't have cared less and would tiptoe into my room in the wee hours to pull my headphones off so I could get some sleep and be ready for school in the morning.
Into my teen years I probably read everything in print about UFOs but hadn't yet grasped the breadth and scope of paranormal phenomena (... or what passes for them in our culture, where we often can't talk openly about these things. So, could they in fact be a good deal more normal than we realize? But I digress...)
In the early 1960s I began a long career as a documentary filmmaker -- my first film, made in 1961, titled SUNDAY, is still being shown at international film festivals. My work took me to the far corners of the earth, but no place was more fascinating or memorable to me than a town on the Ohio River in West Virginia named Point Pleasant.
It was now 1967. I was living in Manhattan and mentioned to a friend that I had just sighted a UFO over the Hudson River. She'd just seen an ad for a talk by the great writer/investigator John A. Keel, so she suggested I contact him. I attended his talk, buttonholed him afterward, and we soon became friends. By late '67 I'd accompanied John on four trips to Point Pleasant and had planned out a TV documentary, which almost got funded by the Public Broadcast Laboratory. Alas, the film never got made, but meanwhile I'd been immersed in the full gamut of witness testimony in the town about all manner of weirdness, including the infamous Mothman, UFOs, Men in Black and so forth. I also experienced a few anomalies myself, not the least of which occurred after I'd returned to New York, on the fateful day of December 15th, 1967.
On our last visit to Point Pleasant, John and I had been given a prediction by a local psychic: "There will be a disaster on the river,” and a power blackout or something “the night President Johnson lights the White House Christmas tree." So, John and I agreed that we'd meet at his apartment that evening, watch TV, and see if anything happened as predicted.
When I arrived at John's, he introduced me to an old friend of his, Joe, who'd suddenly turned up at John's door that very day after an absence of some years. As planned, we switched on the TV news, watched the White House ceremony, and that was that. John and Joe went out to dinner and attended an evening UFO conference. I went back home and switched on my TV... just as the news broke that a bridge over the Ohio River at Pt. Pleasant had collapsed, with great loss of life.
The next day, John's friend Joe had disappeared again, and was untraceable.
We later learned that in December of 1967 Joe had been dead for two years.
Shortly thereafter, one evening I experienced a peculiar, very strong tingling sensation around my whole body for about a minute. A half-hour later the phone rang, with the news that our main contact person in Point Pleasant, journalist Mary Hyre, had passed away a half-hour ago.
One evening after returning from one of my earlier trips to Point Pleasant, I had written a silly song about the Mothman, picked up my guitar and recorded the song on a small reel of tape. The next morning the tape was gone. I never found it.
Fast forward to a summer evening in 1970 in Sugarbush Vermont, where I was working on a film shoot at the local airport. I was driving to a nearby friend's place whose location I knew well -- it was at a prominent intersection about a mile away. Darkness had fallen, and though there would have been no reason for me to have missed this landmark, I somehow found myself on a narrow, remote country road that passed through weedy fields. Suddenly my headlights picked up someone walking along the right shoulder with his back toward me. He was dressed in a silver-gray business suit, carried an attaché case, and was walking robotically. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I floored the car, only to have the most utterly humongous buck deer I'd ever seen leap across the road in front of me. I slammed on the brakes, turned the car around and, though terrified of seeing that strange man again, figured I'd best just go back the way I came. The man, however, had disappeared. Within a minute's time, there was the intersection and my friend's house.
By 1973 I had settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I began a series of remarkable Ouija board sessions with a talented psychic friend that continued, on and off, for nearly a decade. In the course of these sessions, all of which I recorded and transcribed, we communicated with a particular group of ETs who claimed they'd been around the earth for a few hundred years, were studying our civilization, and were fascinated with, among other things, our mass spectator sports. They actually gave us their names. Later, while camped out overnight with a friend in an area of Sonoma County where UFOs had been seen, I mentioned one of these ETs' names. Instantly we saw three bright flashes in the sky exactly where we'd been looking. A few hours later I once again mentioned this name, and again, three brlght flashes! A short while later we witnessed a glowing "star" moving across the sky irregularly as if tacking between random points.
In the early 1980s I worked with a team that was investigating the "Face" and other possibly artificial features on the surface of Mars. During that time, I awoke one morning to find a red Tibetan neck cord draped over my office chair. It was the sort of cord that Tibetan monks wear around their necks. Its knot was intact, shiny, and well worn. I have no idea where it came from... or how it managed to get off the head that had worn it.
In the mid-'90s, after reading Robert Monroe's books, I became intrigued with out-of-body and near-death experiences. Then I met researcher Mark Macy, a pioneer in the field of Instrumental Transcommunication ("ITC") -- communication from the afterlife via modern electronics -- and I was completely hooked. In the early 2000s, co-producer Tim Coleman and I traveled across the US and to four European countries, producing two feature-length documentaries on afterlife communication:
CALLING EARTH documents many examples of the Electronic Voice Phenomenon ("EVP") as well as visual ITC, an international ITC conference, and a sequence devoted entirely to debunking ignorant skeptical attacks on these practices.
SCOLE: THE AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENT documents the longest-running, most successful experiment in physical mediumship ever conducted. It ran for five years in the tiny English village of Scole, amassed an enormous amount of physical evidence, was witnessed and systematically monitored by properly skeptical investigators, and passed all scrutiny with flying colors.
In 2018 I met two extraordinary mediums, Jeanne Love and Regina Ochoa, and have worked closely with them ever since. Jeanne and Regina are perhaps best known for channeling the crews of the lost NASA Space Shuttles, Challenger and Columbia. In 2021 we launched our website, www.cosmicvoices.network. The site features many remarkable channeling sessions with folks on the other side, both well-known and obscure. Most recently we've been working closely with Wendy Zammit, who hosts a weekly afterlife-focused "Global Gathering" on Zoom every Sunday (see victorzammit.com and subscribe to the Weekly Afterlife Report).
Having been browbeaten by friends into writing my first book, I finally completed it in 2023. It was published by Inner Traditions, and you can find it on Amazon: A New Science of the Afterlife: Space, Time and the Consciousness Code. Check it out. It's a pretty good read and I hope you enjoy it!