Alternate Perceptions Magazine, March 2025
A strange circle of light, cancer, paranormal phenomena, and owls
by: David Anthony Epps Jr.
I have many questions as to the how and why of me? Why didn’t I hear the craft that stopped over my tent while camping in the sticks of Freeburg, Illinois? And more importantly, why did it take me roughly 2 years to even remember seeing the craft? I can't say in my memory that there’s any recollection of seeing any beings from that night, but considering my life has never been normal, having an alcohol cocaine addict for a mother and an absent father, I’ve had a lifetime of things most people would never believe. My mother once taught me to play on a Ouija board and how to make one, after which a cabinet in the kitchen kept opening and closing, I jokingly set out a plate and said "maybe its hungry" (because I was 11) and my mother put it back and said "stop being stupid" and immediately a bottle of dish soap flew off the counter at least 10 feet and struck the back of her head. I can’t recall if it was before or after the Ouija board experience, but I remember being a child around that same young age and waking up to what appeared to be a long haired little girl standing over my face as I slept, just for the kid to be completely gone before I had time to even put my glasses on (I can't see things without my glasses unless its right upon my face, yet the hall light was on and certainly bright enough through the doorway to see a small figure with long hair watching me sleep). And I could go on with stories like these, one that goes wayyyy before that when I randomly walked away from my stepfather’s mother's farm property and all I remember is telling the cop who found me that "I was following The Undertaker". I was an adult before I knew the definition of an Undertaker, to me, The Undertaker was specifically the pro wrestler portrayed by Mark Calloway. My whole life is riddled with mysteries like these. I was 22 turning 23 a month later when I started treatment, so I was 21 when i saw the craft (or rather the craft saw me). I just turned 31 on December 18th, 2024. The craft was a perfect circle, with an inner circle, and in that inner circle was a small light that at 1st glance looked like a very faint star, until I noticed it was moving. There was a screen on the roof of the tent my ex and I were in (her cousin and cousins boyfriend were in a separate tent, although I'm not in contact to ask any of them if or what they remember). When I noticed the light, I squinted harder and that's when I saw it enough to see there was a perfect circle craft coming towards the tent. The way we were laying, it was coming in towards us from the right. As I pointed and asked her "do you see that" in amazement, she said "yes" and before we had a chance for anything else, it stopped in midair and the entire inner circle was filled with light. What seemed like seconds later, the light dimmed back to its original state and the craft went off to the left in the opposite direction from which it came. It was gone from view in about 4 or 5 seconds. And then I blacked out. Mike Clelland’s work brings back more, I now relate 2 incidents involving bats and owls that I would not have before. Mike Clelland specializes in these cases, particularly ones involving stories of owls. Just a year after my UFO encounter, I started to see an Owl outside my mother's at the worst point of my life. It would come out into an open branch and watch me, and I it. Years after remembering seeing the craft, I had a vivid dream involving owls. I was in a tower of sorts and hundreds of owls surrounded the tower, with one gigantic owl in the middle of the room on the floor. I don't know what it said, but I remember getting on its back (that's how big it was) and upon the owl taking flight, every other owl in the tower was circling us as it rose in the air and I felt absolutely amazed and full of bliss. Some of those same nights I'd see that owl in summer of 2016, I'd see bats too out there. The night the UFO stopped over my tent, just hours before I randomly bent over to tie my shoe and my ex said "woooah". I asked "what's wrong?" She said "a bat just swooped down at your head, if you didn't bend over just now it would have crashed into your head". Had that happened, I may have had to leave and get a rabies shot or something, but it missed me last second.
In the summer of 2013, I was out walking around a very small town next to Cahokia called East Carondelet/Dupo (Paraire Dupont) which may as well be the same town, each being much smaller than the already small town I grew up in. That ex-girlfriend of mine had told me she herself was a practiced Wiccan (although I later learned she practiced if and when she needed to). Not only did I wake up one night and remember speaking in high pitched growl of a voice that wasn't my own, I said the words "she is evil" and immediately fell back out. Upon awaking, I told my ex (who was sleeping at that moment of my awakening) what I remembered and that I also had a quick memory of a dream involving a blonde woman in a white dress who went down into cellar) and her jaw dropped and said "there's a blonde woman in a white dress that everyone in my house has seen, and my mother tells me she's had nightmares of this woman choking her as she slept". Considering that girl later turned out to be cheating on me, perhaps this was a warning to me vs an attack. We dated for 4 months and another night we were walking around back roads in the area surrounded by cornfields. One night it was me, my ex (Kat BTW was her name) and her friend Bret when I randomly looked back and noticed someone walking behind us in the darkness. Aside from moonlight and one streetlight that was in the middle of a lonely road that went for about a quarter of a mile, I pointed this shadowy figure out and my ex said, "I know, I see it, don't look back at it again". Naturally, curiosity couldn't resist, that's when I saw it walk under that only streetlight to find it to be a perfect humanoid that appeared to be made of darkness, a walking shadow if you will. We get further, I look back again,
I desperately seek answers, and I definitely want to know what and why exactly my brain seems to have had some traumatic reason to block out memories, unless of course they were forcibly blocked out.
Strange dreams, UFO sightings, and paranormal phenomena
By Tony Sandy
Several years ago, I had a series of nightmares, involving the subject of the unknown. In one I was pursued by a Greyhound bus and scrambled down an embankment, to have the vehicle charge down the slope, with its headlights beaming (I am into flying saucers in a big way and saw this as a UFO abduction scenario); I woke up screaming. Another involved me being in a 'U' shaped building, with my wife in one wing and me in another and a corridor between. Suddenly but very slowly the door behind me started to creep open, revealing nothing but a dark, empty space (yes, you guessed it, I woke screaming).
A third dream involved me being in my old family home, in the kitchen, when the back door slowly crept open, revealing nothing again (I awoke burbling as I was in sleep paralysis stage and couldn't utter any other sound. In my childhood I had another instance of this and eventually got out of bed and dozed outside my parents’ bedroom, before going back to bed). A fourth dream involved the same scene, but I had my old dog with me from present time and it warned me that someone was at the front door. Again, it crept slowly open to reveal nothing but darkness. I think the symbolism here is simply fear of the unknown. When I attended the Leeds UFO conference, I mentioned these dreams to John Mack.
Also, while in Cromarty, Scotland, I witnessed several bedroom visitors, including a semi-transparent, Pumpkin Headed Grey, floating at an oblique angle at the bottom of the bedroom. Another night I awoke to witness two red eyed insectoid creatures, which I mentioned on a website, leading to a UFO investigator contacting me for details and saying that I was one of several UK residents who Had had the same experience. He further mentioned that previous even to that, these creatures were mentioned in a famous Australian case centered in the Blue Mountains. One day in the kitchen, my wife saw a tall figure behind me, dressed like a monk. A few years later, after we had moved to Thurso, Scotland, just as I was switching off the bedroom light, I saw the same figure up against the cupboards.
When I was living with a friend in Evanton, I went for a walk along the Glenglass Road, where I was offered the chance to meet a Grey and see a scout craft but I chickened out.
I woke once to see our old dog floating in spirit form near the ceiling. At a later date I also witnessed one of our other dogs hiding in the back of the car, when physically it was with its original owner, previous to our taking possession of it. After we moved up north to Thurso, where it died, I saw it rushing between the bedrooms like a mad thing (for years it had suffered badly from arthritis).
While staying in a caravan, overlooking Castle Urquhart on Loch Ness, I started meditating and as I gazed across to the other side of the water, it transformed into a corrugated shoreline. I was mentally informed that this was in the ancient past and was to do with the fact that it was on a dramatic Faultline, splitting this part of Scotland in half and was used to siphon off tectonic power from plate movement.
Living in The Highlands and travelling along through the Slochd Pass, on the way to Glasgow, I saw a white flying saucer above some power lines and as it dropped below them, it disappeared (I saw the same craft in the same area, again when passing the same spot on another journey through the area).
My first encounter with UFOs began as a teenager, while still at school as I was returning home with some school friends. In the clouds I saw a large, needle shaped craft, floating at an oblique angle between the clouds, over the school itself. My friends, including the form captain and a cousin in the same class as me, walked on towards the green and swings close by, where I caught up with them after staring in awe at the ship for at least ten minutes. They didn’t seem to notice it and I funnily enough didn’t draw attention to it either. Years later I bought a book by John Keel, called UFO: Operation Trojan Horse, which featured an image in the front of the book of the same vehicle, saying it had been seen worldwide.
Recently I had a super real dream that woke me. I suddenly saw to my right these waves where strong winds had whipped up an ordinary but gigantic wave in a storm. I feared I had been cut off by the sea with water beneath my feet but then realized that I was standing on the sea itself, with water all around me as I was in the middle of the ocean. Afterwards it made me think of Christ on the sea of Galilee.
I have been woken several times in the middle of the night, but it wasn't until this morning that I cottoned on why. I am back to dreaming about deep water and the one that woke me this morning involved a ledge I stepped on in the dream that was inches under water but then the water after that plunged into infinity (from the shoreline you simply couldn't tell what was deep water and what was shallow).
Editors Note: I naturally wrote back to Tony and asked him more about his symbolic sounding dreams and strange experiences. He replied:
Yes, the ‘deep water’ sounds like the other dreams of the unknown I had but I didn’t 'take the plunge’ in the more recent ones. The early ones frightened me out of my wits because of the interaction. I think consciousness is a defense against the unconscious (the unknown) and that’s what wakes you up out of ’the nightmare.’ I think I was interested in UFOs before that and liked mysteries such as The Loch Ness Monster and other unknown animals.
As for other paranormal abilities. No, I haven’t had any precognitive incidents, but I did once have a Deja vu incident. Other odd incidents in my life involved a childhood incident of sleep paralysis. Once I saw a transparent spider crawling slowly across the floor when I lived in Crookedholm, Ayrshire. Odd talents include being able to turn over my wristwatch at a particular time, like 5.25 and twenty-five seconds, which I understand is a curiosity of UFO abductees.
I can also still myself and see other faces superimposed over my own, when I stare into a mirror, which I believe is called physical mediumship. I find that staring into space when doing this that the whole of reality shimmers and moves like particles of golden light. I also tried this in the living room in Cromarty and it was like the floor disappeared to be replaced by a sea of grass. I also had a poltergeist series of incidents based on one of my brother in laws, just after he died and four ’special’ relationships that I seemed to have been engineered into. All in all, I have four pages of this kind of thing happening during my life at odd times.
A lucid dream that had me freaking out as a theme, was suddenly finding myself up high and realizing where I was, like a sleepwalker waking up from a dream. This one had me on the ledge of an extremely tall building, while there were birds of prey flying across the way on top of another building, in which the queen lived and was enjoying the spectacle
We were coming back after a long trip away recently and I kept nodding off to sleep (my wife was driving). Twice I woke up seeing representations of the dream content - once was the snow-covered roads perspective, disappearing into the distance in reality and it was the same landscape I caught in the dream. The second was a reclining figure, which when I opened my eyes was the dashboard and the upright part of the passenger window. It reminded me of an advert where this sleeping girl’s form became hills.
I am not an academic, but I do have a recurrent dream theme in being at a university (I lived in Cambridge for a while and had a friend at Fitzwilliam College from the same town). This is I believe because I am always in pursuit of knowledge.
My conclusion about my own experiences is that it shows a continuum from the internal world of dreams to the outward manifestations of paranormal phenomena. Maybe some of this is down to Tibetan tulpas and projections of the mind but not on a conscious level. Athletes’ visualizations of their performance, to improve capabilities, lucid dreaming and imagination (conscious dreaming) are part of this spectrum I believe too.
I think you need a lot of experiences to gain insights into what is really happening, in order to connect the dots (see the patterns). Also, I think altered states happen to most people in childhood and towards the end of their lives (imaginary friends and visits from old friends and family, now deceased). In between we have incidents that disconnect us from physical reality, be it through drugs, illness or accidents, to name the most obvious or simply not being grounded (psychic to some degree).
Last night as I was dreaming, I came to realize that this unconscious state, where life is symbolic and confusing, was the same as warfare and a rout (chaotic action, that is running away from the present - a disorderly, fear filled, retreat from reality; in other words, individual life is the equivalent of social life). The depressed are withdrawn, lost in a situation where they can no longer 'keep it together' (dispersed versus concentrated attention).
Chad Varah, who founded the Samaritans, said in his autobiography that he realized what the purpose of his organization was going to be, when this woman kept walking into his office and repeating something in a chaotic, mixed up form, until one day she finally reached a conclusion (realized what she was trying to clarify in her own mind), thanked him and walked out, totally satisfied.
An American Indian ‘guru’ of my wife’s acquaintance said that he couldn't teach white Americans meditation, but it was easy to teach those from the East. This I believe is down to the Americans being 'out there' through action, rather than 'in here' through thought (no memory needed for information as they have the Internet).
It is like what Soren Kierkegaard posited 'Life can only be lived forward but understood backwards (re-membered).' Understanding requires introversion as action requires extroversion. Belief leads us to act and failure to ruminate on why and what to do next (which possibility to explore out of many).
I have been having some 'shocking' experiences lately. If I flex my lower back, it sends a shock into that region. I even went to kick a ball for a dog the other day and the acute pain made my leg go all over the place and I missed contact with it altogether. Then last night in the early hours I woke up feeling that I had been electrocuted. Also the left side of my neck was swollen before that and continues to be, cramping my ability to turn my head, left (especially), right or tilt it backwards. For years I have had odd bouts of static problems, from the usual shocks from plastic covered handrails to sparks shooting across to my nose, when pulling off jumpers made from synthetic materials. I also had twenty years of migraines, which I believe is like temporal lobe epilepsy, electrical outbursts that knock out the brain and send you into an altered state of consciousness. This relates to The Electric Universe Theory, espoused by Wally Thornhill and others.
More years ago, than I care to remember, I was in Bucht Park, Inverness before it became an athletics track. Looking across to Tomnahurich graveyard, about half way up, I saw a large square area of light. At the time I dismissed it as possibly a glazier’s van, with sloping side for holding sheets of glass, with the sun glancing off it. But was it?
[Editor’s Note: Tony Sandy also wrote a rather lengthy, speculative message regarding various anomalous phenomena that’s in our letters to the editor, which may be of interest to our readers as well.]
