Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2025
Perchance to Dream
By Dennis Stamey
On July 10, 1962, around one or two in the afternoon we were sitting beside a fence with the kid next door in our backyard. Our parents owned several acres of land, and we lived in what could only be described as a rural suburb. Either my friend or we noticed two dots directly overhead. We both thought they were birds but after a few seconds we realized these were something else. They were chasing one another in a frantic game of tag, defying the laws of physics. We rushed back to our houses to tell our moms. Mine didn’t believe me, she was busy and in a grumpy mood, but my neighbor’s mom did come out to watch.
We’re not sure how long we kept these black dots in view. Maybe fifteen minutes. Finally, the objects stopped perfectly parallel to one another. One shot off at terrific speed to the east and then the other to the west. We can still see it vanishing over the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains (we were living in Asheville, North Carolina). Whatever they were, they were putting on a show for us.
Ruminating on the episode now, a lot of it has a dream-like quality. Sometimes we wonder if we even saw it. But there are pieces of the sighting that are distinct, the rest is a blur. Perhaps this is because at nine years of age, a child’s brain is still developing, and episodic memories are fuzzy. Or was the experience partially real and partially illusionary? On that same day as our sighting, Telstar I was launched from Cape Canaveral. It was one of the earliest communications satellites and the first to send a live transmission of broadcast television images between the United States and Europe. The day before there was a high-altitude nuclear test called Starfish Prime conducted by the United States, a joint effort courtesy of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Atomic Support Agency. The nuclear missile was launched from Johnson Atoll, a 1.4 megaton thermonuclear device detonated at an altitude of 250 miles above the Earth.
Starfish Prime produced an unexpectedly large electromagnetic pulse (EMP), overwhelming much of the instrumentation and making accurate measurements difficult. The pulse caused electrical damage in Hawaii, about 900 miles away from the detonation point, knocking out approximately 300 streetlights, triggering burglar alarms, and damaging telephone companies' microwave links, which shut down calls from Kauai to other Hawaiian Islands.
Within seven months, the radiation lingering from the explosion would permanently shut down Telstar I.
A lot of paranormal encounters decidedly have a dream-like quality. Here’s a story from the Canadian TROFUS UFO Newsletter (unfortunately we can’t find the date). In January of 1980 in Woodstock, Ontario, a young couple were driving down a road when a strange figure ran up to their car. The figure began zigzagging all over the roadway and acted as if he were injured. The being’s face was scarred and his cheekbones protruded out. He also had fangs that came down from its mouth and there was blood dripping from them. The being was about six feet tall, thin but well built, and wore scraggly clothing. The driver of the vehicle had to swerve to avoid hitting the creature. He dropped off his girlfriend then bravely returned to the scene where he observed the hideous individual enter a yellow and black car, take off, turn into a dead-end street, and then vanish.
The next case was investigated by the prominent Ufologist Jorge Mafrtin Miranda. In Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, on October 9, 2006, a local psychologist, wishing to remain anonymous, was taking a late evening jog on the Ramey Base golf course. As he rounded the jogging path, he saw a group of what he thought were children running quickly across the golf course. As he watched the group, he soon realized that these figures were not children, but short humanoid figures. They scurried up a hill and the witness followed them. When he reached the top, he found at least a dozen of these humanoids aligned in a row, all facing him. The line they had formed was nearly flawless. The witness observed that the humanoids were thin, had large heads, slanted eyes, and pink skin. They all wore silvery tight-fitting uniforms with a red stripe that went diagonally across their chests.
The witness, oddly not afraid, began walking toward them. One of the figures, who was slightly taller than the rest, turned to face the others. He had an apparatus wrapped around his head. As soon as he looked at his companions, they suddenly darted quickly to the right and vanished into the brush. The witness noticed that they appeared to change shape as they ran. When Eryn Jackson was ten, she went vacationing with her family to Lake Chalan in the Cascade Mountains of Washington (see the YouTube channel A Flash of Beauty for January 20, 2024). Her family were camping at a retreat where they usually spent part of the summer and on the first day, Jackson noticed that there were no chipmunks around as usual. One night after dinner, she and a few other children who were also staying at the retreat decided to play hide-and-seek. Jackson went into the dark so she couldn't be seen and abruptly heard a strange noise. Beside a maintenance building about 12 feet away she noticed a huge silhouette rise. She couldn't make out any details but could discern that the figure was hairy and massive, probably standing about seven feet tall with sloping shoulders and no neck. It also moved "liquidy like it didn't have bones." Jackson ran in fright and told the others that she had seen a bear. Some adults went back to where she had seen the creature but couldn't find anything. She seems very credible when retelling her experience.
37 years later, Jackson saw another Bigfoot when it jumped out in front of her car from about 100 feet away during daytime. This critter "was furry but covered like it had put moss on itself." It even had a main floating out behind, apparently made of moss. The moss-covered Bigfoot leaped across the road, but one foot landed in a mud puddle before disappearing. Jackson quickly drove to the spot, got out, and saw a big print in the puddle.
Reed Thompson, a Milan High School freshman, was at his home in Milan, Indiana, early on the afternoon of January 19, 1967, his school letting out early. He saw what he first thought was a light outside and soon he realized that it was a silver-colored object about 200 yards away moving slowly toward the house. Thompson grabbed his camera and took a few shots of the object before it flew away. We’ve seen one of these photos and unfortunately it doesn’t look convincing. An analysis of the negative proved inconclusive.
Nevertheless, six years later in April of1973 Thompson was the owner of an auto parts store in Milan. Right before closing time, two unusual individuals entered his business. Thompson kept a German Shepherd guard dog there. Although it was usually protective, the canine hid in a corner when she saw the pair rolling herself into a ball and trembling.
One of the visitors was very thin and stood nearly seven feet tall. The other was short, less than five feet, also very thin, long-haired and appeared to be a female. Both wore heavy gloves and dark clothing that completely covered their bodies. The man wore a fedora. Although their faces were flesh-colored, their skin resembled plastic.
In a monotone without any inflection, the man told Thompson: "On January nineteenth, nineteen hundred and sixty-seven, at a few minutes until three o'clock p.m., Eastern Standard Time, did you see something unusual?"
Thompson acknowledged that he had seen a UFO, and the man demanded the photo he had taken. Thompson refused but the man kept insisting he turn it over. Finally, having enough of Thompson’s defiance, they left.
While Thompson and the visitor were talking, one of the employees slipped outside to check what sort of car the visitors were driving. The car was a 1969 Buick LeSabre, bright yellow, lacking any chrome but there was no interior, no seats, nothing inside.
After closing his store, Reed got into his pickup truck and quickly headed for the town of Versailles using the back roads, hoping the eerie pair wouldn’t follow him. But the yellow car did come after him and got on his bumper.
The visitors followed Thompson to his destination, a garage in Versailles. He walked to the building with the pair following closely behind. When he opened the door, there was an intense arc-flash from a welding torch. Obviously startled by the glare, the strangers hopped into their LeSabre and left. Thompson never saw them again. For a more detailed version of Thompson’s story, there’s the two-part article by Norman Kissell in the Dearborn Register (Lawrenceburg, Indiana) for March 19 and April 2,1992.
Back in 2000, a police officer was employed by the Stephenville Police Department as the Patrol Night Shift Sergeant doing a 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift. One night, he noticed something on top of the post office. He stopped his vehicle and noticed that it was a light-green figure walking along the roof.
The witness told MUFON in a statement dated March 18, 2014 (Case #54733) that the figure “appeared to be about 8 feet tall. I base this on the height of the post office wall in proportion to the thing’s height. The body of the thing had a regular build to its height, meaning what a person would have who was in good shape. Not fat or skinny. The most extraordinary item was the thing was transparent. The lines of the thing were fluorescent green which gave it somewhat of a mass but it was still transparent. The thing had great 3D detail. Every feature except for the height appeared to be human. The clothing appeared to be what I would describe as a jump suit. But again, it was all one color and made up by its green outlines. The thing appeared bald to the best of what I remember.”
The entity appeared to be checking his surroundings, turning his body to the west and then to the east. A few seconds later, it noticed the officer. “I didn’t feel fear. I don’t know if I could actually see a smile or just had that feeling like it was smiling and saying, ‘Well you saw me.’ I never felt threatened. The thing turned and began walking back the way it came.” The police officer was determined not to let the being get away. He drove to the back side of the post office. Since the walls were about 25 feet tall on all sides, the officer knew it couldn’t jump.
“I called the fire department which is located next to the police station and told them to bring a ladder truck over to the post office because I believed someone was on the roof. Another police unit left the police department and set up watching the opposite side of the building. About five minutes later the fire department arrived.”
That’s when the officer decided to go up on the roof himself. “I climbed up on the roof and there was nothing. I searched the spot on the roof where it was standing and the path it walked and found nothing.”
Eight years later, Stephenville would become a hotbed of UFO activity. On January 8, 2006, there were several sightings of strange lights near the town of Stephensville, Texas. One witness, Steve Allen, a pilot, and a businessman, saw a brilliant object hovering overhead while camped out with two of his buddies. Allen said that he felt very serene when he saw the light and felt as if we were at one with it. Was this one of the good guys coming to call? We've heard about people claiming that after encountering UFOs or their humanoid occupants, they undergo a religious experience or a feeling of joy. Unfortunately, a lot of these aren't well-documented.
The UFO disappeared like a light being switched off and almost instantly, Allen and his companions saw two F-16s in close pursuit of something.
Two weeks before that, a Stephenville farmer named Ricky Sorrells was out deer hunting one day when he beheld a huge object directly above him. Looking at it through the telescopic sight of his rifle, he could discern that the craft was metallic and seamless, with no bolts or rivets. He could also make out what looked like a praying mantis inside. The UFO sped off without a sound and without creating a gust of wind, almost as if it wasn't interacting with the environment. But Sorrels would see the object, which he estimated to be the length of "three or four football fields" on three more occasions.
Shortly thereafter, strangers identifying themselves as government agents kept showing up at his door asking him questions about his experience. Black helicopters kept constantly flying low over his farm almost around the clock, spooking his cattle and causing him sleepless nights. Around 2:30 a.m. he heard several helicopters over his place and when he went outside, he noticed a large transport helicopter and three smaller ones.
One day a man identifying himself as an Air Force Lt. Colonel called Sorrells over the phone and they talked for almost two hours (recall the mysterious Air Force officers bugging UFO witnesses back in the 1960's?). At first, the conversation was friendly. At one point, the officer asked if he could come by and talk with the farmer and Sorrells said that he would have to think about it. That's when the conversation turned heated. The officer demanded that he speak with him in person and Sorrells told the man not to ever cross his cattle guard. “Son," the officer responded. "We have the same caliber weapons as you do but a lot more of them.” The Lt. Colonel also made vague threats, saying that Sorrells might end up as a missing person before he was too "high profile." Days before this conversation, Sorrells had found a shell sitting on the panel of his truck, apparently meant as a warning.
One night, Sorrells' dogs began barking and he noticed someone standing outside. “He had positioned himself in between the car and the pickup 40 to 50 feet from my back door,” Sorrells said. “He stood staring at me rocking back and forth. I didn't think his feet were moving but the next morning when looking at his tracks I could tell they were.” Sorrels said it was cold and misting rain and it was obvious the guy was “dressed for the elements with a heavy parka-like coat.” He strained to see if the man carried a gun but didn't notice one but could see the face of someone he thought to be in his late 20s or early 30s judging from the way he “walked and acted.” Sorrells kept watching the individual until he slowly turned and walked into the woods. “He walked through an area where I'd cleared the brush so apparently, he'd been there before because he knew where to go,” Sorrells said. The next morning, he discovered a man's footprints and "a shiny new 25-06 Remington - with some dotted tarnished smudges."
Why would the military waste so much time and resources harassing a solitary UFO witness and in this case to the ultimate extreme? What was the point?
There was a bizarre abduction case. If you want to call it that, which occurred in Stephenville, Texas, in March of 1980, A woman reported she had been apparently teleported from her home to some strange room and then transported to what she described as an airport terminal which she somehow perceived was in Colorado. She was escorted to another room where she was asked questions that seemed like those you might find in a personality evaluation. After that, she was handed a black dress to put on and taken to what she called a "beauty salon." Someone put a device behind her ear and told her it was for tracking. After a couple of hours, she woke up on her couch. Her abductors all appeared human but couldn't remember their faces. She also noticed that there were other abductees in these rooms where she had been led.
The Stephenville abductee never mentioned aliens. We should mention that shortly before her abduction, the woman, who remains anonymous, was in a state of depression after losing her one of her two jobs a month prior and, according to her, had been crying and praying moments before all this happened. After her abduction, she began suffering from bouts of depression. Was the depression the result of her abduction or had her dissolving mental state started before then?
What would attract UFOs to Stephenville? We’re not sure. There’s nothing unusual about the history of the area nor is there a history of anomalous events, at least nothing we could locate. However, the events that transpired over a period of almost 30 years illustrate the half real and half unreal nature of this phenomenon.
Reflecting on our sighting, we distinctly remember other stuff that happened to us at nine whether at or at home. None of it seemed particularly nebulous. But the early afternoon of July 10 has elements of a dream mixed with 3D reality. If UFOs and other paraphysical phenomena are just projections of consciousness wrapped in temporary realities, it's logical for them to appear real at times and illusory at others. This is what we think was happening, these objects were dipping in out of levels of consciousness.
In the Journal for the Study of Religious Experience, Issue 4, 2018, Simon Young in his article “Children Who See Fairies” describes the results of a fairy census he took between 2014-17 in different parts of the world. One strange case involved a young girl who in London during the 1950s encountered a “wicker-basket affair with a balloon on top” in her garden. The fliers were dressed in top hats and black jackets and tried to convince her to go away with them. “I would swear’, she wrote as an adult “that this truly happened and was not a dream or any sort of imagination. I cannot recollect reading anything before or after with any illustration of such a strangeness in it either.”
Judging by the study, children have proclivity for seeing fairy creatures. Here is a small sample of the stories Young collected: a five-year-old English girl, lying in bed between her sleeping parents, saw fairies dance on the dresser; fairies joined two children who were playing a game under a fig tree in New Zealand; a boy in the United States saw, while swimming underwater, a “leprechaun” walking across the bottom of his grandparents’ pool; he rapidly surfaced and went back down again, but the creature had disappeared The wicker-basket incident somewhat resembles a UFO encounter. There have been other cases of UFO occupants inviting people to go for a ride. On May 6, 1897, in the Ouachita Mountains near Hot Springs, Arkansas, Constable John J. Sumpter, Jr., and Deputy Sheriff John McLemore were riding around looking for cattle rustlers near Jessieville one rainy evening. As they traveled northwest over Blue Ouachita Mountain, they saw a bright light in the sky. The light disappeared behind the hilltops and the men continued. After a few more miles, they noticed the light again. This time it was much closer to the ground and appeared to be descending. After going another half a mile, the men's horses refused to budge.
Peering into the darkness, the two officers saw that the light had landed, and that people were moving around it. They drew their weapons and approached, demanding that the strangers identify themselves. A bearded man came up to them holding a lantern. He explained that he and two companions were traveling the country in an "airship." The lawmen could see a younger man filling a sack with rainwater and a female in the shadows holding an umbrella. The bearded man showed the lawmen the craft, which was cigar-shaped and about 60 feet long. He offered to give the men a ride, but they refused.
The constable and the deputy later went back to the spot but couldn't find any trace of the airship or its occupants.
This surreal nature of the unexplained reminds us of a Twilight Zone episode from 1959 entitled “Perchance to Dream” written by Charles Beaumont. In this story, a fatigued man named Edward Hall stumbles into a psychiatrist office. His regular doctor, worried about Hall’s mental state, has set up an appointment for him. Once inside the office, Hall lays on the couch, closes his eyes, and then gets back up. Hall says that he has been awake almost 90 hours and if he sleeps, he might die. He goes on to explain that as a kid, he kept staring at a picture of a boat. Eventually, the picture began to move. When the psychiatrist informed him that it was likely an optical illusion, Hall clarified that each time he observed the picture, the sails appeared to be fluttering. “The mind is everything,” Hall remarked.
Hall said that everything he imagined became real if he thought it long enough. When he heard about a woman who had been killed by someone hiding in the backseat of her car, he kept looking in his rearview mirror whenever he was driving. One evening, he glimpsed the face of a young girl in the back, which startled him enough to veer off the road. He had a rheumatic heart condition, and the shock severely affected his health.
For a week, Hall explained that he had been having episodic dreams where he was at an amusement park. It was a nightmarish place, “everything warped and twisted out of shape. But it was real too. Very real.”
One of the attractions was Maya the Cat Girl. Maya began doing a sensuous dance for Hall who, despite being drawn to her, knows he has to get away. “Something about her eyes,” he told the psychiatrist. “Something deep inside those dark cat’s eyes.”
Maya catches up with him and invites him to go with her inside the Fun House. The place is filled with horrible figures including something resembling Sasquatch and an ugly troll. Hall flees the fun house while Maya laughs at him. “That’s when I knew she was trying to kill me,” he said.
The following night, he dreamed that he was back at the park. This time Maya convinces him to ride a roller coaster with her. Unable to help himself, he agrees. Trapped on the ride, Maya again laughs at his predicament. Hall knows that if he goes to sleep again, he will be on the coaster and probably die of a heart attack. But if he stays awake, the strain will also kill him. He departs from the office, stating that no one can assist him. However, as he enters the waiting room, he is horrified to realize that the receptionist is Maya. He goes back in, tells the psychiatrist about what he saw, and then bolts for the window, jumping through the glass and plummeting to his death. But in the last scene, Edward Hall is back on the couch. The psychiatrist checks his pulse and finds that he is dead. His last few minutes had been nothing but a dream. Rod Serling ends the episode by asking: which is the greater reality, the one we know or the one in dreams?
Edward Hall was correct. The mind is everything. Just as he was able to manifest another reality from his overpowering imagination, we too do the same. We have always had this inner desire to beseech gods, demons, or ghosts for help whether it was to heal, curse, or give advice. Creatures from out of time and space appear because we have always wanted them to. We desire a connection with the other world to give our lives purpose. We want to see our dead loved ones, see angels, or see something greater than ourselves. They therefore appear, formed from the layers of consciousness surrounding the planet. Sometimes very real, other times illusionary.
