Alternate Perceptions Magazine, April 2026
Mysteries and Myths of Wayne County, Tennessee
By: Brent Raynes
As someone who for 59 years now has remained very open to hearing people’s firsthand accounts of their UFO encounters, even with alien beings, as well as other high strange anomalies ranging from Bigfoot, West Virginia’s Mothman, to everything else that falls beneath the broad umbrella of the so-called Paranormal, I feel like I’ve pretty well heard it all. From all over the U.S., including other countries like England, Brazil, Peru, Sweden, and Australia, very credible seeming people have shared with me very incredible personal experiences – even a neuroscientist, a psychiatrist, a number of psychologists -- people whose professional jobs and responsibilities it is to clearly distinguish between fantasy and reality, and they and other professionals with very demanding and responsible jobs and backgrounds claim they’ve encountered some truly high strange unknowns.
No matter where you live on this planet of ours there is someone nearby (usually a number of someone’s) who has had a brush with the unknown, unless it’s an arctic wasteland or an inhospitable desert region and even then there are people like Eskimos and Arabians who may be the exception to the usual rules.
I’m originally from the state of Maine. Some say that makes me a Mainiac. Perhaps they’re right. Either way, I feel like I’m in good company. Even noted ufologist Tom Dongo who has written a number of books on UFO plagued Sedona, Arizona, he’s a Mainiac too. Though the vast majority will associate him with Sedona, he’s originally from Maine as well, where he had his first UFO experiences.
For me my interest in UFOs, as best I recall, began in March 1966. There was a massive wave of sightings being reported by the media. They were coming in from all over. Much attention was focused on Michigan at the time, when astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the Air Force’s Project Blue Book’s astronomical consultant, told reporters some of the activity might have been attributable to swamp gas. While that point satisfied the Air Force, which delighted in debunking UFO stories, the general public went into an uproar. Many felt insulted. In Bangor, Maine, a John King claimed he encountered a metallic domed craft that month that was so low to the ground that bushes beneath it were making scratching sounds on its surface. He pulled out a handgun he claimed and fired at it four times, hearing ping sounds twice. Bangor police were reported to have described Mr. King as appearing to have been genuinely upset as he shared his story with them.
A few months later, my middle school’s Weekly Reader had Flying Saucers – Serious Business by noted author Frank Edwards on sale. I put in my order and soon had it in hand and found it quite intriguing. So much so that by January of the following year I became personally involved in the subject, clipping out newspaper articles, purchasing more books and magazines on all of this, and after a few months began writing letters to witnesses and UFO authors and researchers, and I’ve been at it ever since.
Maybe that was too much of an introduction. If so, I sincerely apologize. Sometimes I get carried away. Now it’s time for me to get back on track with sharing some of my local Wayne County stories. You see, in the mid-seventies I spent three years traveling through over a dozen different states locating and interviewing anyone with stories to share. I spent a good part of the summer of 1975 on the road from Maine to Florida and even out to Indiana checking out these stories. That’s when I first came to Waynesboro, Tennessee. There was a pretty young lady there who had gathered some newspaper clippings on UFOs from The Pulaski Citizen, over in nearby Giles County. A columnist named Stanley Ingram was reporting on all sorts of UFO reports. As for this helpful young lady, she had seen a round white ball of light one evening descending down out of the sky overhead. She excitedly pointed it out to other young people present in her neighbor’s front yard, whereupon it suddenly began moving straight back up into the sky. She said it looked bigger than the full moon at its closest point.
Anyway, besides UFOs and other oddball phenomena people were reporting, I came back and married the pretty young thing, on November 26, 1977. Joan Martin became Joan Raynes that day and Wayne County has been home ever since.
Now I’ll share with all of you some local tales of the unknown.
Jim’s personal accounts (pseudonym):
The beautiful, robed woman
“At age 18 ½ I was married. My wife bore a son whom I love very much. And bought a home. On the day we moved in, before going to bed, I asked my higher power to bless this home. Within 10 minutes after laying in bed, with my eyes shut, I could sense the entire bedroom brightening, and a very hot sensation to my entire body. I was scared at first but within a few seconds something calmed me and I knew this was something good. A good spirit. This probably lasted 3 or 4 minutes. I sensed this spirit was telling me to open my eyes, but I would not. The light, the heat, and the smell was so wonderful. When I finally would open my eyes, I saw a beautiful lady disappearing.
“The face of the lady I do not remember that well. I do remember how beautiful she was. She was dressed in a white robe with long hair. She did have her hands occupied with an object, possibly a musical instrument. I could not see her legs, feet, shoes, etc. because she was in a sitting position with the robe covering her entire body from neck down. The object in her hands was a gold, bronze or something like that color. Her hair was dark, not black. I first realized something was going on when I noticed the bright lights while my eyes were closed. The lights while my eyes were closed were very white, changing from dark black. During this time, it became extremely hot. I could not breathe right and began to perspire heavily. During this event I thought I was dying and going to hell.
“After the heat sensation stopped is when I barely opened my eyes and saw the beautiful colors, remembering red and orange. This is when I saw the lady. She was smiling. This lasted for maybe 15 to 30 seconds. Her only two physical movements were her smile and she blinked. She floated above the bottom end of our bed. Almost like she was sitting on our feet. When she left, she became smaller, like backing away, never taking her eyes off me. She did blink a few times. She also left from the inside of the house. I never saw the outside when she was leaving. While this was happening there was a beautiful pink color surrounding her with sparkles like maybe stars, small stars fluttering around her entire body. I would say this was physical not a vision. My side of the bed was soaked from my perspiration after all this ended. I remember the sparkles were shaped like an oval ring, surrounding her. She was real!!!”
The UFO
“The UFO at age 8 was to my remembrance in an oval shape, 30 to 40 feet in diameter with blinking reddish/orange lights surrounding the edge/rim of the object. The light that shined through my window was pinkish. That’s what made me look out the window. I was laying awake. I didn’t see anybody. Any person or any little men. The object was 20 to 30 feet from the window and about 15 foot above the ground. The pink light shining toward me actually made me believe it was a type of ladder or possibly steps. I experienced a good feeling from this light. After it left, I felt really depressed about not going to it. My feeling of being safe if I had gone with it or them was, I knew they meant no harm to me and they would always protect me. From what I don’t know or understand. I also remember the feeling that they were sad also. Either they were sad for me or something. Again, they were sad not mad that I did not go with them.”
Giant Indian spirits and snakes?
Sometimes, in your inquiries into folklore and the paranormal, you come upon stories that are told by very credible seeming people, but the stories are just so darned hard to wrap your mind around. For example, in May 1976, I finally met John C. P., a resident here in Waynesboro, Tenn., who told about how when he was a young man sometime back around 1924-5, early summer, while living on a hill off of Hog Creek, he was with his brother, likely squirrel hunting at the time, when something really bizarre happened. At the time, John had a white cat perched up on his shoulders. The cat used to help him with his squirrel hunting, scurrying up trees to help capture game. So anyway, on this day John claimed that he was very startled to see what looked like a 15-20 foot tall Native American standing on a hill some 50-60 feet away. Shocked and speechless, he said he watched as the Indian man shot an arrow, the size of a spear, in his direction. The arrow allegedly knocked the cat to the ground behind him 6-8 feet away. The Indian man then disappeared before John’s astonished eyes.
His brother had been looking in another direction at the time but helped his brother John to pick up the cat, which they were convinced was dead. Then they walked over to the edge of a road looking at a hole in a nearby embankment left by the arrow, but then mysteriously the ground there was smooth again, there was no hole, and the cat was alive again!
John said that the Indian had red and blue feathers composing a headdress and were down around the sides of his body as well.
In addition, later that summer, the family would witness a number of strange sky falls near their home, looking like a rock, making the noise of air passage on descent, pulverized into pieces upon impact with the ground, that also vanished soon following impact, and in one instance a rooster was struck and they thought was killed, but in a few seconds returned to life. I was also told of arrowheads being left on the ground following some of these strange sky falls.
All sorts of odd things the family claimed happened to them while living there. The mother had seen a "ball of fire" with a "deep red" color to it rolling down the road by their home. She had also seen a man dressed in blue clothing disappear without a trace. John even claimed one day to have seen an impossibly huge "snake" [we're talking hundreds of feet in length] with black and orange stripes down its body, with “scales like a snake,” but kind of resembling a candy stick. The thing disappeared underneath a flat rock, and when the rock was removed later there was nothing but smooth ground underneath it. Paul also claimed that its body was 10-12 inches in thickness, that it had a large head, with like an active feeler or tongue, and yellowish eyes with like black pupils.
I wondered (and still do) about the Native American elements of the story and whether the grounds there may have been part of ancient Native rituals or something? A Native Susquehannock medicine man we'd met in Pennsylvania spoke of a giant race known to his people as the Yuh-dush-gwa and told of his encounter with a giant rattlesnake apparition when he was out hiking with an uncle as an 8-year-old boy. He said it uncoiled before them and began gliding up a mountain. "Then the huge snake (about 150 feet long) began to fade out like the dying embers of a log fire and disappear. It was the Spirit of the Great Serpent in the Sky Garden." He added, "At uncle Tall Willow's instruction I sat for about an hour on the spot where the big rattlesnake spirit had been coiled. Rattlesnake is my family totem."
Did ET’s Phone Home from Beech Creek?
In the course of gathering local folklore back in 1983, for stories I was writing up for my local newspaper [Wayne County News, October 27, 1983, Waynesboro, TN] I came across this ver-ry intriguing tale. The setting was Beech Creek Road, sometime around the mid-1930s. Joe (as we’ll call him here) was dressed in his Sunday best as he was returning home on foot to Leatherwood Branch after a visit with his girlfriend down on Green River. That would have been a pretty good walk which could have been about 9 or 10 miles.
It was probably, I was told, early autumn and around 9 o’clock at night as Joe traversed the first stretch of Beech Creek Road from Highway 13. A sound like a bullet passing close to his ear disturbed him to think that someone might be shooting and have come so close. Then Joe reportedly noticed two small lights up ahead of him, just over the ground, on the right side of the road. He rationalized, at the time, that they were likely just fireflies, although marveled at how they remained level, like a pair of eyes. But then the two lights seemed to merge together, becoming a single “wash pan” sized light. It was at about this point that Joe heard a noise resembling the sound of something like the motor of a sawmill shutting down.
Next a brilliant white light appeared at the roadside. Joe was astonished to see a group of dwarfish sized men, perhaps 8 or 10 figures, starring at him from around what appeared to be a round table. They were, he would later explain, the ugliest men he had ever laid eyes upon. Their faces were slightly flushed, or reddish in complexion, with wrinkled skin, long noses, and some had beards.
In terror Joe threw his walking stick at the ‘little men,’ though he would recall that they made no threatening moves or gestures towards him. It was undoubtedly the high-strangeness of what he was seeing that caused his reaction, in addition to the fact that they, from his very brief encounter, just didn’t look too friendly. Thus, Joe ended up running like the devil was hot on his heels since, quite obviously, he wasn’t too sure at that point that he wasn’t.
Several hundred yards later Joe’s next conscious recollection was of picking himself up off the ground at the foot of Smith Branch Hill. His clothes were badly torn from his frantic escape from the unknown.
“Since then I’ve thought it could have been people from another planet,” a niece of Joe’s told me as she related this remarkable story. “He died wondering about it.” Later, interviewing Joe’s brother and visiting the site of his brother’s strange Beech Creek encounter, he told me how his brother had returned home that night, badly shaken and hurt. Unfortunately, Joe couldn’t tell me the story himself as he had passed a decade earlier.
Joe was described to me as a truthful and Christian person. I was told that for years afterwards he had nightmares about the incident. He worried that it was some kind of “omen.” His brother told me also that he and Joe soon returned together to where this all had happened and how the walking stick never turned up.
I wrote in my newspaper feature, “Perhaps it is on display at a museum on a planet light years away?’
Family encountered an angel?
The following happened near Clifton, Tennessee, in the direction of Savannah which is in neighboring Harden County. A family member recalled:
“I am guessing that the year was in the mid to late twenties because my grandmother was born in 1917. It was in the Mount View area, what was known I believe as the Brooks Bottom. My great grandmother and her children were down past the house at the barn working in the garden. She turned back to see what the kids were making over and she saw it. It was an angel. It looked like a human. It was full sized, dressed in a flowing type garment. It had wings and long golden tresses that were curly and very shiny. It was beautiful and bright. The angel was fluttering in the air about head high. She said that it came so close to them that they could see its fingernails and toenails. It had no shoes no. My great grandfather turned and ran toward the house to get the gun and my great grandmother said, ‘Stop, you can’t shoot it, because it is a heavenly being.’ She said they went on about their business and left it alone. They were not afraid of it. I do not know if it flew away or disappeared or exactly how it ended or if it was ever seen again.”
Aliens, Angels, or Spirits?
Back in 1983, I interviewed a family on South 48 Creek who had some unusual personal stories to share with me. A 10-year-old boy there swore to me that in May of that year he had stepped outside the house around 9 p.m. and observed a roughly 20-foot diameter saucer shaped object with various colored flashing lights hovering just a few feet over their chicken coop. He said that he had gone outside to investigate an odd rumbling sound. His mom, who was 28, and her mom told me how they had been startled late one night by a glowing white beachball sized object floating down the hillside next to their home, only about 2-3 feet above the ground. The grandmother told me she had taken a flashlight and shined it at the light whereupon the strange ball of light reversed direction and soon left from their view.
Weirder still, on at least three separate evenings, from April to June 1983, they claimed that they’d seen white human-like figures coming down the hill toward their home. They all would disappear at about the same spot. They speculated that perhaps they were “angels.”
Strange lights at Cromwell Crossroads
Here a woman showed me a list of strange lights with dates and times that she had seen in her area. One night a son-in-law was on his tractor in a field next to her home when he heard an odd hissing sound. Thinking his tractor may be overheating he shut it down. But still he heard the sound. He then looked up and above him was a strange light. The woman even recounted for me how one night she had stepped outside her home and saw, on the ground nearby, a reddish-orange glowing sphere about ten feet in diameter. Then after a few moments it simply disappeared and no longer was there.
