Alternate Perceptions Magazine, September 2026
Experiences where the Laws of Time and Space seem to Change
By: Brent Raynes
A few years ago, I was put into contact with a former musician and inventor who while living in Canada, was driving to an appointment on a freezing winter night at the time, driving a Volkswagen Beetle, he drove up over a crest in the road on Landsdown Avenue in Toronto and began going downhill when he suddenly noticed several trucks parked in the middle of the road just up ahead. He slammed on his brakes and immediately realized that he wasn’t going to be able to avoid impact as he crashed into one of the trucks. It was as though time seemed to slow down, which he described as a series of images that seemed to merge into a slow sense of movement. Bits of glass and metal came crashing through the windshield, striking him in the head. Then he found himself in a space filled with bright light facing what he saw as a portal. Standing beside him he noticed a being of light who with a female voice told the young man, “You really were doing something stupid there,” adding, “You can pass over if you wish.”
But the young man expressed how he didn’t feel it was his time and that he had more things in his life to do, after which the light being replied: “Okay, you can go back in time and take a different path.” Then, remarkably, things suddenly went in reverse, the shattered pieces of glass moved back into place, the windshield became whole again, the car itself was completely restored as it temporarily went backward down the road. Next there was another flash of light, and he found himself sitting in the car, the car undamaged and himself unharmed, situated between a grass verge and a telephone pole.
Back in 1974, while I was serving aboard the USS Paul (DE-1080), a Boatswains Mate in the US Navy, I heard from a fellow Navy man who was serving aboard the USS Portland LSD-37. He shared an interest in the UFO subject, and he had initially written a letter to me at my parent’s home in Maine. That is, until he discovered I was in the Navy too and realized writing to me at my ship’s address would be more direct.
It wasn’t long before I learned why he was interested in ufology. He described how as a young man living in a suburb of Orlando, Florida he had a UFO experience. “I was drawn out of a deep sleep by some attracting high pitched hum.” He climbed out of bed and went to a nearby window. “It was hovering over a house sideways to us. It was egg shaped,” adding it was “a glowing bright white light.” “At the time it would emit a little blue light as it moved closer towards our house but never closer than about 50 to 60 feet. I seemed to feel a part of myself attracted to it! But another part, which is obvious, was fear of bodily harm.”
A little later, in August 1966, the family was moving out of a house a little further out from Orlando. Everyone was in the car when this guy suddenly remembered to go back in the house and get a book he’d left behind. “But when I came to the house, I remembered that I did not forget anything, so I returned to catch up with the station wagon with my mother and two sisters when time seemed to slow down. (1, 2) I did too but I was able to think separate from physical what was going on, which I didn’t have the slightest notion why.”
“This is farfetched but anyhow as things slowed up, I saw what looked like a fog in some bushes and trees, with some sparkling light taking shape, and it took shape into that of a man about the same distance away as the UFO was at the earlier time. This person, or whatever it was, held out its hands and spoke to me in a warm and gentle voice saying be calm. I became calm and this person seemed to look right through me, until after a little while time backlashed and reclaimed what had passed in a swift motion. Regaining myself I started back to the car only to get in and shiver with fear, which no one can understand but me.”
“I was at this time eleven and had no knowledge of telepathy which was used when the being spoke.”
Around 4:15 p.m., October 25, 1974, a E. Carl Higdon, Jr., age 41, a well digger and resident of Rawlins, Wyoming, was hunting elk in the Medicine Bow National Forest when he spotted five elk standing motionless nearby. He took aim and fired. Then, something very strange happened. He recalled seeing the bullet going out the end of his weapon, noting how this is not normal as the bullet left the barrel appearing to be in slow motion, and then how about 50 feet away it was like it hit an invisible obstruction and fell to the ground. As he went over to retrieve it, he heard a snapping sound nearby, and looking around noticed a tall humanoid figure standing under a tree about 50 feet away. The figure stood a little over six feet tall, wore a black coverall suit, black shoes, with two belts that crossed over his chest and a belt around his waist that had a starlike emblem where a belt buckle would normally go. The being’s face had a flat nose, no visible ears or brows, no chin, and only six visible teeth, three upper and three lower. The being asked Higdon how he was doing, to which he replied, “Pretty good.” Then Higdon says he was asked if he was hungry, admitting he was “a little,” at which point the being tossed him a package of pills, telling him to take one, which he did without question, something he couldn’t explain why he did so. He then was invited to walk with the being, to a small “transparent cubicle” on the ground.
Historical UFO researcher Jerome Clark wrote this of Higdon’s account: “Suddenly he was inside it, in the company of the stranger (whose name Higdon would learn was ‘Ausso One’) and one other like him. The elk were there, too, frozen in a cage. Higdon was bewildered. The cubicle looked to be only seven by five feet and seven feet high. How could something so small contain so much? Besides the occupants, the cubicle carried four seats, a control panel, a mirror, and something Higdon assumed to be a map. Higdon wondered if in some fashion they had all been shrunk.” (2)
Mary Kerfoot of Schaumburg, Illinois, shared with me an experience she had back around 1994 when she and her husband, Bob, were at the kitchen sink of their home when they looked out the window and noticed a three-foot-wide “bronze bell-shaped craft” waft down from the sky like a leaf in a gentle breeze and settle in the backyard. The wafting motion of the craft made it seem almost weightless. Then they saw “at least three fairly tall adults, about six foot tall, and perhaps five children, the same size as human children ages 4 to 7,” emerge from the small craft. Mary was very excited and wanted to talk to the visitors. Bob chose to remain in the kitchen while Mary ran down the deck stairs to introduce herself to the newcomers. They approached her and communicated that her “mission” was to help integrate them into society.
There are a number of these larger on the inside and smaller on the outside accounts, which some have called the TARDIS effect, named after the BBC’s famous Doctor Who TV series. Where the Footprints End, Volume 1, by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner, describe a number of very odd anomalies of shifting size perception. For example, in 1975, a Puerto Rican woman claimed to have watched a tall, shaggy creature with glowing eyes that she spotted in her garden that shrank and transformed into a basketball-sized orb of light before floating away. A similar story from a Malaysian UFO flap described a young witness who “saw a big hairy creature” shrink down to “a few inches tall.”
Jacques Vallee in his book Confrontations (1990) touches upon the UFO aspect of “much larger inside than outside.” He speculated: “If there are more than four dimensions, as many theoretical physicists now suspect, it may be interesting to speculate: a hypercraft capable of topological inversion into our spacetime continuum could indeed be larger on the inside than on the outside.”
Mary Kerfoot, who has a MS in experimental psychology and has done a good deal of research into quantum physics herself concluded, “I think this craft may have been a portal which stretched dimensions, allowing an external dimension to be embedded within our normal 3-dimensional reality.”
References:
1. Back in December 2007, in an interview I was doing with British researcher and author Anthony Peake on anomalous experiences reported by people, he noted the following: “I started putting all of these together, but I didn’t know where I was going with it. I genuinely didn’t. There were things that I had read over the years from my interest in ufology right through to my interest in psychology, psychiatry, and this type of thing. But I didn’t know where I was going with it until one day I received a phone call from a lady who ran a recruitment consulting service and she asked me if I was interested in doing any work as she had a potential contract for me, and I said, ‘Yes, I would be interested, but at the moment I’m taking a year sabbatical to write a book.’ She said, ‘What are you writing about?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know where I’m going with it, but at the moment I’m interested in temporal lobe epilepsy.’ She went incredibly quiet and then she said, ‘Look, I need to meet up with you.’ So, I arranged a meeting near London Gatwick Airport and she said, “Tony, the reason that I needed to speak with you is that I’ve recently been diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy, and everything you were describing was sending shivers down my spine because it’s effectively what happens to me.” So, I said, “Could you explain to me the first time that you discovered or that you realized that you had TLE?” She said that she was sitting in a restaurant at work with a friend and that as she was doing so and as that friend was about to pour a cup of tea, she felt a snap over her right ear and suddenly she looked at her friend and her friend had frozen in time and space. Literally had stopped moving. She looked around the restaurant to find that everybody else in the restaurant had also stopped moving. They were literally frozen in time. She could hear this low humming sound behind her and she realized then, to her horror, that her friend had not in fact frozen but was moving incredibly slowly and she realized that the humming sound that she was hearing behind her was in fact people talking because the metabolic rate in her body had speeded up to such an extent that time had slowed down for her and she was literally trapped in this temporal fugue, for want of a better term, for hours and hours and hours. She watched her friend pour the tea and she said that she never realized what surface tension in a liquid was till she saw the tea hit the surface and watched it bounce up and down. Then after hours and hours she felt another snap over her ear and she came to and her friend looked at her and said, ‘Are you okay?’ She had literally been away for about .5 of a second. She had a classic TLE absence, and this fascinated me, and for some reason, and I don’t know why even to this day, but I said, ‘Do you get déjà vu’s?’ She said, ‘Oh good Lord. I get déjà vu’s to kill for.’ She said she got déjà vu’s where she knew what was going to happen for the next ten minutes. I said, ‘Why don’t you just say something to somebody?’ She said, ‘Because I feel that if I do I’ll change the future or I’ll change the way things are planned to be’ It must be peculiar being in a situation where you feel you know what’s going to happen next and you know that by saying something that you’ll stop that event from happening.
“I was quite intrigued by this because I then checked and discovered the link between déjà vu and TLE. It’s quite well known, but I then found that there are other areas of TLE that are interesting, such as an area that you’re interested in. Abductions, and in fact, Whitley Strieber and I have been in contact and Whitley has requested a copy of the book because he’s quite intrigued about the implications of the things that I’m writing about in terms of TLE and the idea of abductees in such a light.
I then replied to Anthony: “Right. I know that in Communion that was one of the areas that he was exploring at the very beginning.”
Anthony replied: “Yes, it was. Very much so and in fact he’s gone much further on now into the TLE side of things, because clearly it quite fascinates him as well.”
2. In John Keel’s book UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), the chapter entitled The Cosmic Jokers, he describes a New York journalist who was to go to a meeting but stopped, reentered his home and like the case of the Navy man mentioned discovered how there was no reason for doing this, even picking up a book and placing it on a shelf.
Keel wrote: “A young man from Ithaca, New York, called me some time ago at the urging of William Donovan, president of Aerial Investigation and Research (AIR), to tell me of his close brush with death. One evening in the fall of 1967, he said, he left his house to drive to a meeting. For some reason he couldn’t explain, he got out of his car, went back into his house, and carried out several aimless actions such as picking up a book from a table and putting it on the shelf. “Finally, I said to myself, ‘Okay, it’s time,’ “he told me. He remembers leaving the house and again heading for his parked car.
“The next thing he knew he was in a hospital bed.
“He had apparently driven about four miles to a railroad crossing just in time to meet an oncoming train. His car was demolished, but he escaped rather miraculously with only minor injuries. If he had not gone back into the house and carried out those meaningless, time-killing chores, he would have avoided the train altogether. It is possible, of course, that the shock of the accident blotted out his memory of that four-mile drive – but he couldn’t even remember putting the key in the ignition.
“This man had been active in investigating the UFO flap that took place around the radio telescope the radio telescope installations near Ithaca in 1967-68.”
3. The UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd Edition, by Jerome Clark. Pages 487-489, 1998. Vol. 1: A-K.
