Reality Checking
Mysterious Nordic Beings and Psychic Forces in Pennsylvania
By Brent Raynes
December 26, 1966, Hamlin, Pennsylvania, between 9-11 p.m., a family noticed behind the home of a neighbor (who was not home at the time) recurrent odd flashes of light. They reported it to the Honesdale police department. There was snow on the ground and they were concerned that someone might have arrived on snowmobile(s) and be breaking in, or that an outside electrical wire might be sparking. It was later that night that Lin and her sister Judy were awakened when a light “as bright as the sun” temporarily illuminated every corner of their bedroom. Police came that night and when the sun came up the next morning, returned to look again, took pictures, and according to our informant Lin the footprints in the snow were odd. The footprints found by the police, Lin stated, were rounded on both ends, and so it was hard to tell which was the front part of the foot and which was the back.
Lin today lives in Kissimmee, Florida, with her husband Ray. I first met Lin and Ray at the ARE UFO Conference in Virginia Beach, Virginia, back in November 2010. Recently Lin shared some startling personal experiences that she has had over the years. She still vividly recalls that night back in 1966, when she was only 13, and what soon developed shortly thereafter. “About 2 o’clock in the night, for some odd reason, I woke up,” she shared with me. “I was in the presence of a being, often described as a Nordic. He was so beautiful, surrounded by white light. An exchange of communication happened mind-to-mind. I had a mind meld with him of oneness in mind, believe me. It was higher than making love. So pure in light, I felt like light illuminated pure. I did not want to let go of the meld. He passed information to me and told me he was with me at all times. I can still feel my heart on fire, this pure light. He is very much like Jesus and Saint Michael the archangel, that I have had dreams, visions, and encounters with over the years.”
In a recent phone conversation, I questioned Lin further about this dramatic experience. She described what this entity had apparently done to bring about this illumination and state of oneness. “Basically it was like the laying on of hands like how you see Jesus portrayed laying his hands on the person,” she told me. “He was standing in front of me and basically from my top chakra all the way down to my feet…and basically I just felt like I was white light, on fire, and totally illuminated. And then I had like a purification of the heart. It was such a wonderful feeling I didn’t want to break from it, but then he said, ‘I will always be watching you so you don’t have to worry.’ Then he just disappeared.”
This story represented a déjà vu kind of moment for me. Back in September 1977, I was a speaker at a small UFO conference at Marywood College in Scranton, Pennsylvania. This was at the invitation of a local group called the Investigative Circle for Planetary Enlightenment. The Reverend Barry Downing, another speaker at this event, and the author of The Bible and Flying Saucers, joined me in a small room off to the side as I questioned a couple of housewives from Lakewood, up around the same neighborhood where Lin had her experiences back in the 1960s (in fact, I now discover, Lin knows these people too!). “It seems like a UFO sighting can be taken for granted,” Mary explained. “Many people see them even if you don’t expect it to happen to you. But all of these other things that begin to happen is what at first makes you doubt your own sanity.”
On November 1, 1974, Mary and her friend Ruby watched in amazement as a disc-shaped object, flying at tree-top level, approached within an estimated 100 feet of their car. Then the “other things” afterwards began to happen. They told me that within weeks of their encounter that they both began to have strange and vivid dreams about a handsome blond-haired man who spoke to them telepathically! (Any of this starting to sound familiar?) One of the women even experienced precognitive dreams that accurately foretold the separate deaths of her oldest sister and her mother. Both women also had to contend with poltergeist-type activity in their homes. They feared that something “evil” had entered their lives.
Then, one day, Mary sensing a “cold presence” in her kitchen decided not to give in to her fear. She spoke out to “it” saying that there was not enough bad in it to overcome the good that had always existed in her home. Then, after this, the “evil” seemed to depart from her life, and she began to find herself developing deep spiritual feelings. “As the years go by I can understand more and more this feeling that he conveyed to me,” she explained. “This trustworthiness, his acceptance. This is love. This is what the Christian love concept means. This is what we should all feel about each other. I never liked people so much in my life. Before I was a real witch I think. …As I looked at him I could feel so many things. I could feel my whole life. I was conscious all at once of everything that I had ever done that I was a little bit ashamed of. He was standing there smiling, very understanding, and he knew me. I mean there was no pulling the wool over this guy’s eyes. He knew everything at all about me, that I had ever done, either right or wrong. He was conscious of the good, and he seemed to be telling me something like ‘do more good.’ It was really a real dream that you felt meant something but for a long time just a dream and that’s the only content of it.”
I initially visited Honesdale, Pennsylvania, back in April 1976. Months earlier, Ohio ufologist Larry Moyers, while I was visiting his home in Akron, shared with me a tape recording he had done with a deputy from that town who had investigated the report of a “glowing white object,” reportedly seen by four young boys, going down into a mine silt pond in nearby Carbondale, at about 7:10 p.m., on November 9, 1974. The deputy arrived on the scene to investigate the next morning, finding 200-300 people gathered around the pond, including National Guardsmen and Civil Air Patrolmen, along with two Cardondale police officers. He claimed to have noticed several odd things right off. For example, he has been around radios for many years and noticed a young girl with a transistor radio having trouble picking up a signal from nearby WCDL, a 5,000 watt transmitter maybe a mile and half away he said, “as the crow flies.” He noticed a “sparking noise in the radio speaker,” as well as a “low humming tone in the background of all of this.” “WCDL should have been crystal clear,” he added. He did walk with the radio about 150 feet from the pond, at which time the interference diminished some, but when he returned to the pond again the interference returned as before. The deputy also noted: “The top of the water had a sympathetic vibration all across its top, from one end to the other. When I say that, it’s almost as if somebody put a transducer in one end of the pond and fed a low frequency signal to it in the order of maybe 60 to 80 cycles per second.” He noted that there was no wind to account for the ripples in the water. He also had brought along a Geiger counter and noticed that all over the pond he was getting a slightly higher than normal reading. He couldn’t figure that out and only later, he said, did he realize that after an odd cloud that had hovered an estimated 30 feet over the pond did the Geiger counter readings become normal. “And it was about the approximate diameter of the pond itself, and it stayed right there,” he told Moyers. At one point, he even threw a stone up into the cloud. “It went straight on through,” he noted, which satisfied him that there was nothing lurking inside the cloud that shouldn’t be there. A sergeant with the National Guard supplied him with a boat, but he was unable to get anyone else to go out onto the water with him, he said, so he went it alone. Poking around with an oar he said he was able to detect a smooth, what seemed to be a cylindrical-shaped object that seemed to be nose down in the water, about 2 and a half feet below the surface. The water was murky and he was unable to see anything visually, but when he rested his oar on top of this object he could feel an odd vibration. “I think I found out what was causing the vibration along the pond,” he stated. “I could feel the vibration on the oar. Whether it was a motor of some kind running, whether it was some sort of a generator of some kind, I don’t know.” Using a ball of string, and tying a rock to one end, he was able to gauge the depth to the bottom of the pond in the vicinity of the submerged object in question, to have been about 22 and a half feet.
Later the Associated Press carried a photograph of a diver in the water and one of two men in a boat removing a lantern flashlight from the pond, claiming that this was the source of all the “UFO” excitement. The Honesdale deputy didn’t buy it, he said. Larry Moyers had heard unconfirmed reports, that he was attempting to track down, from three different sources (none were first person though), that two helicopters had flown in and an armored truck had pulled up at the pond, that something was placed in the truck, and then the helicopters escorted it out of the area.
The weekend prior to my meeting with Larry, he had been over to Pennsylvania again and met with the deputy, and learned that he had allegedly had odd prowler episodes at his home – a prowler that could disappear through a solid window!
The deputy’s prowler episodes, and what I understood were other paranormal type events going on in his life, interested me more than whatever happened at Carbondale. It seemed pretty clear to me at the time that whatever might have been in that pond was long gone before I arrived on the scene.
The deputy (ex-deputy by the time I met him) shared with me how the paranormal was no stranger to his life. He and his mother, he told me, had had “constant communication” through the years with both her deceased mother and father. He described how the experience would begin with seeing a small dot in what looked like a bluish-white smoke and how it would get larger and larger until “just like life,” with “natural colors,” his late grandparents would appear before him. They would often visit, he added, whenever someone in the family was about to die, and let him know who it would be. “It’s not a dream or a feeling,” he said. “It’s an actual contact. They talk to us.” [Dr. Chet Snow, interviewed in my book Visitors from Hidden Realms, described what sounded like similar spirit visitations: “…8 to 10 feet away, a small little light. It would blur and grow and then my grandmother would step out of it. Then we’d talk—without words but the thoughts came to me in words and I spoke back in words, but in my head, not aloud.”]
The ex-deputy recalled how at age seven he may have had his first encounter with an otherworldly being. It was summer and he was in bed reading a comic book, he told me. Suddenly a man about three feet tall appeared outside his second story bedroom window, standing on the porch roof. The entity asked him if he could come inside. “I was too terrified to say no,” he told me. They shook hands, and the little man told the boy not to be frightened. “Looked like a toy soldier,” he recalled. He said he was wearing blue pants, had a white shirt, and gold criss-crossing suspenders. The little man asked to take one of the boy’s comic books as a souvenir. If he remembers correctly, he thinks it was a Porky Pig comic.
It was a strange visit. I went skywatching with the ex-deputy (he had worked for the Honesdale police department for about a year). We were joined by a 25-year-old female friend who was very interested and supportive of his UFO interests. They had been skywatching together for awhile at that point, and had, I was told, shared a number of odd experiences together. While we were out driving one night and skywatching, the ex-deputy channeled messages, allegedly from an alien personality. However, nothing earth-shattering or conclusive came through, that I had noted. I was told how late in 1975, he was playing guitar with a band in the area (something I was told he does from time to time) when he was approached by a man identifying himself as Ashtar, along with two others, all dressed in long black coats. This Ashtar engaged him in a conversation for about half an hour. His lady friend recalled the evening, telling me that she and a lady friend of hers had dropped in and sat at another table and saw the strangers for a good 5 to 10 minutes before they left. “It looked funny though because it was just a joint you know and everybody was really casually dressed,” she said. “And then you see these three men, you know, like the MIB type men, in the middle of this joint. They didn’t fit in.” The ex-deputy began trying to remember where he had met this “Ashtar” character once before. “Oh, I know now!” he suddenly declared. “Up in Pleasant Mount, when I was investigating that case of that nurse that got picked up for two and a half hours by a craft. When I was down looking at the field where the craft picked her up one night, I met him on the road. I didn’t know at the time who he was. And the name Ashtar just sounded odd to me.” He said this man was about 6 ft. 2-3 inches tall, thin build, “kind of salt and pepper” hair combed back, high forehead, pointed nose, and tight looking lips. “Outside of that he looked as normal as anybody else I guess,” he concluded. The two companions, on the second encounter, were shorter. He also recalled a time when he was out in a field by himself looking up at the sky with a telescope, when a tall, slender man in regular clothing walked up to him and engaged him in about 30 minutes of conversation. None of what was said seemed particularly significant or anything. Just general conversation. Then the stranger began walking away, and the ex-deputy yelled after him and asked who he was. “Valiant Thor!” was the answer. He then began packing his things up, deciding he’d check the police records for a “Valiant Thor” later, and as he was driving away from the field he saw a strange bright light shoot straight up from a nearby wooded area.
Only later, it was alleged, would he come to learn how these names figured into early contactee accounts, as the names of human-type alien visitors.
To top things off, he told me at one point that he believed that MIBs were the bodies of dead people who had been reactivated. Later when I checked with the sheriff I was told that though his ex-deputy had had a number of “redeeming qualitities,” he also had what he had found to be “a very vivid imagination,” and “sees things others do not.” But it was a “failure to obey the orders of a superior officer” that eventually resulted in his dismissal. Another former co-worker provided a similar assessment.
To be fair, many people with UFO and paranormal experiences have been accused of these same things, of having a “vivid imagination” and the knack to “see things others do not.” Most can fortunately balance their paranormal beliefs and background experiences into their work lives and professional careers without any significant or detrimental consequences. However, it seems not always to be the case and law enforcement has some negative examples. In fact, there was the nationally publicized 1966 incident where Portage County, Ohio police officer Dale Spaur and other officers chased a UFO for about half an hour, over into Pennsylvania, and then too there’s the 1973 metallic suited entity encounter reported by Alabama Chief of Police Jeff Greenhaw. Both men soon afterward suffered considerable ridicule, divorces and lost their jobs.
Of course, Spaur and Greenhaw were presumably single encounter situations, with severe life-changing consequences, whereas the Honesdale officer was what ufology long ago termed a “repeater,” someone who is often even perceived as more suspect. But it seems to me that for some people with a background of these odd experiences, going even back to childhood, that such experiences would early on take on a reality that could even greatly exceed the stressful once-in-a-lifetime trauma dynamics and psychological syndrome reported by Spaur and Greenhaw. In fact, I can see how it might potentially shape and mold a personality that others might have reservations about as they would probably perceive that person as quite different, and because they would probably be unfamiliar with such subject matter and experiencer dynamics, they would naturally begin to wonder if such a person were simply delusional or fantasy prone. I can understand how such people might perceive someone as foolish, a little touched maybe, if not downright delusional, if they found out how such a person felt that they were undergoing a series of such experiences. I can certainly also see too how a deeply engrained personal belief system, be it spiritual, paranormal, metaphysical, ufological or whatever, with overlapping into conspiracy beliefs, which I have seen quite a bit of (distrust of government agencies and officials) could further affect how an experiencer could be perceived, as well as perceive events going on around him or her. They might also not always use the same so-called critical thinking or judgement system and thought processes about things that happen to them (i.e., odd light in the sky, an encounter with a stranger, synchronicity events, etc.) that most people would normally use.
Let us again fast forward to the Scranton conference in 1977. I spoke privately with a local radio announcer who described to me a very strange poltergeist situation that seemed to develop in connection with our ex-deputy from Honesdale. He told me that back around June or July 1976, he was helping him prepare a radio program, and gave the show two weeks of free publicity. He said that a great deal of preparation went into it. He pointed out that while he never witnessed anything personally, his wife and one-year-old son did. “She’s not the type of person who gets upset too easy,” he said. “The fear was there and the thing was real.” After the radio show aired the activity ended, and nothing else had happened since.
He said that on several occasions his wife heard footsteps coming up to their apartment door. She would think that it was her husband coming home early, swing the door open, only to discover that there was no one there! She would wait, he pointed out, for the footsteps to come right up to the top step, and so there was simply no time for anyone at that point to escape from view.
Another strange event that transpired was the sound of laughter, resembling mechanical laughter from a toy laughing box, coming out of a closet. She would open the door and look inside, find nothing, then shut the door, whereupon, while walking away, the door would pop open and the laughter sound would again come from that same space. He said that after each of these weird episodes, his wife would be terrified, calling him at work and asking him to pick her up at her father’s house. One time, while house cleaning, she felt a hand on her shoulder, but when she turned around there was no one there.
The one year old son, for some reason, displayed great agitation at times while in the livingroom. This is the only part of the house where he had this reaction. On occasions, he said, his son screamed out in fear. He wouldn’t stay there alone, or even with his mother there with him.
I found out long ago, that poltergeist activity and UFO close encounter incidents definitely seem to share some sort of common enigmatic relationship. From Maine to Florida, I have interviewed UFO close encounter witnesses who have described how these poltergeist manifestations would erupt around them soon after their encounters. Researchers like John Keel and Dr. Berthold Schwarz discovered the same pattern.
Lin became haunted by UFOs and paranormal manifestations. UFOs continued to appear to her. One spectacular event, that happened while she and her husband were living in Tucson, Arizona, back around 1999, was their sighting of a triangular craft “half the size of a football field” low in the sky behind their home. “We had the videocamera, the camera and everything there to film it,” Lin remarked. “And nothing worked.” [This is a fairly common complaint of UFO experiencers and “ghost hunters”] Lin and her husband got in a car and followed it for about 5 miles. Then it disappeared from sight over a hill. Others in the area had also seen it.
“A couple nights later, we went to bed and the next morning when we woke up the sheets were bloody, the dog was knocked out,” and all of them except her mother-in-law had strange “markings” on them. “It was kind of a nightmare for the whole family.” Lin described how her son had been very frightened by this event and had seen a ball of light inside his bedroom closet. She also told me that if she were to show me pictures of him from 4 or 5 years go, that “he is an identical ringer for this entity” she had had seen at age 13. “His hair, his eyes, his structure – everything,” she added. “It’s like if I was looking at the entity.” Her husband remarked once, she said, “My God, am I really his father or did something happen here?”
Lin also noted how around the time of their Arizona experience that others in the area had also reported seeing “blond people” in conjunction with the UFOs.
There are many events in Lin’s life that she wonders about. One she told me about happened when she was 9-years-old. She had been hit by a car, and was very seriously injured. She had a rare blood type (AB Neg.) and needed a transfusion. “These two police men, and to this day the nurses and people there stated they did not know where they came from, but they came and they gave the right blood. They were blond headed guys n police uniforms.”
