• AP Magazine

    An alternative way to explore and explain the mysteries of our world. "Published since 1985, online since 2001."

  • 1
Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, November 2015





Wandering Among the Igloos, eyeing strange Symbols, and Whistling for Answers

by: Brent Raynes



EVP 1
EVP 2
EVP 3

It was late afternoon, Sunday, September 20th, as we wandered a gravel road visiting igloos (old WW II ammunition storage bunkers) located in the TNT Area north of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, the site of much alleged UFO and Mothman activity back during the 1966-67 time period. My son-in-law Scott and I had just emerged from the first igloo along this stretch of road, when one of our team members told us, “I just had something strange happen.” This person said that it was like they had heard a male voice whisper into their left ear, something unrecognizable that sounded like it might have been German. Then they felt a sharp pain in the right hand, which had been down to their side, and it was as though their arm was being slightly pulled back behind them. They thought that someone had snuck up behind them, but when they turned around there was no one there to account for this. That person then showed us the location where it had occurred and said that their hand was still sore. We continued on to the second igloo, which had the reputation it seemed for being haunted. I had my handheld digital recorder still running as we stood there outside and caught an odd unidentified man’s voice clearly whisper “Sir.” It seemed quite out of place to me. This was only about three minutes after the team member had been telling us about their unusual experience and showing us where it had happened.



We went inside four igloos and then decided it was time to head back home to Tennessee. No Mothman, no MIBs, and no UFOs spotted overhead. Although we did do a couple of spirit box sessions in two of the igloos and while I tried unsuccessfully to get a spirit guide named Bishop to get John Keel to talk to us, we did hear “Bishop” come through several times. That name has no doubt come through for us hundreds of times during these sessions, and it could be anywhere, from Birmingham, Alabama, Nashville, Tennessee, or in this case West Virgina. A few times I have even gotten “John Keel,” but no such luck this time. Rosemary Ellen Guiley had told me the day before, when I met her in downtown Point Pleasant at the Mothman Festival, how she felt that in times past she had possibly gotten Keel while doing the spirit box in the area. It sounded like she had definitely had quite a few unusual experiences during her many visits to Point Pleasant through the years, and she was hardly the only one.

As Keel used to say, “The game is afoot.” I suspect he was quite right.

A woman named Debbie in Washington state, while under regressive hypnosis, recalled what seems to have been an abduction by alien beings. She described how she was once surrounded by several masked humanoid beings on an examination table. While those beings did not communicate with her there was another entity she called her “friend” who communicated in a telepathic type manner with her. He wore a uniform that was different from the others and had, on the left side of his uniform, a triangle that enclosed a circle with wavy lines. When my hypnotist friend asked his subject what she felt it meant, while she was under hypnosis, she said that she felt that it represented “a unity…a symbol of life.”




Back in 1988, Ohio UFO researcher and experiencer Madeline Teagle put me in touch with a young woman named Linda who was living in California at the time and who had written her about an ongoing series of remarkable UFO/entity encounters she had been having since childhood. She recalled one encounter where she awakened in her bed naked, face down, and how she then noticed two gray skinned humanoids, with rough looking skin, large eyes and wearing silver one-piece jumpsuits standing near her bed. “The outfits were trimmed in red. On the chest was a symbol, a triangle inside of a circle,” she wrote. “The circle line was red. The entire triangle was red too.”



One of the beings was male and the other was female. “I felt I knew the male,” she wrote. “I felt I met him before. He told me telepathically that he loved me and cared for me very much. It touched me deeply. He said he didn’t want to hurt me. He then had a huge gold needle in his hand. …He then put the needle in the fleshy cheek of my derriere. Oh boy, did it hurt and I screamed, but in my head because I couldn’t move my mouth. I screamed, ‘You lied to me. You said it wasn’t going to hurt and it did.’” She explained that next they “put me to sleep.”

Again my hypnotist friend on the West Coast hypnotized another abductee who described three tall white skinned, large dark eyed (with no pupils) humanoid beings, who wore one piece suits; one wearing a red colored suit and the other two blue. On the left chest of each, once again, was a circle with a triangle inside of it.

Oddly, this experiencer had a metaphysical father who had once been contacted by a mysterious “Mr. Bishop” who informed him that he was one of “them,” whereupon he disappeared before his eyes. This was well before I began radio facilitated communications with a “spirit guide” named Bishop through an alien abductee named Bret Oldham, who is one helluva ghost hunter!

In an ancient Hindu initiation ceremony, initiates in India wear over their left shoulders, a sacred thread composed of three strands of yarn that have been twisted, braided and knotted into a circle. It is supposed to represent the thread that ties us to our souls. Called Tridandi, meaning three, it symbolizes the link between spirit, soul, and personality [Spiritual Telepathy by Colleen Mauro, 2015; pgs 107-8]. Whitley Strieber, in Communion (1987), pointed out how the visitor experience has “its symbolic center in the number three and the triangular shape.” He added, “There are many ancient traditions that view man as a being of three parts: body, mind, and heart.”

Also in Strieber’s Communion he described how while under hypnosis by a psychiatrist (Dr. Donald Klein) that he saw his alien contact pointing something at him, at which time he wrote that he saw “swirling pictures” in his head, stating that he saw circles and triangles, explaining that “the triangle with the circle in it and the square comes around it…”

John Keel also noted the recurrence of these archetypal forms, for example pointing out in his pioneering work UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970) the Garabandal case, from the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain, involving four entranced young girls who described episodes of seeing the Lady (Virgin Mary type apparition), incidents that began back in 1961. Hundreds of people came to observe what was going on. In a state of what had been described as religious ecstasy the children would be kneeling, heads thrown back as they stared upward, transfixed in a vision, a condition that sometimes lasted hours and should have been very uncomfortable, and especially awkward for children. On one of the first encounters, the girls described how the Lady was accompanied by two angels who were dressed alike “as if they were twins.” Off to the Lady’s right the girls said they saw “a square of red fire framing a triangle with an eye and some writing. The lettering was in an old Oriental script!”

Keel noted how this sort of symbol came up a lot in silent contactee cases, though the ufologists of that time were unaware of it. Few back then had tackled the matter very adequately. Keel though was an exception to the rule and claimed at the time that he had interviewed in depth more than 200 silent contactees; “silent” meaning that they had kept a low profile and had not publicly revealed their stories. Remember, this was well before Strieber and Hopkins came along in the 1980s and brought mainstream focus in this field onto the alien abduction syndrome. In fact, one major civilian UFO organization back in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, known as NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) had avoided such reports like the proverbial plague. They wanted only stories dealing with flying objects. If a being stepped out of it, then they were ready to dismiss the report as a hoax or a delusion. This was due to the many dubious seeming contactee reports that flourished back during the 1950s, and NICAP’s founder ex-Marine Major Donald E. Keyhoe’s character attacks on celebrity contactee George Adamski had become highly publicized events.

In Raymond Fowler’s The Watchers (1990) we read of abductee Betty Andreasson Luca’s experience wherein she observed human shaped light beings that could morph into balls of light and then back into light beings, and how they then squatted and with open hands raised into the air they would have different luminous shapes in each palm. The first one she described in fact had a round sphere in one palm and a little pyramid shaped light in the other! Many aspects of Betty’s experiences seemed of deeply mystical, spiritual content. The short gray skinned beings with large pear shaped heads with cat-like wrap around eyes that she described encountering back in 1967 looked identical, except for the leader “Quazgaa,” who appeared to be taller than the others. They wore shiny tight form fitting blue uniforms that had the emblem of a bird with outstretched wings on their upper left sleeves. At one point in her hypnotic regressions, Betty described how Quazgaa suddenly “appeared like a bee” and how one eye appeared mainly black and the other white. Similar descriptions of supernatural deities with such odd contrasting eye colorations are a part of mythologies from around the world.



Back early in December 2005, at the end of a presentation I gave wherein I explored UFO, paranormal, and shamanic aspects, I distributed four replicas of the Peruvian Whistling Vessels (all of Chimu design) among the audience at my talk at the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE) in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I wanted participants to share in the rather unique and extraordinary auditory experience of these powerful shamanic instruments of ancient times. A number of people afterwards described having some pretty interesting and unusual experiences, though the one who really stands out in my memory was Betty Andreasson Luca, who was also in the audience at the time (her talk was to follow mine). “To review the vision, it seemed like a dark mountainous and forest area,” she described to me in an email soon afterwards. “There were stone steps that led upward where there was dim light from a fire. Closer, there was a ring of fire surrounding a huge conical dark stone. The fire seemed to flare up and down in places. And then I saw huge wings from what looked like an eagle in back of the stone.” Interestingly, the huge stone resembles what is called an omphalos in ancient Greek mythology. These stones, considered sacred, were also connected at times with eagle imagery. Omphalos means navel stone, representing the center of the earth.


(Betty Andreasson Luca's artistic rendering of her "vision")


“I wouldn’t be surprised to one day hear that the different vibrational levels from those whistles breaking into other dimensions have the ability to summon the beings and craft,” Betty also wrote. “Especially seeing what I saw.”

“The sound vibration is a tool to help put you into an altered state for ceremony and meditation,” Bonita Luz, an American transpersonal psychotherapist who has lived and traveled in Peru, explained to me. “But it was also used as a way of sending up prayers—sending a tone to open a column—a gateway, so to speak, to another dimension. This column allows information to come direct from other dimensions. In addition, many shamen say that the whistling vessels were used in ceremony to call in the Space Brothers.”

At times, when working with alien abductee/contactee experiencers, I introduce them to these whistles. The experiences can be quite dramatic and profound for them. Recently, for example, early in September 2015, I sat with three abductees in the home of Sandy Nichols, himself an admitted abductee and founder of the Alien Research Group (ARG), located in a remote part of Thompsons Station, Tennessee, south of Nashville. “Wow! Totally trippy,” one of the abductees named Cathy noted in an email soon afterwards. “Was not expecting that at all. While blowing mine, I immediately felt as though I was in a cave (it felt like rock) somewhere up high, with a very strong wind coming from behind me. Not sure if any of you have been in a cavern where there is airflow, but that’s what it felt like. Then I began seeing circular patterns (as Debi [another participating abductee] said, something like a mandala pattern) that seems to have a cross in the center of each circle that was made by some natural material such as dried grass tied together. Each small circle was spinning clockwise and the entire pattern was turning clockwise and vibrating or pulsating.”

“What I saw were swirling mandalas,” Debi explained of her whistling vessel vision. “I’d say (of) muted pinks, browns and a bit of gold, moving in a clockwise direction. They were all collapsing in on each other, and so had the effect of going down a never-ending tunnel. Like it was drawing me in.”

“When we were finished, I felt fine (although my eyes were watering) and I felt fine while we were talking in the kitchen,” Cathy added. But then later, after Sandy had walked her down to her van and as she was preparing to leave, Sandy claimed that he had seen a “small grey” on the other side of her van! Then as quickly as it had appeared it was gone. Cathy admitted that she felt some dread at that point, thinking to herself, “Oh god – not tonight. I don’t want to have that happen tonight.” She recalled that she had told Sandy that they could stay at his house.

The trip home turned out to be “trippy” too. “I thought it would be good to keep track of the time and so called my girls to tell them I was on the way, looked at the clock and took off.” Cathy wrote. “BUT – as many times as I have driven home from Sandy’s and I know the way by heart, I had trouble locating where I was in relation to everything on 840. I kept glancing at the clock to make sure I wasn’t experiencing any missing time (I didn’t) and then I noticed that the landscape seemed to be shifting forward and backwards; further apart and then combined together! Wild.”


(Brent conversing with MIB re-enactor Tim Frick)


“I actually had trouble finding which house was mine and which driveway to pull into. I had to slow down and wait for the landscape to shift back into its proper place so I could park!!! That’s as best as I can explain it. As soon as I got into the house, everything around me seemed normal – except that I then had the energetic high and was too energized to sleep for quite a while.”

The whistles can be quite “trippy” indeed. I still remember quite well the evening back in June 2007 that a group of us were visiting the home of Doctors Greg and Lora Little of Memphis, Tenn., and while blowing the whistles four of us described seeing like a vortex spinning clockwise. Acclaimed author, historian and world adventurer Andrew Collins of England was the first to share his perception of a ring, made up of energy, with three puma-jaguar looking creatures in it, spinning around in a clockwise pattern. I shared how I had seen like a vortex of water, that was spinning also in a clockwise pattern. Greg Little shared how he closed his eyes and saw a “swirling circular thing” with “little nodules popping up, or little energy packets,” also moving around in a clockwise pattern. He stated: “Opened my eyes, looked around, quit blowing. It went away. Just looked around, closed my eyes and blew it again, and the second I blew there it was again. Opened my eyes again, looked around, and said ‘that’s interesting.’ Closed my eyes, blew it again, there’s that swirling thing. I have no idea what it was. It’s never happened before.” Greg had been present at two previous whistling vessel meditations. James Windisch, also of Memphis, provided his testimony: “My first experience with the Peruvian whistles was pretty mind opening for me. I was immediately in the Mayan civilization. I was amongst an entire village and it was alive and vibrant inside of me. I just had some feelings that I’ve never felt before. That was at the ARE retreat of 2005 (where I led a meditation on the whistles there on November 5th, Brent Raynes). Then tonight, June 10th, I just experienced an entire vortex. I was traveling back in time. I don’t know where I was headed but that’s exactly how I felt. I was literally in a vortex just traveling back and it was swirling, and it was clockwise, pretty much like what everybody else experienced tonight.”

Later that night, as we sat back and discussed the interesting events of that evening, Andrew Collins waded in with his personal thoughts and reflections on the whistles. He began: “It may well be that in using this, for example, if you end up doing any controlled meditations, which might help people sometimes…” He seemed to struggle a bit for the right words, and then continued: “To actually visualize something like this, and ask them to actually go into it or through it or interact with it. They could be carried to the future, the past, or they may be just carried to a different place. Almost as if by entering into the vortex they could become at one with almost like a different sort of concept of space/time.” Then he wondered if “once removed into a different realm” that one could then use it “as a vehicle” to then “fling them out, in a way, to wherever they want to go.”

Or, I might add, where they needed to go.

A year after Communion, Whitley Streiber wrote in Transformation that he began to strongly feel a great need to delve into the ancient language of shamanism and see if its symbols and myths could somehow help address the complex and mysterious world that he had (he was coming to realize) been a part of since childhood. I know of many others who have been delving into this realm, in search of personal answers, in addition to a greater understanding and enlightenment about higher spiritual truths and knowledge, including myself and my wife Joan, who has Cherokee ancestry.

Through the years, Joan and I have participated in a good number of Native American ceremonies and meditations. We certainly have had some pretty profound and, at times, unusual experiences. For awhile, we had a sweat lodge on the hillside behind our house and had visitors come to participate in these ceremonies from far and wide, including Chicago, Atlanta, and Marrieta, Ohio. There were quite a few “visions” and apparent spirit “messages” that initially puzzled me but eventually some of the significant pieces began to gradually drift into place and much to my surprise they at times proved to contain rather extraordinary revelations. Thankfully, early on, Greg Little cautioned me that these experiences occur on different levels of reality, that we must be prepared to discern these events, to “test the spirits” too, and beware as the proverbial Trickster often lurks nearby at the beginning of ones spiritual quest or journey.

(Bret Oldham's whistling vessel experience)



Monday, November 11, 2024