Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, January 2016
MIB types, apparitions, and strange behaviors
by: Brent Raynes
In correspondence with John Keel back in 1970, he described how numerous “pre-1947 MIB cases” had been researched by ufologist Allen Greenfield, who had compiled “a list of references from books on witchcraft and the like, all describing rather typical MIB cases.” He assured me that “the MIB stuff is not confined to UFOs at all.” We discussed how some people were essentially “possessed,” and he was especially interested in gypsies, explaining that they were sometimes involved “as part of the possessed type of phenomenon.” He encouraged me to study up on gypsies, adding how one newspaper clipping he had read about how Fred Lee Crisman had been “working with gypsies.” Crisman had been a controversial UFO figure who had played a prominent part in the early 1947 Maury Island Island, a year earlier had written Ray Palmer, then editor of a sci fi magazine called Amazing Stories, about a run in he and another airman had allegedly had with a robot or something with a ray gun in Burma. Crisman had even been subpoenaed by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1968, as he had been identified as one of the three “mystery tramps” in Dallas on the day of John Kennedy’s assassination. Keel had written that the gypsy religion is a mixture of witchcraft, black magic, and elementalism, that they often drive black Cadillacs (like the MIB) and they often turn up in “window” areas during UFO flaps.
“A majority of our MIB seem to be three-dimensional apparitions,” he wrote. “While possessed persons can be made to play an MIB role, the 3-D apparitions are not biochemical entities. They are projections of a most sophisticated sort.”
(Ramona Clark's sketch of alien figure that appeared in her bedroom)
Indeed, these recurrent MIB manifestations and other high-strangeness antics can be found described in a great deal of literature predating the 1947 “flying saucer” wave that included the historic Kenneth Arnold sighting and the controversial Roswell incident. For example, during an intense religious revival in Wales during the winter of 1904-5, many mysterious lights in the sky were being reported. In one dramatic instance, two men reported seeing a dark sinister looking figure standing nearby when one of those lights shot down a white beam at it, at which time the mysterious figure seemingly disintegrated.
Years later, Brad Steiger was to share with me the probable reason I suspect as to why John Keel felt that some MIB could be “3-D apparitions” of a “most sophisticated sort.” This was something that John Keel had never revealed publically.
While in New York City, back in January 1966, as he was working on a book assignment for Macfadden-Bartell publishers, Brad got to visit one night with Keel to chat about their mutual interest in UFOs, monsters, and the MIB.
“According to Keel, after he had suffered mysterious telephone calls and was made aware that a seemingly all-knowing ‘someone’ had him always under surveillance, ‘they’ arrived one night in his apartment,” Brad recalled. “They didn’t bother with the door. Suddenly, three men simply manifested before him. Keel recalled that their behavior alternated between acting buffoonish to that of assuming ‘tough guy’ personas as they threatened him to cease all of his research into the UFO phenomena.”
“After around a half an hour of cacophony of threats and behavior suggestive of the Three Stooges, one of them asked Keel if he wanted a demonstration of their alien abilities. When Keel shrugged, ‘why not,’ one of them went to his kitchen sink, pulled out a bottle of bleach from its cabinet, and took several swallows of the liquid, then handed the bottle to one of his companions, who, in turn, passed it to the third member of the strange trio.”
“Keel said that they took their turn with the bottle of deadly liquid until the bottle was empty. In his opinion, the beings were most likely paraphysical, for he could not imagine any physical beings who could drink bleach. Unless, of course, they were physical beings of an entirely different composition than we humans.”
“While I found Keel’s account difficult to comprehend, he seemed completely honest and forthright with his account of the extraordinary encounters with the strange beings,” Brad concluded. “As we discussed his bizarre visitors at greater length, I could tell that Keel was beginning to lean more toward the belief that rather than extraterrestrials threatening those who chose to delve into the UFO enigma, it was humankind’s ancient supernatural enemies harassing us in more modern guises of beings from other planets. He had, it appeared to me, begun to think in terms of demonic interference for what endgame goal remained unclear.”
(Map drawn by Ramona Clark of route UFO took in vicinity of Mayport Naval Air Station)
Keel had publically written and spoken of how he’d wanted to catch up to the physical MIB and question them, as he felt that he had a better chance of doing that than catching up with the very elusive flying saucers and their occupants. He described how he had even arrived at homes just minutes after the MIB had allegedly been there. In one instance, on Long Island, Keel had received an anonymous phone call that directed him to a location where he encountered a black Cadillac with MIB looking occupants down a dead-end road where they impossibly disappeared.
Keel never got a chance to interrogate the physical MIB that were visiting his frightened informants, but I came across contactees and odd and charismatic psychic type personalities who seemed to be playing MIB type roles, but of a more sociable and traceable sort. They also claimed close ties with witchcraft and other groups with occult leanings. One even admitted to me of being involved in witchcraft from an early age, was head of a coven, claiming that while the CIA was responsible for MIB incidents of harassment and silencings, his people didn’t do that but instead would “psych-out” the government agents of disinformation. A young man, aged 26, he liked to dress as a narcotics agent, wearing a black suit coat, pants, and shoes, and a white turtle neck. He initially approached a fellow Navyman friend of mine [I was in the service] at a bus station in downtown Jacksonville Beach (FL), telling my friend about his strange life, and giving him his business card. This was a little spooky at the time, as two other Navymen, also on my ship, told me how while they were on liberty in the area someone had approached them too and seemingly was asking about me. I later went to that location, a fast food restaurant, but saw no one I recognized and no one seemingly recognized me.
In the process of getting a divorce, the alleged warlock/contactee/MIB type impersonator was living with his mother. The first time I dropped by to see him, he wasn’t home. I spoke briefly with his mom though, who while not seemingly very conversant on the subject of UFOs, did share how one night a year earlier, around 8:30-9 p.m., she had seen two “ferris wheel” looking objects sort of “rolling across the sky.” They were quite lit up and large and made a loud rumbling type noise. She said she ran across the street and pointed it out to a neighbor, a detective, who she said assured her it was likely only the government testing new aircraft. [Naval Station Mayport and Naval Air Station Jacksonville were just miles away]
(Ramona Clark's drawing of what her UFO looked like)
On Monday, December 24th 1973, myself and another fellow sailor spent almost all of an afternoon and evening riding around, observing and conversing with this fellow. He was very open about his story, sharing with total strangers, as he had done earlier with my other Navy friend. He’d walk, for example, into a bar and begin sharing his bizarre story with people he had never met. He told us that a few years earlier, he, his wife and some friends were out riding around when something resembling a fireball came down over the roof of their car. He climbed out the window to see what it was and claimed that over the roof of the car, a mere two feet or so away, was a mechanical “android,” he called it, that he claimed to now know was sent down by an extraterrestrial scout ship. In fact, sometime later, he added, two scout ships, of the Adamski variety, visited his home, and glowing white bowling pin shaped entities (he explained this was their true astral form) appeared to him. He further explained that two entities astrally shared his body. One was a male and one was a female. He and the female, he added, were in love.
As I write this all of these years later, I wonder how that all worked out. I have my doubts that it worked out all that well.
The area seemed to be what Keel called a “window.” All sorts of oddball occurrences were reported. The nearby St. Johns River, that came out to the Atlantic Ocean by the Mayport naval/air facility, was where something resembling a sea serpent had raised its long neck, according to five startled witnesses in a fishing boat. Not far from where the serpent, or whatever it was, had been seen, another man from Jacksonville claimed that early one morning in January 1972, while fishing alone on the St. Johns River, a domed disk had hovered directly over his boat. His attention diverted, the tide went out and he was temporarily marooned on Blount Island. Walking along the beach he encountered a humanoid figure with a cat-like face from which a “brilliant white light” appeared, after which his body went numb and he collapsed. “For the first hour I was sure I would die,” he stated. “But I prayed and prayed, and then the numbness began going away. About day break I was able to get on my knees and crawl.”
In 1973, I met the wife of a Navyman who lived on the naval base at Mayport. Her name was Ramona Clark. She, her husband, and their teenaged son had a close encounter with a domed, disc-shaped object about 40-45 feet in diameter, back on July 29, 1967, around 9 p.m., near the base. They were about to turn onto Route A1A off of a dirt road in an area known as the Little Jetties, when they and other motorists on A1A first spotted it initially appearing to be a plane with landing lights coming in over the water near a U.S. Coast Guard Station. On the other side of the A1A was the air field for the Mayport Naval Station. Everyone stopped their cars and waited, presumably to let what they initially thought was a plane with landing lights pass in front of them as it made a low descent into that air field, but instead it unexpectedly stopped and came to hover about 15-20 feet in the air, at the edge of the water. Suddenly there appeared these bluish lights that seemed to drop down from the object onto the edge of the road. “They looked like welding arcs,” Ramona told me. “If you’ve ever seen anybody weld and the sparks that fly off of it will hit and kind of bounce. This is what was happening. They were coming out toward the cars and I thought, ‘My goodness, they’re taking pictures.’ I don’t know why I thought that. But these lights would bounce around on the edge of the road by the cars.” By this time, the motorists in front of the Clark’s realized that this was not conventional aircraft activity and began to take off. “I mean burning rubber getting out of there!” Ramona exclaimed. “It’s amazing how fast they disappeared.” In moments, it was just Ramona and her family and a dark disk, making a rocking type motion, low in front of their car moving slowly ahead of them as they drove at about 30 miles an hour. At one point, it stopped and hovered at a small bridge for about a minute, and then it continued on to an intersection with Wonderwood Road where Indian burial mounds and a cemetery are located. There it hovered again, over trees on the right side of the road, as though waiting to see which way they were going to go next. They turned slowly left, and as they did the UFO slowly moved across the road and low above them. Looking up, whereas it had been a dark form before as it moved down the road, they could now see amber and green lights underneath it, as well as a red one that Ramona felt may have been on an antenna or something. “You could see right in the center of it what looked like a great big black hole,” Ramona noted. She added that her husband and son both said that they had heard a low humming sound like what you’d hear from a generator. The son, who had been in the backseat behind his father who was driving, was suddenly hanging out the back window to get a better look at the UFO. “I said, ‘Get your head back in the car,’ because you know it could be dangerous,” Ramona recalled. “Our headlights just seemed to kind of draw back into the car. It was real strange. They didn’t just go out – they just seemed to come backwards and went out completely.” During this time, the headlights, as they were retracting, had turned a yellowish color, and then after the UFO got 100 or more feet away the lights came back on and were normal again.
(Artist illustration of Blount Island alien)
The disk was now headed over a marsh back towards the Naval Station, so the Clark’s turned their 62 Ford back around and stopped on the side of the road up near the Jetties again. They could then see a bright red light hanging over the Coast Guard Station. Next they could hear someone talking over a loudspeaker (weren’t able to tell what was being said) and searchlights were scanning around the river. “Suddenly, this thing began to glow and get bigger. It just spread out and reminded me of looking at a coal on fire,” Ramona told me. “You could see it sort of change colors and brighten up.” It slowly began to move eastward toward the ocean, continuing to get “bigger and bigger.” Then two jet fighters came in flying low and fast, from the direction of the Naval Air Station’s Cecil Field in Jacksonville. Ramona said the jets split up, one went up higher while the other continued on a straight path. She felt that they were trying to maneuver it into an intercept position, but by this time the UFO had accelerated at a speed faster than the jets. All three disappeared out over the Atlantic Ocean.
Within about four days of the UFO sighting, the Clark home began to experience poltergeist activity. It began with mysterious “voices,” a loud male voice that would call her first name, and as with breathing sounds, always on her left side (1). “Just behind the left ear,” she noted. “I’d turn around to look and there was nobody there.” It would happen at different locations, like inside the house or outside while working in her flower garden. Then there were unexplained footsteps and knocking sounds. Eventually, in the weeks and months that followed, the paranormal activity escalated and Ramona began to awaken, always around 3 a.m. (2), immobilized in a temporary state of tingling paralysis, observing a frightening humanoid figure. “I remember that I noticed the open shirt collar on the entity very clearly,” Ramona told me. “It ‘stood out’ more so than the face. The face, in fact, seemed distorted or fuzzy.” At times, the face would remind Ramona of her first husband, who died tragically early in the marriage, and then “it faded…to be replaced by a cat-like face.” The second face felt “evil…just totally” Ramona added. Her teenaged son (she hadn’t told him what had been happening to her) came into her bedroom very upset late at night with similar stories. “He would have these akinesia spells and there were people pulling at his arms and legs, and men in black were telling him that they were going to kidnap his mother and take her away,” Ramona stated. “(He) had no knowledge of the men in black. None whatsoever. He never had any knowledge of what was happening to me because I never had told anyone about it.” Ramona also described seeing small glowing balls of bluish or golden lights in her bedroom as well. “When the blue ones were around nothing bad went on but when the little gold ones were around then something bad would go on,” Ramona explained. Years later, Ramona’s husband (she was remarried at this point) watched in amazement as a small glowing ball of light came into the bedroom through an open window, hovered briefly in front of her sleeping face, and then flew back out the window. “I had these experiences for six or eight months before I had read anything about it,” Ramona noted. John Keel’s writings had proven particularly relevant.
The humanoid with the cat like face that zapped the frightened fisherman on Blount Island, was followed by 21 nights of “visions” that would begin right at the threshold of sleep. He told me how he felt that he “almost went crazy” from it all. In these “visions” the Blount Island alien appeared to him again and together they went aboard the S.S. Constitution, a cruise liner that was docked nearby, and how the alien would show him a globe of the earth and draw upon it a five pointed star that went through Georgia’s ancient Eagle Mound as well as distant locations like the Cheops Pyramid and Easter Island. He predicted that on Mars we’d discover statues, pyramids, and mounds (which he called markers) similar to those on earth. For several weeks following the “visions,” the fisherman began suddenly waking up mornings at exactly 3 a.m. He thought it really strange.
Any of this sound familiar? Perhaps the alien with the cat-like face, the paralysis, and the 3 a.m. factor? He confessed to me that growing up in Georgia he loved to explore caves and that one day in 1947 he had encountered three creatures like the Blount Island being. At the time, it shook him up really bad and he thought that he had quite literally encountered demons from hell! He further told me that he had for years dabbled in black magic, described some of the strange rituals and such that he would perform. He also confessed how he sometimes liked to dress up in a black suit coat, pants, tie and shoes and drive into some neighborhood of Jacksonville and mess with people’s minds. Especially women, he said, as they loved to gossip. (Does this strange behavior sound familiar? Is it coincidence?)
In 1973, I joined military buddies at a home just outside Mayport for a Thanksgiving meal. I learned that the young military family (Mike and Elaine) had been disturbed by unexplained knocking sounds, “creepy feelings,” and a door opening on occasion by itself. Within weeks the activity escalated and soon included the wife seeing a 3 foot tall, blurry figure with glowing non-blinking white or golden eyes seemingly floating over the floor of their trailer home. It could happen day or night, most often appearing behind her and on her left side. (Again, sound familiar?) She even said that she saw it while walking along the Mayport Road. Dark, shaped sort of like a tree stump in the beginning, after a short time it’s eyes began glowing red and the form had become more human like. She sometimes would feel as though she was being watched, turn around and there it would be. The couple had a baby and we were becoming concerned. She described waking up one morning unable to move, while hearing her baby crying, and at the same time noticing the strange dark little figure moving around inside the trailer. One day a neighbor named Betty heard a knock at her back door. When she asked who it was, she heard a voice say, “It’s me, Mike.” It sounded just like him, she said, but the problem was Mike and I had returned to the ship we were assigned to at the Mayport base and so we were not around at that time. Early one morning, Mike said that he and his dog were both awakened by the movement of the bed. He said that a brown hunting dog, with paws on the bed, was looking down at them. “Beautiful animal,” Mike remarked. Then it dropped back down to the floor and disappeared into thin air.
At about 9:30 p.m., two nights in a row, October 9th and 10th, 1973, an approx. 25 foot diameter disc-shaped object that produced a “whistling” sound was reported appearing at treetop level, just down the road from the main entrance to the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. The object had a series of white lights that pulsated in unison along its outer edge. It was also reported to me that in May 1974 there were a series of security alerts on the base when strange lights and forms were reported on the runways and at other locations on the base on several different nights. A Navyman assigned to the base at that time informed me that he was present at one of these occurrences when, at about 3 a.m., just off the end of a runway, about 10 feet in front of a blast wall, he saw a thing like a “cone” that was about 5-6 feet tall, pointed at the top and about 2 feet across at the bottom, surrounded by a luminous aura that was an estimated 15 feet across (with an edge that was well-defined). It was visible for perhaps 5-10 minutes and then just faded away. Since this had happened before, my informant was ready with a Polaroid camera. Oddly, the developed print, he told me, showed contradictions to what he had seen in the darkness of a 3 a.m. The cone shaped anomaly appeared in the print as a “big thing of reflecting metal with sun reflecting off of it,” with the surrounding area lit up like daylight, including the river and about a half mile across it a tree line on the other side. What he had seen visually at the time, however, he claimed was more like shining car headlights into a fluorescent road sign at night. Not that bright.
He showed the picture that night to an LTJG (Lieutenant Junior Grade) that he worked under. The next day, he said, he was placed in a room with two men in green khaki uniforms. He said that they were a standard security investigating team and questioned him about the incident. They also obtained the picture from him saying that it would be returned to him later. He said it was not, and he was also told not to talk about the incident.
Ramona was working at the Shrimp Coop in Mayport, where the fishing boats would routinely drop off a fresh boat load of shrimp, when two odd strangers dressed in black showed up. This was right after the UFO sighting. “You know yourself how remote Mayport is,” Ramona told me. “That’s a long walk from anywhere and the only other way in is across the river on the ferry.” She said they ordered themselves each a coca-cola. “One of them drank part of his and I don’t think that the other one touched his,” Ramona added. “They didn’t know how much a coca cola would cost and the man didn’t know how to count money. He was very confused and he just laid it on the counter and let me pick out the money that they owed for the two cokes.
“They wanted to catch a plane at a certain time, or so they said,” Ramona explained. “I said, ‘You’ll never make it’, because you know how far the airport is from there.” She says it seemed like it was about 35 minutes until their flight was to take off, and they were on foot, and the airport was at least 30 miles away. “I told them that they wouldn’t be able to catch their plane and they kept sitting there!” Ramona exclaimed. “You know, people who have to catch an airplane don’t keep just sitting there!” Eventually, they got up and left on foot. “They went toward Atlantic Village, walking on a very hot day, with these winter suits on,” she added. “It was very unusual.”
A few years later, Ramona was reading the book, Stranger at the Pentagon, by Dr. Frank Stranges, with photographs of an alleged alien (but otherwise appearing perfectly human) identified as Valiant Thor, along with another man (“V. Cmdr. Donn”?) pictured with him. She was surprised to see these pictures because, as she told me, “(They) resembled the two men I saw very much. I mean, they were just identical.” The pictures in the book had been taken by ufologist August Roberts at High Bridge, New Jersey, sometime in 1958, at the home of the famous contactee Howard Menger.
The contactee world seemingly introduced other odd characters into Ramona’s already strange life. She became acquainted with a Madeleine Rodeffer, a follower of the best known contactee of all, George Adamski. There was a motion picture film allegedly taken by her back on February 26, 1965, while George Adamski was visiting her and her husband at their home in Silver Springs, Maryland, that portrays one of the classic Adamski scout ships. Ramona told me that there was a man named Johnson, who lived in Florida and who claimed he was with the government, and this Rodeffer used to come down from Washington and visit him at his home. “This man (was) a very close associate of hers,” Ramona told me. “When she would show the film and everything she would always look at this man, when she was talking, as if to say, ‘Am I doing all right?’ He would nod his head and she would go on. It was a strange sort of relationship they had.” It eventually cost her her marriage. “In fact, she called me from Washington and told me about it,” Ramona added.
That would jive with what some sources related to Adamski have reportedly admitted, including Mrs. Rodeffer herself, that George Adamski himself was the actual cameraman.
Ramona recalled a time when there was a meeting in Jacksonville and she had stepped outside to get a breath of fresh air as the crowded room had been filled with cigarette smoke. “He (Johnson) followed me out and was telling me if I was ever invited aboard a saucer not to accept, not to ever go near a saucer, that it was dangerous,” Ramona told me. “I could be physically assaulted by these people, and he said I could even be raped, and so on. I stood there and listened to him kind of shocked. Why did he pick me out to tell me these things? (He) told me definitely never to go with anyone who seemed to think anything about saucers unless I had a male companion with me that I could trust.”
But as if that wasn’t strange enough, the would be good Samaritan reportedly began to keep an eye on her home. Was it a protective eye? “My neighbors saw him driving up and down in front of my house when I wasn’t home, and he would always be in a different car every time,” Ramona explained. “Usually old beat up automobiles that were falling apart.”
As expressed in John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies, he had a title there entitled, “Paranoiacs Are Made, Not Born.”
Maybe so.
References:
1. Increased right brain hemisphere activity seems significant since some recorded instances of psychic/mediumistic phenomena have suggested hemispheric shifts in consciousness similar to what Ramona Clark described. British “direct voice” medium Leslie Flint described “voices” that manifested to him above his head and off to the left side, at what seemed like a distance of about two feet. Arigo, the famed Brazilian psychic healer, was allegedly guided by a spirit “doctor” who reportedly spoke into his left ear. A man named Colin Parsons described in his book entitled Encounters With The Unknown, wrote how for some 30 years a voice whispered messages into his left ear. It was able to tell him things that it was humanly impossible for him to have known.
In the late Dr. Nandor Fodor’s comprehensive An Encyclopeadia of Psychic Science, several examples of apparent hemispheric brain shifts in consciousness were cited with gifted mediums. One of these was Helene Smith, the famed Swiss medium whose controversial “Martian alphabet” and visionary visitations to the Martian landscape, caused a bit of a stir back in the 1890’s. Dr. Theodore Flournoy, a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva, found that when in trance Smith would look for her pocket on the left side instead of the right, and if one of her fingers were pinched or pricked behind a screen from her view, it was the corresponding finger on the opposite hand that was agitated.
California contactee Brian Scott was described being in a trance state (4:20 p.m., November 5, 1975) by a lady named Lou Savage, who observed: “He looked strange: facial features were taut, like a semi-solid rock. His eyes had a fixed stare. Not on the paper, but on the wall in front of his desk, and his facial color was a dull gray; nothing even resmbling skin tone as I know it. All the while Brian’s eyes were fixed on the wall his left hand continued writing. BRIAN IS NOT LEFT HANDED…”
2. The time around 3 a.m. is probably the real witching hour for paranormal and UFO/entity events and manifestations. We know that it is the most likely the time for us to have dreams, it is when our body temperature drops sharply, and it is when our pineal gland has an increased melatonin output and that surges in earth generated electromagnetic energies also peak around this hour.
