Encounters with the Unknown—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, September 2023
High Strange UFO-type Phenomena
by: Brent Raynes
It was a moonlit night on April 4, 1966, when a steel contractor named Ronald Sullivan of Maryborough, Australia, was returning home from Wycheproof, when he encountered something quite strange. As he was driving along the road his headlight beams inexplicably bent to the right. Fortunately, he realized in time the danger he was in if he continued to follow his headlights and came to an immediate stop, just narrowly stopping short of a ditch and a fence. He later told the police at Maryborough, "Had I followed them I would have run off the road."
This story doesn't end there though. As Sullivan continued to observe his headlight beams he noticed that they struck a strange cone-shaped object out in the field. The thing seemed to be resting on the ground, looked to be 25 feet tall, 3 feet wide at the bottom, and 10 feet wide at the top. The bottom was a brilliant white color, but from there on up to the top it was, Sullivan explained, composed of all the colors of the spectrum - rather like a rainbow. Before Sullivan was able to react or in any way make a move the thing silently rose from the ground at a tremendous speed and soon was lost in the night sky above.
Sullivan soon after the incident had his headlights checked. They were fine.
Curiously, three nights later, which was an overcast night, a young motorist named Gary Taylor, age 19, was found dead in his car at the same spot. He had run off the road. A police investigation of the area was done, and they found an odd circular impression about five feet in diameter and two to five inches deep in the freshly ploughed field. The question was soon raised as to whether Sullivan's encounter was connected with the circumstances surrounding young Taylor's tragic death. In Coral and Jim Lorenzen's book UFOs: The Whole Story (1969) they noted: "There was nothing especially unusual about the vicinity of the Sullvian incident or the Taylor crash. The scene was a stretch of straight bitumen road about nine miles east of Bealiba, which is 120 miles northwest of Melbourne. A blood test of the dead driver indicated that he had not been drinking, so that the possibility of drunk driving had to be ruled out. Of course, there is always the possibility that young Taylor merely fell asleep at the wheel, but the circular impression on the ground is completely unexplainable."
Back in the April 1976 issue of Saga magazine's UFO Report, respected British UFO researcher Charles Bowen (who once edited England's Flying Saucer Review) wrote a truly thought-provoking article entitled UFOs and Light. "The UFO 'controllers' can play fantastic tricks with light," he wrote. "Whoever heard of light in 'coherent' beams which move deliberately forward - and turn corners?"
A young biology student in Romania claimed that back in 1953 he observed a glowing ball of light drop from the sky into a bush. Taking a stick, he poked it into the bush in search of the thing and observed that he could no longer see the stick, nor part of his hand! Then he was aware of a tingling sensation throughout his hand and a great heat in the soles of his feet, soon followed by the sensation of something cold pressing down over his entire body. Fleeing from the scene, he later suffered from vomiting and "mental disturbances."
In 1975, while investigating the claims of an Ohio contactee named Al Roush, who could seemingly call down the UFOs, claiming telepathic contact with them, I interviewed Larry Moyers of Akron, a respected researcher who was with MUFON (Mutual UFO Network). He told me that he and several others joined this male contactee at a private park near Cleveland and how, as it was raining at the time, they came upon a bush in which three small "football-shaped lights" were nestled in. "They were transparent," he said. "You could see the leaves through them. There were 4 or 5 of us who were watching it. This was too much for me. I dove into the bush!" When he did the strange lights vanished without a trace! "I had every reason to believe once again that this was a projection."
Yes, Larry claimed to have seen this sort of thing before. Another contactee, named Karmie Tomocello, who would accurately predict things. He recalled, as an example, how she would go into an automatic writing activity and predict that if everyone went out into the yard and looked to the northwest at exactly 3 a.m. a green fireball would appear, and it would happen. One time at this woman's home Larry observed "a big pink rim circling a tree" about 20 feet away. "Above it was a big green light and below it was a big white light." "I stood there in complete awe," Larry said. "I don't' know how much time went by. 45 seconds, a minute, a minute and a half. I don't know. I was involved. Then it was out. ...She said, 'You think you saw a UFO, don't you?' I said, 'I can only describe what I saw.' She said, 'No, you didn't see a UFO. They wanted to show you their ability to project an image on the atmosphere.' And that would explain a lot of here they are and here they're not. It was three dimensional."
In another case, this one in Brazil, in 1973, a 40-year-old salesman allegedly encountered a UFO that projected a light beam down on his car, causing his auto to become completely transparent! He also described how his skin suddenly felt as though it were on fire, and he claimed that he ran from his car for some distance before fainting.
I interviewed a man who described an experience that he had one night in 1967 at the age of 14 while he was sleeping in a screened in porch area in Falls Church, Virginia. “It was in the summer, and I remember waking up and sitting up I noticed a light coming down in the shape of a cone,” he explained. “The light was like a spotlight except it had a pointed end and was slowly coming down. I knew this was strange as light would immediately hit the ground, but this was coming down slowly and was cone shaped. I got up to go outside from the porch and opening the door looked up at a football shaped disk that was a solid bright orange with the white beam of light that came down to about three feet off the ground. I looked at this, but it seemed as soon as I came out, the light started back up to the disk. Once it reached the disk, the craft floated away very slowly and made no sound whatsoever.”
Unbelievably, some even report solid appearing UFOs that can dive into hillsides like they were mere clouds. For example, in 2005, I met an American researcher named Cynthia Newby Luce who had a master’s degree in experimental psychology and anthropology, and who had lived for many years in the mountain village of Sao Jose do Vale do Rio Preto, located northwest of Rio de Janeuro, Brazil. It was here that she said that she one day witnessed something very peculiar near her village. “I was driving along the road that has the river on one side of me (the left) and on my right is a steep embankment as the river is in a narrow valley and the road is cut from the hill that comes right down to the river,” Mrs. Luce explained. “It was in the middle of the day and the sun was bright and clear. I was going along at about 25 miles an hour. The road winds and suddenly I saw this metallic object with windows half-way into the hillside. It was around 8 feet up from the road and about 10 feet of the object was protruding and it just slid into the hillside of bare red earth. It went in fast and so it really startled me but happened so fast I did not have time to stop.”
Tom Dongo, a UFO author and longtime Arizona resident who has spent many years in and around Sedona, an area known to be a hotbed of UFO activity, told me how witnesses had seen disc-shaped objects flying right into a canyon wall. "The disks, like it was a cloud, just slowly melted right into this solid rock. It has happened around here a lot." Michael Grosso, Ph.D., who has done extensive psychic research, also touched upon UFOs when he wrote in his book Experiencing the Next World Now (2004), "UFO craft and occupants behave like mind-matter hybrids and remain maddeningly elusive and surreal, more like the antics of ghosts than machines from outer space. We hear of levitation, telepathy, apports, teleportation, strange light and heat phenomena, and materialization effects. UFOs and aliens, like ghosts and apparitions, behave as if they were not subject to normal physical constraints."
Next is a good case in point.
Journalist Bob Teets investigated more than 150 eyewitness accounts for his book West Virginia UFOs: Close Encounters in The Mountain State (1995). One of my favorite UFO “hocus pocus” cases in the book involved a man named Gregg Knight, a deputy with the Harrison County Police Department. Gregg described an old man named Brian (pseudonym) who was quite a “mentally disturbed individual” who had “quit work because of events in his life and in his daughter’s life in Louisiana because of contact with aliens.” One clear afternoon in 1990, Gregg and Brian were standing outside at a trailer park in Belmont, West Virginia, engaged in conversation. Brian was known to be very knowledgeable about Biblical matters and, in their conversation, Gregg said words to the effect, “If I ask my Dad a question, he answers. If I ask God the Father something, he won’t answer, sometimes for years. Now why is that?”
Brian responded, “It depends on what you ask.” Gregg came back with, “Like UFOs, what could they be? I want to see an alien craft not of this world.” Brian said, “Look there,” and Gregg looked to the west, and what he saw, he admitted, “took my breath away.”
Bob’s account of this story follows:
“It was a massive craft, so huge it “blocked out the sun, and yet it didn’t cast a shadow.” Gregg estimated it was more than 2,000 feet in length, with a finish like that of “a Chrysler 426 hemi-engine, that’s it exactly.” Its features resembled “a battleship turned upside down. “I yelled for my wife as loud as I could, or at least I thought I did, but no one came out.”
After it was gone, Gregg looked at Brian. “Did you see that!” he asked, incredulously. “Sure,” Brian answered. “That ain’t nothing, that’s just a mother ship. You ought to see a colony ship. And then wait ‘til you talk to ‘em.”
Brian’s son, who was 20 miles away in Parkersburg, saw it too. From his perspective, it appeared to be about the size of a baseball on the horizon. Gregg became an active member of the Mutual UFO Network as a direct result of his dramatic encounter that strange afternoon in 1990. This isn’t the only UFO case where a small group of people observed something quite spectacular and massive in size that hundreds of others should have been quite startled by – something that should have resulted in a media sensation. Despite Gregg yelling to his wife at the top of his lungs, no one else ventured outside to observe the huge object.
