Alternate Perceptions Magazine, November 2025
An interview with Tim Brigham, Ph.D., a former resident of Gulf Breeze, Florida, talking with editor/host Brent Raynes on UFOs and the psychic/psychological implications on various anomalous experiences.
By Brent Raynes
Raynes: This is Brent Raynes for Alternate Perceptions online magazine. It is October the 16th and I’m talking with Tim Brigham. I believe he’s out in Arizona now, but years ago he used to live in Gulf Breeze, Florida. And if any of you people are into Ufology, or as Jim Moseley called it Ufoology, you should know Gulf Breeze was quite the controversial story and since he lived there – I don’t know just how long – but a pretty good while – and of course he knew Jim Moseley who I know had interviewed Ed Walters and his wife back in the day. Tim, I don’t know if you ever met him or not?
Dr. Brigham: I grew up in Gulf Breeze originally. For several years I lived across the bay from Ed Walters’ house. I could see his house from where we lived when I was around ten, when he originally started having his sightings and taking his photographs. It was a big thing of course at the time. It was national news. Of course, eventually when I was in my teen years I started hanging out with the local MUFON crew and they were active with nightly sky watches. That’s how I originally met Jim Moseley. In my teen years I put out a newsletter. Raynes: I was just going through the back issues of Alternate Perceptions and back in 1996 you wrote an article for us entitled The Evolution of Abductions. And I remember you had your newsletter The Devil’s Advocate, and you explored everything from Gulf Breeze to angels’ hair. You covered a lot of things.
Did you ever meet Ed Walters?
Dr. Brigham: I talked with him briefly on the phone a couple of times but never really talked a lot with Ed, but it was very interesting and Elgin Air Force Base right there in Gulf Breeze. Something came up the other day with some UFO conversation where one of the whistle blowers claimed some kind of sighting at Elgin Air Force Base. A lot of military activity. A lot of weird stuff.
Raynes: Apparently, a lot of people were seeing things, even though there’s some questions about Ed Walters photographs, like with the model of a UFO that was found in the attic later I think after he moved, someone else found it, and people wondered about his claims and his photos. It kind of seemed like the questions and controversy surrounding his story was going to split MUFON up because there were people who were believers and people who had serious doubts and reservations about the authenticity of Walters’ photos.
Dr. Brigham: The Walters’ photos and his stuff seemed to occur initially and then there were other people who independently saw things so it’s very hard to nail down everything that went on because there were multiple people who did see lights in the sky that were hard to identify but were not the same thing that Ed photographed.
Raynes: And then there were – what six people from the military who…?
Dr. Brigham: Yeah, six, some form of intelligence agents, I think they worked for the Army and were stationed overseas in Germany. Their claim later was that they started to get contact on a Ouija board.
Raynes: That doesn’t sound like intelligence people to me.
Dr. Brigham: It was a zany story. Sounded like some kind of cover story or something, but they ended up fleeing to Gulf Breeze going AWOL and they got arrested in Gulf Breeze. I think they had some kind of personal contact with some of the New Age UFO people in the area. So, there was some social dynamic there. I don’t know what exactly they were. But definitely they were inspired to break the law to flee Germany and do something at least in some ways related to UFOs, which again certainly broke my own faith in belief versus skepticism over the years. I’ve always kind of been more intrigued by the human side of it than whatever was going on with UFOs. It's one of the reasons I went on to study psychology, growing up around this kind of weirdness. It’s harder to study UFOs directly but you can at least study people who see UFOs.
Raynes: Yeah, Carl Jung’s last book was on the flying saucer phenomena, and he struggled with it too trying to figure out whether he could connect it with his archetypes of the collective unconscious theory but yet he was puzzled by incidents of radar contact that coincided sightings and he wasn’t really sure what was going on.
I know that Greg Little went down to Gulf Breeze and saw the Bubba, the light that a lot of people were seeing, and I think he kind of thought that it was maybe the military just testing to see how people would react at the time.
Dr. Brigham: Yes. That’s what I eventually leaned toward as well. I did briefly see the red light thing called Bubba at Gulf Breeze, once very briefly for maybe 5 seconds. For me it was over the Gulf. It looked like some sort of pyrotechnic or something there. I want to say flare. Something that was burning. It was red. It then kind of dimmed out. There was a lot of debate about whether it was some kind of flare suspended in the air. Even then it would be pretty difficult to hoist a flare up by either parachute or a balloon. That would be a pretty large endeavor itself. But there was something there that people were seeing. It did seem to be corresponding with some kind of - I would guess psychological warfare testing. From one of those local military bases probably. I can do no more than speculate about it. Raynes: I remember back sometime in the 1950s, 1956 perhaps, supposedly in Clearwater, Florida the military launched some kind of flare or something off the coast there to see how people would – I guess talk of UFOs was going on at the time and they wanted to presumably see what people would report and see how much might be exaggerated and how much was accurate. Whatever.
Dr. Brigham: I’ve just kind of probably become more jaded and skeptical over the years. I’ve probably fallen down into the psychosocial camp these days. I think UFOs in a lot of ways they’re a mirror to society’s - to our worries and concerns. You go from the ‘60s, of love and light, to the ‘80s when it suddenly became dark, paranoia, and alien abductions. I think a lot of that maps off of the Reagan years and all of those kinds of changes in cultural dynamics. And I think in a sense Jung was right that whatever somebody is seeing we don’t know what it is in a way, but especially if it is circular, metallic, and shiny you can project pretty much any kind of image you want on to that.
Raynes: It’s a big question mark. Keel talked about the reflective factor and then the people with Utah’s Skinwalker Ranch the hitch hiker effect, and Greg Bishop of Radio Misterioso out in LA he’s talked about co-creation where maybe something projects on us and maybe we project on it. I mean, who knows. I’ve invested a little over 58 and a half years in my own life on this, and I’ve gone around in circles. I started out with Frank Edwards’ book Flying Saucers – Serious Business back in 1966 and after three of years I began corresponding with John Keel, who gave me a lot to think about, and it’s just pretty wild.
Dr. Brigham: While I find the co creation hypothesis interesting and appealing, I don't think it's needed. The PSH, I prefer psychosocial MODEL which includes the many reasons and stimuli leading to UFO experience - Hynek called it that for a reason - within a framework of human psychology. Those stimuli include misperceptions, government testing, weather phenomena, plasma possibly, and who knows what other fun possible discoveries.
To also add, I have now supported many people as they recover from traumas of numerous types. War, rape, child abuse and torture. There is no rush on clients needing support for things like UFO abduction. More frequently UFO is mentioned as a positive psychologically in people's lives. As I believe Gray Barker said in later years, "If you seek the source of UFO, look inside yourself. There you will find it."
Raynes: I know that Jim Moseley always liked to stir things up and I know you knew him and I know when he had Saucer Smear John Keel wrote him, with his usual tact, and called him a “boil on the ass of ufology,” which Jim liked it so much that he included it on the banner of the front page for a number of issues.
Dr. Brigham: Most certainly a character.
Raynes: I can see him and Gray Barker, because Keel had gotten so deep into this, I remember I got a letter from John Keel where he was talking about some of the strange mail he was dealing with, and how in New York some teenaged boys who were UFO buffs got some pornographic literature stuffed in APRO envelopes and the parents were very upset and John Keel said he stepped in and notified Coral Lorenzen, the head of APRO, about it. He's telling me this in a letter and I’m thinking, ‘Who would do such a thing?’ [Laughter]
[Editors Note: And here, I should add a comment Keel made which involved Gray, as Keel also wrote: “Another person received threatening black mail letters ordering her to mail money in an enclosed envelope or else. The envelopes were Gray Barker’s standard business envelopes. She had never even heard of Barker and was about to call in the police when I urged her not to.” Of course, this could possibly have been done by Jim Moseley, Gray’s fellow partner in crime, so to speak, who with some alcohol in his system could be capable of all sorts of wild pranks.
Dr. Brigham: Yeah, wasn’t there some part in later years where some of those calls Keel got, like some of the robotic phone calls might have been Gray Barker calling him, that might have inspired some of that stuff?
Raynes: Yeah.
Dr. Brigham: Who knows.
Raynes: I can see where Keel was possibly at, like I discovered from an interview that Tim Beckley did in the 1980s with Keel where he had claimed anomalous experiences going back to childhood. I think when he started investigating all of this UFO stuff full time in 1966 that whatever was happening to him at the time, it maybe went deeper perhaps to an unhealthy level with the MIB accounts, Mothman, contactees, poltergeists, the so-called “bedroom invaders,” and other high strange reports and situations that have driven other ufologists over the edge, so to speak.
Dr. Brigham: You know, it’s interesting, and I don’t know that I mean this specifically about Keel, but so many people get into UFOs and then they go off some kind of cliff believing in everything or in some parts of it. That’s kind of a classic type of pattern almost on the UFO scene.
That’s one of the things to me, as a psychologist. Oh, how do I frame this? People can certainly believe what they want to believe and I think it’s great when UFOs are fun and it’s a hobby where it fills our soul and the world, but there are some people I think that are susceptible just like in the entire population of the American world where there is some small percentage of people that can take that really far and can get a negative outcome. With the comet, I have concerns with Avi Loeb continuously talking about this comet now in the news being supposedly of extraterrestrial origin when we know, what was it, like 30 years ago now that the last time somebody claimed a comet was extraterrestrial a lot of people killed themselves. Heaven’s Gate.
Raynes: He certainly seems to have quite a background as a Harvard astronomer, but I’ve got to take a wait and see. We’ve heard for years disclosure and invasion and everything else. It comes and goes. I’m afraid this kind of thing could end up hurting his reputation. A lot of people are talking about it.
Dr. Brigham: Yeah, when you have that kind of large platform with a microphone you have to be very careful how people may act upon any of those statements.
Jim Moseley used to talk about this over the years, whenever someone comes out and claims to have some kind of insider knowledge or been in the military, the government, and has some kind of special knowledge on UFOs, Jim used to say, “Just because you’re in the military or the government doesn’t make you immune to believing crazy things.”
You have people who say, “How could a former ex commander or secretary of this or that believe such things if it wasn’t real? Didn’t they have evidence somewhere for it?” Some people are more prone to what may be termed fantasy proneness or susceptibility to information like that.
Raynes: Then again, in my mind, when we’re dealing with the military and the intelligence community sometimes, they might want to throw us off on something that may be a secret military project. Why not tell ‘em it’s a UFO, you know? Greg Bishop certainly came across that with the Paul Bennewitz case out there in New Mexico years ago.
One of the things that I thought was real interesting was what Keel plugged into when I asked him what I should do, when I get out in the field, which I did do. I went through several states myself in the ‘70s. Interviewed a lot of people. He said to study a lot of religious literature, religious experiences, and parapsychology. He recommended a book on apparitions, and of course there was the flip side too, fantasy proneness and such to be cognizant of. I thought it was good advice. It was certainly something that Frank Edwards and a lot of the other mainstream UFO community people were not taking into consideration. Keel called it a can of worms sometimes, referring to ufology.
Dr. Brigham: Maybe you can tell me if they exist anymore, like the person who was a really nuts and bolts person. I don’t know of anybody that still goes out and gathers site samples from alleged landings like Ted Phillips did.
Raynes: Yeah, he worked with Hynek. Ted Phillips, he got up and gave talks later and he’d say, after investigating the two ranches at Marley Woods out in Missouri and he experienced things himself, and he said he went from being the nuts and bolts guy to the nuts guy. He showed photographs and everything he’d taken. There’s something out there, but it can really I’d say mess with your perceptions of things, your belief systems, and you can go off the deep end pretty easily with a lot of this.
Dr. Brigham: Yeah, I guess it was a Twitter thing, someone was asking when you start looking into the UFOs do you get more synchronicities. You’ve probably heard that for years, right? I’ll ask a lot of people does it scare up more synchronicities or are you looking for more synchronicities?
Raynes: It may be a certain time where I’m really looking at things really hard. I’ve had that experience. I’ve even tried Jung’s, what I could understand of his active imagination process, and I had this one experience when I was really struggling to come up with a real deep understanding and wondering about spirituality. I had accepted Christ back in May 1975 and I spent about the whole summer on the road from Maine to Florida and out to Indiana, Ohio and places interviewing people and I know some of the people in the Christian community didn’t think I was following it right. They’d ask me if I’d been baptized in the water, but I explained no, but I had felt fine when I verbally accepted Christ. Have you been baptized in the spirit? And I thought all of these conditions, you know? Is this right? So, I asked the Creator can you give me a sign? Then, and I wasn’t even thinking about it at the time, but about two nights later – oh, and I had also specified that I didn’t want anything to scare me. Like a vision dealing with something out of the Book of Revelation or something.
So, I’m headed to bed. It was a little after 11 o’clock at night as I remember. I’m tired and I’m not thinking about anything about what I had asked of Creator. My father was in the bathroom. The hall light was on. My bedroom light was off. I was headed for bed and then the next thing I knew I was headed back to the door. All of a sudden, it’s like I’m stopped midway in the room. I really thought I was actually up on my feet, but something held me back. I didn’t feel anything holding me back, but I just had this inner knowing that someone’s behind me and they’re keeping me here. My eyes are on the open bedroom door. There’s no verbal conversation. No actual touch that I can feel but I’m aware that someone is keeping me there and I don’t even look back behind me. This is not my normal thought pattern. I would ordinarily be shaken up but I’m taking it all in as natural and then all of these little balls of light, seemed like hundreds of them, translucent, pulsating. They were floating around in the hallway, and they seemed to be swirling around and down towards the floor where they seemed to be forming an illuminated small four-legged animal. And then I’m back in bed and I’m laying in bed on my back looking up at the ceiling which is not the way that I usually get into bed. Usually I just jump in, pull the covers up and I’m on my stomach or my side.
And so, I thought, that was pretty weird. I even wrote it on a calendar, the date. I think I may have written Dr. Berthold Schwarz about it. I talked about it and wrote people about it over the years and never forgot it.
A few years ago, I decided – I had had different odd experiences – that was one of the big ones to me. So, what I did I remembered Dr. Jung talked about trying to just go into your mind and let things unfold naturally – try not to make judgements about it. When I went to sleep that night, I dreamt that I was back in that bedroom. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about being shown about that, but I was back in that bedroom up in Maine, at my parents’ house, and there were different people in the room. I figured this is kind of weird. Then I’m about midway in the room again and there was my mother who had passed on years earlier. She hugged me and then the dream was over. I asked where dad was and she said he was somewhere else at the time.
Right after that there was a person who is kind of into the New Age community, she’s psychic, she’s worked in the music industry. Her mother in Texas was an experiencer like back sometime I guess around 1957. Had an alien contact. Didn’t know what was going on. Then she developed psychic abilities. Her two daughters have had experiences too.
Anyway, about a day later I got an email from this one daughter in Nashville (TN) and she informed me that she had a very strange dream about me. So, I wrote back asking her to let me know what it was. So, she wrote to me again and her dream was actually the night before mine, and in her dream I and some TV repair people came to where she was living and her mother, who is deceased, was communicating with me. We had never met but she seemed to have this connection, and she said that my wife was going to be fine, which I had been worrying about my wife. So, it was very synchronistic, and then a month later as I recall an experiencer who I had met a year or two before who claimed to have had ghost and UFOs, Indian spirits and everything, her and the family, contacted me and told me that she’d had a strange dream in which she had gotten a sunburn. So, I said can we talk about it this evening and so we got on the phone then and in that dream, she was in this room and there were people around her who were kneeling down near the floor. She was the only one standing up. There were glass windows all around. Next, her mother who was deceased, came up to her and told her you don’t need to be alone at this time, and they hugged and there was a flash of light. She woke up and said she had a sunburn on her body.
I was thinking wow, the mother thing. I don’t know.
Dr. Brigham: It’s one of those things some people will or won’t talk about but there’s often been those UFO stories that involve people that have passed on and things like that, and are hard to figure out some of them from a nuts and bolts perspective, right? Certainly, when you talk about stuff like radiation burns, or sunburns, or something where something obviously external seemed to have been the stimulus or whatever, quote and unquote, right?
Raynes: Yeah, and then that same woman in Nashville there were different other synchronicities over time, and a lot of it happened around this same period over like a few months. Then it kind of died down. That seems to have happened at other times in my life but it was interesting and I was more open to it because for a while I used to think, “Ah, these things are just coincidences. I don’t need to pay attention to that.” But this time it was really, back around 2018-2019 it was really pretty explosive. So, I wondered about the psychical components or whatever. I corresponded for years with Dr. Berthold Schwarz, who was a psychiatrist and a parapsychologist, who Keel kind of threw him into the UFO field back in the ‘60s. He would talk about synchronicity and things. We corresponded and I met him a couple of times. As I was traveling around different places, I would give him copies of my reports and he would actually tell me you need to see this person and that person, so it’s been quite a journey. I haven’t gotten any real hardcore answers, but it’s been an interesting journey. It’s been thought-provoking.
Dr. Brigham: I think it goes back to what all things are about. It’s a process of discovery. It’s not too much maybe what the answers are. But this made me think of, I’m sure you remember Matt Graeber, who wrote a lot and wrote about biorhythms. I think about it almost as psyche or psychic or mental energy, but some of it ties in a little bit to astrology, this idea that we have rhythms that are almost kind of like circadian rhythms that relate to, I don’t know, maybe our unconscious and how maybe at certain times we’re more susceptible to being able to experience synchronicities and stuff like that.
I don’t know. I think a lot of it is stuff that’s hard to verbalize and talk about. It’s got that ineffable component where it’s difficult to figure out how to discuss it right with all of the languages that we have.
Raynes: Yeah, it is. I think the study of the human psyche interconnected with the possible parapsychological implications is a sound direction before we start creating a little landing pad for the extraterrestrial Space Brothers and Sisters, we need to look at all of these other things. I know that Keel did look at all of the commonalities like the religious elements. He and Jacques Vallee both wrote quite a bit about what happened in 1917.
Dr. Brigham: Portugal?
Raynes: Yes, Portugal. Fatima. And all that went on. And you look at all of the other ones that occurred too over the years and there are still reports of women in white, in religious contexts and even in the UFO abduction cases and it kind of brings back the old goddess type element or whatever. However you want to address it.
Dr. Brigham: And it goes back again to parts of Carl Jung’s stuff. The archetypes and the mother. People will sometimes ask why would we have such things inherently built into this. Well, we’ve all got ten fingers and ten toes, hearts and lungs, and moms and dads, and common human experience even on a deep biological level where mothers are a meaningful figure.
Raynes: Well, I was down in Alabama a few years ago, I was with a retired military Major and his wife, and he’s been going around the country trying to film UFOs and such. We did a ghost box. I’d been experimenting with it and we tried to call one in (UFO) and we kept getting a human voice, or voices, saying beep a number of times. We’d ask questions and we’d get more beeps. Then I went to Nashville, about a month later, to visit a lady experiencer up there, and her daughter, and we did a session, and I asked them to do the beep thing and it started up again. All of a sudden, we started hearing the beeps again. The mother was rather startled and asked what was going on. I said I don’t know. It’s one of those weird coincidental things. Then about 24 hours after we left, she was out in her backyard area of her home and there was this comet-like thing that came down real close to her she said and then flew off. A small orb like with a tail. She was within just a couple feet or so of it. She said she had seen it several times over the years. The first time she’d seen it it was in the daytime, and she was walking down the street nearby and it flew in front of her, and it was on the birthday of her deceased mother. So, she felt it had something to do with her mother.
Dr. Brigham: I appreciate you guys wanting to talk to me. You guys have always been really supportive of me in every way I can imagine. I’d certainly be happy to write up something for your magazine.
Raynes: That would be great!
Dr. Brigham: Because of work and stuff, I’ll aim for the end of the year. I’ll get something to you. Don’t let me slow up anything you’ve got going, but I’ll look up something in the next six weeks or so and send it over to you by the holidays.
Raynes: That sounds great. That would be appreciated. I always encourage people to submit their ideas, experiences, or whatever they want to share. I think the last time we had an article from you was 1996, so it’s about time. (laughter)
Dr. Brigham: Cool. Well, we’ll keep in touch, and we’ll talk again soon.
Raynes: All righty. Good to talk with you.
Dr. Brigham: I was just thinking when Greg Little reached out to me it’s been something like thirty years now.
Raynes: Yeah, I was just going through the back issues of Alternate Perceptions and back in 1996 you wrote an article for us entitled The Evolution of Abductions. And I remember you had your newsletter The Devil’s Advocate and you explored everything from Gulf Breeze to angels hair. I don’t remember off hand what all else but you covered a lot of things. Then you had to leave us and you were going to go to college and become a psychologist, right?
Dr. Brigham: I did. Georgia. Now I do clinical kind of direct work which I was trained as more of a research, experimental psychologist and I did some teaching in colleges for few years. Anyway, for the past five years I’ve circled back around now.
