Alternate Perceptions Magazine, December 2025
An Interview with Maine’s UFO and Paranormal author Nomar Slevik.
By Brent Raynes
Nomar Slevik is an independent creator, writer, researcher and investigator in numerous aspects of the paranormal. He delights in sharing stories through different mediums such as books, documentaries, and podcasts. He has been fascinated by all things paranormal since childhood, beginning with a UFO encounter at 4 years old. His life's passion has been to research, investigate, write, and share otherworldly events from everyday people in a manner that underscores the very human element in profoundly strange encounters. His books, such as "UFOs Over Maine," and "Humanoid Encounters," are available for purchase on platforms like Amazon and Goodreads.
Brent Raynes: In your new book Humanoid Encounters, filled with all sorts of very intriguing and high strange cases, which I reviewed in the November issue, I couldn't help but take a personal notice in your own personal experiences with anomalous incidents, as over the years I've run into many fellow researchers who became involved in looking into things similar to what had happened to them. On the other hand, sometimes these phenomena may turn seemingly "reflective," as John Keel had noted many years ago, because of a person's involvement in such a subject. Sometimes it may be a combination of both. Some people may already have had "paranormal" type experiences, some previous familiarity with such, but then in their research and investigative work later it may continue or even noticeably escalate.
As you know, these things seem to occur to family members sometimes also and there's speculation that there may be an underlying proneness caused by genetic factors, shared psychological openness to such things with a family, or then too there's the theory that members of a family are being monitored or pursued for some reason by some sort of alien or supernatural beings.
In your book you certainly share some really interesting experiences that happened to you and, independently, to your father as well. A couple of those stories, that were in your book, you had previously shared with me back in March 2020, only a month after you had caught in your headlights a 5 or 6 tall black being while driving along the Bayside Road in Ellsworth, Maine, at about 5:54 p.m., on February 10th. You stopped your car about where you felt it had stepped off the road and into the woods. While you didn't see it again, you did notice a strange odor. Then too, your father had a very unusual experience along that same road while taking a walk there around 4:30 a.m., on July 22, 2018.
Of course, as recounted in your book, you and your dad have had several strange experiences altogether over the years. You even saw something weird, like a tall dark winged figure in a kitchen window at an apartment in Portland where you were staying at the time.
Please share with my readers some of these thought-provoking incidents.
Nomar Slevik: Yeah agreed about family. I think I have shared this with you before but I'll say it again here, it's almost annoying being a writer/researcher/investigator of the strange and having your own experience. I want to be as unbiased as possible when reporting/writing about such events, but I am also human. I am having a very human reaction to something utterly bizarre and it's hard to maintain that balance during an experience. SO, I don't fight it. Whatever my reaction is, I just let if flow. Hopefully I'll think to take a picture or capture audio or what-have-you, but if I don't that's ok. And that's reasonable. I would never chastise an experiencer for not gathering enough information about their encounter, so why do it to myself? Ok, with that said, the following are a few of our experiences.
1) My father's strange encounter in Northern Maine in the early 1980s
He had woken in the middle of the night to find one of the cats next to the bed, staring up at him. He got the feeling she wanted him to follow her. As he sat up, he noticed how quiet it was. More than that, sound seemed muffled as if a heavy blanket had been tossed over the house. The cat walked to the bedroom door and glanced back, making sure he followed.
She then entered the hallway and trotted down the stairs. He continued, still uncertain why he felt compelled to follow her. She entered the kitchen and stopped in front of the basement door. She looked up at him, waiting. My father slid the barrel bolt lock open and turned the knob. The cat nudged her head into the crack of the door and darted into the basement. He chased after her, but when he reached the bottom, she was nowhere to be found. He called out for her, but she didn’t come forward. That’s when he heard a noise, something behind the woodstove. He assumed it was the cat and knelt down to call her again, but when he looked, something else materialized.
The head and shoulders of a green humanoid figure peeked out from behind a narrow back wall. It was hairless, with bright eyes, and stood about five feet tall. The slender opening where this figure stood and where my father kept the storm windows was too small to fit a person.
Suddenly, he was back upstairs in the bedroom, sitting up as though he’d just woken. My mother lay beside him, undisturbed. He looked to the side of the bed to see if the cat was there, but she wasn’t. He had trouble getting back to sleep after that. It was twenty-five years later when he told me about the experience, and it wasn’t his only encounter with the paranormal.
2) The weird thing my father saw by the road
On that same road that I had my encounter that you mentioned previously, my father saw something as well. It was an early morning on July 22, 2018, when my mother and father were walking along Bayside Road in Trenton, Maine.
After walking for a bit, something caught my father’s attention. He turned and saw a large white form with no legs and no visible head. Before he could process what he was looking at, the figure floated behind a shed near the house they were passing. He estimated the shed to be about nine feet tall, and the figure appeared to be about the same height.
The encounter lasted just about ten seconds, too brief for him to get my mother’s attention. Just as he was about to move on, he noticed something else: a dark, shadowy form that moved past the picture window of the house. It was a formless black mass that quickly disappeared inside the house. He told my mother what he had seen, and she believed him.
3) The weird, winged entity I encountered
Late one humid night in August 2003, I woke up to use the bathroom. My apartment was on the second floor, with a kitchen that had two large windows that overlooked the parking lot. It also had an eave that covered the porch below. Behind the building, railroad tracks ran parallel, hidden by trees and shrubs.
As I stepped out of my bedroom, something immediately felt wrong or off. The air was thick, and my hearing seemed like it was muted, similar to my father’s experience in his 1980s incident. It was surreal, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might be dreaming. But if I was, I never woke up.
I had only reached the kitchen when something outside the window stopped me in my tracks. Perched on the eave in a crouched position was a silhouette unlike anything I’d ever seen. It looked like some sort of ‘birdman,’ its oily black skin glinting in the moonlight. Though I could barely make out its features, I could see wings folded neatly against its back.
I froze, terrified yet fascinated, staring at the odd figure as it looked out over the parking lot. In my attempt to take in every detail, my foot shifted slightly, and the wood beneath me creaked. The creature’s head turned sharply in my direction. Its movements were deliberate, its pointed, oversized ear twitched as if it had locked onto the sound. I tried to stay as quiet as possible.
After a moment, it rose to its full height, and with a sharp, resonant snap, like a catcher’s mitt receiving a 98 mile an hour fastball, its wings sprang out. It then leapt off the roof and disappeared over the trees, heading toward the railroad tracks.
I’m not sure what happened next other than my hearing going back to normal; my next memory was waking up in the morning.
Brent Raynes: How tall did this creature appear to be?
Nomar Slevik: The winged entity was basically the height of a normal man. I’d say about 5’9” – 6’.
Brent Raynes: Do you think there's been some psychic proneness in your family that has perhaps opened you and your father (or any other family members) to these kinds of experiences?
Nomar Slevik: You know, that's a good question. I only found out recently that a close friend of my mother's used to read tea leaves. She also "knew" things my mother never quite understood how she could. I can't say any of that runs in our family, but I can say, it seems like we have always been open to the possibility of the otherworldly. I feel like that has been instilled in me since childhood.
Brent Raynes: What cases that you've investigated and written about over the years that perhaps really stand out for you and seem to not only provide in your mind credible evidence for these anomalous encounters, but that also may possibly help clue you in personally to significant insights and some deeper understanding regarding what these reports may represent in your mind as to what is going on?
I am not trying to put you on the spot. I realize as an objective researcher and author you have to walk a middle ground with these matters. But do you lean in a certain direction though, have your own pet theory (or theories) that you wrestle with and might care to share?
Nomar Slevik: This is a tough one to answer. Like you said, I do try to walk that middle ground, but I do have a theory that I'll share. I think all of this is connected. Meaning ghosts, UFOs, monsters, psychic abilities, alternate dimensions, etc., might all be the same thing and we're just using different languages to describe them.
A lot of us can't see past our own beliefs or interests, which I am definitely guilty of. For a lot of paranormal investigators, ghosts are dead people communicating from the other side. For some Bigfoot believers, it's a flesh and blood-undiscovered primate. For a lot of UFO researchers, aliens and their crafts are from outer space... I'm not so sure these high strangeness encounters are in their own silos. I think they might all be a part of something bigger. I don't know what that is yet, or if I'll ever find out, but those are my thoughts currently.
Brent Raynes: Thanks so much, Nomar, for sharing your thought-provoking personal experiences, as well as those of your father, in addition to your personal theory as to how so many of these anomalous phenomena are potentially interconnected and how the surface appearances of these reports can be misleading. Admittedly, that very much reflects my own theory, which is something that’s not easily arrived at. In the very beginning as a teenager long ago, my focus was strictly on UFOs as “nuts and bolts” ET visitations. Of course, as you know, that was noted journalist John Keel’s original thought too, but then as he got out into the field and interviewed witnesses in various states and even had his own experiences, his theory changed too.
