Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, July 2019
by: Brent Raynes
Orbs, Remote Viewing, and Synchronicity
I’ve met an interesting gentleman, a former U.S. Army Major named Daniel Erickson, now retired, who spends much of his retirement time these days searching for UFOs and studying remote viewing. He travels extensively all over the country, and as I write this he’s even returning from Mexico. He prefers to keep a very low profile. He’s definitely not wanting to draw much attention to himself, though he’s ready to join other serious researchers in the field from time to time and see what can be accomplished. “I am retired and enjoy my privacy,” he told me early on. “I did my service to the Country and it got plenty out of me.”
During his military service, he says he was given what an instructor referred to him and others as “Jedi” training, exercises and instructions that were a spin-off from the earlier Project Stargate, the former secret government remote viewing program that we’ve all now heard so much about. I and others have met with him in a small groups in Huntsville, Alabama to learn from him and to follow his instructions and see if we could do some remote viewing ourselves. I’ve even been with him and others on a spooklight hunt outside the small community of Cloverdale, in the northwestern part of that state, in one instance wandering around in a field with him using infrared scopes trying to locate the small mystery light in that same field that he was filmed walking right up to while a member of a Canadian film crew was videotaping him just the night before – the light repeatedly it seemed right close to him – but he was unable to see it himself with the naked eye, nor likewise was the person filming him able to see it without an IR scope from perhaps a few hundred feet away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUgXmPEGzd8
Jacques Vallee had told me how many remote viewers he had studied years ago had described UFO and possible entity related encounters going back to childhood. My retired Army friend admitted a bit reluctantly that he had had a very odd experience of this sort back around age four. He described how an “orb” had appeared to him. His interaction with it had been rather playful. Then, he said, he grabbed it and in a loud voice identical to his father’s voice it said, “LET ME GO!” Startled he stopped and looked around, expecting to see his dad, but his dad was nowhere to be seen. Then the “orb” broke away and play time was over.
“Remote viewing allows you to gain knowledge from outside yourself, “Dan states. “If you want to know the truth you have to experience it. There is no substitute. Knowing is different than belief.”
(Picture from around the mid-1980s of Professor Eugene Wigner (left), a Nobel Prize winner in quantum physics, who headed a program at Princeton to study “remote viewing” and “psychokinesis.” This picture was taken during a visit to Huntsville, Alabama. Lee Webster (right) ran an army program in Huntsville at the time during the days when “remote viewing” and such was popular and had visits also from Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ from Stanford.)
In recent months, I’ve tried to step up to the plate and experience for myself whatever interactions of this sort might evidence itself to me. Keeping a journal certainly helps to keep track of the many assorted details that often arise in such a journey. It helps to more soundly review the details later and try and separate the so-called noise from the signal, or what some might describe as the wheat from the chaff. Back on October 18, 2018, a young 30-year-old wife and mother living near the Lakes community in Las Vegas, Nevada, awakened at 3:30 a.m. She heard what sounded like fast and small footsteps coming from her kitchen. Her first thought was that it was the cat, till she noticed the cat laying on her bed nearby. She thought it odd that the cat hadn’t reacted to the sound, as it normally would have. Her young son was in bed beside her sound asleep. She began to fear that an intruder was present and she thought about getting her gun.
Then an extremely bright light coming from outside brightened up the bedroom. Looking out a nearby window she was startled to observe the underside of an enormous, football field sized craft hovering at very low altitude. It had multiple white lights surrounding a square structure. Its surface was a grayish cream color and it also had circular sections, reminding her of the USS Enterprise of the TV series Star Trek. After hovering in view for no longer than 20 seconds, the huge UFO then shot off at high speed toward the southeast.
Right after that she intended to check the kitchen, but instead slipped off to sleep, which she later thought quite odd after what had just transpired, the thought of getting the gun because of a suspected intruder and then seeing a huge unknown craft hovering outside.
“I see spirits of the deceased and can sometimes communicate,” she shared. For a number of years now I’ve been keeping an eye on this family. They’ve had a lot of puzzling UFO and paranormal episodes over the years. I have files on her, two of her brothers, her mom and her mom’s dad. One of her brother’s even claimed a female humanoid appeared in his bedroom one night and how he was then taken aboard a mysterious craft and found himself in orbit above the earth in the company of those much discussed “grays.”
This young lady also recalled a vivid childhood encounter, when she was of pre-school age, that involved about a half a dozen playful balls of light that appeared one night in a hallway outside of her bedroom. She stated: “They were soft, pastel-glowing orbs that were somewhere between the size of a softball and basketball. They changed colors randomly….I felt compelled to get my book that was a compilation of Disney stories out of my room to share it with the balls of light. It seemed like they wanted to play. I remember wondering ‘why wasn’t I afraid?’ I distinctly remember showing them a specific picture in the book (Cinderella on the stairway to her bedroom). This caused them to morph into the faces of the characters in the story! At some point, the lights began floating down the stairs. I felt like I should follow them, but I don’t remember doing so. My next memory is being in my bed again and it is still dark.”
Soon after her 2018 UFO encounter, I learned that she’d been having some “uncanny intuitive” episodes. It seemed that her UFO experience, as often reported by many others, coincided an upswing in her psychic awareness. At work she told her manager that their supervisor, who normally showed up only once or twice a year, was going to visit the very next day, and indeed she did. Following that visit the supervisor phoned and requested the work site be searched as her security badge was missing. Our young lady told her manager that the supervisor would find the badge on the floor of her car, and sure enough she called again later to report that she had found it on the floor of her car.
At this point, having heard stories of her psychic abilities and these recent events, I decided it might be a good time to try doing a remote viewing type of exercise, which I did with both her and her mother (who lives in Ohio). I visualized the moon setting over an ocean. The daughter saw “a sunset over the ocean.” I was rather impressed. But then the daughter’s mediumistic ability seemed to kick in and she described “an older woman’s voice” saying “it’s a place” – and she found her focus shifting to the sky - and “she was showing me this now night sky with clouds.” She sensed that this woman had something to do with me and “had an MAR name connection.”
I wracked my brain for awhile trying to think who might have had the initials of MAR, for a number of weeks, but finally gave up. [This is when you discover you’ve known a lot of people!] After giving up that’s when around 3:45 one morning I awakened from a lucid dream. I was looking down this road that leads downhill to a checkpoint to the local Natural Bridge Fitness Spa near Waynesboro, Tennessee. It’s a place that attracts people from all over the country – sometimes other countries – to come, relax, and work on getting physically fit with exercises and nutritional foods and healthy dietary plans. Next I was seeing an old friend of ours standing in the entrance of a gym there. It was an older friend of ours named Margaret. I began to think – what was her last name? Oh yeah, Ross of course! Then I wondered about the middle name. I didn’t know. Later when I got up I checked online. MARgaret’s initials were MAR – Margaret Ann Ross.
Margaret lived in Marietta, Ohio. She was a Ph.D counseling psychologist and a Tai Chi instructor, and so once or twice a year she’d come down to the spa and maybe spend a couple of weeks leading Tai Chi classes. Margaret loved meeting people and traveled to all sorts of interesting places all over the world. Often when she’d come to the spa she’d meet with us at a local restaurant and show us her vacation pictures from places like Chile, Costa Rica, the Galapagos islands, Easter Island, and even once after she’d been down around the Amazon River and met a shaman there who she said smoked her up like I used to do her with sage. She participated in a Native American sweat lodge ceremony with us [we used to have a lodge behind our home] and on one of her visits we took her to Pinson, Tennessee and climbed up with her to the top of Saul’s Mound, the second tallest Indian Mound in the U.S. – 72 feet in height. The last time we saw Margaret was in 2014, while we were in her hometown of Marietta looking over some pretty impressive mound sites while visiting the area with a group of friends. She passed away on April 2, 2018, at the age of 90. She was an inspiration. An active lady who did not slow down much at all with age. Which brings me to a kind of haiku that came to me that morning [I’m not a haiku person] soon after awakening from the 3:45 a.m. dream. It was just a little after 4 a.m. and I seemed to have awakened again with this in my head:
Here’s a pair of socks,
They’re a bit flawed,
They have holes in them,
But they’re still in service.
I was thinking about my dream and remembering that shortly before I saw Margaret how I was thinking of my little 2-year-old granddaughter Alice, so full of energy and life, and how one day she’ll be up there in age with her grandpa and grandma, and how quickly time slips on by us all. This haiku, which felt like it was from Margaret, seemed to exemplify her view on how life should be lived to its fullest, right up to the very last. It seemed to address the reflections I was having about time and aging during my dream.
After years of reading about the late great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his views on UFOs, synchronicity, archetypes and the collective unconscious, and my many discussions about Jung and his ideas over the years with my good friend Greg Little, who authored The Archetype Experience, I decided one night (Dec. 19, 2018) to give a process Jung called “active imagination” a try. I felt an inner need at that time to try tapping into my subconscious mind for any answers or insights that might help further facilitate my personal quest. I began to pull different books from the bookshelves and as best I could outline my strategy.
Before going to sleep I tried to relax and open myself up to this process, when suddenly in my minds eye I perceived an angelic like blond haired female figure in a flowing robe, and even though the background was black I immediately knew [without any logical reason for knowing] that this was the location in the middle of my bedroom at my parent’s home in Maine where back in the fall of 1975, at the age of 23, I had this experience that has long intrigued me wherein shortly after climbing into bed I suddenly found myself, I thought, walking across the bedroom floor headed toward the open doorway to the main hall on the second floor, where the light was still on. Everything seemed real, and in my mind I was physically walking toward this door. But then about halfway I stopped and even though I didn’t feel a physical restraint, I just knew that someone behind me had just somehow stopped me. Naturally, feeling this to be the case, one would think that I would turn around to face whoever it was. Instead I continued to maintain my sight upon the open doorway, and suddenly these small glowing white pulsating translucent marble sized spheres – it looked like hundreds – appeared in the hallway and began swirling around. It seemed to begin up near the ceiling and worked their way down near the floor where they began to amass into a glowing white cluster that seemed to resemble a small four-legged animal – but before it completely solidified the next thing I knew I was laying on my back in bed [which is slightly unusual, as I’m more comfortable laying on my side or stomach in bed] starring up at the ceiling.
I came to reason that this was a religious based experience as I was going through a kind of existential crisis at the time. I had lots of people giving me religious advice and I wanted answers, so I prayed that God could give me some sort of powerful sign to help me on my spiritual journey – but, I asked, please don’t let it be something that will frighten me. Well it was two nights later that this “vision,” if you will, occurred and I observed without any fear – in fact, with no emotions at all! Which is very unusual experiencing and seeing what I perceived as normally, one would expect, there should have been some sort of reaction. I have come to feel that the prayer programmed what I experienced.
Getting back to my “active imagination” exercise, the following morning, December 20th, somewhere around 4 or 5 a.m. I awakened from a dream where I had been in my Maine bedroom again. I was by my bed, and I was uncomfortable with the fact that there were strangers in my room – who I felt were like “inspectors” of some sort. Then my mom appeared, in the middle of the room, and I rushed up to her and I saw myself embracing her and, at that point, everything was okay. All of our past differences, like how she felt my interests in ufology and the paranormal were a waste of time, evaporated. There was acceptance and understanding now. That’s how it felt.
Without knowing anything about this dream, a psychic named Char Touchstone wrote me on December 21 about a strange dream that she had just had on the night of December 18, in which a white van pulled up to work on her mother’s cable TV. Her mother, like mine, has since passed away, but was present in the dream, and so was I! She wrote that in the dream her mother knew me from some “karmic connection (or) past life type thing.”
Char felt that her and her mother could tell that I was troubled over a couple of issues, one of which was my wife’s health, which was true – something that we had not previously discussed. She stated that in this dream I was told “telepathically not to worry – needs would be met.”
Char’s mom, incidentally, had a powerful life-changing UFO-alien encounter in Texas one night back in August 1957. [Again UFOs and psychic phenomena, please take note] Under the pseudonym of Elaine Burke, her experience is described in Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact wih Non Human Intelligence, Vol. [2018], in a chapter entitled Communication with UAP Related Non-Human Intelligence: The Early Years, by Kathleen Marden. Kathleen is the niece of one of the most famous UFO abductees, the late Betty Hill, and today is an acclaimed UFO author, investigator, and a hypnotherapist.
“My mother was the most amazing psychic I have ever known and I have known a lot of them,” Char told me. “Both my sister and I have those gifts as well, but nothing like her. She started having that gift after her experience.”
Char shared with me a copy of a remarkable 20-page handwritten account that her mother wrote of her experience years later. To me it really captured some of the terror and confusion she underwent at that time. Her husband away at work, she suddenly found herself becoming strangely tired. “I am actually fighting sleep as I’d never imagined it,” she wrote. This began under a cold shower. She crawls into bed, grabs a book to read, a nightly ritual for her, but this night she knows she isn’t going to be able to follow through with it. Then she is aware of a blinding light in the room and “a funny humming sound.” She writes, “Oh God, why can’t I open my eyes?” Gradually she manages to open her eyes, but at first the light is still so bright she has difficulty seeing details. “My heart is pounding out of my body,” she continued. “I am bathed in perspiration. My mouth feels closed.”
“There is nothing in the year of 1957 to help me understand, no books, no movies, no experience, no conversations to explain. Just mind shattering, life altering terror. Though my head is filled with silent screams, I hear a voice ‘Do not be afraid.’ I stare at this thing I am seeing. A very small round metallic object, hovering maybe 2 or 3 feet off of the ground. What looks to me like a glass bubble on top. Inside this transparent dome sit two creatures – creatures of a kind I’ve never heard of or read of. Not even in fairy tales as a child. They are very small, with large heads, huge strangely shaped very black eyes, a small slit where a mouth should be. No nose, as we know it. More indentations with what seemed to be nostrils, but I couldn’t see any ears. I don’t know why I struck on that, but I kept thinking ‘why don’t they have ears? Can they hear?’ For some reason that bothered me in a strange way, considering I was engulfed in terror and shaking from head to foot and totally unable to speak. Then I heard, ‘Yes, we can hear’ and my next thought was, ‘Why are they gray?’ Then it rushed into my mind, ‘My God, they’re hearing me and I can’t speak and I’m hearing them and their mouths aren’t moving.’” “This is the way we communicate, through thought process,” Elaine was told.
“Being from a very religious background I asked them if they were of God, as my greatest fear was of anything evil. They did not say yes or no. He [there was only one who seemed to be doing all of the communicating] replied that they were of the One Universal Force. Somehow they did not feel to me to be of an evil power.”
Returning to synchronicity, on January 16th of this year, I was contacted on Facebook messenger by a lady up in Missouri who I’ve known for a number of years now, who has shared a variety of psychic, ghost, and UFO abduction experiences. Jamie informed me that she’d gotten a sunburn from a dream the night before! Curious naturally, I suggested we talk on the phone. It sounded like this was going to be a weird story! In the dream she was in a building with glass windows all around her. There were other people, but she was the only one standing. The others were huddled on the floor. It looked outside like the sun was about to go super nova and she felt the end was near. Then her mother, who had died 15 years earlier, looking younger than the age she was when she passed, appeared in the room and rushed up to her and they embraced. Her mom told her, “You don’t have to be alone.” Then a tremendous burst of bright light flooded the room, and she woke up, she claimed, with a sunburn!
Later that month, Char invited my wife Joan and I to Nashville for a private gathering with others who shared an interest in strange things. The house we were going Char described how there seemed to be grandmother energy near the fireplace just as you step inside to the right. “I am ALWAYS in the living room by the fireplace and it does feel like a special area to me,” Mary, who lived there with her sister shared. “Also my grandmother is the first person I’ve communicated with clairvoyantly (which happened over the summer). We haven’t been ‘in touch’ as much lately but it’s so nice to hear she’s still there watching over (us) and we could definitely use the comfort!”
Mere coincidence? After so many, and they’re still happening, you begin to feel a genuine need to track the details in a journal or something. I’ve journaled a number of dreams and hypnogogic impressions of my own that later contained too many specific details that corresponded with future events – including several precognitive types that involved the deaths of certain people, including my father and an ex-wife’s father. And don’t even get me started on the electronic voice phenomenon!