Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, December 2019
by: Brent Raynes
The UFO contact experience shares many characteristics in common with religious, mystical and psychical experiences. John Keel long ago wrote that ufology should rightfully be a branch of parapsychology. He even encouraged researchers, if given the opportunity, to befriend Native Americans, to visit their reservations, as he stated that many possessed a deep knowledge of such manifestations. Early on in my own investigations back in 1976 and ’77, I corresponded and paid a couple visits with a Susquehannock medicine man in Pennsylvania who described many visitations from spirit entities, as well as visits from tall extraterrestrial beings who were known by his people as the “Yuh-dush-gwa”, who he described as the ancient “protectors” of his people going back to prehistoric times. He said that these beings were not only interplanetary, but also spirit, adding “as are the spirits, powers, forces and beings who ride them, materializing to whom they will.”
“I pray on mounds and commune with the Great Spirit and the Spirit of Mother Earth,” he explained. He claimed that he was instructed in the construction of his first “prayer mound” in the form of a tortoise, as he was of the turtle clan, and this was when he was only four, back around 1912. “The mounds are to stand upon and pray and talk with the spirits,” he explained. A number of people described having experiences with him. An Ohio contactee named Madeline Teagle, who lived a short distance outside Akron and who was part Iroquois, put me in touch with this medicine man known as “Lightfoot,” and once shared with us: “One time, since I was unable to go to him for instructions, a friend of mine went and when he came back he had a special ritual he was to do with me. We went back to the big hickory and he followed Lightfoot’s instructions. In about five minutes, I looked up and saw two very real white wolves observing us. We did not do anything, except what Don had been told to do, and those wolves were there, moving back and forth until we were finished. Then they took off and were gone. Lightfoot had connections to energies and worlds that we just read about.”
“One time we had a whole group of people here,” Madeline recalled. “He loves kids and the kids wanted to do a rain dance. We had had no rain for a week or more, and they weren’t predicting any.” Lightfoot gave the children some instructions on doing a rain dance. The adults were inside a house in conversation. “The next thing we knew we heard the kids hollering.” The children insisted that the adults come outside and when they did they saw that a cloud had suddenly appeared in the previously clear cloudless sky. Soon it was right above them, and then, Madeline recalled how “it split above us and part of it went north and part of it went south. Then out of that came four figures – two on either side.” Soon after that there was a downpour. “They looked like human figures to me. (Lightfoot) said that they were the rain gods. One looked almost like a half bird, half human. They did not look Indian.” We learned that Lightfoot had passed on to the spirit world himself on December 7, 1979, in a letter his wife had written us some five months later. Though no longer of our world, Lightfoot made his psychic presence known to his wife several times soon after his death. The most amazing incident happened on April 26, 1980. On that date, as she laid down in her bed to rest, she felt something pulling the bed cover from her right hand. Then, she explained, she felt a warm and firm hand take hold of hers and looking up she found herself looking into the eyes of her smiling Lightfoot. “He didn’t say a word as he enveloped me in his arms,” she wrote. “These too felt warm and good to me. My heartbeat like it did when we first met and that is exactly how he appeared, young again.”
She added in her letter, “I got up and wrote down my experience in short terms, but oh, I do remember more than I wrote down.”
The Hopi of Arizona believe in advanced spiritual beings they call the Kachina, believing that they are extraterrestrial and fly around in those so-called flying saucers we’ve been seeing. Hopi tradition even describes a flying shield called a patuwvota that was developed back in ancient times, during a time of corruption and war. Author Frank Waters, in Book of the Hopi, wrote how in their stories “people of many cities and countries were making patowvotas and flying on them to attack one another.”
The ka in Kachina stands for respect and china for spirit. An Apache artist named Jon Thunder was telling me about seeing a metallic looking cigar-shaped craft, about the size of a school bus he estimated, that he guessed was hovering 10-15 feet off the ground. It was making a whistling type of noise. A woman with him was so frightened by the encounter that she began crying. “The Hopi are always seeing flying saucers,” he told me. “Those aliens like Hopi’s. You run into the Hopi’s every once and awhile and they talk about stuff like that, and I’ve experienced stuff like that too, but I was on Hopi grounds.” Then with a chuckle he added, “They don’t like Apache’s I guess.”
Hopi tradition claims that there are energy centers in the body located at the solar plexus, the heart, throat, forehead, and the crown of the head and that consciousness enters the human body at the crown at birth and exits there at death, which interestingly agrees completely with Tibetan and Hindu tradition as well! Hopi medicine men would use their hands and a small crystal as seer instruments to check on these centers, a practice that is reminiscent of numerous other ancient people throughout the world. “There was a time when we were all energy,” Thunder said. “We were just energy. The human shape captured that energy and it is our purpose in life now to experience and obtain as much knowledge while in bondage, and that is our explanation of why when you meet someone sometimes you feel like you’ve known them forever – you know what they’re going to do next. You just know them. It’s because that energy is a connecting point. Like when you meet somebody and they say ‘hi’ and you don’t like them. The déjà vu, so to speak, comes from energy because we’re just one big mass of energy.”
Many ancient people seemed very aware of this energy and the energy centers of the body. In the East there is an awareness of this energy, when it is awakened, that is called kundalini by Tibetans and Hindus. It is also known as “mystic fire,” an energy that can begin around the base of the spine and move up the spinal column to the top of the head, opening up these energy centers along the way, producing a variety of psychic and physical disturbances and states of awareness. The Kung shamans of the Kalahari Desert are said to use ceremonial dance movements to generate a fiery psychic energy called Num. It is said that the Num travels up the spinal column into the skull where it results in a transformative state called Kia.
I recently interviewed a gentleman for this issue named Serial Azkath who underwent what he feels was kundalini as a young man. Quite a number of UFO contact experiencers have described such experiences. In Brad Steiger’s book Gods of Aquarius (1976) he quoted a Gene Kieffer of New York’s Kundalini Research Foundation who believed that there was a kundalini-UFO connection. Kieffer claimed that he had a personal experience back in December 1968, while in meditation, back before he even knew about kundalini, wherein he claimed that he perceived a “luminous green, slightly pulsating, amorphous vehicle” and felt he was given a message to notify someone in NASA [which he did] that on an upcoming lunar mission astronauts were going to have a “spiritual experience” upon entering the lunar orbit.
A Hans Lauritzen of Copenhagen, Denmark claimed that he was suffering from a severe case of liver hepatitis contracted back in February 1966, during a trip to Africa, and how after an encounter on December 7, 1967 with two “great, dim yellow globes,” in a wooded area in Copenhagen, with over an hour of missing time, his liver was miraculously healed.
He claimed that during the conscious part of his encounter, wherein he felt like he was in a “semi-trance like” state, he remembered a telepathic exchange in which he was told that he had a “very strong power” and that it would become stronger. Though he visited this location with four friends, he had left their company, feeling compelled to walk alone into the forest. One of his friends would later admit that he had seen one of the mysterious “globes.” Not long after this episode, Lauritzen described classic kundalini symptoms: “Something was moving up along the spine from the bottom to the neck and back of the head. It was accompanied by a pleasurable feeling and made me stand up and make strange movements and turns. Because of the semi-trance state, I just had to follow it, but afterwards I became extremely afraid what it could be. It was like something spreading in the whole nervous system.” This went on for months, with a variety of different physical and psychological symptoms.
Back in 1975, I met a 25-year-old contactee from Akron, Ohio, named Donna. Donna described a couple of classic type kundalini related healings as a child. Her first memory was from around age three and a half, back around the summer of 1950. What she perceived as some sort of energy being, an oval shape of golden and silver light, appeared beside her bed. She said the being touched her with what she identified as a strange looking arm-like thing. “It’s hard to describe,” she said. “I felt many fingers on my back. Not five, but like 20-30. It was like feelers.” “It completely overcame any fear I had. I went right back to sleep immediately. Very nice too, but when I woke up I had this pain and the pain lasted off and on for three weeks. They finally took X-Rays of my spine and it was completely cured.” She stated the pain was an excruciating burning pain and that whereas she had previously had severe curvature of the spine since birth it was suddenly fine.
Then at age six, on either July 4th or 5th, in 1953, she and several others saw an oblong UFO with “flashing multi-colored lights” at low altitude. It was with the appearance of a white light from the UFO that physical sensations began. “When the white came on, I noticed a similar burning sensation that went from the base of my spine to the top of my head and centered in my throat. After that my defective vision in my left eye was corrected.” She added that she never had any more epileptic seizures after that as well, explaining that she had been a PKU [Phenylketonuria] baby who had to have a complete transfusion at birth. “My intelligence level went up after I was healed too,” she said, adding how she now had an IQ level of 150. I asked her how well she remembered her experience at such a young age as three and a half, wondering if her parents had recalled details for her, to which she replied, “I remember it detail for detail. I didn’t tell them everything that happened. There was something passed to me. It was in the form of a golden ball and it was lodged in my brain. It passed through into the base of my brain. I don’t know if my nerve damage began to be healed at that time or later at the sighting when I was six years old.”
In the June 2019 edition of this magazine, I interviewed Dr. Robert Davis, Ph.D., a respected scientist of sensory neuroscience, who himself claimed a kundalini experience. People from many different backgrounds describe having had these unusual experiences. Readers can listen to Dr. Davis’ interview here: http://www.apmagazine.info/images/stories/article_radioshows/Bob%20Davis%20interview,%20pt%201.mp3
Are we today gradually rediscovering what ancient people already knew long, long agp?