Encounters with the Unknown—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, October 2020
A UFO experiencer comes up with a strange theory about Comets
by: Brent Raynes
Back in 1986, I began corresponding with a fellow student of ufology, one Harv Howard of Manchaca, Texas. Harv and I were both deeply intrigued with the UFO phenomenon and we both became acquainted through our work with the UFO Contact Center International, a contactee support program founded by Aileen Garoutte and her former husband Dan Edwards. In the process of working on a questionnaire form and a paper on hypnosis, we came to know one another on a personal level. Harv, I quickly learned, was one of those people who had undergone a series of very peculiar experiences going all the way back to his early childhood.
When Harv was only about four and a half years old, he and his brother, who was then only about two, became lost in the woods one day. “I saw a ‘picture’ in the air,” Harv recalled. “It was wavery around the edges, such as the optical distortions caused by heat as it rises from a hot road. Except this image was hanging in the air only about 15 or 20 feet in front of me in a wooded area. It was rectangular in shape, about twice as long horizontally as it was high. I would guess that it was positioned with its bottom edge slightly above my head.”
“The display was a scene of what our home looked like from the edge of the woods. I cannot explain how I knew, but after looking at the scene I knew how to get us back to the exact spot depicted in the scene. Thus out of the woods.”
“About two years later, when I was six, and after we had moved to another house near another woods, the exact same phenomena happened when I was lost with a friend of my same age. The scene this time was from the top of the hill where we had ventured down into the woods. I don’t know how long it lasted. Only a few seconds I believe. But immediately I again knew how we must go to return to that spot.”
Next, about thirteen years later this time, in the fall of 1957, Harv was fishing with a couple of boys when they all observed a strange rectangular object flying low to the ground at a pond near Westville, Illinois. “In the near-dark light we saw an object which we later agreed was best described as a ‘flying door.’ It moved across the dam in a silent, smooth and steady manner. It seemed suspended a couple of feet from the ground. It appeared to be positioned long-side horizontal.”
The mysterious object was pursued by several fox hounds, whose barking and chase of the thing is what had attracted the attention of the three boys. How may have these early experiences shaped and affected Harv’s life? “It could be said that these two events of the pictures were my own latent talents of psychic phenomena manifesting themselves under times of stress. I don’t believe that explanation. I believe that the displays were shown to me by some external power. I must make it quite clear that I have never since enjoyed similar displays. I credit these two events for being the chief reason why I have always been interested in psychic phenomena, etc., however.”
Then, one night, back around October 1964, near Danville, Illinois, Harv saw a UFO and had “missing time.” “I’ve not known before or since the instant terror which swept over me as I fixed my eyes on the light,” Harv noted. “I had often spoken and dreamed about having an encounter with aliens, but falling into a fit of sheer terror that paralyzed the mind had not been on my mental agenda. I began telling myself that once I got ‘past’ the light, around the corner, everything will be alright. I just drove on toward the light with the single-minded, unreasonable idea locked into my mind that once past it I would be okay. When I had turned the corner, the burden of terror was gone. Instantly my consuming thought then was that I would not look in the direction of the UFO, and I didn’t. My house was barely a minute away from that point. To turn into my driveway meant that the car would face the direction where the UFO had been. When I got out of the car I turned the ‘wrong’ way to avoid looking in that direction and hurried into the house. Me, a hot-shot UFO buff!”
Rushing inside Harv noticed that the kitchen clock showed that it was about 1:20 a.m. It was over two hours later than it should have been!
After this Harv developed a powerful compulsion to visit libraries and read – a lot! “The compulsion to visit libraries went far deeper with me than a mere urge to do so,” he explained. “I would walk into the rather small library in Danville and get the same feeling of reverence for knowledge that some people get when they walk into a church and feel the presence of God. The feeling was strong enough to about make me cry.”
“I have completed one phase of what I feel was my ‘given’ work, which was trying to prove that comets are really spaceships. Cometships I call them. Believe me, in the early years it certainly was an obsessive drive.” Harv came to spend hundreds of hours scouring through the pages of astronomical textbooks and journals. Some of the comet data he studied seemed rather strange, like observations wherein they reportedly seemed to be multiple bodied, said to have split apart, changing positions, speeds, and even directions.
As off-the-wall as Harv’s cometship theory sounded, back in 2017 the discovery of what many were calling a comet that had entered our solar system, no less than Abraham Loeb, chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, declared strongly that he suspected that this new comet called “Oumuamua” was quite possibly an alien probe. He noted a number of odd things about it, though most astronomers disagreed with his alien probe theory.
