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Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, January 2024



The UFO and the Poltergeist

by: Brent Raynes





Buren, Germany. Rick W., a serviceman in the U.S. Army, assigned duty at a military post about 8 miles outside of Buren, one winter night early in 1971 has a strange experience. Rick and his wife Lynn had spent the evening at the post, watching a movie and then playing some cards with friends. They left around 11 p.m. At the time, they owned a ’61 Volkswagen. It was cold outside, so they switched the heater on. There was no radio in the vehicle, so they engaged in conversation on the return home. It was while on a straight stretch of this road that Rick noticed what he at first took to be the moon in the sky, off on the left side of their car. At the time, they were driving north. As Rick had seen the moon earlier, he thought it odd that it was in this particular position of the sky. Then he next glanced up, almost overhead, and noticed the moon, a full moon. So, Rick asked his wife Lynn to take a look off to the left to see what she could see. “Oh my God, it’s one of those UFOs you’ve been reading about!” Rick told me that he laughed and said, “It sure looks like it.” Then going 25-30 miles per hour, Rick speeded up to about 50, and still it was keeping up with them on the left side and was in fact slightly ahead of them.

The terrain was heavily wooded. The trees appeared to be 80 to 100 feet into the air. The UFO appeared to be perhaps another 80 to 100 feet in the air above the trees. Rick said that the UFO was “a little bit brighter” than the light of the full moon above. “The light of the full moon was on a yellowish tinge and this light was more bright,” he explained. “I won’t call it bluish, but on that order, and more perfect white.” They kept driving on and then, Rick noted, “We were coming down the hill, beside a cement factory, coming into the valley, and this thing, as soon as we started downhill I saw a couple of cars coming toward me up the hill. Meanwhile we had not passed any cars, American or German. Suddenly, this thing shot across the valley, which I would guess would be at the most about two miles, and it hovered over a ridge on the other side of the valley. I told my wife, ‘Let’s hurry home.’ Because we lived on the third floor of an American-Belgian housing area and I said, ‘Let’s hurry home and we’ll go out on our balcony on the third floor and we’ll get a really great view of it.’ So, I raced up through town pretty quick and we ran home. We didn’t see it as we got out of the car, but this housing area we were in was all three-story buildings and they were sitting almost everywhere, and it was hard to see. We could only see straight up.”

“So, we ran up to the third floor and by the time we got there this was gone. As far as unnerving or anything it wasn’t anything really great, but what really got to be sort of hairy was the following 8 months, starting within about a week after we had sighted this thing, our apartment was besieged by poltergeist activity. I’m calling it poltergeist activity because I don’t know what it was, but all of the symptoms were poltergeist.”

Rick had a complete diary written of the events and had placed it in a box with their various belongings and had shipped it back to the US later, but unfortunately the diary, being a chronicle of the haunting events, wasn’t in the box when it reached its destination.

In the meantime, Rick did still have a partial record of events, and so here is what he was able to reconstruct for me.

Friday, September 10, 1971. Lynn, at home alone all day, heard whistling noises behind her. They were female sounding.

Saturday, September 11th, Rick taking nap and awakened by soft raps on wall (three) which separated their bedroom from the spare. Added in diary: “By now familiar knocking.”

September 17th, a large puddle of water was found at the foot of their bed on the floor. No explanation was found for this. They didn’t have a water heater.

October 13, 1971. “This is when stuff really started going into full swing,” Rick wrote. At this time, they were alone up on the third floor, and the fourth floor attic was empty. Yet they heard very strange, unexplained noises from up there. It sounded like someone taking a stuffed studio couch and picking it up at one end and dragging it the entire length of the floor. Lynn had heard it all day and Rick heard it that night. “It has been quite noisy the past five days,” Rick would write.

October 24th, a manifestation that sounded like someone with 10 to 15 marbles, dropped onto the floor from about waist level. They heard the impact and then the sound of what sounded like marbles rolling on the floor.

Another odd thing frequently heard was a sound like someone had taken a rolled up newspaper and had thrown it up against a wall, and then they’d hear it fall to the floor. Both Rick and Lynn read a lot. They each had their own individual night stand by their bedside. Their nightly routine was to retire at 10 and read until 12 midnight or 1 a.m. Rick’s stand, which was perfectly level with four legs, would occasionally rock gently. The lights in the room would be on and so he could clearly see this. He even took everything off of his night stand and tried to rock it himself, but found it to be perfectly level and so could not explain the phenomenon.

Rick next describes: “I come home one night from work and there’s my wife sitting in the dining room. She was sitting there and almost frozen. I saw she had her letter writing material out in front of her. She must have been writing home. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘I saw it.’ At the time nothing had happened for a few days and I really didn’t understand what she was talking about. I said, ‘You saw it? Saw what?’ She said, ‘Whatever that thing is that’s making that noise.’ She said, ‘It was standing right beside your night stand and its right arm was resting on the night stand.’ I said, ‘Was it a man or a woman?’ She said, ‘I couldn’t tell,’ and I said, ‘What do you mean you couldn’t tell?’ She said it was just a lightish grey, but it was darker than like white. It was on the dirty side and it was just human form. Now she said she couldn’t make out any facial features. She said it was just medium sized. It was bigger than her but smaller than me. I’m about 200 pounds, 5’ 11”. That’s all she could tell. She said she saw this just for a couple of seconds when she glanced up from writing and then it more or less dispersed into the air. She said it didn’t disappear like a mist or anything. It just sort of gradually faded away.”

Interestingly, Rick and Lynn had lived in this apartment for about a year and a half before the haunting erupted, and it was only about a week after the sighting of a UFO that that activity started up.

Coincidence?

Speaking of coincidence, Rick had put me in touch with Madeline Teagle of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, a UFO author, editor, and contactee! He lived in another city in that region of Ohio. It was because of him and copies of articles she had written that he shared with me, that I first visited her at her home in July 1975, and several times afterwards. One day, a few years later, my wife Joan and I, while passing through the area during a time that we had ventured up from Tennessee to visit my family in Maine, we dropped in on Madeline, paying a surprise visit, and I was the one especially surprised when Rick and his family, who I had never met in person, after quite sometime had likewise decided to pay Madeline a visit!


Tuesday, October 15, 2024