Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, FEbruary 2025
An accomplished artist tours an ET’s art museum?
by: Brent Raynes
News flash! A brief interruption before this article continues: This columnist will be speaking at the Eureka Springs UFO Conference in Arkansas, April 11-13, on John A. Keel and those ongoing mysteries. Link: https://ozarkufoconference.com/#675fa9e4-864e-4904-a723-f6e84f7ae9dc May 3rd I’ve been invited to speak on Mothman at the Smoky Mountain Bigfoot Festival. Link: https://www.thebigfest.com July 18-20, my wife Joan and I have been invited by doctors Greg and Lora Little to join them on an ARE (Association for Research and Enlightenment) sponsored Indian Mounds Tour in Ohio. Sites visited will be Shrum Mound, Mound City, Serpent Mound, Seip Mound, Cross Mound, and the Newark earthworks. We’ll help do purification and meditation ceremonies at some sites. Link: https://edgarcayce.org/events/tours/
James Edward Carlos
I took some pictures during our recent visit to Carlos’s art museum.
Back on Saturday, November 16th, my wife Joan and I headed off to east Tennessee, to the college town of Sewanee, to spend a few hours visiting James Edward Carlos at his studio, IONA: Art Sanctuary. Carlos has a Ph.D. in comparative arts, a master's degree in fine arts, and for over 60 years taught art to elementary, secondary, college and post-graduate students as well as senior citizens. Though I've known Carlos going back more than two decades, have met him in person twice before (this was the second visit with him at his magnificent art studio), and he has contributed many features to Alternate Perceptions over the years, his story is one of immense complexity, with many moving parts, and as he's today 87 his health and stamina are not what they used to be. But he still keeps at it with much determination and me, feeling rather guilty at not making it to his art exhibit called Bending History presented at the University of Nashville back in January 2024, I decided that it was high time to get off my butt and return to Sewanee and sit down once again before the master visionary artist and record more of whatever he'd care to share. As a result of our recent collaboration and meeting, Carlos put together for me a great article for Alternate Perceptions (December 2024 edition) entitled My working with John Mack. The late John Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist, wrote a chapter entitled A Being of Light, about Carlos in his book Abduction (1994), a book regarding alleged human encounters with alien beings. This article details Carlos's candid behind the scenes interactions that he says occurred between the two of them and provides a significant insight into how this particular period of time in his life affected him.
Beyond Mack's Abduction, few in the UFO community have followed up on his account, much less are familiar with it. Diana Pasulka of the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion, did pay a visit with Carlos which is described in two pages of her book American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (2019). I wrote her later after reading her book, telling of my interactions with Carlos too. She wrote: "If you happen to see Dr. Carlos, please tell him hello for me. What an extraordinary artist he is! I love his work."
Diana is certainly not alone. His artwork is loved by many people all over. Though until his retirement a few years ago, he wasn't comfortable about talking too openly about how his years of close encounters inspired his artwork. But these days he's more than ready to get the word out.
Carlos shared about his family roots. "My family heritage was from the Aaron claim from whom my son was named after the island of Aaron in Germany, on the Rhine River, and they were a very wealthy family connected to royalty." In addition, Carlos has two other “beloved, creative ande intelligent children” named Adam and Malia. Born in Kingsville, Pennsylvania in 1937, Catholicism held a strong influence in Carlos’s early life.
Carlos explained to me, "When I was a young man in my mid to late twenties, I started realizing more and more about my history and that these Hayyots (that were) coming to me. I didn't ask for it. I don't play to them, but I respect the Hayyots from the Old Testament stories. I trust them. They taught me about reincarnation. So, from my mid-twenties on I became aware that that was going on in the encounters. Before that, back to my childhood, I started out having encounters when I was a baby and the Hayyots were what we call ETs today, but the little ones I always called them functionaries, even as a little kid. I thought of them as beings of light because on the UFOs, which were named in Judaism Merkavah, I was picked up and taken to them. But in my little years the smaller ones, the functionaries, which were about three feet tall basically, They came and played with me as a little tyke. I didn't question them about being different. They were just playmates, and I never had the fear that so many people that have close encounters in this century. I never had the fear of them. I respected them. I liked them. I felt I was being taught good things every time they came. I was being prepared as a little tyke for when I was in my teens and twenties with reincarnation experiences."
Carlos explained how in the Jewish tradition the Merkavah are like chariots and the Hayyot are "living holy beings, or associatively, angels and archangelic forces." Carlos recalled for me one of his early experiences in Pennsylvania as a young child one evening, as it was getting dark, as he was playfully running around in the yard when a UFO appeared. He told me, "My mother, father, and older sister were on the ground holding each other because they were scared. A UFO was at the end of that yard. This reminded me as a little kid of a top that you push up and down with this stick and it had that shape to it. It glowed. Frequently they would glow, and they will glow from the inside.”
“In Sewanne there’s a center of the campus here, a wooded area called Manigault Park. I had an experience with the Hayyots there. But it began in my home. The room was lit up with blue light. My wife was asleep.” Carlos described first seeing like fireflies circling in the room above him, with what resembled a bumblebee in the lead. Then he noticed one of these beings floating into the room. Outside there is a craft issuing blue light, hovering over a treetop. “They float through the walls, the glass. Everything. And when they take me I do too,” Carlos says. “I am taken out through the glass doors, through the railing, and I am floated upwards with one of the beings, the host, one of the five foot ones, and there were maybe two other little ones out there that weren’t in the building with me.”
“I am floated up to the craft with these three beings – maybe 4 – and I’m floated not inside. I am still outside, and they float me with them all across the campus from my house to Manigault Park.” The host has an especially odd sounding characteristic. “Their feet are different from ours,” he said. “They have like calves’ hooves.”
“Let me describe the beings. The little ones looked like the big ones. But the little ones did not communicate with me. Although sometimes I feel like they do. The big ones are the ones that treat me like a being and treat me like an intelligent being. My intelligence and all of human intelligence is far, far diminished compared to all of them. They are immensely brilliant, and they know everything about everything. They are what I think the Muslims, the Jews, and the Christians consider to be angels. Especially guardian angels. That’s sort of how I feel that I’ve related to the ones that are big. They don’t have hair. They’re bald looking. They have large eyes. Almond shaped. They’re large and they’re black. …Really, really skinny bodies. Really skinny necks. A sort of bag skull brain on the back of their head and it sticks out – but not always. I used to draw them that way with the brain sack sticking out like a skull. They don’t have ears like we do. They have holes. Maybe little mounds. The reason they don’t need ears like we have is because they don’t speak basically, to me anyway. People talk about them as if they do speak and translate into English or Spanish or whatever. Maybe they do and I just don’t grasp that, but they are telepathic and so my sense of close encounters always – even as a little kid – was pictorial and I described them frequently as stories that I am living through and observe.” Carlos has studied, he says probably 60 books of the Kabbalah and Zohar’s twelve volumes, which he learned about one day on a television special. He said after watching this program he turned to his wife Sarah and said, “My God, they’re talking about my life. My history.”
Meanwhile, getting back to the Manigault Park incident, Carlos said there was an open space there where the craft settled down an estimated 6-8 inches over the ground. Nearby was a dorm for what he called the theologs, who attended the school of theology. He said he could see young men on the third floor hanging out the dorm windows as he was floating toward the craft, maybe he guessed 5-6 inches off the ground. He noticed three young men coming outside and approaching the craft which is circular, about 60 feet wide, with a dome with windows in it. As they get to the craft they become paralyzed. “They cannot move,” Carlos said. “One of them had gotten to the dome and was flat up against it. The other two are back, not touching the dome. I start to cry. When I told this story under hypnosis the psychologist asked me why I was crying and I said because even though they’re paralyzed they’re going to feel sure, like I have many times. Have amnesia about this. I will only see a part of it and then it will disappear. I said, ‘So, I think they’re going to remember this because it’s significant. Unusual. A UFO out on the ground, so to speak. They’re probably not going to remember it but they’ll remember it in a subconscious way.”
“I’m floated by them. They take me in through the craft. I’m taken into a room with only the big one, the 5-footer.” On the inside, the craft appears much larger it seems. “They can change the size of everything, including the craft, including the ship, and including the people. Like me. I can be little and I can be regular size.”
Carlos describes how in this room there’s a 20-25 foot tall structure. From an opening above it a “huge glob of amber colored – it looks like honey – it works like honey – but it’s thicker and it comes down…around the entire stem and when it does so it shapes form and it becomes the most beautiful transparent metal passionflower. Our earth’s passionflower. …It’s all a metal that is luminous and glowing and has subtle colors like pink, and like lavender, light blue and light green. But it’s also just plain transparent looking metal. And it really is the shape entirely of a passionflower. They’re my favorite flower really. They’re here on the mountain and they were out here when I first moved out here.”
“The being, just through his mind, is creating this orchid plant. He doesn’t touch it ever. Its like staring and this thing does all this. …He is so thrilled he jumps up and down. He leaps and he’s excited and swirls his arms around. He’s so proud of this beautiful sculpture that he just created mentally. …I appreciate his joy because so many times people say they don’t have any feelings. Nonsense. They have as many feelings as we do and it’s just as deep. It’s deeper really.”
“Suddenly then I am aware of my appreciation that he’s doing all of this for me. I’m just a human being. An artist. I can’t do anything like that. It’s incredible.” Next Carlos says he was taken through a door (“without opening it”) into another room that was “like eight of these buildings.” He described what he saw next thusly: “A huge museum room. And in it were all these metal glass looking luminous beautiful plants. Every one of them was huge. Even as high as twenty feet high. 30 feet high. And another beyond and another beyond, and they were all different earth plants. Flowers. So, that was an incredible experience for me.”
Carlos’s lifelong journey of unexplained occurrences is a very vast and high strange collection of anomalous memories for which we have barely scratched the surface of here. Space and time prevent me from presenting a more detailed account at this point, but certainly there are similarities to other reports of this kind.
