Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, May 2025
The Ozark Mountain UFO Conference, April 11-13, 2025
by: Brent Raynes
Tons of books and more
The speakers this year were Rey Hernandez, academic researcher on the relationship between consciousness, our greater reality, and the paranormal; Dr. Sam Osmanagich, on the true purpose of pyramids; Kathleen Marden, The ET Presence: A Multidisciplinary assessment; Penny Kelly, Walking the World As A New Human; Michael Schratt, Retrievals of the Third Kind; Brit Elders, An Investigation into the Meier/Pleiadian Contact; and last but not least Brent Raynes, your humble editor, whose presentation title was the same as his 2019 book, John A. Keel: The Man, The Myths, and the Ongoing Mysteries.
Selfie with the wonderful Kathleen Marden
"I always enjoy the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference in Eureka Springs," Dr. Melinda Greer, M.D., a pediatrician shared. "It is such a beautiful setting and only a few hours from my home in Oklahoma. I've even had some paranormal experiences while at the conference. Unfortunately, although it is one of the longest running UFO conferences, I only learned about the conference in time to participate for two years before Dolores Cannon passed. Her family has done a wonderful job of carrying on the tradition and manage to find diverse and interesting speakers, with a mix of Experiencers, like me, and researchers. When seeking answers to events that have mystified and profoundly affected me throughout my lifetime, it is gratifying to find a few answers to these perplexing events in my lifetime."
Naturally, I had to ask what sort of “paranormal experiences” had she had at the conference site? She replied: “It was over a decade ago and was a different kind of conference, but at the same venue. The first thing that I saw was a scintillating vortex above the head of a presenter. (I was new to the concept of chakras, but it sure got my attention, and I subsequently researched the topic). It looked like a diamond top spinning above the crown of his head. At the same conference a day later, I was enjoying my morning breakfast alone on the terrace under the hotel by the pool when I suddenly saw a glowing gold symbol floating in the forest. It was about 10 feet tall and appeared out of nowhere. I did not know the significance of the symbol at the time, but I soon learned that it was the Sanskrit symbol for oneness, or OM. I was not really meditating at the time, just enjoying the morning and the birds singing in the forest, so it was totally unexpected, but a beautiful moment of grace.”
"Even though I, and the two co-authors (Dr. Rudy Schild, professor of astrophysics at Harvard University and Dr. Jon Klimo, Professor of Psychology for over 40 years) edited Beyond UFOs, which is the world's first and only comprehensive worldwide academic statistical research study on UFO Contact Experiencers (with 4,350 participants from more than 125 countries), no one in materialist ufology has shown an interest in this book and in my other academic publications," Rey Hernandez, who was the first speaker on Friday morning (04-11), an Experiencer himself who initiated the former 5 year FREE (Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences) program and currently CCRI (Consciousness and Contact Research Institute), which consists of more than 25 Ph.D. academics, medical doctors, and other serious researchers who are studying what Rey coined "Contact Modalities," wherein UFO Contact encounters are interrelated with a full spectrum of complex and little understood Consciousness and "paranormal" components.
"I have been invited to this conference on three occasions since 2019," Rey added. "For every conference, they have invited several speakers who also share my view that 'Consciousness is Fundamental' and that all of the paranormal is one integrated phenomenon under consciousness. One year they invited Dr. John Alexander and I, and we both share this similar viewpoint of consciousness and the source of the UFO phenomenon. One reason for this is that the conference organizer, Lou Farish, was very much open to non-materialist views. Delores Cannon, the metaphysical researcher on Past Lives and the founder of Ozark Mountain Publishing, was also involved in the conference with Mr. Farish and she and her daughter Nancy took over the conference after their passing."
"In addition to being open about the Consciousness aspects of the UFO phenomenon, the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference was also the best run of any conference I have attended, which included the MUFON national conferences, the Roswell UFO Conference, and the International UFO Congress. The irony of all of this is that many attendees at these conferences are UFO Contact Experiences. These individuals are having a multitude of paranormal experiences involving NDEs, OBEs, Astral Travel Experiences, seeing and communicating with the deceased and even having miraculous medical healings. These individuals go to these materialist UFO conferences to find answers to their experiences. Instead, all they are receiving is misinformation and disinformation and no answers to their multidimensional paranormal contact experiences." Rey pointed out to the audience during his Friday morning presentation (April 11) Dr. Greer’s presence in the audience, mentioning how she herself had an NDE (near-death experience), multiple UFO sightings, and had even had three encounters with Bigfoot, all of which is detailed in Volume 3 of his A Greater Reality. Kathleen Marden, a keynote speaker, who spoke later that day (4 pm to 6 pm) was also mentioned several times during his talk. She volunteered her help with Rey’s Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences, and she is the niece of famous UFO abductee Betty Hill. Kathleen devoted over 30 years to MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), directing the Experiencer Research Team as well, and has authored a number of books on UFOs, and like myself wrote a chapter for FREE’s volume Beyond UFOs (2018).
Joan befriends two little alien dudes
Early into the conference, I found myself sitting at a small table across from a pleasant gentleman who appeared to be one of those experiencers who come to the annual conference looking for answers. He confided that one day back in 1978, when he was six years of age, he and his 8-year-old sister were outside playing, at which point he decided to explore a nearby cornfield. His sister refused to enter out of fear. Just a short way in young Charles Holt confronted something he didn't expect. "I encountered what I thought at the time was a giant grasshopper. It was a little bit taller than I was. It had two arms and two legs, and long kind of prehensile fingers. The way they bent was like they didn't have bones in them, almost like tentacles. It was gripping the corn stalks, very slowly pushing them apart, and looking directly at me with its very large bug eyes."
The creature appeared to be no more than three feet from him. He ran out of the corn field terrified.
"Then in 2020, I heard about Mantis Beings," Charles told me. "I did a Google search and what I found matched what I saw when I was a kid." He found an illustration of it online and then made his own. "It looks like its AI but it is not," he said. "I'm just good with photoshop." He showed me the image on his cellphone. He later emailed me the copy below:
Mantis Being?
"Around the beginning of 2020, I had a very short but profound out-of-body experience. I tilted up and out of my body and then panicked and was pulled back in like a rubber band attached to my belly button. It was like my whole body tilted up, at my feet.
"I'm trying to remember the order of everything. I had a precognitive dream. I started having very odd synchronicities. My first time using my Tarot deck I drew the same card four times in a row, which was the fool, which turned out to be pretty significant. Then I started having some incidents with clairvoyance. I found out I could do remote viewing. Then I started having incidents that turned out to be mediumship, although I didn't know it right away. Then eventually I got to experimenting with EVPs. I have hours of recordings from whatever I'm talking with, and then somehow that appeared to progress into clairaudience, which is now just a thing." Another time Forest Crawford, the Conference's Master of Ceremonies, a long-time contributor to this annual event, sat down at the same table I was and pointed out that we had a mutual friend in ufology. It was Sue Pitts of Huntsville, Alabama, who had once been the MUFON state director there. He had even spoken at a UFO conference that Sue had organized at Huntsville’s Space and Rocket Center. And, in addition, he confessed how in 1967, at the mere age of ten, he and several others witnessed the landing of a disc-shaped UFO near Hardin, Illinois. [This story will be gone into much more detail in the interview section of this issue. Forest has also investigated some truly high strange cases, which are also included in this interview]
It certainly wasn't the first time someone active in this field had acknowledged that it began for them because of their own encounter, and it's not a rare thing either. In fact, I’ve personally found it to be actually quite common.
Then Saturday (9 am to 10:30 am) Penny Kelly stepped up to the podium. She had been described as someone who had had a diverse career spanning engineering, education, and consciousness, and to top it off had collaborated with scientists like Dr. William Levengood on crop circles and extraterrestrial phenomena. She had also described having a profound kundalini awakening and also her own UFO encounters, even the onboard variety, and since I had also come across UFO researchers and experiencers who identified with the kundalini experience, I arranged a private chat with her.
“When a kundalini experience first starts there’s this rumbling sound,” she explained. “It gets louder and louder and louder until it’s like you are standing behind a jet engine on a tarmac and it’s riving its engine full throttle and you are engulfed in this roaring sound. Then there’s a rocking sensation. My thought was, ‘We’re having an earthquake!”
When it goes full blown the experience will be extremely disorienting, from the way she described it. “There’s this sound, a feeling, and a light, all at one time, that soars up the center of you and each nerve section of the spine experiences a full-blown orgasm. You have like eight orgasms and when it hits your brain you are done.”
Done sounds right. Penny shared how your individual identity slips away. “There’s no sense of having a past, a present, or a future,” she explained. “You become part of what I would call Source, or the Godhead, or Ether, or whatever you want to call it.” She says you find yourself initially surrounded by utter silence. There’s no movement.” She explained then you see “billions of little pinpoints of light in a totally black, 360-degree field of blackness. That’s it.”
“When you start to come out of that the first thing that happens is there’s movement and you see these waves form and they’re colorful. Then you see particles form and then the particles gather, and they create pattern, and the pattern creates plasma and the plasma becomes physical matter and then boom, you’re back in the body. I’ve experienced that multiple times over a series of years. Three years it took for things to quiet down.” Penny described how soon after the kundalini you have instant clairvoyance, instant out-of-body, instant psychic ability, and instant telepathy, but no context or idea how to use it. At one point in our conversation, I remarked how this experience sounded like schizophrenia, to which she replied, “It almost is.”
“I liken it to the same thing we have going on in the world today,” she said. “The Pentagon has all these incredibly dangerous tools, but they don’t have the matching consciousness. So, after kundalini you have all of these incredibly dangerous and intuitive skills and you don’t have the consciousness to manage that well. It took me 17 years to integrate all of that. It took me three years before I could turn it on and off."
It was a lot to take in. But it can certainly be a lot of fun to try and accept the challenge to further explore and understand these reported high strange aspects of ufology and its paranormal horizons. An intellectual exercise for sure. For those wanting to learn more about Penny Kelly and her very strange life journey, I can recommend her book which I purchased from her entitled Consciousness and Energy, Volume 1: Multi-Dimensionality and A Theory of Consciousness (2006). And, of course, I had to purchase my friend Kathleen Marden’s Forbidden Knowledge: A Personal Journey from Alien Abduction to Spiritual Transformation (2023). After all, I used to live in Maine, and I knew Betty Hill and was introduced to Kathleen’s mother. There’s certainly much to probe and ponder in that family’s life. Naturally, I had to get autographs from them both while I was at it.
If you haven’t been to the Eureka Springs UFO Conference yet, you should definitely make plans to do so. It’s one of the best organized conferences, very open and informative, the staff is professional and friendly, and they draw in informative speakers with the latest information, and you’ll want to take some extra $$$ with you as you’ll see lots of cool books, magazines, DVDs and CDs, you’ll want to have for your home library, and then there’s the vendors with crystals, minerals, Tarot/Oracle decks, Native American drums, singing bowls, hats, shirts, hand crafted jewelry (and much, much more), plus there may be someone there to give you a psychic reading. Magic happens at Eureka Springs. Go and make your own.
