Alternate Perceptions Magazine, November 2025
Alan Vaughan, an Extraordinary Parapsychologist and Psychic Experiencer himself
By Brent Raynes
Alan Vaughan (1936-2001) played a huge and respected role in the parapsychological community. He was not only a dedicated and recognized researcher but also a competent psychic who for many years was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the “most successful predictor in the world.” He co-authored Dream Telepathy (1973), with Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., and Montague Ullman, M.D. He also wrote Patterns of Prophecy (1973), Incredible Coincidence (1979), The Edge of Tomorrow (1982), and Doorways to Higher Consciousness (1998). During some years he spent in New York he became the East Coast Editor for the prestigious magazine Psychic from 1972 till 1977. His parapsychological studies landed him in many different locations, like San Francisco, California, where he worked again with Stanley Krippner on dream research for a study that appeared in the Journal for Psychical Research in its second edition in 2001. In 1967, Eileen Garrett, who founded the Parapsychology Foundation in New York City, funded a research grant for Vaughan to study precognition and prophecy. In 1977, he worked with The Mobius Society based in Los Angeles, which was involved in remote viewing studies. He also had worked with the College of Psychic Studies in London, England, and with Professor Hans Bender, Director of the Institute for Parapsychology in Freiberg, Germany. Vaughan also served a stint in the U.S. Army where he worked in Army Intelligence and served time in Germany assisting in a program that was monitoring the Soviet Union. During his military time, he learned German and Russian. He was already familiar with Latin, Greek, and French.
Now excuse me as I take a slight detour. As you read on, it will prove relevant to an interesting part of Vaughan’s own journey, after which I’ll include other enticing interconnecting items.
In Robert Anton Wilson’s book Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), a book that revolved around numerous dog star Sirius synchronicities, from Robert K.G. Temple’s book The Sirius Mystery (1976), a controversial book that detailed how the African Dogon tribe of Mali had ancient and very specific knowledge it appeared concerning the Sirius star system. In particular Sirius B, a companion star of Sirius A, which isn’t visible to the naked eye and was only confirmed by 19th century astronomers. Temple theorized that an extraterrestrial visitation had occurred, that seemingly fit in with Dogon mythologies, and how this perhaps accounted for the rise of civilizations in Egypt and Sumer.
Wilson delved into Temple’s findings, adding his own personal findings, detailing his own journey into occult beliefs, practices, and his own initiations into such groups remaining today. He even claimed that at times he felt as though he was possibly being guided by “angelic” type intelligences. “The entity or entities contacted by me during July 1973-October 1974 had most of the characteristics of the ‘being of light’ described by persons who have been resuscitated after what is called near-death experience.” He had entered, he confessed, a belief system wherein “I was receiving telepathic messages from entities residing on a planet of the double star Sirius.”
It seemed like Sirius was popping up practically everywhere for him. It began when in The Magical Revival written by Kenneth Grant, whose author is seen by many as a successor to Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis, it was revealed that Phoenix was Crowley’s secret name. “The Phoenix was also an ancient constellation in which Sothis, or Sirius, was the chief star…” and how in “occult tradition, this is ‘the Sun behind the Sun,’ the Hidden God, the vast star Sirius. Or Sothis.”
Now we shall enter Alan Vaughan’s small but intriguing part of this story. In Wilson’s book, he had written of how after reading a draft of Cosmic Trigger, Vaughan had gotten on the phone and “in high excitement” called Wilson, explaining how Vaughan had himself had a Sirius related experience and readers could contact him at Psychic magazine for further details. So, naturally, I did.
In a letter to me from Vaughan (May 22, 1978) he wrote: “I’m a little confused myself about what to call those peculiar, vibrating red-orange discs. Are they beings? Holographically encoded consciousness from another time-space? (I’m sending along a copy of a recent letter to Jim Harder that might explain).
“I may soon be writing an article, ‘The Sirius Synchronicities,’ to attempt to probe some of those mysteries. I still don’t know what it all means, but lately, there have been curious interconnections with ideas from Temple’s The Sirius Mystery and the ancient Egyptian God Amen, whose name is said after every Christian prayer, an inheritance from the Jews, whose monotheism goes back to most ancient Egypt. He’s back in town, affixed to Tut’s name as a reminder. His symbol is the same as those I and others have seen, sometimes connected with Sirius, or at least something from another dimension. And it’s very, very old.
“The symbol (like a miniature sun) appears both visually and visionarily. I suspect that the ancient Egyptians saw it too, and today we say it is the ‘sun’ that was Amen, the One God. But it was not the sun in the sky but the “sun”-like object that appeared to holy men and was interpreted by the masses to be identical to the sun in the sky.
“Hard to unravel these mysteries after so many thousands of years, but read Budge’s Tutankhamen, the chapter on the ‘Cult of Amen’ to get an idea of just how old and how sophisticated, when compared with modern physics, this idea is.”
In the letter he had recently written on April 18, 1978, to James Harder, a professor with the Engineering Department at Berkley’s University of California, and a well-known UFO investigator, Vaughan described how on the evening of April 6th, he and his wife Diane and their friend Joan Cresson-Wolf “saw a strange red disk floating just over the surface of the sidewalk and street on Grant Avenue at the intersection of an alley, Fresno.” Vaughan admitted that initially he dismissed it as a laser beam but as he looked around, he could see no point of origin. “The red spot seemed to play games with us, moving in squiggles, never in a straight line,” he wrote. “It would disappear into a box and then reappear yards away, then return. Once when it flitted into the street it seemed to go up in the air and back down in a curving path. Diane got the closest look at it when it came to rest at her heel. She described it as red with yellow in it, rather like a fire. It was slightly less than an inch in diameter. All three of us were amused by its cat-and-mouse games, and I was sure it was a laser beam, somehow. Until I talked with Russell Targ and found that lasers are always monochromatic, and do not rise up in the air.”
Vaughan noted that other people had also noticed the light. “I saw such a disk once before, just when I was beginning to have psychic experiences in 1965,” Vaughan noted. “My first thought was that it was a vision or some sort of hallucination. It was inside my apartment and floated just a few inches away. Simultaneously, an artist friend named Yuri saw lights on his apartment wall. We compared notes and I checked out a star map. There was only one location where the lights fit. It was around Sirius, but with one extra light next to Sirius.” “The reason I made a connection with outer space is that I had just finished reading a book on UFOs, ‘My Contact With Flying Saucers,’ before it appeared in my apartment.” Vaughan also shared how Uri Geller, in the company of two friends, claimed how a red disk appeared close to them, and how he had heard a mechanical sounding voice in his head. Then he added this intriguing story: “Lastly, I just heard of an experiment conducted by Brendan O’ Regan, who only recently broke silence about it. He hypnotized Ingo Swann some years ago and had him project his consciousness into the future. Speaking with a mechanical voice, Ingo said the beings of the future were like machines. When Brendan asked what they looked like, Ingo told him to close his eyes. Brendan saw a red dot or disk that slowly turned yellow. Immediately after he saw that, Ingo said, ‘When the red light becomes yellow, you will have seen us.’ Brendan was shaken by the experience. Ingo was angry at him for doing this unauthorized experiment into the future, and made Brendan promise not to tell anyone what happened.”
One very strange and truly unique account that Vaughan shared appeared in FATE magazine, April 1983, in their Report From The Readers section, where he wrote:
“One morning in November 1982, after taking a shower, I looked down at my left thigh and saw what looked like a two-inch razor cut oozing fresh blood. I wiped away the blood and saw three small hairline cuts with scabs forming. I did not feel any pain nor could I imagine that I had brushed up against something sharp. As I wiped away a little more blood the cuts vanished and healed in less than two minutes. “Sitting down at the breakfast table 10 minutes later, I felt something sticky on my right inner thigh. I was astonished to find an ugly two-inch gash bleeding profusely. Taking a tissue to wipe away the blood, I found a strange wound pattern on my skin – thin lines shaped like the ends of two paperclips and about that size. But, amazingly, as I wiped them, the wounds began to disappear and in two minutes had instantly healed, leaving no indication that anything had disturbed the skin.
“My wife, who had seen both wounds, agreed with me that this must be a psychic manifestation. But in 15 years of investigating psychic phenomena, I had never seen anything like it. A related phenomenon would be stigmata but those wounds bleed for long periods and do not instantly heal.”
At the conclusion of his report, Vaughan requested that any FATE readers who may have had experiences themselves with “paranormal wounds and instant healing,” to please write him at his address in Malibu, which he provided. Naturally, of course, I can’t help but wonder now what sort of responses he may have gotten from his request.
Another thing I should add here is how in Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger he also wrote a section called “The 23 Enigma” where he became aware of how the number 23 became a strange synchronicity for himself after learning how it had been so for acclaimed writer and visual artist William S. Burroughs as well. It also became a weird synchronicity for my friend Peter Jordan some years back before he even came across Wilson’s book. Here’s a link to his article on the matter in the December 2022 issue of this magazine: https://www.apmagazine.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1937&Itemid=194 Here's a video talk Alan Vaughan gave to New York’s Parapsychology Foundation entitled Doorways to Higher Consciousness. It details further information and insights gained by him in his interesting life journey. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1T2XSf8vok
