Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, May 2026
Curiouser and Curiouser
by: Brent Raynes
I recently was on a panel discussion recorded back in March (released April 8th) hosted by Anthony Kilner of Supernal Magazine, the panel entitled Beyond Supernal: Contact and Consciousness. Besides myself there was noted Canadian UFO researcher Grant Cameron, medium Desta Barnabe, and much to my surprise Daniel Drasin, whose mentioned in John Keel’s book The Mothman Prophecies (1975) and someone who I’ve interviewed and whose story is told in my book, John A. Keel: The Man, The Myths, and the Ongoing Mysteries (2019). So, alas, it was a happy reunion, and while I’d not previously had an opportunity to connect personally with Grant Cameron, some of the aspects I brought up that are not too well known in ufological circles, he and his fellow researcher and channeler associate Desta Barnabe touched upon some of those. They also recently had a book published that they wrote together entitled The Big Game: The Supernatural Blueprint, Investigating PSI, ESP, and the Afterlife. I’m looking forward to reading it soon.
At one point, I brought up my research into hemispheric brain shifts that I had noted in mediumistic and contactee cases. In fact, in the October 2025 edition of this magazine [Alternate Perceptions] I did a rather extensive review of evidence I had come across relating to apparent or possible shifts to the left-brain hemisphere originating it seemed from the right lobe during altered states of consciousness.
Link: https://www.apmagazine.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2455&Itemid=53
After I finished my thoughts on this subject, Grant quickly jumped in but also added an aspect that reminded me of an experience I had many years ago. He mentioned a man in Los Angeles who suddenly found himself on a UFO and, as Grant explained the man recalled “somebody is standing behind me and they’re telling me what to do and they said, ‘Go ahead and do it’ and he said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ So, he says, ‘I see the panel board, I put my hands on the panel board, and suddenly I’m flying the flying saucer.’” Next Grant recalls a conversation he had with Whitley Strieber. He recalled how it went something like this: “Whitley, you’ve been on a craft lots of times.’ He said yeah, I asked, ‘Have you ever had somebody standing behind you? You can’t look and see who they are?’ ‘All the time,’ he said. ‘I wanted to steal the craft. I was sitting at the panel board. I thought, ‘I’m going to steal this thing, and somebody behind me started laughing.’” Grant even recalled how Jim Semivan, former head of CIA covert operations, said humanoid beings appeared in his bedroom, and how there was one that stood behind him during the encounter.
Grant was reminded of a Michael Newton who claimed that after death you go before a spiritual council, during which a spirit guide stands behind you on your left side.
Toward the conclusion of Grant’s comments, he encouraged Desta to share her experience. “It was kind of a greyish, sparkly, shiny being,” she began. “Both times I encountered it it was standing on my left side with its right hand holding on to my left shoulder. One time it was like a dream where I was in this school and it was standing behind me,” adding how it had “his right hand on my left shoulder while he’s like communicating with me. …I don’t think I turned around to see it. I just knew exactly what it looked like even though it was standing behind me.” Then she recalled her second experience. “It also stood behind me. So, I couldn’t see it, but I knew exactly what it looked like. It was like communicating with me telepathically I guess.”
Though I had delved heavily into the brain hemisphere subject the aspect of someone standing behind and potentially either controlling or helping in some way to guide someone had escaped my notice. But, as I noted in my column Reality Checking (July 2019) of this issue, I wrote: “… my bedroom at my parent’s home in Maine where back in the fall of 1975, at the age of 23, I had this experience that has long intrigued me wherein shortly after climbing into bed I suddenly found myself, I thought, walking across the bedroom floor headed toward the open doorway to the main hall on the second floor, where the light was still on. Everything seemed real, and in my mind I was physically walking toward this door. But then about halfway I stopped and even though I didn’t feel a physical restraint, I just knew that someone behind me had just somehow stopped me. Naturally, feeling this to be the case, one would think that I would turn around to face whoever it was. Instead I continued to maintain my sight upon the open doorway, and suddenly these small glowing white pulsating translucent marble sized spheres – it looked like hundreds – appeared in the hallway and began swirling around. It seemed to begin up near the ceiling and worked their way down near the floor where they began to amass into a glowing white cluster that seemed to resemble a small four-legged animal – but before it completely solidified the next thing I knew I was laying on my back in bed [which is slightly unusual, as I’m more comfortable laying on my side or stomach in bed] starring up at the ceiling.”
Another aspect that I brought up in our interactive conversation was what some have come to call the TARDIS effect, kind of like experiencers who have claimed to have been onboard a UFO and found it bigger on the inside than the outside. An experiencer up near Chicago shared a pretty remarkable experience with me where many beings emerged from a small craft. “Husband Bob and I were standing at the kitchen sink looking out the window,” she recalled. “We saw a bronze bell-shaped craft wafting like a leaf to the ground. Many children and several tall adults emerged from the 3-foot-tall craft. I ran down to talk to the visitors while Bob remained transfixed at the sink. These people all looked perfectly human but had expressionless faces.”
Again, Grant had examples of this category of high strange too. One was of North Carolina contactee Chris Bledsoe. “Thirty feet on the outside and he looks inside and it’s the size of a football stadium. He looks back outside it’s 30 feet across. He looks inside and again it’s the size of a football stadium.”
Heidi Hollis has worked as a therapist in occupational therapy for the Veteran’s Administration in California. “I had my own UFO Group for over 15 years having a website before most: www.UFO2U.com,” she explained to me. “My experiences have been in the area of UFOs more than ‘paranormal.’ I have always come at the topics that I am known for having named, discovered and defined as being interdimensional beings connected to the alien/UFO encounters in the world that I have called Shadow People and Hat man. These beings are seen right alongside with the ‘aliens.’ I actually hold the original copy/trademarks to both of them. I am the host of Dark Becomes Light-part of Coast to Coast AM paranormal podcast network and am a news contributor for them currently. You can find links to my podcast directly on the Coast website or my website at: www.heidihollis.com.”
Heidi was featured in an article in Psychology Today entitled Synesthesia: A Sense of Machines, detailing her computer interactions with what is called mirror-touch synesthesia (similar to what many other major UFO and “paranormal” experiencers have described). Here’s a link to that article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sensorium/201912/a-sense-of-machines?msockid=22079e69b509653d1b6f8c09b42564ec
“I have always spoken of the conflict in alien contact being more like spiritual warfare,” she added. “I have never been a ghost hunter or anything along those lines. My work has always been in the UFO area, but after being the first to do what I have in discovering, naming what I have with the interdimensional beings people tend to think I am a ‘paranormal’ researcher.”
In Heidi Hollis’s book Picture Prayers: The Journey to Picture Perfect Prayers, she describes a method of prayer that evolved for her that sounds potentially to me like it incorporated hemispheric brain shifting. As a child she attended church regularly with her siblings, but she admits how she had difficulty feeling like she was doing it properly. She recalled laying in bed, closing her eyes and engaging in her prayers, which she took very seriously, but often she’d find later how she’d fallen asleep before reaching completion. She’d describe how she’d often “awake in horror” to the realization that she had fallen asleep before finishing her prayers. She’d struggle then to try and remember where she had left off. She admits she suffered “a raw fear at times” worrying whether she was pleasing God in how she was conducting her prayers.
Eventually, one night she had this illuminating experience. She learned a new way of prayer, the “picture prayer” method as the title of this book implies. She noticed a clear visual of people in a solemn state of prayer, heads bowed, eyes closed, hands clasped together in their laps, with others looking up toward the heavens with tears in their eyes. She writes how the pictures “assembled in front of me to the left side of my view.” She felt love and concern associated with these images. At some point the energy associated with the emotions of these images moved over to the right side of her vision, hanging in the air suspended like “glistening stars.” Then with a powerful sense of oneness and intention the final stages of the process seemed to come together perfectly. After a short time, various images that seemed associated with these people and their lives were like downloaded one by one into a “spinning ball of beautiful light.” Once that process was completed, within a brief time, each ball of light shot straight up at tremendous speed and out of her view. Heidi felt each of these balls of light were destined to be received by God. She felt that an unseen guidance was showing her a method she herself could use in her approach to prayer. As she continued this practice, she felt an angelic presence was conveying to her, “This is how we communicate.”
In her Psychology Today interview on synesthesia, Heidi was quoted: “I don’t just talk to a person or hear a story without seeing something like a movie playing out in front of me, but just to the left of my actual vision.”
In regard to my own description earlier in this article of observing luminous balls of light myself while in an altered state, I should add that it occurred two days following my own prayer attempt to get some spiritual clarity. While I had accepted Christ several months earlier, some were questioning whether I was really saved yet. Had I been baptized in water, the spirit, or spoken in tongues? The lights appeared to be forming the image of what I took to be a four-legged animal. Was there a “picture prayer” message here in connection with my lights that I didn’t quite grasp at the time?
As to the left sided aspect, this reminds me of the man described in last October’s article that I linked near the beginning of this feature who described how when he’s talking with someone he will at times suddenly feel light-headed, how a haze will appear around the person, and how he said he will get mental images that “tell me things or show me pictures in my head.” In addition, he said his left hand shakes too during such experiences.
“The left-handedness seems to indicate the increased participation of the right lobe of the brain in mediumistic states,” Dr. Nandor Fodor, a New York psychoanalyst, wrote in his An Encyclopedia of Psychic Science. He reported how quite a few mediums would switch from right-handed to left-handed when in a trance state. Parapsychologists have remarked on how psychic activity seems prominent in the right brain. California UFO contactee Brian Scott was reported being observed writing in a deep trance state where his “eyes were fixed on the wall (while) his left-hand continued writing. Brian is not left-handed.”
