Alternate Perceptions Magazine, April 2026
My Early Days in Keelian Ufology and up into the Present
By: Brent Raynes
In late 1966, I read Frank Edwards Flying Saucer – Serious Business. It was a popular mainstream, “nuts and bolts” ET kind of book. As a 14-year-old, I was initially reluctant to become involved in the subject, but eventually my resistance broke down and by January 1967, I became what I later learned was a person nick named a “ufologist.” No degree or certification necessary. Just a serious interest in the subject where you clip out stories from the newspapers, read magazines and books on the subject, and if your interest intensifies more you begin corresponding with other “ufologists” out there and even writing letters and making phone calls to witnesses you hear or read about. I gradually became increasingly proficient in the art of networking, even started my own mimeographed newsletter, UFO club, and even contributed articles and stories to other UFO magazines. One was a monthly magazine called Saucer Scoop out of Saint Petersburg, Florida, edited by a Joan Whritenour, for which I became a part of their board of directors. It was because of this involvement in 1969 that a New York journalist named John A. Keel, who was contributing a series of articles for Scoop and other magazines, that he came to my attention. In Scoop his articles always included an address where he could be reached, and that’s when my ufological journey expanded significantly to include a much greater multidisciplinary field that included not just odd lights and objects in the sky, but encounters with strange humanoid beings and various anomalous forms of apparent psychic phenomena, poltergeists, telepathic communications, and other parapsychological phenomena, and even cryptids like Mothman and Bigfoot.
Keel became a prominent figure in the UFO field who delved into all sorts of high strangeness and complained that “ufologists” were only investigating and researching a small part of the enigma. When I informed him in 1971 of my own desire to travel across the country to interview UFO witnesses, seeking any advice he might care to offer, he replied: “Essentially, the contactee experience is identical to religious apparition phenomenon and probably is caused by the same factors. It might be best to familiarize yourself with the medical and psychiatric studies of the religious cases before you tackle the UFO variation.”
As anyone who reads my 49-page report in chapter 13 of Beyond UFOs (2018) or my book John A. Keel: The Man, The Myths, and the Ongoing Mysteries (2019), I followed through on Keel’s advice and example, traveling through over a dozen states and up into Canada personally interviewing many people who had these high strange experiences themselves.
One of my very first local contacts up in Augusta, Maine (a state I was born and raised in) was an auto mechanic named James Carey. Married with a wife named Linda and a young son named Jay, I was always welcomed at their home. I spent many hours there and on the phone chatting with Jim. We shared a deep fascination with the UFO subject. We even made a number of trips around the state and down into Massachusetts to meet with people who had their own personal stories to share. While I started out, as I pointed out already, I was first influenced by the strictly “nuts and bolts” ET frame of reference, but it wasn’t long before Jim and Linda both began visiting the spiritualist church in Augusta and meeting with mediums. Jim was quick to point out that some were the real deal and others were not so impressive. They also began experimenting with psychic phenomena on their own. Jim even described to me his first out-of-body experience on Friday morning, July 30, 1971, sometime around 6 or 7 a.m. He told me how he was in bed and suddenly projected out of his physical body. He descended downstairs, finding his wife working in the kitchen. He noticed he could see through the walls of the house. He moved outside to the backyard. He saw the morning sun, noticed a few stars still visible in the sky, but then observed something not a normal part of the local environment. Where normally there was a swampy area out there behind his home there suddenly was a strange “beautiful city,” which he also described as a “perfect utopia.” Rounded buildings, with tinted windows, whose occupants were men and women he described as being beautiful, in perfect physical shape. Next, he found himself sitting on an illuminated bench with a man with long white hair with a white mustache and a goatee. He and the man became engaged in conversation, Jim sharing matters of a personal nature with the stranger.
Not long after this incident, Jim claimed he had undergone several other astral projections. None included the mysterious city or the stranger on the bench though. But the point being is that Jim and his family’s own paranormal claims further introduced me to high strange areas that Keel was certainly becoming known for. My teenage brain was struggling to take it all in and try and digest such stories as best as I could.
Sadly, Jim and Linda have both passed on. Jay, now all grown up, claims to have his own psychic awareness. “A friend of mine was with me, and we both clearly saw a demon standing in an upstairs window and my friend, who is a big man, 6’ 4” and 550 pounds, grabbed me like a kid and threw me in his pickup truck,” Jay recently shared in an email. “He drove off from there and wouldn’t ever go back and he only spoke one time about it when his wife asked what his problem was with horror movies. I told her about it and described it standing in the window clearly seen with glowing red eyes and it was huge and he told me to never speak of it again.”
I asked Jay where this house was. He replied that it was located in Windsor, Maine, was known to be haunted, and supposedly long ago a man killed his wife and a girlfriend there, burying them on the property. Jay added: “After the last time I saw the thing in the window I never returned there and have no interest in doing so. I myself saw children there and so did my step kids several times.”
Someone else who came to my attention early on was one Shirley Fickett, a Portland, Maine housewife and mother who was an artist, with her own art and driftwood gallery built on to her house, an author, and a member of the International UFO Bureau with its headquarters located out in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I spent many enjoyable conversational evenings in the livingroom of her home where we covered all things ufological as well as all things unexplained from Bigfoot, ghosts, angels – like what I said, all things. We’d often enjoy a snack while doing so. Sometimes a delicious Italian sandwich from a local sub shop while other times Shirley would prepare a wonderful dish of lasagna (which I have the recipe to this day). Her husband Dick would often be busy down in the basement in a workshop often creating awesome items for giftshops, like a miniature lighthouse set up on a piece of driftwood. The door to the basement was located in the same room Shirley and I would be kicked back in deep conversation usually of a deep weird nature and periodically Dick would be going to or coming from the workshop and he’d smile and look over at us and ask us if we’d solved anything yet. We’d laugh and admit we hadn’t and then he’d continue on with his work. It became a standard comical exchange during those pleasant evening visits.
Shirley had a lot of interesting personal stories, but the one that really grabbed my attention at the very start was how she described undergoing a series of out-of-body experiences back in 1969. She felt that some intelligence was “training” her in “astral projection.” One time, while she was partially out of her body, she thinks she glimpsed her trainer – a non-human being about four feet tall, with a coconut-shaped head, two slits for eyes, a tiny slit where the nose should be, and no visible mouth. In one instance, she was transported down the road from her home to another house, where she perceived the spirit of her father embracing a young boy. Then she was transported back to her house, back into her body, whereupon the boy's “astral” appeared to her.
“I held my physical hand out in acceptance to receive him, or let him know I did,” Shirley told me. “He then vanished.” Not long afterwards, in a conversation with a stranger, she learned how he believed that his son was having psychic experiences, and as it turned out, she became convinced that it was the same boy she met astrally. She felt her late father's presence was connected with this young man. She suspected reincarnation.
Then something happened that caused her to speculate about UAP. One morning around 5:30 a.m., in late November 1972, this boy was understandably alarmed when he claimed that a beam of light, coming through a wall in his bedroom, pinned him to his bed while the hands on his electric clock spun wildly around, and while a high frequency noise filled the air. The boy stated, “I felt like it was robbers, but they kept saying it was from Christ.” Not long afterwards, Shirley read the story of Israeli psychic Uri Geller's alleged childhood experience of being struck by a beam of light from a small UAP.
These are some of my dear friends who early on further ignited my fascination with the unexplained – friends who further fed that fascination with their own firsthand stories which I continue to carry in my memories and in my heart.
