Alternate Perceptions Magazine, July 2026
Their Balanced Way
By: Brent Raynes
Chief Lightfoot, left, my wife Joan in the middle, and his wife Fleet Deer
I first met Madeline Teagle in July 1975 when I knocked on the door of her home in July 1975. I found that on weekends her residence in Cuyahoga Falls, a short distance outside of Akron, was frequently a very busy place. Saturdays she would often conduct meditation sessions in the front living room of her home, UFO sky watches in her backyard, sometimes wit h a roaring bonfire not far from the woods out back, with groups of people gathered and sharing theories, speculations, beliefs, and their own personal anomalous experiences that they had had – that sometimes had happened right there on Madeline’s property.
Traveling around the country back then, driving from Maine to Florida, going through over a dozen different states, I had hit the jackpot at Madeline’s. I headed for Cuyahoga Falls on several Saturdays and met over a dozen different contactee type experiencers. Sometimes Madeline would join me on the road and introduce me to more of her contacts that I hadn’t met in nearby towns and cities nearby.
The one whose story most impressed me was one Al Roush, a businessman from Akron. It was through Al that Madeline had some extraordinary experiences herself. Once she observed a small silvery-white ball of light rolling across the front lawn of her home. On another occasion she encountered one night an odd “patch of fog” from which suddenly things like “tentacles” wrapped around her. She was afraid she was really in trouble at that point. Then clouds in the night sky above seemed to come together and formed the perfect image of a man – a man like figure, that is, who had what looked like the head and wings of an eagle!
Others also had described having had encounters while in Al’s presence. Larry Moyers, a respected MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) investigator who lived in Akron told me how he and others were with Al at a private park up near Cleveland. It was raining and they were walking through a narrow clearing when Larry spotted three small “football-shaped lights.”” He said. “You could see the leaves through them. They were nested in a bush. There were 4 or 5 of us who were watching it. This was too much for me. I dove into the bush and immediately when I did this they clonked out.” He speculated that they were something like a holographic projection.
Larry recalled another time at Madeline’s when they had hypnotized someone who while entranced said that if Larry and a Francis Rener would go out to the front of the house they would see a UFO manifestation. Doing so, Larry and the lady observed two balls of light, the size of a traffic light, glowing red, skimming three feet off the ground across the lawn. Larry told me he went running after them and as they began going behind a tree they completely disappeared.
Al had his initial UFO contact experience in August 1958. However, he was already a firm believer in UFOs since back in 1945, he and the crew of a tanker saw a bright orange disc-shaped object at a point east of the Florida Keys.
In 1958, he took to studying up on the subject and was learning about how some people claimed that there were ways to establish contact with ETs. Thus, it was during such an attempt on August 6, 1958, that he was surprised to see the walls of his home begin, in places, to look as though they were somehow not quite solid. He noticed an intense “spinning sensation’ in his head and next “blanked out,” Moments later he regained consciousness, at which time he became awestruck by what he observed. “I saw everything in that house, in my neighbors’ houses, that street and that neighborhood completely different than I’ve ever seen it before, and I could not believe what I saw,” he said. “Because what I saw was nothing but black and white, and what is ordinarily people became white dots spinning around in kind of a black void. In other words, human beings not only looking transparent but white – like a white light within a black field.” At that point I interrupted Al. I asked him how he had recognized the white lights as people. His reply: “Because they were screaming. They were making noises. They were yelling and they were cursing and they were cussing, and they were communicating.”
Then a vertical shaft of light appeared to the right of his chair. He reached for it, saying “as if it was a matter of life and death.” He stood up and walked into the light and next found himself accompanied by two approximately eight-foot-tall humanoid beings with large heads, slanted eyebrows, wearing yellow-white robes. He said next he found himself being beamed up into an “enormous green, translucent sphere” where he then found himself in the company of three of these humanoids.
“The planet looked like a dot behind us in a few seconds,” he declared. Then, within a short time, they arrived at what was apparently the home planet of these beings. Al finds himself being given a tour of the planet. He noted how their homes were “humble buildings by contrast to our own,” made up of slabs of stone. Al was then taken he said to the enter of a large, octagonal shaped stone court. The beings at that point told him they would demonstrate their method of construction. As he watched, two humanoids moved over to a large rock and cut themselves a slab simply by extending their two arms out from their bodies in the direction of the rock. Not seeing any tools or machinery used in the process, Al said he was amazed. Then, by way of explanation, he was allowed to see a seething red sphere hovering nearby. “That is god energy,” he said he was told. “We know how to use it. But to us that’s god and energy, and god and energy are one and we know how to use it.” Al said he found himself bursting out aloud asking the beings, “Where is the Great White Father?” He admitted, “I don’t know why I said this.”
“This made them made,” he noticed. “They took me to another place where they had a stone octagonal court with gates in it and they put me in the middle and then they said, “You stand it.” They opened the gates and a lion came out. He said they told him, “Watch this force that contains the lion.” Because they had a force that kept that lion from moving. I was led to understand that evolution can occur in different directions at this point. That is, we can have thought forms that are lions and bodies of men. That is, the thought forms that constitute the spirit are not the same as the thought forms that constitute the appearance of the body. At any rate, they called this the lion test. They were showing that this force contained these lions or held the balance of nature so that nature does not attack.”
In April 1977, I took Joan (who a few months later became my wife) to meet a Native chief and shaman of Susquehannock ancestry to meet him and his wife at their home in Pennsylvania. Joan has some Cherokee ancestry and was really looking forward to meeting them. Madeline had recommended that I meet with the shaman, known as Chief Lightfoot Talking Eagle, as she said that he was yet another person who had had UFO contact. She also shared how she had been present one time when he conducted a successful rain dance ceremony during which a cloud appeared in the sky, split in half, after which four beings appeared up in the sky. One she said appeared “almost like a half bird, half human.”
The shaman told me how at the age of four he was instructed in the building of his first “prayer mound,” which was in the shape of a tortoise. “I am a Turtle Clan,” he explained. “My Family Totem is a Rattlesnake.”
He shared that at age eight around 1916 he and his paternal uncle Tall Willow had a remarkable vision while walking up a mountain. “About two-thirds the way up the mountain we saw before us a huge coiled rattlesnake,” he explained. “The coil was about as tall as uncle Tall Willow who was six feet and one inch tall. As we approached about 20 feet to the rattlesnake it uncoiled and began gliding up the mountain….the direction we were headed. Then the huge snake (about 150 feet long) began to fade out like dying embers of a log fire and disappear.”
“It was The Spirit of The Great Serpent in the Sky Garden. Serpent Mounds are replicas of it. Our Ancient Master Teachers taught that our ancestors came to Earth from that constellation. At uncle Tall Willow’s instruction I sat for about an hour on the spot where the Big Rattlesnake Spirit had been coiled.”
He said that inside many mounds are crystals. “The primary purpose of the ‘crystals’ in some mounds and other places are beacons to guide in the outer space craft. Secondarily, the crystals have healing qualities.”
“I pray on mounds and commune with the Great Spirit and the Spirit of Mother Earth…Sometimes with the sisters and brothers from the Sky Garden. We can communicate with powers, forces, spirits and elementals, even the spirits of trees, vegetation, stones, waters, storms, etc. Often, they manifest to us in physical form. Sometimes only a voice.” He further explained that to him UFOs are without question “interplanetary space craft.” However, he also perceived the UFOs as “Spirit,” adding “as are the spirits, powers, forces and beings who ride them. Materializing to whom they will.”
He described a time years earlier, back on December 5, 1961, around 12:30 p.m., when he and his wife were living in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, that a UFO (which he called a “fire canoe”) landed in their backyard. His wife noticed it first and grabbed an envelope to sketch out how it looked to her. Soon very tall beings entered their home announcing, “We are the Yuh-dush-gwa.” Lightfoot explained how they were “one of the giant races that dwelt with my people before and after the glacial age.”
Later, during a visit with Madeline at her home in Ohio in June 1983, we shared something odd that happened during our visit with Chief Lightfoot. After they had shared a meal with us, Lightfoot invited us into the living room for what he called a “Pow Wow.” We sat on a couch across from him as he sat in an armchair and lit up his pipe. I felt very relaxed and closed my eyes, wondering if maybe I was going to go into a trance. Joan, however, kept her eyes open and noticed how the smoke from Lightfoot’s pipe began to do something unusual. It would spread out horizontally, then move back inward, then in both directions spread out vertically, then collapse back inward and again do the outward horizontal pattern of movement, and it did this several times. Eventually, it was as though the smoke had become like a tunnel between her and Lightfoot, and everything returned to normal. Furthermore, I mentioned how I had done hypnosis with Joan about that episode and she described seeing an inner and outer circle with two crosses, and how each had spun in opposite directions. I speculated that to me sounded like a mandala archetype.
Madeline turned around and faced briefly in the opposite direction. Joan and I looked at each wondering what was going on. Then she turned back toward us, and explained, “That’s true. That is their balanced way. Their balanced cross.” She added that she felt something might have been passed on to her.
I would later reflect on Roush’s otherworldly octagon encounter, a circular form, and the so-called “lion test,” and his statement, “They were showing that this force contained these lions or held the balance of nature so that nature does not attack.” And let us not overlook the fact that ancient native people built some large walled octagon shaped earthworks in Ohio. Newark has one that’s still intact.
Madeline had described to me a handsome humanoid being named Amana that would appear to her. “When he appears, however, there is generally a brilliant white tube of light first,” she said. “Then he just seems to form within it. When I have touched him in the process of deforming something like a sharp electrical shock runs through the area of my own body that is touching him. And I feel sort of as though the cells of my body at that place are separated, that they are apart and loose. Can see that this is not so, but it feels as though whatever part of me is touching him is not very well tied together.”
Kathleen Marden, a UFO researcher, a hypnotist, and the niece of the noted abductee Betty Hill, informed me, “Sometimes people feel as if they are coming apart in these UFO beams.” Madeline announced in 1990 that she was constructing her own prayer mound “just under a large pine that was the space where we first met Amana as a beautiful ball of light, lemon colored, but clear. About the size of a basketball.”
