Alternate Perceptions Magazine, July 2026
Ghosts in the Machine?
By: Brent Raynes
British author Antony Milne noted how a variety of “ghostly analogies” could be drawn from “the apparitional nature of UFOs, similar to ghosts that walk through walls, or the way people can be levitated at seances, and the way UFOs materialize from nowhere.” Milne (2011) also added in his book, Fireballs, Skyquakes and Hums: “UFO sightings seem too often to be similar to the mind-created worlds that shamans encounter during their journeys through the subtler dimensions.”
Michael Grosso, in Experiencing the Next World Now (2004), a book that primarily explored the evidence for an afterlife, noted how UAP and their occupants, a subject that he had delved into quite extensively, were “maddeningly elusive and surreal” in a way wherein their manifestations compared more with the “antics of ghosts than machines from outer space,” mentioning frequently reported case details like telepathy, levitation, apports, teleportation, and odd light and heat phenomena. “Are ghosts really UFOs and UFO entities, or are UFOs really ghosts?” Keel wrote (1970). “Take your choice.”
Some of the UAP are indeed very ghost-like. Ufologist Bob Teets described to me an experience he had as a young boy on a farm in Terra Alta, West Virginia, one early morning in the summer of 1958. A typical farm family they were early risers, but on this one morning a loud sound woke young Bob (perhaps about age 8 at the time) before the others. Looking out his bedroom window, he clearly saw a silver-colored disc-shaped object, about 30-35 feet across, with “two glowing orange-red orifices” that seemed to be propelling it. “Even with my hands over my ears it still penetrated my head,” he told me in a phone interview. “It was just unbelievable. It was like if you were standing right beside a freight train that was going full throttle.”
Next the most amazing thing happened. The craft (or whatever it was) headed straight for a nearby hill and while young Bob was fearing that his sighting was going to end in an explosive crash it (the UAP) instead “went into the hill.” Yes, like a ghost. “I had a very clear view,” Bob told me. “I could see everything.”
Bob Teets investigated more than 150 eyewitness accounts for his book West Virginia UFOs: Close Encounters in The Mountain State (1995). One of my favorite UAP “hocus pocus” ghost-like cases was recounted to Bob in an interview with one Gregg Knight, a deputy with the Harrison County Police Department. Gregg had described an old man named Brian (pseudonym) who he stated was quite a “mentally disturbed individual” who had “quit work because of events in his life and in his daughter’s life in Louisiana because of contact with aliens.”
Gregg’s story is that one clear afternoon back in 1990, he and Brian were just standing outside at a trailer park in Belmont, West Virginia, engaged in conversation. Brian was known to be very knowledgeable about Biblical matters and, in their conversation, Gregg said words to the effect, “If I ask my Dad a question, he answers. If I ask God the Father something, he won’t answer, sometimes for years. Now why is that?”
Gregg recalled that Brian responded, “It depends on what you ask.” Gregg came back with, “Like UFOs, what could they be? I want to see an alien craft not of this world.” Brian then simply said, “Look there,” and Gregg looked to the west, and what he saw, he admits, “took my breath away.”
Bob’s account of this story continues as follows:
“It was a massive craft, so huge it 'blocked out the sun, and yet it didn’t cast a shadow.'” Gregg estimates it was more than 2,000 feet in length, with a finish like that of “a Chrysler 426 hemi engine, that’s it exactly.” Its features resembled “a battleship turned upside down.”
“I yelled for my wife as loud as I could, or at least I thought I did,” he recalls, “but no one came out.” After it was gone, Gregg looked at Brian. “Did you see that!” he asked, incredulously. “Sure,” Brian answered. “That ain’t nothing, that’s just a mother ship. You ought to see a colony ship. And then wait ‘til you talk to ‘em.”
Gregg says Brian’s son, who was 20 miles away in Parkersburg, saw it too. From his perspective, it appeared to be about the size of a baseball on the horizon.” Bob Teets adds that Gregg afterwards became an active member of the Mutual UFO Network, as a direct result of his dramatic encounter that strange afternoon in 1990.
This isn’t the only UAP case where a small group of people presumably observed something quite spectacular and massive in size that hundreds of others should have been quite startled by – something that should have resulted in a media sensation. Despite Gregg yelling to his wife at the top of his lungs, no one else ventured outside to observe the huge object with them. Indeed, often witnesses to UAP close encounters seem to become somehow isolated from others. The neighborhood, the streets, the highway suddenly become eerily quiet and devoid of normal human activity or automobile traffic. British ufologist Jenny Randles coined the term “The Oz Effect” for such situations. Have such witnesses become unknowingly and temporarily pulled into a parallel world that outwardly resembles our own on the surface? Or is this an experience similar to religious visionary phenomena, induced perhaps by an alien intelligence of some sort that floods our consciousness with powerful imagery through altered states.
In 2005, I met an American researcher named Cynthia Newby Luce who had a Master’s Degree in experimental psychology and anthropology, and who had lived for many years in the mountain village of Sao Jose do Vale do Rio Preto, located northwest of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was here that she said that she one day witnessed something very peculiar near her village. “I was driving along the road that has the river on one side of me (the left) and on my right is a steep embankment as the river is in a narrow valley and the road is cut from the hill that comes right down to the river,” Mrs. Luce explained. “It was in the middle of the day and the sun was bright and clear. I was going along at about 25 miles an hour. The road winds and suddenly I saw this metallic object with windows half-way into the hillside. It was around 8 feet up from the road and about 10 feet of the object was protruding, and it just slid into the hillside of bare red earth. It went in fast and so it really startled me but happened so fast I did not have time to stop.”
Later she found a drawing depicting exactly what she felt she had seen in an illustration, based on eyewitness testimony described as a curious “comet” observed in Arabia...back in 1479 AD! She found the illustration in William Bramley's book The Gods of Eden (1989, 1990), where it explained that this rendering had been published initially back in 1557.
In his book, Confrontations (1990), Jacques Vallee described a UAP witness who said she had seen an oval-shaped object rise up off the ground a few feet, pause briefly and then shoot off up a canyon at high speed, passing directly through several trees, as if the trees weren't even there.
