Reality Checking
Bridge to the Southern Cross, Ghostly Aliens, and Phone Calls from the Dead
By Brent Raynes
Editor Brent Raynes (left) with Peruvian wisdom teacher Jorge Luis Delgado (right).
Back on Wednesday evening, August 15th, Joan and I gathered with about thirty spiritual questers atop the large pyramidal Indian Mound located close to the Tennessee River, in Florence, Alabama. It’s not everyday that a Peruvian wisdom teacher adventures this far north to share his spiritual teachings and conduct ancient ceremonies, but this is exactly what Jorge Luis Delgado was doing on this very pleasant, early sunny evening.
For me, this was certainly a dream come true. Years earlier, I had written Jorge by email and we had even spoken once on the phone, but we had never met in person. But when writing my book Visitors From Hidden Realms (2004) I had interviewed people like Bonita Luz and Mark and Andrea Pinkham who had all traveled extensively in Peru and shared with me details of a mysterious huge stone wall with a doorway in it (that led no where and was out in the middle of the proverbial nowhere), which Jorge had been led to essentially through a strange series of dreams. Many who have visited the site have stood in the doorway and claimed powerful psychic impressions and visions. Bonita claimed to have envisioned a “crystal city, an interdimensional city” while visiting the stone doorway. Many regard it as an interdimensional portal to other worlds.
I handed Jorge a copy of my book, showing him where he was mentioned in it, and showing him pictures of his friends in the book. He smiled real big and laughed as he immediately recognized the pictures of Bonita, Mark and Andrea.
At one point, with everyone in a circle on top of this large flat topped earthen mound, Jorge invited me to step into the center of the group and to share with everyone something about the Peruvian Whistling Vessels, of which I had brought along five fully functional replicas of pre-Columbian Chimu effigy whistles. I explained what a powerful influence they had been in my life and the lives of others, how their psycho-acoustical qualities had been discovered back in 1972 by one Daniel Statnekov (author of Animated Earth), and invited anyone who wanted to try blowing one to feel free to use one of those that I had brought. Jorge took one and demonstrated it for the group. Soon the air was filled with the hypnotic and mind-altering noise of the whistles, a conch shell, a rattle, and drumbeats.
Toward the conclusion of what had been an absolutely phenomenal evening and as the sun began to sink down to the horizon and we stood by a nearby ceremonial fire, I asked Jorge about the meaning of the “Southern Cross,” which a few years ago came to me (along with psychic imagery of a cross inside a circle) at an ancient Native American site down near Hamilton, Alabama. Jorge explained to me how the Southern Cross was very important in Peruvian cosmology. In fact, on page one of his book Andean Awakening (2006) he wrote: “On a clear night in early May in the Peruvian mountains 14,000 feet above sea level, the heavens are crowded with visible stars. Yet, the ‘Southern Cross’ dominates the sky. The ‘Eye of the Llama,’ a black cloud in the middle of the Milky Way, flies toward the Southern Cross. Its ‘eyes’ are the stars Alpha and Beta. The ‘llama’ stretches its long neck and tucks its front legs inward in a gesture of reverence. On the third of May, the Southern Cross is at its zenith in the sky, and the Festival of the Cross is celebrated with all-night fiestas in the mountain villages of Peru, as it has been for centuries from pre-Incan times. …When the Incas gaze at the Southern Cross, they see a ‘bridge’ to go from one side of the Milky Way to the other side of the Milky Way. It is a point of departure during this lifetime for the spirit and also a point of transition into the next life.”
I just got word from one of Jorge’s associates in Peru that he has enjoyed reading my book. I am certainly looking forward to a future time when he will personally convey to me any personal further comments and possible insights he may care to share.
Back in June 1987, I met Peter at a local metaphysical gathering. Originally from up around Sarasota Springs, New York, he described how when he was 14-years-old he had an encounter with a large green ball of light, adding that he had since had seven more encounters with this same UFO. A handsome dark-haired man, he had been a male model, worked as a lithographer, and for over 20 years had been very interested in UFOs. In fact, he identified with Steiger’s Star People.
He described to me how he meditated and had learned to use his psychic “energy,” and could even project “in energy form”; showing me an elaborate drawing of a circular room with a being composed of crystal, along with a drawing of a crystal city in space. He had apparently projected to all of these places. But he added that he had learned through the years to tune into the positive energies as his initial encounters had seemed rather negative. He explained how the site he had experienced in New York had been considered by Native Americans as “forbidden ground.” He felt there was an interdimensional “vortex” there and how there was one spot that really felt weird and that had this strange silence about it. There were also two famous haunted cemeteries nearby, and houses in the area were often abandoned. Other people in the area had reported seeing a car-sized emerald green UFO. “It had a consciousness,” Peter said of the area. He said it felt negative, and even compared the energy there as like that of a psychic vampire, and mentioned how there had been strange deaths in the area too.
“I have seen ghosts,” an abductee named Patsy in East Tennessee shared with me. “Shadows, figures walking in my house, colds spots, strange whispers, knocks that my whole family heard. I have been told people have seen me at two different places at the same time. I can’t explain this.” She’s also had some pretty spooky and frightening episodes, including the so-called “bedroom visitation” incidents wherein a being would appear to her at night in her bedroom. One night, she recalled, she awoke and there was this man close by, seemingly she said “taking my breath.” She screamed and she saw the mysterious man disappear through the wall near her bedroom window. “There upon a large tree an owl sat that had red glowing eyes,” Patsy recalled. “It flew away quickly. A few days after this, I was talking to my aunt Kathleen. A voice in a loud whisper said, ‘My name is Raven and I am the spirit bird that Noah set free from the ark and I am still with you.’ We both heard this and were astonished.”
Patsy has had her share of the more traditional encounters with the ever popular “greys” of modern alien abduction fame. One morning, back in 1985, the alien visitations had become what Patsy called a “nightly torture,” and besides that she was pregnant. She was in no mood to be messed with. Then on this particular occasion three “greys” came marching into her bedroom. “I had planned for days that when they came in that room that I was going to grab it and see what happened,” Patsy told me. “I got up out of that bed in a flash when they came through that door and I grabbed that one in the middle. I swear it’s neck just napped like a twig. It sounded exactly like a small twig breaking when it broke. That’s how I knew that I had broken its neck. I never had expected to break anything’s neck. The other two that were with that thing, they just put their arms under its arms and dragged it back into this light that came through the window area in the bathroom, above the bathtub. And when they did that they went right back in there and then they went up, like swooshed back up, kind of like in a walking fashion but at the same time like they went up. What is so strange is how could they go right through the wall like that?”
“Those two that were with it, they had the funniest kind of look suddenly when I grabbed that particular one,” Patsy noted. “They seemed surprised. When these things walked in that room they walked together in unison. I’ve never seen anything walk more perfectly together.”
Andrew Collins, in his book Alien Energy, describes an incredible UFO encounter from Brighton, East Sussex, England, wherein there were three entities that performed in a similar synchronized manner, just after the witness observed the silent landing of a large silvery disc-shaped object with flashing red lights early one morning back in September 1951. “It came to rest on the lawn just as three large, evenly-spaced panels began to open,” Collins wrote. “An alien entity then emerged simultaneously from each door and proceeded to walk in a straight line away from the vertical central axis of the craft. They were between 1.5 and 1.8 m tall with egg-shaped heads and Mr. Spock ears. Each wore a one-piece silver space suit, complete with a black diagonal sash and a thick belt, while held up against their hips was a science-fiction style ray-gun.”
“After some 20 or so paces, the three identical-looking entities suddenly stopped and began to walk backwards in a synchronized manner until they simultaneously re-entered the landed object.”
After that, predictably enough, the large panel doors again closed, the red lights began flashing again, and the craft took off straight up and was soon gone from sight. The witness stated that the entire event lasted no more than 40 to 50 seconds. Collins interviewed the witness in 1978, and described her as a mature and sensible person who seemed quite sincere about her account.
Indiana ufologist Don Worley had corresponded with Patsy about this and other experiences she had alleged having. He sent me a copy of a letter he had received from noted American folklorist and Indiana University Professor Eddie Bullard, who noted: “David Jacobs knows a woman who had the ability to kick out at the beings in her bedroom, struck one in the face and broke his neck with a snap.”
“I don’t see how one can really study the UFO problem without being aware of the psychic aspect, which seems to exist in so many cases, and if it doesn’t, and you look and explore you will discover it somewhere,” psychiatrist Dr. Berthold E. Schwarz explained to me back in1975. “I am particularly interested in what I have now collected a few cases of: voices from the dead, in connection with UFOs. It sounds wild, but we have to account for the facts as they are supposed to be.” Dr. Schwarz had been keenly interested in the paranormal years prior to his becoming involved in ufology, but in 1968 he wrote his first UFO article on what he felt were four credible UFO cases that he had looked into, published in the Medical Times. Later he would confess that this was secretly intended to be his “swan song” from the field of the paranormal and he would return to more conventional psychiatric work. However, fate would have other plans. For one, famous news commentator Paul Harvey took notice of Dr. Schwarz’s contribution and asked him to appear on a TV documentary on UFOs, and then noted UFO author John A. Keel took notice of Dr. Schwarz as well, and soon they became good friends. Keel had put Schwarz in touch with Charles Bowen, then the editor of England’s prestigious scientific oriented journal the Flying Saucer Review, which Dr. Schwarz would come to make many contributions to. Dr. Schwarz would again and again find himself facing very perplexing and challenging UFO case studies involving paranormal elements. From one of those first four cases he had outlined in the Medical Times, emerged details of strange “telekinetic events” wherein unexplained footsteps and voices would be heard, a light switching off and on, a sofa cushion moving up and down as though someone was sitting on it (but again no one could be seen), etc.
Also in 1975, Dr. Schwarz put me in touch with a husband and wife UFO investigative team who lived a short distance outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. Besides being serious-minded ufologists who had covered many amazing cases (particularly during the 1973 UFO wave; some of which are detailed in Len Stringfield’s Situation Red: The UFO Siege) they had also had quite a number of strange paranormal episodes occur, plus they had seen UFOs. “It happened at 4 a.m.,” Geri began, as she described her most remarkable encounter back in July 1973. “I had gotten up to give the baby her bottle. I went downstairs to warm the bottle in a glass and running hot water over it for a few minutes. All of a sudden I had this urge to go upstairs to our bedroom and look out the window. When I came to the window this huge saucer-shaped object was hovering above the telephone wires. The craft covered the entire parking lot. The windows were long rectangular (shaped). I could see the fine ridges which reminded me of stainless steel.” The following year, Geri began to see a strange being that would materialize in her home. “He seemed solid enough but he disappeared at will. He had high cheekbones, blue eyes, a high forehead. His hair was white and stood high, which could have made his forehead seem higher. He had square shoulders and stood about six foot two. His silver suit looked very soft and seemed to be in one piece. He gave me the feeling of being very old but appeared to be only in his fifties. He projected peace and love with the smile of an angel. He comes whenever there is going to be a flurry of sightings.”
“My little 5-year-old daughter and I have both seen (the) tall silver suited man in the house,” Geri added. “She talked to him for about half an hour last April of 1974.” During the time I was staying with this family, Geri once described during a psychic meditational exercise with me how she was hit by a tingling sensation on the top of her head and described seeing several energy beings in a human-like outline in the room with us. One she said was standing behind me, but I myself perceived nothing out of the ordinary.
During my investigations in Ohio, I came across a number of these stories of psychically perceived, apparitional type ufonauts. “When he appears there is generally a brilliant white tube of light first,” Madeline Teagle of Cuyahoga Falls, told me of her humanoid visitor. “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.”
Geri had once written me, “Two days after Dr. Schwarz left we had sightings in our area. One day after we had some sort of electrical current in our bed which hit my husband’s posterior and made him leap out of bed. He said that it was right next to me and he couldn’t understand why I didn’t wake up.” The husband told me how he has had “lumps” in that spot since, but hadn’t been to a doctor. He also admitted to hearing footsteps when nobody was there, having had precognitive type dreams, and heard unexplained music in the house. Geri had heard “voices” for which she was unable to isolate a natural source and described how she once saw a Clorox bottle in the laundry room fly through the air about 5 feet, for which there was again not any normal explanation for either.
Ohio ufologist Earl Neff (another referral from Dr. Schwarz) had been quite skeptical of “contactee” and paranormal accounts, until these phenomena began to zero in on him. In November 1973, people attending his lectures on UFOs began to approach him afterwards and share how they were seeing mysterious “figures” and “auras” near him as he talked. These incidents became so frequent that Neff told me how one night he had a professional photographer attend one of his talks, with a psychic woman sitting behind him, and every time she saw something she’d tap the photographer on the shoulder. The photographer had more than one camera and used both regular film and infrared film, but none of his pictures showed anything abnormal. Following one of his talks a woman came up to Neff and asked him why did he think that no one had ever silenced him about UFOs. Just then they both heard a voice from behind Neff say “Apparently they like what I’m saying.” He turned around quickly, but there was no one there. One day, Neff was walking down a street in the daytime. “I saw a man running toward me in the middle of the road,” he recalled. “I was walking in the opposite direction as he was running, so as he passed me, I went a little bit closer to the side of the road. As I did that I wondered why he was running so rapidly, and I turned and there was no one there.”
I spent quite a bit of time with the family near Cincinnati and got to know them pretty well. Dr. Schwarz met Geri’s mom during a visit in September 1974, as did I during my many weeks visiting with the family in 1975, and we both considered her quite credible and sincere as well. She had also told Dr. Schwarz about how she had had one of those curious “phone calls from the dead” experiences, which the late parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo had devoted an entire book to back in the ‘70s. Over a year earlier, on a January evening, Geri’s mom received a phone call from her favorite Aunt Lorraine, which was her mother’s sister. “She was four years older than I,” Dr. Schwarz was told. “We were like sisters. We talked about different things we had done in the past, places we had been together, just sort of reminiscing. I was home alone. This went on for about half an hour, but when I hung up, I thought ‘It was Lorraine! But she’s dead. She was killed instantly in an automobile accident six or seven months ago!’ I even get chills now, talking about it. In fact, I was so upset, I dialed her number but nobody answered.”
One person to receive one of these mysterious calls believes that it may have saved her life! She said that her phone rang one day and she heard her father’s voice (he had been dead for over a year) ask her, “Honey, are you all right?” In shock she asked, “Daddy, Daddy, is that you?” The familiar voice on the other end of the phone then laughed and asked again, “Are you all right, honey?” Then the line went dead. This woman then got up and ran into her living room, at which point the doorbell rang and then the alarm on her truck sounded. She discovered that there were police outside! Someone was running by her home. A gun was then fired. The police were at her door and explained to her there had been a murder and that they had chased the murderer right by her bedroom window, which would have coincided with when the phone rang!
“There are now many cases in which the voices of deceased persons have seemingly called up their loved ones on the telephone, just as the metallic-voiced space people have been phoning researchers and reporters around the world,” John Keel wrote in his Operation Trojan Horse (1970). “Television sets, telephones, ham and citizen’s band (CB) radios in flap areas have been going awry on a massive scale during the periods when the UFOs have been most active.”
John Keel was once quoted stating “ufology should rightfully be a branch of psychical research.” Interestingly, fellow UFO and paranormal investigator Sandy Nichols and I recently remarked on a website that was selling equipment (www.ufostop.com) to ufologists. We chuckled as we noted how some of the same equipment being advertised on the site for ufologists was the same gear being sold to “ghost hunters” (i.e., K2 meter, motion sensor, full spectrum HD camcorder, Trifield Natural Meter, Laser Grid, and even an EVP recorder!).
I think it’s high time we quit splitting semantic hairs and objectively and carefully pursue recording and documenting the vast spectrum of paranormal phenomena that presents itself during many onsite UFO investigations. The late Dr. Schwarz’s long ago dream of instrumented investigations, a process he came to call “experimental ufology,” seems to be finally taking shape….hopefully!
