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Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, March 2016





Possible electromagnetic experiences of NDErs, Alien Abductees, and others

by: Brent Raynes




The late Shirley Fickett of Portland, Maine openly wondered if there was a connection between the afterlife and what ufologists call “aliens.” “Suppose there is an etheric plane that we go to after death and the aliens know this plane well?” Shirley pondered.

Shirley had a reason for wondering this. Back between September 13 and December 8, 1969 she felt that she was “being trained” for “astral projection.”



“It was no dream,” she insisted. “I awoke from sleep finding my astral body rising up, then going down back into the physical and repeating this over and over.” During this time, Shirley found herself being observed by a strange being. “In a standing position beside me, about midship of the astral body, I observed a being watching me. It was about parallel to the height the astral would rise to. Psychic vibration indicated that it was of male gender and stood approximately four feet high. All noticed by me was its head, what was shaped like a coconut, with two slits for eyes and a tiny slit where our nose would be. There seemed to be no mouth.”

“Upon rising the astral to its full height, I had to look down a bit to observe the being. There was not a bit of fear. In fact, it felt rather friendly to be with him. I felt in complete control and with an emphatic manner I mentally said, 'I'm sorry, I can't stop and talk to you now because I have to practice this!' There was no return from him.”

At the time, Shirley did not think in terms of any possible alien/UFO connection with these experiences. She was having psychic experiences that seemed to be connected to a house down the road from her, once seemingly projected there where she saw her father's spirit embracing a young boy. Then in the last projection of December 8th, this young boy came to her. “I held my physical hand out in acceptance to receive him, or let him know I did,” Shirley explained. “He then vanished.”

“We then met in the flesh and the phenomena between us began,” Shirley stated. “Neither his mother or I talked UFOs in front of him during this time, but at the age of six in 1972, he was to have a UFO related encounter. He awakened early one morning screaming. His father went to his aid to learn that a beam of light had come through the wall, hit his arm under the bedding. The hands on the electric clock were going madly around and there was a high frequency sound within the room. His mother verified that his clock never worked right after that and it was established as reality, not a dream!”

It was shortly after this that Shirley read of Uri Geller's alleged childhood UFO experience where he was struck by a beam of light in Israel and that she began to seriously consider a UFO connection to her experiences with the young child.

Back in October 1981, fellow researchers Dan Edwards and Aileen Garoutte in Washington state were helping an “abductee” to reconstruct her memories with hypnosis. The abductee they wrote in their report “had been upset, shaking and crying all week prior to interview. Had an electrical surge in house which burned out the freezer, TV, stereo, but not the light bulbs. When this happened she ran outside. Daughter said lights started flashing green. Clock on bed stand was running backwards. Wrist watch, which was new and battery operated, stopped.”

A former aerospace engineer who had shared details with me of an 'alien abduction' that he had back in 1963, when I recently questioned him about electrical equipment problems replied, “Yes. 1963 till 1990; on numerous occasions an entire block of street lights would turn off as I approached; battery-powered watches would fail to function when I wore them.” Then too, there were bewildering psychic events. “When highly emotional, I caused pictures to fly off the wall, glass to break with witnesses present,” he noted. “I had recently lost my high school graduation ring and couldn't find it. A few days later I was taking a shower and thought to myself wouldn't it be strange if my ring suddenly appeared. At that moment, I heard a clink on the shower floor and looked down and there it was.”

This reminded me of a UFO experiencer here in Tennessee who recalled how one morning he and his wife jumped out of bed fearing that they were going to be late for work as it appeared that sunlight was shining into the windows, only to discover it was only 3 a.m. And of course there was no sun. They were quite perplexed. “The next morning she [wife] noticed that her wedding ring was missing – (was) off of her finger – and we looked all over the house for it. That day, I come home from work and just yelled out, 'Give me back the f—king ring.' After I had searched all over, and I hear this 'ping,' and I walked over to where I had heard the sound and I picked the ring up.”

There it was on the kitchen floor. “How did that happen?” he wondered. “Was it something that just heard me?”

So many weird electrical/electromagnetic and paranormal anomalies are reported by UFO experiencers that a British researcher named Albert Budden wrote two books on the subject, The Electromagnetic Indictment: UFOs Psychic Close Encounters (1995) and Electric UFOs (1998). He compiled a massive collection of data and described how a substantial number of psychics and UFO experiencers suffer from “electrical hypersensitivity,” as well as, in many instances, psychokinesis, poltergeist activity, visions, apparitions, and other common paranormal related twists and turns. It's even common with NDErs (near-death experiencers) and is described in such books as Life After Near Death (2016) by Debra Diamond and The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences (2007) by P.M.H. Atwater. Diamond points out in her book how NDE testimony and scientific research shows that at the point of death and near-death the brain undergoes dramatically increased electrical activity, recorded and identified by scientists as high-frequency brainwaves called gamma oscillations, which other studies have shown are associated with meditation and noetic experiences. One lasting and detectable brain change of the NDEr, Atwater pointed out, was what is known as synesthesia, linked to the limbic system of the brain, found to exist in two thirds of the NDErs. “This alone is a major neurological finding,” Atwater noted. A person with synesthesia (called a synesthete) has multiple sensory awareness and may, for instance, “see” music, “smell” sounds, “taste” a visual image, and so forth. Atwater also noted that in the many experiencers she interviewed that some 73 percent described electrical/electromagnetic anomalies and a high incidence of psychic phenomena.

Dr. Melvin Morse, in his book Transformed By The Light (1994), describes an electrical surge called a “light shout” that is associated with the dying experience. He wrote that as a cell dies, a strong surge of electromagnetic energy is released. He wrote that it can be more than a thousand times greater than found in the normal resting state of the organism, and Dr. Morse added that on rare occasions bystanders actually see it too (proving it’s not a mere hallucination). I actually spoke with a man who was present when well-known 1950s contactee Howard Menger’s 12-year-old son (who was dying from a brain tumor) was suffering a spell characterized by severe breathing difficulty and muscular spasm, and both he and another man present saw a strange light appear over the headboard of his bed. The bed was situated in a corner of the bedroom, and at first the light appeared as a “very pale blue,” and then “went across through the air around those two sides of the room, but didn’t throw any light on the wall,” adding how it “created a brilliance, but didn’t reflect on the wall.” 

“It started as a minor light blue light, became brighter blue, and then turned white,” he stated. “Throughout all of this time, even with the white light, it didn’t show any brilliance on the wall. It then diminished in a blue and went out again, and by that time he had relaxed.” A week later the young boy had died.

A woman in Alabama shared with me a dramatic account of a potential “light shout” event in connection with the passing of her 14-year-old daughter Catherine on May 28th 2004. “She had myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) up until May 25th when it turned into acute myeloid leukemia. We were scheduled for bone marrow transplant the next week. Her condition was the first that St. Jude has seen in children because it was complicated by what is called Monosomy 7, part of the 7th chromosome was missing.” Her illness had first been diagnosed only a short time before, on March 1st, 2004. “At the moment of her death, with ten doctors around her bed, we witnessed a ‘luminous’ glow which surrounded her,” this mother recalled. “There was an enormous feeling of total love and everyone in that room felt it. Afterward, I requested time with her and layed down on the bed and cuddled for about four hours. I remember I would periodically get this ‘shock’ (that would) go through me, like it was coming from her body.”

In Debra Diamond's book she also focused on some case studies that provided objective measures of verifying changes to NDErs. For example, the case of an NDEr named Mary Ann Mernaugh whose IQ increased by 22 points after her NDE. Then too there was one Ken Ebert who after his NDE developed remarkable hearing ability, and Robert Bare whose eyesight improved from 20/90 to 20/10!

A woman in Alabama with typical 'alien abduction' type memories described to me how she had what she suspected was an “implant” in the shin area of her right leg. It showed up in a CT scan. An engineer described to me privately how he checked it out with some equipment he had and picked up some anomalous electrical responses. “It was under 100 kilohertz that was coming out of it,” he told me. “So it was pretty low.”

Curiously, this woman described how her “implant” disappeared for a few months, during a time that she had knee surgery. Also while passing through Oak Ridge on the interstate she felt a vibration there underneath the skin, she said, adding that it was irritating and hurt, but once out of that area she was okay. She also mentioned how a similar thing had happened in the vicinity of Redstone Arsenal at Madison. “Truthfully I don't really know what that thing was,” the engineer added. When he examined the CT image he initially thought it was a piece of shin bone that had broken off, but the electrical response left him scratching his head.

Some of us in our work with “alien abductees” are beginning to use Tri-Field Natural EM Meters to detect possible changes in and around these experiencers. Although mine didn't detect anything with the Alabama experiencer, I was informed by the engineer that it probably had to do with the fraction of a second electrical bursts that he was getting, and that if the electrical activity had lasted instead for a few seconds I might well have registered something myself. Brain imaging is another area of exploration that might yield very interesting results, especially I suspect with hypnotized subjects, but it is very expensive and funding for such study is very scarce.

Nonetheless, if “ufologists” were to begin equipping themselves with certain gadgets as “ghost hunters” do and do serious experimental work in the field, like with the Tri-Field Meters, we might begin to gain some additional insight and understanding into the mechanics and psychodynamics of these perplexing phenomena. This was certainly a suggestion that decades ago was voiced by my late friend and colleague, the psychiatrist and parapsychologist Dr. Berthold Schwarz, the author of UFO Dynamics. Some of us have discovered 'alien abductees' who were even adept at electronic voice phenomena (EVP), with the supposed dead and possible alien entities too.


Thursday, March 28, 2024