Classic Mysteries

Note from Editor Brent Raynes: In August 1971, I traveled to Toronto, Canada, to meet and interview my first UFO contactee. Her name was Joan Howard. She was mentioned in Brad Steiger’s The Aquarian Revelations (published that same year), a book that helped to arouse and intensify my own curiosity in the “contactee” phenomenon and further inspired me to initiate my own investigations.

A few years after we had met and we had engaged in rather extensive correspondence, I asked Joan to write an article for me summarizing how she had become a “contactee” and what her experiences had been about. Below is her article:

Experiences with Space People

By Joan Howard

In July 1968, my husband and I moved into an apartment in the northern part of this city. We spent a month cleaning and painting it, then I began making 3-D oil paintings to sell, in addition to my work. After a week, using production line methods, each night I had some lined up to sell. I went to bed that night thinking I was going to win the Rat Race at last! Before I slept I distinctly heard two men talking about me in German. (I am not German) I have worked on and off in spiritualist churches as a student and given messages in public. I am used to spirit communication. These two elderly men, killed in WW2, I later met on an astral trip and named them Franz and Josef. I believe they were spirit guides paving the way for what came next.

I must have fallen asleep. Next thing I knew I was in a place that looked like a cross between Luna and Mars. (I’d never seen the lunar surface on TV then, only in visions since my extreme youth). There were buildings, and people covered from head to foot in obviously protective clothing or “space suits.” Some wore black, a few of them wore red, green and blue. I guessed (correctly) these denoted rank.

A red suit approached and began talking fast and asking questions about my opinions and attitudes on everything, especially human relations. I could not see his face but knew he was male. I demanded to know what the devil I had been brought here for. As he talked I became increasingly aware that something was being done to my physical body. I could feel all my innards and my head being thoroughly examined as though by a medical team. Still listening to Red Suit, I wanted to know what was going on Earthside. I arrived suddenly back in my body and felt the electricity of several beings around my body. They told me not to be afraid.

All this leaving me slightly dazed, I lay there wondering what weird type of spirit contact this could be as I’d never known ordinary guides to carry on like this. Before the alarm went off I saw several visions of, God preserve us (!)….”flying saucers.” I wondered if I’d slipped a cog. Also someone was trying to teach me how to transmit whole sentences by a sort of pulsating beat. I felt I was a rotten student. I’d given messages in public but that was kid stuff to this.

Next night I was waiting for them. Whatever “They” were! I thought, “By God, they’re not going to catch me napping this time!” When I saw a vision of the space suits I began to repeat the Lord’s Prayer, slowly and deliberately, transmitting the way they taught me as my mind seemed to be suddenly hooked up to some powerful beam which bored into my head like a mild laser and stepped up my own feeble mind-instrument. No one was more surprised than I was when “They” answered.

They weren’t kidding! From then on, for several weeks, every night, I was shown: spacecraft, inside and outside; control panels, instruments, gadgets of all kinds; people in uniforms (not spacesuits); a weird terrain on what I feel was Uranus or Neptune, with wild-looking formations of frozen ammonia, greenish-blue-white, rearing up on the strange skyline. Then came movies of Space itself; huge vastnesses with unfamiliar constellations; beautiful close-ups of other solar systems; all awe-inspiring; frustrating because I wanted to be “out there” and was Earthbound.

I began to question them! How was the Universe constructed, both in the “visible” and the “invisible” part of the electromagnetic spectrum? Answer to a small child (me): In levels and other “levels” at right angles to the first; possible to “transfer” (their word) from one sector or “dimension (our primitive word!) to another.

And if I wished to understand them I must refresh my high school physics and learn the latest discoveries of Earthman, plus astronomy. I was then “led” to various study books. I bought a transistor radio and plugged rock music into my ear to drown out the infernal din in our building. Each night “They” tested me, even on the lesson ahead.

In the ensuing years I have seen UFOs (in the daytime yet); had “physical contacts”; experienced hostile attacks (two on my life) by “Their” enemies, the Opposites, the “bad guys”; astral trips on board spacecraft; taken down reams of dictated communications (not automatic writing); everything but a ride in a “flying saucer” in my physical body.

This, in brief, is my connection with the “Interstellar Wayfarers” (their name, not mine), a division of those highly-developed beings who raise the children of the various “planetary orbs” (their words).