VISITORS FROM HIDDEN REALMS

Discover the connection between UFO visitors and shamanic lore! Brent Raynes' stunning book—intro. by Brad Steiger.

Saturday, January 17th, 1 to 3 p.m., Brent Raynes will speak on UFOs at Jason’s Deli Conference room at 3473 Poplar Avenue, Ste. 102, Memphis, TN. The event is being sponsored by Night Search Radio.

Wednesday January 21, 9 to 12 p.m. EST, Brent Raynes will appear on Paranormal Radio (www.paranormalradioshow.net) with Captain Jack Harris to talk about Peruvian mysteries, legends, UFOs, and of course the paranormal.

“Old Hags” and “Thought Forms”

Prominent California UFO and paranormal investigator Ann Druffel has noted that the entities associated with our modern day UFO abductions are strikingly similar to supernatural beings associated with the stories and legends of many other cultures, including the Native American Indians, the Celts, the Buddhists, and the Muslims. “These creatures, the Jinns of the Muslim religion and the elementals in the Buddhist religion, reportedly can materialize and dematerialize, and so can our Western culture’s abducting creatures,” Druffel explained to me. “They shape shift in various forms, they delight in harassing and traumatizing human beings, for their own purpose. I don’t know why. They reportedly abduct human beings and transport them long distances in a matter of seconds, and that’s what happens here. And the Jinns, the elementals, and our own abducting greys [have taken] a sexual interest in human beings…down through the millennia. In every major culture of the world, and in many minor cultures, they all have these same folkloric stories, and even religious and philosophical texts in some of the countries talk about this ‘third order of creation,’ as the Muslims call it. They aren’t angels, they aren’t devils, they aren’t human beings. They’re something in between that share our world with us in a hidden state.”

Some years back, Druffel investigated the Jinn encounters described personally to her by a young Iranian-American named Timur. At the time of his encounters, Timur was a college student living in Southern California. He told of how one night he was attacked by a type of Jinn the Iranians refer to as a Bakhtat. It was as though a great weight was laid upon his chest. He was unable to move and he felt as though he was suffocating. With considerable effort he finally managed to call out to God for help whereupon the dark entity lost its power over him and he was able to sit up in bed. In the darkness he could make out the figure of a small dark being looking at him, and what appeared to be other creatures in his bedroom with cat-like eyes.

What Timur described to Ann Druffel sounds like a phenomenon commonly referred to in our Western culture as a “hagging.” In this kind of event, a person awakens to find an evil entity (often described as an “old hag”) sitting on their chest. Often there is described this difficulty in breathing and how they feared that they were going to be suffocated.

A dramatic and well-documented account of this phenomenon is reported in John Michael Greer’s Monsters: An Investigator’s Guide to Magical Beings (2001). Greer describes how after the Vietnam War, many Vietnamese people known as the Hmong found themselves in refugee camps and then were later relocated to apartments in the U.S. All of a sudden, dozens of young and presumably healthy men began to die in their sleep. Medical doctors were mystified and unable to do anything. Eventually it was discovered that in their country there was practiced a shamanic intervention that protected these people from dab tsog, an evil spirit said to sit upon people and suffocate them in their sleep!

The problem persisted for years (had been virtually unknown back in their own country), but when many were able to move out to rural areas and reunite with extended families and traditional clans and got back to their shamanic practices, the incidents of these unexplained sleeping deaths began decreasing. Reportedly, surveys of Hmong’s living in America showed that 50 to 60 percent of them claimed to have experienced at least one Old Hag episode. This was said to be a rate two to three times that of the general population. In addition, for those who had abandoned their traditional ways and converted to Christianity the rate was even said to be higher. Some 72 percent!

It seems clear that there are paranormal realities that have been with us for a very long time, though we’ve perceived them within different cultural settings and contexts throughout the centuries and in various regions of the world. However, there’s another intriguing element to these stories that suggests that we somehow create our own realities, to some degree. In a recent phone conversation with Native American healer and counselor Tommy Lightning Bolt, he explained, “You know, one of the things that I have found really, really fascinating in the training that I’ve done is our reality, what our reality can manifest.” He explained that one compelling example from his own experience was one time when he went to spend four days with Medicine Grizzlybear Lake. Tommy was out in Medicine Grizzlybear’s backyard to pray with his pipe. “I’m doing ceremony and here flies up a blue jay and it just starts squawking and squawking and squawking, just making a real nuisance of himself.” Later Tommy told Medicine Grizzlybear about the blue jay’s antics, to which he told Tommy, “Yeah, blue jay. He’s always making trouble.” “But see I’ve never had a problem with blue jay,” Tommy explained to me. “But see in (his) reality blue jay is a trouble maker. Blue jay is associated with bad medicine. So when I go into (his) world I experience that. Not to mention that that is the traditional belief of some Native tribes in Northern California. And where was I? I was in Northern California. Different areas of the world have different realities and belief systems among the Native people of that area, and that reality can manifest in a variety of ways.”

I described to Tommy my recent trip to New Mexico and Colorado, and of the stories I heard regarding the mysterious shape shifting skin walkers. “Now with the Skin Walkers that’s a really big deal with the Navajo, as I have been taught by one of my Elders.” Tommy explained to me. “He told me that if you’re down in the Navajo country, down in those areas, and if they think you’re a Skin Walker here’s what they’ll do. They’ll get some buckshot and they’ll open it up and take out the beads and they’ll put in shards of bone, which should be shards of bone of the dead, and seal it back up and they will shoot you with it. They will kill you. They believe in their traditional belief system that the only thing that can kill a Skin Walker is shards of bone. So to hear about people really seeing Skin Walkers down in that area doesn’t surprise me at all, for down in that area that’s their reality.”

“I was also talking to a counselor once (who worked with some of the Navajo people) about the Star People and she warned me about talking openly with some Native people in the Navajo region about Star Beings. She told me that that kind of discussion would terrify some of them. She said some of them are afraid to go out at night because they believe (and she used a Native word meaning alien being) will take you away. These different beliefs don’t just come out of the blue, they have a legitimate source. Most legends come from a factual base, but in modern day these realities are usually just blown off and laughed at.”

(Read my interview with Tom Dongo in the August 2005 #93 issue of this magazine. He describes investigating a spectacular case involving alien encounters by Navajo Indians. Go to: www.mysterious-america.net/tomdongointervie.html)

There are many examples that can be cited for reality shifts among different groups of people whose particular belief systems have somehow had an impact on how they perceive and interact with reality in their own corners of this world of ours. Here’s one of my favorite examples from Paul Devereux’s book Re-Visioning the Earth (1996). Devereux relates how a German cultural anthropologist named Christian Ratsch went to the Central American rain forest near Palenque to live among the Lacandon people who are descended from the Mayans. He had studied Mayan linguistics before embarking upon this trip and he wanted to try and walk into the rain forest, meet them, and win their confidence so that he could learn about them and their way of life. He succeeded at it quite well, and was even invited by the village elder to stay with him in his home. He was taught their ways, how to hunt, gather food and to farm in the Lacandon way. He soon became aware of profound psychological changes within himself and how he became very sensitive to the natural environment. One day, in the midst of his training and the development of his shift in consciousness, Ratsch was watching over a field of nearly ripe corn. He was to protect it from predators. It was early morning and he was sitting on a tree trunk. Nearby, a mere estimated 15 foot in distance, stood a dead tree. It consisted only of a trunk and one branch. Suddenly a bird landed on that branch and Ratsch decided to seize this opportunity and have that bird as a meal. He raised his gun, took aim and fired at it. The bird exploded, he reported, feathers flying everywhere. The bird itself dropped down to the ground. He walked over to recover the bird, but then was very puzzled to find that there was nothing to find! Impossibly there was no dead bird’s body, there wasn’t even a single feather, and when he looked around further he was quite mystified to discover that the branch was no longer there! Very shocked by this incident Ratsch returned to the village to tell the village elder what had just happened. The old man laughed at him, explaining that such things happen quite often. It was merely the jungle spirits teasing him! He realized at that point that there was no way for him to logically explain this incident and that he would have to be satisfied with the Lacandon explanation for it.

Ratsch became increasingly fluent in the Lacandon language. Over time, the Indians took him further into their confidence and allowed him to participate in their ceremonies and began to share some of their ritual secrets, such as spells that they used for healing. There was one spell that he was taught that was for healing a cut on a hand or leg. Such injuries are common in the rain forest where a machete is often used. It wasn’t an easy spell to memorize. He described it as a long and complex incantation, but he managed to commit it to memory. The very next day, while working in the cornfield, his machete slipped leaving a very serious gash on his leg. At the time he was only in the company of some village children who ran immediately for help. Bleeding profusely Ratsch realized his predicament was very serious and that he only had one course of action to follow: to do the healing spell he had just learned! Lowering himself to the ground he began to recite the incantation, which involved spitting three times and blowing on the wound. He performed this spell twice, and by the second time the bleeding had stopped. The children then returned with the village elder and were quite amazed to see that the bleeding had ceased. However, not so for the village elder who was smiling. Ratsch was told that whenever someone learns that particular spell, they invariably cut themselves soon afterwards, and that this was like a test. Ratsch reports that it was at this point that he thought to himself, “Now I am in a different reality.” A reality, he further reflected, that had nothing to do with what he had learned growing up in his homeland of Germany.

In Dr. Greg Little’s People Of The Web he related how he was engaged in a conversation with Lou White Eagle, a Cheyenne Arrow Priest, in which Greg was describing the UFO abduction phenomenon to him. “At one point in the discussion, White Eagle stated, ‘we create our own reality,’” Greg wrote. “There are times that the mind and the heart can become so energized and entangled in the same web of thoughts that ‘visions’ appear to people. We create them from the great energy that is produced from the mind and the heart.”

Greg asked this medicine man if such visions could “become physically real,” to which White Eagle replied, “Yes.” Greg then asked if reality, or better yet, if things in the physical world could be changed, to which he again replied “Yes.”

“It suddenly occurred to me that what White Eagle had described was quite similar to what the Tibetans call a tulpa,” Greg wrote. “A materialized thought form that is physically real but unstable. It eventually dematerializes, usually in a short period of time (that is, it disappears when it transmutes back to an energy state).”

The Ghost In The Road

A few weeks ago, while in the area of Savannah, Tennessee, tracking down a UFO report (a story perhaps for another time), Memphis MUFON state director and Night Search Radio host Eddie Middleton introduced Sandy Nichols of the Alien Research Group and myself to a delightful elder psychic lady named Bell Hubanks. Eddie had known her for a good number of years, had even had her on his radio program, and mentioned that she had quite an interesting ghost story to share. “We were coming from Memphis one night,” Mrs. Hubanks recalled. This was an event that transpired approximately 8 to 10 years ago, in the area of Millington, Tennessee.

“It was about one or two o’clock in the morning. It was me and Barbara, my friend, and we saw this guy on the side of the road. We thought it was a real man. He looked like he was walking out in front of us. She hollered, ‘I almost hit that man.’ So we went on down to a little store down there that was still open and there was a cop car sitting there. She said, ‘I’m going in and tell that cop that he needs to go up there and see about that man because there’s something wrong with him. He looked like he had blood on his shirt.’”

“So she goes in there and tells them and they just laughed at her. They said, ‘Well, he does that every once and awhile.’ So she came back out and she told me, ‘Those people in there have got to be crazy.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘They laughed at me.’ We went on and her lawyer lived up that road, so she was talking to her about it and she told her, ‘Don’t you know what that is, Barbara?’ She said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘Well that’s a ghost. Everybody has seen him up here.’”

“She said that his daughter got killed in a car wreck and I think that he committed suicide afterwards,” Mrs. Hubanks said. She claims that she has seen this ghost now on two other separate occasions and that Barbara and her husband Mike have seen him two or three times since that first early morning encounter.

“He stands on the same side of the road every time, but he looked like he was walking out in front of us the first time and Barbara screamed and I looked and I saw him. She said, ‘Did you see that man?’ I just got a glimpse of him that time. I didn’t see him good. But the second time I really saw him good, and then the third time I didn’t want to see him really, but I did look.”

When asked how he looked, she stated: “Well he looked like he had on a brown suit and a white shirt, and the suit looked kind of dirty, and it looked like he had blood on the front of his shirt. He looked to be in his 50s.”

“I guess about two years ago was the last time that I saw him,” Mrs. Hubanks told us. It seems that this ghostly apparition appears always at night, generally around the early morning, and most frequently around the Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays.

Is One Picture Still Worth A Thousand Words?

I recently sent around to a number of my internet friends three photographs that showed photo images of what some believed were angels. “I analyze photos frequently,” Bryon Smith, a long-time ufologist of Arkansas, replied in an email. “As you know I've also seen ghosts, angels and demons so I know they exist. Sometimes we as humans need something higher to believe in and will sometimes read things into a photo seeing what our minds want us to see rather than the truth. Since these photos are believed to be of angels I wouldn't want to upset or tell any of these people what they believe to be angels were something less than.”

Bryon shared the photo images with his wife. "I don't trust anything I see anymore because photo software today is of such a high quality," his wife responded. “She's right,” Bryon agreed. “Take everything with a grain of salt. I did a video animation of a flying saucer flying over Branson, MO for a family video. I took a still image of that and made a print. I showed this picture to someone who instantly thought it was a real UFO. They pointed out the color, the reflections, the lighting and how it blended in perfectly with the image. I had some time trying to explain to them that I made it myself. Then later I had to show them the video and tell them how I made it.”

Bryon concluded, “If I can make a believable image while not even trying then I know someone who put in some real effort could fake anything.”

Photographic authentication has always been problematic in the UFO and paranormal fields of investigation and research, but indeed with the creations of various modern and sophisticated computer generated imaging photo software the difficulties are considerably increased it would seem. Sandy Nichols of the Alien Research Group just forwarded me some video clips of alleged UFO sightings, that appeared to be quite spectacular, but for which we agreed couldn’t be taken at face value. Unfortunately, there are a good number of technically capable hoaxsters out there with too much time on their hands. This is an area of investigation that must be approached with critical discernment.

Are Some Explanations Only Part of the Truth?

Bryon also wrote me with some additional remarks that are worthy of repeating here also. He wrote:

I don't care if you use my name, that's up to you. I am in the business of trying to help people when I can.

I was just implying that when people show me certain images I sometimes hate to throw water on their campfire and upset them. People send me images of "ghosts" and "orbs" frequently and while most of those must be dust orbs or something else a small few of them are difficult to explain away. UFO sightings are the same way.

Most of these can be explained and identified by a trained eye and someone who knows what's going on. Like the Phoenix lights. The white lights that appeared over the mountain range were white phosphorous illumination flares on parachutes. This may have been a "training" exercise but it may also have been a distraction to keep the majority of the people from seeing the real UFO that was passing overhead to the south. I am inclined to believe the military knew of the UFO. Either it was theirs, a stealth craft of some kind or it was a UFO. When UFOs were sighted around my home town these were small brilliantly lit craft that literally flew down and hovered over people's homes, yards and fields then zipped away at fantastic speeds. The first thing the military did was fly jets all over the same area popping flares of various kinds. When they gave their answers to the reporters they said all the UFOs were flares. This worked for the majority of those who didn't get a close look at the UFOs. My friend Butch (Leslie Allen) said "I've been in the Air Force for 30 years and I've seen everything they've got but I've never seen a flare hover low over the ground then fly away at fantastic speed." This is the same man who was with me when the UFO flew up right in front of us in Pearl, ILL. over route 100. His sister Missy married my cousin Randy Campbell. She saw one of these UFOs about 10-15' across hover over a field just over the fence from her back yard. She called her brother who came out after the UFO had left but while they were standing at the back fence three of these small brilliant UFOs flew over low just above their heads toward the south. They split up one and went south one went west and one went east.

Butch said "Yes, the military creates distractions to keep people from seeing the truth as well as giving an alternate explanation to the questions being asked about the UFOs."

When I see those UFO shows of the Phoenix Lights and they point at the flares and swear they are UFOs (craft of some kind) I see how well the distractions work on quite a lot of people. Another thing that serious investigators are aware of is when they see the government going to great lengths to explain a UFO sighting away you can be fairly sure there's something else they don't want people to become aware of, like "the truth." Maybe there was a real UFO or maybe they had a secret project of their own they don't want people to become aware of.

Moving back on track if a person sends me the image of a dust orb and I tell them it's a dust orb and upset them there's a good chance they won't send me anything else, even if they get something worth while. I've learned a few things in my time investigating such things and how to talk to people while not offending. Now and then it's difficult but you know exactly what I mean I am sure.

I should still have that image of the UFO that I made for our family video but I became reluctant to send it out as a still image to show people how a UFO could be faked. There are people who would take it and pass it around as if it were real when it isn't. The next thing you know some people would be accusing me of "faking" a UFO picture when that isn't what I was trying to do when I made it. It was made for a fun family video with my daughters as the aliens.