Close Encounters, Astral Aliens, UFOs and Bigfoots, and Interdimensional Fog—Part 3

After describing the “missing time” episode from around 1987, Jenny then described a close encounter, with other witnesses, that she still remembers clearly from beginning to end. It happened “just a few years” later it seems. “I was riding back and forth to Lewisburg with three other people,” she recalled, where she was living at the time. She was in a car pool with three others. “Just as we got to the Intersection T’s car stalled and there was a car at each point of that four way stop, and they all stalled. We saw this huge shape coming, floating up the highway, up 96, from Franklin, and as it got over the intersection with all of us sitting in our cars, it just stopped and hovered. I got out of the car to look. They were all screaming and yelling, “Are you crazy!?” I’m like, “What are they going to do? Beam me up?” It was basically a kite shaped ship and it was every bit the size of three football fields and it was only about maybe a hundred feet off the ground. It didn’t lack much at all touching the phone polls.”

“It was a beautiful ship. Very shiny. It didn’t make a sound. It had lights on it. A few lights on the bottom and a few lights on the side. I didn’t notice any portholes or any windows. And it just hovered there, just quietly, not making a sound. Then it turned slightly and headed straight out like going towards Murfreesboro.”

I asked Jenny if she had noticed any sensation of heat or had detected any odors. “No warmth, no nothing,” she quickly replied. “I stood there until it vanished and then I got back in the car, and the car started and we left.” I asked what time of the day this had been. “At night,” Jenny said. “We were on a third shift so we had to be at work at 9:45 and got off at 6:30, so this was approximately 8:30 in the evening. It was dark, pitch black dark. I got back in the car, all excited, and I was going to talk about it and they were like, ‘We don’t know what you’re talking about.’ They went instantly into denial and to this day they won’t talk about it. Now T will, every once and awhile.”

“Now that was the biggest one that I have ever seen. It was completely metallic. It looked like depth wise it was probably as deep as this room. It wasn’t very deep. But length and width it was big.” She added that it didn’t have many lights or any features really. “It was just a sleek beautiful shiny metallic (ship) and you couldn’t see any seams.”

Some of Jenny’s alien adventures seemingly happened on the “astral plane,” that is, in a so-called “out of body” state. One incident that happened when her family was living in an apartment up in Antioch, near Nashville, illustrates this point quite well. One night as the family had gone to bed, Jenny was laying in her bed when she experienced a state of paralysis. “I’m right in between awake and asleep and then I hear something and I go to get up and I’m frozen. I can’t move. I can’t move anything. One minute I’m thinking, ‘This is not going to happen,’ and the next I’m up. I don’t feel my feet touching the ground and I’m moving like at neck break speed from my room to W’s, which his room was at the other end of the apartment, and we’re talking like a 1300 foot apartment. I bust into his room and there’s two of the gray looking (guys), one on either side of him, and they’re reaching toward him, and one of them had a little metallic thing. It looked like a cigar. It was fixing to touch W with that thing and I hit them both as hard as I could and knocked them across the room. Then I just stood there like this and I said, ‘No! Get out!’ I screamed it and they looked around at me, just so surprised, and they looked at each other and they started toward me with that metallic thing and then somehow I’m up over W’s bed and I hit them again with both hands and they slammed against the walls. Then they looked at each other and they just vanished. Well, the next morning I woke up and instantly remembered the dream. I got up and ran in there and checked on W. He was still asleep and I shook him awake and I said, ‘Hey!’ He sat up in bed and said, ‘What? What?’ I said, ‘Tell me what you dreamed last night.’ He said, ‘I dreamed that you flew into my room and knocked two gray creatures off of me.’ I said. ‘Well let me tell you what happened last night,’ and to this day he hasn’t forgotten that.”

“It wasn’t like I was in my physical body. Like I said I never felt my feet touch the floor. I never felt myself go through a wall, but then I went through a wall because I was in my room and in a split second I was in W’s. And with my hands, I never physically touched them, but with the power that came out of my hands, two times, (and) they left.”

Jenny remarked that when it came to “yeti experiences” she had had “some doozies.” Then looking across the table at her dad, she remarked, “Remember that time I called you after me and R split up? I lived in Lewisburg. I just found out that he was going to leave me for his newest girlfriend and I was sitting outside swinging in the backyard, squalling my heart out.” Then suddenly she heard a “hellacious thundering” from the woods nearby, “like something is running as hard as it can, and you hear brush breaking and limbs snapping.”

“I stopped boohooing and I looked up and here comes a Yeti running as hard as it can run straight at me. To this day, I do not remember feeling my feet touch the ground. I screamed. Instantly I’m on my porch, which is about six steps up, and I’m in my back door, the door slamming. I’m just a shaking. And for an hour this thing traveled around my house beating on the sides of the walls. The whole time I’m on the phone with him he was in Mount Juliet and I was in Lewisburg, 90 miles away, squalling. ‘What am I going to do?!’ He said, ‘Just calm down. It’s not going to hurt ya. It’s done what it wanted to do.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘It’s made you quit crying.’ I mean, that was his answer to it. But this thing went around that house for I don’t know how long. The most terrifying part of it was my kitchen had double sliding doors, just glass doors, so I mean it could have come in with me at any point. It’s mission was to make me quit crying, which it did do.”

Jenny’s father GP still had her beat when it came to yeti tall tales or “doozies,” but a couple of months later I caught up with “contactee” David Swanner of Minor Hill, and his had to be a close second to GP’s story of encountering a “yeti” onboard a UFO.

David’s story of witnessing a UFO landing on September 30, 1973, at about 2:15 p.m., is described in Stanley Ingram and W. A. Darbro’s 1974 book, Unidentified Flying Objects over the Tennessee Valley. But something that wasn’t mentioned in that book was how a “yeti” came out of that UFO!

When I visited David recently on Saturday afternoon, March 13th, he went back to that very first encounter with me and recalled the following: “I was sitting up in the deer stand. I was sitting there deer hunting with a bow and arrow. I seen it coming down but it wasn’t making no noise or nothing. It just come down like that and hovered about that high above the ground, about 18 inches. It didn’t have no seams, no windows, no nothing on it. Then all of a sudden there was a door that formed there and it let down, and I started getting scared (he laughed). It sat there a few minutes. Never did see nothing come out of it and then one of those big yeti or whatever they call it, it came out of it.”

“Oh, it did?” I exclaimed. “I didn’t know that part of it.” [It’s not mentioned in the book]

“He walked around there for a few minutes and he walked back up to the door, and there was a car that went by. He just walked up there just as pretty as you please, door just went back up, all of the seams left, you know, and it folded up [landing legs] and [David made a whistle sound] like that, gone.”

“Went straight up?” I asked. “Yeah,” David confirmed. “You know, there wasn’t a bird or nothing chirping when that come down.”

I reiterated “completely silent” and David said “Silent! I guess you could have heard me breathing,” and then he laughed. “I guess it was heavy breathing,” I joined in.

I asked David how big the “yeti” had been. “About 8 foot tall,” he replied. Since he had mentioned an atmosphere of silence, I asked if the Bigfoot made noise, like footsteps. “Yeah, the limbs and stuff,” he said. “It was real dry and the grass would be crackling under it’s feet.”

I then asked about odors. “I didn’t smell nothing when it left, but whenever I went over there there was a fog left on the ground, about 18 inches deep,” he stated. “So I started to walk up in there and look at the grass where it had sat down and the further I’d go in there the more I couldn’t breath. It just choked me up.”

Shortly after meeting with David Swanner, I called GP (years ago they had become good friends) and mentioned my surprise at hearing about the Bigfoot stepping out of the small spherical UFO, since it wasn’t mentioned in the book. “There was a whole lot that wasn’t in that book,” he replied. He had already known about this aspect.

Another thing that wasn’t in the book was when David stepped into a mysterious “fog” that seemed to lead to another dimension. This happened in this same field apparently. “I walked through it and could see the other side,” David said. “It didn’t even look like this country here. I mean, it was pretty and green, you know. That was in the winter time. I didn’t want to turn back, but I did.” David added, “It was all open land. Like it used to be here I guess before we started invading it.”

Soon after that initial 1973 encounter, David claimed to have become a “contactee.” He had telepathic communications, onboard encounters and “rides” with them. In fact, his experiences seemed to be with the same entities that GP had been dealing with. He described their one piece, seamless uniforms of an “off white” looking color as possibly “their traveling clothes.” They all seemed to be “dressed alike.” “GP said that they had like a toboggan on their heads,” I noted. “He said he wasn’t sure if their head looked pointed because of the toboggan or if it naturally was.” To this David responded, “You never seen one without it though. I wish that I had kept up with it a little closer than I did.”

Now 69 years of age, I asked David if he had any regrets about having gone public with his encounters back in the 1970s. “I had a lot of people kidding me about it,” he said. “I just tell them, ‘Well some day you’ll get some sense in that head.” Then he laughs. “And that would hurt them worse than if I had walked up and hit them in the face.”

Science Updates

SMounds Right!

As some of you will recall, in previous issues of this magazine’s column I touched upon the phenomenon of synesthesia, also known as “multiple sensing,” thanks to near-death experiencer and researcher P.M.H. Atwater, whom I interviewed back in the April 2006 (No. 100) issue of this magazine. I also wrote about how this phenomenon was described to me in an interview with a Native American medicine woman (Kiesha Crowther, June 09, No. 137) and how Don Wright, a New Mexico psychotherapist who also does pottery, manufacturing functional replicas of the pre-Columbian Peruvian Whistling Vessels, has mentioned synesthesia in relation to the whistles and how he often experiences increased color and hearing perception with them (this column, October 2005, No. 94).

In the April 2010 (Vol. 302, No. 4) issue of Scientific American there is a very interesting report on how two researchers, Daniel Wesson and Donald Wilson of the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (Orangeburg, New York) have found an apparent biological basis for at least part of this phenomenon. It begins by describing how there are cells in the “olfactory tubercle,” as it is called, located at the base of the brain. This structure helps in odor detection. One day while studying this process in mice Wesson sat his coffee mug down on a laboratory bench, at which time he noticed a spike in the mice’s olfactory tubercle activity. He repeated the action and the same thing happened again. Following this happy little accidental discovery, Wesson and Wilson found that some 65 percent of the tubercle cells were activated by exposure to at least one out of five different odors used for this study. Then they used only a sound and 19 percent of them fired. In addition, they found that by combining odors and tones to tubercle cells that some 29 percent were either enhanced or suppressed in their firings. One cell even appeared to be indifferent to smell and sound individually, but when mixed together responded robustly.

They have nicknamed this phenomenon “smound.” Which smounds about right!

Making Sense of the “Sensed Presence”

In this same issue, Scientific American’s columnist Michael Shermer, always a skeptic of things paranormal, did produce an interesting report on what he calls the “sensed-presence effect,” which as some of you will remember Michael Persinger refers to a “sensed presence” phenomenon in his lab studies of people he exposes to pulsing electromagnetic fields. As Persinger well knows, in the natural environment, the so-called “sensed presence” happens to a lot of people. Shermer skips the magnetic factor though and instead sticks with such causal circumstances as isolation, sleep deprivation, oxygen deprivation, exhaustion, and dehydration. Irregardless, no matter what ones bias, it’s always interesting to read what others have pondered on this subject and what data that they have presented. Shermer does confirm the notion that the perception of this “presence” by the left hemisphere seems to originate in the right hemisphere and cites how with “split-brain” patients (those whose hemispheres have been surgically separated) the right side of the brain can be given a command to do something and the left side won’t know what is going on, but if asked will make up what it perceives to be a logical sounding reason for that behavior or that action that was executed.

It definitely puts a whole new spin on the expression of how the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing!