VISITORS FROM HIDDEN REALMS

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

Those Mysterious “Voices”: Where do they come from?

It was early April 1967. New York journalist John A. Keel, 37, a former self-described “hard-boiled skeptic” of things of a supernatural flavor, was confronting increasing evidence that his original support for the UFO-ET theory was in need of major revision (not to mention his views pertaining to the paranormal).

Little doubt his initial investigations in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in March and April 1967, came to truly alter his overall perspective on the whole UFO question ver-ry dramatically.

Keel, the author of Jadoo, published back in 1957, a book that he admitted “sneered at the occult”, took a dim view of the reality of anything presumably supernatural. In Jadoo, he recounted his personal explorations and adventures in the Orient, where he repeatedly exposed the magic tricks of fake mystics, fakirs and snake charmers who catered to the superstitious locals and tourists in that part of the world. Keel, after all, was an amateur magician, and the wide-spread belief system of Jadoo, a Hindu word that meant black magic, intrigued him and was the kind of high adventure this self-described cliff-hanging journalist was addicted to. In the fall of 1954 it led Keel out of Egypt, where he had been studying the legendary gali-gali magicians, to exotic India, which was rife with practitioners and believers in Jadoo.

Keel had initiated his UFO investigations full-time in 1966. “I tried to adopt a very scientific approach to ufology, and this meant that I scoffed at the many contactee reports,” Keel wrote in his 1970 book, Operation Trojan Horse. “But as my experiences mounted and investigations broadened, I rapidly changed my views.”

Instead of looking to far off outer space locations for the answers, John Keel began to suspect that we were dealing largely with a terrestrial-based phenomenon. Keel had a number of UFO sightings while in West Virginia, but he wrote that his best one occurred on top of a high hill in Gallipolis Ferry during the wee hours of the morning of April 3, 1967. It was at about 1:35 a.m. when he observed a clearly defined saucer-shaped object, an estimated 20-30 feet across, that was “glowing red with greenish upper surface” and had “red lights or ‘portholes’ around (the) perimeter.” It appeared to land behind some trees a short distance away from his automobile, in which just moments before he had been relaxed and listening to the Long John Nebel radio program being broadcast from New York, while chewing on a candy bar.

The very next afternoon Keel led Macon County Sheriff George Johnson and Deputy Millard Halstead up the hill to where he had had his encounter. They checked the area over with a Geiger counter and looked for any physical trace evidence, but nothing abnormal turned up, although one odd thing did happen. As Sheriff Johnson had been driving up the hill a strange sound issued from his radio, which wasn’t even turned on at the time (and, in fact, turned on with a key, and the key wasn’t in the lock). “It sounded like the voices on a speeded-up phonograph record,” Keel wrote.

In addition, Deputy Halstead stated that five months earlier he had heard that same noise come over his radio. It happened in the McClintic Wildlife Station on Wednesday, November 15, 1966, when he sat in his car with frightened young witnesses to what would become the “Mothman” legend.

Across the Ohio River from Gallipolis Ferry, West Virginia, is Gallipolis, Ohio. One day Keel was introduced by a local journalist named Mary Hyre to a respected, credible woman who insisted on anonymity. She hesitantly described her encounter. It had happened several months earlier, the previous November. It was somewhere around 7 or 8 p.m., she was outside and getting ready to leave her job site and go home when saw a “big cylinder” silently land a mere 20 feet from her. Two normal looking men got out and approached her. They seemed heavily tanned, had pointed noses, pointed chins and high cheekbones. “Their voices were sort of singsongy and high-pitched,” she told Keel. “It was like listening to a phonograph record played at the wrong speed. And they kept asking me for the time. They said ‘What is your time?’ two or three times. Finally they just walked back to the thing and it took off.”

Keel began frequently finding this apparent alien curiosity and confusion about our time in many of his investigations, as well as these strange voices and anomalous radio-related events. On April 14, 1967, at about 9 p.m., a UFO encounter reportedly occurred near Melville, New York, an area that Keel came to investigate quite a bit. In an internet report posted by Mark Rodeghier, it reads: “A motorist saw a glowing object overhead, suddenly his car engine stalled, and a smaller circular metallic object landed beside the road. His car radio, which had been turned off, began to broadcast in a strange language. A tiny metallic robot like figure appeared in the doorway of the object. It then dug up some dirt and placed it inside the craft. The doorway then closed, the object then turned a bright red color and rose into the sky emitting a whirring sound. It appeared to join the large glowing craft overhead.”

Keel described unusual signals and “unidentified voices” reportedly coming out of CB radios and walkie-talkies, adding that “people with all types of walkie-talkies have sworn to me that they’ve picked up sounds ‘like a speeded up phonograph record’ while in the vicinity of reported saucer sightings.”

Keel investigated a pretty high degree of bewildering contactee and MIB activity in the vicinity of Long Island’s now legendary Mount Misery, located near Melville. I visited this strange site myself with a friend back in April 1972, and corresponded with a couple of New York researchers who had been investigating this place back then. One of them, however, reported encountering a mysterious man-like dark figure, 7-8 foot tall, at this location, and even underwent the contactee experience himself, leaving New York to head out west in search of the legendary Lost Dutchman Mine that his entities had promised him that they’d lead him to. He also reported that strange voices came in on his television set. His friend Michael back in Manhattan hasn’t seen him since he left town in his van back in 1971.

Recently L.I.P.I. (Long Island Paranormal Investigators) posted on the internet details of their investigations at Mount Misery. During their on-site investigation a mysterious “voice” spoke with them over their walkie talkie units. They reported: “While normally radio transmissions are not a reliable source this voice remained constant for the entire period and was clearly responding to our verbal (not transmitted) comments and questions! It is highly unlikely any one was around clandestinely observing the group. There is historical precedence for EVPs being heard via radio.”

Indeed there is, and as Keel pointed out long ago, this activity surfaced within the early 1950s contactee community itself. In his book, Our Haunted Planet (1971), Keel described how amateur anthropologist and contactee George Hunt Williamson claimed that back in 1952 he was present when an amateur radio operator was allegedly communicating with “space people.” This radioman would ask a question and an answer would come back. Then without warning he suddenly switched to 160 meters and asked another question and got an immediate response! “Any radioman knows that no power on Earth would have enabled any operator to know where he was switching to!” Williamson pointed out. “Even if Mr. R had told the other operator that he was going to switch to 160 meters, still they would not have found him on that band until after the question had been asked.”

Keel also described how at California’s then popular contactee conclave Giant Rock in 1954, a speaker described how the “space people” could even “read the mind of a radio operator.” He stated: “In one case involving something in the nature of mind reading at a distance, these entities gave the answer to a discussion going on in a room and not taken up or referred to on the radio.”

“Ham operators in flap areas have cautiously reported all kinds of manifestations, including the materialization of entities in their radio shacks,” Keel also wrote. During a trip through the Midwest in 1967, Keel met a Ham radio operator who he stated had been undergoing a long series of strange experiences. The area he lived in had had a lot of UFO activity and this radioman told Keel that he had been hearing unusual guttural voices from his speakers, even when his receiver was turned off! (Is this beginning to sound familiar?)

Early on in my ufological non-career I corresponded back in 1971 with an early contactee who shared, “I am still working with the ‘Space People’ as some choose to call them and am often contacted by them, both in person and by two-way radio. …as I said…we do use two-way radio from time to time (but) mostly to confirm locales where I am to meet them or their ship.”

The famous electrical genius Nikola Tesla described hearing mysterious, unexplained radio signals in his lab as early as 1899, and heard them for many years afterwards. The initial ones that he received were reportedly more like morse code type transmissions, and then around 1918 he began to hear voices. In 1925, he wrote: “I am hearing more phrases in these transmissions that are definitely in English, French and German. If it were not for the fact that the frequencies I am monitoring are unusable for terrestrial radio stations, I would think that I am listening to people somewhere in the world talking to each other. This cannot be the case as these signals are coming from points in the sky above the earth.” Author Tim Swartz, in his book, The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla, speculated: “The mysterious signals that Tesla received could be linked to what is now known as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). Tesla was one of the first men to experiment with the necessary electronic receiving equipment. The very same equipment, albeit more sophisticated than Tesla had access to, is being used today to receive EVP.”

Going back again to Keel’s Our Haunted Planet, he may have waxed prophetic when he concluded with how incidents of mysterious alien radio signals, even images of “spacemen” on television sets (now a familiar description of the EVP and ITC, Instrumental Transcommunication), all seemed to have been on the increase since 1965. “It sounds like a cliché science fiction plot, but a time may come when a general message to the human race may suddenly spurt from every receiver on Earth in every language,” he wrote. “Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth!”

Ouch! Indeed it would! I have recently spoken with my good friends Sandy Nichols and Bret and Gina Oldham, all extensively involved in first-hand EVP work (much of which I’ve been a frequent participant in over the last several months), about how it seems to us as though paranormal activity may be on the increase (or at least it seems to be in the circles in which we’ve been traveling recently). This has brought about conversations in which we wondered if there might indeed be some credence to the speculations of some folks who feel that the “veil between the worlds is growing thinner,” or something along those lines.

In the late Harold Sherman’s 1974 book, You Can Communicate With The Unseen World, he devoted a chapter to the EVP subject. In fact, a noted paranormal researcher, Dr. Walter Uphoff, a professor at the University of Colorado, prepared an extensive summary for Sherman’s book on what was then known about this phenomenon. In his report, Dr. Uphoff naturally referred quite a bit to noted EVP pioneers like Dr. Konstantin Raudive and Frederich Juergenson, but he also made a reference to earlier statements by George Hunt Williamson’s claims back in 1952. (No mention about UFOs though.) He quoted a source that stated: “He collected many cases of voice phenomena from all over the States, including commercial transmitting stations.”

I shared a brief correspondence on this subject with Dr. Uphoff back in 1974. He had traveled to England and Europe and met a number of the researchers and pioneers doing EVP studies, including Dr. Raudive. He wrote: “…enough instances of individuals being addressed by name unmistakably, and identifying themselves by names on the part of ‘the voices’ that in my mind it virtually rules out the possibility that these are ‘stray radio signals’ as some critics suggest. This is not to say that material received by experimenters could not, at least at times, originate from some source such as radio or TV transmissions, but the growing number of experimenters who report voices from so many and diverse places is adding up to a volume of information which cannot be ignored.”

Dr. Uphoff also sent me a summary of data on what was known at that time about all of this, responding to common questions that people asked on this matter. Here was one:

“Why did Juergenson and Raudive (and others) conclude the voices came from another dimension?”

“For several reasons. First they did not sound quite like normal voices. The speed was often 1- to 2 times faster than normal speech and usually there was a certain cadence in the voices. At times, two or more distinct voices would be heard simultaneously as if several entities were attempting to use the ‘mike’ at the same time.”

Could there be a connection with what John Keel was describing years ago with those alien voices that were “like a speeded up phonograph record” and the continuing EVP studies and experimentation that is still ongoing?

On Saturday, August 7th (2010), we again successfully recorded another spirit box session (again with similar results as to what was described in my last column, which occurred on July 3rd). Again I wrote down various words and names on paper, and again the mysterious “voices” accurately read them back to us, several times, over the AM radio frequencies! We had several digital recorders and video cameras going, and six witnesses total.

During that session Bret Oldham asked of Keel, “Say your first and last name.” Then it sounds like someone repeating, “First and last name.” Then seven seconds later you hear a male sounding voice saying, “For a pizza.” Interestingly, we had just enjoyed eating two large home baked pizzas! At another point, I asked, “Could you say your name again, John Keel.” Seven seconds later you hear a drawn out “Keel,” immediately followed by “spirit box.”

“Sometimes I wonder if John Keel and others that pioneered much of this are on the other side ‘helping’ us along on our journey and sort of continuing their work while they are doing it,” Bret pondered in an email just received.

As John Keel wrote at the conclusion of his article Mysterious Voices From Outer Space, published in Saga’s UFO Report (Winter 1975): “Why don’t they contact us? Hell, why don’t we contact them?”

“CQ…CQ…CQ…is there anybody out there?”