On Exclusive Members of the UFO Paparazzi.

Another Dream of Lights in the Sky.

It’s nighttime, the blackest of conceivable black, cloudless and entirely absent of light pollution during what appears to be the deepest, most dead hours of the night. My family and I are just outside my parents’ house, and I’m meandering about their beautiful, rural property, watching the crystalline clear night sky, bathing in its cosmic beauty as I so often did during my insomniac-plagued teens and twenties, when I still lived here.

I think it was the eldest of my two younger sisters, the middle child, that first drew our attention to them: these strange lights above, dancing in the heavens. As soon as all our eyes were brought to the skies, they began producing these bizarre, hypnotic displays. Veering across the full length of the property, they executed these breathtaking aerobatics and luminous, seemingly miraculous acts in this grand light show far above our silly, dumbstruck heads. All of us are utterly captivated. We watch them with increasing enthusiasm and elevating, entranced attention, drawn into their ominous and unearthly beauty. Investing more focus than we would if we were witnessing something even as awesome as a meteor shower, fireworks display, or those heavenly, truly illuminating lightning storms above the forest lining the front yard that we always enjoyed observing from the safety of the garage, from out its open door, when my sisters and I were young.

After an enduring period of total psychological absorption, I finally break free from the trace long enough to realize how important it is to document this profound experience, to acquire evidence. How mindless I had been until this moment. So I grab my phone, open it, tap video, and try to record the astounding, otherworldly light display that our eyes had for so long been permitted to behold. Despite my efforts, though, I simply couldn’t catch it. However much I tried, I always seemed to fail. It was so real, but yet again, I had no documentation. Nothing even approximating substantial evidence. Nothing tangible to hold onto.

And with that frustration, the dream ended.

I awoke on the early morning of March 2nd, 2024, with just another rendition of the same general dream I’ve had now since the middle of December, 1994, just circling around in my waking mind like a goddamn psychological whirlpool. That recurring fucking dream theme of watching mysterious lights, objects, or anomalous phenomena in the sky. I was so frustrated upon my exit from the dream that I refused to open my eyes, roll over, and record the specific details immediately after it ended. Fuck it, I thought to myself. Fuck it all to hell. What’s the goddamn point? Consequently, all throughout my subsequent dreams the nonverbal mantra persisted: write it down, write it down, write it down…

After awakening that morning, I finally did. Most of the details were out of reach, but the general story, a story I knew all too goddamn well, it was undeniably cemented, imprinted, burned into my consciousness.

Generally speaking, I’ve been unable to find a trigger for these dreams over the last 30 years or so, but on this particular occasion the stimulus was pretty fucking obvious. Just the evening before, I’d watched yet another UFO documentary. This one was suggested to me on YouTube, an offering from the almighty algorithm ever-amplifying our echo-chambers, and it sprung from a channel called Mountain Beast Mysteries (MBM). The video itself, just over 49 minutes long, was entitled “The Beings From Beyond.” I’d only vaguely recalled it having been referenced in something I’d heard, watched, or read rather recently, which led me at the time to make a nearly-forgotten mental note to watch it. I still don’t recall its origins or why I thought it would strike my interest – aside from the general subject being the UFO phenomenon, of course – but in any case, I’m certainly glad it drove me to do so.

Even if it triggered another one of these wonderfully cosmic, yet undeniably ominous, and endlessly frustrating dreams of mine. I’ve not only accepted them as inevitable but, if I can be honest, I actually look forward to them. I always feel as if they provide for me something my mundane life is lacking, even starving me of, and both the dream and the video that inspired it unquestionably provided me with that psychospiritual sustenence.

This, of course, brings us to the video in question, and to the strange case of Justin Chernipeski in general.

Regarding The Beings From Beyond.

As I would later learn, Chernipeski is certainly no stranger to the weird. After all, he had started MBM, which was exclusively geared for years, as it’s homepage explains, towards “providing information and stories on the subjects of Bigfoot (also known as Sasquatch) and conspiracy theories relating to it.” While his focus had been on Bigfoot, he was well-aquainted with the UFO subject and had even engaged in some meditation practices over the years that some claimed had the ability to summon UFOs. He honestly didn’t expect it to work, however, and still isn’t confident that this was what triggered what eventually happened to him.

Regardless of the cause, as is often the case in life, shit inevitably happened.

During the period in which he shot the videos, he was living in an apartment building in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, and he believes it was on May 30th, 2022 that the first event occured. It was a clear night. He was heading inside from the patio through the sliding glass door when he noticed a flash of light out of the corner of his eye. Turning, he saw a row of six or seven lights spinning like the rotors of a helicopter in a way he later described as very calculated, very precise. It was entirely silent and traveling in a straight line right over him, heading from north to south.

He fully confesses to having freaked out at that point. He ran inside, slamming shut the sliding door behind him, and proceeded to pace, trying to come to grips with what he had just seen. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to sleep, once he managed to calm down a bit he decided that he wanted evidence to ensure himself and others that he wasn’t just going batshit insane. So he went back outside in the attempt to capture it on video. While the object he had seen was gone, he managed to capture some strange and silent lights on camera nonetheless, though freely admits the footage was of an awful quality. He was finally able to get to sleep around three in the morning and subsequently made a YouTube video describing what happened. Afterward, he admits that his looming fear was either getting abducted or getting a visit from the Men in Black. To me, this at the very least confirmed his allegations that he was familiar enough with the subject.

Interestingly, that night was only the beginning. It kicked off an entire year’s worth of sightings – and this time he captured it, thankfully, on a higher-quality camera.

On the second night of sightings, he had set up a camera with a wide-angle lens on a tripod, aimed it to the sky directly above him, sat down on a chair, and just let the camera roll. After awhile, he didn’t notice anything, and so decided to go inside and grab something to eat. Just after he had come back outside, right as he was sitting back down in his chair, however, he saw a row of three lights coming out of the clouds directly above him, traveling from east to west, and so grabbed the camera to follow it. It’s faint, but with effort, you can see it on the video.

He found that he was less anxious on this second occasion, Curiosity, it would seem, had overcome his fear. So he made the decision to move away from his Bigfoot efforts and turn his focus toward the UFO phenomena he was experiencing instead. It should be noted, though – unless I’m mistaken – that he never once referred to these lights as UFOs, at least in the context of the documentary. He also repeatedly made it clear he didn’t pretend to know what was behind the phenomena, though many of the speculations he provided confirmed to me that an extraterrestrial origin was certaintly among the top candidates in his mind.

At any rate, as time went on, he found he could go out at night on his porch with reasonable confidence that he would end the night having captured something strange on film. This struck him as strange, for as previously mentioned, he didn’t live in some rural area, but rather in the capital city of Alberta, where these UFOs may be subject to a mass amount of onlookers. Even more confounding, as he also pointed out, was the fact that they typically appeared or flew directly above him. And often enough, he also emphasizes, a lot of what he captured on video he didn’t realize he’d captured until afterward, while reviewing the footage on his computer.

He ultimately described a few distinct categories his UFO sightings fell into. The first mentioned were these low-altitude, dead quiet, bright and Blue Lights. Sometimes there would be another, fainter blue orb at a greater distance, moving in parallel and at the same speed. Another category were these low-altitude White Lights that appeared in pairs or triangle formations, sometimes distant formations and on other occasions very close together. The most bizarre category he mentioned, however, involved what he called Creatures.

Until this point, at about the twenty minute mark in the documentary, I had found myself being almost involuntarily absorbed by his videos and general account. Now I found myself pulling back a little. This was approaching my boggle threshold, though he swiftly confirmed I was by no means alone. “This is where I start to lose most people,” he said, providing, at the very least, a degree of self-awareness I can respect.

He calls them Creatures because like birds, he says, you can see wings flapping. Watching the provided videos detailing these alleged Creatures, I caught only hints of what could perhaps be interpreted as flapping, but perhaps my laptop and flatscreen TV aren’t sufficient for me to notice this element of the provided videos in their full glory. I’ll suspend judgement for the time being and give him the benefit of the doubt. At least at the beginning there could be anywhere between one to five of them, he said, though typically four, and when there was more than one they would be flying in a rigid formation, sometimes a V-formation. As time went on, however, they would appear in larger groups and their formations became less rigid. As they collectively moved, they would begin to move individually in what I personally considered a strange and breathtaking way – a way that could certainly be described as more organic, but nonetheless nothing like any birds I’ve observed. He actually provides a good example as to why I feel this way at about twenty-four minutes in, too. He was out on his porch one evening and upon looking up noticed a group of them hovering directly above him, kind of flying in a swarm, after which he pointed the camera in their direction. Then another one flies in their direction, joins the group, and then, assembling themselves in a V-formation, they collectively take off in a joint direction.

He later says that he considers their movements and appearence to constitute “disguises,” which helped desolve my resistence a bit. The distinction between these creatures and birds, he said, is that they are both silent and emit light. He has deduced that they aren’t reflecting the lights from the city, as the helicopters and airplanes that have began flying low over his apartment during this period didn’t reflect light at their intensity, which are almost brighter than the backdrop of the stars. Some of these so-called creatures would be, as he put it, “zipping around” alone in the sky, executing insane areal maneuvers, abruptly moving into the frame and then shooting up into the heavens. Other solo creatures would do so while seemingly “glitching” in and out – maybe flashing, strobing their lights – in weird patterns as they swiftly moved about. You couldn’t help but lean in towards the screen, furl your brow, and try your damnest to focus on it and subject it to the most intensive, critical, visual analysis you could.

Whatever they are, some of the maneuvers these objects pull in his videos literally had my eyes bugging out and my jaw dropping, it’s reactionary descent only temporarily suspended for me to involuntarily exclaim aloud, in the one-bedroom apartment I live in alone, “WOW!”

As alluded to before, he also described and caught on film a lot of low-altitude, seemingly manmade aerial activity over his apartment as well. An airplane akin to a Cessna would fly over his apartment again and again. One night he thinks he filmed it flying over a dozen times. What seemed to be a police helicopter flew over on multiple occasions as well, and sometimes the helicopter would fly over and he could hear it but never see it. He even managed to catch it on video, flying without it’s lights on.

While a lot of what he’s described has been described and even captured on video before, at least in singular doses, his initial experience is a rather rare one. I’ve certainly never heard of it before, and I’m fairly well acquainted with the UFO phenomenon. I’ve never heard of a line of lights swinging like a helicopter rotor crossing the sky. Despite this, he reports having randomly met a girl online – also from Alberta, though roughly two hours away from his location – and though it didn’t originally come up in conversation, and she wasn’t aware of the full scope of his experiences, she eventually confessed to having had an experience that he immediately recognied as being remarkably similar to his own, origional experience. While his had been at the end of May 2002, hers had been in October of 2002, however, and while she didn’t report having seen as many lights – only four in her experience – they were nonetheless arranged in a line, and they spun like a helicopter blade across the sky. And she saw it again that December, only this time it was spinning faster. Assuming his account is true, and I am of the strong opinion that it is, as he asked: really, what are the fucking odds?

There are two peices of video he provides in the documentary that sparked my interest specifically. Apparently I wasn’t alone, either, for as I would learn in the days after I watched the documentary, he actually had separate videos dealing with each of these videos.

The first one was a clip that was provided at about fifteen minutes into the documentary and then detailed in a separate video, “Alien Visitors Caught on Camera.” Here he explains – and shows the footage of – how he was tracking a singular light in the sky with his camera. That was all that he noticed, too, until he later reviewed that footage on his computer, at which point he discovered that he had filmed what he described as his most amazing peice of footage to date. And I agree. “This light comes from the top left corner of the screen,” he explains, and then “zips down, and then zips back up to this object I was tracking, and pulls these maneuvers that I’ve never seen anything pull before in the sky.”

This was my first truly jaw-dropping moment watching this documentary. It reminded me a lot of a video I had seen years ago when looking on YouTube for videos of UFO sightings. It depicted this strange light, about as faint as the stars, which would fly erratically across the star-speckled sky as the camera struggled to keep up with it, but in this case it seemed to be playing cat and mouse with the focus of the camera – or the person behind it.

The next video that sparked my interest is, so far as he has made us aware, his most recent one, and it came after a bit of an experiential commercial break. As Winter had approached, the weather became agonizingly cold, so he had an understandable increasing reluctance to go outside and skywatch. Consequently, his sightings and the videos of them trickled to a standstill. When the weather warmed, however, he went back outside, but to his dismay, he didn’t see anything. He feared that they might have gone away, and that he might have to start over from square one, striving to summon their presence – if that brought them to him in the first place – or that he might have to face that this enlightening chapter in his life was simply over. Still, he persisted.

Then he had what he considers – despite the poorer quality of the camera – the most spectacular sighting he’s captured to date. This was at the very end of the documentary and was also detailed in a separate video, “Alien Mothership Caught on Camera,” which, yes, might be a misleading if not dowright click-bait kind of title. Still, it aroused my curiosity.

It was around 11:45 in the evening on May 26, 2023, and there was heavy cloud cover. He was outside on his top-floor patio and suddenly noticed a spot in the clouds that looked slightly brighter than it should be. As he focused his attention on it, the glow seemingly behind the cloud abruptly disappeared – and then reappeared. It did this a few times and then began going through all the colors in the light spectrum – at first slowly, and then again, at higher speed. The light would then veer away at high speed across the sky. Sometimes it would shoot across the sky in a straight line, or it would do a circle or a triangle, sometimes reversing course. He emphasized he could see it from beyond the angle he caught on film when it zipped across the sky, which reinforces his hypothesis that this couldn’t have been a spotlight. It would always return to the same general area where the camera was fixed, however, and it would stop on a dime. When the light stopped, sometimes it was dimmer, sometimes more brilliant. When the light would occasionally blink off, sometimes you could see a faint ring of six or seven lights around where it had been, and the ring seemed to be rotating – and as soon as the central light came back on, they would disappear. He said it went on like this for at least three hours. Sometimes he would get tired, go back inside, and when he’d come back out it would still be there, zipping around. It went on until at least three in the morning, he said, when we finally went inside and submitted to sleep. Shortly thereafter, he moved that location. This was the last video of the lights that he filmed and, so far as I’m aware, the last he’s seen of them so far.

A lot of people in the comments, even those who considered his other videos as containing truly anomalous lights, dismissed this particular one as an effect caused by a spotlight, a strong flashlight, or a laser projected on the clouds. If it was a hoax, I don’t think he perpetrated it, but that it was likely someone who had seen his previous videos, found out where he lived, and decided to pull a prank in hopes of making a fool out of him. After all, he said he always went out there at about 11 o’clock or half passed, so they’d know when to do it. Even so, you’d think the buildings would get in the way, particularly when the light went zipping out of the frame and across the sky, where he could see it. Even so, I considered this possibility rather seriously after my dream and watched some videos of such effects I could find on the net. While I entirely accept I could be wrong, it simply didn’t seem like the same thing to me. I’ve also watched the “mothership” video a few times, and even analyzed some parts of it frame by frame, and not only can I not see a beam but there are parts where you can see it in breaks in the cloud cover. I’m no professional analyst, of course, not in the least, but It really seems to be behind the clouds to me.

If you poo-poo this particular video, however, there are his other videos, most specifically (in my opinion) the aforementioned video clip in the documentary which was focused on in “Alien Visitors Caught on Camera,” and they are far more difficult to dismiss, as the potential explanations just explored wouldn’t be applicable. Despite that, there may be resistance. I get it. Hell, I feel it. Even among those of us who realize that the UFO phenomenon is a legitimate mystery, at least among those of us not among the Gatekeepers buried in our world governments, we might find ourselves rather suspicious of Chernipeki, inclined to impulsively dismiss him on the basis of his countless videos and the associated anecdotal evidence he provides alone. After all, this is too far outside the the norm, even in the context of the utterly bizarre UFO phenomenon, to take seriously, we might tell ourselves. And again, I get it.

It should be understood that Chernipeski is by no means alone, however. There are others.

Other Exclusive Members of the UFO Paparazzi.

Aside from Chernipeski, there are, so far as I’ve been able to discern, at least three other individuals in relatively recent history that not only appear to constitute UFO magnets, but are permitted frequent photo ops by the nonhuman intelligences behind them: Ed Walters, Ellen Crystall, and Dorothy Wilkinson-Izatt.

Ed Walters articulated his experiences alongside Francis, his wife at the time, in their 1990 book The Gulf Breeze Sightings: The Most Astounding Multiple Sightings of Ufos in U.S. History. Ed was a builder-developer by profession and at the time lived in Gulf Breeze, Florida, with his aforementioned wife and two children for five years. It was on November 11, 1987 when the cascade of weirdness began relentlessly pouring into his life and it would extend until at least May 1, 1988. In short, he not only began seeing UFOs regularly, but phographing and videotaping them. He claimed to have been immobilized by a blue beam from a UFO on at least two occasions, lifted by it once, and on another occasion – February 7, 1988 – even photographed his wife attempting to outrun it. The family had seen aliens as well, and they had telepathically engaged with Walters, who also had experiences of missing time and recalled a series of typical abduction scenarios when he finally unwent hypnosis. Early on, he began submitting his UFO photographs to the Gulf Breeze Sentinel, though fearing the ridicule him and his family would be predictably subject to, he used at least three aliases, though ultimately confessed his identity in 1989.

Unsurprisingly, Walters was subject to a buttload of scrutiny. He took a polygraph test and passed it, with the examiner concluding that he was being truthful, at least in the respect that he believed he was being truthful, which is all those tests can truly determine. Aside from that, examinations of the photos and assessments of his character and allegations were entirely dependent on what one considered a reputable source. Discreditors obviously dismissed and ridiculed his allegations and Believers clearly invested in it. The perceptions of what I would regard as the true Skeptics varied. Military officials, specifically the nearby Eglin Air Force Base, denied there was any anomalous acitivity at the time of the reported sightings. In essence, everything you would expect from an intense UFO flap.

Until the last year or two, I hadn’t read the first, aforementioned book of his, but only his second, 1994 book, UFO Abductions in Gulf Breeze, of which I can remember very little, given I read it back in the mid-1990s, when I was still in high school. Upon reading The Gulf Breeze Sightings, however, I felt instantly transported back into my high school period, when The X-Files first made it’s appearance. I particularly felt vibes between this book and the first season of the television series, not only because the sightings were mentioned at least twice that season but because there are a wealth of incidents in the book that seemed to serve as inspiration for the show. Many have cast doubt on the authenticity of Walters’s photos (including Carter himself in that first season, through the words of Mulder), but I’m inclined to think (at least based on the first book) that they’re authentic, at least on most days.

Again, I’m willing to accept I’m wrong, but in Walter’s defense, him and his family were by no means the only ones to witness and report a UFO in Gulf Breeze during that period. After his photos were published, many came forward with their own reports, and some recognized the specific craft they saw as corresponding to what Walters caught on film. Many would and certainly have dismissed this as a form of mass hysteria, blind to the alternative possibility that others embraced: that Walters might have had a tightly-knit series of intense encounters that compelled him to share his photographic evidence publicly in hopes that others had seen the same thing and that, once he had broken the ice, others might feel more comfortable coming forward with their own stories and nurture his hopes that he wasn’t just going batshit fucking insane.

Maybe you think he’s full of shit anyway. Fine. There is also the case of writer, musician, and photographer Ellen Crystall, however. In her 1991 book, Silent Invasion: The Shocking Discoveries of a Ufo Researcher, which I also read in high school, she describes how she first witnessed UFOs as nocturnal lights doing aerobatics in the distance from the balcony of her Hollywood, California, apartment complex amongst a crowd of neighboring tenants in May of 1971. Before long, her curiosity was piqued.

“After a few weeks of observing the craft from our apartment complex, I decided I wanted a closer look. About a mile from our apartment was a small hill with an excellent view of the area, so my friend and I decided to go there,” she wrote. “It was only a few minutes before a set of lights descended towards us, turning off as they came closer. Soon we could clearly see the saucer shape of an unlit craft. Totally silent, it began to circle us, staying about two hundred feet or so from us.”

After two nights on the hill, during which craft at different distances would revolve around the two of them, she retreated to the former distance of the balcony, though they then seemed to be moving closer to her. Her next close encounter was even closer than the former, however, and occurred in August, 1971, some four months after her sightings began. She was walking home from work at roughly nine in the evening on an otherwise unpopulated street when she looked up. What she was was a delta-shaped craft descending from above a house, its headlight shining down upon her. Through four large windows on the craft she saw lights flashing on the walls inside and, most unnervingly, a Gray sitting in one of the two seats that were visible to her, working what appeared to be a joystick. She ran, the craft following just behind her until she entered her apartment, where she promptly began packing. She flew back home to her parents in New Jersey the following day — where she continued having close encounters among other witnesses.

Nine years later she was hunting for UFOs with colleagues and snapping photographs of them in Pine Bush, New York. These encounters got even more intimate with her personal encounter on the roadside. On August 7th, 1980, she decided to go hunting for UFOs in Pine Bush alone, which she had never done before. As she was driving along a dark road at 1 AM, shining her flashlight into the woods in hopes of catching hints of a hiding craft, she caught sight of an alien roughly 25 feet away. Shortly thereafter, she stepped on the gas.

In general, whether you believe in what she recounts as having experienced or believe in her interpretations, it is an intriguing, fun, and interesting read. Again, like Walters, I found myself drawn into her narrative. Was it fiction, as some attest, or at least an attempt to document her actual experiences? It’s difficult to know for certain, obviously, but like Walters, she was by no means alone in her sightings and encounters – many others reported similar experiences in the same location during the same period of time.

Even aside from all I’ve provided above, Chernipeski, Walters, and Crystall weren’t the only alleged members of this exclusive UFO paparazzi. No, there was another.

Last, by no means least, though perhaps most curious, is the case of Dorothy Wilkinson-Izatt. She was born on September 24, 1922, in Kowloon, Hong Kong, where she later married Duncan Izatt and went on to have four children. When the strange experiences in her life began, she lived with her husband and family in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, on Pacific coast of Canada. Her story was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, Season 3, Episode 13, which aired on December 12, 1990. There was also a 2003 book written regarding her experiences by Peter Guttilla, entitled Contact With Beings Of Light: The Amazing true Story of Dorothy Wilkinson-Izatt. To say the least, it’s an interesting read. Subsequently there was a 2008 documentary, Capturing the Light, which is where she first came to my attention.

Her first UFO sighting came to pass on November 9, 1974, when she was 52 years old. While in her kitchen around four in the evening, making herself a cup of tea, she had the sudden and strong sense that she was being watched. Going over to the window, she saw a large, diamond-shaped object in the sky, spinning and flashing. She felt elated, privileged to be able to see it, and felt no fear whatsoever. After the experience, she tried to share it with her husband, who sort of laughed it off dismissively. Later that same evening, she saw a bright light shining through one of her heavy-curtained windows. She again told her husband, who seemed utterly disinterested. After proceeding to the guest room, she now saw lights in the sky through that window, wondering to herself, “Is this real?” Telepathically, she received the response: “Don’t be afraid. We are real.”

I’ve often read or heard about those who blindly deny their own strange experiences or those of a loved one of this type (as an example of this last instance, her husband), or with equivalent blindness, lay uncritical faith in it, but this was demonstrably not the instinctive nature of Izatt. This is one reason why I found myself respecting the woman so much. Instead of blind faith, she sought confirmation. In response to this telepathic communication, she picked up a flashlight and asked the intelligence apparently communicating with her if it would imitate whatever it was she did with the flashlight. She then flashed it three times to the left. The object went three times to the left. She then flashed it three times to the right. It went three times to the right. Three times upwards, three times downwards, zigzagging – each time the object mimicked her, as requested, in the style known as “crossover mirroring.” Then they were gone.

Later that same evening, as she was meditating prior to sleep, a light suddenly appeared in her room. She then saw three men, who apparently collectively communicated to her that what they were going to show her was for the purpose of preparing her for what they were going to give her. After subsequent communications, they left.

She continued seeing these lights in the sky. Her husband and children took her sightings “lightly, almost as a joke,” but she took it seriously – but not on faith. She called the airport, the police, and so on, but no one seemed to take her seriously, so she finally had enough.

Borrowing her husband’s Super 8 Milimeter video recorder, she waited, ready to capture them – and she did not await in vain. At first, she heard a high-pitched buzzing. As time went on, she noted that dogs seemed to hear it, but the people around her usually couldn’t. In any case, in this particular instance, she started filming, and upon watching it later, was very happy she’d actually captured these lights in the sky. She showed it to her husband, who continued to say nothing in response. Even so, she would go on to see them everyday. When she finally asked the natural and obvious question – namely, why her? – they said that they’d known her for a very long time.

What she saw in the sky were just orbs of light, which she also caught on film, but a few frames later the video she took captured something invisible to her naked eye: an incredible blast of light, almost like a lightning flash (later it was noted that these flashes lasted 1/18 of a second). Watching her videos later, she rewound and fast-forwarded until she isolated the single frames containing the blast of light. Rather than just a flash of light, the frame revealed an elaborate display of colored, streaking lights. The frame was self-contained, too, and no evidence was found in the surrounding frames.

“I noticed that while I’m filming these objects, they’ll suddenly stop,” she said. “And then I’ll notice one object, like, shooting out a little beam at the other object, and then that object would be shooting out another beam back at it. And so I guess it must be messages or something that they’re passing back and forth on these beams of light. And then when I get it developed, I’ll find all these strange, one-frame shots on it.”

She blew up these frames. Also those that just depicted the balls of light, and here the photos began to show more details. Sometimes they would beam a light down on her. She would ask them to come closer and closer so she could get better shots. They complied. She used three different cameras, all of them producing similar results. By the time she died on January 29, 2021, in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada, she had amassed over 30 thousand feet of film depicting UFOs and other anomalies.

There are similarities in these three cases that ultimately bind them all and I feel it’s important to consider them. The experiences of both Walters and Izatt are similar in that they heard a buzzing sound prior to the appearance of the UFOs that usually only they could hear, for instance, and they also reportedly had telepathic communication with the occupants of the craft as well. Both Crystall and Izatt are similar in that their photos (in the case of Crystall) and video stills (in the case of Izatt) reveal strange, perhaps subliminal light phenomena not consciously visible to the naked eye but captured on film. All three are similar in that their UFO experiences are supported by other eyewitnesses, some of whom had association with them, and some that simply happened to live in the same area.

Chernipeski, on the other hand, only shares likeness with them in that he was capable of capturing them on film. Even so, many of his videos seem astounding to me, and I certainly don’t think he’s a liar.

Telepathy & the Photogenic Status of UFOs.

At the time that I first watched Chernipeski’s documentary, I was still reading D.W. Pasulka’s 2019 book American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology for the first time. Her perspective takes the subject of UFOs from a different angle than those I’ve been formerly aquainted with, and having previously watched various interviews with her on podcasts, I knew it was inevitable that I would read her two books on the subject. This one was the first, and in this book she references more than once something Carl Jung said in his 1979 book, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, which is another book I own yet have yet to read cover to cover. In full, he wrote:

“Considering the notorious camera-mindedness of Americans, it is surprising how few ‘authentic’ photographs of UFOs seem to exist, especially as many of them are said to have been observed for several hours at relatively close quarters. I myself happen to know someone who saw a Ufo with hundreds of other people in Guatemala. He had his camera with him, but in the excitement he completely forgot to take a photo, although it was daytime and the Ufo remained visible for an hour. I have no reason to doubt the honesty of his report. He has merely strengthened my impression that Ufos are somehow not photogenic.”

In Jung’s defense, there are many cases from the very beginning of the modern UFO phenomenon up until modern day where witnesses who were clearly capable of capturing the incident through a photo or video fail to do so, and the fact that they didn’t often serves to utterly mystify and even embarrass them in the aftermath. Even before the rise of cell phones, this counted as a boldfaced, underlined, italicized, neon-blazing highlighted strike against witnesses in the eyes of the Discreditors. Today, when we live in an era when most of us typically have a phone on us 24/7/365 and our collective propensity for not merely snapping a photo but recording a video is damn near obsessive-compulsive, however, that lack of photographic or video evidence serves as a major red flag.

For whatever reason, in the recurring UFO dreams I’ve had since I was in my early teens (a recent example of which I provided in the opening of this post) has also consistently reflected this. Even when I struggle against the trance induced by what I’m witnessing and try to snap a photo or record a video the UFO either disappears or my phone “mysteriously” fucks up. I’m not sure I’ve ever successfully accomplished the task, even in the alleged privacy of my mind’s own vivid, involuntary, nocturnal simulations, and the frustration I feel upon awakening often stings. I can’t even hope to imagine how those who had the opportunity to capture such photographic evidence in the context of witnessing a UFO in the real world must have felt – and yet I can also understand the skepticism of those who weren’t there.

After all, it’s difficult to deny that this is suspicious. I mean, how could you witness such a truly awesome display and not consider recording it, given your capacity to do so was well within reach? Unsurprisingly, this has led some, on that basis alone, to doubt the legitimacy of the phenomenon as a whole. As an example, in relatively recent years I even remember hearing about how Stephen Spielberg’s attitude towards the phenomenon has shifted since the days of ET: The Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where he had a sincere interest and even belief in the reality of the phenomenon. He remarked that he simply found it impossible that such events could happen and that we wouldn’t also have a wealth of photographic and video evidence for it.

That pulling out their camera somehow slipped the mind of UFO witnesses has never seemed that amazing to me, however, and if it does to anyone else, it only suggests to me that they have failed to explore the subject at sufficient depth – and specifically, the reports of the witnesses themselves.

This brings to mind a quote from Messengers of Deception, a 1979 book by Jacques Vallee. While I have yet to read the book, I’ve found myself coming back to this quote so bloody often it certainly serves as a sign that I most certainly should. In any case, Vallee explains that he has come to believe that to truly understand the UFO phenomenon as a whole one must not only engage in scientific analysis.

“Scientific analysis will undoubtedly provide part of the truth about UFOs; however,” he writes, “I no longer believe it will lead to the whole truth. I owe this realization to a man I shall call ‘Major Murphy,’ although his actual rank is much higher than that of Major.”

Over drinks after their meeting during a gathering of UFO contactees, this “retired” member of the US intelligence service suggested that, despite what Vallee believed at the time, the proper place for the study of UFOs was not in science, but rather in intelligence, which is to say counterespisonage, which was his forte, and in this context, the rules were entirely different:

“He drew a simple diagram in my notebook. ‘You are a scientist. In science there is no concept of the ‘price’ of information. Suppose I gave you 95 per cent of the data concerning a phenomenon. You’re happy because you know 95 per cent of the phenomenon. Not so in Intelligence. If I get 95 per cent of the data, I know this is the ‘cheap’ part of the information. I still need the other 5 per cent, but I will have to pay a much higher price to get it. You see, Hitler had 95 per cent of the information about the landing in Normandy. But he had the wrong 95 per cent!’”

The manner in which the intelligences behind the UFO phenomenon operate is disturbingly similar, he suggested, specifically when he suggested that “[t]hey will keep feeding you the information they want you to process. What is the only source of data about the UFO phenomenon? It is the UFOs themselves!”

As I’ve illustrated above, albeit in summation, Major Murphey’s suggestion seems to hold a great deal of water.

Consider that there have been countless cases that have displayed how during distant UFO sightings, close encounters, as well as alleged abductions the witnesses involved have felt as if they were compelled by an external force to look in a certain direction of the sky, where their sighting or encounter began, or even to drive to an area where they subsequently witnessed or encountered an object, or even experienced an abduction. Not only has their attention been drawn to a UFO seemingly telepathically in such instances, as a matter of fact, but the UFO has often gone on to respond to their desires for it to move closer or further away from them. As much as I detest Stephen Greer and his ever-irritating bullshit, this even provides a basis for his CE-5 protocols. And this aspect of the phenomenon, reported so often – and which, be it a psi ability or a technological analogue, could really only be called telepathy – would also explain how they could make witnesses “forget” to reach for the camera.

More broadly, the telepathy explained above suggests that by and large UFOs are seen when and by whom they desire to be seen. Sometimes they attract the attention of someone and move closer if that person is comfortable with them doing so, and/or move away if they start freaking out. On other occasions, it’s quite obvious they couldn’t give so much as a shit regarding how the witness feels or what the witness wants: they’ll chase a car down the road, after all, or an aircraft right back to base.

Clearly we don’t know why they select specific individuals to witness them to varying degrees, or why they behave towards such individuals in the varying ways that they do. Despite our ignorance regarding that matter, we should accept that given the telepathic component in UFO experiences they have clearly demonstrated that they can indeed control by whom they are seen, what those witnesses see, and given the episodes of missing time reported by some witnesses, how much they can remember. That they could ensure this targeted, staged experience for the witness or witness in question stays with them and is not disseminated to a wider community by means of making them forget to document the experience through photos or videos by use of the same sort of telepathy would, relatively-speaking, be a walk in the fucking park.

While most walk away from a sighting or encounter without any photographic or video evidence at all, some occasionally come away with perhaps a few photos, maybe a video or two. Strange enough.

Then there are apparently others, like Ellen Crystall, Ed Walters, Dorothy Wilkinson-Izatt, and even Justin Chernipeski, that are evidently given the clear by the intelligences behind UFOs in an absurdly broad sense. Such witnesses are not only chronic witnesses, but are permitted to capture them on camera time after time. To greater or lesser degrees, the UFOs are clearly showing off, begging for attention – on the surface seemingly constituting the equivalent of what the cool kids call a “simp” or “pick-me girl” for the witness and, through them, the camera. The witness, instinctively enamored, becomes a shameless UFO paparazzo.

To take it from another, admittedly more religious angle, it’s as if these particular witnesses become the photographic or video emmisaries of the UFO phenomenon – specifically selected, for whatever reason, by the intelligences behind the phenomenon to provide second-hand visual evidence to the masses willing to view it all, and they at least initially embrace this opportunity, and provide it to others out of a sense of responsibility.

Then idiots like me, we study the photos. Subject the videos to insanely intense analysis.

And then we have dreams.

Physical Encounters With Mantis Aliens, Part I: Wilderness Encounters.

Humanoid mantis beings – also variously referred to as Insectoids, Insectalins, Mantis aliens, Mantis entities, Mantids, and I feel confident other names I have yet to come across – have been described in a variety of physical and non-physical contexts. In general, these creatures have been described as looking remarkably akin to our earthly praying mantises in various respects, though also occasionally described as giant grasshoppers or ants as well, or as merely insect-like. If you look online or scour the available alien abduction or cryptid literature, you’ll see a great many individuals providing their summary of the appearance and abilities of Mantis entities. While some of it is interesting, particularly when it comes to researchers who have amassed a large number of first-hand encounters, I can’t help but consider such things suspect.

I want to see the source material for myself. I want to see the bulk of actual, first-hand eyewitnesses, where they describe the appearance and capabilities of these entities. So I went on a deep dive far down the rabbit hole and tried to put the puzzle pieces together for myself. And here is where I share what I’ve found so far to anyone who happens to give a ragged rat’s ass.

Of course, in so doing I feel it’s only fair that I provide just why I happen to give a ragged rat’s ass.

Since as far back as I can recall I’ve had strange experiences that would fall within the categories of what others have referred to as synchronicity, telepathy, astral projection, past live memories, and encounters with the dead but not gone. Central to all of this, however, has been a life replete with experiences that others have referred to as UFO sightings and encounters, and encounters and abductions by the occupants of UFOs.

The fact that any one of these experiences alone and by themselves would likely exceed the boggle threshold of the typical human being (whatever that constitutes) hasn’t escaped me; that all of these things would have happened to a single, hopelessly lost and irreversibly weird soul such as myself would certainly lead them to the conclusion that I’m bat-shit crazy, I assure you, has certainly not escaped me, either. In any case, for whatever reason, these things have indeed occurred to me, and continue to occur to me. I’m left with only what I am, to go with what I’ve got, and to continue to seek the ever-elusive truth in any way that I can.

Aside from telepathy, which seems to bridge both, the two recurring experiences I’ve had throughout my life, which have been largely compartmentalized in any clearly-defined sense but which I have always intuitively felt had to have something to do with one another despite a total lack of evidence (if only because they were both so weird and happening to the same person, being me) were my astral projection experiences and my alien encounters.

While these two categories of weird experiences often seemed to occur around the same time as one another, there was no other apparent relation between them. My UFO sightings or encounters and my alien encounters and apparent abductions had no apparent direct relation to my astral projections, in other words. During my astral projections, I had never encountered an alien being, though at one point, even during my initial astral projections, I even attempted to summon them into that space, nor did I consciously recall any instance where an alien triggered an out-of-body experience of any sort. In short, there was no clear connection between these two weird categories of experience.

Until September of 2001.

As I’ve written of elsewhere, I went to bed around ten in the morning on the 29th, and at some point afterward, I felt those familiar out-of-body sensations:

“As I rested on my bed, the familiar paralysis crept up on me, the volume knob on my senses seemed to turn down to zero, and I felt my subtle body drifting from the confines of my skin and sinking down into the otherworldly black void. Struggling to reattach to my body, I focused on a “whirring” noise I could hear as if from underwater, using it as the auditory equivalent as a rope by means of which I could pull myself back together, quite literally as it seemed. Once I met with success, I lifted my head, looked around, listened and discovered that the whirring had been coming from my computer, which I had left on in the midst of writing an article. I then went to sleep.

Around quarter to eight that evening is when I next awoke. I found that my computer was reading an error on the screen and my keyboard wasn’t responding. I rebooted it but had to unplug the keyboard and plug it back in to get it working again.

Heading downstairs, the quiet house suggested my mother and sisters were still out. I found my father asleep on the sofa chair, out cold, a strange movie on television. When he woke up as I came down the steps, I asked him if for any reason him or my mother had come in my room and fiddled with my computer as I was sleeping. It was a dumb question, and it didn’t surprise me when he told me they had not. The electricity had clearly not gone off, either.

Pouring myself a mug of coffee, I then put on my shoes in the mud room to go outside for a cigarette. As I began to open the front door of the house, I saw the red globe of light shimmering as it hovered just slightly above the front lawn and began to silently rise. Shaking myself free of shock, I aggressively yelled for my father, urging him to book it the short distance to the door.

The globe rose, crossed the driveway onto the other side of the yard and then ascended above the power lines and trees to the far right side of the property close to the horse barn. As my father arrived at the door frame, it had dimmed and was ducking behind some trees before it seemed to shrink or move out into the distance, glow turning an opaque milky red that then dissipated until it was entirely gone. He seemed perplexed by it, at first wondering aloud if it had been a flare, then asking if I wanted to check it out.

We hopped in his truck and drove to a nearby dirt road where it seemed to have been headed, but I was not even looking towards the sky. I knew it was gone. Soon we turned back around, and on the way back he tells me how strange it was that I had stepped out the front door at just the right moment to see it. He adds that it reminded him of the fireball my mother had talked about seeing in the sky while she was on the highway a few years back.

My mind was elsewhere. The important part of the red light sighting for me was that it established a connection I had for long suspected but had never had any real reason to believe: that the alien stuff was somehow related to the OBE stuff.”

That was the last suggestion of any connection between my astral projections and my alien encounters and abductions for almost 22 years.

Until September of 2023.

On the 14th, I had a particular form of out-of-body experience that I began having on March 2, 2021, and came to refer to as “serial OBEs.” I would awaken in an immobilized physical body, feel my subtle body drift upward, and then violently snap back into my physical body. This would happen again and again, over and over, and all the while I would have the distinct sense that someone was watching, intensely observing this as it all played out. This had never happened, not since these experiences began spontaneously happening back in May of 1995. More disturbing was the pattern that played out after the experience:

“For one thing, after I’d finally awakened into my physical body, I didn’t write the experience down. This was something that I noted at the time as being unusual, as this has been standard practice of mine for three decades. It was also strange that, despite my lack of immediate documentation, I remembered it at all. It was even stranger that once I awoke in the physical reality, I didn’t immediately roll over and go to sleep. To the contrary, I remembered remaining awake and in bed, eyes open, which is something I haven’t done since I was a kid. […] Yet that evening, after the first set of serial OBEs, I distinctly recalled having remained awake in bed, eyes open, staring high up on the wall to my left – in the area between the window beside my bed and the wall separating my bedroom from my living room. I watched as the rising sun bled through the curtains, casting shadows across my bedroom, all as I just stared and marinated in terror.

This profound terror, I felt certain, had not stemmed from the serial OBEs. Instead, it seemed somehow associated with the physical plane — specifically someone, I later felt, who had been in my room, and was likely the source of the presence I’d also felt when out of body. I’d just remained staring at the area where he’d been after his departure. Whatever had happened, whoever it had been, it brought back fears of living alone – I remember that specifically – which in turn frustrated me, as I was determined not to live with anyone ever again. I also felt what I later described as a ‘fear of fear’ – a fear of remembering something that would inspire intense terror, no matter how much I desired to recollect it.”

On September 14, 2023, specifically, there was an additional element. Rather than seeing a nocturnal red light hovering above my parent’s lawn, however, it was something that implied a more direct link between aliens and these astral projections:

“After laying back down in bed, it happened several times in succession. I’d blast into awareness, feel a head rush, hear the sound of blood rushing into my ears, making that muffled sound like I had been submerged underwater, and I would realize my body was paralyzed and I could move my subtle body to some degree. I couldn’t see, all was black, but merely felt the sense of touch and movement. I kept fearing that I was dying and didn’t want this to be permanent, and that fear drove me out of it a few times. Each time I was out of it, the process would happen all over again.

Four distinct episodes happened during this experience, though I’m not sure of the sequence. One of the first two I’ve written below came first, however.

At one point, after my focus came to the immobilization of my body, I sensed a presence nearby, so called out with my mind telepathically, ‘Who’s there?’ While there was no verbal response, I immediately received a tinted visual still image that slowly faded out of the black background of my mental space, and it certainly felt as if it had come from outside me. It was a Mantis-type Gray alien. Shortly thereafter, I snapped out of it and the process started over.”

However utterly irrational it may seem to others, I have come to sincerely believe that this Mantis entity has been visiting me since at least as early as March 2, 2021, though I now feel strong suggestions that this entity, or those like him, have been involved with me since my early childhood. For that reason, I decided to explore the personal encounters others have had with such Mantis entities. I went on a deep dive. I went as far down the rabbit hole as I could manage, and here is where I begin to share what I’ve amassed.

Encounters with these creatures have been reported in what I will categorize, for convenience – and however potentially arbitrarily – as Physical Encounters With Mantis Aliens and Encounters With Mantis Aliens in Altered States. At present, I will focus on physical encounters, which I will subcategorize into three types: Wilderness Encounters, Urban Encounters, and Abduction Experiences.

First and foremost are Wilderness Encounters which I will define as those random, apparently chance encounters an individual has had with such a being in an area outside the home, typically in a forested area.

I initially came across such stories through Beyond Creepy, a YouTube channel I would highly recommend to anyone interested in UFO and paranormal tales, especially obscure ones bearing a particularly high strangeness. This YouTuber, who prefers to be referred to as Mr. Black, seems to have acquired the bulk of these Mantis tales through Fortean researcher Lon Strickler, who has published countless books and also began a blog in 2005 entitled Phantoms & Monsters. It was only recently that I began taking notes and quotes from Mr. Black’s relevant videos, however, which in turn led me to Strickler’s website to see what other cases he might have collected. What I found there was quite illuminating.

The initial post I came across on Strickler’s site was dated July 26, 2011, though whether this was the date of the report or the date of the incident is still unclear to me. In any case, the unnamed eyewitness described the incident as having occurred five years prior while he was fly fishing with his boss on the east bank of the Musconetcong River in Hackettstown, New Jersey. It was mid-afternoon, the sky was “white and heavy,” and while there had been heavy rains for several days, he described the river that day as smooth, though with an incredibly strong current. Both he and his boss were in the water, with his boss about fifty yards behind him. He was chest high in the river, leaning back, digging his heels into the gravel beneath, when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye to his left.

On this side of the river, he explained, there was a sloping bank perhaps ten feet high with a strip of trees between 10 to 20 yards thick, beyond which there were fields, though there was an occasional, roughly 20-yard gap in the trees that provided unobstructed access to the river. When he looked towards the source of movement, it was in one of these gaps, and what he saw, for what he calculated amounted to “only a couple of seconds,” was a creature some 15 to 20 yards away and several feet above him, its figure cast against the aforementioned “white and heavy” sky.

What he caught first was a strong left thigh and calf that, while reminding him of a grasshopper, was bent forward like a human. He then saw the creature in full, which he described as a tall humanoid, somewhere between six and a half and seven feet tall with a “gangly, nobby” body. While he remains uncertain as to the nature of its hands or feet, he insists its arms were typical and not akin to the literal praying mantis forelegs that earn the earthly insect its name. Its head was triangular with huge, black, slanted eyes that reminded him of a praying mantis, and he spotted it as it was moving away from the river and up the bank, presumably away from him, as it looked over its shoulder at him – and at this moment, they locked eyes.

Upon their mutual gaze, his immediate sense that the creature was astonished, and though he remains uncertain why, he suspects that the fact that he had not only been able to see the creature but had not reacted in fear may have had something to do with it. He emphasizes that he has always had paranormal experiences and has come to shrug them off, and feels that his “whatever” kind of attitude may have played a role in its reaction, and so in the creature’s reaction. At the same time, however, he is swift to insist that this was a physical, biological creature, not some apparition. In any case, he said the Mantis quickly faded into transparency. It “disappeared into thin air,” as he put it, mid-stride. He feels it had a cloaking ability and he “caught it” at just the right moment, as it found itself against a new background and was adjusting.

He also adds that he muttered not a word about this to his boss, and honestly, I can’t blame the guy.

What makes this tale more intriguing to me is that he wasn’t alone in encountering a Mantis entity in this general location. To the contrary, Strickler came across a post on the Hackettstown Life online forum describing yet another sighting of such a creature along the Musconetcong River. Though it was a second-hand story, he began corresponding with the individual who posted it and I feel it bears mentioning.

As the story goes, the poster was far into a conversation he had been having with his friend, a successful businessman, when the guy began tearing up. He confessed to having had an incredibly frightening experience roughly two years prior and explained that he hadn’t been the same since. Around dusk, he and his brother were fishing at Stephen’s State Park, and as his brother was fishing about 50 yards downstream, he suddenly felt a vibration in his right ear, and so naturally turned his head in that direction. As he did, he saw a 6-to-7-foot-tall black-and-gray-colored humanoid resembling a praying mantis. He saw the creature for perhaps three seconds, he claimed, though it frightened him so bad he wet his pants and subsequently sat down in the water so his brother would be none the wiser. After this original confession, however much the poster struggled with accepting the story, he knew his friend wasn’t lying. They then both Googled “Praying Mantis Man on Muscenetcong” only to discover that he was not alone.

Despite the similarity in their activities at the time, their locations, and the general description of the Mantis creature they witnessed, I find it interesting how their reaction to their individual experiences differed in such an extreme manner: the first, utterly fearless; the other, not only so terrified he pissed himself but was traumatized by the sighting for long thereafter.

Another Mantis encounter took place in yet another forested area, though not a river, and not in New Jersey. I believe this was the first Mantis encounter I heard of on Beyond Creepy which I believe he got from Strickler, who in any case posted it on his site, though the story originally derived from the radio show Coast to Coast AM on its September 29, 2016 broadcast. It was delivered by a caller who only identified himself as “Ricky” from San Diego, California.

As the caller explained it, his sister had taken him, a friend, and others deep into the Sequoia National Forest around 2014, and while initially everyone was having a great time, things ultimately took a turn towards the undeniably strange. Around nine in the evening, as the rest retreated to their tents to get some shut-eye, he and his friend decided to stay up and gaze at the bonfire. At some point he decided he wanted to listen to some music, so he went to his sister’s 4Runner and opened up the back door to grab his iPOD, and as he did so he heard a sound that suggested to him that something had fallen out of one of the nearby trees. It hit the ground with a loud thumping sound – and it hit the ground so hard, he said, that he could feel it. “I had a flashlight on me,” he said, and:

“I looked over at the tree I heard the fall from and I swear on my life – and I swear to God; honest to God – I saw a 6-to-7-foot-tall praying mantis. And as I laid eyes on it, I completely lost breath. I was completely taken aback. It took a step back and it became completely invisible. I could not believe what I saw.

I slammed the door and I ran back to the campfire. I alerted my friend. I woke everyone up and no one would believe me. I was really upset because I knew what I’d seen. So that happened and my friend didn’t believe me. He was laughing at me and then all of a sudden I could hear all these things surrounding us. And finally, when I brought it to my friend’s attention, he kinda put his ear to it and he heard it too. Finally, I was patrolling the campground with my flashlight and I could just hear these things surrounding us and I heard, like this clicking sound, it was like… It was really strange. I was so scared.”

All three of the above reports occurred in rural areas, with the first two in the same area, and with the first and the last both describing the apparent abilities of these Mantis beings to cloak themselves. In the first case, this seemed to occur in tandem with eye contact, and it may be the case with the last as well, though it isn’t entirely clear. This last case also added that the creature made a clicking noise, however – but, much as with the “astonishment” of the Mantis in the first case, this is by no means the only case to report this.

Another report, for instance, comes from the newsletter UFO Roundup, Volume 9, Number 32, published on August 11, 2004. It involves an experience reported by an eyewitness, A.T., who explained how he and his girlfriend were lying on the grass in Kay Rodgers Park in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on August 4th of that year, at around ten in the evening when they saw two humanoid beings walk out of the bushes about ten feet away from them. The creatures were roughly seven feet tall, he said, though the one on the left was a few inches shorter than the other.

“They wore grey or off-white tunic-style outfits,” he explained. “They had shiny bronze or gold medallions on the center of their chest or shoulder.” They had “mantis-like heads” that bore eyes that would change from “blood red to neon green” and “made strange clicking noises.” The couple and the two creatures gazed at one another for five to six minutes before “they disappeared into a white light.”

Again, the clicking. Again, the capacity to seemingly vanish upon eye-gazing – though in this case “into a white light.”

Other wilderness sightings of the Mantis beings come through another YouTube channel, What Lurks Beneath, specifically a video entitled “It Preyed Upon Me – 2 Scary Stories of Insectoids,” which I must confess I initially had profound doubts would provide any useful information. It seemed like one of those YouTube channels that serve only to provide creepy stories for entertainment purposes and remain loose on the facts. While the first story lacks satisfying detail, it bears mentioning, and the final story certainly seems interesting.

The first story was provided by a fifty-year-old fighting cancer who asked that their name and gender not be revealed, but who for the sake of convenience I’ll refer to in the feminine. She had purchased 20 acres in the Ozarks in the early 1990s and came to believe a “small family of Sasquatch” lived on the property. While she permitted close friends and family to hunt whitetail deer on the property, when they did so they were required to leave something such as a basket of fruit and chocolate. The Sasquatch always took the basket, she claimed, sometimes leaving a bundle of sticks or nuts in its place. Then, around August or September of 2018, everything changed. She no longer had wild boar destroying the property, the elk disappeared, successful deer hunts became a rarity, and the baskets were left untouched. The reason, she says, is “something in the woods” that she has seen during the daytime “that I cannot explain. It looked and moved like a six-foot praying mantis and made this clicking screech as it followed me to the woods.” She adds that “it was big, fast, loud, and it was not afraid of me. It was definitely stalking me” but she “didn’t see it or hear it after I got in my truck. I just sat there, paralyzed. I couldn’t move.” Even her pets were petrified. “My dogs were barking, snarling, whining obviously terrified,” she explained, adding, “I’m gonna sell my property. I’m not going back into the woods.”

Despite her frustrating lack of description regarding the actual incident, she writes:

“I see it almost every night of my dreams. I always go back looking for it, like it’s calling me to it, beckoning me closer. Sometimes I stumble on it and it’s consuming a fresh-killed deer or a hunter. Sometimes it is waiting for me and lashes out with its stiletto-laden arms, piercing my body before I even have a chance to defend myself, before I even have a chance to scream. And each time I see it, how do I know what it is? It looks exactly like a praying mantis. There’s just something different about its eyes like they see into my soul like no insect ever could. It knows you
fear it. I think it knows how to follow me into my dreams. I’m wondering now if it can track me here to my home in the city through my dreams. I barely sleep anymore at night and every time the dogs bark at night I jump, adrenaline racing through my heart. I need to add this even though it may cause some doubt to my story even more.”

So again, we have an encounter with a being that looked liked a Mantis and made a clicking sound, though this time described as a “clicking screech.” She also mentioned being “stalked” by the creature. We might also add the element of presumed telepathy here, as she felt that its eyes could see into her soul, and felt that it could follow her into her dreams as well.

The next tale was an account by someone who identified himself as Daniel. He described himself as someone who, though he was no hunter or adept outdoorsman, loved being in nature, taking in the beauty, and enjoyed exploring the forest, particularly the swamps of northern Florida, into which he’d been venturing for years. Then, during the pandemic, he began letting himself “kind of get lost in the swamps, to not just escape but escape reality, escape the world that we live in to find myself in a place of so much beauty.” Unfortunately, that’s when he began having experiences that left him with the feeling that he was being stalked by something that even he admits is more far-fetched than the notion of Bigfoot, which he’s not even sure he believes in.

“It all started when I began hearing this weird clicking noise. Sometimes it would appear as if it was directly behind me, then other times it would sound like it was all around me, top to bottom. Degrees. Like some sort of swarm of insects that I couldn’t swat away. It was very bizarre. The noise would just kind of come and go and sometimes would change in volume and even pitch. Over time, it began to make me more and more uncomfortable. I soon realized I wasn’t just hallucinating or having some sort of vision, I was experiencing a noise that was surrounding me that I couldn’t identify, I couldn’t pinpoint it to any specific animal…”

Then, about thirty to forty feet away and directly in front of him, he saw large, bulbous eyes, very close together, that “kind of emanated a bright yellow glow. And that’s when I was able to see the silhouette” of the “large, insect head” to which the eyes were attached. While he couldn’t see the body, which “was standing in the bog and the brush,” it seemed larger than himself, and “as I looked at it and as it looked into me the clicking sound grew louder and louder” and he was suddenly overcome with the fear that if he remained there any longer, he would perish, so be hightailed it back home.

He further explained that this had happened just a few weeks before writing his letter, which he was shaking in the process of writing, and he was writing all of it down mostly to process the experience and was uncertain who he could send it to who wouldn’t simply label it as crazy. He had sent it to this YouTube guy and a few others, however, “out of desperation” in the hopes that someone could provide him some information regarding what he saw.

And so we again have the clicking, the eye contact, an the glowing eyes – not “blood red” or “neon green” in this case, however, but yellow. As with the previous case, there is also the fact that the Mantis appeared to be stalking the individual.

While the seven encounters above may leave one assuming these beings are intelligent creatures native to the earth and merely as of yet unacknowledged by the scientific community, they are without question also associated with the UFO phenomenon.

To provide a recent case of such an encounter, we’ll now turn to an incident that occurred on Thursday, July 16, 2020, in Warwickshire, United Kingdom. At about five that morning, Paul Froggatt was riding his bicycle home after working a 12-hour shift when he suddenly saw what he described as “a glowing orange sphere just hovering on the horizon” and wondered if it might be a satellite, or perhaps Venus, though he ultimately concluded that the object seemed too close for either to serve as a suitable explanation. After some time, he stopped to take some photos of the object with his phone, adding in retrospect that it seemed larger than the photos depicted. In any case, as he continued watching, the object began to rotate. As he went on to explain:

“I could see it was circular with a part sticking out from the main body. When this started I got the chills down my back and felt like there was something wrong here, I hurried on my way home. As I kept cycling I could swear the object was moving along my course but I just told myself it must be some kind of optical illusion. I entered a wooded area and lost sight of the object through the trees. Usually at this time of morning there is a chorus of bird song and insects but the woods were dead silent.”

This is a common experience during UFO encounters, it should be mentioned, that is often referred to as The Oz Effect. It is as if time has not just slowed, but entirely stopped. As if the whole of the universe, from inception to expiration, were but a roll of film, and you are suddenly stuck in a single frame – yet paradoxically able to move around as you otherwise would. In such instances you often quickly realize you are not the only free agent in this temporal amber, however, just as Froggatt did:

“As I cycled down the path I came around a bend I saw something I will never forget. Standing a few meters ahead is what I can only describe as a humanoid praying mantis. This thing was at-least 7 foot tall, light green with triangular head and big oval black eyes. It had all the features of a mantis but stood on two legs and had a somehow human like shape about it. I was completely frozen with fear. For what felt like an age, but was probably only seconds, I stared into this creature’s eyes and it stared back. I felt like it could read my mind and I could read its. My fear was replaced with completely alien thoughts of utter hatred and evil I felt projected from this thing. I suddenly snapped out of this hypnotic kind of state and it made a step back as if it was gonna pounce on me.”

As I can find no article that references the conclusion to the encounter, I must assume that he tore ass home, just as I would have. In any case, yet again we have a humanoid Mantis-like entity roughly seven feet tall who engaged in prolonged mutual eye-gazing with the witness that left the witness feeling as if telepathy was occurring.

There are still other UFO encounters associated with such Mantis beings, and while this final account makes mention of a Mantis entity only peripherally, which is to say second hand, I feel that it is important to include nonetheless. As recently reported in “Messengers,” the first episode of the 2023 Netflix docuseries, Encounters, there was a UFO flap over Stephenville and Dublin Texas in January of 2008, one which I had passionately followed in the news at the time. Concerning eyewitnesses of the event, the docuseries focused on Steve Allen and Lee Roy Gaitan, the Constable of Erath County, both of whom witnessed the UFO on January 8, along with over 300 other eyewitnesses.

Allen first saw the UFO while around a campfire, bullshitting with some friends of his, and he equates what he saw to a religious experience. Two seconds after it disappeared, they all witnessed two F16s come flying by, and shortly thereafter he talked to the press – and subsequently was contacted by the military:

“A military Colonel called me one afternoon at my house and talked to me about an hour and forty-five minutes. Says, ‘We’ve had a lot of discussion about you and what to do with you,’ he said. ‘You’re kind of a high-profile guy. If you was to just happen to come up missing it would kind of look suspicious’…'”

Along with his young son, Gaitan saw lights in the sky outside his house, which then departed at an insane speed. A minute or two later, like Allen, he also saw jets appear, traveling in the same direction as the UFO.

Neither of their accounts or any accounts in the general area of Stephenville, for that matter, struck me as hard and with as much depth as the account of Ricky Sorrells, however – even when I initially began following the story when it broke in the papers and news stations back in 2008. He was one of the first to come forward with his UFO experience, and the sincerity and simplicity inherent in his character made the truthfulness of his account undeniable to me. Sorrells’ encounter took place in December of 2007, however, which is to say a month before the 2008 flap.

He had gone out to hunt deer on his property, dressed in the appropriate camouflage and bearing his gun. At some point, however, he got tangled in some briars, and with his head down, as he made efforts to get untangled, he suddenly realized that everything had gone dark – as if a stormcloud were looming above him. As a consequence, as he freed himself from the briars and was in the process of stepping forward, he instinctively looked up, at which time he saw the object hovering about 300 feet above him. While he raised his gun, he thought it best not to shoot, though he still stood under the object for roughly three minutes, studying it with his naked eye and often studying it through his scope as well.

He explained the object in detail through interviews as well as in William J. Birnes’ book Aliens in America: A UFO Hunter’s Guide to Extraterrestrial Hotspots Across the U.S. While he couldn’t see the edges of the object through the canopy of trees nor see passed it, he explained it as being akin to a smooth, perhaps three-football-fields-wide sheet of iron, barn gray in color with a dull, matte-like finish. There were no bolts, rivets, or seams. There were circular indentations beneath the object – each of which went perhaps four to six feet deep, cone-like in that they were bigger at the bottom and smaller at the top – that were placed about forty feet apart. It made no sound as it hovered, and made no sound and produced no wind as it took off. To his surprise, it didn’t pivot skyward and take off as an airplane would, either, but rather remained flat as it departed at a 45-degree angle – and with such an insane speed that if he had blinked, he said, he would have thought it had simply vanished. After that, he hightailed it back to the house.

Sorrells, it should be noted, was not featured in the Netflix series, however, and there may be damned good reasons for that. On Larry King, he openly confessed that he believed he’d been harassed since his encounter by what he assumed to be the military, who had flown helicopters above his property in a grid pattern. Someone claiming to be a Lieutenant Colonel had called him on the phone, he said, and requested an interview with him, which he refused, after which they had a rather heated discussion. In the midst of it, Sorrells asked him to stop flying helicopters over his airspace, upon which the guy claimed that it wasn’t Sorrells’ airspace, but his. Eventually, he said that if Sorrells quieted down he’d stop his helicopter bullshit, and Sorrells had remained quiet – until the Larry King interview, that is – and the activity above his property had indeed ceased.

Angelia Joiner, a reporter for the Stephenville Empire-Tribune, had also said on Larry King that she thought Sorrells might have been singled out because he had a detailed, daytime sighting.

There may have been another reason, however, as mentioned by both Gaiten and Allen in the Netflix series – something that, despite my interest in the flap, I had never heard before. Gaitan said one day Sorrells came to him in tears, alleging that someone was harassing him.

“Suddenly, Ricky stops talking to everybody,” he says, ominously adding, “I think Ricky saw a lot more than what the rest of us saw.”

Allen also asserts that Sorrells was “being intimidated,” as he put it, and he added details that Gaitan had not.

“Ricky has said he saw some sort of ‘something’ inside the aircraft, and it resembles some sort of insect,” he said, “or maybe even a praying mantis.”

Chinese Spy Balloons, UFOs, and Defense Capabilities.

A Balloon & Three UFO Reports.

All of this shit started, it would seem, on January 28th, 2023, when NORAD detected a Chinese spy balloon over the US between 60 and 65 thousand feet. The balloon itself was an estimated 200 feet tall and had a payload the size of a regional jet and a weight of over 2 thousand pounds. It was subsequently shot down over the Atlantic ocean in the vicinity of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, by an F-22 Raptor using a short-range, infrared, AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, on February 4th. The communication between the pilots was recorded and published online, as was a video of the shootdown. A recovery mission subsequently collected some wreckage.

Some say Biden should have acted sooner rather than let the Chinese spy balloon meander across the country, collecting intelligence, before blasting it out of the sky.

Shortly after the incident, there began what at first seemed like a sudden rash of unidentified objects invading the US, but we were then assured by military authorities that this probably wasn’t the case. After the incident with the Chinese spy balloon, we were told, the US military adjusted their radar “velocity gates,” which are filtering systems that allow the radar to ignore things deemed irrelevant. Before now this irrelevant noise included small, low-speed objects at particular altitudes, but after the adjustment, this was apparently no longer the case. As a consequence, they more easily and quickly detected those three, smaller objects over the course of roughly a week and then took action – shooting them all down, in fact, with the same kind of 472 thousand dollar missiles. 

Six days after popping the spy balloon, on February 10th, two F-35s encountered a metallic-colored, cylindrical object the size of a small car at 40 thousand feet near Dead Horse, Alaska, with one pilot reporting it interfered with the aircraft sensors. The other pilot reported no problems in that regard. Later that day, reportedly due to the fact that it constituted a threat to air safety, it was shot down by an F-22 over Prudhoe Bay, along the northern coast of Alaska, and crashed onto the sea ice. 

The following day, on February 11th, F-22s from Elmendorf base in Anchorage, Alaska, shot down another object some 100 miles from the US-Canada border, over Yukon, Canada, due both to the fact that it was a threat to air safety and had illegally crossed the border. Then, on the third day in a row – February 12th – an octagonal object (which one pilot thought may have had strings hanging beneath it, but no payload) was detected traveling at about 20 thousand feet near the east side of Michigan’s upper peninsula. Citing both safety flight hazards and potential surveillance capabilities, it was shot at over Lake Huron – twice. One missile evidently failed to hit the target; the second one allegedly got it. 

Speculation among the public quickly grew given the suspiciously vague or entirely absent details regarding these three objects, and as ambiguous data is always ripe for psychological projection, much of that speculation went a rather conspiratorial route. Fueling this maelstrom of paranoia was the initial reluctance of the authorities to refer to the last three objects as balloons. Three days after the last shoot-down, on Valentine’s Day, the White House, via spokesperson John Kirby and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, informed the public that they are calling them objects, rather than balloons, as they are uncertain of their nature, origin, and purpose. Despite this, as mentioned, they nonetheless shot them down. 

That’s right: after watching the Chinese spy balloon for a week before blasting it out of the heavens, they suddenly shifted to a policy of “shoot first, ask questions later.” 

The three unidentified objects were much smaller than the Chinese spy balloon and given that they had all been shot down in “pretty remote locations” and in “difficult terrain,” they’ve been unable to recover the wreckage, though they eventually will do so and subject it all to analysis. 

To summarize: they knew the nature, origin, and purpose of the Chinese spy balloon before they shot it down, there is at least one video of them doing so, and they rather swiftly located and collected the wreckage, and yet a month later nothing is known for certain about the other three objects, no wreckage has been recovered, and no videos have been provided. 

All of this, of course, also provides fuel for the aforementioned paranoid speculation. 

Also on Valentine’s Day, Senators also received a classified briefing on the subject held on Capital Hill, with many of them saying in the wake that much of what they learned was already known by the public, though a few of them had some rather interesting comments to share. Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton noted some contradictions, for instance: 

“On the one hand, the administration is saying we don’t yet know what these last three objects are, and we don’t want to characterize them until we recover them. But on the other hand, it wasn’t a threat. Both of those things can’t be true.”

Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio also had some interesting shit to say, clearly suggesting an association between these objects and traditional UFO reports: 

“The most important question we have to answer now is, what are these things? Who sent them here? And what are they doing here? The only way you’re gonna get answers to that is not just to retrieve whatever is left of them, but to understand how it compares to the hundreds of other similar cases.”

Republican Senator John Kennedy’s commentary, however, was by the far the most intriguing to me. The briefing, he said, left him with more questions than answers. He insisted that despite the beliefs of many, this isn’t a recent phenomenon, and that the government has known about them – presumably UFOs of uncertain origin and purpose – for years, at least since 2017. The only recent development, he says, is that we’re now shooting them down. Save for the spy balloon, however, we’ve been unable to find to the wreckage. 

I’ve been unable to find a video or a transcript of his entire encounter with the press on this subject, though I’ve managed to find various clips:

“They need to explain to the American people if they know — and I’m not sure if they know; if they know, they’re not telling us — what these things are, who put them up there, and do they pose a threat to the American people. And if the answer is no, how do they know that?”

“The only thing I feel confident saying right now is that if you are confused, you understand the situation perfectly.”

“I just know that going into the last two hearings that I had the impression that this was something that had happened over the last two weeks, and that’s not accurate. This has been going on a long, long, long time. At least 2017. Last week, we were told 2019. That’s what I took away from it today. Lock your doors tonight.”

Really? “Lock your doors tonight”? Way to be ominous, Senator Kennedy. 

Two days later, on the 16th, Biden finally publicly address the subject, emphasizing that the three unidentified objects weren’t believed to have been spy balloons from China or any other foreign power, nor was any ill intent likely involved, though he defends having shot them down. Now calling the three objects balloons, he said they probably derived from research institutions, private companies, or were recreational. He spoke on formulating sharper rules regarding how to deal with these objects.

I find this announcement curious, for if they still have no intelligence on the nature, origin, or purpose of the objects and there have still been no recovery missions, what on earth was it that suddenly led the authorities to conclude that they were not only balloons but were likely to be from benign, non-military sources? 

One has to wonder. 

And don’t get me wrong: to some degree, I can understand the government’s silence on the matter. After all, they may legitimately not know what these three objects were, and so wouldn’t want to make claims based on their limited understanding only to have to go back on them later, when they have sufficient data, which would consequently instill doubt in their citizens and allies with respect to their competence. Conversely, if they do have sufficient and concerning information on these three objects, they may not want our enemies to know what they know, so they can’t let their citizens and allies know what they know, either, because their citizens and allies are not compartmentalized from their rivals. In either case, maybe suddenly referring them to balloons, and ones likely of benign origin, was done in an effort to quell the rising paranoia.

It would all amount to patronizing bullshit, of course, but if this were the case, I could at least understand the motivations. 

Still, one can’t help but wonder: why this new policy of “shoot first, ask questions later,” contrary to their previous strategy? Well, perhaps after the criticism regarding how they handled the Chinese spy balloon they did this as a form of damage control. In other words, these actions were fueled by their desire to assure their citizens as well as rivals across the globe that such incursions will not be tolerated, regardless of the details.

And I suppose that, too, makes enough sense. 

Even so, again: why are there videos of the shoot-down and successful recovery of the initial Chinese balloon but not with respect to the three subsequent objects? Why was the recovery of the Chinese spy balloon so swift and successful but not with respect to the other three objects? Are they lying?

On the 16th, the same day Biden finally addresses the subject, Saagar Enjeti on Breaking Points offers some interesting data:

 “They’ve now had days. In every single one of these instances, I’ve checked, and the weather conditions have been changing in the Yukon, and in Alaska, Lake Huron. So as we told you previously: first it was choppy waters. Okay, that lasts for a day. What about the next day? Well, now it’s too deep. I went ahead and checked: the maximum depth of Lake Huron is 754 feet. That is actually quite deep. However, we have had multiple instances in our history where we have gotten stuff from far deeper – the US Navy, specifically. There’s actually a military base on Lake Huron, or very nearby, with some capabilities.”

So I felt there was a damn good possibility they were indeed lying — and yes, there could be sound reasons, some of which I’ve previously mentioned. Do I suspect these three objects were manufactured and controlled by extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI), however? Unless something drastically changed on our end, I would have to say no, and this is because I do believe many UFOs are vehicles or probes of an ETI and I’m aware of the historical context, which stretches back at least as early as the second World War, and that history provides good reason for such skepticism in this respect.

All things considered, my doubts that these three objects constitute such crafts come down to two main reasons. 

1. UFOs Can Disarm Our Weapons Systems.

First, more than once UFOs have displayed their alarming capacity to disarm our weapons systems. 

For instance, consider the testimony of now-retired Captain Robert Salas, who was formerly a missile launch officer at Malmstrom AFB in Montana, where each of the launch control facilities monitored and controlled ten minuteman missiles, each of which contained an 800-kiloton nuclear weapon. 

On the early morning of March 16, 1967, he was on duty at Oscar Flight, in a capsule roughly sixty feet underground, on alert status – an active shift – while his commander, Fred Mywal, was taking a snooze. Around six guards were up top at the time, guarding the facility, and he received a frantic call from one of them, asking if he had any knowledge regarding the strange lights they were nervously watching above the facility. Salas informed him that he did not. So they hung up, but the guard called back roughly five minutes later, now clearly in a state of terror, screaming into the phone that he was now seeing a large, glowing-red object, hovering just outside the front gate. All guards had their weapons drawn. His question was: what the bloody hell should they do next? 

A sensible question. I mean, it would certainly be my most immediate question. 

Just as Salas was going to awaken Mywal, he saw activity on their panels – lights going from green to red. One by one, each of the missiles went into a “no-go” position, which is to say they could not be launched. To have a single missile go offline, Salas has repeatedly emphasized, was in itself a rarity, as these were reliable, state-of-the-art systems, but to have all missiles go down like dominoes? This was unheard of. They were each independent systems. Upon reporting this to the command post at Malestrom, however, they were told that the same thing had happened at Echo Flight.

Nearly a decade later, there was a disturbing incident in the skies over Iran that also falls into this general category and specifically relates to the three recent shoot-downs of unidentified objects. It can be found in Chapter 9 of Leslie Kean’s phenomenal 2010 book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record, where Major Parviz Jafari recounts the experience.

It occurred in the early morning of September 19, 1976, when at least four civilians reported a strange object in the skies over the capital, Tehran. An F-4 Phantom II jet interceptor was dispatched to investigate but lost all instruments and communications upon approach – though, just as strangely, upon return to the base, all those formerly failing systems were suddenly restored. A second F-4 Phantom II jet was then dispatched, piloted by Jafari and a weapons officer, but as they approached the insanely brightly-lit object, ultimately determined to be diamond-shaped, their communications system went out. Most relevant: during the incident, they tried to fire an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile, at least generally of the same type as the four recent shoot-downs, but their weapons system mysteriously failed. Only when Jafari turned away, like the former pilot, were all systems restored. 

2. UFOs Are Impervious to Our Weapons.

While I eagerly anticipated the movie Independence Day from the moment I saw the trailers on TV, and truly enjoyed it once I saw it sometime after its release in July 1996, when I was about eighteen, it didn’t take me long to realize how closely it echoed my favorite film when I was roughly five years of age: the 1953 film The War of the Worlds. There, too, alien spacecraft positioned themselves all across the earth, pacifistic-minded individuals welcoming them were vaporized and, before they were defeated by a virus – a literal virus in the 1953 film and a computer virus in Independence Day, which constituted a far better and faithful remake than Spielberg’s literal, 2005 effort – the last effort of the human species against their alien invaders was to use a nuclear bomb. 

And it failed.

Looking at the examples above where what I presume are real ETIs displayed their ability to disarm us before we even had the chance to utilize such weapons, one might think that this would be a sufficient display of power, and they wouldn’t even give us a fighting chance. 

One would be wrong. 

For some reason there have been instances where we have successfully – and, it would seem, they have allowed us to – fire upon them, and with results that perhaps even trump the disturbing nature of the incidents involving them disengaging our nuclear weapons. There are three such instances that I am currently aware of.

The first two can be found in Kieth Chester’s 2007 book, Strange Company, in which he documents UFO sightings during the Second World War, predating what many still regard as the beginning of the modern UFO era in 1947. The first took place during the ordeal which is sometimes referred to as the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, but which is largely known in UFO circles as The Battle of LA, and it occurred from the late evening, early morning of February 24-25, 1942. Given the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7th, 1941, tension was high in California, and it only shot sky-high when three radar posts detected something approaching LA. A blackout was ordered, Air Raid Sirens deafened ears, and searchlights swept the skies. Flares, machine-gun fire, and anti-aicraft rounds littered the air. Many objects were evidently seen, varying in description: triangular formations of lights, apparent balloons, planes, a “big object, too big to be an airplane,” and, most relevant, what appears to have been a classic disc:

“Remarkably, several searchlights had caught one of the objects in their crossbeams. It was completely illuminated and remained motionless while several antiaircraft shells appeared to explode right against the object’s surface. According to a Herald Express reporter witnessing the event, the antiaircraft shells hit the object but had no apparent damage or effect. An object sustaining antiaircraft fire without effect was captured on film and printed in the newspapers. Close examination of the picture reveals the classic shape of a flying saucer, not a conventional fighter, bomber, hovering dirigible, or balloon” (p 20-21).

The next instance, mentioned in both Chester’s aforementioned book as well as in Mack Maloney’s later, 2011 book, UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn’t Want You To Know, sort of echoes the aforementioned incident during the Battle of LA. In fact, it occurred a mere four months later, more or less to the day — specifically on June 25, 1942.

Flight Lieutenant Roman Sabinski was piloting a bomber assigned to the 301 Squadron. While returning home from a bombing mission, his rear gunner told him an aircraft was approaching from behind. Sabinaki could only see a bright light, probably a few miles away, and told the gunner that if the object came within range to fire upon it. As the object gained on them, Sabinski could see that it was a dull, copper-colored object roughly the size of the moon with fuzzy, ill-defined edges. He then ordered his gunner to fire, which he did, delivering a rain of tracer and machine gun rounds for roughly two minutes – yet this didn’t have the intended and logical effect. 

Not in the slightest. 

Amazingly, the rounds simply “entered” the object and seemingly disappeared, not damaging it at all. The object then accelerated until it was around 200 yards off the left wing, where now both front and rear gunners continued firing away. Still, the damned object still seemed to swallow the fire, like it was nothing. Despite Sabinski’s subsequent evasive maneuvers, the object remained in position relative to their bomber, eventually moved ahead of them for a short time, and ultimately shot upward, like a bat out of hell, swiftly vanishing amidst the stars. 

The last and most recent instance of this type took place on the early morning of April 11, 1980, at the La Joya Air Force Base, when Peruvian Air Force Lieutenant Oscar Maria Huerta went on to have an experience that, while echoing the two aforementioned instances, most closely – and so close it constitutes as hauntingly – resembles the previous experience of Sabinski some 38 years earlier. It was described in detail in Chapter 10 of Leslie Kean’s aforementioned book, where Huerta details the experience in his own words.

An unidentified object was detected hovering near the end of the runway and ignoring attempts at communications, and Huerta was directed to intercept it. So he took off in his Sukhoi-22 fighter, flew up roughly 8,200 feet, and came in for an attack, delivering, as he put it, “a burst of sixty-four 30mm shells, which created a cone-shaped ‘wall of fire’ that would normally obliterate anything in its path.” In this case, however, it had no apparent effect. “It seemed as if the huge bullets were absorbed by the balloon,” as he originally called it, “and it wasn’t damaged at all.” The object then shot up at a rapid speed, prompting him to chase it. When it came to a sudden stop, he veered to the side, then prepared to fire at it again – and just then, it shot upwards again. After this happened twice more, he elected to go above the object and attack it from that vantage point, but it followed him. Low on fuel, he had to abandon the effort, but decided to get close enough to it to see it for what it truly was:

“I was startled to see that the ‘balloon’ was not a balloon at all. It was an object that measured about 10 meters in diameter with a shiny dome on top that was cream-colored, similar to a light bulb cut in half … The bottom was a wider circular base, a silver color, and looked like some kind of metal. It lacked all the typical components of aircraft. It had no wings, propulsion jets, exhausts, windows, antennae, and so forth. It had no visible propulsion system.”

After returning to the base, the object maintained its position for two hours, where it was visible to everyone on the base.

“I find myself in the unique position, at least for the moment, and as far as I know,” he wrote, “of being the only military pilot in the world who has actually fired a weapon and struck a UFO.””

This, as we now know, is not the case. It had happened at least twice in our history, three-quarters of a century before what nonetheless constituted his undeniably awesome experience. 

And If They Are ETI UFOs?

The real question is: now, in February of 2023, has it happened again? Have our jets had encounters with true UFOs and have our pilots been successful this time? 

The capacities these true UFOs have displayed to both disarm our weapons and remain impervious to our weapons when we manage to fire upon them lead me to suspect that the three recent shoot-downs did not, in fact, involve craft manufactured and piloted by ETI. If any of these three, recent, unidentified objects were truly ETI UFOs, however, there are, in my mind, only three possibilities as to how this could be the case.

The first? Alien error. 

No one and nothing is perfect, after all – a truism that close to four-and-a-half decades in this life has undoubtedly hammered into me with unnecessary aggression. And as far more advanced in intelligence and technology as these ETI may indeed be than any human inhabiting this spinning space-rock, Murphy’s Law undoubtedly applies to them as much as it does to ourselves. After all, I do see sufficient evidence that some allegations of UFO crash-retrievals by some aspects of the US government are legitimate – the Roswell Incident; the incident in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania; that case in Varginha, Brazil – and so on the surface, at the very least, it would appear that the presumed ETI behind the UFO phenomenon can occasionally fuck shit up just as we do. 

Having said that, however, given their clearly advanced tech one would assume that, while not infallible, an ETI would at the very least be less likely to crash one of their craft than we would be, and the incidents near Roswell, in Kecksburg, and in Brazil, all seem to exceed what would be expected by Murphy’s Law, in my opinion. And even if they had crashed accidentally, one would think they’d be advanced enough to develop systems that would detect when and where such crashes occur and send a thorough recovery mission ASAP – certainly far before our comparatively primitive militaries would be capable of doing so. 

As a consequence, some time ago I was forced to ask myself: could these crashes have been intentional for some reason that to us might seem absurd, at least on the surface, but to an advanced ETI may constitute an intentional, elaborate strategy implemented due to motivations and towards goals that we, as humans, would find difficult if not impossible to wrap our potentially, comparably feeble minds around? Is it possible that such crashes have been “staged” by the aliens?

I began to think this was more likely than Muphey’s Law.

Why would aliens stage crashes of their own craft, intending them to be recovered by earthly militaries? Well, because successful recoveries of alien craft would inspire the earthly military in question to try to reverse engineer and replicate this alien technology so as to both develop a defense against the aliens should they prove to be hostile and to secure their position as the global military superpower on earth (in the case of the US) or to become the global military superpower on earth (in the case of other earthly, military powers). Both motives would inspire and require a conspiracy of silence, denial, and ridicule of the subject as a whole, and with respect to the crash retrievals in particular. Their citizens couldn’t know that they were impotent in face of such a potential threat – especially if they were, at present, considered the global, military superpower of earth, as that would diminish their perceived power in the minds of the masses. (See: that small portion in the Brookings Report. See: Viktor Marchetti’s hypothesis). Their rivals could not know, either, for the same reason, and because they might pursue the same goal and reach it first and so go on to gain or sustain their power and so, again: their citizens and perhaps even their allies could not know. 

Yet it would all be a wild goose chase inspired by the aliens. The late Stanton Friedman offered some enlightening analogies that may help articulate my point: 

“You might have handed Thomas Edison one of today’s pocket calculators forty years ago, and there’s no way in the world he could have figured out how it worked.” 

Elsewhere, Friedman has put it more elegantly: 

“If you gave Christopher Columbus a nuclear submarine with an unlimited budget and said ‘Chris, as your reward we’re giving you a nuclear submarine, by the way, we need two more of these.’ Could he have done it? Not a chance.” 

Of course, on top of all this, there are the repeated allegations that both the fuel for the crafts and the material out of which they are constructed are not just of a non-terrestrial origin but are both not readily available on earth and are difficult if not impossible to manufacture given our present state of science and technology, and likely even our projected states of science and technology within a timeframe deemed safe by the ETI. In other words, if the aliens staged these crashes, it would ensure the militaries that recovered them would not only cover up the existence of ETI, but it would pit those militaries against not only their own citizens but all other militaries of the world as well.

Divide and conquer, divide and rule: plain and simple. Having inspired the territorial and power-hungry impulses of their leaders, never would the people of the earth be capable of locking arms, sharing resources, and coming together as a joint force against a common, extraterrestrial enemy.

Or perhaps I’m wrong, and crashes such as Roswell weren’t staged, and perhaps at some point recently the US military successfully developed technology that gives us a defense against ETI incursions into our airspace, maybe through successful reverse engineering and replication of their downed craft. And perhaps these three, small, unidentified objects shot down out of the sky were indeed true UFOs – likely probes, given their reported size – and while recovery operations have been underway, and we have perhaps even been successful, it will continue to reinforce the same old paranoia of those in power, and so the cover-up will continue. 

Or maybe, in February of 2023, the US military went certifiably John-Wayne bat-shit and spent circa 2.3 million dollars shooting down goddamn balloons. 

Who am I to say?

Telepathy and Inner Speech (Part I).

I. Linguistic Telepathy, Aliens, & The Incommensurability Problem.

“Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project’s idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea–if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t exist with a system which doesn’t work.”

― Philip K. Dick, The Dark-Haired Girl.

“In science fiction, telepaths often communicate across language barriers, since thoughts are considered to be universal. However, this might not be true. Emotions and feelings may well be nonverbal and universal, so that one could telepathically send them to anyone, but rational thinking is so closely tied to language that it is very unlikely that complex thoughts could be sent across language barriers. Words will still be sent telepathically in their original language.” 

― Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind.

While largely ignored by the scientific community, even within the realm of parapsychology, what we might call “linguistic telepathy” is a form of telepathy fairly popular in fiction, and it involves what traditional psychologists often call inner speech. It was present, for instance, in Stephen King’s 1977 book and disappointing miniseries, The Shining, which aired two decades after the novel — and, of course, also featured in Stanley Kurbick’s epic yet not altogether faithful 1980 film adaptation. It was again present in King’s novel Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining, and in the film adaptation. The character Matt Parkman had the ability in the television series, Heroes, and it also featured in the first episode of the second season of the 2019 reboot of The Twilight Zone, entitled “Meet in the Middle.” As I’ve recently been enlightened to, as I finally got around to reading the book, it was also present in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land

Despite the ignorance or disinterest of parapsychologists, however, experiences of this type are by no means confined to the realm of fiction: there are indeed anecdotal accounts. One area of the unknown (and at least partially paranormal) in which telepathy involving inner speech has played a consistent role is in reports of alien encounters and alien abduction — which I can personally attest to, for what that’s worth. The issue is that in the alien abduction literature, all telepathy typically functions as a barely-noticeable backdrop, an unspoken given that is hardly acknowledged, much less examined by researchers, no doubt due to the cornucopia of grander weirdness offered by this aspect of the UFO phenomenon. One abduction investigator who stands out in this regard is David Jacobs, who has spent some time studying and contemplating this issue. He wrote about it in his book, Walking Among Us, and in his paper, “Telepathy and Emotion in Alien Society,” though his most relevant insight came in his 1992 book, Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions, his first book on the abduction phenomenon, where he made an interesting observation about how telepathy functions within that context:

During the entire abduction experience, communication between aliens and abductees is telepathic. The abductee either “hears” the communication or receives an impression in her mind. … Usually the abductee receives only an “impression” of what the Beings are communicating and has difficulty repeating specific words and sentences, although some people “hear” sentences in their minds and can recall not only the sense of the communication but the words as well.


This I’ve always found interesting, for while there was at least one occasion I recall in which I received “impressions” from one of the creatures, I would typically “hear” sentences during this kind of direct telepathic communication despite the fact that, as reported by Jacobs, this is apparently a relatively uncommon experience. This distinction in the experience of telepathy during abductions and encounters only began to make sense to me when I learned about studies into inner speech in mainstream psychology. While scientific studies into inner speech is currently in its infancy, it is currently believed that everyone experiences what we could call inner speech, at least in a sense, it’s just that they experience it in two main fashions: through symbolic and non-symbolic language. 

Symbolic language is what we naturally associate with inner speech, and this is an umbrella term for the agreed-upon verbal and written languages we develop as a culture in order to communicate with other members of our cultural tribe. We grow up within the confines of a particular culture and therefore within its characteristic linguistic context, and as a result of that come to use it to communicate with others externally; as a result of that, some of us ultimately internalize it as an additional means by which we can communicate with ourselves. After all, it is far more economical to think within our shared, linguistic context than outside of it, as in doing so we save the time and energy we would otherwise be wasting in our efforts to translate when communicating our thoughts to others.

In the context of symbolic language, then, inner speech refers to the monologues or dialogues many of us have with ourselves within the presumed privacy of our own minds, where we “speak” to ourselves without making corresponding noises with our mouths. Despite this, our inner voice tends to echo the accent, tones, and inflections of our external voice — though not always. I have found that when I’ve been listening to quite a bit of a single comedian, a narrative voice in a documentary, or even a specific YouTuber, my inner voice will for a short time afterward take on their own.

While some experience this inner speech primarily in the form of monologues, many, such as myself, also engage in internal dialogues in which they have a back-and-forth with themselves. Ordinarily, the person experiences themselves as being at both ends of the conversation, though occasionally they imagine talking with others, sometimes even in “imagined interactions.” These are occasions in which the inner voice can be utilized in tandem with other internal experiences, such as emotions, simulated sensations, as well as still and animate imagery. This experience appears to be synonymous with what is typically referred to as daydreaming. These are simulated scenarios we generate in our minds, for instance, when we think of the perfect line or perfect thing to do in a situation in retrospect — “the spirit of the stairway,” as it’s been called. We may also imagine a potential future scenario, rehearsing what we’ll say and do. Last but not least, we can, of course, imagine entirely fictitious scenarios as well 

To my surprise, I discovered that not only do people experience inner speech in different fashions, as suggested above, but also with varying degrees of frequency. 

It was only in mid-to-late 2019 when I saw a meme circling around on a social media site that alleged that not all people had the capacity to think in one’s native language, and when I also discovered, to my surprise, that I knew someone like this, I knew I had to engage in some research and reevaluate many of my former assumptions. So I did some research, and indeed, I found recent studies which suggest that while, like me, some people think predominantly within the context of their native language, almost as a default, others do so only occasionally. And much like there are those with aphasia, which is to say those who cannot generate mental imagery, there are also those who claim they are psychologically mute, having never experienced an internal voice at all. 

When not thinking within the context of symbolic thought, it turns out that people can still think, it’s just that their “inner speech” comes in the form of a non-symbolic language, or what the “language of thought” hypothesis refers to as “mentalese” — an underlying, innate, non-symbolic, language-like mode of thinking we all share from the dawn of our consciousness. In the midst of my research, I suddenly recalled that Chomsky had spoken of this as well — of a basic grammar underlying all language that is innate to our species and serves as a basic template that all of our specific, native languages conform to. Put another way, Chomsky suggested that the process of learning our native language as a child is actually the process of learning to translate our innate mentalese into our native language.

As evidence of mentalese, particularly with respect to those of us that think in symbolic language as a default, it is important to realize that even we all get a taste of it here and there, specifically during those occasions in which we can’t think of a word yet know exactly what it means — clearly, as despite having lost the word we nonetheless know what we desire to communicate, as if that were not the case it wouldn’t be so goddamn frustrating. These are known as tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTS), and studies evidently suggest that this happens about once a week for most of us and increases with frequency as we age until it happens roughly once a day. In the most frustrating cases, TOTS also involve what are commonly referred to as “blockers,” or “ugly sisters,” which are things associated with the desired word. I think it goes even deeper than this, however, for on far too many occasions I’ve also struggled to convey something for which I had not the words and ultimately had to accept the fact that such words, at least in my native language, simply didn’t exist. I’ve also had the experience when I find myself staring into space yet upon reflection found myself unable to recall or at the very least explain what I’d been thinking during that period. 

This seemed to provide some clarity with respect to linguistic telepathy, as it appeared to be supported by what Jacobs had to say about the nature of telepathy during the abduction experience. To recap that which was quoted earlier, he stated that a relatively small percentage of abductees could either literally “hear ” what the aliens were saying inside their minds, which, given my updated context, would imply linguistic telepathy involving symbolic inner speech, but that a greater percentage merely received impressions that they then had to translate into their native language, at least when expressing those impressions to others. 

Assuming the aliens in question communicate in telepathic mentalese, it would make sense that abductees who think in mentalese themselves would immediately understand the telepathic impressions of the aliens but that they would have to translate it into their native language before expressing it to other humans. Abductees who think symbolically, however, would have to translate the telepathic impressions into their native language in realtime, as if they did not do so they would be unable to consciously comprehend what was being communicated.

Assuming that the aliens in question communicate telepathically in one’s own native language, however, it would make sense that those who by default think within the context of their own native language would understand them at an immediate and specific, but to a nonetheless limited degree, as there is always something lost in translation — be it from mentalese to symbolic language, or from one symbolic language to a foreign Other. If permitted, questions expressed due to a need for greater detail and discrimination would likely result from such a communication.

What about linguistic telepathic experiences between those who spoke one native language and those who spoke another, relatively foreign language, however? Imagine, for instance, that I, a symbolic thinker who only knows English, were to have an experience of linguistic telepathy with a symbolic thinker who only knows Chinese: would they hear English when I communicate to them, and would I hear Chinese when they spoke to me, thereby rendering our communications as useless as it would have been had we spoken verbally? Or would the underlying, shared, nonsymbolic language of mentalese be transmitted as well, either allowing us to understand one another despite the foreign languages we were using to communicate one another or automatically and unconsciously translating that mentalese into inner speech, overriding the foreign mental tongue?

It also helped make more sense of tales I had researched long ago, both of which emerged out of Catholicism — specifically the cases of Padre Pio and Maria de Jesus de Agreda, “The Lady in Blue,” both of whom were venerated by the Catholic Church. Both were evidently rather adept at the out-of-body experience (OBE), too, it would seem, and allegedly capable of other astounding feats of psi, even if taken solely within the context of OBEs. While their stories — which are intriguing, to say the least — deserve to be detailed in a paper dedicated to that subject, I mention both here because they both exhibited apparent telepathy in a similar fashion that always fascinated me and now makes some sense in the context of what is known regarding mentalese. 

First is one of the countless peculiar stories regarding the abilities of Padre Pio, this one from the era of World War II. The tale comes to us from Benardo Rosini, a general of the Italian Air Force. During a search for a secret storehouse of weapons hidden in the Nazi territory of San Giovanni, several allied pilots reported seeing a monk with upheld hands floating in the sky. They also described some strange sort of resistance around the monk, making them unable to fly over the target — or drop their bombs for that matter, as the mechanism seemed to be jammed. The first mission to encounter this problem returned to base, more than a little embarrassed to report what had occurred. They tried again and again, but try as they might, mission after mission returned to the base at Bari, Italy, reporting a hovering monk in the sky over San Giovanni. What first seemed like a joke soon bred into fear, so the US Commanding General took up a squadron under his own command — but he met with the same result. Situation what-the-fuck: big floating monk. Bombs were dropped and obliterated the surrounding area, but not one was to fall on San Giovanni. After the war, the American General, along with a few pilots, went to the town and sought out the monk with the superpowers that was known to live there. When he entered the Capuchin monastery, he recognized, in a group of friars, the hovering, supernatural monk he’d seen during the war: Padre Pio. It was Pio that went towards him right away, however, putting his hand upon the General’s shoulder and saying: ”So it is you, the one who wanted to do away with us all.”

Interestingly, though Padre Pio had spoken this in his Benevento dialect, the general was convinced he had spoken in English. In a few renditions of this account, it was explained as one of his many “talents”. I also found a similar account in the story of Maria de Jesus de Agreda (“Sister Mary of Jesus”), also known as The Lady in Blue.

There was Catholic mission known as the Isolita Mission, which took place in 1622 in the area now known as New Mexico in order to convert some of the native tribes to Christianity. There had been, from the Christian perspective, failures and successes, but with respect to some tribes, it seemed, there was no job to be done at all. Case in point: in 1629, Father Alonzo de Benavides had been approached by a group of some fifty natives of an unknown tribe who asked that their missionaries be sent to them. This native tribe, known as the Jamanos, claimed they were sent by a mysterious, young and beautiful Lady in Blue who had been teaching them the ways of Christianity. And this, to put it mildly, was more than a little odd.

Nonetheless, two missionaries were sent back with the tribe, who had evidently traveled the lengthy distance from Texas to the priests by means of directions that had been given to them by the Lady in Blue. Upon investigation, it was found that though these native peoples had never met any of the Spanish or French and no official missionary had yet reached them, they knew things they should not, and by all logical reasoning could not have known. For instance, they carried crosses, had altars, knew Roman Catholic rituals and liturgy — and all in their native language. The missionaries then went about baptizing the entire tribe.

Naturally, the question arises: just who the fuck was this Lady in Blue? ”She came down from the heights to us,” the natives had said to him, ”she taught us the new religion, she stayed among us for a time, she told us you would come and to make you welcome, and then she went away. That’s all we know.”

Father Benavides knew that the nuns of the Poor Clare order wore blue habits, and so he found a painting of one of them — of one Sister Louisa Carrion, to be exact — and showed it to the Jamanos. He asked if this was the woman, and they said that while that was certainly the outfit, it wasn’t the woman herself. The woman in the painting, they said, was too elderly and chubby; the woman they’d seen had been beautiful and young. So the lady was a Poor Clare nun, it seemed, though evidently not the one he’d revealed to them in the painting. This actually didn’t help in the manner of an explanation, Benavides knew, because from the day they took their vows and onward to the grave these nuns never left their convents, much less journeyed far distances on unofficial missions to fucking Mexico.

More than a little confused, Father Benavides wrote to King Philip IV of Spain and Pope Urban VIII in order to get to the bottom of this. He told them about what was going on and asked for their help in solving the mystery. He wanted to discover who had been there before him and, as it seemed, beaten him to the punch. The response from both of them was that no one had been sent before Benavides at all.

They decided to investigate, however, and soon enough they found her. In the Poor Clare convent in Agreda, Spain, they found Maria de Jesus de Agreda, the superior of the convent. This woman, now 29 years of age, was a mystic and had experienced many “visions” over the course of her life which fed her writing. And even prior to her questioning due to Father Benavides inquiry, she had openly admitted to visiting and converting the Natives of North America. When she was presented with the argument that this was impossible, as she’d never left the convent, she responded by saying she had visited them ”not in body, but in spirit.”

In more modern terminology, she had visited them in a non-corporeal form during an out-of-body experience.

So a letter was sent to Father Benavides in Spain, informing him that he’d better come meet with the nun, as something was certainly amiss — and this he did that year of 1631. Upon meeting her, he discovered that between 1620 and 1631, she often lapsed into these cataleptic trances during which she had strange dreams, or visions, of being carried to strange lands occupied by strange people, to whom she taught her religion. It is claimed that she visited various tribes in the American Southwest some 500 times, sometimes four times a day, to whom she was variously known as the Blue Lady.

As proof of her seemingly impossible disembodied journeys, she was able to provide details about the natives such as their customs, clothes and appearance. She could describe the climate. She gave names of tribes the father either had already known about or later on found to be accurate. She knew things that had just been recently discovered by the Europeans, as a matter of fact, and which it was either impossible or highly unlikely for her to know. As impossible as it seemed that this woman was traveling out of body, it equally seemed indisputable that this nun had been to this distant land and mingled with the tribes.

Most relevant is how they understood her, and her them, as she had no way to know their language. She explained that she had simply spoken to them in her disembodied form and that her supposed deity had let them understand one another, which makes about as much sense as explaining Padre Pio’s indistinguishable ability (though his stories suggest he could also accomplish this while within his physical form) as “one of his talents.”

While this may not suggest telepathy to some, it’s been the only way these incidents, assuming they truly happened, could ever hope to make any sense to me. In present terminology, my hypothesis on the Padre Pio incident could be articulated in this way: as he spoke in his own dialect, he simultaneously communicated the message in mentalese, which the general’s mind automatically interpreted into his own language. With respect to the Lady in Blue, her means of communicating to the tribe in a disembodied form makes the telepathy hypothesis a bit more digestible, as there was no spoken word to contend with. The Blue Lady’s explanation that her deity permitted them to understand one another could be easily explained as a theological rationalization of two-way mentalese telepathy.

Mentalese would prove to be invaluable with respect to linguistic telepathy, particularly if you are alien to the culture and the associated language in question. Its true that in the process of communicating non-symbolically that much may be lost in translation, or at least left uncomfortably vague, but it would constitute a truly universal language, it would provide a common ground for all life, or at least all intelligent life, and this common ground may not be exclusive to those who evolved on earth, but all life — or intelligent life — throughout the cosmos.

In other words, this may constitute an answer to what those involved with SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) have come to refer to as the Incommensurability Problem. This refers to the anticipated cognitive mismatch between humans and an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). They may have developed under entirely different conditions from within a truly alien ecosystem on an exoplanet radically different than our own. They may have evolved distinct sense organs and instincts and even have a far longer lifespan than the oldest human that has ever lived. All these variables would certainly influence their understanding of the world and, to get to the core of the problem, influence how they think and communicate. If that were the case, how could we effectively communicate with each other? Where is our analogue to the Rosetta Stone? Would our divergent histories breed divergent cognition, making mutual understanding entirely impossible? Even if we could communicate with one another, could we really understand one another? This has spawned a search for a “universal language.”

Carl Sagan logically deduced that any ETI capable of creating technology that would enable them to communicate with us through, for instance, radio, regardless as to the specifics of its origins or the circumstances of its development, must be well versed in math and science. It was based on the assumption that these were external things we’d all see, logical conclusions we’d all come to, regardless of planetary or cultural context, simply by virtue that we emerged in the same universe, with the same governing laws. So he elected math and science as the universal language, and it was under the guidance of this logic that he pushed for the golden records on the Pioneer Probes and something else. He also scoffed at UFO sightings, abductions, and anything paranormal or parapsychological, however, so would have naturally dismissed telepathy as a likely candidate for a universal language. 

Exploiting telepathy with inner speech at the non-symbolic, mentalese level would in effect answer the incommensurability problem, however, as mentalese would constitute a language shared by all forms of life, cutting across all categories, be it regional or planetary. In this context the differences Jacobs identified between what abductees experience in the realm of telepathy involving inner speech during abduction experiences make a great deal more sense. 

If the bulk of UFO and alien encounters and particularly alien abductions are to be believed, they utilize telepathy as their central mode of communication. I assume this is even the case outside encounters and abductions, as aliens, for instance, often communicate telepathically to one another during abductions and abductees can sometimes “tap into” their conversation. If the aliens predominantly communicated verbally, for instance, they would likely use this when speaking to one another during abductions for the same reason my parents used to spell out words when they were trying to hide from us what they were talking about when we were kids. They don’t, however, and if they’re an interstellar species that has come into contact with other forms of intelligent life, this actually makes a good deal of sense, especially in the light of how telepathic mentalese functions. There is no need for a Rosetta Stone, as it overcomes the language barrier, just as it did with Padre Pio, The Lady in Blue, and presumably countless abductees. 

Assuming we’re not the first ETI they’ve interacted with, telepathy in the form of mentalese is probably their basic means of telepathic communication. Those abductees who think predominantly in mentalese would receive “impressions” during their telepathic communications with aliens which their minds would then have to translate into symbolic language, at least when expressing those conversations to others, thereby serving the role as an interpreter, whereas those who think predominantly in symbolic language would only have to engage in transcription, playing the role of a stenographer. 

Many of the aliens, or at the very least those who have been cast in roles that require extensive, long-form communication, have probably studied our native languages, however, and may, on top of their mentalese capabilities, communicate to us through our familiar, linguistic context. What would be the benefit of this? Those abductees who thought symbolically would hear and potentially have a telepathic dialogue with them through inner speech that parallels the way human beings verbally communicate to one another, but those abductees who thought in mentalese: what of them? 

Being someone who thinks predominantly in symbolic language myself, this makes a good deal of sense with respect to my alien encounters that involved linguistic telepathy. In my flashback concerning the creature who called himself the Doctor, which I detailed in my blog post Ancestral Interstellar Supervillains, I know that I at least initially received impressions and associated imagery when he telepathically communicated with me — no inner speech was involved:

Upon meeting his eyes, we were suddenly communicating mind-to-mind. Any sense I had of my external environment vanished as I became absorbed in the content occupying the mental bond we now shared. He had commandeered my psyche and, judging from the high-speed picture-show flashing before my inner eye like a flipbook composed of random images, proceeded to explore it with as much speed and thoroughness as his little henchmen had been exploring the room. It was as if he was working the switches of my mind yet leaving me there to witness the process as a passive passenger. Ultimately he communicated to me in what seemed to be a form of internal yet interpersonal dialogue. They were Scientists, he told me, and he was The Doctor. He was very old, very wise, and in some way served as a grandfather to me.

Though I explained this as “a form of internal yet interpersonal dialogue,” it was much unlike my telepathic conversations with Nimi. They seemed to be expressed initially as simple meanings, with subsequent symbols spawning in my mind as a result. Though I’ve never expressed it in writing, I specifically recall that when he communicated the fact that he was The Doctor to me I didn’t “hear” that fact internally but rather saw it visually, as an image in my mind, displayed as if the text, written on the old, worn page of a book, was viewed from an angle. Still, this image seemed attached to impressions, so it was predominantly mentalese. 

With the creature called the Leader — who I encountered in the toy room of my childhood friend Jimmy when him, his brother, and I were “camping out” there — I know that we argued telepathically, and though I feel that we exchanged words of the “inner dialogue” order, I’ve been unable to recall the details of the conversation, so I have little of substance to offer with respect to this circumstance.

Nimi and I often had extensive conversations, however, which involved exchanges in inner speech, often in tandem with associated still and animate imagery in such a way that the inner speech served as a kind of internal voiceover. In the group of flashbacks I had concerning her, I can recall particular sentences and even specific chunks of dialogue we had between one another telepathically. The nature of our extensive interactions and two-way communications is, in fact, one of the few central reasons why my memories of her remain  far more difficult for me to dismiss in my most self-doubting moments than my interactions with the other creatures. I simply cannot convince myself that our meetings merely constitute dialogues I had with some hallucinogenic externalization of my unconscious during my childhood or that these memories are in fact false memories obscuring a real-time interaction with some dissociated aspect of my psyche or autonomous subpersonality. She felt too real, undeniably real, as if I were truly dealing with a separate entity. 

While all of my encounters with her suggest linguistic telepathy was involved, in at least two encounters I had with her sometime between the ages of five and eleven, both experiences that I’ve written of elsewhere, there was additional suggestion that this was the case.

I wrote about one such conversation in my post Aliens, Auras, and the Indigo Children:

In the midst of what seemed to be a more casual conversation than those which we usually had, I remember revealing to Nimi how I had recently decided that I wanted to be either a scientist or a chef when I grew up. We were, at the time, both standing in my room in the area opposite the bed, with her beside me, far taller than me. Curious as to what she did for a living, I asked her what she was, and she said she was a Teacher. I pondered on whether I might one day be a teacher as well. In response, she said that I was an Artist, that it was “my work.” Curious, I asked her how she knew it would be my job. She said that she did not mean that kind of work, at least not necessarily. Instead, she explained, by “work” she meant that it was a talent I had developed over the course of many lifetimes and would most likely continue developing in this one.


The other experience I wrote about in a post entitled Nimi’s Planes:

She had been beside my loft bed in the darkness when, in the midst of our conversation, I confessed to her that I had always felt as if I had a foot in two worlds. As I told her this, I imagined my body wedged between a paper-thin membrane separating two realities, involuntarily painting a mental picture for her to go along with my telepathic voice-over just as she so often did with me. She responded with a soft, “in a way, that is true,” which made me immediately suspicious. I feared from her mental tone that perhaps it was just the all-too-typical adult’s way of humoring a child, but she then did what adults characteristically failed to do after casting out those words: she actually explained to me just in what way that it was true. 

This was when we came to share the same dreamscape, floating beside one another. At some distance in the blue-black space before us, I saw four or five flat, rectangular boards hovering slightly above one another. She told me that there were “planes of existence” and that some people could function better on one plane than on others. Despite the fact that I have no recollection of it, she must have indicated that each plane was a “world,” using that word specifically, as I remembered turning to her in confusion. My understanding, I told her, was that the world was round, not flat. Her response seemed to clear things up for me at the time, and though I cannot recall with certainty what it was that she said, I believe that she explained to me that it was a metaphor, an indirect way of explaining something.

In both cases I became confused regarding a word which she used — “work” in the first example; “world” in the next — that I then questioned, and which she then had to go on to explain. If it were the case that she was telepathically communicating to me through mere “impressions,” my mind would have presumably received the meaning or intent of her impressions and then proceeded to automatically and unconsciously translate it into my native language. There would have been no confusion over any words, no need for her to define the words and reframe my understanding.

Given that telepathically communicating through impressions would have presumably been possible, as I believe that’s what I experienced at least to some degree in the Doctor flashback, and that it may have been easier in this respect, as I would have presumably immediately understood the concepts she was attempting to convey, I must wonder why she elected to communicate to me through linguistic telepathy, whereas the Doctor and Goblin Man didn’t seem to. After some contemplation I’ve come to wonder if it may have come down to her role, or her “work,” as she might put it. In the Doctor flashback, the impressions and images I received from him brought me to understand that he was The Doctor and that the rest of his team were Scientists and that they were just here to give me a check-up, perhaps spawned by his curiosity regarding the fact that I was wearing leg braces (which, whether he knew it or not, was due to Leggs-Calves-Perthes Disease). In other words, his role or work may not typically require long-form telepathic conversations with (relatively) alien entities such as myself, so mentalese may have been his natural default when unexpectedly coming upon me hiding beneath that bed as they raided the bedroom. Nimi, on the other hand, identified herself as The Teacher — a role that, given it would presumably involve understanding a wide variety of concepts as well as alien cultures, as it apparently involved teaching lessons to alien entities such as myself — would likely also require mastering diverse native languages and employing that through her telepathic communication with her students so she would be able to customise her lessons in a way best suited to the student in question. She identified me as an Artist, so perhaps that was why she chose to communicate me most often in what I’ve since come to call documentary-style telepathy — telepathically-transmitted still or animate imagery with telepathic, linguistic voiceover. 

A subsequent experience I had in 2011 reinforced this notion of a customized telepathic experience among aliens playing a particular role, or pursuing specific “work,” though I must confess the experience was not nearly as convincing as my encounters with Nimi. Though all of what I consider to be the telltale signs of an abduction or alien encounter took place, I neither remember seeing a UFO or encountering an alien being. I have also written of this previously, in a post entitled The Conversation:

I can’t be sure, but I think it was a man with whom I spoke. The subject matter of the conversation should have made me remember the individual with whom I had the conversation, too, because it dealt with the abduction phenomenon and my studies, speculations and theories regarding it. These are not topics I discuss with just anyone. At some point in the conversation I remember explaining why I thought the Grays were “insectival,” but then, doubting the word was appropriate, stuttered in embarrassment and then said “insectoid” instead. I often do this kind of thing when I’m talking with someone about things and using words I’ve read and thought about but haven’t spoken about. I tend to do this most often with people I consider a lot more intelligent or that bear a far better vocabulary than I do, for while I could use a word fleetingly among some people (who wouldn’t be likely to know the correct word or word pronunciation anyway), among others I might come across as a dumbass trying to talk over their head but instead just doing a shitty job of talking over my own head. I might end up looking like a jackass trying to hide his lack of intelligence beneath big words, like some kid pretending he’s on the same level as some genius he’s talking to. So whoever I was talking to I trusted and considered intelligent. Two more very good reasons I should remember who the hell it was.

The person also seemed to catch my embarrassment and was quick to soften my fall and brush it off by revealing he knew what I meant.

I remember explaining that the Small Grays seemed, in abduction reports, to be in a subordinate position to the Tall Grays, who in turn also seemed to have an authority: taller, slender beings in cloaks or robes that are often said to look like a Praying Mantis. The person said “Praying Mantis” just before I said it, which indicated to me — with great excitement and enthusiasm on my part at the time, I might add, forcing me to smile and give a little laugh — that they were actually listening to me, taking it all in, on the same page as me and, even better, were apparently well-read on the subject. It went beyond that at the time, however. I remember thinking just after the person said that how weird it was, because it seemed as though he had read my mind. I went on to say that the Mantis species we know on earth have young that do not always look like miniature versions of Mantises, but instead often look like ants, so it was my theory that the Grays were merely the younger versions, the “nymphs” of the taller Mantis beings. They were basically an advanced insect species. I then explained how they also seemed to be part of a “hive mind” like bees, and this is where the person again interjected, this time to express a difference of opinion, feeling that the “bee” analogy was insufficient or misleading.

My hesitation over using the word “insectival,” and the fact that I then stuttered as I attempted to say “insectoid,” as well as the mystery individual saying the word “praying mantis” just before I was able to say it myself, both would seem to suggest that if this was a telepathic conversation with an alien, as I believed it was, it was clearly one of linguistic telepathy of the symbolic kind.

My telepathic experiences of this nature therefore were in good company with respect to my encounters with Nimi and the other presumably alien creatures, but when I began having such experiences, however limited, with my fellow human beings, I inevitably felt that I was the rarest of weirdos. It took some time, experience, and deep-Googling research for me to discover, to my great relief, that I was by no means alone in having this experience with my fellow humans. Indeed, there are scattered reports of individuals who either report “hearing,” with their mind’s ear, the thoughts of another, which we’ll call telepathic reception; report someone else heard their thoughts with their mind’s ear, which we’ll call telepathic transmission; or report that they even held a back-and-forth with one another mind-to-mind in this fashion, which we’ll call telepathic dialogue. I myself have experienced all three — though again, I’ve only held telepathic linguistic, telepathic dialogue with apparently nonhuman entities. Among my fellow humans, I can only claim that I’ve received and transmitted such subjective messages, never engaged in an active back-and-forth.

To do so has been an interest of mine for some time…

UFOs: Sightings, Encounters, & Recurring Dreams (Part III).

III. UFOs & the Numinous.

After a recent UFO dream, I reflected on the recurring dreams I’ve experienced:

As a kid, I had recurring dreams that were the same dream, though over time they revealed a bit more of the scenario they depicted. Since I was sixteen, however, I’ve had recurring dreams of a slightly different flavor: they all shared the same theme; they are all variations on the same scenario.

One of the two major themes is a UFO sighting. Frequently enough the UFO or UFOs are above the forest between my parent’s yard and the road. These dreams are always vivid and sensory-rich, as if I’m actually there, as if its entirely real. They always seem marinated in the same dark, vivid, clear and eerie kind of mood. It’s dark and intense yet somehow calm at the same time. I wish I could better articulate the mood so that I could more easily examine it. Following these dreams, this residual mood hangs with me for awhile, almost as if a part of me is still in the dream, emotionally-speaking. Its somehow a comforting, balancing, almost mystical feeling, like I’m fully awake in a way, like my brain got what it needed.

I’ve increasingly wondered over the years why these dreams emerge when they do. What triggers them? One thought is that recurring dreams, much like flashbacks, may recur again and again in an attempt to process or discharge the emotions produced by them (if they’re memories) or which they represent (if they’re dreams). But is that indeed the case, at least here?

In the 2014 article, “What’s Behind Your Recurring Dreams?” by Michelle Carr Ph.D., she presents another possible answer. Or an elaboration upon it, perhaps.

In college, for instance, perhaps you began having dreams of missing an exam due to the stress produced by an actual, upcoming exam. This dream, or variations on the theme, may recur throughout your college career for reasons that are rather clear: you’re stressing out over an exam. Once you are seeking an actual career, however, those recurrent dreams may be triggered again, as the stress produced by an upcoming job interview is remarkably similar to the exam anxiety you formerly experienced.

This, she explains, is a complex, or script, as they are sometimes called. A similar network of experienced emotions in your life may serve as a trigger for activating such a complex, at which time the entire script unfolds. In other words, it operates in a manner similar to psychological projection and transference: the brain interprets something similar to something in the past as identical to that something from the past. As a consequence, in a meaningful but perhaps consciously invisible way, the past becomes present.

Some of these scripts, one would imagine, are highly personalized, whereas others are more culturally-influenced or archetypal in nature. In either case, this is thought by some to account for recurrent dreams. It suggests that the dreamer has not acknowledged and dealt with something in their life that is producing the stress that triggers the dreams and that the dream will continue to recur until the conflict achieves resolution.

Given I’ve actually seen UFOs, do these dreams stem from some actual, original experience, one that then became the default representation in dreams for the emotions originally elicited by the experience? The day before this most recent dream wasn’t only my birthday but the first major snow of the season, and both my age and driving in the snow are sources of anxiety, so might it be that that triggered it?

The thing is, these dreams don’t terrify me. There is always an element of fear lingering, yes, but it’s always dwarfed by my curiosity and awe. Recurrent dreams typically constitute nightmares, too, from what I understand, so I’m rather confused.

It would appear that I am by no means alone, as I discovered on Reddit.

In a thread from 2018 entitled, “Anyone else have constant dreams of UFOS?” a user by the name of wright345 related the following:

I have dreams of UFOS pretty often. They don’t really happen around particular emotional or psychological states, and I’ve never had a close encounter so to speak with the ufo or any beings inside. They just stay in the air or fly around. Usually disc-shaped, though last night they were varied shapes and colorful this time.

Another user by the name of scrignutz responded with his own experiences:

I’ve had hyper-realistic UFO dreams during several periods of my life. The most memorable—and the ones very difficult to shake, as they felt like real experiences—happened over a few years early in this century. While different, they put me in the exact strange emotional state as a frequent dream I had as a child of 10 or so: bewilderment along with concern or fear.

The adult dreams involved a rural, natural park at the end of the suburb where I lived at the time. I knew the park well, and walked there daily. Hilly terrain, with a typical Western U.S. landscape of occasional conifers but mostly brushy hillsides. These dreams saw me returning to different hillsides in the park, at sundown in order to be at a location by nightfall. And then the sky would fill up with the most fantastic swirling multi-colored wheels and discs, which would hover in formation and then shoot off like meteorites. I would hide in fear amongst the brush, but watch in wonder. There were no aliens or landings or anything of the sort; just these fantastic wheels in the sky, neon coloring, and if I close my eyes I can see them today, decades later.

In response, wright345 added:

Mine often happen at (hilly) places I live(d) and sometimes elsewhere but still familiar. They aren’t usually at dusk though. That bewilderment/awestruck feeling mixed with fear is what I usually feel as well, every time I see them.

In another thread, also from 2018 and entitled, “Recurring dreams of UFOs”, erako writes:

I’ve been having the same dream for about 2 months? I’m in my front yard and I’m generally in the same place, give or take a few feet and I look up at the sky and see these ships. So far they’ve been needle pointed, spherical, blimp-like (but metal and plated), lights, dark triangles, black cubes, more sci fi style human made looking space ships, swarms of drones coming from ships and probably more that I can’t remember at the moment. It’s a lot.

A few dreams have been in other locations. Sometimes it’s night, but often it’s day. The only night dream was an invasion with several large lights in the sky and swarms of drone-like ships coming to take us, that dream was in a different location.

But the way it goes is, I’m doing something I walk through my front door, down the steps and look up at the sky and see them. It’s a feeling of fear and excitement, I’m happy, but I’m afraid. Sometimes they’re massive and no one will look up, sometimes they’re tiny and fast, so no one would catch it anyway. My most recent one my dad saw, which was fantastic.

I’m rarely lucid in these dreams, but sometimes I am. In one of the more prominent dreams, I was visited by god, who was a glowing golden Buddha statue and he told me I was meant to be a healer. Then I saw a row of them in the sky passing by, all different types. And as an areligious person, that was kind of weird.

Even from these three examples, there are clearly many correlations with my own recurring UFO dreams. For instance, wright345 described being unable to identify any psychological states that preceded these dreams and which might have triggered them, which has also been the case with me. He also recalled no incident in which the craft landed or any alien encounters occurred (though there is, in my case, a single exception).

Wright345, scrignutz and erako all described the settings of these dreams as taking place in areas where they either currently live or had formerly lived, much as has been the case in many of my dreams. This makes me wonder if these recurring dreams were perhaps born of actual experiences in those locations; memories that have remained inaccessible to consciousness but can sometimes bleed through into dream life.

The most striking similarity, however, which all three share with me, is their reaction to the UFO sightings. We aren’t alone in this reaction, either.

A user by the name of EliHood posted a thread entitled, “Recurring dreams about a Massive UFO event.” He writes that since the beginning of the year he had been having recurring dreams regarding UFOs. The dreams typically begin in a normal fashion, but then he looks into the sky and sees the UFO, which gets increasingly closer to him, prompting him to run and hide in fear. “Last night takes the cake,” he then writes, “which prompts this post.” As in the prior dreams, he was at first engaged in some mundane activity; in this particular case, he was in traffic. He then suddenly noticed a UFO in the sky, though the anxiety wasn’t as intense at first. Everyone began getting out of their vehicles, he explained, “to take a look at this gigantic white saucer shaped ufo,” but this time, there was nowhere for him to run and hide. Ultimately he explains seeing a bright, white light as he was being sucked into the UFO, but what really caught my attention was how he explained his reaction as it began to descend. He writes that he began to feel “this IMMENSE TERROR/ASTONISHMENT.”

A user by the name of Timeghost182 posted a thread entitled, “Recurring dreams about lights in the sky. UFOs”. Here he details dreams he had on 12/17/13, 2/18/14, 10/3/14, 10/23/14. 3/2/15, and 5/14/15. Each time he appears to be in a different location.

For his 10/3/14 dream, he writes:

I had been on the front porch of my mom’s house in Opelousas, concerned about something, i was loading a revolver. My friend had just come back from somewhere and he brought home many revolvers and different types of ammo. I recall choosing the gun that held 10 bullets as opposed to 6. I loaded it with hollow points and walked outside with 2 people. On the front porch, it had just gotten dark out. Something shimmered across the sky like a shooting star. It caught my attention but was fleeting and gone in a second. About 10 seconds later i see “it”. An ominously huge craft with lights adorned all over flying through the sky. I immediately scream “UFO, UFO” to my 2 friends as if to be like …”Boom, I told you so… People called me crazy but there it is.. I’ve been right all along.” Then there were others flying in very strange unpredictable patterns throughout the night sky. The bright lights flickering on and off in weird intervals. One common theme throughout all of these dreams is that when i see the craft(s) I am immediately met with a feeling of fascination and elation, like a kid catching Santa Clause, but then followed by the most extreme feeling of helplessness one can imagine. They make me very uncomfortable.

Looking upon these dreams as a whole himself, he noted recurring themes: he was always the one to spot UFOs in the sky and to turn the attention of others towards them, for instance, and he has never been inside the craft or seen their occupants. Most relevant is a rearticulation of what he commented on towards the end of his notes on the above-quoted dream, which is that he was mostly “fascinated, elated, and interested at first, followed by extreme apprehension and fear.” He again describes this reaction in his 3/2/15 dream, saying that, as usual, he is “fascinated but then immediately feel terror and uneasiness at the sight of these things. […] I remember my reaction upon proving myself right was a brief second of wonder and awe followed by immense fear and terror.”

A user by the name of melvvay posted a thread entitled, “Occurring dreams about UFOs,” with “occuring” clearly being a typo. The poster writes:

I’ve always had this dream where I keep teleporting to this rocky desert type of setting. and in front of me is [an] enormous ufo that’s been crashed diagonal. I get excited because Dream me has discovered a ufo and couldn’t wait to write a news paper. After that I wake up. What does this mean?

In response, the user levelologist wrote:

I have had this same dream since [I was] a kid. The dream is part dread and part immense fascination. There is also usually a massive sky battle happening with chrome crafts and terrestrial crafts. In my dream I pray for one to crash so I can go check it out. I’m 48 and have had this dream as long as I can remember dreaming. They are so vivid that I think about them almost daily.

When they actually note it when describing their recurring UFO dreams, everyone appears to have suspiciously similar reactions. Scrignutz described the feeling the UFO dreams elicited as one of “bewilderment along with concern or fear,” and wright345 agreed, stating that the “bewilderment/awestruck feeling mixed with fear” is true to his experience as well. This is also incredibly close to erako’s “feeling of fear and excitement” in which he was happy yet afraid; EliHood’s “immense terror” and “astonishment”; Timeghost182’s “fascination and elation” followed by “the most extreme feeling of helplessness one can imagine” and levelologist’s “part dread and part immense fascination.”

Interestingly, this reaction we all share also echoes the reactions I had during my actual, UFO encounters, and it would appear that here, too, I am not alone.

Written by Marc Moravec and published in the April, 1981 issue of The MUFON UFO Journal, the article “Psychological Reactions to UFO Events” centered on a study of 46 cases, from which it was determined that:

The most common psychological reaction to close encounter UFO events is fear. The next most common reaction is curiosity.

How many reported both reactions, however, and what might a larger study reveal? It’s clear that many who report UFOs do report either one emotion or the other, it should be noted, while others report the sort of mixed reactions I and others have experienced in dreams and in real life. Why is this the case?

With respect to the mixed reaction, I think I’ve determined what it is. I think I know what this feeling we share, and which our mutual recurring dreams elicited, really is — or at least what others have labeled it as and perhaps more accurately articulated it as being. It is what theologian Rudolf Otto called “the numinous.”

It was first expressed in his 1917 book, published in German and entitled Das Heilige – Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationale. Yes, this is fucking Greek to me. It was subsequently published in English in 1923, where it was entitled The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. To be clear, I haven’t read the book, but various internet sources seem to outline his general idea rather clearly — assuming their accuracy, of course.

In short, Otto described “the holy” as being comprised of two distinct elements, one of them being being moral perfection, the other which he called the numinous, based on the Latin numen, for “divine power,” and which he asserted “cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind.”

The numinous experience was itself composed of three parts, all articulated in the Latin phrase “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” In short, this roughly translates to English as “a fearful and fascinating mystery,” though in efforts to further to flesh out the concept, it seems best to break it down in more detail, namely word by word.

By “mysterium,” he means to convey the notion of what he refers to as “the wholly other.” This is something so utterly alien to our ordinary experience that it generates a state of astonishment or wonder in us — one that is so absolute it leaves us in a state of silence and stupor. Then there is the element of “tremendum” or “mysterium tremendum,” which leaves us feeling small, utterly insignificant, frustratingly inadequate and ultimately terrified before its awesome and overwhelming power. Last yet equally significant is the vital ingredient of “fascinans” or “mysterium fascinans,” which is to say a charm or attractive quality which inspires in us an allure or fascination despite the simultaneous, aforementioned terror.

And in the midst of these echoing dream themes or an actual sighting or encounter, being before these UFOs does indeed elicit the sense of being in the presence of something terrifyingly and fascinatingly alien — something I have formerly described as my “dark moods” and what the aforementioned Reddit users have attempted to articulate in their own, individual ways.

The question, of course, is why the UFO sightings in and outside of dreams elicit the numinous experience. If these recurring dreams stem from still more actual sightings of mine that I cannot recall, perhaps these dreams represent my mind’s attempts to process those blocked memories and the numinous emotions they elicited. And perhaps this is the case with the others as well.

As to why UFO sightings, regardless as to whether one is awake or dreaming, produces such numinous experiences is something I’ve previously explored. Perhaps this is simply the predictable reaction the life forms of a lesser-advanced civilization have to the technology of a more advanced one. If not, this effect on us may be intentional and may even help provide an explanation as to why we have sightings of them at all — as well as the recurring dreams they inspire.

UFOs: Sightings, Encounters, & Recurring Dreams (Part II).

II. Personal UFO Sightings and Encounters.

It was towards the end of 1994 when strange memories began spontaneously floating to the surface of my mind. Initially, they dealt with seeming alien encounters as well as UFO sightings and close encounters throughout my childhood. Given my curiosity regarding my recurring UFO dreams, I will focus here exclusively on my UFO-related flashbacks and real-time observations.

Though I do not distinctly recall seeing a UFO in the following memory, the presence of one, I feel, was strongly implied, especially given my other, far more blatant memories of such sightings and encounters. This occurred when I was young, and it was certainly before 1988, when I was ten, as we were still living in our first house, which was in a suburban area. Behind our local police department there was a large field that was also accessible by climbing over the chain link fence at the very end of our backyard. Sometimes we would climb the fence to play over there, though my mother preferred that we walk or bike the half a block around. There was a baseball diamond way in the back, a football field that began almost directly across from our backyard and a sandbox right by the tennis court, which was situated between the football field and the parking lot for the police station.

It was in that sandbox where I found myself one late afternoon, playing and nervously watching as the occupied tennis court was slowly but surely deserted until I was the sole inhabitant of the field. Once alone, a gigantic shadow fell over me, like something large and circular had positioned itself above me in the sky, though I never recall looking up. Immediately, the world around me suddenly took on a rather ominous edge, an almost sinister quality. It was as if someone had pressed the cosmic pause button, leaving an intense still and a penetrating silence. Creeping up on me was that distinct sense of being watched, too, like the way in which one might watch a bug in a jar or some tiny creature under a microscope, but there was something more predatory here as well, as if I was a field mouse feeling the doom inspired by a hawk circling above me, as if it were some sentient stormcloud above me and I could sense the static energy in the air, the foreboding feeling of an impending lightning strike.

And in a way, what ultimately happened left me feeling as though I had been struck by lightning.

What followed was incredibly confusing, at least in my memory. In an apparent flash, it felt as though data was being downloaded into my brain from above, yet at the same time I was literally, physically ascending. For all I know, both may have been the case. All I recall for certain is that my surroundings suddenly disappeared and I was thrust into another “space” that I can now easily compare to an immersive virtual reality. The experience itself remains stubbornly difficult to nail down in words, ever-resistant to satisfying articulation, though over the years I’ve constantly tried. I was zipping about at high speed around, before, behind and through endless geometric patterns, growing fractals, and nets stretching on towards infinity in all directions. I soared through endless cubes within cubes, grids that stretched out into every direction, sliding down endless spirals. Zooming out of the macroscopic until it was microscopic, zooming into the smallest until it was the most inconceivably large. In essence, I felt akin to a worm that had suddenly been thrust into a bird’s eye view. I felt as if I was on overload, pushed to the brink of my capacity — and then it all stopped as suddenly as it began. I was back in the sandbox.

I would later realize how deeply this experience seemed to resonate with the experience of the Square upon being peeled of his measly two-dimensional plane and being forced to visit Spaceland in Edwin Abbott’s 1884 book, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, and how my struggle to articulate the experience paralleled the allegory of the cave that Plato wrote about in his 6th century work, Republic.

It was an enlightening yet frightening, confusing yet satisfying journey I experienced within or above that sandbox, or perhaps both, and, as was a very common characteristic of these memories, I remain not the least bit certain how it ended. There are, however, some deep associations between this memory and other things I recalled from my childhood.

There was, for instance, an old homework assignment that I found in the attic during high school. It was inside this box both my sisters and I kept beneath our beds as kids, and which housed all our artwork and other memorabilia. Given the words I wrote across the top of the page, the theme of the assignment was supposed to be, “In Celebration: A Past to Remember, A Future to Mold.” I later looked it up on the net, and it is, not coincidentally, the “Reflection Theme” of the PTA for the 1986-1987 school year, when I was in second grade. It was supposed to be a poster that dealt with the 50th anniversary of the Flint, Michigan sitdown strike. My memories, vague as they are, is that I had forgotten to do it and drew it all before class began on the very day it was due and hadn’t a clue as to what the assignment was about.

In any case, I had decided to interpret the project in a most peculiar fashion. Drawing a line down the center of the paper, I had drawn a gray brontosaurus to the left and a rather elaborate flying saucer to the right. The saucer had curved lines to the sides, suggesting movement, and was tipped upward, revealing its detailed underside. Twenty-one portholes — ten black, eleven gray — encircled the bottom along rim, and from each porthole extended a curved line that ultimately embedded itself into an eye-like structure at the center of the disc.

I can’t for certain say why I associate this drawing with my experience in the field that one, late day, but it wasn’t alone. It also reminded me of a short story I had written perhaps a year before the memories began flooding my mind in 1994, the central image of which has hung with me over the years. In the story a man finds himself alone one evening in an expansive landscape — a huge clearing in a forest, a desert, maybe even a field. All was eerily silent and, after a period of feeling as though he was being watched, he looks up into the sky to find, to his utter terror, that a gigantic eye was peering down at him. Aside from perhaps being associated with my experience in the field as well as my drawing, it also served as a way of expressing a strange fear of vast, open skies that I had for some reason developed around the second or third grade. I remember describing it as a fear of falling upward or being swallowed by the sky.

There were other memories of encountering UFOs that were considerably more blatant, however, such as the two regarding blue orbs descending from above, the first of which must have occurred when I was very young, as it took place at my maternal grandparent’s house. It was nighttime and I was alone, standing at one end of the dark kitchen as I gazed out the bay window at the other end, which looked out into the backyard. I could see this shimmering blue orb slowly descend from the sky towards the lawn, and it made my young mind think of the children’s rhyme, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

My other memory of blue orbs felt far less innocuous. By this time I must have been in my early teens and we had already moved into the second house, which resides in a rural area. I was on the right side of the yard, near where the huge horse barn would eventually be built, and it was nighttime yet again. Others may have been with me, though I don’t recall for sure. What I do remember is looking up into the night sky and seeing two bright, blue stars that began moving erratically. When it became clear that they were both curving downward, unerringly aimed towards me, I bolted across the grass, up and over the small picnic table we used to have there, and then darted into the woods running alongside the house.

On that same side of the yard, in the area where the aforementioned barn would later be, we used to have a swingset. I remember swinging there one beautiful summer day, facing the forest, my eyes staring at my feet as the background followed the looping perspective. I would see the ground, then the mown grass, the tall grass, the tops of the trees, and finally, the bright, blue sky before I came swinging back down again to watch it all play in reverse. As I did this, I began to hear this faint noise that was increasing in volume. To me, it sounded like rain hitting the leaves of the trees; as if some stormcloud was quickly approaching from deep in the forest and headed my way despite the beautiful weather and clear skies. Ultimately, as I watched my feet touch the blue sky one last time, I saw the edge of a gigantic black circle flying out from the tree tops, on its way to being just over my head — and at that point, the memory cuts off abruptly.

It appeared that I was looking at the bottom of a saucer that had been gliding across the treetops, accounting for the sound I had heard and had mistaken for rainfall. I would see this particular memory play over and over occasionally on the bridge of sleeping and waking, and it left me with that fear and awe kind of feeling.

Another memory, though significantly hazier, involved an incident that had taken place one night in the guest room at my paternal grandparents’ house, where my sisters and I slept on our visits. Above the head of my bed was the window, and I have a vague recollection of suddenly awakening during the night to the sense of an ominous presence which gave rise to an intense anxiety in me. I saw red lights flashing behind the curtains above me and, peering out from between the curtains cautiously, I saw, resting in their backyard, a large, egg- or acorn-shaped object adorned with blinking lights, it’s more pointed end aimed toward the sky. My instinct was to pretend it wasn’t there. Quickly, I lay back down in bed, pulled the blankets over my head and tried to go to sleep, or at the very least do my very best to play dead.

Then there were my two memories of the red orb.

The first was a memory I was uncertain about for a long time (and in fact to some degree I still am, despite its ruthless persistence), though if true, it may explain quite a bit about that initial UFO dream I had in December of 1994.

When we moved out of our old house and into our new one in 1988, the old house had yet to be sold; coincidentally, at the very same time the family of my best friend, Jimmy, was moving to Oregon. The family was hyper-religious, and my parents were convinced they were joining a cult. The father, a carpenter and an abusive asshole, had moved down early to set things up in their new place and start his new job. Their house was sold, too, and since they had no place to stay, and our old house had yet to be sold, my mother let them stay there. For at least one night James slept over at our new house, and I was happy to spend some time with a friend I suspected I would never see again.

That night my family, him and I went to the mall for something, probably things for the new house, and the car began to overheat on the freeway on the way back. My mother, grandmother, two sisters, Jimmy and I all waited on the side of the road as dad tried to get a ride from someone so he could get to the nearest phone, where he would call for a tow truck and find us an alternative way back home. As we sat on that hill, watching the sky as it darkened and the stars reveal themselves, I remember seeing a red light in the forest ahead of us — which is precisely where my memory of the events end until we finally arrived home, with my mother half-joking to him that he shouldn’t tell his mother about our car issues.

I subsequently confirmed that the whole incident, aside from the red light, actually happened, as Eve, the elder of my two younger sisters, remembered it herself. She even added details from her perspective that I didn’t recall or perhaps never knew to begin with, such as the fact that as we were all lying back, looking at the stars, Jimmy had laid his head upon her shoulder.

The interesting thing about this event is that, if my memories above are correct, everyone who sat on the hill that night save for my uncle were present on the bench-swing in the dream — even Jimmy, though in this case it wasn’t the Jimmy I knew in high school. In both the dream and the incident on the hill we were all having a good time watching the sky, too, until I saw a dancing light in the distance — though in the dream, it wasn’t red, as it was here. It led me to wonder whether the dream was in part a sort of residual memory of this specific event and if more happened on that hill beside the highway than I consciously recall.

Another and seemingly related memory, however — and one that I am most confident actually happened — took place a short time thereafter. It know it was shortly after we had moved into the new house as I still had the floor-to-ceiling window in my bedroom with a locked, black grate over it and blue-colored shades. Within a year or two my father had made it a regular-sized window. At the time, my bed had been positioned against the wall opposite the window and my head was laying towards it. I woke up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason and, without moving, popped open my eyes and looked outside the window. Off in the distance, behind the forest of trees that lied to the right of the driveway, I saw what appeared to be a red light in the distance. At first I just thought it was one of those red lights they have on top of towers and I just hadn’t noticed it before. Once I convinced myself of that hypothesis, despite the ominous feeling that persisted, I found myself closing my eyes again.

What felt like only a short time later, my eyes popped open again, and though I told myself I was mistaken, I again saw the red light in the distance, but that distance seemed to have diminished considerably. It seemed closer, and my anxiety was rising. Despite this, my eyes closed again. They popped open again later, and the red light seemed even closer. This recurred several times, and each time, the red light seemed to be increasing its proximity to my window. I remember it shimmering right in front of the trees at the end of the driveway. I have vaguer recollections of it ultimately hovering outside my window. After that, though, the memory certainly ends.

Why I didn’t run, move, or do something throughout any of this, I haven’t the foggiest clue, though I later read of similar reactions in UFO encounters. It’s as though the notion simply didn’t occur to me or I was somehow incapable of carrying it out.

A common thread running through all the aforementioned memories is that they came back to me in flashbacks. In other words, I mysteriously forgot each and every one of them immediately after they occurred, or so it seemed, only to spontaneously recall most of them around the age of sixteen or seventeen. Hypnotic confabulation is not a possibility, as no hypnosis was involved, so debunkers that prefer to be seen as skeptics would no doubt cry “false memory” and feel they solved the mystery. Though I certainly feel otherwise, for all I know, they are right. In tandem with this, however, they would also have to cry out “hallucination,” as I subsequently had real time sightings or encounters with UFOs, which is to say that I’ve recalled many such instances from the very moment in which they occurred.

The first of these I have previously written about in my post, UFOs and OBEs:

After speaking with my mother on the early morning of September 29, 2001, I learned that she was taking one of our horses to the vet due to its peculiar swollen eye and later, in the evening, her and my two sisters were going to see Sylvia Brown. Just as she was about to leave around ten, I finally went up to my bedroom and crashed.

As I rested on my bed, the familiar paralysis crept up on me, the volume knob on my senses seemed to turn down to zero, and I felt my subtle body drifting from the confines of my skin and sinking down into the otherworldly black void. Struggling to reattach to my body, I focused on a “whirring” noise I could hear as if from underwater, using it as the auditory equivalent as a rope by means of which I could pull myself back together, quite literally as it seemed. Once I met with success, I lifted my head, looked around, listened and discovered that the whirring had been coming from my computer, which I had left on in the midst of writing an article. I then went to sleep.

Around quarter to eight that evening is when I next awoke. I found that my computer was reading an error on the screen and my keyboard wasn’t responding. I rebooted it but had to unplug the keyboard and plug it back in to get it working again.

Heading downstairs, the quiet house suggested my mother and sisters were still out. I found my father asleep on the sofa chair, out cold, a strange movie on television. When he woke up as I came down the steps, I asked him if for any reason him or my mother had come into my room and fiddled with my computer as I was sleeping. It was a dumb question, and it didn’t surprise me when he told me they had not. The electricity had clearly not gone off, either.

Pouring myself a mug of coffee, I then put on my shoes in the mud room to go outside for a cigarette. As I began to open the front door of the house, I saw the red globe of light shimmering as it hovered just slightly above the front lawn and began to silently rise. Shaking myself free of shock, I aggressively yelled for my father, urging him to book it the short distance to the door.

The globe rose, crossed the driveway onto the other side of the yard and then ascended above the power lines and trees to the far right side of the property close to the horse barn. As my father arrived at the door frame, it had dimmed and was ducking behind some trees before it seemed to shrink or move out into the distance, glow turning an opaque milky red that then dissipated until it was entirely gone. He seemed perplexed by it, at first wondering aloud if it had been a flare, then asking if I wanted to check it out.

We hopped in his truck and drove to a nearby dirt road where it seemed to have been headed, but I was not even looking towards the sky. I knew it was gone. Soon we turned back around, and on the way back he tells me how strange it was that I had stepped out the front door at just the right moment to see it. He adds that it reminded him of the fireball my mother had talked about seeing in the sky while she was on the highway a few years back.

My mind was elsewhere. The important part of the red light sighting for me was that it established a connection I had for long suspected but had never had any real reason to believe: that the alien stuff was somehow related to the OBE stuff.”

The second such encounter occurred on August 11, 2002. I had gotten off work and smoked Salvia Divinorum again while hanging out with some friends. It was just the leaves without any extract on them this time, however, and by the time I saw the UFO later that evening it should not have affected me in the least. In any case, in the spirit of full disclosure it’s worth noting.

Disappointed that it had had virtually no effect on me, I soon left and dropped off one of my friends at their place on my drive home. I was going to write a bit, so I made some coffee, went to the bathroom and then went outside for a smoke. I was thinking again on my disappointment on the whole Salvia thing as I gazed at the sky full of stars as I did every night. As I turned to look toward the sky above the yard in front of the house at about 3:45 AM, things in my life got extremely weird again.

It was a triangular object that had a multitude of white, circular lights all over it’s underside that appeared to be arranged in rows. I saw it from an angle, moving from the forest in front of the house, across the yard and towards the space above the house. It was absolutely silent and remained in my clear, direct field of vision for about ten seconds. It gradually slowed down, dimmed its lights, brightened them to a degree brighter than before, and then the lights turned off completely. I could still see a dark, triangular object move there for a few moments, but it soon faded in the dark sky above the yard and I lost sight of it. Shortly thereafter I heard noises in the woods behind the house, like twigs cracking and leaves moving. I had the paranoid notion that the thing might be ducking into the tops of the trees.

I finished my cigarette, lit another, and kept my senses acute. I looked all around the sky, but saw nothing that couldn’t be easily identified as a plane or star. I eventually figured the show was over and went inside.

In both the real time red light experience and the experience with the triangle of white lights other odd experiences followed rather immediately — “astral projections” in the case of the red light and a hard-to-classify encounter with respect to the triangle.

My most recent sighting was brief, and though it could have been a mere hallucination, I’ve simply been unable to convince myself that this was the case, particularly due to my strange, extreme reaction subsequent to the event.

On July 1st, 2015, I had been high on cannabis and writing on my laptop in the third-story, one-bedroom apartment that I still occupy at the time of this writing. At about 3:30 AM I got up from my chair and proceeded to go through the doorway leading from the living room to the bedroom on my way to the bathroom. As I was at the door frame, I turned and glanced towards the windows to my left for a moment. There I saw, through the green curtains my mother had made for me, two red lights positioned vertically, like a colon, at the far left side of the window. I kept walking a step through the door frame, as it didn’t hit me right away, but when I realized what I had just seen I stepped back and looked again.

They were gone.

I tried to put it out of my mind. After all, I was high. Even so, I felt certain that this was no hallucination. Nor were they fireworks, despite the approaching holiday. Maybe it was two red lights on some tower I had for some reason never noticed before, I thought to myself, so I went up to the windows and pulled the curtains aside. There was no tower. There was only the moon in the general direction I had seen the lights, and it was certainly not the fucking moon. It couldn’t have been taillights from a car or a reflection from anything within my apartment and there was nothing else outside the window. Just the quiet, still darkness of the night.

I’m not alone in my family with respect to UFO sightings, either.

My mother once told us how she was driving home from work one evening when she saw “a meteor,” as the news would later call it; specifically, it was a huge fireball that was traveling parallel to the road she was on. I remember my father speaking about seeing a “strange light” above the garage when I was young and we still lived in the first house, but neither of my parents seem to remember anything of this. Much later, I believe in the 2010s, my father said he had gone outside one early morning and saw two objects moving above the forest in front of the house. He was mystified and told me he would never forget it as long as he lived.

Both my parents recall seeing a strange object in the sky when I was just a kid and we were camping at a park in Geneva, Ohio, and another above the house when I was just a baby.

There was also an incident with my maternal grandmother, who had been watching over my uncle’s house when he was away. She said she saw a strange, lighted object go over the house, and as it did so the electricity went off. The VCR was left blinking 12:00, she said. Despite her interest in UFOs and how she always said she wanted to ride in one before she died, she dismissed it as a legitimate sighting, however.

On my paternal side, my grandmother — a severe, functional alcoholic I only met when I was a baby — told my father and, to his dismay, many people that she worked with, how she had seen flying saucers outside her window. He deduced that it must have been the reflection of lamps within her place as seen in her window pane.

Maybe the recurring UFO dreams were inspired by one, some or all of my remembered and real time experiences of sightings or encounters, much as my original UFO dream seemed to echo elements from the admittedly vague memory of being on the hill on the side of the road with Jimmy and my family that one evening in 1988. Or perhaps the dreams are residue from UFO encounters which I have yet to consciously recollect.

Maybe the creatures that pilot these UFOs follow family lines, as has been suggested by alien abduction researchers, or perhaps these dreams are just a different manifestation of the same underlying psychological issue that gives rise to the hallucinations and subsequent delusions of having had UFO encounters — and much more — throughout my life, and maybe whatever is wrong with me has a genetic component. One I evidently inherited through both of my parental lines.

Choose your own interpretation.

In any case, I cannot help but note the similarity between the dark mood elicited by my personal sightings and close encounters and those which my recurring UFO dreams elicit. After my most recent UFO dream, I wondered why, despite the fact that I’ve looked up an untold number of UFO sightings and encounters that others have had, I had never bothered to look up anyone who, like me, also had recurring dreams of such incidents. After some minimal research, I wondered why I hadn’t taken the time to do this before. Others apparently have recurring dreams of UFOs as well, and their dreams share some interesting characteristics with my own — as do the presumably real-life, waking UFO encounters others have reported.

Aliens, Auras, & The Indigo Children.

“For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes.”
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

“I can remember when I was a little boy. My grandmother and I could hold conversations entirely without ever opening our mouths. She called it ‘shining.’ And for a long time, I thought it was just the two of us that had the shine to us. Just like you probably thought you was the only one. But there are other folks, though mostly they don’t know it, or don’t believe it.”
The Shining (the 1980 film).

NIMI’S BODY LIGHT.

Though I’ve had an absurd amount of childhood memories suggesting alien encounters, the bulk of these memories were horrifying. Not all of them, however. A certain set of these memories dealt with a tall, willowy, female entity donning a monk’s robe. She looked like the typical Gray alien with lighter skin and larger eyes. I’ve called Nimi ever since the flashbacks in high school, though she had only referred to herself by her title, which she told me was The Teacher. We always communicated telepathically, through internal-yet-interpersonal dialogue as well as mental imagery. Whenever I peer back on those memories I find myself filled with warmth, as I truly value the time we spent together and all the weird and wonderful things she told me. And though I will perhaps forever be plagued by the question as to whether my memories and real-time experiences reflect reality or are merely the fantasies of a diseased mind, I continue exploring them in the hopes that I’ll earn a greater understanding.

One of the first memories that came back to me regarding her dealt with her speaking to me through my bedroom window one night, which was right beside the head of my loft bed. That was where she explained to me, mind-to-mind, how there is an energy or light that surrounds all forms of life in the universe. The light around her was green, she said, and the light around me was a certain type or shade of blue. As she spoke to me regarding the significance of the colors of body-light in general, I have vague recollections of seeing a rainbow or some form of the visible light spectrum in my mind’s eye. We then had a discussion about my bluish color and what seemed to be some confusion with respect to its classification, though the specifics escape me.

Though I had no idea when I was a young child, I believe that by the time I remembered this childhood experience during high school I knew at least vaguely about the concept she was referring to. I was a fan of Star Wars as a kid, of course, but I didn’t grasp the whole concept of the Force and how it related to all this until much later. More recently, I’ve begun to explore the cross-cultural notions of this energy in greater depth.

Many religious and spiritual philosophies over the ages have believed in this energy and that it exists within and around all living things. In Indian or Vedic cultures, this energy is known as prana. In Chinese philosophy, it’s called chi or qi. In ancient Greece, it was known as pneuma. In Japanense medicine, it is known as ki. In Hawaiian and Tahitian culture, it is called mana. In ancient Egypt, it was known as ka. In medieval philosophy, it’s known as quintessence, the fifth element. Among the Māori of New Zealand, it is known as mauri. Among Algonquian groups of Native Americans, it was known as manitou. Among the Iroquois Native Americans, it’s known as orenda. In his 1907 book Creative Evolution, French philosopher Henri Bergson called it Élan vital, which has been translated to English as either “vital impetus” or “vital force.” Dr. Wilhelm Reich called it orgone. More generally, it has been referred to as subtle energy.

When used in religious artwork, it is often called the aureola or aureole when depicted as a radiant cloud cocooning the body; at other times it is limited to the head, where it is known as the halo or nimbus and represented as a luminous disc or crown of light rays encircling the cranium. While the distinction between the halo and its full-body counterpart is often vague, they are often collectively referred to as a glory or mandorla. They come in every color, even various colors, and typically are used to denote holy figures, mythical figures, rulers or heros.

In India, the halo is known as either prabhāmaṇḍala or śiraścakra, and the aura as a whole is known as prabhāvali. In his Hypothesis of Formative Causation, Rupert Sheldrake refers to morphic fields that exist within and around everything, living or not, maintaining and evolving the patterns that characterize all that is through what he calls morphic resonance. The concept has also been embraced in modern new age religions, where it is often referred to as an aura or the human energy field. Even modern science in the West is slowly coming to incorporate this energy into their overall understanding, as the generic term “biofield” was elected in 1994 by a panel of scientists at the National Institutes of Health to denote what they described as interactive fields of energy and information surrounding and interpenetrating all living systems. These fields are comprised of not only scientifically accepted and technologically measurable electromagnetic energy, they posit, but also the thus-far-only-hypothetical subtle energy.

Though I cannot say that I have ever seen an aura myself, it would appear to be an embarrassingly perfect visual analog to the atmosphere of vibrating energy that I feel residing within and around my own body and those of others. The manner in which I feel it can be best described as some hybridized form of the kinesthetic and tactile, some subtler form of touch and movement that can be sensed independent of physical contact. Personal experience suggests that there are at least three distinct aspects or levels to this energy field, the most immediate of which seems to either correspond to an individual’s present state of consciousness or actually constitute the mind itself. In other words, it bears a frequency, vibration or “vibe” that seems to change in accordance with an individual’s emotions, moods, thoughts, and the state of their body. Interactions between my own energy and that of others seem to play a role in my involuntary empathy and telepathic experiences. Sometimes I’m only conscious of the received emotions, with the energetic sensations serving as a sort of background unless I deliberately focus on them, though often enough the energetic interactions themselves are so intense they take the foreground.

In either case, this energetic interaction seems to intensify during eye contact, as if the eyes serve a dual purpose, not only allowing us to see but also serving as psychic amplifiers — “windows” or “gateways to the soul” that provide a more direct interface to the individual mind. During or quickly following eye contact with some of my fellow human beings I have received incredibly intense bursts of emotion, more rarely imagery or internal dialogue.

There is another aspect to our aura, however, that doesn’t seem to change, at least with such frequency, and seems to represent an identifiable energetic pattern specific to the individual. This came to my attention in my teens but for a long time, despite being aware of the aura as a concept in religious and spiritual philosophies around the world, I had never heard anyone else refer to this aspect of it — until I discovered Psionics. Psionics is a portmanteau of the word psi (which itself is an umbrella term for extrasensory perception and psychokinesis) and electronics, specifically radionics. It was a term that developed in the 1940s and 50s to denote disciplines involving the application of engineering principles to the study and exploitation of parapsychological or paranormal phenomena. It was appropriated in the nineties or early aughts by a network of individuals eager to educate, experiment, practice and hone these skills. Among these “psions,” which are those who practice the art of psionics, there is a belief in what they call “psionic signatures,” or psi sigs. This is essentially a psychic fingerprint that is specific to every living thing and, according to some, every existing object. It is a marker of identity that one can detect if one is sensitive enough and Psions use it when attempting to determine the geographical location of someone. They may also do this in an attempt to establish a psionic link with others at a distance, as when trying to engage in telepathy.

Among some psions, the act of utilizing the psi-sig has been called “sig snatching,” and they have attempted to articulate the process. First, they clear their mind, focusing on blackness, and then turn their focus to the individual in question. This may involve picturing the person in their mind, perhaps using a prop such as a photo or personal possession tied to them in order to guide the psychological process, and then trying to get a feel for them. Once it seems that the focus on the individual is established, that you are “locked” on the sig and so the individual in question, they let their mind slip somewhat. Then they either open up while focusing on the desired data to be extracted and received or fixate on the data to be sent or transmitted. Naturally, when one has a genetic or emotional bond with the individual in question or has already established some form of non-psionic link in the physical landscape — through the phone, the internet, or while in spatial proximity — establishing such a link via sig snatching becomes easier.

If such a psi-sig indeed exists, it might help explain my sense that everyone has a unique, energetic pattern. It might also help explain how many, including myself, feel as though they can resonate their energy or mind with another not just when they are in close proximity but when they are at a distance and experience various forms of telepathy (such as dream telepathy) as a consequence, even without conscious intent.

There is yet another aspect of this energy, however, that seems to suggest that there are different groups of people who share certain energetic qualities that distinguish them from other such groups. It is as if there are energetic types, groups or subspecies scattered throughout the human population. For instance, some people seem to consistently drain the life from me, almost as if they were psychic parasites or mosquitos of the soul. Others seem akin to psychic furnaces, their luminous, shimmering glow from within charging me up, even cleansing my energy. During high school and occasionally since, I’ve also felt a vibe from people that suggest to me that they share my unusual experiences. I have often suspected that these were the kind of characteristics and tendencies of particular types of body-light that Nimi was distinguishing by means of light spectra.

ANATOMY OF THE SUBTLE BODY.

Reports of those who have repeated out-of-body experiences and who are awake for the apparent separation from the physical form suggest that the subtle body they exist within during their “disembodied” state exists in and around the physical body, which seems to suggest that the aura is the portion of the subtle body that extends beyond the physical skin and can potentially be perceived by certain sensitives clairvoyantly. Similarly, many religious and spiritual philosophies hold that this aura stems from not merely one subtle form but rather a hierarchy of additional, ever-subtler bodies in which every living thing exists simultaneously, with each body serving as a “band” of the aura — perhaps accounting to the various levels of aspects of the aura previously explained. Each of these subtler bodies are believed to correspond to a plane of existence, just as the physical body corresponds to the physical plane.

This makes some sense to me. While I have not had an out of body experience with respect to floating around as a disembodied entity on the physical landscape during my present life, I have had experiences that seem synonymous with what others have referred to as “astral projections” onto the “astral plane.” I remain open to the possibility that they may in fact be little more than lucid dreams, though the experiences in that realm take on a hyperreal quality that remain difficult to dismiss. In any case, in the context of these experiences I find myself in a body that seems to be composed of energy and takes on one of three potential forms: a singular point of consciousness that, if I were to look on it from a third-person perspective, I feel would appear as an orb; an amorphous or fluid form that I imagine would look a blob of energy or cloud of smoke; and a body akin to my physical vessel in terms of form, but which is instead composed of energy — namely an intensified version of what I feel within and around my physical body during my mundane, waking, material life. During these experiences, especially during those periods where I am lucid during the period where my “subtle body” separates from my physical body, there are frequencies and vibrations I cannot only feel but hear. Whether this suggests I have three distinct subtle bodies or merely one that can take on three different forms, I cannot be certain, but the general notion of having a subtle body is certainly something I can relate to experientially.

As I have detailed elsewhere, Nimi did indeed explain the concept of other planes of existence to me during one incident, namely after I told her I felt I had a “foot in two worlds.” She also mentioned that some people were better at operating on one plane than they were on others. Given that this was the only occasion I can recall in which our telepathy was cranked up to the degree that we shared and occupied the same mental space, as if we were sharing a lucid dream while still awake, it has often felt to me that she was suggesting that imagination itself may constitute a parallel reality and that I may function better in that realm than on others.

While I have no memory of Nimi explaining how the aura related to subtle bodies, I did have an odd experience, perhaps merely a dream, on October 1st of 2009 that shed some light on the subject. I suddenly found myself in some rendition of the basement of my neighbor’s house across the street when I was young, just as I had in my initial “astral projection” in May of 1995, sitting on a couch in a rather drowsy state of consciousness. Two other individuals who I sensed to be male were standing nearby, though out of my line of sight, and they spoke to both me and with one another mind-to-mind. The conversation involved the physical body being nothing more than a sort of “post body” that served as a thin slice off the top of a body composed of a more subtle form of energy or matter. Furthermore, this body itself was just a part of a greater system of subtler bodies in which conscious beings coexist.

Interestingly, I later found that this description parallels the Eastern model of the subtle bodies remarkably well. The Jiva, which in Hinduism and Jainism is equivalent to what we often refer to as the individual soul or self, is said to be enveloped within five sheaths which are in turn organized into three separate bodies. These five sheaths are said to interpetrate one another and exist inside one another in the style of a Russian Doll. There is the annamaya kosha, which is the physical sheath; the pranamaya kosha, the sheath of the breath or life-force; manomaya kosha, the mental sheath; the vijnanamaya kosha, or wisdom sheath, and finally the anandamaya kosha, or bliss sheath.

The karana sharira, or causal body, is composed of the jiva and one sheath, the anandamaya kosha. The sukshma sharira (later called the linga sharira) or subtle body, on the other hand, is composed of three sheaths: the pranamaya, manomaya and vijnanamaya koshas. Last but not least, there is the physical body, known as the sthula sharira, which is composed of the annamaya and pranamaya koshas. Of possible significance here is the fact that while the subtle body consists of three sheaths, the physical is composed of only two, and one of the sheaths of the physical body — the pranamaya kosha — is also a component of the subtle body. In light of this, one could say that the physical body is just a small part, a “thin slice off the top” of a much greater body, just as the two entities in the aforementioned dream had stressed.

This subtle body, the sukshma or linga sharira, is also believed to have its own anatomy. Subtle energy, here called prana, is carried along through the nadis, or channels, which are the subtle body’s analog to veins — similar to the meridian system in Chinese medicine. I have but one personal experience that seems to reflect this supposed aspect of the subtle anatomy, and it happened in the early aughts. I had been using my Mindgear mind machine and, as I often do, had fallen asleep in the process. At some point I abruptly awoke and could not only feel but somehow also see this luminous, golden energy racing through elaborate, interwoven tubelike structures that took the form of my whole body.

These nadis are said to intersect at points on the subtle body known as chakras, which is Sanskrit for “wheels.” In terms of function, these chakras seem to have at least two. First, they are thought to “hook up” the physical and the subtler bodies to one another. They serve as not only the intersection of the nadis of the subtle body, then, but also as the intersection at which the physical and subtler bodies connect. Second, they are much like transformers in that each chakra changes the frequency of the prana brought to them by the nadis. While there are many chakras, attention is given to a minority, typically seven (at least in the Westernized versions), the functions of which seem to serve as an ancient rendition of Maslow’s Hierarchy.

Strangely, five out of these seven chakras also correlate with the location of the major endocrine glands of the physical body, which release hormones into the blood. The remaining two chakras — the highest and the lowest, both with positions that are often depicted as residing outside the structure of the physical body — correlate with the functions of respective endocrine glands, but not their positions.

Muladhara is the first, the “root chakra,” as it is often called. It is located in the area that corresponds to the base of the spine and is associated with the adrenal gland. It governs basic needs that serve personal survival, such as food, water, sleep and security. This chakra is also said to serve as the seat of the kundalini, a form of divine energy coiled like a serpent three and a half times around the sacrum. Various practices are said to awaken the kundalini, allowing it to rise along the spine, activating the higher chakras until achieving liberation upon activating the Sahasrara chakra at or above the crown of the head.

The following chakra is Svadhisthana, the sacral chakra, located in the area between the anus and genitals and corresponding to the ovaries or testicles. It governs our creativity, sexuality, and intimacy. The third, called Manipura, is located in the solar plexus and associated with the pancreas. It serves as our “personal power center” and “gut feeling,” governing our willpower, confidence and ambition. Anahata, located at the center of the chest, corresponds to the thymus. It serves to connect the bottom three chakras, which are concerned with biological needs, to the top three, concerned more with the spiritual. It governs our relationships, our capacity for compassion for ourselves and others, emotional healing and our ability to integrate opposites.

Vishudda, chakra five, is also known as the throat chakra and governs communication and self-expression. It also purifies energy from the lower chakras and corresponds to the thyroid.

While all of that seems rather consistent among those who provide commentary on the chakra-endocrine correlation, the associations designated to the top two chakras and glands evidently suffer from some confusion. The sixth chakra is Ajna, which translates to “command” or “authority.” It is also known as the brow chakra, the third eye, the inner eye, and the mind’s eye. Its located at the center of the brow or forehead. It governs intuition, imagination, perspective, self-awareness, and psi abilities such as telepathy and clairvoyance. Sahasrara, also known as the crown chakra, is the seventh chakra, located just above the crown of the head. Its oriented towards enlightenment, understanding, knowledge, reality and truth.

Ajna is sometimes associated with the pituitary gland for some reason, and this despite the fact that it correlates exactly with the position of the pineal gland, which in this case is instead associated with Sahasrara. With a little research I must concede that this does make some sense, at least from a certain angle, as in some species there is a parietal eye that formed from the pineal gland that pokes out the crown of the head. Nonetheless, the pineal’s placement in human beings certainly corresponds to the Ajna chakra, and the fact that it is considered the third eye and the pineal is literally our third eye makes their association a rather solid one in my mind. The crown chakra, Sahasrara, is more appropriately associated with the pituitary gland despite the fact that, much like Muladhara and the adrenal, it does not correspond with its position.

Due to these correlations between the chakras and the endocrine system, some speculate that ancient practices such as yoga and meditation may serve as a means of stimulating both the subtle manifestations, the chakras, leading to altered states of consciousness, and stimulating the material manifestations, the endocrine glands, to effect the corresponding biology.

PINEAL & THE THIRD EYE.

Rather than merely a curiosity relating to the energy field I feel around myself and others, the notion of chakras makes some sense with respect to my personal experience as well. For as long as I can remember I’ve felt what I can best describe as an energetic pressure or concentration of my energy on at least three areas of my body, each of which correspond to the alleged location of particular chakras.

The lowest location on my body where I feel this corresponds to is Svadhishthana, or the sacral chakra. Considering what is associated with this chakra, this should perhaps not surprise me at all. While I have nurtured the creative impulse through various mediums throughout my life, in the areas of intimacy and sexuality I have progressed very slowly and I could best be explained as rather stagnant at present in this respect. As of the time of this writing, it’s been well over a decade since my last relationship, for instance, and nearly nine years since I’ve gotten laid or had any sort of intimate contact with a female of the species.

Another point of concentration is the chest area, corresponding to the Anahata chakra, which always feels tender, vulnerable or exposed to me. It’s one of the reasons I nearly always sleep on my belly or on my side, hugging a pillow or blanket. Indeed, ever since childhood, I’ve avoided sleeping supine for just that reason — and for the fact that it often gave me nightmares as a child. Though I cannot remember a single example of those childhood nightmares, it has been the case that sleeping this way since the age of sixteen or so has led to some frightening experiences. On March 14, 1995, I had a classic “old hag attack” when sleeping on my back. I felt an entity crawl on my bed, straddle me, and attempt to suffocate me — first by pushing its hands on my chest, and ultimately by placing its knees there and applying agonizing pressure. During at least two astral projection experiences — one on July 1st of 2003 — I also had the feeling that my subtle body and physical body were bound at the chest area by something akin to elastic.

In addition, I certainly have issues associated with the functions this chakra allegedly governs. Though I have higher aspirations, for instance, I certainly haven’t “mastered the mundane,” so to speak. I’m also rather distant when it comes to relationships, be the nature of the bond one of family, friends, or the rare significant other in my life. I have an impulse toward intimacy yet need to be free and independent, and with these seemingly contradictory drives I continue to struggle. I also have a good deal of internal conflict about damn near everything and have had many difficulties in my attempts to reconcile the opposing forces within me.

The most curious area of concentration is the center-of-the-brain and corresponding forehead area, however, just above the area between the eyes, which corresponds to the location of Ajna, the “third eye” chakra.

An opened third eye is said to result in mental clarity, emotional stability, empathy, an ability to communicate with the dead, and an affinity for nature and animals. Characteristics of a partially opened third eye encompass the above, but also psychic imbalances such as anxiety, depression, resentment, aggression, addictions, sleep issues, hypersensitivity, an overly active imagination, issues with or total resistance to authority, bipolar emotions, and either lethargy or hyperactivity.

So all of that makes sense.

In multiple areas of my life, it seems, the third eye has played a rather consistent role. This first came to my attention through the theme running through the spontaneous artwork I began producing in 1995. While in art class at school or alone in my room at home, I would either place my black Bic pen to paper and let my hands guide me along, or tape a paper to the wall and essentially cooperate with the same process through the medium of chalk pastels. This “automatic artwork,” as I later learned it be called, gave rise to some elaborate pieces, many of which featured some rendition of the third eye — either between and above the eyes or at the crown of the head. This recurring theme only came to my attention slowly, and only later, after attempts to glimpse all my bizarre experiences as a whole, did it begin to make some sense. It came back to something that happened just prior to the spontaneous false awakenings and “astral projection” experiences that I began having just prior to the automatic artwork, in late April or early May of 1995.

At the time, I had called it “aura surfing.” I awoke to find my subtle form mostly detached from my physical body, hovering at an angle just above my physical back. Despite the efforts of some unseen entity that had grabbed my feet and was violently tugging me back and forth, however, I for some reason remained stubbornly attached at the head. This ultimately led to nested false awakenings, and no longer than a few days later, intense, hyperreal astral projections in which I wrestled with an entity that I feared was either trying to possess me, kill me at a level deeper than the flesh, or both — and this continued for some time. In addition, on at least three other occasions my experiences have also suggested that both my subtle and physical body are connected at the pineal/Ajna region (as well as at the Anahata region, as formerly described).

Later on during high school, I had been incredibly sleep deprived and writing on the computer that was in the hallway just outside my bedroom door. As I wrote, I felt myself nod off and felt my subtle form rapidly “fall” backwards, away from my body in the chair, and into this huge beehive-like structure that was dimly lit and gave off the sense of being very ancient, with various objects and things kept on the rows upon rows of shelves to the side. Suddenly I pulled back abruptly from that place and lurched violently forward into my physical body on the chair. At the very moment I regained sudden and full control of my physical body, I heard a loud “click” inside of my head which felt as if it had come from the center of my brain.. It stands as the most unearthly disembodied environment I have ever been in and the only occasion in which I slipped out and back in while still awake, with no breach in continuity of consciousness.

Yet it had company in its suggestion that the pineal serves as the locale of subtle hook-up. There was also that experience, in November of 2002 I believe, in which I felt “lightning bolts” coming from my temples and striking what would correspond to the area of the pineal in my brain when I abruptly reconnected with my physical body. An experience that came to serve as further reinforcement arrived on the very morning after which I slept for the first time my former apartment. I awoke feeling my subtle form still attached to my physical body at the head, just as in the “aura surfing” so many years before, but its form was bent in the direction opposite my physical body so that my subtle feet were against the wall beside the window just behind and above my physical head. It was like an involuntary, head-bound, subtle body yoga pose.

The Ajna chakra only became more intriguing to me when I learned it corresponds with the endocrine gland known as the pineal, also known as the conarium or epiphysis cerebri. It’s a small, pine cone shaped gland of the endocrine system that is often referred to as the third eye — and for good reason. It is seen as an “atrophied photoreceptor” because, like the two eyes with which we are familiar, it is sensitive to light and comes complete with a lens, cornea, and retina. It exists in most vertebrate species and in some reptiles and amphibians it is linked with the parietal eye, which actually pokes out the top of the skull, as formerly mentioned. As animals climbed the evolutionary ladder, however, the pineal began burrowing deeper into the brain. In human beings, at 49 days after conception, in tandem with the first indications of the sex of the fetus, the pineal gland emerges. It first develops in the tissues at the roof of the mouth and then ascends to the very center of the brain, between the two cerebral hemispheres. In its final resting place, the pineal is surrounded by the limbic system, which is the emotional brain center, and in close proximity to auditory and visual sensory relay stations. It also is in close proximity to the cerebrospinal fluid channels, allowing it to secrete its manufactured chemicals into deep areas of the brain.

One such chemical is melatonin, a serotonin-derived hormone that modulates sleep patterns and both circadian and seasonal cycles. It was found that the longer the hours of daylight, the less melatonin the pineal produces, and constant exposure to light has been shown to cause pineal shrinkage and increased reproductive functions. The longer the nighttime or exposure to darkness, the more melatonin it produces, and constant exposure to darkness will shrink reproductive organs and inhibit the reproductive functions. It also informs animal of the time of year, triggering seasonal instincts.

In his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Dr. Rick Strassman also speaks about the pineal security system, which, for instance, typically inhibits the production of melatonin during the day. He explained how nerve cells in close proximity to the pineal release neurotransmitters known as noradrenaline and adrenaline, which activate the pineal so that it begins producing melatonin. Yet while the adrenal glands release these same neurotransmitters in response to stress, the aforementioned pineal security system usually gets rid of them.

Studies he references have shown, however, that in instances of incredibly high stress the security system can be overridden — but only minimally. This results in melatonin levels that are relatively high with respect to waking, daylight hours but which are rather typical during sleep. Even so, it causes no apparent ill effects and exposure to daylight quickly counteracts this anyway. Due to this, he argues that the production of melatonin wouldn’t justify this security system — but that the production of DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) most certainly would.

DMT has been called the most potent, naturally-occurring psychedelic known to man. Despite its illegal status in the US and other countries, DMT is naturally present in our bodies and in many other plants and animals. In his aforementioned book, Strassman posits that the pineal is at least one of the areas of the human body where it is manufactured. As Joe Rogan has grown fond of pointing out, the Cottonwood Research Foundation has since done tests with rats and discovered that their pineal glands do indeed produce DMT. Though its presence in the pineals of humans has not yet been confirmed, Strassman points out that the pineal not only has all the required ingredients to produce DMT, but is also known to manufacture compounds called beta-carbolines that inhibit it’s breakdown in the body, thereby enhancing and extending the duration of its psychedelic effects in a manner akin to ayahuasca. The same security system may typically inhibit stress-induced DMT release in normal individuals, however, much like the case with melatonin.

What role would the pineal production of DMT serve? Strassman finds significance between the sexual differentiation and pineal development in the fetus 49 days after conception and the fact that, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, there is an intermission of exactly 49 days between the death of a soul’s former body and its reincarnation into another. He fleshes out his hypothesis even further in his aforementioned book:

“The pineal gland produces psychedelic amounts of DMT at extraordinary times in our lives. Pineal DMT production is the physical representation of non-material, or energetic, processes. It provides us with the vehicle to consciously experience the movement of our life-force in its most extreme manifestations. When our individual life force enters our fetal body, the moment in which we become truly human, it passes through the pineal and triggers the first primordial flood of DMT. Later, at birth, the pineal releases more DMT … As we die, the life-force leaves the body through the pineal gland, releasing another flood of this psychedelic spirit molecule. (pages 68-69).”

Between birth and death, however, he believes the pineal may flood our brains for other purposes as well. Along with melatonin, for instance, the pineal may release DMT during dreamtime. Many, among them Terrance McKenna, have remarked on the similar issues of amnesia one experiences following both awakening from a dream and coming out of a DMT trip. It may also play a role in the altered states that can be triggered through meditation, prayer, and even natural childbirth.

Given that stress is known to exacerbate delusions and hallucinations, he posits that in psychotic individuals there may be a malfunctioning pineal — the aforementioned security system may be weakened, in other words, allowing sufficient stress to trigger an endogenous flood of DMT that accounts for the psychosis. This hypothesis of his, I must confess, instills a good deal of fear in me, as I have previously considered — only half-jokingly — that I have a malfunctioning pineal myself, and for several reasons.

For one thing, the pineal regulates circadian rhythms and I’ve suffered from consistent insomnia since I was a kid. I also have absolutely no sense of direction, which I later found many others term directional or geographic dyslexia, and remembered reading that at least in birds, the pineal serves as an internal compass. Seeing as how my own internal compass is perpetually spinning, I wondered if this, too, could be explained by a dysfunctional pineal. In the process of writing this I did a quick Google search and discovered that studies involving both pigeons and humans suggest that calcified pineal glands can indeed cause a defective sense of direction.

Though these issues of mine fall within the accepted role of the pineal, there are also elements of my life that could be explained by its more hypothetical role in DMT production. There is, for instance, the phenomenon that began on September 30, 2002, and which I originally called “the blurs” or “a trip without a drug.” Only later would I discover they seemed to be the scintillating scotoma brought on by what are known as silent or acephalgic migraines. These are migraines that generate the hallucinogenic “aura” minus the excruciating headache — all of which, I have noticed, are triggered in me during heights of anxiety or anger. In other words, the kind of stress that might trigger a flood of endogenous DMT in someone with a weakened pineal security system.

There are also my recurring instances of “false awakenings” and so-called “astral projections” — both of which may have occurred in my childhood, but certainly began occurring by early May of 1995. These, too, seemed to be triggered by stress, and so could also be explained by a glitchy third eye secreting endogenous DMT — and I say this due to the focus of Strassman’s book.

Between 1990 and 1995, he began the first psychedelic research in the US in roughly two decades at the University of New Mexico. He administered over 400 doses of DMT intravenously to 60 pre-screened volunteers with prior psychedelic experience and along with documenting the external, observable effects took extensive notes on the subjective experiences of the participants. He describes how a remarkably high number the volunteers in his DMT research trials reported encountering entities in the context of apparently “free-standing non-corporeal realms,” or what we might call other planes of existence or parallel universes. After finding that available models failed to suitably explain these experiences, he seems to have arrived at the hypothesis that DMT may function as a sort of chemical gateway for consciousness to enter into these parallel universes.

Many of the reports he claimed to have found to resonate deeply with what has been described in Near Death Experiences (NDEs). While they are not NDEs themselves, many of those elements are also found in my so-called astral projections, which suggests to me that these experiences of mine could also be related to pineal DMT release.

Most disturbing of all to me, though, is that he also claimed to have found that many of the reports paralleled alien abduction experiences. While I’ve read his book as well as many articles and trip reports, and watched countless videos on the subject, I’ve only found that people sometimes come across reptilian or mantis beings that parallel the beings described in abduction accounts. Indeed, this alone is interesting enough, but the allegation that these psychedelic experiences parallel abduction accounts as a whole seems unfounded given what I’ve come across thus far. I also find it difficult to ignore that my astral plane experiences seem incredibly distinct from my alien encounters with respect to both my flashbacks and real time experiences, and it has been this case from the beginning. The astral plane seemed hyperreal, but a different kind of real — not physical reality. I may be perplexed during the false awakening experiences, uncertain as to whether it’s the physical reality or not, but it’s clear as day immediately afterwards at the very least and often enough during the experiences as well, as that environment operates in accordance with a different set of laws. I’ve also tried to summon the aliens during those experiences and have always failed.

So far as I can tell, abduction reports have a basis in physical reality, just as UFO sightings and close encounters do. Even so, it may be the case that they also have access to these realms, and perhaps that is why so many others have encountered them there through the DMT gateway.

A CERTAIN SHADE OF BLUE.

All things considered, Nimi’s body-light concept and the historical context I later found it to be relevant to — not to mention the context of recurring, personal experience — made a lot of sense to me. Even so, I had a hard time understanding the concept as she proposed it to me on an intellectual level.

Given that I specifically remember her having given me the mental image of a rainbow with respect to the body-light, I can be reasonably certain this was the classification system she was referring to when discussing the confusion regarding my color. This makes little sense to me, however, for light is simply the name we’ve given to the relatively narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes can pick up on. We call this range of wavelengths the visual spectrum and experience different wavelengths within it as different colors, to which we then ascribe specific names. Assuming this body-light exists, it is clearly invisible to most human beings and would have to be a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum our science has yet to uncover. Why this life-glow would parallel the colors of the visible light spectrum is beyond me, though this is what Nimi appeared to be implying.

Regardless, how did my confusing blue color fit into all of this? Well, as the visible spectrum is truly continuous and division-free, our color labels are ultimately arbitrary. Different cultures ascribe differing wavelengths to the same color names, after all, and even a single system may change over time. If body-light somehow shares this spectrum, perhaps Nimi was suggesting that my designated color differed depending on what classification system was used. In any case, I would have to be a shade of blue on the cusp of one of my two spectral neighbors.

Given that her color, green, and my color, “kind of” blue, are spectral neighbors, perhaps Nimi meant to imply that my body-light was cyan. As Nimi’s light was green, perhaps our proximity on the spectrum made our energies compatible in some way that inspired her visits. In Western new age literature, at the very least, green auras are seen to represent growth, balance, and nature and they are allegedly found among those who are natural healers or teachers, which seems fitting enough for Nimi. Cyan auras are supposed to embody elements of their neighbors, and so are said to be independent, calm, organized and clear-thinking, which sounds like an ideal student for such a teacher. While I have always envied and continue to strive towards embodying those characteristics, however, they certainly don’t accurately describe me. I’m a hypersensitive, perpetually chaotic mess, to be honest.

So we come to the second possibility, which is that the classification issue with respect to my sort-of-blue aura dealt with the spectral neighbor on the other side, namely the color we call violet. This came to my attention when I learned that though once accepted as part of the color spectrum, indigo has since fallen out of favor among many modern color scientists, who have as a consequence dropped the “I” from the ROYGBIV mnemonic and now divide indigo between its neighbors, blue and violet. In essence, indigo is the Pluto of the visible spectrum, though to be fair Pluto didn’t get sliced in two over its ordeal.

In any case, this would square well with how a friend of mine explained what my aura looked like during high school. During our meditation sessions in our mutual friend’s dark bedroom, he would attempt to see auras in his mind’s eye. He placed no significance on the colors and insisted auras always change. Nonetheless, on the two occasions I asked him what my colors were at the moment he described my aura as dark blue with streaks of red in it, which is a fair description of indigo.

The alleged significance of Indigo as an aura color in New Age thought, however, didn’t come to my attention until 2002. The notion seems to have been born from a woman by the name of Nancy Ann Tappe, who has a neurological trait known as synesthesia in which two or more sensory (and perhaps extrasensory) wires get crossed, leading to bizarre, consistent and highly individualized means of (extra-)sensory experience. In the case of Tappe, it manifested itself as an alleged capacity to see an “electromagnetic energy field” or aura around all living things in the form of a spectral field of colors. For the most part, this field of colors is in a constant state of flux, changing in correspondence to an individual’s emotions, thoughts and physical health. To that degree, her explanation resonated quite strongly with my own experience of body-energy.

Tappe also spoke much about the exception, however. This she called one’s life color, and it was a single color in every individual aura that seemed to persist from womb to tomb. Aside from the stability of the life color were the shared traits she noticed among those sharing the same color, and from these synesthetic perceptions emerged a system that mapped them out. This ultimately culminated in her 1982 book, Understanding Your Life Through Color. To me, this sounded much like the energetic subspecies I felt existed and resonated even more strongly with the spectral classification Nimi appeared to be explaining to me as a child. To boot, though she originally distinguished only eleven life colors present in the population, in the 1960s Tappe noted the dawn of a new Indigo-colored aura in children.

At roughly the time she met Tappe in the 1970s, Jan Tober claims to have had recurring dreams in which strange children would approach her regarding their upcoming incarnations, and that upon awakening she would find herself drawn to particular infants or toddlers with peculiar eyes and “old souls.” Ultimately this led to Tober and her coauthor Lee Carroll fleshing out and further popularizing the concept of the Indigo with the publication of their 1998 book, The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived.

Their argument was that those who have worked with children have been noticing an increasing number of them displaying new and distinct psychological and behavioral patterns, and that these were the children that had Indigo auras. The traits that characterize those with indigo auras have been written about extensively, and in the midst of my research I’ve broken them down into the most limited list of traits possible: their full-spectrum sensitivity, nonconformity, and sense of alienation.

One of the most commonly-mentioned characteristics of Indigos seems to be their full-spectrum sensitivity — or perhaps more appropriately, their hypersensitivity — which is a trait I undoubtedly share with them. It was relatively recently that I learned about a trait, apparently genetic, that is found throughout the animal kingdom known as Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS). Humans bearing this trait are commonly referred to as Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs) and make up roughly 15-20% of the population. This trait seems to cover not only many of the traits inherent in not only myself but those that are allegedly characteristic of the Indigo population.

As I learned via the rabbit hole offered by Dr. Google, the still-growing recognition of HSPs began with the publication of Elaine Aron’s 1996 book, The Highly Sensitive Person, where the term was coined. The following year Elaine, along with her husband, Arthur Aron, identified SPS as the characteristic trait distinguishing such HSPs and produced a questionnaire aimed at measuring SPS among the human population. Scientific papers exploring, experimenting, seemingly validating and elaborating upon this trait would follow in the years to come. Though it has certainly expanded beyond their own work, the Arons have to a large degree focused their efforts towards providing evidence which distinguishes SPS from traits and disorders with which they believe it could be confused, which range from shyness and sensation-seeking to autism and sensory processing disorder, perhaps in an enlightened attempt to cut off the negative consequences HSPs might experience in consulting Dr. Google in striving to understand their symptoms at the pass.

Rather than a disorder, SPS is a survival strategy developed through evolution that bears both advantages and disadvantages. In comparison to the masses, they have a hypersensitive central nervous system. In other words, they have a lower perceptual threshold that results in intensified sensory experiences, which is to say that they involuntarily pick up on sensory stimuli that others would consider novel, subtle or nuanced, given that the majority are capable of filtering these aspects out of perception out before they breach the threshold of consciousness. As a consequence, this lower threshold makes HSPs far more easily overstimulated, which in turn results in a deeper, more highly organized and thorough form of cognitive processing, an increased reaction time and an intensified emotional response towards such stimuli which others would be likely to interpret as an overreaction.

The overstimulation of HSPs makes them more easily overwhelmed and leads to higher stress levels, which at best inspires HSPs to engage in less risk-taking activities and proceed through life with more caution. More dismally, it also makes them more prone to depression, anxiety, and sleep issues, thereby increasing the risk that they will adopt unhealthy coping mechanisms and habits of avoidance.

Far less scientifically, however true it may be to experience, both Indigos and HSPs report elements of hypersensitivity that either straddle the fence between the mundane and spiritual or reside beyond the pale and rest solely in the realm of the fringe. Indigos, for instance, are frequently associated with Ajna, the third eye chakra, and are said to be born with their third eye already open — though either partially or completely. In any case, it is allegedly this that earns them an additional form of sensitivity, which is evidently psi or psychic sensitivity.

Another trait typically associated with Indigos is their nonconformist approach. This is said to be a consequence of their overwhelming sense of purpose, a drive that inspires them to take action and change the world. This leads to them having issues with authority and tradition, preferring to question everything and explore new ideas.

Aside from their sensitivity and nonconformity, and perhaps partially as a consequence of it, they often feel alienated. They feel misunderstood, different, like they don’t belong. The traditional terms “fish out of water” or “square peg in a world of round holes” describes their circumstances quite accurately. By others, they may be perceived as strange or weird. Even so, they passionately clutch onto their sense of independence, the third trait. They stubbornly refuse to change for others, determined to remain true to their odd souls, and so may become introverted and socially isolate themselves. They may have only a small, close circle of friends, and tend to get along with other Indigos best, being less shy around them, as they are far more likely to understand one another.

Indigos are also often lumped in with people of other spiritual “types” in the eyes of New Age philosophy — Wanderers, Starseeds, Star Children, Rainbow Children, Crystal Children, Children of the Blue Ray — though just as often they are all regarded as distinct. Even apart from this, some regard Indigos as old souls that have come here from other planets. In addition, I discovered a possible link in a book published two years before The Indigo Children, and it was the 1997 publication of David Jacobs’ The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda. There he transcribes the 1994 hypnosis session of Allison Reed (pages 246-250.) Along with fellow abductees, she was brought into a room where they were made to watch a “media presentation” on a large screen. It is a colorful, sunny, springtime scene that takes place in a park where numerous families are having picnics and children are playing. Though the aliens told her to try and distinguish the true humans from the “creations” of the aliens within the scene as a whole and then in individual families, she finds it impossible. It was then explained to her that the only way in which their creations could be distinguished from normal human beings was by means of an “energy field” around their bodies, and that those that were capable of detecting it and elected to cause problems would be eliminated.

I would later learn that according to Tappe, there are also subdivisions of Indigos, which again brought me back to an exchange between Nimi and I. In the midst of what seemed to be a more casual conversation than those which we usually had, I remember revealing to Nimi how I had recently decided that I wanted to be either a scientist or a chef when I grew up. We were, at the time, both standing in my room in the area opposite the bed, with her beside me, far taller than me. Curious as to what she did for a living, I asked her what she was, and she said she was a Teacher. I pondered on whether I might one day be a teacher as well. In response, she said that I was an Artist, that it was “my work.” Curious, I asked her how she knew it would be my job. She said that she did not mean that kind of work, at least not necessarily. Instead, she explained, by “work” she meant that it was a talent I had developed over the course of many lifetimes and would most likely continue developing in this one.

I later learned that, according to the Upanishads, throughout the cycles of death and rebirth known as samsara, the linga sharira, our subtle body, retains latent habitual physical and mental patterns called samskaras. They were developed by and in turn retain one’s karma. It is not the reward or judgment of some god that sentences you but the amoral influence of past action on present action, and present action on future action, and in that sense karma comprises the whole of causality with its action-reaction, cause-effect associations. The subtle body is the carrier of our conditionings, sustaining our talents, phobias and fetishes, our use of voice and body language, how and what we think and feel. Karma is not fate or the result of judgment, then, it is only the process of building habit and reinforcing and evolving memories. Though karma is typically translated to mean action or deed, less often, though more accurately, it is taken to comprise both cause and effect, the whole of causality as instigated and perpetuated by the individual in question. The most all-encompassing word might be “work,” which Nimi had chosen to use.

This encounter, and learning about my work, also built on the Indigo theme in a way that did not at first come to my attention. Later I learned that Tappe had split Indigos into four subtypes.

There is The Conceptualist, who questions the commonly accepted and has a hunger for new ideas and fresh perspectives. They are introverted, observant, calm and logical problem-solvers, potentially inventors or engineers. Then there is The Catalyst, who is polite, philanthropic and enraged by injustice. They are also curious and philosophical, but prefer to learn on their own, which causes problems in school and the world at large, which likely feeds their deep sense of alienation. They tend to force us into new perspectives.

The Humanist is a hyperactive social butterfly that has the tendency to treat everyone equally. They are quick to learn, and so get bored easily, and are focused on seeking out new ways to connect and communicate, primarily via technology. Last but not least, there is The Artist — emotional, empathic and sensitive in general, they are naturally geared towards self-expression in the visual arts, music, dance or writing.

It is often said that the central, unifying purpose of Indigos is to break down the social systems and belief structures we’ve outgrown and pave our way to a better future. Tappe illustrated her own sense of what the Indigo agenda was as well. “Indigos accept individuals for who and what they are and work for the interconnectedness of all,” she writes of them on her website. “Their task is to integrate mankind to one world through a globalization that moves beyond political or economic boundaries and beyond personal biases and prejudices.” It’s not all light and fluffy, however, as Tappe also asserts in an interview transcribed and provided in Tober’s aforementioned book, echoing the description others have given of an Indigo with their third eye incompletely open. She explained that “these young children — every one of them I’ve seen this far who kill their schoolmates or parents — have been Indigos.”

This brings us to one of the central and most controversial aspects of the Indigo: they are often diagnosed as having ADD, ADHD, or OCD, which those supporting the Indigo label insist is a consequence of their resistance to strict, absolute authority systems and the traditional use of fear- and guilt-based manipulation and discipline techniques, which Indigos naturally find intolerable. This tends to cause issues with them in the realm of social adaptation in school, at work, and society at large, say the Indigo supporters, which makes sense given their system-busting purpose. Either out of an unconscious desire to maintain the status quo or a very deliberate attempt to subvert the next step in evolution, the authorities in question seek to marginalize, numb, quell, and control the Indigos, and this is what has resulted in such diagnoses.

Meanwhile, the mainstream regards the “indigo” label as an irresponsible and dangerous new age belief promoted in part by the Forer Effect — which is to say that the qualities allegedly characterizing the children are so vague that they could with little effort be used to describe nearly anyone. Further, they assert that the Indigo label only serves to exacerbate mental disorders by placing a quasi-religious value on them rather than having them properly diagnosed and treated with the prescription pharmaceuticals they require.

There are astounding correlations between my partial memories of what Nimi told me and what Tappe laid out regarding life colors, not to mention associations between the Indigo personality type and my own traits which are difficult for me to overlook. If we accept her alleged ability to perceive auras, it seems conceivable enough that Tappe was able to note associations between people of a certain life color and certain personality characteristics, and even potential subtypes. Despite that, there is doubtlessly a lot of bullshit mixed in with the truth, if indeed a morsel of it holds up to scrutiny. I only hope that eventually science finds a way to detect and study this energy and incorporate it into our overall understanding of ourselves and the cosmos. Until then, it remains an undeniable experiential reality and the available models provide, at the very least, a fascinating reality tunnel to peer through.

Porch Light & Invisibility.

I just don’t get it.

Some days, it’s like I’m a porch light on a cool, summer evening attracting every phototactic insect in my vicinity. It seems I can’t get a moment of peace. People don’t get the hint and they’ll keep talking to me, keep venting, keep spilling, sometimes following me around everywhere — even the fucking bathroom. I try to hide, but someone always finds me, like I’m sending out some psychic beacon.

Other days, it’s the polar opposite. As hard as I try, I can’t get anyone’s attention. It’s like I’m fucking invisible. It makes me want to scream in their faces.

Depression and frustration plague me on invisible days; anger and anxiety when I’m a porch light.

I prefer the middle road, and I suppose that happens often enough, but why is it Others seem to react to me as if they were a joint psychic entity?

In Bad Company.

As stupid as we all too often seem to be as a civilization — particularly when you try and take the wide-angle lens, third person perspective — perhaps our path of self-destruction is not an uncommon one.

I remember hearing once that “intelligence is a failed mutation,” but I’ve come to disagree. There may be species infinitely far more intelligent than ourselves who aren’t in the appropriate environment and/or have failed to evolve the bodies necessary to manipulate their environment so as to develop a high-tech civilization. Dolphins or octopuses that developed on an ocean planet would have neither the right bodies or the right environment, for instance.

Perhaps when an intelligent species is in the appropriate environment and has evolved the biological technology necessary to manipulate the environment and build artificial high technology, however, they have a damned good chance of engaging in species suicide and potentially bringing most life on their home planet down with them. So perhaps one of the reasons for the Great Silence in the cosmos is that the Great Filter is ahead of us — that advanced, technological civilizations may be relatively common but have the tendency to kill their planet and therefore their high civilization before they migrate to space.

This might be inevitable, for instance, if such a civilization needs fossil fuels to achieve our heights of civilization and beyond. If so, perhaps all such civilizations also need to change course before the damage is irreversible and civilization collapses — and maybe intelligent species just aren’t that likely to change course. If they can migrate to space and become an interplanetary civilization, perhaps that helps to some degree, but unless those factions of the species are self-sufficient and need not rely on the home planet to sustain their existence, it wouldn’t help much at all.

And maybe climate change and ecological destruction isn’t the only element we share with fallen global civilizations across the universe. Maybe the kind of political divide we’re presently experiencing in the US and the general disagreement on what constitutes truth is not unique to this time, place and species but is instead a recurring theme across life-bearing worlds that have developed intelligent and capable creatures.

It’s a thought that’s been plaguing me lately, and it certainly doesn’t make me feel any better about our curcumstances.

In more ways that one, we may not be alone.

Believe in Nothing. Explore Everything.

I enjoy exploring possibilities, seeing how various allegations, anecdotes or hypotheses might match up, and fleshing them out — but I’m not sure if I believe any of it. Some years ago I wrote UFOs and Recycling Souls to explore some connections I noticed in the midst of reading anecdotal reports in the UFO abduction literature that took on the quality often referred to as “high strangeness” and it was picked up by two or three sites. One of the sites mentioned that the ideas seemed crazy to them, but that I seemed to believe it — a comment I found fascinating. And kind of irritating.

The fact is: I don’t know. Since I’m going to be speculating about it anyhow, though, I might as well do it on a foundation of at least potentially relevant research and give my speculations some framework, some sort of structure. I sort of temporarily “believe in” an idea in order to explore it and then “believe out” again to explore some other aspect of it, or something else entirely. I think its related to what Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary called “reality tunnels”. By extension, it’s related to the philosophy touted by Maynard James Keenan around the time of the release of Tool’s album, Aenema. In the liner notes to the album, they suggested “Believe in nothing…” In interviews, Maynard expanded on this, saying: “Believe in nothing; explore everything.” A sort of Chaos Magick approach if you will. And that’s kind of been my approach in research and speculation. As to what I actually invest in at this point, I just don’t fucking know.

Do I think the aliens are physical, material beings like we ourselves are? About 90% of the time, yes, I think the extraterrestrial hypothesis is the most reasonable interpretation of the UFO phenomenon, even ignoring the abduction reports. Do I think abduction experiences are caused by sleep paralysis, the nocturnal release of endogenous DMT or mutated residual birth memories? No. Psychological theories don’t cover it, especially given the fact that people aren’t always asleep when this happens (and may in fact be driving, as in the Betty and Barney Hill case) and it has happened to more than one person at once often enough (Betty and Barney Hill and the Allagash four, for instance) and people are reported to be physically missing often enough.

Do I think these alien beings come from Zeta Reticuli? I have no fucking clue and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to discover that this us not the case. We heard this supposed origin from them, after all. Nothing they say to us should be blindly accepted. I won’t accept that from religion or society, I’m not accepting that from aliens.

Do I think there is a conspiracy? Clearly there is, though the Greada Treaty stuff seems a bit too deep end for me. I do think they’ve recovered alien tech through incidents such as Roswell, though I doubt they’ve been capable of successfully reverse engineering and replicating it with earth-bound materials. Are abductees products of a transgenic program rather than subjects in alien experimentation? I have no idea. Maybe they subject us to catch-and-release for a host of reasons much as we catch-and-release animals.

A few things as of late have brought this to mind, which is to say what I actually believe regarding all this weirdness in my life. The first, of course, is Trump, who I feel has given conspiracy as a whole a bad name. Conspiracies are a natural product of human social groups. You can see things like this in a circle of friends, at the level of a fast food restaurant, and one can really doubt that shit like this happens in government? Wake up. And some are going to be poor conspirators and they’re going to get caught, but others — such as the intelligence community, as an easy example — are artists at keeping secrets or swaying public opinion from believing them through spreading disinformation and utilizing ridicule. So conspiracy in and if itself is not an absurd concept.

Having said that, not everything is a goddamned conspiracy, either. We went to the moon. The earth is lumpy and roundish. The recent flat earth documentary I watched called Behind the Curve and my failed attempts to watch The Joe Rogan podcast with Alex Jones have left me astounded at the kind of dogma and absolute madness obsessive-compulsive conspiratorial thinking can generate.

Stick your head into a notion. Explore an idea to the extremes, to the very edges of the earth — but pull your fucking head out when you’re done. Unless you can be at least reasonably certain, unless the evidence is absolutely overwhelming, why take the risk of investing in just another lie?