The Poole Pyramid: A Saga of Strangeness

Illustration by Traci Shepard

This is a story that has been told many times. The so-called Poole Pyramid is routinely counted among the exalted pantheon of the strangest entities ever to be associated with the UFO phenomenon. However, most retellings of this fantastical tale fail to mention that it was just one part of a family's much longer relationship with the unknown. It might have started in 1965, with two terrified boys witnessing something incomprehensible in their bedroom, but it winds its way onwards for many years afterwards. I am about to tell you a tale of multi-witness sightings, UFO car chases, and photographic evidence of flying saucers.

A Portal on the Dorset Coast

In 1969, Leslie Harris was a member of the Bournemouth-based Cosmic Research Group. Led by former government official Francis E. Hurley, this tightly-knit group maintained a library of books, pamphlets, and tapes relevant to UFOs. They conducted skywatches in the summer, and could often be seen delivering lectures to public meetings regarding flying saucers, approaching the issue from a metaphysical point of view [1].

Between these activities, Harris dedicated his time to investigating local Dorset reports of the strange and unusual. It was in this capacity that he first encountered L. Druce.

As far as Druce could remember at the time, it all began in October of 1967. He and his brother-in-law, B. George, were driving home through the autumnal dusk after an afternoon's fishing off the beautiful Portland coast. They had been accompanied by eight of their friends, but had eventually gotten separated from the rest of them on the road, seeing as George was an inexperienced driver currently being taught by Druce. They were passing through Lytchett Minster when George first noticed something odd.

"A cigar-shaped form, coffee brown in colour with a row of regular yellow lights"

Whatever it was, it was big. It was floating over St Peter's Finger Garage [2], and appeared to be about 70ft long and roughly 200ft off the ground. The car's engine abruptly stalled, leaving both men staring helplessly out of their window at a cigar-shaped form, coffee brown in colour with a row of regular yellow lights along it, resembling windows. Several others gathered around them, leaving their cars and staring up at the night sky in bewilderment and rapture. They watched the thing for five minutes, becoming increasingly unnerved until they decided to leave the scene. 

Luckily, their car was now starting as if nothing had happened. They set off down the road, only to see the UFO ascend slightly before beginning to follow them. It crossed from one side of the road to the other in order to keep pace with them, and they eventually stopped their car again when they reached the Oasis Cafe. The flying enigma came to rest in the sky above a police station opposite the cafe, and Druce decided to run into the building to fetch an officer. When a policeman accompanied him back outside, the object had vanished into the night sky. 

"It crossed from one side of the road to the other in order to keep pace with them"

However, just as the two men were about to explain what had happened, their need to do so was extinguished by the reappearance of the apparition. This time it looked completely different, resembling a blazing mass of coloured light, composed of bands of multiple different colours. It shone red, yellow, green, and blue in the dark night. Awestruck, the policeman staggered back into the station to alert his compatriots to the unfolding situation. 

Now two policemen were watching the thing, and it began an uncanny dance. The top section of the vaguely conical vision split off from the main body of the object, and went beneath it before rejoining. After flickering out of existence and back again once more, the UFO began to slowly move away from the witnesses. It suddenly gained speed and shot out of view, like a bullet from a gun, leaving all four men stood on the street with their sense of reality irrevocably shattered. The policemen took statements from the brothers-in-law, but they never heard anything more about it.

"A blazing mass of coloured light"

Druce told Harris that his legs had felt weak for the duration of the sighting, and that the hairs on his arms had stood up. George vomited on the journey back home. The men had perhaps been initiated into something that night.

Harris also notes that George had since seen an orange sphere "four times the size of a dinner plate" traversing the clouds near Old Harry Rocks in Studland, Dorset. He had also seen a floating yellow "scratch" in the sky on September 25th 1968, which he estimated to be one inch wide and eighteen inches long [3].

When You Notice It...

After witnessing the incomprehensible in the skies over Lychett Minster, Druce had become an enthusiastic believer in the reality of extraterrestrial visitation. On these grounds, he had maintained contact with Leslie Harris, and so he notified her on July 20th, 1971 that his brother-in-law had photographed something neither of them could identify five days previously. Harris promptly went to speak with George, and was able to disclose that his full name was Brian Arthur George, and that he lived in Poole.

It had been the evening of Thursday, July 15th, somewhere between 22:30 and 23:00, and George was just about to turn in for the night. His wife, Sallie, and his three-year-old son, Rory, were already asleep, leaving him as the sole conscious occupant of the house. In what was a normal nighttime ritual for him, he went over to his window and looked out at the night sky. 

As he did, he caught sight of a white, glowing object plotting a slow course across the sky. It seemed to be moving diagonally away from him, from left to right in his field of vision. The UFO appeared approximately the "size of a tennis ball at arm's length" and was roughly 30° above the horizon, probably moving west from a southeasterly direction, as seen in the southwest-facing window. George watched it for a few moments in confusion, before remembering that he had a polaroid camera nearby.

Clutching the blocky body of his Polaroid Swinger II in his hands and opening the window, he pointed the camera at the UFO and took a photo with a dazzling flash. Anxious to resume his observation of the saucer, he pulled the developing photograph out of the device slightly before it was finished and looked back up at the sky. The mysterious craft had vanished, but its image had clearly impressed itself onto the film. White patches had appeared along the top of the photo, likely caused by rushed viewing.

Brian George's full 1971 photo

Closeup of apparent flying saucer

Harris persuaded George to part with his sole copy of this photo so that he could get prints made, which he published in Flying Saucer Review in October of that year. He also reported that between his visit to Poole in July and the publication of his article, members of the George and Druce families had been having further strange experiences, including several dramatic UFO encounters. Brian George and his sister (Mrs. Druce) were also said to have some limited ESP abilities, including George's apparent skill for predicting the sex and time of birth of unborn babies [4]! 

It Notices You

What was to occur throughout the rest of 1971 was definitely not without precedent. Not only had Druce and George been tailed by a cigar-shaped object over Lychett Minster in 1967, but George had also had another eerie encounter sometime around 1970 while hunting rabbits on Canford Heath in Poole. He claimed that he suddenly became aware of two bright lights, one red and the other green, descending towards him. They were very close together, but he couldn't see any solid structure behind them. They made no audible sound. As one would, he initially thought he was watching an aircraft, but the lights were not flashing and continued to descend towards him at a steady 45° angle.

He started to grow uneasy as the lights got closer, and they appeared to land behind a clump of trees some 500-600 yards away. George was terrified at this point, fleeing the scene promptly.

Roughly one year later, Brian and Sallie were driving to Poole along Longfleet Road at 13:30, when they both noticed a "rocket-shaped" object climbing steeply into the southern sky above Poole Hospital. It was bright white in colour. Both witnesses momentarily lost it in the glare as it crossed over the sun, and soon after Brian was unable to continue observing it due to needing to drive.

Slightly over two weeks after Brian took his striking photograph, on Saturday, July 31st, Druce's mother and his sister Jenny saw a flying saucer. Jenny was the first to see it, looking out of her lounge window just after 23:00. Excited, she attracted her mother's attention and they both ventured outside the house to watch the strange object. A large, white craft shaped like a child's spinning top was floating at an elevation of approximately 75°. It moved slightly to the right and lost a little altitude before continuing to hover, with a slight vertical oscillation.

As they were observing the perplexing thing from outside on the street, another object started to emerge from it. This one was about a quarter of the size of the saucer, and resembled a string of five red-orange lights. Harris described it as worm-like when he briefly mentioned this sighting in his October article. Only the lights could be seen, but it gave the impression of a solid object. The streetlights went out as the serpentine apparition slowly and silently drifted away from them. In total, it took about 15 minutes to disappear. The saucer remained hovering, and the women watched it for a few more minutes before both grew tired and decided to retire to bed. Neither of them knew of Brian's photo.

Two days later, on August 2nd, Druce and Roy George (Brian's brother) were driving along the A31 towards Ringwood in their removal van. Three white lights approached them from their left at roughly 21:50, and began to keep pace with their vehicle. They were described as approximately the size of an old penny at arm's length, and appeared to be attached to a circular object, despite this not being visible. They noiselessly flew at an elevation of roughly 150-200 yards.

"They noiselessly flew at an elevation of roughly 150-200 yards"

The lights initially travelled in a straight line until the van cleared a line of trees, at which point they swooped much closer to it, getting to roughly 100 yards away. George began to slow the vehicle, intending to stop for inexplicable reasons. Druce was terrified and yelled at him to speed up, at which point he accelerated rapidly and the objects overtook them. They flew at least 600 yards ahead of the vehicle before turning back on themselves to the left, and abruptly retreating the way they had come [5].

Enter the Pyramid

It was at this point that Druce's two stepsons, Roderick (13) and Terence (14) told Harris that they had been through a frightening and inexplicable experience of their own some seven years ago. Seeing as Harris was writing in 1972, that would mean that the event took place in 1965. Terence had woken up in bed in the middle of the night, and had seen something utterly bizarre moving at the foot of his bed. It had a pyramidal body, taller than it was wide, composed of many-coloured triangles that slotted together, as well as spindly black 'arms' ending in crab-like claws. These appendages moved in an unsettling "waving" motion. 

Terence screamed in baffled horror, and Roderick woke with a start. He also saw the pyramid, just before it suddenly vanished. Mrs. Druce also confirmed to Harris that she remembered Terence being terrified of something in his bedroom that night.

The next afternoon, the brothers were walking home across a carpark when they saw it again. This time, it was entirely black in colour, and seemed to be stood next to a parked car. It was halfway up the car's window in height. Roderick had a side view of the thing, and he said that it had a sort of "beak" protruding near the top of its triangular form. Horrified, both boys ran off, and claimed to see the creature turn to watch them as they left [6].

Terence's drawing of the pyramid in his bedroom (left)
Roderick's drawing of the pyramid by the car (right)

The Wheel of the Year

The families' houses were perhaps unusually quiet throughout the rest of August and September, although I can imagine that they were all holding their breath for the inevitable return of the alarming phenomena. This return indeed came on Tuesday, October 12th. Druce's daughter, Suzanne, woke blearily from sleep at 3am on that day, and soon became conscious of a "whirring, swishing" sound that seemed to be coming from outside. Wandering over to her window and wiping the condensation from the glass, she saw nothing, despite the continuing noise.

Perplexed, she ran to her parents' bedroom and woke them up, whereupon they too could hear the weird noise. Mr. Druce told Harris that it sounded like the regular swishing of a skipping rope, and appeared to be passing overhead. He also looked outside, but was similarly unable to see anything unusual.

Precisely a week later, it was between 22:00 and 22:30 at night when Druce and his two brothers-in-law were driving along the M3. When they got between the Reading intersection and Winchester, they started noticing vibrant red points of light appearing in the night sky. Some of these were round, some were oblong. Some were stationary while others moved about in all different directions, with some being very close to the ground. They seemed to randomly appear and disappear. 

Although there were no more than 50 lights in the sky at any one time, the men counted at least 200 in total. 

At this point, they had stopped on the deserted motorway and were watching the UFOs dancing in the darkness from outside their van. A policeman rolled up behind them and told them to move along. No-one heard any sound, and it is implied that either the policeman was unable to see the lights, or they had vanished by the time the trio got back on the road. 

They continued driving until the Winchester bypass, where something even more unsettling happened. They stopped again, presumably at Brian's request, who abruptly left the vehicle and marched off into a pitch-black field by the side of the road. Thankfully, he swiftly returned, but appeared terrified. His pulse was racing, and he was so agitated that he was unable to speak for a moment, but was eventually able to answer when Druce asked him what was wrong. "Come see for yourself!"

Druce accompanied Brian out into the field while Roy remained in the van. They waded through the presumably wet October grass, before catching sight of something glowing white in the darkness. It was roughly 40 yards away, and was shaped like the letter M, 10ft tall and between 7-8ft wide. The incomprehensible thing seemed to silently hover some 2ft above the ground, and was slowly progressing over a rising incline to its right. Deeply unnerved, both men elected to return to the van.

When later questioned, Brian told Harris that he had initially only seen one of the arches, but that he had seen the full M-shape when he returned to the scene with his brother-in-law.

On October 24th, a red oblong hovered in the air in full view of the Druce household. Mr. Druce's two sisters, mother, and brother all saw the aerial geometry very clearly, as did everyone who lived in the house next door. It remained stationary in the air for many minutes before exiting the scene, and Druce's sister phoned him while watching it, telling him to look in its direction. He was unable to see it.

As mentioned earlier, Harris noted that Brian George, Mrs. Druce and her husband's mother have all had ESP experiences. The latter apparently had a gift for recognising certain places despite having never visited them before. Mr. Druce told Harris that he was growing tired of the inhuman attention, stating clearly that he was "fed up with it all".

As if granting his wish, no more reports of strange activity were forthcoming from the Druce or George families. Whether this was due to lack of reporting or genuine cessation of anomalous events, we will likely never know [7].

Sources and Notes

1. Topside, No. 32 (Summer and Fall, 1969)

2. St. Peter's Finger Garage no longer exists (or at least is not findable on Google), but there is a pub in Lychett Minster called St Peter's Finger. Perhaps this is the same location?

3. Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 15 No. 6 (November-December 1969)

4. Flying Saucer Review: Case Histories, Supplement No. 7 (October, 1971)

5. Flying Saucer Review: Case Histories, Supplement No. 9 (February, 1972)

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

Phantoms and Rituals in Staffordshire

Artwork from Hellebore Magazine

The origins of the ritual are still shrouded in mystery to this day. Folk knowledge asserts that it dates back to a long-lost pagan fertility ritual, and modern historians remain unable to state with any certainty where the practice comes from.

It was Monday, September 8th, 1986 – and Mick Dodds, his wife Lila [1], and his mother-in-law had spent a long day in the Staffordshire village of Abbots Bromley, where they had borne witness to the age-old performance of the Horn Dance. As they put the village in their rearview mirror on the way to Stowe-by-Chartley, they had no idea that the ritual wasn’t done with them yet.

The Wildman's Hunt

After dropping Lila's mother back at her cottage in the nearby village of Stowe-by-Chartley, Mick continued driving northeast until he reached the A518 road that would take them home. It was nighttime by now, but both parties were looking forward to the drive that would take them through the idyllic West Midlands countryside and past the 11th century ruins of Chartley Castle.

Perhaps the couple's casual conversation was suddenly interrupted. Something large and dark lurched out of the field to the right side of the road, and Mick slammed on the breaks in shock. It was a massive stag, its velvet antlers glistening in the moonlight. The giant animal wandered across the road directly in front of their vehicle, leaving both Mick and Lila silent with awe. While they watched the deer, something else was quickly making its way through the field under cover of darkness.

Lila screamed with horror as the grotesque thing leapt out onto the road, seemingly in pursuit of the stag. It seemed to be a large primate, like a chimpanzee. Neither passenger registered how the stag reacted to this, however, because the chimpanzee only made it halfway across the road before stopping dead in its tracks and turning to look directly at them through the car's windscreen. It began to move towards them, picking up speed.

Red hot panic overwhelming his senses, Mick put the car into reverse gear and attempted to back away as quickly as possible as the ape began a flat-out charge towards their vehicle. The engine stalled. Just before it reached the car's bonnet, the chimp stopped and retreated. Fumbling to restart the engine, Mick accidentally flooded it and left them completely stranded and helpless. Maybe sensing weakness, the hairy thing charged again.

Just before it reached their car, it stopped once again. Was it mocking them? The terrified couple and the monstrous ape remained deadlocked like this about twenty seconds, and it made at least one more mock charge before beating its final retreat. It bounded off the road and into the dark field to the left of their car, presumably chasing the stag. It had never actually touched the car, and the passengers were (physically) unscathed by the encounter. 

Mick set about the gruelling process of restarting the engine, pale as a ghost and shaken to his core [2].

Clashing Antlers and Pagan Cults

At the start of this article, I mentioned the Horn Dance of Abbots Bromley. I feel that this is particularly relevant because of the contents of the performance, which seems to have been somehow reflected in that evening's weird happenings on the A518. 

The 'horns' of the ritual are actually antlers, held by six costumed men who perform what is perhaps a strange re-enactment of the clashing of rutting stags throughout the day on Wakes Monday (the first Monday after 4th September). They are accompanied by a motley crew of other characters who provide a musical backdrop for the ceremony, including a fool, a bowman, a hobby-horse, a triangle player, and a man in costume as Maid Marian.

Beginning at 8am at St. Nicholas' Church, the stag-men pass through key sites throughout the parish of Abbots Bromley, forming into two parallel lines at each location and methodically advancing towards each other. Their antlers are held at chest height as they pass, but they never actually collide with one another. This strange rite is repeated all through the parish for twelve hours, before a final dance is performed in the street at 8pm [3]. 

The first mention of a hobby-horse dance at Abbots Bromley dates from 1532, but does not mention the antlers. A 1686 source discusses the antlers in a description of a performance witnessed around 1630. It has seemingly been performed annually since then, with a short hiatus for the English Civil War. 

Before the Civil War, it was likely a Christmastide festivity associated with St Nicholas' Day and New Years Day. The antlers used have been dated to the 11th century, having been from domesticated reindeer perhaps imported from Scandinavia sometime between then and the 17th century.

Mainland European church documents from between the 4th and 11th centuries frequently denounce midwinter practices that were viewed as pagan, which included animal guising and ritual transvestitism, just like the Horn Dance we see today. These have frequently been interpreted as fertility rites.

While none of these references refer specifically to Britain, or to any time beyond the 11th century, 20th century folklorists frequently saw the possibility of a connection between these ancient practices and modern day rituals. 

Doubt has been cast on the pagan theory by modern scholars due to lack of direct evidence, and Ronald Hutton postulates that animal disguises and crossdressing may have independently arisen during medieval festivals as an easy way for ritual participants to express the suspension of normal social rules (distinctions between the sexes, and between humans and animals) that took place at midwinter [4].

A Place Between Places

Rituals in which the spirit world was invoked frequently involved the dissolution of normal social categories and boundaries. Initiation rites often feature a middle stage between the initiates' separation from their previous social roles and their reaggregation into a new position in society, which has been called liminal. This same quality of liminality (neither-here-nor-there-ness) has been identified in settings conducive to paranormal activity in the modern day [5].

One such setting between settings nowadays would certainly be a long road, such as the A518, the site of the Dodds' encounter. In fact, the Dodds are not the only people to have seen something strange along this road. Local resident Tom Goode told investigator Jim Foley of his recollection of seeing a large number of cars parked near Weston Bank (about 3 miles southwest of Chartley Castle) sometime around the summer of 1950. When he asked what the drivers what they were doing, he was told that they had seen strange objects in the sky and wanted to get a better look.

Apparently unidentified aircraft had been seen coming towards the road from near Stafford, and "hovered and darted to and fro". Tom stayed in the area for a little while, but was unable to see the lights. He dismissed this event as having been due to secret aircraft testing at a nearby airbase [6].

A newspaper article from the October 27th 1995 edition of the Post and Times, written by Rosemarie Davies, is also reprinted in Foley's excellent book on the folklore of the road. It details a poltergeist outbreak that took place over the course of three days at Lower Loxley Farm (approximately 3 miles northeast of Chartley Castle) one August in the 1890s. 

Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, along with their 13-year-old maid, were horrified to repeatedly witness kitchen items and shoes pick themselves up and fly through the air at great speed, accompanied by loud knocking on the walls and ceilings. Stones were thrown at the house from outside, shattering windows up to the third floor. After Mr. Wilson called the police, they witnessed the strange happenings too, and then apparently threatened the maid with jail time if she did not confess to the whole thing.

There was only ever one incident in which the maid was seen to throw a small stone at the house, and she was frequently with the Wilson couple when all three of them witnessed strange things happening, well beyond her ability to accomplish. When spiritualist F. Brittain asked her about her experience of the three days, she said that she didn't have much memory of them and had felt as if "a bandage was wrapped tighly around her head, so tight at times that it hurt her". She described experiencing strange sensations all over her body at night, and fainting uncontrollably.

After the first night of activity, the maid slept in the same room as the Wilson couple. One night, Mr. Wilson noticed that she raised her head while breathing very heavily and making "peculiar noises in her throat" whilst the knocking sounds were occurring. The bizarre events ceased when the maid left the farm on the 21st of August, leaving behind more questions than answers [7]. 

Conclusion

I cannot remember exactly where I heard it, but I think it was on an episode of the podcast Strange Familiars with Timothy Renner. He said that when he investigates Bigfoot sightings, he will often ask the witness if they have seen anything else out of the ordinary. He is rewarded so often with further stories of strange lights and apparitions that he has come to expect this pattern. It seems that the same holds true for the 'British Bigfoot'.

Many sources grasp at a possible connection between manifestations of inexplicable phenomena and human ritual behaviour. If the area around what is now the A518 seems to be especially prone to strange happenings, then perhaps it is no surprise that such a modern remnant of an age-old boundary-defying ritual is still annually performed there too. Just like the costumed performers become something that is neither human nor animal, it seems that forces beyond our knowledge might take on similar costumes given the right circumstances...

Bibliography and Notes

1. Pseudonym, Mick's wife goes unnamed in the original source. 

2. Redfern, N. (2012) ‘Chapter Sixteen: A Monstrous Castle’, in Wildman! The Monstrous and Mysterious Saga of the British Bigfoot. CFZ Press, pp. 95–98.

3. Roud, S. (2008) ‘4th September: Abbots Bromley Horn Dance’, in The English Year: A Month-by-Month Guide to the Nation’s Customs and Festivals, from May Day to Mischief Night. Penguin, pp. 394–397.

4. Hutton, R. (1996) ‘Chapter Eight: Hobby-Horse and Horn Dance’, in The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford University Press, pp. 81–95.

5. Hansen, G.P. (2001) The Trickster and the Paranormal. Xlibris Corp.

6. Foley, J. (1998) ‘Tom Goode’s Story’, in The Road to Chartley: Ghosts, Legends & Stories of the A518 (Part I), pp. 38–49.

7. Foley, J. (1998) ‘Strange Goings-on at Lower Loxley’, in The Road to Chartley: Ghosts, Legends & Stories of the A518 (Part I), pp. 103-105.

Resistance: The Gary Rowe Story

CONTENT WARNING: This story contains discussions of domestic violence and child abuse.

Pain. Pain was what woke Gary from sleep that night, and he winced as he opened his eyes to find himself caught in blinding lights on the ceiling above him. The surface under his back was cold, hard and unforgiving. Save for the ceiling lights, most of the setting was shrouded by darkness. He was on an operating table. As a regular biker, his mind immediately went to thoughts of a horrific accident. Had he been out on the road? Was he in hospital? He began to panic.

The pain was getting worse, it was throbbing in his head. His eyes focused and adjusted to the dark, and his heart dropped as he looked upwards. There was someone - something - in the room with him, and it wasn't a doctor. It was tall and had grey skin. Gary tried to move, tried to escape, but found he was paralysed. Shouting at the creature now, he demanded to know why it was doing this. 

Image Source

He was met with only silence from the entity. He screamed at it again, and his next memory is of the horrible thing inserting a large needle into his left temple. Pain ricocheted across his skull, throwing him to the limits of consciousness. 

"What are you doing? You're going to fucking kill me! You're going to fucking kill me! Leave me alone!"

The creature gave Gary no compassion or acknowledgement as the needle was pushed further into his skull. The searing agony finally overwhelmed his threadbare senses, and he blacked out.

Gary soon found himself back in his bedroom, and the room was spinning in a disorientated haze. It was 1988, and he was roughly 19 years old. His head hurt terribly and he needed the bathroom. Staggering to his feet before looking in the bathroom mirror, it must've felt like the ground was swept out from underneath him. There was an angry red mark on his left temple. It wasn't a dream. What had happened to him?

The Night Side of Childhood

Gary Rowe (pseudonym) was born in Cumbria in 1969. Despite the beauty of the Lake District and rolling mountains around him, his family home was a tangled nest of vipers and thorns. Susan, his mother, had resented him since before he was born. She would tell him bedtime stories about the times she had tried to miscarry or abort him. She was convinced that he only made it into the world through terrible luck. He doesn't remember anything about his father, except seeing him sat in a van, screaming verbal abuse at Susan before leaving both of their lives forever.

This abandonment prompted Gary and his mother to move into his grandparents' house. Unfortunately, he was subjected to further abuse at the hands of his grandparents. It seemed as if his mother had simply carried an intergenerational trend forward into her own behaviour. He was kicked and beaten by his grandfather, and these awful moments constituted some of his earliest memories. 

In spite of it all, Gary fought to express the humanity that his elders had lost. He was a chatty and curious child, spending his free time with the animals at the local zoo and developing a strong distaste for greed and other social ills.

In hindsight, Gary remembers that his first UFO encounter came when he was about five or six. He had been in his bedroom in his grandparents' house when he saw something strange outside his window. There was a "large, white object" hovering in the sky nearby. Hollering for his grandmother to come take a look, she joined him by the window and could also see the anomaly. As they both watched, it started to move away from them before disappearing. 

"What was that?" he asked, breathlessly. 

"Probably the moon" she curtly replied.  

Gary knew this wasn't right, even at the time. Nevertheless, he forced himself to dismiss it, knowing that he was surrounded by people who would be unwilling to entertain his myriad questions. 

Soon, a strange lump appeared on the roof of Gary's mouth. It didn't move when he felt it with his tongue, and appeared to be below the tissue. It was months until his next dentist appointment, and the object somehow vanished in that time, disappearing as suddenly as it had appeared. When he told his dentist about it, he was intrigued and examined his mouth thoroughly, but was unable to find anything. 

Susan began dating a man named David, who would eventually reveal himself as a drunken gambling addict. Understandably, Gary and David didn't get on very well. 

A tense drive ensued when Susan decided that the family should all go on a holiday to the other side of the country. They were still trapped in the car together by late evening, and this was when Gary's next meeting with the anomalous currents running beneath the surface of his life would take place.

Perhaps on the brink of sleep, Gary didn't notice anything was amiss until his mother loudly cried out, "Oh my God! It's following us! What are we going to do?"

Something luminous was keeping pace with the car. It was floating along above the hedgerow on the left side of the road. David told both Susan and Gary to ignore it - "Don't look, just ignore it and go to sleep" - but Gary was unable to. He quietly watched it move along beside them for about an hour, before it turned and disappeared into the long night. 

Once the family had returned from this fated vacation, Gary can recall that he began experiencing intense dread around bedtime. Eventually, this unattributed apprehension morphed into memories of full-fledged visitations by "little creatures" who would enter his bedroom at night. He cannot remember them ever interacting with him directly, but he still felt extreme fear around them, running out of his room every time he saw one. Susan and David reacted to their son's night terrors with amusement.

Even regardless of the nighttime visitations, Gary never needed to sleep that much. He would usually sleep for a few hours per night, before just lying in his bed and daydreaming. 

Image Source

Perhaps as a way to escape both the boredom of these hours and the wanton cruelty he experienced in his day-to-day life, he discovered the ability to leave his body during these liminal times. He would catapult his awareness out of his physical limitations and float above the house, flying around the neighbourhood and experiencing the quiet of village nighttime. He even found that he could leave the planet altogether, and observe our blue world from the vastness of outer space.

It was at roughly this time that Susan married David, and David began to beat Gary just as all the rest of the adults in his life had. His mind was set on slot machines and alcohol, and he regarded the presence of a child in his life as an unwanted burden. The verbal abuse was constant and physical violence was frequent as well. 

Beyond the Bounds

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gary was a struggling student. He enjoyed the process of learning, but he didn't feel any sort of attachment to academia. Once he'd finished school, the suffocating life that had been built up around him started to fall away rapidly. 

His mother and stepfather kicked him out of the house the moment he was of legal age - but this would ultimately serve him well. He was able to successfully secure a place to live, and managed to find a fulfilling job and a lively group of friends. I can imagine that joy became a more frequent part of his life. 

Just a couple of years later, it was 1988. One night, Gary woke to find himself lying on a cold operating table with an inhuman spectre staring down at him. The being drove a needle into his head, causing him to lose consciousness shortly after he'd woken up in the otherworldly setting. Much to his horror, he discovered a red welt on his left temple the next morning, exactly where the needle had been inserted. Despite its incongruity with the rest of his life, it had indeed taken place.

Knowing that he would not be believed - barely believing it himself - he pushed this experience out of his head and submerged himself in his ever-expanding life in the human world. 

Soon afterwards, he found a woman named Grace and she found him. They were bound together in romance, and shortly thereafter got married. They decided in together in the little town of Distington, Cumbria. This place had only slightly over 2,000 inhabitants. It was the perfect place to raise a child. Nine months later, Grace gave birth to a baby boy. Gary would give his son the childhood he was deprived of, and was a loving and compassionate father. 

Many years passed, the new family sharing trials and joys and sorrows. Gary felt anchored and happy in his world. His son had grown into a bubbly little toddler, and everything seemed as if it had finally reached a place of calm. Gary was now 24 years old, and it was 1993. 

Most nights, he would be woken up by the need to urinate - unable to sleep through it due to an unspecified injury he'd received as a teenager. The bathroom was on the far side of the house, and so Gary would need to navigate down the stairs to the first floor and make it across the living room and through the kitchen each time. One night in particular stands out. 

It was close to dawn, and although Gary had woken up needing the bathroom, he briefly tried to wait it out. He proved unable to, and had to get out of bed and walk down to the living room. As he stepped into the room and shut the door behind him, his blood ran cold. There was a short humanoid stood in the middle of the room. Its flesh was dark grey, and it had its head bowed and its arms together in front of it, "like it was a scolded schoolboy". Gary recoiled in horrified confusion, before abruptly losing consciousness. When he next woke up, he found himself back in bed.

He remembered this fully the next morning, but once again decided to keep it a secret. Although the uninvited guests had left years in between their previous visits, they started to pick up the pace after this incident. The next bizarre happening took place a few weeks later.

Gary and Grace turned out the light after talking in bed for roughly 30 minutes, and laid down with their backs facing each other. Gary curled into a ball to sleep in his usual position, and waited ten minutes before realising that he couldn't sleep. Sticking his head out from the blanket, he was terrified to see a woman's face just "six or eight inches" from his face.

It took a moment for the reality of the situation to set in. Was it Grace? No, she was still asleep in bed. There had been a total stranger staring at him through his bed covers. She was wearing a grey-coloured suit which looked clean and new, and she had blonde hair. He lept to his feet, yelling, and the woman did the same. Without wasting a moment, she floated upwards and disappeared through the ceiling, which seemed to blur and swirl as she passed through it.

Grace was now awake, and pleaded with Gary to know what was going on. He gestured to the ceiling and told her that he thought he had seen a ghost. The swirling effect on the ceiling was no longer visible by the time Grace was looking upwards. The couple made tea to calm themselves down, and Grace agreed that the strange woman might've been a ghost.

Image Source

Two weeks later, the woman reappeared. Gary woke to find himself curled up at the foot of his bed sometime around midnight, and his heart lept in his chest when he opened his eyes to see the same woman kneeling at the side of the bed, staring intently at Grace. Heart still pounding, Gary approached the woman and put his hand on her shoulder. 

Choking out words, Gary asked, "Hello, what's your name?"

The woman jumped backwards and shoved Gary powerfully away from her. His screaming woke Grace up - but the woman had already vanished before she could see her. 

Could she have been a ghost? Her shoulder felt solid, and she had physically pushed him with great force. A while later, Gary and Grace were briefly exposed to information about alien abductions involving "Pamela Anderson lookalikes". Gary wondered whether the woman he had seen could've been from another world. 

Big Questions

"What do you want to do with your life?" 

This was the question that Gary found himself confronted with when he woke on the operating table, in the company of a tall grey humanoid. He was sat upright on the edge of the table, with his legs dangling off it. One or two years had passed since the encounters with the woman in grey. For a reason he couldn't explain, he felt "calm, relaxed, and at home" with the grey alien. It was as if he was with his doctor. When the entity asked him the question, he was nonetheless caught off guard.

His response to it was apparently so embarrassing and humiliating that he refused to tell Preston Dennett (with whom he spoke about his experiences) what it was. It was through this experience that he began to reconcile with the fact that he was an alien abductee. It also seemed that the aliens had no sense of humour, based on the being's emotionless response to his absurd answer.

He got the impression that his family was somehow involved with the abductions, and shortly afterwards this would be confirmed. 

The next time he woke somewhere he had not gone to sleep, he was with his wife. He felt groggy and disorientated, struggling to come back to full consciousness. He and Grace were both completely naked, huddled together "like two trapped animals in the corner of a cage." They were floating in a clear, breatheable liquid in some kind of giant tank.

They could both see grey humanoids above and to the right of them, observing from an elevated walkway. Three of these beings were tall, and two of them were shorter. One of the tall greys was the same one who had painfully inserted a needle into his skull many years previously. He understood that the tall entities were the masterminds, and that the smaller ones did grunt work.

Behind the greys stood two human-looking figures in dark suits and boots. They held what were either tablets or clipboards, and seemed to be taking notes on their observations.

Grace was terrified, screaming at Gary and pleading with him to tell him what was happening and what they should do. Despite not feeling certainty, and knowing that they were powerless in the situation, Gary tried his best to reassure her that the beings were not going to hurt them.

Gary's memories of that night abruptly end there, and he discovered that Grace did not recall that night's events when he gently questioned her about it the morning after. He decided against telling her.

In late 1994, Gary was looking out of his window in the late evening when he caught sight of the most striking UFO he had ever seen. It was slowly, silently moving over the house. It seemed to be solid, shaped like a cigar, and was big enough to have completely "blotted out the winter sky". Gary said it was "the biggest moveable object I have ever seen in my life".

This was the last alien-related experience he would have for many years. Gary got a satisfying job at a nearby warehouse and attempted to move on with his life. All the while, he continued to have intense out-of-body experiences in which he had the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, and even to other dimensions, which he lacked the language to really describe. He believed these experiences were related to his abductions.

Both Gary and Grace developed precognitive abilities. Grace's were more pronounced, regularly giving her foreknowledge of events in her daily life. Gary experienced many dramatic visions of tragic events of both personal and global scales. 

"I Think We're Property"

It was now 2016, and the intrusive beings had been absent from Gary's life for over twenty years. A few years earlier, the Rowe family had moved from Distington to a little village outside the city of Carlisle - a city with a strong military presence. It took a long time to unpack their whole lives into this new dwelling-place, and by the time they had started to feel properly settled, they were due to receive some unexpected visitors.

Gary was lying awake in bed at night when he suddenly felt the covers being tugged back away from him. He snapped out of his nocturnal reverie, uncertain whether he had imagined what had just happened. Just as he tried to relax again, the same thing happened. The third time it happened, whatever it was successfully pulled the covers fully off his body. 

"My heart was pounding like a steam train".

Panic struck him like a rock impacting glass as he felt his body begin to float off the bed and into the air. Unable to resist, he levitated out of his bedroom window and upwards into the night. 

Beyond that point, he was unable to remember anything else of that night. When he woke up the next morning, he checked himself for any visible marks but could find nothing. 

The same thing would happen to him repeatedly over the next few months. They could take him whenever they wanted, and there was nothing he could do about it.

After repeated violations, he noticed something crucial that would eventually help him defend himself from his otherworldly tormentors. There was a peculiar heaviness that would come over his body when they were about to make their presence known. He could now anticipate their interventions, provided he was awake at the time.

One evening, Gary drifted off to sleep how he usually did - and found himself jolted awake. He was lying on an unfamiliar surface and there was a figure straddling him. It was a young woman, and she was having sex with him. The moment she realised he was awake, she immediately got off him and sat down beside him. Gary presumably scrambled backwards with horror and bewilderment. 

"Shush! It's okay. Keep calm. You're okay", whispered the woman in a forceful, urgent tone.

She had dark hair and was lithely built, and appeared maybe only twenty years old. For reasons he couldn't explain, Gary found himself feeling reassured by the woman despite the bizarre situation. He was sat on the floor of a strange room, facing the wall. He could see an arched doorway nearby, that led down a narrow, curved corridor with dim lighting.

Where was he? He made a move to turn around to look at the rest of the setting, and the woman reacted dramatically. Her voice rose in panic, and she begged him to remain facing towards her. 

It was too late, and Gary's head spun with what he saw. The room was enormous, like a warehouse. There were human bodies, male and female, lying all over the floor. At least 50 of them, probably closer to 100. Most of them were completely still, while others twisted around with apparent pleasure. Some were coupled together and were having intercourse.

"The feeling I got was, I really, really wasn't supposed to see this."

Looking back towards the woman, he was momentarily confronted by two small greys walking past them at the end of the corridor. They seemed to be talking with one another, and didn't notice him. Nevertheless, he reacted with instinctual panic and the woman grabbed him, telling him to ignore them. She stood up and put out her hand - "Quickly, come with me!"

He followed her through a previously-unnoticed arched doorway and passed into a long, narrow room with a work surface with sinks up on the furthest wall. It was some kind of washroom. The woman leant against the surface, and Gary approached her before lifting her up onto it and kissing her. She reciprocated eagerly, and they both agreed that they were attracted to one another. Gary asked her if she would like to have sex again. It seems likely that she ultimately refused, though the precise events were lost in Gary's hazy memories.

The woman looked entirely human, but Gary somehow knew that she did not live on Earth. She seemed to enjoy spending time with him, giving the impression that human interaction was a scarce thing for her. Making the most of his intimate audience with her, Gary started asking her questions about his circumstances, which made her visibly nervous.

"Why are you doing this? Why are they doing this?" 

"I'm not allowed to tell you."

In what seemed like an instant, Gary was suddenly back in his bed. It was morning, and his otherworldly lover was nowhere to be seen. This experience led him to conclude that the interlopers had an agenda involving human reproduction, and that alien abduction may be a much more common experience than most realise. 

What if it happens to everyone? What if it's a human universal, like birth and death? What if only some of us are able to remember it?

Pandemonium and Resistance

Gary was laying in bed one evening in 2016 when a different kind of visitor appeared in his bedroom. He opened his eyes to see a tall humanoid shape stood by his television. It was entirely black in colour, but seemed to be three-dimensional. As if realising it was being observed, the entity darted away from him and abruptly passed through a closed curtain and window before disappearing. These shadow people would soon become a permanent fixture of Gary's life, most commonly appearing at night. 

The Rowe family household seemed to suddenly become a magnet for all sorts of otherworldly intruders. Grace was terrified to see an entity she described as a woman's ghost, and one morning the couple woke to find that all their stove burners had been switched on overnight. Phantom footsteps and weird noises prowled the corridors at every opportunity. 

Gary and Grace both witnessed a "ghost dog" walking through their house, which was certainly not the same animal as their two pet dogs. They would see this creature often enough that they started referring to it as another pet in the household. 

Gary also saw a round, spider-like creature “about the size of a grapefruit” scuttling on the floor. A giant lizard-like entity made its presence known to him as he was lying in bed, crawling up his wall and turning its crocodile-like head to hiss at him. He saw it several times over months, and would liken it to a demon. Despite having loved animals his entire life, he could not love this thing.

Later that year, he would have one of his only daytime encounters. He came downstairs in the morning to find a grey alien standing next to the base of the stairs in the living room. Thinking fast this time, he jumped towards it and grabbed it by the throat in a strong chokehold. It spun its spindly arms around in mad panic, and he could hear its voice screaming in his mind.

"Get off me! Get off me now!"

The thing had leathery, firm skin which was cold to the touch. Just as he seemed to have gained the upper hand over his kidnappers, something unseen rushed him from behind and he lost consciousness. Nonetheless, he felt good about having made his tormentors panic for once, instead of the other way around.

His first experience of 2017 was a repeat of his horrifying abduction from 1988 - complete with the agonising penetration of his temple with a large needle wielded by a tall grey. The nighttime kidnappings had also become constant at this point, with the blankets being pulled from him and his body being levitated up out of the window. 

Gary woke in the middle of the night on one occasion to see something moving in his bedroom to his left. It felt like there was something in his head, and it was attempting to force him back to sleep. He tried to sit up, knowing that this wasn't right - and was met by an gentle voice telling him to go back to sleep.

When he finally managed to sit himself up, a hand reached out of the darkness and pushed him back down. "It's okay. Just sleep. It's not you we need this time."

He felt a hot surge of anger at the sight of two greys getting Grace out of bed. Unable to help his wife, he mutely fell back to sleep.

Gary found himself standing up when he woke from sleep one night in September of 2018. He squinted as his eyes filled with a blinding light, and had to stop himself from covering his face. He was inside some kind of small craft. It was a circular machine, and was entirely transparent save for the floor. Two small greys sat at a control panel roughly eight feet away from him, apparently piloting the vehicle.

Standing there, motionless, Gary took in the view as it rushed past him. They were flying through a scrubland environment, resembling the quintessential North American desert. Although they were only several feet off the ground, the craft was continually picking up speed. It felt like he was seeing something that he wasn't meant to. He wasn't meant to be awake.

A few minutes passed before he decided to make his presence known. He wasn't sure what to say, still feeling groggy and disorientated from sleep. "Alright, lads!" 

The entities in the bubble-like vehicle seemed terrified, more scared than he had ever seen them. The one sat at the right leapt up and started running from one end of the craft to the other, seemingly trying to find a way out of the situation. Gary got the impression that it was young, or otherwise inexperienced. The other one was frozen at the controls in complete silence. 

"It's okay! I'm not going to hurt you!" Gary repeated, until the seated grey finally broke its silence and told him to remain standing where he was. He agreed, and the younger one seemed to calm down slightly. It went back to its seat and looked at him. The ship stopped moving and both entities approached him, initiating a telepathic conversation.

He felt that this was the first time a human had woken up while they were being returned to their home after an abduction. Just like he had asked the woman, Gary asked the pair why they did this to people. They seemed sad to tell him that they were not allowed to say. They did not say why this was the case. 

"Can you let me remember being taken?" Gary pleaded.

"No, we're not allowed" the greys responded regretfully.

"Who am I going to tell? Who'd believe me anyway?"

He received no answer, and soon woke up back in bed. At first, he didn't recall the incident - but his memory suddenly came rushing back to him later in the day. He felt as if the beings had allowed him to remember what had happened as a 'thank you' for remaining calm when he had woken up onboard the ship. 

Three days later, he remembered that the small craft had actually left a mountain or mound in the desert via an opening. This implied that he had been taken to an underground facility, and that the "shuttle craft" had been ferrying people back and forth from it. Perhaps he had not been being taken to an off-world mothership all this time, but rather somewhere closer to home?

A few months later, it was December of 2018 and Gary was lying in bed when he felt the familiar heavy feeling that announced the greys' impending arrival. This time, he was prepared for what was coming. The entity pulled the covers all the way off him when he lunged forward and punched it in the face.

It was as if a mask slipped. The grey's face changed immediately - its slit-like mouth suddenly widened to display jagged teeth in a gaping maw. The monstrous thing approached him and Gary pulled his fist back in preparation to punch it again, realising that he was fighting for his life. He blacked out.

Image Source

Nonetheless, this experience changed something in him. He had now seen the true face of the greys. They had tried to come across as frail and innocent, but were really vicious predators underneath. He was ready to fight back even harder when they next appeared.

Just a few months passed before the heaviness once again filled his bedroom. The visitors were here. Gary thought to himself that he would have to kick them this time instead of punching them, to gather more power and hopefully do more damage. As soon as this thought crossed his mind, he lost consciousness.

Conclusion

The greys would not appear to him again. They had learned that he was prepared to violently resist, and so adopted more indirect means of kidnapping him. His next experience took place in early 2019, when he was relieving himself late at night. A group of approximately twenty small orbs appeared in the bathroom, swirling around next to his head at high speed. Confused, he retreated from the bathroom. 

In Spring of 2019, Gary had just gotten into bed when a dazzling white light filled his bedroom from the curtained window. He stared at it, transfixed, until a grapefruit-sized orange ball floated through the curtains and into his room. It hovered silently as he watched it, perplexed at this new phenomenon. A dizzying flash caught him off guard, and he lapsed into unconsciousness again.

One cold December morning of that year, Gary woke up and went to look out of his bedroom window. Thick mist covered his garden and field. The gust of wind suddenly blew, pushing the mist around the outline of a large UFO that had previously been invisible. It was some 50ft above the ground, and was a clear oval shape. As the mist gradually cleared, the object did not depart - but was no longer visible. Was he being watched? 

Eventually, Gary realised that he could not do anything to stop the abductions altogether. He often woke with memories of being floated out of his bedroom window, but nothing much else. Eventually, he decided to break his silence and tell Grace about what had been happening. He had to get a little bit drunk to do it. "It would be easier confessing to being a serial killer, I think."

Grace was shocked but supportive, and Gary felt safe enough to also tell his closest friend. His friend also supported him. "Now that the weight has been lifted, I want people to know."

After many decades of abductions, Gary's perspective on his visitors remains negative at the present. He suspects that the human species is essentially livestock to the beings, but has resolved to make the greys' job harder for them by talking openly about his experiences.

"I've spent most of my life trying to block this all out. I think that's what they want you to do... but now, I've gotten through that mental block. The genie is out of the bottle."

Source

Dennett, P. (2020) ‘Chapter Fifteen: Gary Versus the Greys’, in Onboard UFO Encounters: True Accounts of Contact with Extraterrestrials, pp. 175–193.

Two Phantom Dog Tales

From here in Britain, it can be easy to assume that supernatural 'black dogs' are a primarily British phenomenon. Most areas of the country you visit have their own local names for the unpleasant creatures, and we even have pubs named in their dubious honour. One was immortalised in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1902 Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. 

However, our black dogs are only some among many. Encounters with the hellish hounds stretch across much of the planet. Today I'm going to tell two stories, one of which was told to me directly by a friend, and the other I found in Flying Saucer Review. The latter is so weird that I can't help but tell it.

The Beast of Bhavnagar

People can only know me for so long before I inevitably ask them if they've ever had any encounters with the paranormal. I met Valerie (pseudonym) a couple of years ago and we've grown very close since then. She asked me about UFOs, and I started explaining my research into the topic. It was at this point that she volunteered to tell the story of a strange experience she'd had as a child. 

Valerie grew up in the city of Bhavnagar in the Indian state of Gujarat. In the early 2000s (probably 2005), she remembers sitting on a jhula swingset in the back garden outside her family's house. On the other side of the garden was another swingset owned by the neighbours, backed up by a tall wall. She cannot recall whether anyone else was outside in the garden with her at the time, but she knows that there was at least someone else in the house - possibly one of her grandparents or her sister. 

All of a sudden, something came over the wall behind the neighbour's swingset. Valerie described it to me as misty in texture, comparable to a cloud. It was in the shape of a dog or other four-legged animal, "very black and void-like". The spectral animal seemed to jump over the wall into the garden at great speed. Shortly after hitting the ground, the entity vanished as quickly as it had appeared. 

Valerie was young enough at the time that she couldn't "describe what [she] saw or make sense of it". She told herself that she might've just been dizzy or had some kind of waking dream. She remembers being "disturbed" by it, but deciding not to tell anyone else about it for fear that she wouldn't be believed or would be mocked [1]. 

Phantom hounds are not nearly as prevalent in India as they are in western Eurasia, but there are some mentions of spirits in the form of black dogs in religious lore. The Mahākanha Jātaka of the Pali Canon tells of how the god Sakka saw that mankind had fallen into a state of wickedness, and so he came to Earth with another god in the form of a fearsome black dog with tusks and chains around its body. He came to the city of Varanasi and pronounced the world doomed, allowing the monstrous hound to chase its residents. 

Before returning to his heavenly abode, Sakka and his dog went to king Usīnara of Varanasi. The dog roared with rage, and the king ordered the monster fed. The dog ate all the food in the city and was still hungry, at which point Sakka told the people that the hound would devour all those who lived in unrighteousness.

"Not to hunt game the Black Hound came, but he shall be of use
To punish men, Usīnara, when I shall let him loose."

Terrified into following the teachings of the Buddha once more, the population was saved from their fate at the jaws of the hellhound. Sakka revealed himself to be the King of the Gods, before disappearing back up into his otherworldly home [2]. 

UFO Road-Rage at Vereeniging

It was late at night on December 13th of 1963 when the police phone-lines in the Vereeniging district of the Gauteng Province of South Africa lit up with reports of strange lights in the sky. A dazzling object was seen passing over Keyterskloof, roughly 20 miles northeast of Vereeniging city proper. 

One Mr. Gericke, working on a farm near Keyterskloof, saw a "fiery object travelling low over the horizon" that night. He said that it lit up the whole surrounding area as it seemed to disintegrate, before disappearing with "a tremendous bang". The official explanation is given as a meteor. Shortly afterwards, two men approached the Afrikaans newspaper Die Brandwaag to tell their story, which suggests a different explanation for the eerie lights. 

These men were Leslie Immelman and WT Muller. Early in the morning on the 14th, they had been driving along Potchefstroom Road towards Vereeniging and were about 50 miles away from the city. They were unaware of the UFO wave then hitting the surrounding area. Leslie was a sworn skeptic of "ghosts, fairies and any such nonsense", but that was about to change. 

As they raced along the dark road, they passed something large and out of place in the road. Leslie later said that he initially thought it was a buck, and he impelled Muller to turn the car around so that they could look at it. They soon found that it was an "exceptionally large dog". Turning again to drive away from the strange dog, both men were stunned when the area around them was suddenly lit up as bright as daylight. 

This shock quickly turned to panic as a glowing object appeared ahead of them, moving towards their car at enormous speed. Instantly sensing that the UFO was going to collide with their vehicle, both passengers fled the car in terror. As they stood beside their car, the light dove down over their car before ascending again at a breakneck pace. 

Swinging like a pendulum, the object then turned back on itself and made another pass over the car. This time it hovered in place for a moment, bathing the road in its unearthly light. It stood still in the air roughly 50ft above the vehicle, and Leslie could see it clearly enough to describe it in detail. 

It was round in shape, and approximately 50ft in diameter. It glowed an incandescent orange, with a blue light on one end, which seemed to emit a fiery tail of electrical-looking sparks. It was this light that was responsible for lighting up the surrounding environment. The object was accompanied by a gentle humming sound and no noticeable heat. 

Turning to his companion in amazement, Leslie asked Muller if he was seeing the same thing, to which he responded in the affirmative: "Yes, but I don't believe it!"

Like a bullet from a gun, the object then shot away from the witnesses once again - travelling extremely rapidly southeast towards Parys before changing course northwest towards Potchefstroom. It made another pendulum swing down towards the terrified pair's car, and actually repeated this daring manoeuvre "five or six times" - each time "swooping low over us only to disappear into the distance". 

Leslie and Muller had decided to keep their experience to themselves until they saw the coverage of the bizarre 'meteor' flap at Keyterskloof. Both men later swore statements before a Commissioner of Oaths to say that their testimony was "gospel truth", as Leslie later put it. 

About six days later, on Friday the 20th of that month, residents of Krugersdorp (some 47 miles away from Vereeniging) were awoken by two defeaning explosions and an unexplained bright light. One Mrs. A Stoop says she heard a bang coming from an easterly direction at about 3am that morning, before seeing a blue luminous object "swinging... to and fro" over the town. This phenomenon lasted for about a minute before subsiding [3]. 

Conclusion

The latter story might appear to have very little do to with black dog folklore, but I contend that it is relevant to this specific category of zooform phenomena. A black dog reported from Budleigh Hill in Somerset was said to have gone "up in the air like a flash of fire" when it reached a stream of running water that it presumably could not cross. Another case from Dartmoor in Devon describes a shaggy canine entity that disappeared with a dazzling flash of light and the sound of an explosion [4]. 

Black dogs and other phantom hounds are found all across Eurasia and the Americas, with examples being known from as far afield as China and Guatemala. It seems likely that they are connected with the frequent mythological appearances of dogs as psychopomps, accompanying the souls of the dead. This archetype is not only present in Eurasia with famous examples like the Greek Kérberos and the Norse Garmr, but is also found in the lore of American civilisations such as the Aztecs and the Mayan Téenek people [5].

Sources

1. Personal correspondence. 

2. Translated by Rouse, WHD. (1901) 'Jataka 469: Mahā-Kaṇha-jātaka' in The Jataka, Vol. 1V. https://sacred-texts.com/bud/j4/j4033.htm

3. ‘On the Road to Vereeniging’ (1964) Flying Saucer Review, 10 (3), pp. 27–28. Translated by P.J. Human.

4. Bord, J. and Bord, C. (1985) ‘Chapter Three: Mysterious Black Dogs’, in Alien Animals: A Worldwide Investigation. HarperCollins, pp. 80–108.

5. Cutchin, J. (2022) ‘Chapter Two: Psychopomps’, in Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death and the Paranormal - Volume One. Horse & Barrel Press, pp. 47–72.

The Relic: A Warning for the Unwary

Introduction

Our ancestors kept traditions for a reason. Culture does not tend to endlessly self-replicate without any meaning for the people who live within it. This raises the important question of why religious ritual has survived the ravages of the evolutionary process for (at least) tens of thousands of years if it is merely the product of mistaken conceptions of the world. The modern world is actually becoming more religious, not less [1]. Why? 

Cognitive evolutionary theorists and medical anthropologists seem to have the beginnings of an answer. Ritual works, and appears to be a natural response to something. 

According to Winkelman [2], the psychological impact of ritual is capable of producing physical healing through the placebo effect. This same psychological component produces strong senses of in-group solidarity, contributing to the formation of communities. Individuals with genes that predisposed them to dissociation and extraordinary experiences could've thus been more likely to survive than those without, and rituals were gradually developed that encouraged such experiences [3]. 

Kalweit [4] speculates that religions have their roots in unusual experience, and in experiencers trying to replicate the conditions that gave rise to their encounters through ritual.

What sort of experiences would give rise to ritual/religious behaviour? Shushan [5] convincingly argues that the spontaneous near-death experience may have been among them. Cutchin [6] highlights that a large percentage of those who apparently return from death find that they have developed extrasensory capabilities that they did not previously possess. They may have increased IQ, the ability to sense the thoughts of others or even to perceive apparitions. According to Vallee [7], similar strange developments take place in the lives of those who come into close contact with unidentified flying objects. 

It seems that psychological and social benefits would not be the only results of regular, ritualised contact with the unknown. 

If some forms of ritual (like shamanic trance) exist in response to the advantages gained from supernatural experience, then what can we say about rituals that developed to repel evil? If paranormal phenomena are the roots of religion, then perhaps a similar experiential basis exists for various taboos and prohibitions. After two decades of misfortune, Jim Hunter would likely agree that such taboos might've existed to protect us from something... 

The Discovery

Jim Hunter contacted paranormal investigator and prolific author Brad Steiger in the mid-1980s to report his ongoing experiences with entities that the latter came to label 'Deiform Spirits'. By Steiger's definition, these are spirit entities that "have congealed in certain places" they deem sacred [8]. Meddling with these places or taking things from them can anger these beings, with unpredictable consequences. 

Hunter's involvement with the Deiform Spirits began when he was just seventeen years old. His father worked for a large South Pacific import company, and so the family moved around frequently - but in 1967, the Hunter family was living in New Zealand. It was March of that year, just shortly after Jim's seventeenth birthday. He had gone on holiday to the isolated coastal town of "Kawhai" [9], and was swimming off the shore when he came across a smooth metallic object lodged between two boulders.

Wrenching the strange object out of its hiding place, Hunter saw that it was shaped like a flat oval, encrusted with algae and seaweed, and seemingly inscribed with some kind of strange symbology. It weighed roughly one pound. Intrigued, he took the item home and showed it to his father. 

Mr. Hunter figured that it was probably of Maori origin, and so encouraged Jim to show it to the local Maori community. After about two weeks, they told him that they had no idea what the object was [10]. 

Shortly afterwards, an ambiguous figure arrived on the Hunters' doorstep. He introduced himself as a journalist with the New Zealand Herald, and claimed that he had heard about the object from a Maori contact of his. He asked to examine the object, and concluded that it was "made of some kind of bronze alloy". The alleged journalist asked to take the object back to Auckland to run tests on it [11]. 

The Hunters declined, having already inquired about having a metallurgical analysis of the object done at a university in Christchurch. As far as Jim knows, these tests were never performed, and the object instead languished in a drawer for the next year before the family relocated to New York in May of 1968. 

When Jim went to retrieve it while packing his suitcase, he discovered that it had gone missing. He suspected someone he knew had stolen it, but he had to accept the loss given his limited time left in the country.

Scare Tactics

Amidst the bustle of Auckland International Airport, Jim found himself on his own while his parents bade goodbye to some friends. Two strange men approached him - described as "Polynesian types" - and identified themselves as being affiliated with New Zealand Inland Revenue. 

They asked if he was taking anything illegal out of the country, and despite their professionalism, Jim soon found them very intimidating. They asked specifically about "any relics, art objects, or the like". 

Despite his repeated denials of having any such objects, the pair were persistent. They eventually insisted that he come with them to a hotel room for a private baggage check. Frightened, Jim called his father over, who demanded to see their ID cards and asked why they couldn't simply check his son's baggage where they were standing. He got a nonsensical reply in return, and responded by calling for a patrolling constable. Finally taking the hint, the bizarre figures wordlessly "shuffled" away [12]. 

There were no further incidents until the Fall of 1968. By that time, Jim had enrolled in Columbia University for the freshman year of his undergraduate course. Shortly after the start of the term, a middle-aged man who claimed to be an Italian art dealer approached him. Predictably, this man had somehow heard that Jim had lived in New Zealand and wanted to know if he had brought any interesting artifacts home. 

Presumably starting to suspect that something was amiss, Jim told the 'art dealer' that he didn't have any relics. This didn't stop the man from approaching him two further times to ask the same question [13].

It was around this time that Jim discovered that three of his closest friends in New Zealand had been harassed by figures who seemed to be the same people he had encountered at Auckland airport. 

The letters his friends sent to him used words like "weird", "creepy" and "spooky" to describe the men. Apparently situations had escalated enough that the police had gotten involved, and one girl's life had been threatened. 

"You Have Acted Unjustly"

Jim transferred to Stanford University in 1970, and immediately after he had gotten a telephone installed in his new apartment, he received a bizarre and ominous call. An anonymous voice warned him never to return to New Zealand. 

A second call (from a high-pitched female voice) told him that he was being surveilled by a group that he had wronged by acting "unjustly" and "not returning things to their proper owners" [14]. 

Throughout his time at both Columbia and Stanford, he received over thirty mystery phone calls regarding New Zealand and the stolen artifact. 

In 1972, Jim was on holiday in San Francisco between graduate work and beginning a teaching career in the Sacramento suburbs. Just a few weeks before starting work as a teacher, he received another phone call to his hotel room. On the other end was a male voice, who said that he "had acted wisely by not returning to New Zealand".

Three days after he'd begun work at the school, a student he'd never seen before stopped off in his classrom. While this wasn't inherently unusual for obvious reasons, the child walked towards the blackboard and drew some strange symbols. Jim's heart dropped - these were the same markings that were on the object from Kawhai. The student asked Jim if he knew what they meant, to which he desperately insisted that he tell him where he'd seen them. 

Swiftly erasing the symbols and laughing, the student said that he had just been "fooling around" before making a rapid exit from the room. When Jim described the offending student to his colleagues, he was frightened to discover that nobody could identify him. He would never see the boy again [15]. 

After teaching at a high school level for four years, Jim was finally offered a teaching assistant position at a major university. He began his doctorate program in the Fall of 1976. Four days after starting at the university, someone rang his room and reprimanded him for theft. The voice from the other end of the line accused him of "acting unjustly" and demanded that he "should never take anything from where [he] found it". 

By the time Jim contacted Brad Steiger, the harassment was infrequent but still ongoing. 

Conclusion

Anthropologist Mary Douglas [16] describes taboos as being for "hedging divinity off" - protecting the supernatural from contact with the profane world, and protecting the profane world from chaotic contact with the supernatural. Supernatural disorder seems to act as a contagious agent according to Douglas, with those who break taboos spreading their misfortune to those they come into contact with. Ritual could almost be thought of as a form of quarantine. 

This reminds me of the descriptions given of visitors to 'window areas' such as Skinwalker Ranch being followed home by unwelcome supernatural guests [17]. This same terrifying effect was observed among Jim Hunter's close friends, who were harassed by the phantom strangers despite presumably not having had much contact with the mystery object. The hitchhiker effect - as this phenomenon has been called - will be the topic of an upcoming article. Watch this space. 

Bibliography

1. Sherwood, H. (2018) ‘Religion: Why Faith is Becoming More and More Popular’, The Guardian, 27 August.

2. Cited in Shushan, G. (2018) ‘Chapter Five: Interpretations, Implications, and Conclusions’, in Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 200–247.

3. Ibid. 

4. Kalweit, H. (2000) Shamans, Healers, and Medicine Men. Boston: Shambala.

5. Shushan, G. (2018) ‘Chapter Five: Interpretations, Implications, and Conclusions’, in Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 200–247.

6. Cutchin, J. (2022) Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death & the Paranormal Vol One. Horse & Barrel Press.

7. Vallee, J. (2008) Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. San Antonio: Anomalist Books.

8. Steiger, B. (2007) ‘Chapter Nine: Sacred Places of the Deiform Spirits’, in Shadow World: True Encounters with Beings From the Darkside. San Antonio Tex.: Anomalist, pp. 192–216.

9. As far as I can see, there is no coastal town in New Zealand by this name. The location was likely the town of Kawhia on the country's North Island, probably misspelt by Steiger. 

10. Steiger, B. (2007) ‘Chapter Nine: Sacred Places of the Deiform Spirits’, in Shadow World: True Encounters with Beings From the Darkside. San Antonio Tex.: Anomalist, pp. 192–216.

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid. 

16. Cited in Hansen, G.P. (2001) The Trickster and the Paranormal. Philadelphia: Xlibris Corporation.

17. Lacatski, J.T., Kelleher, C.A. and Knapp, G. (2021) Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insider’s Account of the Secret Government UFO Program.