paranormal

Safe Spirit Communication Practices

Spirit communication is one of the most misunderstood topics in the paranormal field. Between television shows, social media influencers, and misinformation, many people never learn the practical techniques, safety practices, and discernment skills needed for meaningful spirit contact.

In this episode, Stephanie and I pulled apart something most people in the paranormal world take for granted. Spirit communication. Not the cute Instagram version with aesthetic candles and soft-focus angels. The real thing, with all its mess, trickster energy, and human ego.

This all started because I watched someone at a metaphysical fair do almost everything wrong in front of a room full of people. And I realized how much of what Stephanie and I do in the field is instinctive now. Protection. Discernment. Ethics. Knowing when the “ghost” is actually the land. Or a thoughtform. Or you.

So this episode is about that. How we actually work with spirit. Why “exclusive” machines and “paranormal experts” piss me off. And how you can talk to the dead without getting wrecked by someone else’s theatrics.

Spirit communication is not a lottery win.

Stephanie and I have been investigating together for years. Not cute little haunted B&Bs once a season. I mean, road trips across the country, “most haunted” locations, sanitariums, hotels, battlefields, private homes, the whole thing.

We work very differently, which is why it works. Stephanie is deeply empathic. She embodies spirits. She feels their personalities, emotional landscapes, and inner weather more than she sees or hears them. When someone comes through, she usually knows their flavor before we get a single EVP.

I’m more of an antenna and facilitator. I attract things and pull them into the room. I can talk to them, but half the time I’d rather point at the energy and say, “you, deal with Stephanie,” and then ask questions from the side. I’m the one who sets the circle, frames the questions, pushes back, and watches for trickster patterns.

We’ve done this long enough that a lot of it is muscle memory now. Which is why what happened at that metaphysical fair hit a nerve.

The metaphysical fair machine guy.

Picture this. I’m at a metaphysical fair, selling books and doing readings. There’s a guy there doing a “talk to your dead loved one” demo with a special machine he built. Cool in theory. I am absolutely the person who will sit front row for a new weird device. I have built spirit boxes. I love gadgets. If you tell me “I made a thing that talks to the dead,” I want to see it work.

Instead, I watched a 45-minute TED Talk on quantum immortality and entanglement that did not need to happen.

If you’ve never heard the term, “quantum immortality” is basically a dramatic way of saying energy doesn’t die, it changes form, and every choice spins off a different possible timeline. Cool. Fine. We do not need a graduate seminar on this in a hotel conference room. Say “parallel universes” and “multiverse” and call it a day. Everyone has seen Marvel.

Then he shifted into the “exclusive opportunity” pitch. He announced that only one person in the room would get a chance to use his machine and speak with a loved one. Already gross. Spirit communication is not a raffle prize. You do not need to win a spot on someone’s list to talk to the dead.

He had everyone raise their hands if they wanted to participate. I raised mine. Not because I needed to talk to anyone, but because I wanted to see how the machine responded if I didn’t feed it a sob story. I lied and told him no one close to me had died. Which is absolutely not true. I simply wanted to see if he was willing to work with “let’s see who comes through” instead of preloaded grief.

He was not. He bypassed me and picked a girl who was under sixteen, already emotional, and obviously still raw from her father’s death.

Red flag number one.

Then came the machine.

The “exclusive” machine that did what a seven-dollar app can do. Update: It’s now free.

His device was basically a dressed-up version of something I already use. Think Huff Paranormal’s Portal concept. He had phonetic fragments, audio chopped into small bits that can be recombined into words. The machine would spit these out in real time, so whatever energy was present could use it like a magnetic poetry kit.

Here’s the information straight from the app page:

Experimental ITC Tool optimized for use with the Portal/Wonder Box/similar device or can be used alone.

Steve Huff of Huff Paranormal was looking to experiment with vocal banks from various age & gender people. This app will sweep randomly between 7 short single file reversed human speech vocal banks. Young male & female/Middle aged male & female/Elderly male & female & 1 whisper bank. During your sessions look for intelligent replies to questions asked & always keep the audio reversed for better validation of audio manipulation.

This is not new. This is not proprietary.

He made a big deal about his machine “removing the static” spirit boxes usually have. You can do that with a basic noise gate or guitar effects pedal from Amazon for twenty bucks. I know this because I have done it. I’ve also built my own spirit box with crystals and an anti-distortion pedal. It cost me fifty dollars and a Saturday afternoon.

His special twist was a giant crystal bolted to the front and a copper handle that the sitter had to hold, which supposedly connected them energetically to the machine. Only one person could hold it at a time. Which, if you’ve ever done group spirit work, is already backward. You want the group field. You want shared energy. You want the hive mind.

He never explained what the knobs did while he was turning them.

He never set an intention.

He never grounded the room.

He never talked about protection.

He never said, “Here is how you validate who you’re talking to.”

He put this teenager on the spot, handed her the copper piece, and then let the whole thing turn into a spectacle.

Leading questions, trickster answers

The questions he fed her were long, leading, and designed to generate drama, not clarity.

“Do you remember that one time when we went on a drive in the forest, and we played that one song?”

The machine would spit out “yes.”

He would point and say, “See how clear that is?”

It wasn’t.

There were maybe two or three phrases that sounded like actual speech. The rest was vague noise and pareidolia. But he treated all of it like gospel. At one point,t the machine said, “I’m behind you.”

If you’ve ever done ethical mediumship, you know how wrong that is. Her dad, who she adored, is not going to lurk “behind” her like a horror movie extra. He is going to be beside her. In front of her. Holding her hand. The “behind you” line is classic fear theater. Trickster energy. It reads like something trying to get a reaction, not a father trying to comfort his daughter.

She started crying and hyperventilating. He did not stop. He did not give her grounding tools. He did not ask for confirmation; only she would know. He did not ask for a specific detail. He simply kept pushing, while his assistant beamed at the audience like they were witnessing something profound.

Someone else in the room had to go comfort the girl.

I sat there angry. Not just because of him, but because an entire room of people watched this and thought, “This is how spirit communication works.”

And it gets worse. This same guy is the “official investigator” for a very famous, very accessible haunted hotel. He uses this same machine at their paranormal weekend as a premium, exclusive add-on.

Which is ridiculous. I have been to that hotel with friends, stayed there with equipment, and had a full run of the hallways. Staff literally step over you while you sit in the hall with your spirit box. Sometimes they even point you toward the “good spots.” There is nothing exclusive about talking to the dead in that building. You can walk in with a seven-dollar app on your phone and talk to whoever is there.

That is the problem. Not the tech itself. The performance. The upsell. The message that you need a special machine and an “expert” to talk to your own dead.

We are chaos witches, not hall monitors

Stephanie and I are not pearl clutchers.

We use Ouija boards. We use tarot. We have sat in dark basements and told things that claimed to be demons to chill out and give us something useful. We have had things thrown at us. We have been in old hospitals, prisons, cemeteries, and private homes where the activity went sideways.

We are absolutely “fuck around and find out” people.

We are not love and light, sage everything to death, never touch a talking board types.

What we are is intentional.

We do not walk into liminal spaces blind. We do not hand the steering wheel to whatever wants attention the most. And we do not treat people’s grief like a stage prop.

Over time, without really naming it, we built a protocol. Not a rigid ritual. More like a set of habits and expectations that keep us safe and keep the work honest.

Our actual protocol, underneath the chaos

Before we investigate with a group, we almost always eat together. We sit. We talk. We relax. Everyone comes down from the drive and their adrenaline. You cannot do clean spirit work when everyone is brittle, hungry, and anxious.

When we start, we set an intention. Out loud. Simple. Clear. Something like:

“We intend to communicate with whoever is present who is aligned with the highest good. We are not here for tricksters, parasites, or bullshit. If you are those things, you are not welcome in this circle.”

We usually create a circle energetically, even if it’s just a felt boundary. Sometimes we’ll cast in a more formal sense. Sometimes it is more casual. Either way, there is a container.

We acknowledge that the trickster is real. That thoughtforms are real. That feedback loops are real. We assume that at least part of what we experience is our own energy mirrored back to us. That assumption actually makes the work stronger, not weaker.

We ask very specific questions. We do not lead.

We ask spirits to show us they understand the tools we are using. With a talking board, we might ask, “Do you know how to use this?” or “Do you know how to spell?” You can tell a lot by how the planchette moves, by the language, by the mistakes.

We validate with details. We ask for names, dates, locations, and specific phrases. We cross-check what we receive with research later. We do not build entire narratives off one dramatic phrase that “sounds right.”

We command the space. If something feels off, we say so. If something feels like a trickster, we tell it to leave. If something claims to be a demon, we treat that as a bit first, not as truth.

The point is agency. We expect communication. We are not chasing scraps. We are hosting a conversation.

One of the best examples of how this plays out is the Fee House.

By the time we went, a TV show had already filmed an episode there. The story of the house was pretty established. Certain named ghosts. Certain tragedies. Certain “known” hauntings. There was a script.

Before the trip, we did dream machine work, pulled cards, and ran Estes sessions to get a feel for who or what we were actually going to meet.

What we got did not match the public story.

Where everyone else described playful, chatty spirits who loved to respond on cue, we were getting angry, frustrated people living with secrets, double lives, and unresolved mess. We were picking up on something heavier, more complex, and much less marketable.

When we arrived and started working in person, the “famous ghosts” did not show up for us at all. The personalities, language, and emotional tone we picked up matched our pre-work, not the TV script.

Later, the owner confirmed some of what we found. Off camera. Quietly.

It fits a pattern we see everywhere. Hotel ghosts that never existed in life. Entities like “Theodora” at the Crescent Hotel who are actually stitched together from multiple people’s experiences and rumors. Thoughtforms born out of repetition, investigator attention, and the expectation of a haunting.

None of this means the phenomenon is fake. It means a lot of what people are talking to are egregores, not the original dead. If you walk into a place assuming the legend is true, then any blinking meter becomes “proof.”

If you go in with discernment, you start asking, “Who are you really?” and “Who made you?”

When people ask me how to talk to their dead, I do not say “buy a portal device from a guy in a hotel ballroom.” I tell them to start with:

Cards.

Any kind. Tarot. Oracle. Mediumship decks made specifically for connecting with passed loved ones. Shuffle. Ask a clear question. Pull a card. Sit with it. Look at the image, the keyword, and the feeling you get.

Automatic writing.

It freaks people out, but it is simple. Sit down with a notebook. Ask to talk to one specific person. Write whatever comes without editing. Most of it might be junk. One or two words might be gold. I have seen people channel the title of a painting they had never heard of that later checked out historically. Two words is enough.

You do not have to go to their grave. You do not have to sit in a dark room at midnight. You do not have to earn the right by being sad enough.

You can talk to your grandpa from your kitchen table.

If you want to invite a specific person in, say their full name and birthdate out loud. State clearly that you only invite that person, and that nothing else is welcome. Then ask them to give you something only you would recognize. A phrase. A joke. A location. A very specific memory.

You are allowed to say, “If you cannot give me that, I don’t believe you are who you say you are.”

You are allowed to say “no.”

Which brings me to fear.

You are probably the haunting

Here is the part most TV shows skip.

A lot of “hauntings” are human emotions with nowhere to go.

If you are in a heightened state for a long time, you can absolutely affect the physical world. Doors slam. Lights flicker. Plumbing fails. Dark figures appear in hallways that feel like “someone watching you.”

I have lost count of how many clients told me they saw a tall dark shadow at the end of their hall, and their lights keep flickering and things move around the house, and when I ask what is going on in their life, they say:

“I just went through a divorce.”

or

“Someone close to me died, and I haven’t cried about it yet.”

Or they grew up being told their feelings do not matter, so their body and their house start screaming for them.

Water signs are especially bad for this. I recently talked to someone whose rising sign is Cancer. Her house kept having water issues. Pipes. Flooding. Backups. She felt invisible and unwanted. As soon as she started setting boundaries and talking about her feelings, the water calmed down.

Stephanie has had multiple floods at emotionally intense times in her life. Washer hoses exploding. House flooded. You cannot convince me that is random.

We are not separate from our environment. We are generating phenomena all the time. So if you get an EVP that screams “run” in a room full of jumpy people, that might be the room reading you, not an outside entity.

When we investigate, we always ask:

What state were we in emotionally when that happened?

Is this us?

Is this the land?

Is this a thoughtform?

Is this something truly other?

We do not assume every noise is a ghost with a tragic backstory.

So how do you do this “the right way”

There is no single correct way. There are ways that are less stupid.

Set an intention. Know who you want to talk to, or at least what kind of energy you are willing to entertain.

Claim your authority. This is your body, your mind, your circle, your house, your time. You are not a victim wandering into the dark with a flashlight. You are a host. Act like it.

Work with people you trust. At least at first. Go out with folks who have done more than binge-watch paranormal TV. Let their calm regulate your nervous system.

Keep your nervous system online. One drink is fine. Seven is not. Weed, psychedelics, anything that blows the doors off your perception can also blow the doors off your discernment. If you already struggle with anxiety or intrusive thoughts, you need more protection, not less.

Be specific with your questions. Avoid leading and yes or no questions. Ask for details and be willing to sit in silence while the answer forms.

Document everything. Video. Audio. Little notes in your phone. You will not remember half the weirdness later. You will see patterns only when you zoom out over time.

Research what you get. Names. Phrases. Locations. Titles of things. Sometimes you will find nothing. Sometimes you will find enough that you sit back and go, “Okay, that was not from my head.”

Stay open to layers. A phrase can mean one thing now and a different thing years from now. It can refer to a person, a place, and a project all at once. Liminal work is rarely linear.

Most importantly, drop the idea that spirit communication belongs to people with special titles or special machines.

Spirit communication without the performance

The reason this episode exists is because I watched a teenager be used as content. Her grief was a prop to make a machine seem powerful. No intention. No protection. No grounding. No education. Just trauma theater.

You deserve better than that.

If you want to talk to your dead, you have that right. You can do it at your kitchen table with a deck of cards and a notebook. You can go into haunted locations with your friends, a cheap K2 meter, and a clear head, and get incredible results.

What you need is not gear.

You need intention. Discernment. A sense of humor. The ability to say “no” and “prove it.”

And the willingness to accept that sometimes the ghost you are chasing is your own reflection, blinking back at you from the dark.

If you’re interested in practical methods for contacting spirits, you may also enjoy my Spirit Calls Tarot Spread for Spirit Communication, designed specifically for safe and intentional spirit contact.

The Haunted Vermont Farmhouse

The haunted Vermont farmhouse at the center of this story wasn’t just rumored to be haunted. According to witnesses, it became the site of poltergeist activity, unexplained photographs, missing time, shadow figures, and a growing sense that something unseen occupied the property.

On this episode of the NVus Alien Podcast, I sat down with Paul Dulski from the Haunted Vermont podcast to talk about the paranormal experiences that shaped his life and eventually pushed him into investigating the unexplained.

Like many investigators, Paul didn’t start out looking for the paranormal.

The paranormal found him.

What began as strange childhood events in a Vermont farmhouse slowly unfolded into a long series of eerie encounters involving unexplained shadows, missing time during sleep, mysterious photographs, EVP recordings, and something investigators often describe as a “zone of fear.”

In this conversation, Paul shares the experiences that led him down the paranormal path and the evidence that still makes him question what might actually exist beyond the normal world.

Paul grew up in Holland, Vermont, and says his first real encounter with the unexplained happened when he was in fourth grade. At the time he and his friend Justin were just kids watching paranormal shows like Ghost Hunters. The idea of ghosts was more entertainment than reality.mThat changed when Justin’s family farmhouse suddenly became the center of strange activity.

Looking back now, Paul says he wishes they had documented what happened. At the time, they were just kids trying to make sense of something that felt impossible. Even today, he admits the story sounds unbelievable when he tells it. But the experiences were real. And they stuck with him.

Some of the most unsettling events happened during sleepovers in Justin’s bedroom. One night, three of them fell asleep on a futon placed against the wall beneath a window. When they woke up the next morning, all three were in completely different positions than where they had fallen asleep.

Paul had started the night on the edge of the bed. When he woke up, he was now at the window. Justin had somehow ended up half on the floor and partially under the futon. Justin later remembered waking up half inside his closet. None of them remembered moving. And none of them remembered anyone getting up during the night.

For that to happen normally, someone would have had to:

• throw off the blankets

• crawl past the other two people

• step over them in the dark

• and somehow reposition everyone without waking anyone up

None of them recalls anything like that happening. To this day, none of them can explain it.

Another night in the farmhouse produced something even stranger. Paul and Justin looked out the bedroom window and saw a shadow figure outside. The shape was unusual and didn’t resemble anything they could replicate later. Even more confusing was the lighting. They couldn’t determine what could have been casting the shadow, or where the light source could have come from.

Justin also remembers an incident involving an orange juice container that appeared to suddenly explode or fly across the room and hit the wall. Paul wasn’t present for that particular moment, but it’s one of the memories Justin still talks about. Before the farmhouse events, Paul had already experienced smaller moments that he now looks back on differently.

When he was about seven years old, several deaths in his family happened close together. His grandfather died in 1994. Within 24 hours in June of 1995, he lost another grandfather and an uncle. That was the first time he truly understood death.

Around that same time, something strange happened one night in his childhood bedroom. He woke up in complete darkness and tried to leave the room. But he could not find the doorknob. He searched the wall and door over and over again, feeling for it, but it simply wasn’t there. Eventually, his mother opened the door.

She told him the doorknob had been only a few inches away from where he had been reaching the entire time. But for reasons he still can’t explain, he couldn’t locate it. Another strange detail from that house involved the attic. Some nights, he thought he could hear voices coming from above, almost like people laughing and talking.

Later, he wondered if it could have been the television in another part of the house. But at the time, the voices sounded like people gathered together, almost like a group playing cards or talking. Years later, in 2007, Paul and his band visited an abandoned church to take photos for fun. That night, they heard what sounded like a woman screaming in the distance, almost like someone being attacked. They dismissed it at the time because animals can sometimes produce similar sounds.

But the location would become important later.

In 2011, Paul returned to the same area with friends while exploring local haunted locations. When they stepped out of the vehicle near the abandoned church, something immediately felt wrong. Paul suddenly felt overwhelming nausea, strong enough that he thought he might throw up. One friend heard what sounded like a growl. Another thought he heard chains dragging against the church wall.

All three of them experienced an intense wave of fear at the same time. They quickly returned to the vehicle and left the area. The moment they drove away, the feeling disappeared. Paul describes it as stepping into what investigators sometimes call a “zone of fear.” Something about that specific location triggered a powerful physical reaction. Interestingly, Paul says he has visited the site about seven times, but that experience only happened once.

The road near the abandoned church has its own folklore. One story involves a male hitchhiker ghost that people claim to see walking along the road. Another nearby legend involves a woman in white who appears along Marble Street in West Rutland. According to one witness, an older man named Frank saw a glowing woman in a veil standing by the road. He offered her a ride. She entered the car. Then vanished.

Stories like that appear across the country, but the Vermont case follows the same pattern that many investigators recognize.

The hitchhiker gets in the vehicle. And disappears moments later.

The event that truly pushed Paul into paranormal investigation happened on October 28, 2011.

While exploring a cemetery with friends, Paul felt something strange to his left. He asked his friend to take a photo. When they looked at the image, something unusual appeared beside him. The photograph shows Paul’s shoulder and arm. Next to him appears to be a floating form. Some people suggested it could be cigarette smoke.

Paul says that the explanation doesn’t fit.

He was smoking at the time, but the smoke in the image looks completely different from the shape beside him.

To him, the form looks like a female figure floating vertically, almost as if it were demonstrating it could move in ways a human body cannot.

When the image is zoomed and rotated, Paul believes he can see:

• hair

• a face

• a gown

• and possibly a raised hand

Five months later, Paul and his friends returned to the cemetery to see if anything else would happen. They recorded audio while taking photos. At one point, Paul thought he heard a voice whisper:

“What is that?”

The voice seemed to be reacting to the equipment they were holding. He had a voice recorder. His friend had a camera. As if whatever was present had never seen those objects before. Later, they took more photos. One image appeared to show particles or condensation forming unusual shapes in the air.

Another photograph captured something that looked eerily similar to the raised hand from the original image. To Paul, the shape looks like the same hand appearing again, but more clearly formed. Looking at the photos together, we discussed what the shapes might represent.

To Paul, the original image looks like a floating female spirit raising its hand. To me, the shapes in the photo resemble something else entirely. Almost like a creature on all fours, possibly with wings. That raises a fascinating possibility that appears in many paranormal cases.

Multiple witnesses can observe the same phenomenon. But each person perceives it differently. Some investigators believe these entities might not have a fixed form at all. Instead, they may appear differently depending on the person experiencing them. Which raises the bigger question.

Are these beings physical?

Or are they something more like energy that our minds interpret into shapes we recognize?

Reports of poltergeist activity and unexplained encounters aren’t limited to Vermont. You may also enjoy my investigation into the Hopkinsville Goblins encounter and the strange events that continue to puzzle researchers decades later.

(From the NVus Alien Podcast Archive. This interview is from 2007. Re-edited and Revised.)

The Betty and Barney Hill Abduction Case

The Betty and Barney Hill abduction remains one of the most influential UFO cases in history. In this interview, Kathleen Marden, Betty Hill’s niece and author of several books on the case, discusses the evidence, hypnosis records, and the questions that continue to surround the famous encounter.

Kathleen Marden is introduced. Author of Captured: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. But more importantly, she’s Betty Hill’s niece. Not an outsider looking in. Someone who was there from the beginning. Heather points that out immediately. That this isn’t just another UFO book. It’s written from inside the story. And what makes it different is that Kathleen didn’t go in trying to prove anything. She went in trying to figure out if it was real.

Kathleen explains that clearly.

She says she started with a specific question. Did this actually happen, or did Barney absorb Betty’s dreams and build a narrative from them? She talks about her background in social science and education. That objectivity mattered to her. That she wanted to test the idea, not just believe it.

So she transcribed the hypnosis tapes. All of them. Hours of material with psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, who was a skeptic. Then she compared everything. Betty’s dreams. Betty’s hypnosis sessions. Barney’s hypnosis sessions.

Line by line.

What she says she found is where things shift. The details matched in ways they shouldn’t have. Not just general themes. Specific sequences. Information that wasn’t in Betty’s dreams but showed up in both of their hypnosis accounts. She says that, based on that analysis, she believes they were abducted.

She also explains that the book doesn’t just argue that point. It lays everything out. The problems with hypnosis. The issues with dream recall. The physical evidence. Including the chemical testing of Betty’s dress, which she says we’ll get into later.

She brings up Stanton Friedman at this point. A physicist and well-known ufologist. She asked him to join the project after she’d already started writing. Not for validation, but for scrutiny. To vet the work and strengthen the scientific side.

Heather responds to that by pointing out one of the strongest parts of the book. The timeline. Not just the encounter itself, but what happened before and after. How it affected their lives. Then she asks Kathleen to walk through the actual incident.

Kathleen starts in September 1961. Betty and Barney Hill are coming back from a trip to Niagara Falls and Montreal. They planned to stay overnight but decide to drive through.

Barney feels fine. He’s used to working nights. They keep going. They’re driving through New Hampshire when Betty notices something in the sky. At first, it looks like a bright star. Maybe a satellite. But it’s moving strangely. It appears to rise upward next to the moon. She keeps watching it as they drive. It gets closer. Larger. More defined. Eventually, she convinces Barney to stop the car.

They pull over near Franconia Notch. A known tourist area. Betty looks through binoculars first. She sees a craft moving across the face of the moon, flashing multicolored lights.

Barney takes the binoculars next.

At that point, the object shifts direction. It turns and descends rapidly toward them. Silent. No conventional lights. He doesn’t believe in UFOs. He keeps trying to explain it away. They get back in the car and continue driving. The craft follows them. Moving along the mountains. Sometimes above. Sometimes in front. Dropping vertically. Moving in a kind of stair-step pattern.

Kathleen describes it like something bouncing on an elastic band. Forward, back, forward again. They reach the Old Man of the Mountain landmark. The craft positions itself near the rock formation. At that point, it’s massive. Nearly twice the size of the stone profile.

They stop again. Watch it. It appears cigar-shaped at that moment. Then they keep driving.

As they move through the notch, the object continues tracking them. Eventually, they reach a more populated area. Motels. Cabins. A nature center. They feel a sense of relief. They decide to stop again. But before they can, the craft shoots ahead of them and positions itself directly over the road. Barney has to stop the car.

He grabs the binoculars. He also has a pistol. He gets out. The craft shifts into a nearby field. Now it’s only about 100 feet above them. It’s no longer rotating. There’s a double row of windows across the front.

Betty stays in the car. Dome light on. Watching for traffic. Barney walks toward the craft. He looks through the binoculars and sees figures inside. Between nine and eleven. Standing behind the windows. Looking down at him. Then something changes. All but one of the figures move away from the window. They go to a panel at the back of the corridor. Their arms are moving like they’re operating something.

The craft tilts toward Barney. He sees structures extending from the sides. Red. Something drops from the bottom. The one figure still at the window frightens him. Deeply. He describes it as reminding him of a German military officer. The precision. The control. The feeling of being watched.

He wants to grab his gun. He can’t move.

He wants to lower the binoculars. He can’t.

Then suddenly he can.

He runs back to the car, screaming to Betty that they’re going to be captured.

This part, Kathleen says, is fully within their conscious memory. They never forgot it. Barney gets back in the car. The craft moves above them again. He takes off. He tells Betty to roll down the window and look up. She does. Instead of seeing the craft or the sky, she sees nothing. Just blackness. Then they hear it. A series of buzzing or beeping sounds. Hitting the trunk of the car. Vibrating through the vehicle. Through their bodies.

Betty wonders if they’re about to be electrocuted. They’re not. But something happens. Their conscious memory starts to break. Barney loses it first. Betty holds onto fragments a little longer. She remembers seeing familiar landmarks about eight miles down the road. They stop talking. She remembers taking a left turn off the main highway. Then there’s another gap.

About 35 miles later, they both see a glowing object in the road ahead. Then another series of beeping sounds. And suddenly they’re back. Aware. Talking again. They drive home. But the timeline doesn’t make sense. They expected to arrive around 2 AM. Instead, it’s already approaching dawn. When they get home, everything feels wrong.

They immediately act like they’ve been contaminated. They shower. Thoroughly. They don’t bring their luggage inside. Betty throws out all the food in the car. Their watches have stopped working. Betty’s dress is damaged. Torn at the zipper. Torn along the lining. The hem is ripped. Barney’s shoes are scuffed. His shoulder hurts. They go to sleep.

When they wake up, the unease is still there. Heather calls it out directly. That instinctual reaction. The purge. The sense that something had invaded them.

Kathleen agrees.

Then the aftermath starts. Barney wants to forget it. Says nothing good will come from talking about it. Betty can’t let it go. She calls Kathleen’s mother. Kathleen overhears the entire conversation as a kid, sitting in the dining room.

Her mother contacts a neighbor who’s a physicist. He suggests testing the car with a compass. Betty goes outside. Finds bright circular spots on the trunk that weren’t there before. Shiny. Polished-looking. When she holds the compass over them, the needle spins wildly. She shows it to a tenant. Barney sees it too. They report it.

Eventually, it reaches the Air Force. Project Blue Book gets involved. Barney gives a detailed account, but leaves out the beings. He’s afraid of being labeled unstable. Then the dreams begin. About two weeks later, Betty starts having them. Not ordinary dreams. Nightmares. Structured. Repetitive. They include the abduction.

She writes them down. Doesn’t tell Barney directly. Later, during hypnosis, everything comes back in a different way. This is where Kathleen’s work really centers. She explains how the hypnosis sessions were conducted separately. With amnesia imposed afterward so neither of them knew what they’d said.

And yet their accounts match. In detail. In sequence. In ways that contradict Betty’s dreams. Different number of beings. Different actions. Different emotional responses. In the hypnosis accounts, they’re terrified. Fighting. Resisting. Being physically taken. Barney feels himself dragged. Shoes hitting rocks. Betty remembers being forced onto the craft.

They’re separated. Examined. The beings are not human-looking. Not like the figures in Betty’s dreams. Hairless. Large eyes. Slit mouths. No external ears. Thin noses. They communicate with a kind of humming or mumbling sound.

hey examine their bodies. Teeth. Spine. Reproductive organs. There’s a needle used on Betty. She reacts with intense distress. During hypnosis, she’s crying, screaming. Dr. Simon has to stop the session.

Heather points out how raw those tapes are. That the emotional intensity alone suggests something real happened. Kathleen agrees. Even says the tapes she’s played publicly are toned down compared to the originals. Dr. Simon himself is conflicted. He tries to explain it as dream contamination. But he can’t fully reconcile how their accounts align so precisely. In the end, he admits he can’t disprove it. Then the story shifts again.

Public exposure.

Barney never wanted it out. He had a reputation. Civil rights work. Community leadership. A life that could be damaged by this. But in 1965, a reporter leaks the story. It runs in a Boston newspaper for five consecutive nights. It explodes. They’re overwhelmed. Media everywhere. They literally have to leave their home to get away from it. Eventually, they speak publicly. That leads to The Interrupted Journey. Then the movie adaptation.

And finally, Heather brings it back to the physical evidence.

The dress.

Betty notices a pink powder on it. Shakes it off, but stains remain. Years later, it’s analyzed. Multiple tests. No clear duplication of the staining effect. Then a deeper analysis by chemist Phyllis Budinger. She finds biological material. Protein. Natural oils that didn’t come from Betty. A bacterium that shouldn’t be there from simple storage. Her conclusion is blunt. The evidence supports Betty’s account.

And that’s where the conversation ends.

Stories like the Betty and Barney Hill abduction continue to influence how experiencers understand contact events today. For a modern perspective, read my interview with Alison Hartman about her lifelong ET experiences.

The Alison Hartman ET Experience

The Alison Hartman ET experience began when she was just five years old. What started with a childhood encounter outside her bedroom window would become a lifelong pattern of UFO sightings, unusual entities, and experiences she still struggles to explain.

Alison Hartman is a lifelong ET experiencer from Greenbriar, Arkansas. She’s 42 now, and her first encounter happened when she was five years old. She woke up in the middle of the night, walked back into her bedroom, and noticed the curtains were open. Outside the window, sitting on a desk on the front porch, was a grey alien. Thin, wrinkled, large black eyes. Just sitting there, looking at her.

She didn’t scream. Not because she wasn’t scared, but because she didn’t want to wake her siblings and get in trouble. So she just stood there, staring back. Then she went to bed and looked out the second window. In the backyard was a small saucer-shaped craft, about the size of a van, with blinking red, yellow, green, and white lights. It was sitting on tripod-like legs. She closed the curtain, got into bed, and went to sleep.

The next morning, she was excited. Not traumatised. Excited. She ran around telling everyone what she saw, like it was the coolest thing that had ever happened to her. Her siblings remember it. Her parents don’t. Not long after, something else started showing up.

She would go into the bathroom just to get space from her family, and a glowing green, cartoon-like dog would appear out of nowhere. Floating. With rings around its neck and tail. She named it Bernard. It didn’t talk. It didn’t interact much. It just showed up. And she had the sense it was connected to the same “them.” Like it was checking on her, she told her mom once and got brushed off as having an imaginary friend, so she stopped talking about it.

After that, things went quiet. For decades, there have been no major, vivid experiences. Just interest in the paranormal, typical curiosity, nothing that stood out. Then around late 2020 into 2021, everything came back. Hard. She started having in-person nighttime visits. Not vague impressions. Physical presence in the room. Enough that she started journaling because there were too many to keep track of.

She estimates at least a dozen in-person encounters since then, along with a much larger number of astral interactions and dream contact. She says she can tell the difference between a dream, an out-of-body experience, and something actually in the room. Some of the encounters involved what she describes as medical procedures. Some felt targeted and specific to her. One of the most significant events happened in January 2022.

She was under intense stress at the time, working 70 to 80 hours a week in a high-pressure banking job. One night, after waking up to let her cat out, she lay back down and tried to calm herself with meditation. Halfway through, she felt the air in the room change.

She opened her eyes and saw a being on the other side of the bed, reaching over her husband toward her. She recognised it immediately as non-human. Instead of fear, she felt calm. Curious.

She touched its hand. Then stood up. Another being appeared behind her. Taller. Same general appearance. They took her hands and began moving through the house. At one point, a screen appeared in front of her showing data, including what she interpreted as her frequency. Then they lifted her upward through the ceiling. Her vision went completely black, but she could still hear the environment around her.

When her vision returned, she was in a space that didn’t resemble anything physical. A vast black environment with people sitting in a circle, aware of her presence. Then another room. This one more structured. Green-toned. People standing in rows, rigid, almost vibrating. She was placed in a circle with them.

One of the beings kept pointing to a man nearby and repeatedly asked her if she remembered him. She didn’t. She guessed. Said maybe she knew him from work. Immediately after that, she was back in her bed. What hit her wasn’t fear. It was the feeling that she failed something. Only 45 minutes had passed. That same day, after years with the company, she quit her job. No notice. Walked away from a 20-year career.

Months later, through a chain of coincidences, she saw a documentary and recognised the man from that experience. She reached out to him. He confirmed he had missing time the same day. They spoke, stayed loosely in contact, but never fully understood why they were connected. He later died of pancreatic cancer.

In 2024, Alison had a near-death experience due to pulmonary embolisms. During that experience, she felt his presence again, along with a sense of clarity about everything that had happened. That their meeting mattered. That there was a larger arc she was part of.

Since then, she’s shifted her life. Focused on writing, her podcast, and her work. Her experiences didn’t stop. They continued. She describes ongoing encounters involving different types of beings, though most resemble variations of the “grey” archetype.

Some involve what she interprets as energetic upgrades, especially before travelling to high-energy locations. Others feel more clinical, including procedures involving her body. She’s had experiences that suggest reproductive involvement, which she connects to what others describe as hybridisation programs.

She also has what she believes is an implant near her ear, visible on an X-ray, along with recurring ear ringing and body vibrations that often precede encounters.

In one experience, she was taken outside to two crafts. One tic-tac shaped, one more rectangular. Inside, she saw what looked like a mix of beings and human-like individuals working together. She overheard a discussion about needing to revert to an older method for extracting metal, which led her to believe they were replacing or adjusting an implant.

She woke up with intense ear pain but no physical evidence beyond that. Across all of this, what stands out is her reaction. She isn’t panicked. She isn’t trying to fight it. She questions it. Pushes back at times. Sets boundaries when she can. But overall, there’s a level of acceptance.

She sees it less as random events and more as an ongoing interaction. Something structured. Something that’s been there her whole life, even when it went quiet. She also believes experiences like hers have increased since 2021. That more people are opening up, becoming receptive, or being approached.

Not because something new arrived. But because something that was always there is finally being noticed.

Stories like Alison’s raise larger questions about the nature of contact experiences and high strangeness. For another perspective on these recurring patterns, explore my article on the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference and the unusual conversations happening at the edges of UFO research.