- J. Randall Murphy ( By J.R. Murphy )
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Birthplace: Calgary Alberta Canada
Lifespan: 1958 - Present
Current Occupation: PC Tech & Web Design
Personal Pursuits: Ufology, Music, Art, Antiaging
I first became interested in UFOs in the mid 1960s after my older brother and his wife saw a brilliantly colored UFO performing radical maneuvers near Calgary Alberta. The story inspired me to look for an explanation and doing so kindled an interest in UFOs, science and the paranormal. I made a UFO investigator ID card by tracing the Man From Uncle motif onto some card stock, recruited another kid named Steve, and during recess we'd go around asking other kids if they knew anyone who had seen a UFO. I also started reading anything I could find about UFOs. My first real UFO books were The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J. Ruppelt (1956), Flying Saucers Serious Business by Frank Edwards (1966), and UFOs The Whole Story by Coral & Jim Lorenzen ( 1969 ).
In 1967, my Mom gave me a copy of The World of Science - A Deluxe Golden Book. So at the age of nine I was reading about mass spectrometers, radio telescopes, cosmology, particle accelerators, super conductors, genetics, supersonic flight, and was trying to put all this into perspective with respect to UFOs. The Space Race was also going full tilt and the original Star Trek was lighting up the living rooms of the first generation to grow up with color television. Therefore it seemed perfectly natural for me to think that UFOs probably come from space and use some kind of exotic propulsion system. I came up with the idea that UFOs might use some kind of gravity-drive, and years later I learned that NASA engineer Paul R. Hill had seen UFOs and theorized the same thing.
Since then I have read and collected literally thousands of books related to science, UFOs, and the paranormal. During the late 1970s and early 1980s I also attended the University of Calgary where I took courses in Fine Arts, Philosophy and other areas of personal interest, including a course in astronomy. The highlight of the astronomy course was viewing Jupiter and its moons though the reflector telescope at Rothney Astrophysical Observatory. Now, having followed the progress of ufology and science for over 40 years, I remain more convinced than ever that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin, and operate on technology beyond our means. In addition to learning through study, I have also had several firsthand experiences, some of which are chronicled below.
Each experience was almost identical and would begin late at night after everyone had gone to sleep, probably around three or four in morning. I would suddenly wake up to discover I was floating in mid air. Then I would float out of the bedroom, down the hall along the ceiling, past the kitchen, through the dining area, and into the living room. Each time, the living room was flooded with a bluish-white shimmering light. Then the walls would seem to disintegrate, I would hear a low pitched crackling sound, and I would lose consciousness. When I told my Mom about these experiences, she simply dismissed them as dreams. I tried to explain to her that they weren't dreams and that I knew the difference, but it was pointless. After the third time it happened I asked her why, if they were only dreams, I knew the top of the ceiling lamps were all dusty. She told me not to be silly and forget about it. However a few days after the last experience, I came into the dining area to find her standing on a chair cleaning the glass lamp shades above the table. She seemed to be having some trouble so I asked her what she was trying to do. She said one of the bulbs had burnt out and she was trying to remove the lamp shade. I told her there was a small screw right in the middle at the very top and she had to loosen it. She couldn't see it, but she reached up over the shade and could feel it. She asked me how I knew it was there, so I reminded her that I had been flying around up there and that I had seen it. She just stopped what she was doing and looked down at me from her vantage point, unsure whether or not to be annoyed or mystified.
The most important facet of these experiences that differs from textbook OOBEs is that at no time did I seem to leave my body, I simply awoke to find myself floating in mid air and my body wasn't in the bed. Neither was there any "silver thread" or other umbilical cord like construct. Still, because I am reluctant to call them anything else, I've chosen to class them as OOBEs anyway.
During June of 1965, I was living on 39th Avenue North West in Calgary Canada. In those days our home was near the northern edge of the city and across the street was a large field. It was about 600 meters across north to south and extended about 700 meters east to west. About a third of the eastern side had been converted into graveyard. A small creek ran through it and I would often spend time there. I found it to be a serene and beautiful place where I could lie back on comfort on the green well tended grass, watch the clouds drift by and contemplate life. One day I was wandering through an undeveloped part of the field when I came across a shallow depression in the landscape. It was about 20 meters wide and I thought it would make a cool place to play, so I went down into it and sat down. The next thing I remember I was sitting inside a dim circular room with some other kids.
There were eight or nine of us, all about the same age. Two kids were still wearing pajamas. The kid in the yellow flannel Yogi Bear p-jays was blonde. The other two had sandy brown hair and looked like twins. There was also one black haired oriental boy in day clothes ( brown corduroy, suspenders, black t-shirt ). There were no girls, and the other kids were wearing smooth silvery pajamas with subtle geometric lined symbols on the sleeve. I remember wishing my Mom would buy me some of those. Because I thought we were all playing a game, I thought the ones in the silvery pajamas were the space captains and the rest of us were pretending to be the crew. They took us to consoles along the inner circumference of the ship where they gave us instructions to do things like wait for orders or participate or hold onto strange toys. I don't actually remember them speaking as such. It's more like I just knew what they wanted me to do and I did it. At one point I was holding onto a metallic diamond shaped object about 7 inches long with small greenish-white rectangular lights in it, similar to modern LEDs. Most of us seemed to be having fun, but we were always separated, and the little oriental kid just sat on the floor with his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. Sometimes he would look up and make eye contact, but he never said anything or interacted with anyone. I don't remember anything else, like actually entering or exiting the craft. The next thing I knew, I was sitting back in the same place in the field where it had begun. So I walked up out of the depression, and headed home. To me the experience only seemed to last about 45 minutes, but when I got home my worried mother asked where I had been. I told her I had been playing spaceship with some other children. She said that she had been looking for me for hours and had been calling me, but that I seemed to have just disappeared.
The next day, I wanted to play with my new friends again, so I returned to the spot in the field, but was unable to locate the depression in the landscape, and I never saw the other children or the spaceship again. However there was a large burn circle in the tall grass near where the depression in the landscape had been, and as I was returning home another strange thing happened. As I was making my way through the tall grass when I suddenly came face to face with a large white rabbit. This patch of grass was at least as tall as I was, and so was the rabbit. It had big black almond shaped eyes and as we stood there looking at each other, I distinctly heard it say "hello". Not realizing that rabbits could talk, I said hello back and was trying to think of what else to say when it turned around and disappeared into the grass. I tried to follow it, but it eluded me.
I realize that this experience, especially the aspect of missing time, is reminiscent of alien abduction scenarios. But like my OOBEs, I am making no such claim here. This is only what I remember happening to me when I was six years old. It was also before I had ever heard of UFOs or aliens, and in neither case did I actually see any "aliens". To me they just seemed like other kids. Neither did I see a UFO land or take off. Most people would probably dismiss the story as the workings of a child's imagination, but the other children and the spaceship seemed perfectly real to me. With the exception of the burn circle in the grass, the experience is also reminiscent of the fairy mounds and hollows of Celtic lore.
Another incident involving missing time occurred during July of 1973, when two friends and I were hiking near Invermere British Columbia Canada. We had camped out overnight, woke up early, and decided to do a little exploring. We followed a trail that went up a small rise and along the edge of a pasture. The trail passed directly under the large branch of a solitary black tree that looked like it had been hit by lightning. It was burned from the inside and stood in stark contrast to the green grass and alpine flowers in the surrounding landscape. As we passed under the dark branch, we all felt a simultaneous rush of some kind of energy. It wasn't like fear or adrenaline or anything I've experienced before or since. The only thing that describes it best that the average person might relate to is how the Star Trek transporters affect some people. WHen this happened, we were momentarily disoriented and stopped walking. We began discussing what we had all just experienced and agreed that it had happened just as we passed under the dark branch, so we walked back and forth under it a couple more times, but felt nothing else unusual. However we did notice that the light seemed different and that an old fence and several overgrown piles of lumber seemed to have appeared about 15 yards off to the east of our path.
We were all young and healthy with keen senses and clear minds. We didn't do drugs or drink and we had all experienced exactly the same thing. There is no way we had all simultaneously imagined exactly the same phenomenon. But neither did we have any explanation, so we just shook our heads in wonder and continued along the path. Soon we came to an abandoned mill with one of those tall metal open air incinerators. We hung around there for about 20 minutes checking out the old tower and climbing around on a big pile of wood chips. Somewhere along the way one of my buddies lost his pocket knife. He insisted that he could not have accidentally dropped it, yet it had somehow disappeared. He even went so far as to suggest one of us had picked it from his pocket, something we would never have done to our friends even if we knew how.
In a way, my friend's accusation that we had stolen his pocket knife was even weirder than the mystery of his missing knife. He was one of the smartest and most level headed kids I knew, but after this experience, his personality changed and I always felt a bit sad that I had lost his trust. The last time I touched on this subject with him he had written it off as the overly tired minds playing tricks on kids. I was a bit surprised because I wasn't overly tired and we all seemed just fine at the time. Anyway, we helped him search for his pocket knife for about half an hour without any luck, then headed back along the path the way we had come. The entire hike could not have lasted more than a couple of hours, but by the time we returned to our camp site, almost 8 hours had passed.
Something extraordinary had happened that day, but I didn't come across an explanation until 1991 when I first heard about the so-called dimensional portals. Although the missing time phenomenon explains the change in light and lost knife, it does not explain the other anomalies. Even if we had somehow been rendered unconscious for several hours by a roving gang of set builders who made the fence and piled the lumber, it would have been impossible for them to have pulled-off all the details. The moss, vines and grass that were growing on and around the lumber piles were undisturbed. The fence was falling apart and similarly enmeshed in the tall grass and shrubs. We all agreed that those things had not been there before we passed under the branch, yet it was also obvious they had been aging there for decades. This didn't seem possible. The only explanation I have for this mystery is to propose that when we passed under the black branch, we were enveloped by a strange energy field that somehow acted as a portal into this universe from one that is almost, but not exactly identical. Or that perhaps our universe is some sort of generated construct and we experienced some sort of "glitch in the Matrix". Either way it represents an experiential clue into the deeper nature of our reality.
During June of 1975, I was with my girlfriend Karen at her parent's ranch on the west side of Lake Windermere in British Columbia Canada. Her parents were gone and I was staying overnight with her and another younger friend of hers. The three of us were sitting together on the couch in the dark looking out the picture window and listening to Led Zeppelin Two. Just after midnight a glowing blue-white orb sprung up from behind the mountain range across the lake and bounced down the side of the mountain in three big arcs. We were all stunned and didn't know what to say. Finally Karen said, "did you see that?" we were already nodding. The sphere itself was about as wide as a Volkswagen beetle as seen from the side, and it had a plasma like glow surrounding it, but at our distance ( about 3 kilometers ), we couldn't make out any surface details. When it landed it went dark and stayed on the ground until about 2:00AM. Then it lit up, ascended straight up to about 300 meters, stopped instantly for about two seconds, then traced a graceful infinity symbol about 300 meters wide at a 30 degree angle to the right ( south ) of its starting point. It traced the symbol precisely in the same place four times in about 7 seconds, leaving a glowing trail of light behind, not unlike the effect of waving a glow-stick in a dark room. Then it stopped instantly and settled back into the forest in exactly the same spot it had taken off from and went dark again.
After that I was determined to stay awake all night so that in the morning I could get a fix on where it went down. The second time it came up it was around 4:00AM and by then both of the girls had nodded off. The orb repeated the same maneuver as it had the first time, then settled back into the forest and went dark. Around 6:00AM the light of dawn began to illuminate the valley well enough to make out where the orb had landed. So I went outside to get a better look, and just as I stepped out onto the landing, the orb came up again. It rose vertically to about 300 meters and stopped instantly. Only instead of repeating the infinity symbol maneuver, it turned bright white and instantly accelerated north up the valley as far as I could see. Quite literally, from where I was standing it traveled over 25 kilometers in about 1 second ... from a dead stop. No human technology has anything that comes close to that kind of performance. Given the precise repetitive maneuvers that it had performed, there is also no way that it was a random natural phenomenon. I am convinced that it was intelligently controlled.
On July 29th, 1977, I was nearly broad sided by a black Cadillac carrying three MIB. I had been working for the Canadian Pacific Railway in Glacier National Park, British Columbia Canada. At about 10:45 PM I was driving my 1964 Pontiac station wagon along a remote stretch of Highway 95 between Golden and Radium. I was heading south into the Columbia Valley to visit my mother in Invermere. The Columbia Valley is part of the Rocky Mountain Trench, a great valley extending 1400 kilometers from Montana through BC to the Liard Plain just south of the Yukon Territory. It is a well known point of reference for aviators and easily seen from space. It also has a history of strange phenomenon including UFO and Bigfoot sightings. It was very dark and there was no other traffic on the highway. I was in the vicinity of the small town of Harrogate when a black pristine 1959 Cadillac suddenly traversed the highway from east to west directly in front of me. I jammed on my brakes to avoid what would have otherwise been a certain collision and the Cadillac missed me by mere inches. The sighting only lasted about three seconds, but as is commonplace in automobile accidents, the event seemed to happen in vivid slow motion detail.
My headlights, which were set on high beam, shone directly into the side windows of the Cadillac, illuminating the interior & passengers. I saw three MIB in total. Two in the front and one in the back seat on the left-hand side. All three of them were dressed in black overcoats and were wearing black hats and sunglasses. The driver was concentrating intently on the wheel, a dull purple glow from the dashboard illuminating his face. The front passenger was looking out his side window and he looked directly at me as the Cadillac sped by. His face was pasty white, somewhat drawn, intense and expressionless. I felt as though we had made eye contact. A third MIB was seated in the rear passenger side. He was turning his head toward me in a sort of robotic manner and he barely had time to spot me as the Cadillac rocketed past. None of them were in a state of panic or out of control, as if this was the sort of thing they were used to. The last I saw of the Cadillac was its red tail lights fading into the depths of the valley below, leaving a white mist of some kind in it's wake. I pulled the Pontiac onto the shoulder and got out to inspect the scene,
The mist the Cadillac had left in its wake was dissipating and there wasn't a sound to be heard except the Pontiac idling quietly on the side of the highway. That's when I also noticed there was no road intersecting the highway either! On the east side of the highway was a dense forest that rose up the mountainside and on the west side was a steep grade that continued down into the valley. I could see the trail of mist that the Cadillac had left behind descending low over the bush and between the trees into the darkness.
Fearing some kind of freak accident I backed up the Pontiac and aimed it's headlights down the grade as far as I could. I also turned off the engine to listen for any faint sounds. However there was no indication of another vehicle. Only the trail of mist it had left behind, which soon evaporated into the air leaving no trace of what had just occurred. I continued to check for evidence to explain the event, but there was nothing to be found. There were no tire tracks on either side of the road, no broken or flattened vegetation ... no skid marks ... no lights ... no flames ... nothing.
After starting the Pontiac, I climbed a few dozen yards down the grade and searched in vain for another ten minutes. Then I decided to abandon the scene. I didn't encounter any other traffic until I reached Radium where I stopped at the RCMP office to report the incident, but they weren't in. On the way back to work in Glacier Park, I stopped and examined the spot again during daylight, but there was nothing out of the ordinary to be found. I also monitored the local media for news of missing people, accidents or lost Cadillacs, but nothing was ever reported. Since then, I have had no further encounters with the MIB mobiles. Below is an is an illustration of the Cadillac I saw. It is a 1959 special edition Eldorado Brougham. Total production was a mere 99 vehicles that were factory priced at $13,075.
During the summer of 1990 shortly after I started USI, I had an odd visit by three men dressed in classic MIB attire who claimed they were Jehovah's Witnesses. Unlike typical Jehovah's Witnesses, these three were only interested in ufology related biblical information. They could easily cite biblical passages that suggested technology far in advance of biblical times. Two of them took turns reciting this information while their leader sat and stared intently at me, making me feel nervous and physically shaky. The visit lasted about 20 minutes, after which time they abruptly got up and left. I stopped to put my shoes on before following them outside, and by the time I got to the curb they were already pulling away in a black sedan. The sedan was not the iconic Cadillac, but neither was it readily identifiable as any particular brand. Rather, it was ultra-generic without any insignias or logos. The only car I could find that looks like it is an executive K-Car ( picture below ). It had a black on white alpha-numeric license plate without any year or location, which I assumed must have been some kind of custom plate for their church. I also thought it was kind of odd that they didn't leave any of the usual Jehovah's Witnesses publications or visit anyone else on the street.
A few days later, some genuine Jehovah's Witnesses came to visit me. They had never heard of the three who had paid me a visit and were surprised that any others had been covering their area. They explained that each pair of canvassers was assigned a specific area and that they would have known if any others were supposed to have come by. Realizing that something out of the ordinary had happened, I visited two of their Halls and made some inquiries. Nobody knew of anyone fitting their description or any members with the kind of car I described. Although I am not a member of any religion, I typically do not turn these people away because I do believe that they are in their own way, seeking a higher truth, and I have spoken with them numerous times before and since. Usually they arrive in pairs rather than threes, and are very polite and non-confrontational, nothing like the three MIB that came to my home in 1990.
Strewn amid the events above are a host of other paranormal experiences including haunting's and iconic religious manifestations. I experienced all of these events while healthy conscious and unimpaired. The only conclusion I've drawn about these experiences is that some UFOs represent an advanced alien transportation technology. Anything else is pure speculation. However it is reasonable to assume that the principles that allow the various components of UFOs to work could also be used to produce a variety of paranormal and religious phenomena, including apparitions and levitation.