CHRISTMAS EVE ABDUCTION IN DEKALB COUNTY, TN

By Brent Raynes


Woman wonders: Have they “succeeded in breeding in emotion or soul?”

Following my one hour presentation on UFO close encounters at the December 5th MUFON UFO conference in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, I was approached by a very pleasant gentleman named Don Odum who told me that he was a resident of Lewisburg. My ears perked up and I asked him if he by chance had known a Stanley Ingram, a former resident of Lewisburg, formerly a columnist for the Pulaski Citizen and the author of Unidentified Flying Objects over the Tennessee Valley (1974). Though Stanley had shuffled off his mortal coil late in December 1982, Don knew precisely who I was talking about. Stanley’s weekly Moment of Truth newspaper column had chronicled many UFO reports that he had collected from local residents in Giles, Marshall, and Lincoln counties, as well as detailing his own UFO sky watching adventures going back to 1973, a year that the entire U.S. was gripped by a massive UFO wave.

Don was also familiar with others who had been connected with Stan and the local UFO scene here in Tennessee. One of these Stanley identified publicly only as GP (as GP preferred to stay out of the public limelight). We had met several times through Stanley back in the ‘70s. In fact, when Joan and I got married back in November 1977, we lived for a couple of months in an apartment in Pulaski, and I remember how Stanley and GP dropped by for a pleasant visit one day. Stanley was a talker, always a very friendly and outgoing southern gentleman whose only crime (if one wants to call it that) was becoming obsessed with these UFOs. GP, though always pleasant, was always rather quiet and reserved with us and others I’m sure, and obviously for good reason. We knew that he was a “contactee,” and truthfully, at the time, we didn’t know much more than that. But because he had seen what had happened to his friend Stanley for going so public with his evidence and beliefs about UFOs, GP knew that it was best to keep a very low profile and remain well in the background. Stanley Ingram had formerly been a highly respected citizen of Lewisburg. But as one magazine writer bluntly put it in his article after visiting Stanley and talking to area residents: “Finally not a few of the townspeople now consider Ingram, their former city judge and city manager, to be something of a village idiot.”

Harsh and unfair words for the gentle and caring columnist we had come to call a friend from our very first meeting in July 1975 until his passing in late December 1982.

At the risk of being branded a fellow “idiot” (something that I don’t actually fear, confident I’ll be in good company) it certainly seems that the game is still afoot, even after all of these years. I’m wondering if there is an upsurge in activity here in Tennessee again as Don forwarded this recent email on to me from GP’s daughter Jenny (who has had her own share of UFO and alien encounters going back to childhood), now living up in a rural area of DeKalb County, Tennessee. Her email read:

I think they are back, for what reason I do not know. Christmas Eve, as I was about to drop off to sleep, a small child with very white skin appeared in my doorway. She looked at me and said, mentally, ‘Come on Mama, we need you.’ I left the bed and entered the living room which then became a very bright light. Then I was in a large room about the size of a football field. This room was oblong in shape with shiny metallic walls and was filled to capacity with more of the strange looking children. Then I was in the center of the room. And all the children were taking turns just touching me, stroking my arm, or thigh. They were projecting thoughts of awe, gratitude, and love to me. Many were saying ‘thank you for allowing us to be here.’ They were very loving. I felt from them just overwhelming gratitude.

Strange such a show of emotion coming from them. Were they trying to show me they have succeeded in breeding in emotion or soul? And why show me all of "my children" now? Very strange. I woke later in my bed, very cold and tired.

Soon after receiving this email, Don and I ventured up to Dekalb County and visited GP and Jenny, and were brought up-to-date on all sorts of ongoing high-strangeness, everything from alien visitations, abductions, and Bigfoot encounters. GP even told us that he had encountered a Bigfoot while onboard a UFO! We even got out and hiked a nearby hillside where Bigfoot had recently been reported on their property.

Don, a former Tennessee game warden, recalled how he had met GP back around the mid-1970s. At the time, farmers had been complaining that coyotes had been killing their livestock, so Don had agreed to help organize a group of men one night for the purpose of trying to protect these farms. The men, a lot of them hunting buddies, paired up and took up separate positions at different farms. That night GP was one of those volunteer hunters, he had showed up alone, and so he and Don paired up. As they sat in the dark that night, keeping some farmer’s livestock under surveillance, one of them tested the waters of conversation where UFOs was concerned. This is when they discovered that they shared a strong mutual interest in that subject. “We just struck it up and became real good friends from that point on,” Don said. Within a few days, GP introduced Don to Stanley Ingram, and from there things just continued to escalate and Don heard all sorts of local UFO stories and met various local people who had their own first-hand stories to share.

GP was one of those who had described some of the most extraordinary encounters. In fact, he claimed to have had face-to-face encounters with the occupants of those mysterious otherworldly craft. One night, around 1979 or 1980, GP and Don even shared a close encounter. “GP was riding with me one night while I was working,” Don recalled. “We were down in the south end of the county. I guess it was about 1:30 or 1:45 in the morning and we had started back to town. I was going to call it a night. As we were driving up this valley road I just kind of saw something that caught my attention out the windshield. My first instinct was that this was a big passenger plane. It was lit up pretty good. Then the next thing that dawned on me was that I could see the silhouette of the hill above these lights. Then the third thing that crossed my mind was that this thing was getting ready to crash because it’s not supposed to be that low.”

“So I just stopped the truck right in the middle of the road. It was a rural back road, so there wasn’t any traffic. GP stepped out on his side of the truck and I stepped up on the side of mine and looked over the top of it. This thing came drifting beside us. Oh, I’d say less than a 100 yards away, and we counted 22 like porthole windows on the thing that were kind of opaque. We couldn’t see in them. They were dimly lit up and there was a T-Bar strobe on the top and the bottom, and it seemed to me there was like a white light and two red lights, or something like that on the top, and two blue lights and a red light on the bottom, which didn’t meet any of the configurations of an aircraft. It was probably not moving more than about 10 miles an hour. I mean, it was going real slow. We got to watch if for maybe 3 to 5 minutes. Then it kind of turned and banked and went up a hollow, another valley that didn’t have any road that went up through there. I looked at GP and he looked at me and I said ‘Hop in.’ I just spun the truck around in the middle of the road and drove about half a mile down the road and drove up on top of a big hill where we could see the lights of Fayetteville, Shelbyville, and Lewisburg. It was one of the tallest hills around. I was expecting to see this thing come out on the back side of that hill, but we never saw it again. I’d say it was at least 150 feet long, maybe even longer.”

“It was big and close and it never made a sound,” Don added. It had been a dark night, there was no moon in the sky, and so Don was unable to define a shape behind the lights. Later in asking GP about it, he recalled that he had been able to make out a silhouette behind the lights. “It was more of a circular shape,” he said. Then looking across the table at Don he stated, “The biggest one I had ever seen was when we were sitting up on the top of the hill south of Lewisburg and I looked back to the north, maybe it was to the northeast, and it came right across over the radio tower up on the hill. A big triangle shaped job, all lit up all the way around. That thing just floated. It wasn’t very high when it came across the top of us and there wasn’t a sound.”

Don joined in. “I remember there were blue lights on the tips of it.”

Make no mistake about it. GP and his family possess all of the outward signs of being very ordinary and very typical country people, but soon after sitting down at their kitchen table that Monday afternoon (01-18) and switching on my tape recorder, the direction of our conversations quickly took a totally unconventional spin. GP’s daughter, who is married with children and 43-years-old, recalled a life-time of strange experiences. “I’m standing in the baby bed and I’m screaming at the top of my lungs because I knew that something was coming to get me,” she recalled. “I can remember that it was alligator people that was going to get me. That was my first memory that something is not right here.”

“The next memory I have I am about 7 years old. We’re still living in the same house. I heard what sounded like footsteps. I opened my eyes and looking down at me was a small child. I remember the eyes were solid dark eyes. No white and they were shiny. They were big and I remember that it had short reddish colored hair. And I remember an overwhelming sense of fear. I instantly rolled over and faced the wall and I laid there and shivered and shook for what I thought was all night long, but it probably wasn’t long at all.”

The third memory was around the time she was turning eight. “I remember sitting straight up in bed and screaming,” Jenny said. “Then daddy came running to me. What I was screaming at was what was coming through the window. It was the traditional Gray and it was coming physically through a window that was two panes of glass covered in plastic, with the strips around the plastic, yet it didn’t break the glass or tear the plastic. And as daddy entered the room it backed through the window and he picked me up and held me most of the night. It terrified me that bad. From then on I had night terrors. I was in my thirties before I even had a full night’s sleep, and that was only because I had a hysterectomy. Right after that hysterectomy, for the first time in my life, I slept all night long without fear.”

The Reproduction Program?

GP seemed sure that like himself, his daughter had also been part of “their reproduction program.” He said, “I don’t understand what their reproduction program was all about, but I knew that we wouldn’t treat a bull or a stud horse the way that I was treated. I mean, I was used and abused there for about three years. I don’t really know if all of the females were theirs or some more that they were picking up down here. There were some beautiful women. See that’s one thing that David’s (another area contactee) wife got so upset about and most women would be. Not that you have a whole hell of a lot of control over it.”

I asked GP how clear his memories of these encounters had been. “Oh they were clear,” he said. He explained that with his initial encounter he didn’t recall anything, and then one day the memory came back to him. “After that the whole relationship was friendlier,” GP explained. “Them towards me and me towards them, because I could accept something like that without going stir crazy or something. I have never been afraid of a whole lot in my life.”

UFOs and Bigfoot?

“That’s just like the night that they introduced me to the Yeti. They said he won’t hurt ya and I walked off in there with him, and he was a big ‘ol boy. I mean, that sucker was 12 to 14 foot tall, and he didn’t smell too good. He looked at me, watched me, and I walked around him and I went on back out and there was no aggression.” One ufonaut told GP afterwards that their confined Bigfoot worked for them. The being said words to this effect: “We bring them here to help us, for our use to do things for us.”

Jenny added, “As far as there being any connection between the Yeti and UFOs, I firmly believe that. I always thought that. When I was about 15, I remember laying in bed. I’m looking up at the ceiling and I closed my eyes to go to sleep and the next thing I know I’m floating up through the ceiling. I got up there and I’m in the air and I’m looking around like ‘Hey man, I’m above the house. This is neat!’ And I look around over this way, I don’t know why, and at the time there’s this huge old Cherry tree. From the side of that tree I saw something standing beside it. I can tell it’s really big and it steps away from the tree and I can see it, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Hey, I’m going to go see this thing. I can see it, but it can’t see me!’ You know, typical kid. Instantly I float over there to it and when I get to it it just looks at me and it turns to walk away. So I was just thinking that it couldn’t see me.”

I asked GP about “astral projection” and he said, “I’ve done a lot of that. I’ve been doing that for years. I haven’t lately.” So perhaps it’s a family thing, an inherited ability or awareness. GP and Jenny often see ghosts too. GP has a ghost in his house I learned. Jenny mentioned seeing “the old man who lived here,” to which her dad said: “I’ve seen him about every night. I’ll be sitting here watching television and I’ll see him. He died here. That’s part of it.”

“I have noticed that there’s definitely a direct connection between the Bigfoot creatures and the lights,” Jenny continued. “The activity around here will increase with the Yeti and then you’ll start seeing a lot more activity in the sky. Like one night we woke up, we heard the strangest hum, a constant low pitched hum. It woke me up and I went ‘Something is up.’ So we got up and we looked out our bedroom window and I looked over at (neighbors) house, which she’s right down below us, and there was this huge saucer shape. It was as big as the top of this house, hovering right over the top of that house. The lights were going on around it, just changing colors all around the bottom. We stood there and watched it for ten minutes.”

Apparently that incident happened back around February 2009. Jenny remembered seeing the Bigfoot just a few months before, maybe November 2008. She was returning home with her family and their car had just crossed an “old rickety bridge” when she noticed it. “Down away from the bridge, on the right hand side, there was the biggest, prettiest Yeti standing there that you’ve ever seen. Just standing there like ‘Hey, here I am!” As soon as we got home, I told the boys ‘Don’t unload the car. Let’s go in the house because it’s coming right down that creek.’ It was following the creek which goes right in front of my house. It wasn’t five minutes and there was this God awful smell, worse than a skunk.”

Jenny’s 17-year-old son has seen Bigfoot too. Just last August, in 2009, he was riding his 4 wheeler not far up the road. “He’s sitting on the pull off and he hears limbs and stuff breaking and he just sort of looks around and when he looks around he sees it jump down, but not far enough. He still hit his head on the underside of a branch.” [We drove by that tree later, and that limb was very high up] Jenny also said that the Bigfoot tried to hide behind this same tree, which was about four feet around, and still the young man was able to see part of each of its shoulders on each side of the tree. That evening, Jenny and her husband went up and found two large footprints sunken very deep into the ground there. She took pictures of them.

Then probably in November 2009, this same young man got up into a deer stand at the bottom of the hill near his home, to do some hunting, when up near the top of the hill (near GP’s deer stand) he saw a Bigfoot. “He [Bigfoot] just kind of squatted down behind a little cedar and some bushes there,” GP stated. “He could still see it. Sat there and looked at him for a pretty good while. Then it stood up and looked back at him again and turned and walked off. He was scared to death when he got back to the house.”

Hair and Tissue Samples, and Unmarked Helicopters

They believe that they may have gotten some hair and tissue samples of a Bigfoot. Not too long ago, Jenny said that they had gone outside to feed the chickens and found that a nearby fence was down. “Something had hit it with such force that it pulled four strands of barbwire away from three posts and a cedar tree. Pulled the staples loose and stretched it when it hit it. It didn’t break the wire, it just stretched it and pulled the staples loose and all of the staples out to where it was sagging down on the ground. I looked down and there were two different areas where hair had gotten caught. One is the sample that I showed you and the other is another barb. I actually took pliers and cut the barb out because it had a little bit of flesh and it had another and different hair on it. So me and (husband) just cut that barb out and then later we fixed the fence. But I plan to have it sent off to have a DNA check. But here’s the kicker. I was on the phone talking to Mary Green, who is known as the Tennessee Bigfoot Lady. I hadn’t been off the phone five minutes when black unmarked helicopters come over my house and they go straight back to the pond area and they went around in a little circuit back there, and I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ve been on the phone with Mary for 30 minutes, 45 at the most, get off the phone with her and in less than 5 minutes I’ve got unmarked, black government helicopters flying over this pond with spotlights. What does that tell you? That’s the main reason I haven’t sent the hair off.”

I asked about the spotlights and she said that they were red, believing that they were “infrared.” She added that there were three helicopters.

“One night right after that happened we were talking,” GP added. “Yes, and they come over again,” Jenny replied. “And they were sitting over the top of this house.” Jenny said that she could identify the helicopters as Apaches.

Jenny believes she’s had a lot of UFO encounters where her “memories are blocked.” One time, back around 1987, she was driving to meet her parents for dinner. As she was crossing a bridge one moment it was early evening, the sun was still out, and then the next thing she knew it was dark! When she arrived at her parent’s, they were hysterical. She recalled them saying words to the effect, “Where have you been!? We’ve been worried out of our minds!” Soon afterwards, she called Don and told him what had happened. Don has been doing regressive hypnosis for years, so they decided to try hypnosis. Under hypnosis she indeed recalled an abduction. “A huge being helped me out of the car,” she remembered. “He was a man who looked just like any one of you guys. Tall, very slender, had white hair and the most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever seen, and a beautiful smile. I couldn’t really tell his age. He was an elder, but yet I could really guess about his age. He took my hand and he took me out of the car and then instantly I’m in another room. He said to me, ‘We’re not sure, at this time, whether you’re going to decide to stay or go. Whichever your decision may be, we’d like to take DNA to continue your strain.’ I gave them permission to take one DNA and it was about three months after this abduction that I had a head-on collision and spent two weeks in a coma and broke about everything in my body. I was in really bad shape. So I’m sure that was what they were talking about. ‘We’re not sure whether your soul is going to decide to stay or go.’ Because I had a choice then, whether I was going to die or come back.”