The Wall and the Witness

Following the trail of anomalous testimony, and what we find when the road ends

For the first time, I recently read an account that mentioned the “shimmer”—and it gave me a different perspective on something I had seen beside my own bed and began writing about in 1998. Why had I never considered a possible connection to UFO encounters?

I’m still working out how to introduce that information, and I plan to interview the author. For now, I’ll hold the details. But it’s a reminder of how someone else’s account can prompt us to revisit our own — and notice a possibility we hadn’t considered. Sometimes a single word becomes a thread, linking our experience to something larger.

The problem of the single witness

Almost everything we know about anomalous experience rests on one kind of evidence: a person telling us what happened to them. No laboratory can rerun the night a craft hovered over a campsite, and no archive holds the room where a stranger was shown a child and told it was hers.

I set out to test that limit by following one trail as far as it would go. It began with a single question about a well-known whistleblower and led through con men and crash stories, Harvard psychiatry, an X-ray, and the accounts of people who have spent decades trying to make sense of what they lived through.

What I found was not proof, and not debunking either. It was a clearer picture of why proof, as we usually mean it, may be the wrong tool for this subject, and of what might take its place.

The whistleblower: Robert Dean

Robert O. Dean (1929–2018) retired as a U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major after 28 years of service. For decades he told audiences that while posted at NATO’s European headquarters (SHAPE) in the 1960s, he read a classified study called “The Assessment,” which concluded that Earth was under observation by several extraterrestrial groups.

Some of his story checks out. SHAPE’s own historian confirmed from personnel rosters that Dean served there from 1963 to 1967, so he was not inventing his career. The senior figures he named were real too: General Lyman Lemnitzer was Supreme Allied Commander from 1963, and Sir Thomas Pike was his deputy.

The rest does not hold together:

• The dates. Dean said Pike ordered the study after radar sightings in 1961, and that it took two and a half years. Pike did not become deputy commander until January 1964, the same month Dean said he read the finished report.
• The documents. SHAPE examined a photograph of the report’s cover and concluded it was a forgery. It used a classification marking, “NATO COSMIC TOP SECRET,” that NATO never used, and a 1963 letter offered as proof of Dean’s posting gave him the wrong rank.
• The changing story. Dean first said he photographed the cover himself, then that the photos were sent to him anonymously.
• No other witness. The German security colonel he named appears nowhere outside his own account.

A close associate of Dean’s told me in conversations in 2016 and 2024 that some of what he said late in life was confabulated as dementia set in. No specifics were given. That account fits the record, but only partly. The core story and its problems were already in place in 1993 and 1994, long before any decline. What dementia may explain is the later layer: Apollo photographs, crashed Navy craft, and aliens who pass as human.

That later layer also matches material circulating at the time, including ideas found in Ingo Swann’s Penetration (1998). Real names and real events, with an unverifiable story attached, is exactly the pattern you would expect from embellishment, borrowing or confabulation.

The echo chamber

When I widened the search, the same ideas kept appearing in different books. Jim Marrs wrote about them in Alien Agenda (1997). Ingo Swann, the remote-viewing pioneer, published Penetration the next year. Nick Cook, a former Jane’s aviation editor, explored zero-point energy and anti-gravity in The Hunt for Zero Point (2001), and Swann’s family later commissioned him to write Swann’s biography.

These are serious people, and the overlap feels like confirmation. But they read each other, shared conference stages and repeated each other’s material. When several sources agree because they draw from one pool, they count as one source, not several.

The Aztec, New Mexico crash story shows how hard that pool is to drain. It began with Frank Scully’s 1949 columns and his 1950 bestseller, whose sources, Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer, were exposed in 1952 as con men; their “alien metal” tested as ordinary aluminum. Researchers Scott and Suzanne Ramsey have since spent more than $500,000 arguing that the hoax was itself a government cover story for a real recovery.

That argument may be right or wrong. But when evidence against a story is treated as evidence of a cover-up, how can the story be meaningfully tested? Dean’s explanations for why the truth remains hidden — from suppressed free-energy technology to a public not ready for neighbors from other stars — raise a similar question: what evidence would distinguish concealment from a claim that simply cannot be substantiated?

I interviewed Scott and Suzanne Ramsey in 2016. Link

The body as evidence: Terry Lovelace

Terry Lovelace offers something rare: a physical object. A former Air Force medic and later an assistant attorney general, he describes an encounter at Devil’s Den State Park in Arkansas in 1977, along with sightings and childhood experiences before it. In 2012 an X-ray revealed a metal object in his leg, and a radiologist reportedly said it could not have got there without leaving a scar.

The X-ray is real medical evidence, and his background makes simple invention unlikely. What the image cannot show is where the object came from. Small puncture wounds can heal almost invisibly over 35 years, and foreign objects can move through tissue.

As far as I can find, the object has not been removed and analyzed by an independent lab. That single step would turn an anomaly into evidence. While that may not be possible or even advised, even the best case in this field returns to the same place: one person’s account of how it got there.

My interviews with Terry Lovelace are posted here. Link

The experiencers

Budd Hopkins, with Missing Time (1981) and Intruders (1987), and Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, with Abduction (1994), took experiencers seriously when almost no one else would. Their compassion mattered. But both relied heavily on hypnotic regression, which raises a witness’s confidence while also adding false detail, especially when the hypnotist expects a particular story.

Later research sharpened the concern. Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy found that many abductees were prone to false memories, and that many first experiences began in sleep paralysis. None of this means experiencers are lying; most are plainly describing something real to them. The open question is what caused it.

Two accounts show the range of what remains.

Maria Cuccia recorded her testimony nearly three decades ago and later wrote His Name Is Elijah, a memoir that includes being shown a child the beings told her was her son. Her early recording is valuable because it can be compared with how she tells the story now. The child motif is also one of the most common in the literature, which can be read either as many people meeting the same reality or as a theme passed along through books, support groups and hypnosis sessions.

John Foster refused hypnosis because of its stigma. Instead he relied on conscious memory, began writing it down in the 1990s, and as an engineer tried to test his recollections against verifiable facts. He also names other witnesses, including his daughter and people present at a grade-school sighting.

Foster’s method is the stronger one, though memory still rebuilds itself each time it is recalled, and his writing began years after many of the events. The most valuable thing now would be (and does exist) independent statements from his co-witnesses, recorded separately, that match details he wrote down decades ago.

Some experiencers stopped speaking because telling their stories brought ridicule or reopened wounds. Others keep talking, and the catalog of accounts keeps growing. Its size is real data, but it cannot by itself confirm any single explanation.

I interviewed John Foster and Maria Cuccia. Those interviews are posted in the Wendy’s Coffeehouse Curious archives. Link

When proof runs out

Every trail here ends in the same place. The books I am reading now, They Live in the Woods, Anomalous Phenomena and On a Slide of Light, share the same limit: no event in them can be reproduced. The experience is personal, so asking only whether it happened as described soon reaches a dead end.

What these accounts share is consciousness, and change. Each experiencer must make sense of an event their reality never prepared them for. Mack called this “ontological shock,” and toward the end of his life he cared less about physical proof than about how people integrated it.

Others reached similar ground. Kenneth Ring’s The Omega Project (1992) found that UFO experiencers and near-death experiencers reported strikingly similar aftereffects in their values and sense of meaning. Jacques Vallée proposed in The Invisible College (1975) that the phenomenon may act as a “control system,” shifting human belief without ever offering proof. William James, writing in 1902, argued that such experiences should be judged by their fruits rather than their roots.

Yet even change resists measurement. We don’t know the person before the encounter, and we don’t truly know the person after. All we have is their own account of having been different, which brings us back to the single witness.

I can only speak for myself. A life-changing event of my own opened my mind to the possibility that I had never been given a wide enough view of reality. It made me curious, and it sent me down this trail.

Who decides what is real

Governments can classify information, run programs and issue reports. They do not get to decide what exists on this planet. That isn’t their domain.

Official statements are evidence to weigh, like anyone else’s. NATO’s rebuttal of Dean was persuasive because it came with records anyone could check, not because NATO said so. The Pentagon’s 2024 conclusion that it found no verifiable evidence of recovered alien technology deserves the same treatment: it carries exactly as much weight as the review behind it.

The standard that matters applies to everyone equally: whistleblowers, researchers, experiencers and officials. Take nothing for granted, from any direction.

The wall

So what are we left with after following all these trails? Not proof. What we have is a society in the middle of a shift, as more and more stories challenge the old assumption that anomalous events are fiction, hysteria, hoax or delusion. Something is happening.

The best way forward is curiosity. Follow the trail, take nothing for granted, and assume there is more to the story, even when the road leads to a brick wall. Someone among us may show us how to go through that wall, around it, or tear it down. Someone may dissolve it entirely, or show that the wall was a fiction all along, built to produce a shift in consciousness.

Stop looking at the wall and ask why it was necessary. Then look at everything else and ask the same question. And finally, ask how I have changed by shifting my view from looking out to exploring within.

Onward we grow.

Sources

• SHAPE: the truth about an alleged 1960s report on UFOs
• Gregory Pedlow, “The Alleged SHAPE ‘Assessment’ of UFOs”
• Omni, April 1994: “Inside the Military UFO Underground”
• Supreme Allied Commander Europe: list of commanders and deputies
• Kevin Randle, “Robert O. Dean is Gone”
• Robert Dean obituary (Colin Andrews)
• Nick Cook Author
• Aztec crashed saucer hoax
• Robert Sheaffer, review of The Aztec Incident (Skeptical Inquirer)
• Terry Lovelace case summary
• John Foster: Identified Phenomena, interview with director Rhett McClure
• John Foster interview, 2022
• John Foster’s website
• Author’s conversations with a close associate of Robert Dean, 2016 and 2024