When Time Slows Down: UFO Encounters, Dimensional Anomalies & the Mystery of Altered Reality

By Brent Raynes

A few years ago, I was put in contact with a former musician and inventor who shared an extraordinary experience that occurred while he was living in Canada.

One freezing winter night, he was driving a Volkswagen Beetle to an appointment in Toronto. As he came over the crest of a hill on Lansdowne Avenue and began heading downhill, he suddenly noticed several trucks parked in the middle of the road directly ahead of him.

He slammed on the brakes and immediately realized there was no way to avoid the collision.

His car crashed into one of the trucks.

At that moment, however, something very strange happened.

He described time as seeming to slow dramatically. Rather than experiencing the accident as a continuous sequence, he perceived it as a series of images merging into an almost suspended sense of movement. Pieces of glass and metal came crashing through the windshield and struck him in the head.

Then, suddenly, he found himself somewhere else.

He was standing in a space filled with brilliant light, facing what appeared to be a portal. Beside him stood a luminous being who spoke with a female voice.

“You really were doing something stupid there,” the being told him, before adding, “You can pass over if you wish.”

The young man replied that he did not feel it was his time. He believed there were still things he needed to accomplish in his life.

The being responded:

“Okay, you can go back in time and take a different path.”

What happened next was remarkable.

According to his account, everything began moving in reverse. The broken pieces of glass returned to their places. The shattered windshield became whole again. The car itself appeared to completely restore itself as it temporarily moved backward down the road.

Then there was another flash of light.

He found himself sitting in the Volkswagen, unharmed. The car was undamaged and resting safely between a grassy verge and a telephone pole.

Was this a near-death experience? A time anomaly? A visionary state brought on by trauma? Or something stranger still?

Experiences involving distorted time, altered perception, UFO encounters, and apparent manipulation of ordinary reality appear surprisingly often in the literature of unexplained phenomena.

A UFO Encounter and the Slowing of Time

Back in 1974, while I was serving aboard the USS Paul (DE-1080) in the U.S. Navy, I corresponded with another Navy man serving aboard the USS Portland (LSD-37).

We shared an interest in the UFO phenomenon.

He had originally written to me at my parents’ home in Maine. Once he learned that I was also serving in the Navy, however, he realized that sending letters directly to my ship would be much more practical.

It was not long before I discovered why he had become interested in ufology.

He described an experience from his youth, when he was living in a suburb of Orlando, Florida.

“I was drawn out of a deep sleep by some attracting high-pitched hum,” he recalled.

He climbed out of bed and approached a nearby window.

“It was hovering over a house sideways to us. It was egg-shaped,” he wrote, describing it as “a glowing bright white light.”

At times, he said, the object emitted a bluish light as it moved closer to the house, although it never came nearer than approximately 50 to 60 feet.

“I seemed to feel a part of myself attracted to it,” he explained. “But another part, which is obvious, was fear of bodily harm.”

Then, in August 1966, another unusual experience occurred.

His family was preparing to move out of a house farther outside Orlando. Everyone had already gotten into the car when he suddenly believed he had forgotten a book inside.

He returned to the house.

“But when I came to the house, I remembered that I did not forget anything,” he later wrote.

As he began walking back toward the station wagon, where his mother and two sisters were waiting, time suddenly seemed to slow down.

He felt that his physical movement was slowing, yet his thoughts remained clear and separate from what was happening to his body. Similar descriptions of dramatically altered time perception have also been discussed in relation to neurological and anomalous experiences. (1, 2)

Then he noticed what looked like fog forming among some nearby bushes and trees.

Within the fog, sparkling light began to take shape.

“This is farfetched, but anyhow, as things slowed up, I saw what looked like a fog in some bushes and trees, with some sparkling light taking shape, and it took shape into that of a man.”

The figure appeared at roughly the same distance from him as the UFO had during the earlier encounter.

The being held out its hands and communicated in what he described as a warm and gentle voice:

“Be calm.”

He immediately became calm.

He felt that the figure seemed to look directly through him.

Then, just as suddenly, normal time returned.

He described it as though time had “backlashed” and reclaimed the missing interval in one swift motion.

He returned to the car trembling with fear.

“I was at this time eleven and had no knowledge of telepathy,” he later explained, “which was used when the being spoke.”

The Carl Higdon Encounter

Another famous case involving altered time and space occurred on October 25, 1974, in Wyoming.

At approximately 4:15 p.m., Carl Higdon Jr., a 41-year-old well digger from Rawlins, was hunting elk in the Medicine Bow National Forest when he spotted five elk standing motionless nearby.

He raised his rifle, took aim, and fired.

Then something highly unusual occurred.

Higdon claimed that he could actually see the bullet leaving the barrel of his rifle.

Under normal circumstances, of course, a bullet travels far too quickly for the human eye to follow in this way. Yet Higdon described the bullet as appearing to move in slow motion.

Approximately 50 feet away, it seemed to strike an invisible barrier and fell to the ground.

When Higdon moved forward to retrieve it, he heard a snapping sound nearby.

Looking around, he noticed a tall humanoid figure standing beneath a tree about 50 feet away.

The figure was slightly over six feet tall and wore what appeared to be a black coverall suit with black shoes. Two belts crossed over its chest, and another belt encircled its waist. At the center was a star-like emblem where a belt buckle would normally be located.

The being’s face was equally unusual.

Higdon described a flat nose, no visible ears or eyebrows, no chin, and only six visible teeth—three on the upper jaw and three on the lower.

The being casually asked Higdon how he was doing.

“Pretty good,” Higdon replied.

The being then asked whether he was hungry.

Higdon admitted that he was “a little.”

The stranger tossed him a package containing pills and instructed him to take one.

Remarkably, Higdon swallowed it without questioning why he was doing so.

He was then invited to walk with the being toward what he described as a small transparent cubicle resting on the ground.

UFO historian Jerome Clark later summarized Higdon’s account by describing how Higdon suddenly found himself inside the cubicle with the stranger—whom he would later identify as “Ausso One”—and another similar being.

The elk were supposedly there as well, frozen or immobilized inside some form of enclosure.

What puzzled Higdon most was the apparent size of the structure.

From the outside, it appeared to measure only approximately seven feet by five feet and seven feet high.

Yet inside were several occupants, four seats, a control panel, a mirror, something resembling a map, and the elk.

How could something so small contain so much?

Higdon reportedly wondered whether he and the others had somehow been shrunk. (3)

Or was the object itself much larger on the inside than it appeared from the outside?

A Craft That Should Have Been Too Small

Years later, Mary Kerfoot of Schaumburg, Illinois, shared another remarkable experience with me.

Around 1994, Mary and her husband, Bob, were standing at the kitchen sink of their home when they looked out the window and noticed a strange object descending into their backyard.

Mary described it as a three-foot-wide bronze, bell-shaped craft.

It drifted downward almost like a leaf floating in a gentle breeze and then settled onto the ground.

Its movement gave the impression that it was nearly weightless.

Then the experience became even stranger.

Mary and Bob claimed to see at least three adult-sized beings, approximately six feet tall, emerge from the object—along with perhaps five smaller beings roughly the size of human children between the ages of four and seven.

The obvious question was difficult to ignore:

How could so many beings possibly emerge from a craft only three feet wide?

Mary was excited and wanted to speak with the visitors.

Bob chose to remain inside the kitchen.

Mary ran down the deck stairs and approached them.

According to her account, the visitors communicated that her “mission” was to help integrate them into society.

Again we encounter the same paradox:

Something apparently tiny on the outside seems to contain far more space—or far more occupants—than conventional geometry should allow.

The “TARDIS Effect”

There are numerous reports of this kind.

Some researchers have informally referred to the phenomenon as the “TARDIS effect,” borrowing the term from the long-running BBC television series Doctor Who, in which the Doctor’s spacecraft famously appears much smaller externally than it is internally.

Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner, in Where the Footprints End, Volume 1, discuss a number of strange cases involving shifting size and spatial perception.

In one account from Puerto Rico in 1975, a woman reportedly watched a tall, shaggy creature with glowing eyes standing in her garden.

Then the creature appeared to shrink.

It eventually transformed into a basketball-sized orb of light and floated away.

A somewhat similar account emerged during a Malaysian UFO flap, in which a young witness claimed to see a “big hairy creature” shrink until it was only “a few inches tall.”

Are such reports literal descriptions of physical transformations?

Could they involve perceptual distortions?

Or might witnesses be encountering phenomena that do not conform to the normal spatial rules we experience in everyday life?

More Dimensions Than We Perceive?

The late UFO researcher Jacques Vallée also addressed the strange recurring claim that some UFOs appear larger on the inside than the outside.

In his 1990 book Confrontations, Vallée speculated about the possibility of higher-dimensional geometry.

If physical reality contains dimensions beyond the familiar three dimensions of space and one of time, he suggested, then a craft capable of interacting with our spacetime in unconventional ways might behave very differently from ordinary physical objects.

Something that appears small from our three-dimensional perspective could potentially contain, connect to, or open into a much larger spatial environment.

Mary Kerfoot, who holds an M.S. in experimental psychology and has also studied quantum physics, reached a similar conclusion regarding her own experience.

“I think this craft may have been a portal which stretched dimensions,” she told me, “allowing an external dimension to be embedded within our normal three-dimensional reality.”

Whether such explanations ultimately prove correct remains unknown.

But reports involving slowed time, missing time, altered spatial dimensions, impossible interior spaces, strange transformations, and beings seemingly able to manipulate our perception of reality continue to surface throughout UFO and paranormal literature.

Perhaps these accounts are trying to tell us something important.

The greatest mystery surrounding UFO phenomena may not simply be where these objects come from.

It may be whether they operate within the same understanding of space, time, matter, and reality that we do.

And if they do not, then perhaps the strangest part of these encounters is not the craft itself.

Perhaps it is the possibility that, for a few extraordinary moments, witnesses are glimpsing a reality far larger—and far stranger—than the one we ordinarily perceive.

References

1. Anthony Peake interview with Brent Raynes, December 2007.
In this interview, British researcher and author Anthony Peake discussed temporal lobe epilepsy, altered time perception, déjà vu, and anomalous experiences. Peake described the case of a woman with temporal lobe epilepsy who experienced what appeared to be an extended period of dramatically slowed time, although only a fraction of a second had passed externally. He also discussed possible connections between temporal lobe phenomena, abduction experiences, and the work of Whitley Strieber.

2. John A. Keel, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), chapter “The Cosmic Jokers.”
Keel recounts the story of a young man from Ithaca, New York, who inexplicably delayed leaving his home before later being involved in a collision with a train. The unusual delay may have altered the timing of the accident and is presented in the context of anomalous behavior and UFO-related experiences.

3. Jerome Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd Edition, Vol. 1: A–K (1998), pp. 487–489.
Clark provides a detailed account of the Carl Higdon encounter, including the unusual bullet behavior, the humanoid figure identified as “Ausso One,” and the apparently small craft whose interior seemed far larger than its exterior dimensions would suggest.