John Edmonds: Alien Slayer?

The entrance to Stardust Ranch, previously owned by controversial “contactee” John Edmonds.

Photo courtesy 12NEWS

Today’s post has absolutely nothing to do with the greater Huntsville area. Recently I’ve been doing this thing (and I’m sure you’ve noticed) where I try to shoehorn local sightings into an article to “justify” my deciding to talk about that specific topic, but I’m not gonna be doing that today. I considered, for a time, combining this one (in that sort of shoehorning manner) with a writeup on some of the stranger UFO/alien encounters from our area, but I think I’ll save that for next week.

Instead, we’re gonna talk about something that doesn’t get as much coverage as it should on websites belonging to “true believers” like myself: mental health and the reality of these types of experiences.

***

John Edmonds was a social worker.

For all intents and purposes, he was a serious kind of guy who didn’t show any sort of interest (at least as far as anybody knew) in any shade of the paranormal.

After a bout of severe illness which left Edmonds on a ventilator, in the ICU, and finally in hospice care as his doctors did not expect him to recover, he and his wife decided that he needed something like an early retirement. His wife, employed by the FBI, was willing to do anything to help extend his life (or at least improve the quality of whatever remained).

It didn’t take long to fall in love with the promise of this new life they were trying to make for themselves.

They’d purchased a large ranch property, sight unseen, in Nevada. The previous owners, employed by the FBI like Edmonds’ wife, were barely home (with their work keeping them on road for the vast majority of the year), so they sold the property well below the going rate. Furnishings were originally included, but having uprooted their entire life for this move, the Edmonds were able to talk the price down even further as long as the owners agreed to move all of their belongings prior to their move in date.

Now, I’ve never bought a house, but I find it a little strange (and feel like it’s worth noting) that the Edmonds never actually spoke to the couple they bought the property from — all communication came and went through the realtor.

After a long drive down, the Edmonds’ finally arrived.

The house was, still, fully furnished.

Irritated, believing that the previous owners had left it for them to deal with, John called their realtor who (more or less) told them it was just going to be their problem to deal with.

In the only verifiably true part of this entire story, John and his wife went to see The Matrix that afternoon to try to relax and kill some time before dealing anymore with the issue of the furniture.

When they got back, according to John, they found the entire house emptied with every piece of furniture, every picture off the wall, even the deep freezer thrown haphazardly into the drained inground pool behind the house. Whether or not some unseen entity ever came to retrieve from said pool is unknown (at least to me). This would be the first of many strange occurrences John would report in their time living on the ranch. Soon would follow cabinet doors opening and closing in the middle of the night, phantom footsteps, and vanishing items that would reappear days later in places that had been searched many times over.

These experiences were only had by John — his wife, spending much of her time at work in a nearby FBI field office, wouldn’t report any encounters of her own during this time period. She believed, perhaps, that the stress of John’s recent near death experience was still very strongly affecting him so she recommended that he start spending more time outside.

So he did. He’d go on long walks in the vast emptiness that surrounded them. Having no nearby neighbors to speak of, John could go the entire day without encountering another human. He’d come across all kinds of animals — both wild and domestic. Following encounters with a herd of emaciated (obviously released by some prior owner) horses, the decision was made that this was to be his new calling. John was going to run a ranch for rescued animals.

While returning from an afternoon drive, what was an unsuccessful attempt to track down this roaming herd, John pulled into his driveway to see in his rearview a man approaching his property from off in the distance. This man, noticeably homeless, was making a beeline for John’s car with something big in his hands. As he got closer, it came into view: he was carrying a katana.

John wasn’t someone who owned guns or tended to carry weapons of any sort on a daily basis, so he stayed in the car hoping this apparent vagrant would just move on. He didn’t though. He walked right down the driveway and up to John’s window (which John had rolled down just a crack). John, obviously, was very curious as to why this man was here and why he had a katana with him.

“I kill the monsters,” was his answer to John’s questions.

He went on to explain that there was a shed at the edge of the property that the Edmonds’ had purchased. There, this man claimed, was his base of operations for maintaining the safety of the ranch. The previous owners had supposedly paid him to live there.

John wanted nothing to do with him, assured him that his services wouldn’t be needed any longer, and told him to move on. The man agreed but left, with John, his machete telling him that he would need when the “monsters” returned.

That night, John set out to find the shed. And there it was, an old, rotten looking thing that seemed like it might fall over should a strong wind blow through. Inside the shed lay a ratty old mattress and a series of bladed weapons suspended from the walls — mostly rusted machetes and hunting knives. John told his wife, showed her the katana, took her to the shed, and they found themselves thoroughly concerned for their safety.

John bought an assault rifle.

***

Some time passes here.

John is still bringing in animals (mostly horses and dogs) and they come and go as they’re rehabilitated and rehomed. John is also still having what he believes to be paranormal encounters. His wife, it seems, is more willing to write missing items and strange feelings off as lingering symptoms of John’s brush with death.

Then it all changed.

One night, John found himself startle awake by a bright light that fully engulfed his bedroom. In the corner (and walking towards the door) stood a grey alien. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Even more startling, his wife was being seemingly levitated out of the room and towards the front door. He jumped out of bed, fully nude (if I didn’t say, John slept in the nude), and ran towards his recently purchased rifle.

He knew what had to be done.

He bolted out the door, loading and cocking the rifle as he ran. He shot the alien dead, barreled out the front door, and found himself cowering in a mix of fear and awe at the sight before him. His wife was being abducted by a massive craft - so large it seemed to blot out the sky.

He raised the barrel of his gun, rage in his heart, and opened fire.

The craft retreated, his wife hit the ground, and as she was so rudely awakened she saw the craft as it escaped. John wasn’t crazy. The body of the alien, however, disappeared.

Thus began his nightmare. The Edmond’s found themselves suffering nightly assaults from these would-be abductors. After a time, they began appearing in the day, too (though they seemed to remain invisible to all but John). Not knowing what else to do, and given the apparent success that he had in firing on their craft, he decided to go to war.

He filled the house with weapons. Blades and guns stuck on every wall and crammed in every corner. He’d never be caught unprepared. Truly, he wasn’t. Every time he saw the creatures, he attacked.

He shot greys, He decapitated greys. He ripped them to pieces with his bare hands. Every time, the body would disappear. He began to believe that the creatures had some sort of antenna built into their body that, upon their death, ceased transmission signaling that their corpse needed to be recovered in a refusal to leave behind evidence of their existence. How exactly this functioned, or how the bodies could just disappear, John never really figured out. He had ideas, but no proof.

John’s preferred weapon, the katana gifted to him by the monster slayer. Yes, that is supposedly alien blood.

In his frequent slayings, he was gifted the opportunity to experiment. A chance to find a way to kill one and refrain from alerting whatever or whoever recovered their bodies. One day, foregoing his normal methods of choice, he had some of his rescue dogs attack one of the aliens. They mutilated it and devoured most of the corpse. This time, though, it didn’t disappear. He grabbed what remained, stuffed it in his freezer, and (sharing his story in the process) arranged to have it studied at a local university.

Upon examination, the “remains” were determined to be plant matter.

That night, in an apparent retaliation, the alien craft landed on (and flattened) the dog kennel.

***

This is kind of where John’s story ends.

I mean, he still encountered them. He still killed them. He even claims to have caught a few on camera. When it comes to further developments or any kind of a breakthrough, though, that’s it. His story just kept on going up until his fairly recent death. There’s probably more that could be said about him and about his life after the destruction of the dog kennel, but I don’t know that there’s any real point to it.

I’d be loathe to try to sum it all up or tie a neat little bow around it. This is not a story that I can even attempt to do that with. But it’s definitely worth talking about.

It’s worth talking about his brush with death. It’s worth talking about how his experiences affected him. It’s worth talking about how the only time his wife had an encounter it was the faintest glimpse of the ship as it flew away. It’s worth talking about how fruitless the attempts to document anything related to this case were. It’s worth talking about whether or not John was okay.

I don’t think he was but I don’t think that really matters.

I’m not going to sit here and poke holes in every part of his story. John, at least, really believed that these things were happening to him. And whether or not these encounters were in our tangible, physical world (or in the mindscape) just doesn’t matter. For all intents and purposes, these things happened to him.

And that’s something that I think about a lot when it comes to the paranormal.

Do any of these encounters “really” happen to us? Is there some mental or psychical realm, existing at that blurred line between our minds interpretation of the world and the world that’s out there, where all of this occurs? Is there even a point in trying to differentiate between the two?

We have a tendency as humans to want to classify things. We long to reduce things to simple, easy to digest factoids and categories. In doing so, we often remove most of the mystery that there is to life. We’ve done that with our world and with reality at large. We’ve come to agree upon this hard and fast thing, this reality that doesn’t allow for any weird interpretations of inputs. A reality that can’t coexist so easily with things that aren’t tangible and categorical and reducible. Letting go of this, in my very unasked for and unneeded opinion, is something that we need to all work on.

However, and this comes with a very big stipulation, this shouldn’t be done haphazardly or (necessarily) for every case or every experiencer. For one, not everyone is capable of handling the vast implications of that type of system. Beyond that, not every experiencer is as honest or as stable as we would hope.

This is a fine line, here. A schizophrenic man may see the devil in his backseat, but that doesn’t always mean the devil’s there.

Where exactly do we draw this line? Which experiences are more trustworthy than others? What the difference between that schizophrenic man and someone like me who thinks they’ve a UFO a time or two?

I honestly don’t know.

The more we work on Signal & Noise the more I think about cases like John’s. The more I think about what reality really is, whether or not we’re actually experiencing things, and whether or not that distinction even matters. I hope to have an answer for you but I think it’s beyond my ability to grasp. I think it’s beyond, well, the reach of any human. We’ve gota very limited viewpoint on things, here, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

Whether or not John was crazy, it was real to him.

I think that’s all that matters.

Stay tuned for next week. I’ll be back with a vaguely similar story that took place right here in North Alabama: a story of alien abduction, universal translators, and pills that supposedly halt the influence of demonic entities!

-Scott