This attorney takes extraterrestrial contact seriously. Now he’s helping remove the stigma for other “experiencers” |260|
Successful Miami attorney Rey Hernandez’s UFO experience drove him to support others.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Miami attorney and ET experiencer Rey Hernandez. During the interview Hernandez explains how several dramatic extraterrestrial encounters, with multiple credible witnesses, led him to advocacy work on behalf of contactees:
Alex Tsakiris: …please fill us in on some of the experiences that happened to you starting two-and-a-half years ago…
Rey Hernandez: …My [second] encounter was in late August of 2012; so approximately six months later. During that interim period my wife began seeing enormous crafts. Large crafts; very large crafts outside our house at night. I won’t go into those details…[but this also happened] in Mexico…and during one incide
nt it was seen by her sister, her two nieces, and three other professionals. Actually four other professionals: Two dentists, another attorney, and an architect – in two cars. Anyway…let me go now to my incident, my second incident…
Up until that point I immediately did what any rationalist person would do when you’ve never been exposed to anything like this: You go to the internet. [I typed in] UFO’s/ET’s…because I had no basis for any of this…never…maybe I had seen one or two ancient alien shows (laughing)…that they have on TV. This was totally outside of my mindset. All of it just confused me even more. So what had happened was here I was…I don’t know if they’re devils or angels, or annunaki…just total confusion.
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Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Rey Hernandez to Skeptiko. Rey has Master’s degree from Cornell and was on his way towards a PhD at Berkeley before changing course and getting his law degree and becoming a practicing attorney. But none of that has anything to do with why Rey Hernandez is here on Skeptiko today, because Rey’s the driving force and co-founder of the Foundation for the Research into Extra-Terrestial Encounters, the acronym for that happens to be FREE which is quite handy. So Rey welcome to Skeptiko, and thanks so much for joining me.
Rey Hernandez: Thank you Alex. It’s a pleasure.
Alex Tsakiris: So Rey, I’ve known you for quite a while, which I think is an interesting part of this story, and, for that reason I don’t want to really start at the beginning, I want to start at kind of the middle, or maybe even where we’re at right now. Two-and-a-half-years plus after you had this amazing ET encounter that really kind-of shattered your world. But the reason I want to start now, and I want to get into talking about the foundation and what you’ve done, is that I think one of the amazing things about your story, is about how you’ve allowed it to transform your life. And like I said, because very early on you had contacted me and said “Hey I don’t know what to do with this experience” I think you were at the beginning stages of this search you were doing about “What do I do about this experience?” But I really, really am so impressed that you just took it head on. I mean you’re obviously a really smart guy, you’re a well educated guy, you have unbelievable completely paradigm-busting experience that thousands and thousands of people have had, but you just don’t bury it. You just dive right into it and say OK, I got to figure this stuff out. Start there and tell me why you felt so compelled to take action in that way?
Rey Hernandez: Well Alex, you hit the nail on the head. This was definitely a paradigm-busting experience; a ride that I’ve been on for the last two-and-a-half years. I guess to address your question you must understand where I came from. My mindset…I was your typical over-educated, material, rationalist, agnostic. I did not have a religious background; even though…I was baptized and had a communion. My parents were not very religious. We did not go to church. My academic background as you noted, I had gone to and graduated from Rutgers with honors. I then got a full academic scholarship to Cornell for a Master’s program in urban planning. Then I received a National Science Foundation PhD fellowship to attend basically any University that I wanted in the United States. I decided to attend Berkeley [but had] also had gotten into MIT. So the spiritualist-side, the consciousness-side of me that I have now, that was a whole antithesis of what I was a few years ago, given my background.
What had happened was a series of experiences which led me to reach out and find out what is true nature of our reality? Because, the experience I had totally exploded – [it] was like a nuclear bomb that was dropped on my rationalist mindset. This was not the science that I had learned. This was not the rationality that I had been exposed to. It could not be explained by modern science. And myself having the academic background that I had, I started to explore [the question]…what the hell happened to me?
Alex Tsakiris: Right, and Rey…I think we should probably at this point, tell people about these series of experiences really briefly, that you had…Number one you have multiple experiences. You have experiences with multiple and different eye witnesses, right? So these are not experiences where just you are having them. Actually you get pulled into the first one! The first one isn’t even your experience. Someone, your wife, comes and pulls you in to that experience. But then you have other experiences with neighbors, you have experiences with other relatives who you never see that much. So this is a profound set of experiences that are hard to dismiss, but you need to go ahead [and recount those stories]. I’m sorry I don’t want to interrupt your story, so please fill us in briefly on some of these experiences that happened to you starting two-and-a-half years ago…
Rey relays an amazing experience involving his dying dog, his hysterical wife, and a floating horse-shoe-shaped UFO in his own living room — [5min.30sec – 10min.15sec]:
Rey Hernandez: I’ll try to be very brief…the very first experience that I had was on March of 2012. It occurred on a Sunday morning at approximately 6AM. The day before, on a Saturday, we had a 16-year old Jack-Russell terrier that we were basically keeping alive with medications. She was pretty much in her last months. What had happened was she had a stroke, and she became paralyzed from the neck down; [that occurred on] Saturday, at approximately 6PM or so. At that time we had a decision – do we bring her into one of these medical hospitals? At that point we decided since she wasn’t in pain, she appeared just to look confused, we would bring her Monday to our veterinarian and put her to sleep and do a ceremony for her, because she was like our first daughter.
The next day, Sunday morning at 6 o’clock, my wife woke up and [checked on] the dog to see if she had regained her mobility. Our pet was not able to move at all except just from the neck up. My wife then carried her down the stairs, and when she got down there she saw an object that was floating four feet off the ground, one foot [away from] the wall, and it was metallic in shape – approximately like an upside-down-U…It had these two ring lights in the center. My wife being the good hardcore Catholic from Mexico that she is, she knelt down and started praying…basically [saying] “If you’re a bad spirit, leave. But if you are a good spirit or an angel or the Virgin Mary [stay]” Mexicans always see the Virgin Mary everywhere (laughing). And she said “Please stay and don’t let my dog suffer. My poor Nina.” Nina is her name which means “little girl” in Spanish.
Then all of a sudden these green lights started blinking and started flashing on her – like scanning her. At that point she freaked out and she started yelling for me. She started screaming my name. It was six in the morning, and I thought she had seen a cockroach or a little mouse on the floor (laughing). I just totally ignored her. After 10 or 15 minutes of screaming for me to come downstairs, she went upstairs and literally hauled me out of bed. When I got downstairs, what I saw was not the object that she had seen…what I saw was, I guess could be described as a plasma-object. This was not just an object; I call it a plasma-being, a light being, because it did control my mind. It was…approximately two-to-three-feet in width, one and a half to two feet in height, cylindrical in shape, but it didn’t have any external outer edges because it was pure energy plasma. Multi-colored, translucent, and when I looked at it I did not have any peripheral vision…just straight ahead at that object. I could not see to my right or to the left or up and down…I was just focused only on that object. What I did was quite irrational – I stared at it, I waved my hand at it, and then I said, “Ah B.S.”…Then I turned around, I walked upstairs, I went to my bed, I folded my hands on my belly, and I looked straight up at the ceiling. So for 15 minutes I was in this hypnotic state with nothing entering my brain/my consciousness. After 15 minutes, it was if the hypnotist said, “OK Kid, wake up, we’re finished with your wife and your pet.” And all of a sudden I woke up and I said, “Oh my god, what in the world just happened?” I ran downstairs and there was my wife jumping up and down, saying “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The angels cured her! The angels cured her!” She was running around the living room dancing, and the dog was running up and down with the energy of a little puppy. Right there my whole worldview was totally shattered (laughing). That was the first event.
Alex Tsakiris: Let me pull out a couple of things from there…I mean number one, as we said, this is kind of your wife’s experience, but what I thought was interesting was you talk about the mind-control aspect of it…this will be highly controversial, I mean the whole thing is controversial, how are we gonna get past that (laughing)? But as you break down the parts that are most controversial, I love how you have put it together for yourself because folks, this is the tip of the iceberg right? This is the first experience. He’s had a number of unbelievable experiences…not all of them like this. But experiences with his neighbors, experiences with his relatives, it just goes on and on…
Rey then goes on to recount the second unexplainable experience he had during an incredible chain of ET-encounters/Synchronicities — [11min.35sec – 17min.55sec]:
Rey Hernandez: …My next encounter was in late August of 2012; so approximately six months later. During that interim period my wife began seeing enormous crafts. Large crafts; very large crafts outside our house at night. I won’t go into those details…[but this also happened] in Mexico…and during one incident it was seen by her sister, her two nieces, and three other professionals. Actually four other professionals: Two dentists, another attorney, and an architect – in two cars. Anyway…let me go now to my incident, my second incident…
Up until that point I immediately did what any rationalist person would do when you’ve never been exposed to anything like this: You go to the internet. [I typed in] UFO’s/ET’s…because I had no basis for any of this…never…maybe I had seen one or two ancient alien shows (laughing)…that they have on TV. This was totally outside of my mindset. All of it just confused me even more. So what had happened was here I was…I don’t know if they’re devils or angels, or annunaki…just total confusion. But that day a lot of my confusion was completely stopped (laughing).
I had been waiting for a friend of mine to give me some documents. He had called me up and said “Rey I finally got the documents.” I said “Come by.” So I’m waiting outside for him; I live in a cul-de-sac [and] this is approximately 9 o’clock in the evening. [It was a] totally cloudy night, not one star in the sky. Complete overcast. I had remembered two things instantaneous that popped into my head. One was I never am outside at that time of night in the front of my yard. I immediately was looking right at the area that my wife had described 3 months ago where she had seen a huge gigantic craft. It had colors at the edges like stained-glass window. Again, she sees them as angelic crafts, so [she] compares the colors [to] the stained-glass windows of our church. Then I remembered the day before I had watched a video on YouTube of this man who called down these crafts. So while I’m waiting for my friend to come by with these papers I say, “To hell with it, let me try.” So I said, “Oh I want to see you, the beautiful angelic craft that my wife saw…with the colorful stained-glass windows on the edges…she’s seen you I haven’t… I want to see you please” I do a 180, turn around – nothing.
After 15 minutes of doing that I said to myself, “I’m really losing it. I’m going crazy.” I really lost it this time, trying to call down a craft, and I started laughing to myself – I’m really nuts. All of a sudden on top of my neighbors house, literally five feet from the roof, was a half-a-stadium, football stadium-sized craft. I could tell that it was at least two blocks in depth because we have these huge gigantic trees that were about 2 blocks away, and it was still further away than those huge trees. The width was approximately the size of…two ranch style houses. There was a [ranch-style house] right next to mine…then at that point I was like, “Holy….” You-know-what. And what it was made up [of] was thousands and thousands of light-streaks that formed the whole shell of this craft. It was semi-translucent so you could see through it – you could see the clouds in the background. But you definitely knew what it was because of the shape of it. Then all of a sudden a thought popped into my mind. I know it wasn’t my thought; it was put into my mind. It was my daughter telling me, “Daddy you and mommy have seen UFO’s. Next time you see a UFO you call me, because I want to see them.” That’s what popped into my head; clear as a doorbell ringing right in front of us here. So I immediately stepped like ten feet to my right and I started yelling at my daughter outside her window. I said, “Scarlett…come outside!” She opened up the window, and she said, “What is it daddy.” I said “There is a UFO out here…get out here!” So within 10 seconds she’s outside and so now you have two people – my just recently turned ten-year-old daughter and myself were looking at this craft. We weren’t scared. We were being entertained. That’s at least the thoughts that both of us had in our head.
Then about 15 minutes later after we were observing these thousands of light streaks on top of my neighbors house – came not only my friend who was at that time 48 years old, Mexican, hardcore Catholic, [but also his] wife [who was a] 52 years old from Columbia, another hardcore Catholic, and their 17 year old daughter. They immediately leave the car right in the middle of the cul-de-sac. They run to us and they say “What the hell is that!?” I said “You know what it is, it’s a UFO. Remember I told you my wife and I had seen that entity inside our house, it’s come back!” I didn’t tell them that I called [the UFO]. Then for the next 10 minutes they started to come up with “rational” explanations of what this thing could be…[in parallel] I was coming up with rational explanations why their rational explanations were not appropriate (laughing). Then…what popped into my head was a thought, “Hey they don’t believe you”. Like I was communicating to this craft…all of a sudden the lights completely changed. Instead of these thousands and thousands of oblong light streaks, those terminated and what was replaced was thousands of stars. The stars were sort of ten-times the size of Venus. [They] were blinking on and off three times a second. It was throughout the whole craft. At that point, no one had any doubt what this was…
Rey later describes his serendipitous entry/interest into near-death experience science — [20min.45sec – 24min.30sec]:
Rey Hernandez: …Up [to that point] I had been on YouTube and on the internet every day, four hours a day at least. Just trying to read anything I could about, you know, ET’s, UFO’s, Aliens, the whole works. [By] then I had already read like 30 books on UFO’s, and had another ten books to read that I had ordered from Amazon. After that day I went cold turkey. I stopped going to the internet. Those books are still unread on UFO’s. All I did was reorder books from Amazon on near-death experiences and consciousness studies. That’s how you [Alex] became involved – because I typed in consciousness studies into the internet, and your radio blog came on. That’s how I became educated [in] this field. I started reading…goodness…I would order like ten books from Amazon. I read almost all of them in like a week. Then I would order ten more, and when I was down to two, I would order ten more. Tons of these books too. I became pretty much an expert in NDE’s. Consciousness studies are different because it’s so much more complicated, as you know. That’s what I did for four straight months.
My wife thought I was going crazy. I thought I was going nuts because all of a sudden I had a sort of heroin addiction. I had to read these books. I was up till 3.30 in the morning, when I couldn’t read anymore, that’s when I fell asleep and I would wake up with a book on my bed. It was that type of a scenario. Then what happened four months later in late December of 2012. Up to that point I had never asked anyone, never spoke to anyone, about NDE’s, let alone consciousness studies, except my wife. Over a three day period – Friday, Saturday, and Sunday – the very first three people I had spoken to about NDE’s, all of them had had NDE’s. What are the statistical probabilities of that happening!? You know? It’s like hitting the lottery three days in a row, you know? The very first one was my daughter’s pediatrician. I won’t go into the details but I [had] never met this woman. [My] wife was always the one who brought her to the pediatrician. That day for whatever reason my wife couldn’t bring her so I brought her. Out of my mouth…as I was saying it I was like, “Why in the hell am I telling this to this woman? I don’t even know her.” So my mouth was saying something, [and] my mind was like “Your mouth is out of control, why am I saying this?
Anyway I said excuse me doctor have you ever heard of the term NDE? I just finished reading approximately 300 books on this topic, and out of those 300 books I would say 75 were written by medical doctors, and out of those 75 books approximately 20 books were written by professors at medical schools. So this topic has been scientifically studied for at least thirty years, and is something that you need to know about. At that point her eyeballs “popped out”. I said [to myself], oh my god I offended this woman, she thinks I am nuts. I said “Excuse me doctor I didn’t mean to offend you, that was totally inappropriate…” [She responded] “No, no, no…I want to know how did you know I had one?” Then she goes on to the details. How when she was ten years old she was brought into a hospital…she floated out of her body. She described exactly what the doctor looked like, what the nurse looked like. She then went through a couple walls and was right on top of her parents…[also my daughter was in the room listening to this the whole time]. She told me verbally for a fifteen minute period the conversation that her parents had…then she floated back through the walls again, right on top of her, and she saw that the doctor had quit giving her the defibrillator. Then he put a syringe in her heart. Then the next thing she remembers is waking up and her parents at her bedside. She said, “Mommy/daddy, what a dream I had…” and told them all the details.
That’s Friday…
Rey and Alex then go on to better elucidate the ever-so-important intersection(s) between UFO/ET-contact, near-death experience, and the scientific/educational objectives of Rey’s organization FREE — [43min – 48min.20.sec]:
Alex Tsakiris: There are some unique aspects to your approach to the phenomenon that we should talk about. One that you just mentioned which is this welcoming cross-pollination of the near-death experience, extraordinary spiritual experience, and ET experience…you want to kind of bring those all together, not in a way that forces them together, but in a way that is open to looking at how there are parallels between the two. So that’s number one I want you to talk about. But the second thing I want you to talk about is that I get the sense that you are…experiencer-centered. That is, you’re trying to fill the gap…for so much of what we’ve talked about here in this interview. That is, how unsettling, and at the same time enabling this thing, this experience, can be for people. You want to be that resource that helps people take that experience, and allows them to propel forward with it, rather than just have it crush them. I think that’s an awesome, awesome role for this group to fill. Do you want to talk about those two aspects of it?
Rey Hernandez: Surely. Let me first of all mention our website which is very, very important. Our website is experiencer.co, not “.com”, but “.co”…now in terms of…the objectives of FREE, FREE has three objectives. One objective is education. Education in the sense that no one knows about these phenomenon, you know, the consciousness phenomenon and the ET-experiencer/contact phenomenon. The whole world is clueless, and yet you have possibly hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of individuals having contact with these non-human intelligent beings…everyone just stays quiet. Everyone, you know, never speaks about it. So in terms of education, the approach we’re taking is that…first of all we have a little bit over twenty-one individuals on our free advisory board. Just to let the public know you are one of our members [Alex} of our advisory board.
Alex Tsakiris: Yes, happy to be.
Rey Hernandez: Yes, thank you. Also, to let the public know, out of all the members of our board everyone except two individuals are experiencers. That’s very important. I would say there are many individuals in our group that do not publically proclaim that they’re experiencers and have not come out in the open, out of the closet so to speak. But I can tell you that you are one of them who’s not an experiencer…so in that sense it’s an organization by experiencers for experiencers. So in terms of education we believe that the topic of consciousness is fundamental to the educational aspects of it. Why? For many reasons. I was guided in that direction as I told you in my experiences.
Secondly the way these ET contact us, it’s like a format that cannot be explained rationally. It’s a format that, if you model consciousness, that’s a way of possibly explaining this type of communication. We also believe that the ET contact experiences are related to the paranormal – including NDE’s. There was one call I was on – we had seven experiencers on our call…out of those seven individuals, six had had near-death experiences. I was the only one who did not. Then if you would do a poll to find out how many experiencers – hardcore, in-depth experiencers have had NDES – I would say statistically it would be significant the amount of experiencers who have had NDE’s…at this point you cannot begin to pin this complex phenomenon down.
In summary the concept of consciousness and the approach we’re taking with consciousness is the physics approach to consciousness – particularly the quantum hologram theory of physics. Dr. Mitchell, Dr. Rudy shields, Ralph Steiner, Dr. Jude Kervin, and one other undisclosed individual who’s also a physics genius, all of them believe that the quantum hologram is the physics explanation for consciousness. I’m sure you’ve gotten that indication from many of your presenters in the past…but Edgar was the very first one that made this intimate association after David Bohm and Karl Pribram. Edgar took it to the next level. He has several articles on our website that explains that connection between quantum hologram theory and consciousness…
Toward the end of the dialogue, Rey speaks more directly to the goals & therapeutic nature of his organization, as well as FREE’s research effort into better documenting the ET/NDE relationship — [56min.20sec – 1hr.01min.30sec]:
Alex Tsakiris: Well, it’s a huge, huge undertaking…so Rey you’ve given u a good sense of what’s there, and what people might find it important and interesting. And it’s actually quite a diverse crowd. On one hand it’s for experiencers – people who are looking to connect and understand what’s happened to them. It’s a great resource for them. Also for people who are on the outside but curious and trying to sort this out logically and rationally. There’s a ton of stuff they would find [as well]. Tell folks a little bit about where you see this going. Where is FREE headed towards and what is it really trying to accomplish? What are the goals?
Rey Hernandez: Let me address two topics…one is [the topic of support]. There are a lot of people who have traumas associated with these experiences and we’re providing a whole range of support. We have an experiencer forum. We have a list of twenty-something pages of professional(s) that provide support to experiencers. Either licensed mental health therapists, regression therapists, support groups, etcetera.
Now the other aspect, which is one of my babies, is the research aspect of it. Myself being an academic, one of the first things I did was to do an academic literature review of individuals that have had contact with UFO-related non-human intelligent beings…[I discovered there’s very little literature on the topic]. We know so little about this phenomenon – the experience that I had. I was like, “This can’t be, how could it be?” I read literally thousands of stories of individuals that have had these experiences, but yet we know nothing about this phenomenon. So at that point I started to write out an abstract of a research project to begin to do a long-term, comprehensive, academic, and eventually peer-reviewed research project on the experiencer phenomenon. So I approached Dr. John Cremo, who I identified as probably the leading authority on the paranormal in the U.S…and out of the blue I called him. I sent him an email, then he gave me his phone number, and we spoke…[I mentioned] the research project I wanted to get off the ground. He [then] told me that he has been a lifelong experiencer. At that point I knew that I was guided to this individual. This was not another “coincidence” – this was another synchronicity…[synchronicity] is not even a word for it…he jumped at this idea. Then I told him I want to bring in Dr. Leo Sprinkle, who pretty much was the first academic to do this type of research…[he began this work in 1962 approximately]…
…[unfortunately] you can’t find a [legitimate] academic outlet for these things…[furthermore] we have Mary Rodwell, Denise Stoner…Dr. Joel Lewis…Whitely Strieber…many individuals who have been working with experiencers for at least thirty years. There’s about four or five other individuals whom I won’t name…there’s just so many names. So we established a quantitative survey instrument which is embedded in our website now, and we’re in the process of developing twenty secondary research instruments – qualitative and quantitative – addressing a series of topic areas. For example, the individuals who have received science and physics “downloads” – what questions would you ask these individuals? So that’s one of the topic areas…
Alex Tsakiris: …just to clarify, so you’re saying one of the research projects you’re kind of interested in doing is asking people who report that they’ve received this “download” – and this kind of a common thing…not unheard of by any means, and you’ll hear it over and over again: I received this information download. Then you’re the first one to ask the obvious question, well, what did you hear? What did you know? Then comparing that with other people who’ve heard it; that’s interesting.
Rey Hernandez: Correct. It’s all one study…
[partial transcript ends here… see audio file for full interview]
photo by Giampaolo Macorig