An Interview with Me’Chelle Redfern

by Brent Raynes

Me’Chelle Redfern, the wife of retired psychotherapist and UFO researcher Melvin Redfern, author of Assessment and Treatment of UFO Witnesses and Experiencers (www.Experiencers.net), and the soon-to-be-released How to Improve a Consciousness of the Light, interviewed in the October 2005 (# 94) issue of Alternate Perceptions, is this time the subject of an interview. As a person of Native American ancestry and an experiencer herself of UFO and paranormal phenomena, we wanted to get her perspective on these different aspects. Here’s Me’Chelle’s take on it all!

Readers may contact Me’Chelle at: redfern1@localnet.com.

Editor: I understand that you’re Abenaki Indian, right?

Me’Chelle Redfern: Ah ha. Canadian French and Abenaki Indian. Kind of intertwined.

Editor: Now Mel mentioned you seeing a UFO, the same one apparently that Budd Hopkins had?

Me’Chelle Redfern: I had experienced something unusual while living in Truro, on Cape Cod, in February 1987. I lived way in the back part of Truro, in what is known as the National Seashore Area, and at that time of year most houses are closed and just the people who live there go up and down those little roads. This particular incident occurred two evenings in a row at about the same time of night. It was about 10-10:30 at night. I had a full grown adult Brittany Springer dog, who was a couple of years old, totally house trained, and he started acting peculiar. Barking and stuff. I thought he wanted to go outside. Then he started running around the kitchen and knocked over a wine rack that was hanging. Coming from California I used to be in sales and you buy things that are earthquake proof, so this thing was hanging on a rack thing where it was designed to withstand earthquakes. So he knocked that over, smashed everything, and piddled all over the floor.

So I thought that he had to go out in a hurry so I’m trying to get him out the door and he wouldn’t go out the door. He just went a little crazier, and I could hear other dogs in the neighborhood barking and howling. So naturally I went outside, and I was really trying to push him out the door, cussing at him, yelling ‘You peed on the floor. Get out of here,’ you know, the whole bit. And I got out onto the porch and I heard what sounded almost like a chainsaw kind of sound, in the middle of the night, and I thought that was kind of peculiar because 10:30-11 o’clock at night, who would be running a chainsaw in the National Seashore Park, where it was against the law in the first place. So I looked, off in the distance, where I thought it was coming from, and there was like a neon colored, sort of a purplish kind of light, off in the distance, and just a buzzing sound. A high-pitched kind of buzzing sound at that point, and the dog was spastic and had gone in the house and underneath the bed. So I shut the door and I was kind of a little frightened about it. I locked the doors and everything as the dog was going nuts.

The next day I spoke to the carpenter who worked out in my garage. At that particular time, I used to work for the newspaper and I had rented a garage to a guy that was a carpenter. I (described) to him (there was) this particular sound and this is what the dog did, and he said, “Well I’m going to be working late tomorrow night here in the garage. So if you hear it again let me know.”

So it was about 10:30 at night and the dog started in again. I said, “Well this is crazy,” so I went out to the garage with a flashlight and I’m banging on the garage door and by that time he lost power in the garage. So he opened up the garage door and I said, “Do you hear that funny buzzing sound? It was like a high pitched thing, almost like a chainsaw,” and he goes, “Yeah!” So I said, “Well it’s not where it was last night.” You know, it was off in a different area, and we looked out behind in the opposite direction completely and this color was off in that direction, with the high pitched sound. So it continued for a good 20 to 25 minutes and then it was like this bright translucent purplish colored light shot off in the sky like somebody had like a laser type of thing. It shot off very quickly into the sky and was gone completely. And this was probably, I would say within an eighth of a mile of my house that this occurred.

So it turned out that Budd Hopkins, on that particular night, was coming back from dinner down in Provincetown with a group of people in his car and he saw this purple thing go across the sky. So that was a very unusual event. And when I spoke with him, since he lived in Wellsfleet during the summer, and he had a few talks in the area, like at the library, I said, “Hi” and my name and on this particular night I saw something and he said “By coincidence, I happened to be going down the highway and I saw it,” so we compared what we saw at that particular night.

But I had not seen it after that because I had moved into Provincetown to get a year round apartment because I had like only a winter rental at that time. The following November, which is 1987 still, I was awakened in the middle of the night with a bright light, like the fishing boats have giant spotlights on them, or like at a grand opening kind of thing with the lights in the sky. That kind of a light shined into my bedroom window, about 2 o’clock in the morning. Keep in mind that I still had the same dog and he freaked out again and I go, “Oh no.” But then I said to myself, “Oh well”...Now this is a stupid thought but this is what went in my head. Somebody, I believe, planted this weird thought, because this is not me. “Oh well, it must be like a nuclear war. We’re all gonna die so I guess I’ll go back to sleep.” Now what kind of people think that?

And I went into this wicked deep sleep and I felt like little hands on my back (laughs). It was the weirdest thing. I get up the next morning, at 7 o’clock, and I went to work and down by the water, because again I work for the newspaper, I was advertizing sales manager for the newspaper in town, and I had gone done by the water...there had been a super duper low tide, so I mean none of the boats could have got in to my location and beam that kind of a light, and the lighthouse was way off on the other side. I’m the kind of person that I have to research everything to find an answer. So I couldn’t get it out of my mind, like (that) there was like little hands on the side of my back. You know what I mean? And the weird light. And how many people say, “Well, it’s a nuclear war, I guess I’ll just go to sleep. The world’s going to end.”

Nobody does that. They panic. But I went into a wicked deep sleep and that’s all that I personally remember of it. But it was pretty unusual.

Editor: Of course, when you’re in sleep you dream some of the craziest things sometimes. That’s the only connection that I can make with a thought like that. But you were going from wake back to sleep.

Me’Chelle Redfern: Yeah. I mean, the dog physically woke me. I go, “Oh no, here we go again.” Then this bright light, this really bright light. Why would I say, “Oh no, here we go again”? I didn’t get that part either. Then the bright light and I go “Oh well, it’s a nuclear war, the world’s going to end.” 1987 nobody was thinking nuclear war, the world is going to end. It was just kind of the weirdest thing. For years I couldn’t put my finger on it as to what happened that night and I lived near the water, in a Condo in town at a very nice little tranquil area and it was just one of those things that you don’t expect a bright light shining in your room.

Editor: Did the light that had the sound like a chainsaw, did it have any shape that you could see?

Me’Chelle Redfern: Almost like a shard. A glass shard type of thing when it took off into the sky. It was like this luminescent neon purplish colored glass shard. Almost like you could see through it type of thing.

Editor: Okay. How high up do you think it was when you were maybe seeing it both nights?

Me’Chelle Redfern: When I saw the light off in the woods it was somehow in the woods, like somewhere around tree level or something like that. You know what I mean?

Editor: Okay, that was the first night?

Me’Chelle Redfern: That was the first night and the second night, as the light occurred again one more time, again it was in the woods and I could see the area of the woods lit up, where I could see trees and the light was like background like behind the trees.

Editor: Okay. Did it affect your eyes to look at it?

Me’Chelle Redfern: I really don’t know. I felt like I couldn’t take my eyes off of it and I couldn’t identify it. I was trying, in my mind, to identify what I was looking at in the woods, in the winter time. It was like February. February there’s snow on the ground on Cape Cod. Everything is closed down. The only people that are there are the year-rounders, and there’s only about four or five thousand year-rounders in that town in the winter. You’re out in the sand dunes and scrub pine.

I had a job out in California. I worked for N.S.A. out there. I was tech librarian, and I used to go to military and military related, and business related to military type of businesses, do you know what I mean? I never saw anything weird there or any of those places with engineers. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to. I’d go in and update files and get out. I’ve been to like the military nuclear shipyards for the submarines. I’ve been out to Edwards Air Force Base, out to Nellis, out in Nevada. They moved me like every six months, or every year. I was like 11 years of working and eleven moves at least in eleven years. I never really put any of that stuff in my mind, and when I moved out to Las Vegas area for my last stint with them, I was walking my dog out on the golf course late at night, because you really don’t walk your dogs during the day out there. It’s too hot. It’s like a 115 degrees in the summer.

It was about 9:30 or 10 o’clock at night, around New Years time, in 1990. I think you could even find it in the newspaper articles archived in the Las Vegas Sun or something. My next door neighbor and I were walking our dogs around the golf course, which was just on the outskirts of the compound that we all lived in. Everybody out there had to have...areas that mountain lions couldn’t get in. I know it sounds crazy. Coyotes, wolves, mountain lions right outside Las Vegas, (but) they’re there.

So my dog stopped dead. Kind of froze. Same dog. Weird symptoms, same dog three years later. He didn’t move, he didn’t budge, and then my neighbor came up with me and her dog stopped too. And the dog wouldn’t go, like the invisible barrier thing. Looking all around I couldn’t see anything until I looked up and like one whole section of the sky was dark. You couldn’t see a star through it. Like black, in an honest to God, triangle. I know it’s hard to believe because I’ve never seen anything close up. It was way up in the sky and something really, really huge. Only this one time I’ve ever really seen anything close enough to say that it could be military or it could be something else, but it sat there like a hot air balloon and just kind of moved in a...sort of circle. No colors, no lights, no windows, no portholes, nothing. Just black.

Editor: And it just sort of...

Me’Chelle Redfern: Floated. As it was there it was almost like in a stationary circle. Like this thing was just in one kind of spot, but it was really huge. Not super high even. We’re only talking maybe about four or five thousand feet up, which is like the tops of some of the hills out in that area, and it was like almost directly over the golf course, just sitting there, and it was probably well over a hundred feet long, I would say, on each corner. Well over a hundred feet on each side. And I said, “No one is going to believe me.” Of course, I never told anybody that I work with, because I would have lost my job immediately. But I just kind of stashed it in the back of my mind and my neighbor and I went quick back home. We decided, “Nope, we’re going to walk the dogs earlier at night. We’re not going to walk them later at night.” She told her husband and he went out with the security guard looking for something. I mean, what are you looking for? But we didn’t see nothing land, didn’t see any lights, nothing like that. Just this peculiar thing floating like a hot air balloon would float, with just that kind of float to it. A gentle float, like it was a feather, not this big giant thing. Like it was light as a feather just sitting there.

My neighbor and I kind of froze in our steps just like our dogs and we just walked backwards quickly as we could and got out of there as quickly as we could and went home, and never ever went back at night like that, but it actually, the Las Vegas Times Sun newspaper, within I would say a day or so of when I had seen this, had reported something strange in the skies like that by several people in the area. So I wasn’t the only one who saw it that night.

But that’s the only unusual thing that I could honestly say really showed me the size of something. The magnitude of it. The silence. The absolute silence. It wasn’t this purple shard.

Editor: But it must have been something that the dogs could hear.

Me’Chelle Redfern: Dogs are amazing. I go by my animal’s senses. I’ve learned, since my great-grandmother said, “Always pay attention to the animals.” Now they tell you on National Geographic they know about tsunamis. They go up the hill. They know about earthquakes. They leave the area. They seem to sense things before us. My dog wakes me up before the thunderstorms start. He comes to me whining.

Editor: How about the incident with the thing that you had saged in the kitchen?

Me’Chelle Redfern: Mel was amazed with the critter. So was I. It had some very unusual features to it. It was bigger than the average moth in size. Much bigger. More along the size of a bat. (See illustration below.)

My great-grandmother died when I was 32 years old and she was American Indian with the big long braids down her back that never got cut and we’d always done things like cleansing our house periodically. I grow sage in the yard. I dry it and I burn it, and it has a way I guess in our mind it chases away any kind of darkness. The evil spirits in our home. Like if you have a lot of tension, a lot of stress, some people meditate, some people turn on Led Zeppelin. Who knows what they do! (Laughs) I mean, whatever it takes to kind of cleanse you of things you feel. Some people take a bubble bath. But I use sage on a regular basis, and this little cottage apartment that we were renting back east was kind of an unusual place itself. There was vibration in the house on a regular basis, like rattling vibration in the middle of the night where the bed would rattle almost. But I saged one afternoon. Mel was at work, and this was just before he was coming home, and my dog, a few days earlier, had acted like he was seeing things going behind pictures on the wall. He’d look at something that you couldn’t see. ...There in my living room and he periodically, for about two days, was looking at some of the pictures on the wall. Not at the TV, not at any critters on television, but the pictures. He’d walk up next to the picture and he’d get real close to the pictures on the wall and I would go, “What is wrong with you?” So it was one of the days that I was just going to sage the house and I went from room to room with the sage, and I kind of mix it in with the Catholic thing. You know, “I rebuke these dark spirits in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.” I mean, they’ve done incense since the time of Jesus. The Catholic Church does it. The Jewish people do it. Myrrh.

So I was doing that, and I got in the kitchen. Now I had this tiny little kitchen at this tiny little apartment, about the size of what you’d have on a boat kind of kitchen. Two people no way. You had a refrigerator, stove, sink and a cabinet with a little counter area. It was only about 5 or 6 feet long and maybe about 5 or 6 feet wide, of walking space. So on a real regular basis I was cleaning the things on my cabinet and I had the light on above the coffee pot and I was moving things around and all of a sudden this thing moved. It scared the daylights out of me, and I had just finished saging the house.

So anyway I moved the glass containers and something moved. Well, you know, spider or some sort of thing, so I grabbed a paper towel and I went to grab whatever it was and it was quite a bit bigger. You know, about the size of a bat or a mouse, and it already started to like disintegrate. I go, “Wow, that’s really weird!” Pieces of it were like flying into the air, like little particles of dust, like something burned or something. So I put it all into a plastic bag, with the paper towel that I had it in, and I was looking at it and it looked like a cross between a mouse, a bat, a moth. It was just the weirdest looking cross breed of something, and it just continued to keep falling apart, like it had been there for years and years. Which that could never happen because I am forever rearranging and moving things around. I get that PMS move stuff around thing all the time, so it had to have been there no more than a few weeks at the most, and they just don’t disintegrate in a couple of weeks. So by the time that Mel got home the thing was really falling apart in the bag and I had it zip locked in the bag.

So when I showed it to him, and I cut the bag open and I opened up the paper towel, it was just pieces and particles of it where it was falling apart into the air, and I told him how I was saging the house and this must have been the thing that Baron was seeing. This critter. So he took it out and he burned it. (Laughs) He was just like an animal about it. He had lost his temper on this thing. I don’t know what he thought it was, but it was very peculiar looking, little talon like things on its wings and it had like little talons on its feet, and sort of a beak almost. Different. Real different. Almost like a bird beak. The eyes looked more leathery than any kind of a bird or a moth or anything, and it had little ears, and it’s like, “Is this a giant moth from out of the Congo or something?” You know, because it was so peculiar looking. But I couldn’t find it in any little books and I looked on the Internet trying to see if I could identify what it was. And it was sort of multi-tones of beige and black, so it was just peculiar.

Editor: And Mel had mentioned, the way that he was remembering that maybe you folks had seen something before finding that in the kitchen. It would run quickly across like the baseboard or across the wall behind a picture or something?

Me’Chelle: Yeah, yeah. It’s like I was saying, the dog was seeing something and you’d get like a glimpse, like something out of the corner of your eye type thing, but you weren’t sure that you saw something, and I would get up because the dog was acting like a mouse or something, and we didn’t have any mice. The lady had the place, and that was another thing. She always had the place fumigated for mice or anything. The guy would come around once a month and do all of these little mouse traps and stuff.

Editor: So you would see something too and then you’d notice the dog looking at a picture.

Me’Chelle Redfern: Yeah, yeah. Something was going on and we couldn’t figure out what kind of little critter we had running around the house.

Editor: So do you think that it was alive at all when you found it?

Me’Chelle Redfern: I’m not sure, because it just changed, you know, so quickly to start disintegrating into little parts. It was just peculiar because it was like the minute you open up the paper towel it was like particles into the air almost, these little pieces of dust or something in the air.

Editor: How long do you think that had been going on before you found that in the kitchen? You know, like seeing something out of the corner of your eye?

Me’Chelle Redfern: About a week.

Editor: About a week?

Me’Chelle Redfern: Yeah. It was about a week seeing something, so it was definitely not anything that could have disintegrated that quickly, you know? Even if you do a mouse with Decon it takes the mouse a couple of months to disintegrate, and then you’d smell it. My little kitchen counter was yellow and my spice things in there were clear, translucent glass, so I would see anything, and they couldn’t get into anything in there. I had those glass tops on them. So this was just a weird thing.

Editor: So then there was something that happened while you were washing clothes down in the basement?

Me’Chelle Redfern: Oh, Mel told you about that. She had a weird house and I had to sage a lot in that house, because I just felt very uncomfortable there. I was washing clothes, and you go down a narrow little staircase into a really dark basement. The old fashioned cellars were houses that were built at the turn of the century, and the whole area had like a dead, decayed bad smell, (in) the basement, and I was forever opening windows because mold was growing down there even in the sides of the basement, and I went into the laundry room and honest to God this glass thing didn’t fall immediately. It just kind of moved down before it fell. It didn’t break. It just sat there on the floor. So I ran upstairs to Mel and I made him go downstairs and do laundry after that. That was his new job.

It was a very peculiar house. Cape Cod has some very unusual homes.

Editor: And it was just like a bottle that just kind of floated down?

Me’Chelle Redfern: My ex-landlady was very eclectic. She had like enough furniture in her basement for three houses and every little vase or glass or jar that she ever got flowers in, no matter how cheap or tacky, she’d save it, and every yard sale she went to she had to buy, and there was very little room to walk around in her basement to get to the washer and dryer. She had so much stuff. So this was on a shelf with many other glass things when it just kind of drifted down, because it wasn’t even close to broke or anything. “Mel!” I went running up the stairs.

Editor: Just the one glass item that did that?

Me’Chelle Redfern: Yup.

Editor: Apparently your mother had seen a UFO or UFOs too?

Me’Chelle Redfern: My mom was on a trip up the Hudson Valley in the mid to late 1960s. I was a kid. Her dad had died and they were heading up there for the funeral, and she was in the car with my grandmother and my grandfather, and they were headed up this big four lane highway with cars going in different directions, in the evening, and two very large cigar type UFOs lit up the highway and everybody saw it all the way around. It even made the news, and my mother is not one to pee in her pants, but she did. They were quite scared of this thing, because it did have a beam of light going down into the highway and stuff, and my mother goes, “Honey, they were so huge you wouldn’t believe it.” And she’s a Catholic. She goes to church every Sunday and she reads her Bible every single day, but she says it took a whole new perspective on religion on who we are and what we’re doing. She said she realized suddenly how small we are after seeing that. I mean, she was a skeptic until that time. And, of course, my grandmother and grandfather couldn’t believe it and they just kept driving and my mother was yelling, “No, no! Don’t go into the light! We’re going to die! We’re going to die!” (Laughs)

Editor: Like with the Native American things have you heard any legends or the old stories that maybe make you think about what maybe they knew about the UFO or the paranormal? Like did your grandmother share anything like that?

Me’Chelle Redfern: My grandmother and great-grandmother were extremely superstitious. A lot of superstition. A lot of sayings. My mother still is very, very superstitious, and we all have this little mind click. If someone is sick or something we all get nervous and call each other. “What’s happening” kind of feeling. My grandmother, and mom, they all believe in spirit guides quite heavily, and I do too. I mean, some people call it instinct or that little voice, but somewhere somehow there’s definitely spirit guides. There’s no doubt in my mind that there’s spirit guides. I survived a car accident where I got up and walked away where I could have been dead. My car flipped over twice, hit a tree and a stone wall. I was 17. It was a brand new car that my grandfather had got me. The brake fluid was gone. You know, one of these problems with the car dealership. I heard a screaming voice tell me, “Get out of the car! Get out of the car now!” I got out of the car. I opened up the car door that my grandfather when he came with the tow truck had to open the door with a crow bar. I mean, you hear about these stories all of the time. People have these amazing instantaneous strength to do something like that, but I believe a spirit guide saved me! By screaming at me to get out of the car. Because it wasn’t my voice. It was somebody yelling at me to get out of the car. We all call it instinct, but I think even our animals have it, and we just forgot that we have it.

Editor: So you got out of the car before anyone got there?

Me’Chelle Redfern: Oh yeah. I got out of the car and the car was flipped over and there was little trees in the tires and the radiator was leaking all over and every window was broken in the car. I was only a few miles from my families home. I was going over a road that was reservoir on both sides, in the middle of the winter, and I hit an ice patch and I went to slow down, I was only doing about 30, and I had no brakes, and I did the deadliest thing ever is I down shifted, and being a teenager at 17 I didn’t realize I was skidding and when I downshifted it just tripped my car and it flipped right over.

My grandparents and my mom, they’re all very spiritual, and what we call superstitious, and they have definitely always believed in things like spirit guides, or your little guardian angels. Whatever you want to label it. And I think as people get older sometimes they’re more receptive to these things than they are when they’re younger. I believe that when you’re younger you’re into current events. You’re not too well attuned to your heritage and stuff, but I think we’ve lost a lot of what we knew.

Editor: Yeah, as we’ve become civilized, as we call it.

Me’Chelle Redfern: Well you can call it civilized but I call it destroying the world. I think we’re on a path of destruction of not only ourselves but every species because of the way that we don’t respect Mother Earth. I think there’s a great importance in trying not to rape and pillage the land. White Man came to this country and just about killed all of the buffalo. My people only took what they needed to keep warm and to feed their families. We always made sure to leave plenty more for the future.

Editor: Yeah, some Native Americans I understand planned seven generations ahead.

Me’Chelle Redfern: Well you see this is the problem. All of these older guys that run these big old companies and the ones who really control the power, the electrical, the gas, your taxes, your income, those guys don’t realize that they’re not going to live forever. And the damage that they’re doing, us poor peasants, who have a lot of faith in those kind of people, and they’re taking us down a very dangerous and unhealthy road. The air you breathe is bad. The food that you eat has been treated with so many chemicals.

Now the American Indian, that’s another story. We didn’t have diabetes before the white man came. My great-grandfather died at 102. I was alive in my 30s when he died, and he only died because he walked home from the hospital. He didn’t want to stay in the hospital. He wanted to go home, and it was winter time in Vermont, and he walked home in slippers and died of pneumonia. He probably would have lasted a few more years if it hadn’t been for that. There wasn’t anything wrong with him. He just didn’t want to stay in the hospital.

And these were people that chewed their own tobacco. Rolled their own tobacco. Didn’t have the treated tobacco with all of these other carcinogens that are now in there and they lived to be over a hundred years old.

Me'Chelle's drawing of creature she found in her kitchen.