The remarkable encounters between a Scots supernatural investigator and a medium who 'projected' the faces of the dead - including those from other worlds and dimensions - are set to feature in a new book. Ron Halliday, who has spent a lifetime looking into UFOs, ghosts and other strange phenomena, was astounded by his experiences in the 1990s with the Edinburgh medium Ray Tod, the Scottish Daily Express reports.
However, he did not tell anyone about the extraordinary things he witnessed in Tod's flat for more than 20 years. Now he has set out the story for the first time in his latest book, Alien Spirits?
The tale begins in 1995 when Halliday was investigating strange lights in the sky over Bonnybridge near Falkirk, which became known as Scotland's UFO hotspot. Tod called him up and asked: "Do you want to see an alien?" before going on to claim that he could make spirit faces appear via a process known as 'transfiguration'.
Halliday - who says he had investigated this before, while researching the 19th century Scottish spiritualist Daniel Horne - agreed at once. During the seances in Tod's living room in Edinburgh's West Montgomery Place, an incredible array of faces appeared as "Ray's features seemed to dissolve and re-form into a distinct and clearly visible different face".
They included a blonde-haired Viking, an ancient Egyptian and dozens of other figures from different historical periods. Halliday also saw famous people including Winston Churchill and the actors Peter Cook and Peter Sellers, as well as his own grandfather.
Most bizarrely, Tod also 'transfigured' into a number of strange alien faces, including one which was "a cross between a dog and a lion except it had no hair. It was very grey and puffy looking, but there was clearly an intelligence behind it."
Other extraterrestrials projected "great power and intelligence", including one with a "small head with large blank eyes" and another that resembled an ape. "It was beautifully clear and the smooth black hair looked so real you felt you could have reached out and touched it," Halliday writes.
"At the same time I sensed open space and freedom. The ape was very friendly looking almost as if he was pleased to see you and curious about what we were doing." As time progressed, the seances became more and more intense and Halliday often felt himself transported into other dimensions or into outer space, witnessing strange vistas filled with pyramids.
He also began to witness Tod's face transforming into that of a being he understood to be the Greek god, Zeus. Halliday recorded all his experiences at the time and the contemporaneous notes from each seance form the main part of the book, which gets darker and more disturbing throughout 1995-1996 and into 1997.
Eventually, the pair broke off contact due to Tod's increasingly erratic behaviour and the medium died a few years later. Speaking to the Scottish Daily Express, Halliday said: "I had never seen anything like it before, that is what I found so astonishing. It really opened up new worlds for me and made me question everything I knew about the universe and the supernatural.
"It was the alien spirits that really shook me, spirits of dead aliens or beings from another dimension." Asked why he had decided to publish his diaries after more than 20 years, he said: "I thought it was so significant that people should get the chance to read about what I experienced.
"It is understandable if people are sceptical but I only put down what I saw and people can take a decision for themselves on the basis that I'm a genuine person who has published other material."
Halliday added: "Ray was very affable when I first met him but by the end he was a slightly different person. The seances placed a terrible strain on him."
He said the reception to his book - which was published independently in September 2020 - has been uniformly positive. "The book is still selling and I've had a lot of people saying how fascinating they found it. Others have got in touch to describe similar experiences but there is nothing like what I recorded. As far as I'm concerned, Ray was almost unique in the intensity of what he could do."
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