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William Kern Feature By Sean Casteel On first hearing the stories that William Kern has to tell, one might think he had led a “charmed life,” with frequent UFO sightings and other fascinating anomalous experiences. If you asked Kern himself, he would more likely offer the word “haunted.” Almost from birth, Kern has been touched by the unknown. His earliest memory is of being an infant and seeing a strange dream that would stay with him the rest of his life. “When I was ten months old—of course I didn’t know I was ten months old—I had a dream one night,” Kern began, “of a person, a man, in a bright, almost silver-colored uniform, walking across the desert towards me. I was lying on my back with my head turned to the left, watching this figure approach me. It seemed in my mind to have taken a long time. This figure, as it approached, would appear and diminish as if it was walking through a mirage.” After what Kern recalled as an uncomfortably long time, the figure came right up to him, fell to its knees, and then fell on its face dead. “As this figure fell,” he said, “I could see or I knew or ‘understood’ that it was me who was dying. So I kept this dream in my head for years and years, all through my twenty years in the Navy.” More about Kern’s military history later. But the story of his dream continues.
“One day, when I was visiting
my mother in Kern was thirty years old when he told his mother of the dream. She had a dramatic surprise of her own. “She told me that I was born dead,” Kern said. “I was a breach birth and I was dead. They worked on me, according to my mother, for quite a long time before they resuscitated me. My mother told me that for ten months, I cried day and night. I wailed and wailed. But she said after we left that house, I never cried like that again. She looked at me very seriously and she said, ‘I believe that’s when you got your soul.’” At age fourteen, Kern spontaneously began to draw and paint and write, an event, like many others, that he cannot explain.
“I simply bought an easel and
brushes,” he said, “and oils and turpentine and linseed oil and I
began painting. Nobody taught me or told me that I should or couldn’t.
I just began doing it. I would take my oils and my easel and my
canvasses out into the woods. At the same time, I bought a used
typewriter, an old It was the 1950s, in what has been called the Golden Age of UFOs, when Kern caught the art and writing bug, and he would obsessively draw pictures of flying saucers for hours on end. “Almost as if I were ‘designing’ them,” he said, “trying different shapes and hull forms. Odd.” Kern’s teen years brought many a UFO sighting, a pattern that has lasted all his life. “Every place I went,” he said, “it seemed like these things were there, around. I could see them easily. I think a lot of people go through their entire lives looking for UFOs, or whatever you want to call this, and never see them. I can just look up in the sky and there they are.” Kern joined the Navy, where he would serve 20 years, working as a photographer and motion picture cameraman. Needless to say, the strange experiences continued. “I wonder sometimes,” he said, “if it was caused by stress or something. But the most significant thing I saw—I’m not really sure I can describe what happened.” Kern launched into the story anyway, and one can easily understand his difficulty in expressing the unexplainable. “I
was standing at security watch,” he said, “armed with a .45 caliber
semiautomatic pistol and a baton. The things that a person who stands
security watch has. After I made my last report to the OOD, at Kern said he turned around and saw a second light, flying at the same altitude, with the same brightness, west to east, parallel with the first one. The second light made an abrupt right angle turn, passed behind the first one, and then disappeared behind a low mountain. When he lost sight of the second light, Kern turned his attention back to the first one and watched it for five or ten minutes. Suddenly he saw that cars were now driving into the parking lot. “It was the day crew,” Kern said, “coming to work. I realized I’d been standing there for almost an hour. However, I wasn’t in the parking lot anymore. I was out in a field about 50 or 60 feet away from where I thought I had been standing. And I tell you the truth, I do not remember walking out there. And I do not remember observing this light from the time it passed over to the time I saw it against the face of the rising sun. So there was a whole period of time there that I can’t account for.” Kern went back into the building and turned in his sidearm and signed the log. Under the desk, he saw a pair of cameras and was stunned to realize he had never once thought of photographing the two objects he had seen. “It was like my mind was blocked,” he said. The event changed Kern in some very strange ways. “I became very anxious after that,” he said. “I became suspicious of people, and I thought people were watching me after that, to see if I would talk about it or if I was going to do anything about it. So I never told anybody about it until just a couple of years ago. That was in 1968. I can’t reveal the location because it was an intelligence facility.” The burden of keeping his experience secret was only part of the load that Kern was now forced to carry. “I
came back from Kern described the phantom interloper as having a pigtail hair bob, olive-skinned, very thin and youthful looking, and wearing an East Indian traditional outfit. The figure would appear around Kern repeatedly for two or three years, after which he never saw him again. “At
that same time,” Kern said, “this feeling of anxiety began to
increase. I couldn’t sleep in the house anymore. I began to sleep
outside, with a loaded rifle. I was so afraid that somebody or something
was going to trap me in the house. I continued to remember this episode,
this sighting of this transient luminous object that I saw when I was in
Kern
said he still does not know what occurred there in some unnamed “I don’t want to know what happened,” he said. “If you think the event frightened me, imagine how it would be if I found out. I don’t want to know. If something happened, leave it alone. I’ll live with it. I’ll deal with it.’ Moments of precognition and involuntary remote viewing are also part of the complex layers of the paranormal in Kern’s life. He recalled that one day he was painting a house when he was overcome with a vision of an airplane crash. “When you’re painting,” he said, “it’s a no-brainer. Your mind can think of a million other things while your arm does all this automatic swinging. All of a sudden I saw this airplane crash. I saw it as if I was above the airfield looking down though the clouds. I saw two airplanes on the runway, one taking off and the other crossing the runway. The one taking off smashed into the one that was crossing the runway. It was so real, so violent, that I knew something had happened.” Kern
said he did not take the vision to be literally true, but instead
thought his own family might be in some kind of danger. He went into his
house to call his family to make sure everything was okay. At that
moment, he heard a television news report that a plane had crashed on “I just stood there with my mouth open,” Kern said, “because it was exactly what I saw. I saw it when it happened. If you see an image of something in your mind, where people are dying, things are being torn to pieces—it’s a horrible thing to see that in the first place and to feel it might be happening. But then to read about it or hear about it on TV exactly as you imagined it in your mind! I wish I didn’t know. I don’t want to be clairvoyant. I don’t want to be able to remotely view things that are happening where people are dying. I never see anything good. It’s always something terrible, and that’s a frightening thing.” Along with the missing time episode and the frequent unwelcome psychic visions, Kern also recalls being visited by something while working for the space program to develop the parachutes used to help the Gemini spacecraft land safely on reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. “One
day,” Kern said, “while I was routinely doing my job, I fell into a
kind of a stasis or trance of some kind. It seemed like with this
feeling that there was a light, a globe of brilliant light, like those
transient luminous objects I had seen in “I could hear people talking in the distance, a strange language or something, almost an Esperanto or a gibberish. I could hear words, but I couldn’t interpret them. I could hear like the tinkling of glass, like wind chimes far away. Then the light lifted away from me, and I was fully conscious again. But it wasn’t just a few seconds, but a long time. It was minutes, it was hours, that I had been in this light. I don’t know what it was, and I don’t want anyone to tell me what it was.” Kern’s
time in the military did not include any direct involvement with the
presumed Black Budget, top secret relationship between the “It was centuries,” Kern said, “between throwing a rock and throwing a hand grenade. And then suddenly we were in space. How in the world did that happen? I never worked on anything other than the stuff that finally came out, like the Stealth and the B-2 and the B-1 and the Tomahawk Cruise Missile. But that’s just technology; it’s just hardware. I don’t think aliens had anything to do with the Tomahawk Cruise Missile. As far as UFOs or any other technology, I saw photographs, but I don’t think they were what they looked like they were. They were probably just unusual aircraft or spacecraft.” There
was one incident from his time in the Navy that still puzzles Kern. He
was working at the Defense Intelligence Agency in “Hundreds
of them, thousands of them,” he said. “I would go to the archive and
get a great huge shopping cart full of documents and I would copy them
to microfilm. We were not supposed to read these documents. It wasn’t
like a law or an order, it was just understood that we would copy them
and not read them. One of the documents that I did read—this is
the strangest thing in the world—was an article from a There
was no date on the article, which concerned a group of sailors who had
erupted in a barroom brawl in “And why the Defense Intelligence Agency would have had any interest at all in that is puzzling, isn’t it?” Kern asked. “Unless it was related to something that they knew about.” In the years since he retired from the Navy with a long and distinguished service record, Kern has written and published four novels, “The Morningstar Conspiracy,” “A Fine Raving Madness,” “Loose Ends,” and “Space Enough and Time.” He is currently working on a novel called “The Windmills of Mars,” which is told in a first person, stream of consciousness style by a very depressed and unhappy narrator. “That was me,” he said, “when I came back. I actually think now that I had some illness that no one would validate. It was some kind of a mental thing that was preventing me from progressing or moving forward in my life. I did my job, I did it well. I was commended and got nice letters of recommendation for my documentary films. But in the back of my mind was this trouble, these troubling memories. When you read this first portion of the new book, it came right out of my guts. “When I’m writing about it,” he continued, “I can write about things in the order they happened and in detail. But when I talk about them, I get lost in the progress of my conversation. I begin to forget things, almost as if my mind doesn’t want to remember things. So I skip over them or eliminate them completely. “The reason that it’s so difficult to talk about this with anyone, particularly people who are outside this loop of UFO research, is because they look at you sideways like you belong in a strait jacket.” But William Kern is not completely downcast as he enters his 70s and looks back at a lifetime of strange experiences. In an email he sent to a reporter working on this story, he closed by saying, “Stay well and always lean toward the light.” Good advice at any age. [Visit Sean Casteel’s website at www.seancasteel.com Casteel is the author of “UFOs, Prophecy and the End of Time,” “Signs and Symbols of the Second Coming,” and “The Excluded Books of the Bible,” all of which are available online at his website, at Amazon.com or Filament Books or Phantom Bookshop in Ventura, CA.] THE END
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