The Jinn or ETs? Three generations of
a Turkish family’s paranormal experiences
By Farah Yurdozu
Abstract: This article takes up a major question confronting ufology: Are traditional paranormal manifestations different from contemporary UFO manifestations? Are they separate phenomena using the same ‘highway’? Are the traditional phenomena evidence of ancient ET involvement with the human race?
My native country, Turkey, has always been a land where spiritual, paranormal, or unexplained phenomena are considered normal. Turkish history goes back at least 6,000 years and is full of stories about beings who came from the sky bringing higher knowledge to the human race. FOOTNOTE 1
Knowledge about our remote ancestors who married the visitors from the sky is written in our history, traditions and literature. That is why beings from other dimensions, from space, and the existence of a spiritual universe, are facts for us—not science fiction.
It’s the same in my family as well. I come from a family whose members can see ghosts, communicate with spirits, see the future, and whom I believe have often been visited by extraterrestrial beings.
I don’t remember when I first thought about extraterrestrial life or interdimensional beings. From the time I was aware of myself as a tiny child in Istanbul, I was aware of the existence of different life forms around us. Even though they weren’t visible to us in the physical sense all the time, they used to make themselves obvious to me using other, subtle means of communication.
Sometimes it would be the soul of a deceased family member, sometimes the spirits of strangers. I would feel a kind of vibration, the pressure of their energy, and then I could usually see them as well. Sometimes I would recognize a departed spirit who was appearing as a normal, physical being.
This activity became pronounced in my early teens, and at 13 I was taken to Istanbul’s Center for Metaphysical Research, a very old institution where I became their hypnotic trance medium. As I grew up these spirits became my “guides” and later they spoke to me through my family and its history.
How it began
In the late 1890’s, something happened to my family. Since then, for three generations our destiny has been shaped by unknown visitors. This very real life story is still going on. I heard it from my mother. And she heard it from her mother. It was never a secret in our family. It was talked about openly without fear of ridicule, just as other personal stories of the paranormal are accepted in Turkish society. FOOTNOTE 2
I used to spend hours with my grandmother and mom listening to their fascinating stories. Often, around the dinner table or over tea, they would talk about spirits, ghosts, mysteries of the unknown world. There was always a story about a family member, an uncle or an aunt who had a paranormal or unexplained experience. It was from them I learned my great-grand father’s story.
My great grandfather
The first contactee in my family was my great-grandfather, Refik Kiris. He was one of the first French and mathematics teachers at
In the late 1890’s he was a young teacher, married with five children—two boys and three girls who inherited his passion for writing, teaching and academic careers. But there was more. They also inherited a strange destiny which caused our family to experience heightened spiritual conciousness as well as extreme pain and sorrow, in later years.
Refik Kiris was a talented and idealistic teacher, but the salary he received from the government was meager, and from time to time his family had financial difficulties. According to my mother, in those days my great-grandfather felt completely helpless about his financial situation.
One day when his wife and children were away visiting relatives in another city, something unusual happened. As my great-grandfather stepped out of his house to go to the university, he saw an old man smiling at him from the opposite sidewalk. The old man approached Refik and spoke to him.
Who was the stranger?
Though he was a stranger, the old man knew my great-grandfather’s name, knew about his family, his job, even his financial problems. The stranger insisted he was ready to help and told to Refik that late in the night he would have some visitors, visitors he should not fear. As a scientific young man my great-grandfather didn’t take this conversation seriously. He quickly forgot about the funny old man and busied himself at the university with his students.
That night he came home and went to bed. Before he fell asleep the bedroom door opened. Two visitors entered, the visitors the old man had mentioned. But there was something he had not mentioned: these visitors weren’t human. They were tall, and though they walked on two legs my great grandfather later insisted they had reptilian characteristics such as elliptical pupils.
Who were the visitors?
My great-grandfather used the word “monsters” when he described these visitors. He recalled they wore no clothes; their skin was dark, oily, and partly covered with hair. They had horns and tails.
This was in the days long before movies and mass media, so the only things that might have informed his descriptions of these beings would have been traditional depictions of “monsters” and “devils,” or, the reality of their appearance itself.
Though the stranger had said not to fear the visitors it was impossible not to, especially since they looked at my great-grandfather through the elliptical pupils of a snake’s eyes.
Refik tried to move, scream, do something—but it was impossible. He was under a total paralysis. The reptilian visitors were trying to communicate with him. He felt a heavy pressure over his body. At the same time a strange vibration filled the room. His bed started to shake. One of the reptilians stood at the headboard of the bed while the other stayed at the foot.
Refik fought against them mentally. He repeated again and again that they were not allowed to be in his home, and commanded them to leave. Refik was unaware how much time elapsed.
“From you to three generations. . .”
At the end of the night, the two reptilians left him. While they were going they looked at him and said something about his family. He remembered these words spoken telepathically in his mind: “From you to three generations. . .” And they were gone.
Refik was in shock. He couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. He dressed and decided to leave for the university very early. Outside another surprise was waiting: there was the old man he had met one day before. The stranger looked at him with disappointment and said, “I believed you were an intelligent man. . . you lost a big chance.” After these words he left.
No available interpretation
Refik preferred to forget about this incident, and there was no one to talk to about it anyway. This was decades before science fiction had filled people’s imaginations with this kind of incident. In those years no one knew about UFOs, extraterrestrials, grey or reptilian races. For Refik, these two visitors were demons coming from a dark source. Angels, demons, jinn—they were known in the spiritual and religious fields in
This case has some familiar and some different aspects compared with other well known reptilian encounters. The case starts with the intervention of a normal-looking human, the old man. We don’t know anything about him expect he apparently had control over the reptilian visitors as it seems he sent them to Refik’s house. And the next morning the old man knew everything that had happened in my great-grandfather’s home.
Did this man send the reptilians on a mission to help my great-grandfather? Today, in some contact cases, abductees and contactees mention the presence of normal-looking humans who work together with ETs. Did the same thing happen in Refik’s case over 100 years ago?
A lasting impact
The reptilian visitors never appeared again to my great-grandfather. But soon he noticed they had left him and his family with something that would stay with us through the years, until today.
After the frightening visit, Refik’s wife and children came home. He told everything to his wife. They were convinced the beings were evil visitors and they decided to try to forget about the case. But it would be impossible to forget.
Our family changed
After a while they noticed their five-year-old son was able to see ghosts. Wherever he went he saw beings, heard voices, communicated with people only he could see. The other children also suddenly developed psychic abilities. For instance, one of the daughters, my grandmother, became a capable psychic medium. All her life she dealt with ghosts, apparitions and spiritual contact just like her sisters and brothers.
Madam, the lady
One night my grandmother woke in her bed and saw the figure of a lady in the room. Although this happened in 1940’s, the lady was wearing an outfit typical of World War One years. The spirit was young, tall and beautiful with her dark eyes and tan skin. The image was so real my grandmother had enough time to look at her elegant hat, brown long skirt and jacket. She had a nice purse and gloves.
The visitor came closer to the bed, took off her gloves and extended her hand to shake my grandmother’s hand. My grandmother had the telepathic feeling the lady was there to thank her. When their hands touched, my grandmother screamed in terror as the visitor’s hand was dead cold. At that moment the elegant lady disappeared.
After that the family did some research, speaking to other family members and neighbors, and looking through neighbors’ photo albums, and they found the visitor was a Greek woman who used to live in the home and had died in the First World War. My grandmother has called her “Madam” since then.
My grandmother and her siblings were the first generation of psychics in our family. Something made them psychic. Something was given to my family which opened their spiritual “third eye” to the unknown. When the Reptilian visitors said, “From you to three generations. . . ,” did they mean these psychic powers?
Aunt Keyser’s double
As the children grew, psychic and paranormal activity around them persisted and their power affected others. On one occasion everyone in the family witnessed a daytime doppelganger and shape shifting phenomena. This happened during an open air family picnic in the yard of their home. It was summer and family members were visiting.
While they were sitting and having lunch with elderly aunt Keyser, they also saw her walking out from the home! The same woman was at two different locations at the same time!
As they watched aunt Keyser’s double, the apparition shape-shifted into a black dog. The dog barked a few times and disappeared. The family searched for the dog, but it was gone.
Paranormal and poltergeist activity became part of the family’s daily life. Although they changed their home and lived in
Years passed. Refik’s two sons became lawyers, and his three daughters teachers. Throughout their lives they investigated paranormal and psychic phenomena and performed spiritual channeling as hypnotic trance mediums. Neighbors and strangers would come to them to receive messages from departed loved ones. Meanwhile, nobody was talking about UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors. All were focused on the spirits, ghosts and other aspects of mediumship.
The second generation
That was the first generation of psychics in my family. My mother Taylan and my aunt Ümran were from the second generation and they were psychic too. And I am the third generation psychic-paranormal researcher from my family.
What happened that night to Refik Kiris is a big mystery. Did the reptilian visitors really want to help him? Was their gift to him a psychic talent to be passed to his children?
Maybe the help or gift was the ability to communicate with beings from other dimensions. Maybe the richness wasn’t material, but something spiritual, such as understanding the cosmos, such as understanding the possibilities of a cosmos peopled with endless numbers of beings, such as being open minded and accepting the truth.
Many abductions
Thinking back on all the stories of strange experiences I heard in our family, I am convinced my grandmother and her siblings were abducted many times—although they had no idea about alien abductions—because what they described fits well with today’s alien abduction cases such as sudden trances, mysterious abortions and unexplained physical marks on the skin.
As we see in many abduction cases today, the phenomenon influenced them in both positive and negative ways. They became successful in their professional lives, but there were always problems in their personal lives, such as unhappy marriages, problems with having children, or financial difficulties.
Of Refik’s five children, only my grandmother and her older sister were able to have children. The other two brothers and one sister were childless. And in their time medicine didn’t offer much help. I have observed today that many abductees remain childless. Did they lose their ability to have children due to medical experiments or procedures conducted by their extraterrestrial abductors?
My grandmother married in 1935. From this marriage my mother Taylan and my aunt Umran were born. At very young ages, both manifested psychic talents.
My aunt had constant “visitors” she wasn’t able to find words to describe. She used to pass into a trance by herself and stay in that state for hours. She never married and died young from a puzzling liver ailment in 1975. As for my mother, she was a sleepwalker since she was a little girl and had strange UFO-related encounters.
For instance, following what I believe was an abduction in 1990, my mother found (and the family observed) white spots on her arm, as if the pigment had vanished from the skin. Her doctors weren’t able to determine what caused the white spots which remained for many years.
Brown palms
When Taylan and Umran were little girls, they would wake up with a strange brown color paint on their palms almost every morning. The “brown color paint” is well known in Turkish tradition, and is considered “the trace of the jinn.” People believe the jinn come to visit young children in the night, take them somewhere, and early in the morning bring them back to their beds. The brown paint is believed to be a remnant of the jinn visitation. The “jinn” are supernatural entities in Turkish culture. We’ll see more about the jinn later in this article.
And it happened to me as well. At a young age I started to have night visitors who came through the closed windows of my third floor bedroom in the early hours of the morning. For some reason I always woke up just before they appeared.
First I would see grey clouds in the sky. The clouds would come through the closed window, change shape, and become three people: a young woman, a young man, and an old woman.
When my mother saw the brown paint on my palms for the first time, she smiled and said, “Just like we had when we were little. The jinn took you away last night.” I was two or three years old.
Hard to wash away
I remember the brown paint well. It was so difficult to wash away. I used to wake up with these marks almost every morning. I was an only child and spent a lot of time playing by myself. One of my favorite games was something I believed I invented: going out of my body with my soul.
I don’t remember how I discovered I could perform this astral projection or out-of-body experience, but I used to lie down and easily let my soul leave my physical body. Being able to fly out of my body was a wonderful sensation. Complete freedom. It was the easiest thing to do and lots of fun!
The year 1975
In time I started to predict future events. Some were good, some very sad. In 1975, my aunt, grandmother and grandfather died and this was a period of pain and sadness. But despite those years of emotional difficulties, I believe being able to communicate with other dimensions, to know we are not the only intelligent beings in the universe, and that ETs and interdimensional visitors are a part of universal reality, were worth the pain.
Following my family’s heritage, I have chosen to keep on the path of being an investigator-writer on the paranormal and UFO field. I started to write professionally on UFOs and paranormal subjects in the late 1980’s in my native
My cousin, a psychic
I am not the only psychic in my family’s third generation. One of my cousins began experiencing severe abductions about ten years ago. Almost twice a week, she woke up with bruises and cuts on her skin. A short time after this, my cousin began to spontaneously see future events, such as an accident, somebody’s death or a cheating husband. And during this very period of my cousin’s abductions and psychic manifestations, her wealthy husband lost everything he owned in a short time.
At my suggestion, my cousin read one of my books on abductions published in
In the last two years the abductions of my cousin have reduced and she no longer practices psychic readings. She and her husband have founded a new business together and have started a new life. A sudden and unexpected spiritual/paranormal experience became a severe life lesson for this young couple. Now they don’t want to hear anything about paranormal cases and they deny the ET abduction possibility. For them everything was the work of the evil jinn.
Throughout Islam
I have mentioned “the jinn” several times in this article. Here is some history: Before Islam, the Turkish nation’s religion was Shamanism. Today in various parts of
According to Shamanic Turkish and Islamic beliefs, the jinn are interdimensional beings who were created by the same God who created the universe, galaxies, planets, angels, humans, animals and plants. The jinn are referenced numerous times in the Qur’an, and belief in the jinn is everywhere in the Islamic world, not just in
For example, in the Qur’an God says, “I have only created jinn and man that they may serve me.” (C 51: V 56). And elsewhere we find, “And indeed: We created man from dried clay and altered mud. And the jinn, We created aforetime from the smokeless flame of fire.” (C15: V 26-27)
1001 Nights
Anyone who doubts the Islamic world holds closely to belief in the jinn should take a look at the cover story in the current issue of Smithsonian magazine. The article features Sufi religious practices in
The jinn became known in the western world in the 18th century with publication of 1001 Nights, a collection of ancient Middle Eastern folk tales popular in Europe and
Exorcising the Jinn
Current day Islamic religious authorities continue to assert the reality of the jinn, but for Muslims to form relationships with the jinn is frowned upon, and the Qur’an prescribes specific procedures for exorcising jinn since it is believed evil jinn have the power to take possession of human beings.
Since Islamic resources make it clear the origin of the jinn is “fire which has no smoke,” is it possible the jinn were made from a kind of energy? According to popular belief in
They don’t belong to our world. They can spend only a limited time among us. People believe the jinn can easily make themselves visible or invisible, and it is written the jinn can see us even though we cannot see them.
In ancient drawings, the jinn are represented as half human, half reptilian-looking beings with horns, tales, reptile eyes and claw-like hands.
What are the jinn?
According to Turkish belief, the jinn have gender, female and male. Jinn marry and have their own children and families. Although they have no physical body, they are very interested in human sexuality. They often have sexual relationships with human men and women. Since ancient times, night visits by the jinn are a well known paranormal aspect in Turkish society.
Today in
The jinn are very interested in human children. As I mentioned earlier, they take them somewhere in the night, and at the end of the night bring them back. Or sometimes they exchange human children with jinn children, as if they are trying to create a new hybrid nation.
In some close encounters with jinn, the visited humans develop psychic and paranormal abilities, such as remote viewing, spiritual healing, telepathy or mediumship. But getting close to the jinn also has physical effects on the contactee’s body.
After a jinn visit, the human contactee may wakes up with bruises or cuts. In
The Jinn and ET, the same source?
As you can see, contact with the jinn causes many of the results as contact with ETs. There is so much similarity between the cases that I have to wonder—Are the jinn and the ETs coming from the same source? Or are they the same beings? We really don’t have the right answer in this moment.
And I am not the only one who has thought about this. The American ufologist
Still learning
One thing is sure: with experience we learn better and faster. And personally, I believe I have a reasonable amount of practice and experience on this subject thanks to my family’s three generations of contact. For some reason our family was chosen and given a certain amount of knowledge. I believe every piece of information about this phenomenon is going to help us understand better the reality of the extraterrestrial presence.
I found this dry flowers in the appartment when I moved in. They belonged to a young bride who lived in the same place before me years ago. I guess my place is still haunted by her. And the plastic bride and groom were hers too. 
