Gregg Phillips, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Office of Response and Recovery, has raised eyebrows over a series of extraordinary claims that recently surfaced after CNN reviewed his public interviews. Throughout his life, Phillips says he has experienced an array of supernatural events. While some observers have suggested that he may be mentally disturbed, there is another possibility that may better fit the available facts: Phillips may be fantasy-prone, a rare condition typically found in high-functioning people who develop a rich, inner fantasy life. Remarkably, many people with fantasy-prone personalities lead outwardly ordinary lives; even close friends and relatives may be unaware.
One of Phillips’ most bizarre claims is that he was once teleported to a Waffle House restaurant in Rome, Georgia, roughly 50 miles from where he had been. In a 2025 interview he said: “Teleporting is no fun… because you don’t really know what you’re doing. You don’t really understand it, it’s scary.” He then noted how it just happened one day. “And you know it’s happening but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride. And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was,” he said. Just before the alleged teleportation he had remarked that he wanted to go to Waffle House – then suddenly, he was there.
He also described a strange episode in the parking lot of a Lowe’s store in Indianapolis, where he said he collapsed and could not account for two hours. When he regained awareness, he said he was in a nearby McDonald’s parking lot with a Big Mac on his lap. His phone, he said, had recorded nearly 15,000 steps. He describes these events as spiritual experiences. “The whole space and time thing, continuum… it fell with me,” he said. Rather than consider a medical explanation, Phillips was emphatic: “This isn’t a health thing… This is a spiritual thing.”
On another occasion, Phillips said that while driving a car he had won in a poker game, a deceased girlfriend materialized inside the vehicle and caused it to float in the air, narrowly avoiding a collision with an oncoming truck. Another time while hiking in Spain, he claimed that the Devil walked behind him and urged him to lighten his backpack by pouring out his last remaining water – which he did, and nearly died of dehydration. He also said that God visited him after he woke up in the middle of the night, sat cross-legged on his bed, and told him he had cancer but he would beat it. A friend in Alabama nicknamed him “God’s zombie” – someone essentially dead but kept alive to carry out God’s work. Phillips embraced the label.
‘Crazy’ or Just Fantasy-Prone?
Some have speculated that Phillips is engaged in an elaborate prank. Yet by all available accounts, he appears sincere. After President Trump reportedly learned of the claims on April 14, the White House moved to reduce his public profile. What makes the story so intriguing is that, aside from his unusual experiences, colleagues described him as competent and level-headed. In fact, he is the third-ranking official at FEMA. One of his agency colleagues said that despite his extraordinary claims, he considered him to be “the most reasonable and trusted political appointee inside the agency.” The tension between alarming claims and professional competence may be central to understanding what is going on.
In the early 1980s, psychologists identified a remarkable phenomenon: a small portion of otherwise normal, healthy people report extraordinarily vivid fantasy lives. Some people immersed in such experiences have difficulty differentiating imagination from reality. In their pioneering research, Sheryl Wilson and Theodore Barber identified a small portion of the population as having fantasy-prone personalities ranging from mild to intense.
Many subjects who identified as fantasy-prone reported spending large portions of the day engaged in vivid inner experiences. They often said they could see, hear, feel, and even smell imagined events with unusual intensity. Some described their fantasies as “as real as real,” and said the experiences sometimes occurred involuntarily. The researchers were struck by how immersive the fantasies could be.
How does Phillips compare? Consider his reported experiences alongside common features associated with fantasy proneness:
Hallucinatory vividness of fantasy: Phillips’ accounts are marked by sensory richness and detail – the cross-legged posture of God, the Big Mac in his lap, the Devil’s voice behind him on the trail. These were reported as having been “as real as real,” matching the hallmark fantasy-prone criterion.
Difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality: Phillips does not frame his experiences as dreams, metaphors, or imaginative episodes. He presents them as literally true.
Religious visions: His stories include direct encounters with God and Satan. Many fantasizers report religious visions. Phillips’s experiences are saturated with religious content.
Apparitional experiences: The appearance of a deceased girlfriend inside the car maps directly onto this category. According to one study of fantasy-prone subjects, 73 percent reported ghostly encounters.
Out-of-body/dissociative episodes: The Lowe’s/McDonald’s story, involving two lost hours and the inability to account for his movements, resembles the out-of-body and bilocation experiences reported by 88 percent of Wilson and Barber’s fantasy group.
Physiological symptoms corresponding to fantasy content: His framing of a physical collapse as spiritual rather than medical parallels findings that fantasizers experience physiological effects in conjunction with their fantasies.
Spiritual guardians and supernatural worldview: Phillips’s conviction that he is sustained by God, that he exists in a state between life and death, and that a friend calls him “God’s zombie” echoes the tendency of fantasizers toward a supernatural worldview populated by mythical guardians and spirit beings.
Normal functioning in daily life: Perhaps most crucially, fantasizers appear to function as normal, healthy adults. CNN’s own sources describe Phillips as competent, caring, and reasonable. This ability to function normally alongside extraordinary experiential claims, is the signature profile of fantasy-prone people.
None of this constitutes a clinical diagnosis. Phillips has never been evaluated for fantasy proneness, and any assessment based on media reports alone carries obvious limitations. But the pattern is striking, and it suggests a framework that neither the White House nor Phillips’ critics appear to have considered. While some commentators have suggested that he may be mentally disturbed, identifying him as a possible fantasizer opens a different path which recognizes that rich fantasy lives can coexist with professional competence, and that the appropriate response may be helping such individuals understand the nature of their experiences rather than pathologizing them. The question is not whether Phillips’ experiences were real in a literal sense. The question is whether calling him crazy is the most useful or even the most accurate way to understand what is happening. For public officials, the real issue is not whether unusual private beliefs exist, but whether those beliefs impair judgement, decision-making, or trust in high office.
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Wilson, Sheryl C., and Barber, Theodore X. (1983). “The Fantasy-prone Personality: For Understanding Imagery, Hypnosis, and Parapsychological Phenomena.” In A.A. Sheikh (ed.), Imagery: Current Theory, Research, and Application. New York: Wiley.
This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.
