A senior Trump administration tasked with managing America’s disaster response won’t stop talking about teleporting.
Gregg Phillips, who leads FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, first made claims about teleportation on a podcast, describing the feeling of his car being “lifted up” and relocated into a ditch near a church. In another instance, Phillips described finding himself teleported to a Waffle House miles away from his previous location.
The Trump administration named Phillips, best known for profiting from election conspiracy theories, to one of the top roles at the disaster relief agency in December. “Teleporting is no fun. … It was scary in a way,” Phillips said on an episode of the podcast Onward, which aired prior to his appointment to the federal government. At the time, Phillips said he didn’t know if the experience was “good” or “evil.”
After CNN reported on Phillips’s strange claims last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency official has taken to social media to defend his experiences and contextualize them in religious terms. In a Truth Social post, Phillips said that God moved him instantaneously “during a spiritual battle.” Phillips likened his experience to miracles described in the Bible, including the resurrection of Jesus, celebrated on Easter.
“People can debate me. Question me. Even ridicule what they don’t understand,” Phillips wrote. In one Truth Social reply, Phillips accused the media of taking his quotes out of context, describing the experiences as a spiritual journey linked to his battle with cancer and attributing the teleportation to “the power of God.”
CNN previously reported the FEMA official’s account of being teleported: “I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House,” Phillips said in early 2025. “This was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was.”
“And they said, ‘Where are you?’ And I said, ‘A Waffle House.’ They asked, ‘A Waffle House where?’ And I said, ‘A Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’ And they said, ‘That’s not possible, you just left here a moment ago.’ But it was possible. It was real.”
