Waffle House employees in Rome, Georgia, say they have never laid eyes on Gregg Phillips, a top FEMA official who claims he was once teleported there.
“I’ve seen it all. But I’ve never seen that,” Shastoni Burge, who has worked at the diner for more than a decade, told The New York Times.
None of the two dozen workers and regulars interviewed by the newspaper — at all three Waffle House locations in Rome, a city of roughly 33,000 people — said they had experienced any metaphysical activity. No one even recognized a picture of Phillips.
“I can say I’ve been drunk and ended up in a Waffle House,” said 29-year-old land surveyor Austin Spears told the outlet. “Don’t know how I got there. But I was there.”
Phillips, who in December was appointed to a top position within the nation’s disaster relief agency, said during a podcast appearance in January 2025 that he teleported in an “incredibly frightening moment.”
He said his car was suddenly lifted up while he was driving and transported 50 miles to the diner chain.
“Teleporting is no fun,” he told the Onward podcast last year.
“You know it’s happening, but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride,” he said. “And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was.”
The revelations have prompted Democrats to question his fitness for office at the agency, where he heads up the Office of Response and Recovery with a staff of 1,000 employees and a budget of nearly $300 million.
He was also taken off the schedule at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing late last month where he was slated to testify about the partial government shutdown’s impact on FEMA, which is housed under the Department of Homeland Security.
“FEMA is on its third unqualified acting administrator in 15 months,” Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson said at the hearing. “And the witness that was scheduled to testify today, Mr. Gregg Phillips, raises serious concerns.”
Despite the criticism, Phillips doubled down on his supernatural account this week, claiming that the incident occurred while he was “heavily medicated” and that the incident was a “miracle” performed by God.
“The word ‘teleportation’ was not mine,” he wrote on Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social.
“It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name,” he wrote Wednesday. “The more accurate biblical terms are ‘translated’ or ‘transported’ — not new ideas for people of faith.”
As exciting as Phillips’ claims are, they are, scientifically, extremely unlikely, according to Sidney Perkowitz, emeritus professor of physics at Emory University.
“The amount of information you need to reproduce something as complicated as a body is so immense that I don’t think there’s a number that can express it,” Perkowitz told The New York Times. “Expressing what you need about every atom, every electron, etc., is just off the charts as far as the data goes.”
The Independent has requested comment from FEMA about Phillips’ claims.
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