Shastoni Burge has worked for a decade as a Waffle House server in Rome, Ga., much of it on the night shift. She said she was once punched in the face by a customer. She saw someone overdose in the bathroom. One night, a man took all the steak knives and threatened the staff with them.
But she has never seen anyone teleport to the place. “I’ve seen it all,” said Ms. Burge, 38. “But I’ve never seen that.”
Nor, Ms. Burge said, has she ever laid eyes on Gregg Phillips, a top official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who has generated numerous headlines and at least one biting late-night comedy segment for his claim that he once teleported to a Waffle House in Rome, a city of 39,000 people northwest of Atlanta.
Indeed, among roughly two dozen workers and regulars interviewed this week at Rome’s three Waffle House locations, none said they were aware of anyone traveling to the 24-hour restaurants by paranormal means, despite their reputation as powerful magnets for the sort of idiosyncratic characters who tend to surf the psychic fringes of the American South.
In December, Mr. Phillips, 65, a former top health official in Texas, was appointed to head FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery. The office, with more than 1,000 employees and a budget of nearly $300 million, is central to FEMA’s job of responding to disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and fires. Mr. Phillips was known, at the time, as a proponent of election fraud conspiracy theories, some of which were amplified by Mr. Trump.
Things got stickier for Mr. Phillips last month, when an investigative report by CNN detailed how, on podcasts and social media, he had propagated other conspiracy theories, used violent rhetoric in discussing former President Joseph R. Biden, and recounted how, on two occasions, he had somehow found himself being moved, by forces beyond his control, dozens of miles from two different starting points in Georgia.
“Teleporting is no fun,” he said on the podcast “Onward,” which is hosted by a conservative activist.
Ridicule has been mounting online. “Here’s why I know he’s lying,” wrote John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, on x.com this week. “Given the fact that teleportation has a theoretically infinite travel distance, he could have ended up at a Bucc-ees, or a Culver’s, or a Cheesecake Factory.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Phillips wrote on Truth Social, President Trump’s social media platform, that the incident took place while he was heavily medicated as part of a cancer treatment. But he also described it as a miracle performed by God.
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“The word ‘teleportation’ was not mine,” Mr. Phillips wrote. “It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are ‘translated’ or ‘transported’ — not new ideas for people of faith.”
But no one at any of the three Waffle Houses recognized his picture.
In a phone interview on Thursday, Sidney Perkowitz, emeritus professor of physics at Emory University, said that pulling off the teleportation of an entire human being would be a neat trick. “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,” he said. “Expressing what you need about every atom, every electron, etc., is just off the charts as far as the data goes.”
FEMA’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
Mr. Phillips’s claims are part of a growing trend among high-profile American conservatives to assert the physical presence of beings from the spiritual realm, or from provinces that are often reserved for science fiction novelists. In 2024, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, said that he was “mauled,” while sleeping, by “a demon or by something unseen.” Former Representative Matt Gaetz recently said that a U.S. Army official had told him about “hybrid breeding programs, where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication.”
Representative Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, told Newsmax on Wednesday that he had been briefed by government officials about aliens, adding that the country “would’ve come unglued, I think, if they would’ve heard all that I’d heard.”
The Office of Response and Recovery, which Mr. Phillips leads, is FEMA’s largest division and carries out some of its most essential disaster work.
When floods or fires strike, Mr. Phillips’s division helps determine whether and how the federal government should provide relief. It coordinates the delivery of supplies, including manufactured housing units, lifesaving aid and recovery efforts that can last years.
Upon taking office, President Trump pushed to downsize the agency and shift the responsibility of disaster response toward states. Under his former homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, Mr. Trump moved to slash the agency’s funding and staff.
Waffle House has, for decades, played a small role in the agency’s work. The restaurant chain sticks to its 24-hour operating schedule in all but the most dire of circumstances, dishing up hash browns and omelets. That policy gave rise within FEMA to a Waffle House index, which helps gauge storm damage by the operating status of the local Waffle House. If a restaurant in the path of a storm isn’t serving, it’s time to send the cavalry.
At the Waffle Houses of Rome this week, Mr. Phillips’s assertion of supernatural travel was met with skepticism. At the branch on U.S. Route 411, close to a Quality Inn and a pest control company, Estelle Mandeville, 27, was finishing up breakfast. Ms. Mandeville, a North Carolinian who was traveling for work, described herself as “uncomfortably atheist,” and noted that she, personally, had come to Rome in a 2018 Kia Niro.
Grant Sikes, 20, a student at nearby Berry College who hopes to attend an Episcopal seminary one day, said that divine power, from his experience, expressed itself in more subtle ways. He said he felt the presence of God at that moment, as he wrapped up a late, mellow breakfast with his grandfather, Larry Kellogg, 83.
Austin Spears, 29, a land surveyor, also found Mr. Phillips’s story to be dubious. But he also acknowledged that all human lives are studded with little mysteries.
“I can say I’ve been drunk and ended up in a Waffle House,” Mr. Spears said. “Don’t know how I got there. But I was there.”
Chris Hippensteel and Scott Dance contributed reporting.
Richard Fausset, a Times reporter based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.
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