For years, Gregg Phillips — now a senior FEMA official — has instructed tales that blur the boundary between the extraordinary and the supernatural.
A lifeless girlfriend as soon as lifted his automobile off the street to keep away from a crash. Satan as soon as spoke to him whereas he walked throughout Spain. After collapsing inside an Indianapolis Lowe’s, he got here to in a McDonald’s car parking zone throughout the road with 15,000 steps logged on his well being app, a Big Mac in his lap, and little understanding of what had simply occurred.
In telling these tales throughout varied right-wing podcasts, Phillips has mentioned lots of the experiences occurred whereas he was out and in of therapy for metastatic bone most cancers. Rather than endure chemotherapy, Phillips says he selected as an alternative to depend on a self-directed routine of ivermectin and fenbendazole, antiparasitic medication generally used to deworm animals.
Phillips has additionally continued in current weeks to insist he teleported to a Waffle House in Georgia, saying he immediately discovered himself roughly 50 miles from the place he had been moments earlier — a story first reported by NCS in March.
Those claims are actually reverberating across the federal authorities.
In a quick interview with NCS on his cellphone Thursday morning about Phillips, President Donald Trump mentioned, “What does teleport mean? Was he kidding?”
Told that Phillips was not kidding, Trump responded: “I don’t know anything about teleporting. … It just sounds a little strange, but I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.”
After NCS first reported on Phillips’ teleportation claims, the White House contacted the Department of Homeland Security — FEMA’s mum or dad company —urging officers both to take away Phillips or preserve him out of public view, a White House official instructed NCS.
“Everyone’s thoughts were, ‘What the hell is this? This guy has got to go,’” the official mentioned.
Meanwhile, Phillips continued to insist publicly that he teleported.
Within days of NCS’s report, Phillips was pulled from a scheduled Capitol Hill listening to. He has since been quietly sidelined from components of FEMA’s operations, in accordance to a number of company sources. He was additionally directed to cease posting about teleportation on Truth Social, a supply acquainted instructed NCS.
Several sources mentioned Phillips was livid — and is now satisfied that Trump officers at FEMA and DHS have been angling towards him. Since then, he has grown more and more agitated and suspicious, a number of FEMA insiders who work with Phillips instructed NCS.
Despite his job because the No. 3 FEMA official, Phillips was left off a visit final week that newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin took to western North Carolina, the place communities are nonetheless recovering from Hurricane Helene’s devastation in 2024. Mullin introduced alongside two prime FEMA political officers — however not Phillips, who oversees catastrophe response and restoration and had traveled to the area after the storm.
Instead, Mullin appeared alongside FEMA performing chief Karen Evans and Associate Administrator for External Affairs Victoria Barton, praising Evans throughout a roundtable. Phillips was not talked about.
NCS reached out to Phillips, FEMA and DHS for touch upon this story. None of them replied.
A assessment of Phillips’ podcast appearances, livestreams and interviews over the previous 5 years reveals a sample of outlandish claims. Across dozens of recordings reviewed by NCS from the final 5 years, Phillips repeatedly described what he characterised as supernatural encounters, usually framing them as a part of a non secular or religious expertise.
Phillips mentioned his experiences occurred so usually {that a} buddy in Mobile, Alabama got here to consider he was “half in and half out” of heaven, stored alive by God to end unfinished work, and jokingly referred to him as “God’s zombie.”
“I’m actually dead,” Phillips mentioned in April 2025. “But I’m here doing God’s stuff. And so we laugh about that a little bit.”
NCS saved copies of episodes from the previous a number of years of the “Onward” podcast co-hosted by Catherine Engelbrecht, a conservative activist who ceaselessly collaborates with Phillips in selling false and unproven claims of widespread voter fraud.
The episodes, together with the place Phillips made his teleportation feedback, seem to have been faraway from public platforms following NCS’s preliminary reporting.
On the identical January 2025 podcast the place he talked about teleportation, Phillips described a near-crash within the desert during which he mentioned a deceased girlfriend appeared inside his shifting automobile and lifted it off the street to keep away from an oncoming truck. Phillips mentioned he was driving a automobile he had not too long ago received in a poker recreation.
“The girl that I had dated came into the car with me, the girl that had died,” Phillips mentioned. “She said ‘You’re not going to survive this. So I’m going to take you away.’ And she lifted me and the car up and out of the way from a truck that had slid across the road and had come all the way across the road and was about to hit me.”
On the identical podcast, Phillips described being woken in the course of the evening by God, who he mentioned sat on his mattress and instructed him his most cancers had returned.
“He sat me up in the bed and he sat cross-legged with me, I’ll never forget it,” Phillips mentioned. “And he said, ‘Hey, your cancer’s back, but don’t worry, I’ve got this.’”
In a number of appearances in 2025, Phillips mentioned his experiences at an Indianapolis Lowe’s ironmongery store, the place he mentioned he collapsed throughout a piece journey and disappeared for roughly two hours, throughout which his cellphone recorded about 15,000 steps regardless of him saying he might barely stroll. He got here to, he mentioned, in a McDonald’s car parking zone throughout the road with a Big Mac in his lap.
Phillips repeatedly described the incident in religious phrases.
“The whole space and time thing, continuum, got all — it fell with me,” he mentioned. “This isn’t a health thing. This isn’t the cancer. This isn’t me. This is a spiritual thing.”
“At some point, I had gone through the drive-through, apparently, gotten a Coke and a Big Mac, and then parked and fell asleep for two hours,” Phillips mentioned, claiming he once more disappeared after going again to the Lowe’s.
In one other account in 2022 , Phillips described a hike he took throughout Spain throughout which he mentioned he was approached by Satan, who urged him to lighten his pack. Phillips mentioned he responded by pouring out his final two liters of water, leaving him in misery till he was discovered by a passerby who sought assist.
“The devil’s right behind me saying, ‘Dude, lighten your pack,’” Phillips mentioned. “So… I poured the last two-liter bottle of water that I had out on the ground.”
“I didn’t make it, Christ brought me to this place,” Phillips added of his survival.
“Satan lied to me. He convinced me to pour out my water bottle to reduce my pack weight. He almost got his demonic wish and watched me die,” Phillips mentioned in one other video describing the incident posted on Truth Social in 2025.
Since Phillips started working at FEMA in December, he has clashed with different political leaders on the company — significantly these pushing to shrink FEMA’s workforce and tighten management over its spending and day-to-day work on the course of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her deputy Corey Lewandowski, sources mentioned.
Phillips repeatedly warned that these strikes have been placing Americans in danger, incomes him respect from some senior company workers who fear FEMA’s capabilities have been crippled in Trump’s second time period.
For months, these senior staffers have argued that regardless of Phillips’ checkered previous and historical past of controversial, conspiratorial statements, he has been essentially the most cheap and trusted political appointee contained in the company. Phillips, they mentioned, was one of many few keen to push again and shield his staff.
“It’s straight up Kafkaesque,” one senior FEMA official mentioned. “At some level I’m sure my colleagues and I are just numb to the absurdity of the string of leaders we’ve had in the last year.”
As FEMA’s performing director, Evans, then again, was largely seen as somebody carefully aligned with Noem and Lewandowski. Evans performed a key function of their sweeping cuts and strict approval processes, which stifled company features and stored billions of {dollars} in grants and catastrophe help backlogged at FEMA, irritating lawmakers and state officers throughout the nation in addition to company workers.
After NCS’s story ran, profession FEMA leaders discovered themselves in an uncommon spot — weighing feedback they discovered alarming and absurd towards the worry that shedding Phillips might make issues worse for the company. Some joked about it. Some shrugged and moved on.
“Yes, it’s hard to trust the judgment of someone who said they teleported and then doubled down on it,” mentioned one other senior official. “But he seems to really care about people, which I really appreciate. And I think he cares about readiness for hurricane season.”
Senior officers have mentioned for months that FEMA is now not the company that Trump inherited 15 months in the past. Workforce reductions, a mass exodus of senior leaders, and confusion over the company’s murky future have left many insiders warning that the administration is ill-prepared for a serious multistate catastrophe, the likes of which the present Trump administration has not but confronted.
FEMA’s future, they are saying, hangs within the stability, with the weird Phillips saga on the middle of the turmoil.