FEMA official says he teleported to Waffle House

National news

Greg Phillips, a top official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has made many headlines for his claim that he once moved to a Waffle House.

By Richard Fawcett, New York Times Service

April 7, 2026 | 5:33 pm

4 minutes to read

ROME, GA – Chastoni Berg worked for a decade as a server at a Waffle House restaurant in Rome, Georgia, most of his work on the night shift. She said she was 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 employees with them.

But she didn’t see anyone teleporting to the place. “I’ve seen it all,” said Berg, 38. “But I’d never seen it before.”

Berg said she never had her eye on Greg 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 moved to a Waffle House in Rome, a city of 39,000 northwest of Atlanta.

In fact, of the nearly two dozen workers and regular users interviewed this week at the three Waffle House locations in Rome, none said they were aware of anyone traveling to the 24-hour restaurants by supernatural means, despite their reputation as powerful magnets for the kind of discerning characters who tend to surf the psychedelic fringes of the American South.

In December, Phillips, 65, a former top health official in Texas, was appointed to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) 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 mission of responding to disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and fires. Phillips was known, at the time, as a supporter of election fraud conspiracy theories, some of which the president amplified. Donald Trump.

Things got more difficult for Phillips last month, when a CNN investigative report detailed how, on podcasts and social media, he spread other conspiracy theories, used violent rhetoric in debating former President Joe Biden, and recounted how he somehow found himself, on two occasions, moved, by forces beyond his control, dozens of miles from two different starting points in Georgia.

“Teleporting is not fun,” he said on “Onward,” hosted by a conservative activist.

Internet ridicule has increased. “This is why I know he’s lying,” John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, wrote on social media platform X this week. “Given the fact that teleportation has a theoretically infinite travel distance, it’s possible he could end up at Bucc-ees, Culver’s, or the Cheesecake Factory.”

Phillips wrote Wednesday on Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, that the incident occurred while he was receiving intensive therapy as part of his cancer treatment. But he also described it as a miracle created by God.

“The word ‘teleportation’ was not mine,” Phillips wrote. “Someone else has used it in conversation to come up with language to describe something that has no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are ‘translated’ or ‘transmitted’ – not new ideas for people of faith.”

But no one at any of the three waffle shops recognized his picture.

In a phone interview Thursday, Sidney Berkowitz, a professor emeritus of physics at Emory University, said achieving teleportation of an entire human would be a cool trick. “The amount of information you need to reproduce something as complex as an object is so enormous that I don’t think there is a number that can express it,” he said. “Expressing what you need about every atom, every electron, etc., is off the charts in terms of data.”

The FEMA press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Phillips’ claims are part of a growing trend among prominent American conservatives to assert the physical existence of beings from the spiritual world, or from the provinces often reserved for science fiction novelists. In 2024, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said he was “attacked” in his sleep by “a demon or something unseen.” Former Rep. Matt Gaetz recently said that a US Army official told him about “hybrid breeding programs, where captured aliens would mate with humans to create a kind of hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication.”

Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett told Newsmax on Wednesday that government officials had briefed him on alien information, adding that the country “would have been noncompliant, I think, if they had heard everything I heard.”

The Office of Response and Recovery, which Phillips heads, is FEMA’s largest division and carries out some of its most important disaster work.

When floods or fires strike, Phillips’ department helps determine whether and how the federal government should provide relief. It coordinates the delivery of supplies, including manufactured housing units, life-saving aid and recovery efforts that can last for years.

Upon taking office, Trump pushed to shrink the agency and shift responsibility for disaster response to states. Under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump moved to cut the agency’s funding and staff.

For decades, Waffle House has played a small role in the agency’s work. The restaurant chain adheres to its 24-hour operating schedule in all but the worst conditions, serving hash browns and omelettes. This policy led to the creation of the Waffle House Index within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which helps measure storm damage by the status of a local Waffle House’s operation. If the restaurant in the path of the storm is not providing service, it is time to send in the cavalry.

At Waffle Houses in Rome this week, Phillips’ assertion of paranormal travel was met with skepticism. At the branch on U.S. 411, near the Quality Inn and a pest control company, Estelle Mandeville, 27, was finishing breakfast. Mandeville, a North Carolina resident who was traveling for work, described herself as “uncomfortably atheist” and noted that she personally came to Rome in a 2018 Kia Niro.

Grant Sykes, 20, a student at nearby Perry College who hopes to attend Episcopal school one day, said divine power, in his experience, has expressed itself in more subtle ways. He said he felt God’s presence in that moment, as he wrapped up a late breakfast with his grandfather, Larry Kellogg, 83.

Austin Spears, 29, a land surveyor, also found Phillips’ story questionable. But he also admitted that all human lives are full of little secrets.

“I can say I was drunk and ended up at a Waffle House,” Spears said. “I don’t know how I got there. But I was there.”

This article originally appeared on New York Times.