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If you’re the head of disaster response for the federal government, teleportation wouldn’t be a bad superpower to have. Unfortunately for Federal Emergency Management Agency official Gregg Phillips, his power comes with a catch: he can’t seem to turn it off.
The bizarre news was first reported by CNN, which noted that Phillips — a far-right conspiracy theorist with little experience in disaster management prior to his appointment as head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery in December of 2025 — has a record of making ludicrous claims involving involuntary teleportation.
In a prior January 2025 interview, Phillips said he had teleported before, and that it isn’t a great experience.
“I tell ya, teleporting is no fun… it was scary in a way,” he told Catherine Engelbrecht, host of the 2020 election-denial podcast Onward. “I mean, you don’t really know, okay, is this evil? Is this good? What is this? What do I do with this?”
As Phillips describes the experience, it seems like a cross between the black comedy “Being John Malkovich” and a “Looney Tunes” cliff gag: “I was on the phone, [then] ‘oh my God, what’s happening?’ and I landed about 40 miles away in a ditch outside of a Baptist church in a little tiny town,” Phillips explained. “It was an incredibly frightening moment to experience yourself, in your car, flying through the air.”
If there’s any rhyme or reason to the spontaneous teleportations, Phillips couldn’t tell you. Another time, he told Engelbrecht, he was “with my boys… and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House.”
No sooner than he had pulled out of the driveway, Phillips recalls that he instantly “ended up at a Waffle House.”
“This was in Georgia, and I ended up at a Waffle House, like, 50 miles away from where I was,” the FEMA official continued. “They said, ‘that’s not possible. You just left here, you got, like, a long way to go. But it was possible. It was real.”
Until Phillips can get his teleportation problem under his control, someone should probably take his keys (and his government ID.)
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