A FEMA Official Says He Teleported to a Waffle House. Yes, Really.

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We live in an age in which absurd claims circulate constantly. Normally, the people making them are far from positions of real responsibility. Lately, that line has started to blur.

Gregg Phillips, an associate administrator in FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, has offered a vivid example of just how blurry it has become. He has claimed, and later repeated under questioning, that he was teleported multiple times. He has also insisted that it really happened.

The specific claim that gained headlines was his Waffle House teleportation story. In an archived CNN article from March 20, the details were reported as follows:

“I was with my boys one time and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House. And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was,” Phillips said in the January 2025 podcast episode.

“And they said, ‘where are you?’ and I said, ‘A Waffle House.’ And ‘a Waffle House where?’ And I said, ‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’ And they said, ‘That’s not possible, you just left here a moment ago.’ But it was possible. It was real.”

“Teleporting is no fun,” Phillips added. “It’s no fun because you don’t really know what you’re doing. You don’t really understand it, it’s scary, but yet um – but so real. And you know it’s happening but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride. And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was.”

In other parts of the episode, he claimed that his vehicle “lifted up” while he was driving and carried him roughly 40 miles from Albany, Georgia, before setting him down in a ditch near a church.

Phillips said the experiences were frightening and uncontrollable, and questioned at the time whether they were “evil” or “good,” but insisted they were real and had happened more than once.

What really happened here?

One possibility is that he experienced a memory lapse, a mini-stroke, or something similar, and then explained it in supernatural terms. Things can happen to us that we do not truly understand, and so we plug in supernatural explanations to try and make sense of the confusion.

His claim, however, went viral.

Because he is a public figure, media outlets are expected not to revert to mockery but instead to report the story responsibly. This is exactly what the New York Times did. Here is their April 3, 2026 coverage of it all (Gift Link):

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.

They really did go out and interview staff to check the claim.

Normally, crazy claims from random people would merit little more than an eye roll. But when the person making the claim is the head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, The New York Times treats it as a serious story.

They do, however, offer one plausible clue.

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.

The key phrase there is perhaps “heavily medicated.”. This is medically plausible. In U.S. cancer care, some medications, especially strong opioid pain drugs, can cause delirium or hallucinations in some patients. Whether it happened in this case is a separate question, but yes, it is well within the realm of possibility.

The Times also asked whether teleportation is possible.

They reached out to a subject matter expert:

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.”

For a human being, the problems are overwhelming. You would need to capture and reconstruct the state of an absurd number of particles with extraordinary precision. On top of that, measuring that much information would itself destroy the original quantum state. Even leaving that aside, the information required would be unimaginably vast.

It also opens up an even deeper philosophical problem. If you scanned and rebuilt a perfect copy elsewhere, would that still be you, or just a duplicate?

Let’s park that one, because human teleportation is not currently possible.

But what about all those news stories about teleportation:

So it is worth addressing that briefly.

These stories relate to what is termed quantum teleportation. That is really information teleportation, not object teleportation.

Imagine you have two special particles, A and B, that have been prepared in a linked quantum relationship called entanglement. Even when separated, they share a connection in how their quantum properties are described.

Now suppose there is a third particle, C, whose quantum state you want to “teleport.” You do not move C itself anywhere. Instead, you do a special joint measurement on A and C. That measurement destroys the original state of C, but it also produces a small amount of ordinary information about what happened.

That ordinary information is then sent in the normal way, meaning not faster than light, to the location of particle B.

Once the receiver gets that information, they perform the right adjustment on B. After that, B ends up in the same quantum state that C originally had.

So what happened?

  • The original state of C is gone.
  • B now has that state.
  • No matter traveled from C to B.

And the process still required ordinary communication, so it is not instant messaging across the universe.

This is real and impressive because it transfers an exact quantum state without copying it in the ordinary sense. That is useful for quantum computing, quantum networks, and secure communications research.

Let’s be very clear about this.

You are not moving a person, a chair, or even an atom from one place to another in the everyday sense. Instead, you are transferring the state of a tiny quantum system. Scaling that up to a human would be unimaginably beyond anything we can do.

The obvious response

Most are mocking him and, to be frank, rightly so.

The New York Times article ends with this:

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.”

The real problem is bigger

If this were a one-off story, and if he had been medicated at the time, I’d be willing to give him a pass. However, there is a history of bizarre claims from him.

He has a track record of promoting things that are simply not true, and also has a well-established track record of corruption. According to his Wikipedia page:

  • Phillips has faced allegations of ethical misconduct and cronyism, including abusing his previous positions in government in both Mississippi and Texas for personal financial gain.[19][20] 
  • An investigation by The Center for Investigative Reporting found that Phillips and the Texas-based nonprofit organization True the Vote engaged in questionable transactions involving more than $1 million sent to its founders, and a longtime romantic affair between the founder Catherine Engelbrecht and Phillips.[48][20]
  • On June 5, 2022, Gregg Phillips announced on Truth Social that he had begun a nonprofit under the name “The Freedom Project” and began soliciting donations to raise $25 million for a mobile hospital in Ukraine … The hospitals in Ukraine never materialized
  • He has falsely asserted that his organization has evidence that between three and five million votes were illegal in the 2016 presidential election.[67][68][69] Phillips made his voter fraud claims before voter history data was available in most jurisdictions.[69]

There is more, much more, and by now the pattern should be clear.

Despite a well documented history of corruption allegations and conspiracy claim promotion, he still ended up in a position of extreme responsibility. He had no documented professional background in disaster relief prior to that December 2025 appointment.

What could possibly go wrong when FEMA is called upon in the next disaster?

The deeper problem is not just that Phillips made an absurd claim. It is that he has a long record of promoting falsehoods and attracting controversy, yet still ended up in a position of enormous responsibility. FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery is not a place for fantasy, self-mythologizing, or conspiracy theatrics. It is a place where competence, judgment, and trust matter. Those are exactly the qualities this episode calls into question.

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