Pocketful of Miracles — Part Three

In previous posts, we considered some deeply strange accounts of UFO sightings and encounters with UFO occupants. The latter stories, in particular, have an oddly dreamlike quality. In his anthology Deep Weird, editor Jack Hunter discusses the “Oz Factor,” a term coined by Jenny Randles:

The Oz Factor is common in a range of paranormal experiences, and often seems to precede the climactic encounter – whether with a UFO in the sky, Bigfoot in the woods, a gnome-like entity in the garden or an angel in your bedroom. Randles defines it as:

[…] a set of symptoms […] which [create] the impression of temporarily having left our material world and entered another dream-like place with magical rules. It tells us […] most notably that the percipient has changed their state of consciousness [...] The result is a dreamy and weirdly silent state of mind that is recognized as peculiar […] even though they do not appreciate what it implies. (Introduction, quoting Randles, Abduction, 1988)

Given our previous speculations, the Oz Factor shouldn’t be surprising. Dream imagery, after all, is often the mind’s attempt to make sense of incomprehensible input by recasting it in familiar (but absurd) forms. Ordinarily we don’t meet with incomprehensible sensory input in our waking lives, but when we do, a similar response may be called up. In our efforts to categorize the unclassifiable, we are, in effect, temporarily translated into a dreamlike state of consciousness.

An objection may be raised at this point. Some of these anomalies have left physical evidence. We saw, for instance, that some of the Marian apparitions were recorded on film and video. And of course purported photos and other evidence of UFOs exist. Doesn’t this prove that the phenomena are objective?

Before giving a more direct response, I should note that much of this apparently “objective” evidence is inconclusive. The recorded imagery of the Marian apparitions is blurry and indistinct – adequate to show that something unusual was going on, but inadequate to prove exactly what it was. The same may be said of much of the purported evidence collected for UFOs. There seems to be an inherent ambiguity in such experiences, a tricksterish quality of the type extensively documented by George Hansen in his famous book The Trickster and the Paranormal. It’s as if the intrusion of an alien reality into our mental space is inevitably circumscribed so as not to be entirely convincing. But why would this be?

Physical experience as a VR role-playing game. (N.B.: Only an analogy!)

If we return to the analogy of an information processing system that allows us to render images in consciousness, then our experience of earthly reality is akin to a fully immersive first-person video game. Commitment to the game is essential in order to get the most out of it. Anything that causes us to step back from the game and see it as artificial will impede our ability to play. Perhaps for that reason we are simply not allowed to “look behind the curtain,” except for brief, tantalizing, but ultimately unsatisfactory glimpses. An Oz Factor indeed!

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” — The Wizard of Oz, 1939

That’s all well and good. Still, photos and videos and other artifacts do exist. And whatever their deficiencies, they are objective … aren’t they?

Well, yes and no. They are objective in the sense that they are part of what we may call “consensual reality,” the agreed-upon environment in which we operate. But they are subjective in the sense that they are known to us and to others only through the medium of our subjective perception.

This is where we see the full import of Kantian ontology and epistemology, which together take us to a far more radical place that we may have realized. If Kant was right, and our experience of reality is rendered by consciousness in accordance with the innate structures of the mind, than all of phenomenal reality is a construct arising from, but different than, its noumenal substrate. The structured, subjective, phenomenal world is all there is for us. Our subjective perception, shaped and mediated by mental structures and limitations, encompasses literally everything we’re aware of, including photographs, video, radar screens, and anything else we see, hear, feel, taste, smell, or observe with instruments (which are themselves part of our sensory environment).

Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

But if even so-called objective evidence is ultimately subjective, where is the line between accurate perception and hallucination? Is it even possible to draw such a line? Maybe not. To return to Deep Weird, Anthony Peake offers a fascinating but disturbing insight based on the work of researchers Green and McCreery. Looking deeply into the nature of drug-induced hallucinations, they observed (in Peake’s summary) that “consensual reality … is also a brain-generated hallucination … All of what is perceived through our senses is technically a hallucination.”

Peake says they concluded that “all perceptions are hallucinations and consequently one sort of hallucination can overlap with another. They called the hallucinatory spectrum the Metachoric Model of Hallucinations … If all our perceptions are ‘brain generated’ then beings encountered in hallucinatory states … have exactly the same level of ontological reality as any other beings encountered in waking life.” (Chapter 14, “An Introduction to the Egregorial”)

In the same book Jack Hunter makes reference to paranormal investigator John Keel’s “famous notion of the ‘superspectrum’ – the suggestion that all manner of paranormal entities exist on different frequency ranges, which occasionally interact with our own.” (Introduction)

The spectrum idea also dovetails with observations made by William James a century ago. After conducting a rather ill-advised experiment with nitrous oxide, which nearly proved fatal, he wrote :

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

The implication, for me, is that this “filmiest of screens” can be pierced by intrusions from outside our normal sphere of consciousness, and that these intrusions lie at the basis of legitimate anomalous phenomena of the Fortean type.

And the larger application is that there is no such thing as reality per se in any form we can recognize, which means that everything we experience, whether it is “anomalous” or not, is a self-generated illusion.

I understand the reluctance to embrace this view. It feels like a step too far. In fact, I suspect that a deep-seated aversion to this implication accounts for a good deal of militant or knee-jerk skepticism of the paranormal. One can’t help worrying that acceptance of these phenomena may open the door to a mystifying subjective universe. And with this worry comes a warning: That way lies madness.

The Scream, Edvard Munch, 1893

So I really can’t blame people who fear this prospect and seek to nullify it by any available rationalization, or by simple avoidance.

Still … it may be just crazy enough to be true.