The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Category “Forteana”
Unknown Unknowns: Psi, Association & the Physics of Information
I have always been skeptical of parapsychologists, because their experiments and their theories borrow the standard concepts of space and time dimensions from physics. These concepts seem obsolete to me. They are not appropriate for understanding telepathy, or the moving of objects at a distance, or ghosts, or Melchizedek. I have always been struck also […]
Strange Animals in the House of Knowledge: On Forteans & Paranoia
Scientists always seek better ways of aligning their categories with what they take to be preexisting ruptures or boundaries in nature—the idea of “carving nature at its joints.” I love that phrase, because I have always been troubled specifically in certain divey Chinese restaurants when I see a fowl like a chicken or duck being […]
Martian Holocausts, Cosmic Paranoia, and the Surveillance Universe
Ever since the Viking orbiters photographed a curiously face-like mountain and oddly pyramidal features in the Cydonia Mensae region of Mars in 1976, many have liked to speculate that the Red Planet was once inhabited, either by human settlers in the distant past—the argument made by Richard Hoagland—or by an indigenous civilization that flourished many […]
The Great Work of Immortality: Astral Travel, Dreams, and Alchemy
The ceramic-and-glass sculptures shown in this article are by artist Christina Bothwell, used with her kind permission. Judging from the number of books and YouTube videos now available on the subject, out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) seem to be enjoying a contemporary revival, and there is surely no hobby more ontologically controversial. Several authors, including Robert Monroe […]
Feeding the Psi God: Precognitive Dreaming, Memory, and Ritual
I’ve mentioned several times the debt I owe to J.W. Dunne and his 1927 book An Experiment with Time. Dunne was not a scientific researcher or a parapsychologist by training, but a military man and aeronautical engineer who became interested in questions of time and its structure after becoming aware of uncanny examples of apparent […]
Psi, the Enjoyment Body, and the Electric Power of Yes
Like many people, I am fascinated by synchronicities that occur in my life, and I even see them as signposts on my life’s path. Yet the “nuts and bolts” side of me agrees with Arthur Koestler in his wonderful 1972 survey of ESP research, The Roots of Coincidence: Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity is a […]
No Visitors: A Non-Silly ETH for Our Silly Times
“At present, utilizing the principal of parsimony, my ‘investigative assumption’ is … that we are dealing with extraterrestrial visitations as the central core of the problem.” Jim Lorenzen “The evidence is overwhelming that the Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled vehicles from off the Earth.” Stanton Friedman “I believe that these extra-terrestrial vehicles and […]
Prophecies, Time Loops, and Bubble Realities: La Jetée and The Sacrifice
If precognition is real, then we have to take account of the range of sci-fi effects it would produce, effects that go beyond the strictly ‘prophetic.’ Because we fail to see how our consciousness is receptive to the future and how our actions contribute to, and only in a minority of cases confirm, that future, […]
Don’t Look Now: Witches, Weird Sisters, and the Eroticism of ESP
Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 paranormal thriller Don’t Look Now, based on a Daphne du Maurier short story (and now finally released on the Criterion Collection), is one of my desert-island top 10 (probably top 5) favorite films, and it is hands down the greatest Fortean film ever made. Short of UFOs, it has everything you could […]
Coincidence, Chaos, & Archetypes in Our Science-Fictional World
You don’t have to be a hardheaded materialist skeptic or an atheist to be troubled by the idea of synchronicity. The fundamental mystery—or really, outrage—of synchronicities is they seem arranged, stage managed, in a way that is impossible without imagining an active higher intelligence taking interest in guiding us and arranging the events of the […]
