This is a work in progress – notes on high strangeness cases and the hope, if any of a scientific approach to them. What do we mean by high strangeness cases? I mean cases that may or may not involve anomalous aerial phenomena, but go beyond even close encounters of the third kind, and also involve unexpected elements like interactions with the witness, distortions of time, and other strange events that generally fall under the broad category of “paranormal.”
I have resisted lumping paranormal experiences with UAPs, and continue to resist this, because at face value, different categories of human experience could well admit of different explanations. However, what is common in all this is the human experiencer, and in nearly all cases all we have to study are the memories of the experiencers. In Unidentified Science 3, I talked about some of the problem with eyewitness testimony, rooted in the flaws of human perception and memory, and almost as much of a problem are our oversimplified mental models of how these work.
But this is not a reiteration of those concerns, real as they are. I want to make a point about high strangeness cases, and that is that we have no basis for dismissing them out of hand, or for ignoring the stranger elements, or for regarding the experiencers as mentally deranged. We have the experiencers, their memories, and what they are willing to tell us about themselves, and we are not justified in jumping to conclusions about the reality of the experiences. Note that I am not approaching these cases as a psychologist who wants to know how people could possibly remember such absurd things. That is one possible approach, although I don’t think it’s completely satisfying by itself. As a field investigator, I want to find the facts of the case, and we struggle with the facts, if any, masked by all the oddities.