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.
So, does it become impossible to proceed straightforwardly? If we ask what we really have before us, then the usual situation is that we have a mentally functional person with memories that make no sense to us. Quite possibly there is another person who can corroborate some of the memories. For example, in a recent case we have a normal married couple who shared the opposite of a missing time experience – an added time experience, in which common tasks that should have taken hours were completed in 15 minutes. Both thought it must be late afternoon, and when it was in fact, hours earlier. To the investigator, there is no way to make sense of this, but it is also difficult to dismiss the witnesses as liars or lunatics.
While I can’t give you the answer, I can suggest that the we do not filter out these strange experiences, and that we do not concentrate solely on what the witness saw in the sky. The questions we need to ask should focus on the data we have, which nearly always is exclusively information about the witness and and their memories. What “it” was behind the memories we may never know, but I can guarantee you we will certainly never know if we jump into premature theorizing and ignore the context and related cases.
This is why I am enthused about the recent Project Core. This project attempts to look for patterns across cases and across experiencers. I am not sure they went far enough with their questions, or asked all the right ones, but it was a start, and to my knowledge the first study of its kind, and points the way to more definitive, comprehensive studies in the future. Is there anything different about high strangeness experiencers from low strangeness witnesses, from people who report no strange experiences? It’s not that we’ll find the answers there, but maybe we’ll figure out how to ask the questions.
