Making Mountains out of Mashed Potatoes: UFOs as a ParaPsychological Event

In August 2010 I was contacted by an Aboriginal family who live near the Bruce Peninsula at Cape Croker, Ontario. Some members of their extended family had been invited to visit and camp out in their yard so that they could all attend the community’s annual Pow Wow together. It was late in the evening when the UFO incident occurred. Five of the family members had gathered around a bon fire to talk, and catch up, and enjoy the star filled sky. The witness stated, “We first noticed what we thought was a satellite and then it started to move strangely. It started getting bigger and bigger by the second. It looked like a star at first, it was that high up. Then we all heard strange voices inside and outside of our heads that said look up.“

The family encountered a large inexplicable ball of light or UFO that seemingly descended from some distant point in the night sky. When asked to guess the duration of the experience one of the witnesses remarked, “I do not know how long it was there, but it lit up my sister’s entire yard, and we could see the forest as if it was daylight. It made no sound and I almost feel like I lost some time. I don’t know what it could have been?” (*UFO witness, personal correspondence, August 24th 2010) All of the family members who were present that night were willing to discuss what happened with me, all acknowledged hearing an external voice urging them to look at the UFO, and all of them had felt in some way profoundly affected by their UFO encounter.

This is one example from dozens of cases that I have personally investigated in the province of Ontario, Canada that demonstrates a certain degree of what is known in UFO studies as high strangeness. The term high strangeness really is a catch-all for the often absurd and paranormal features of UFO encounters. In his 2015 groundbreaking book The Hyperspace of Consciousness, Astrophysicist, and UFO scholar Massimo Teodorani describes the importance of such reports, and the need to study them in a meaningful way.

“In reality, the witnessed cases gravitating around such light phenomena are even more intriguing than the phenomenology deduced by scientific investigation described so far. Many persons claim to feel suddenly attracted by such lights. Some even induced into telepathic contact by the light balls themselves. Of course, there are no scientific demonstrations yet of such claims, but certainly the witness statistics of such happenings is quite rich and valuable, especially when people reporting these facts are reserved and divulge their experiences privately. I have been meeting personally with such people wherever these phenomena occur.” (Teodorani, 2015 pg 206) Telepathy, disembodied voices, and other psychic experiences have been scientifically explored for more than a century via Psychical research and Parapsychology. This essay will argue that high strangeness UFO reports that include various types of psychic phenomenon may be the key to a greater understanding, or at the very least, trigger much better questions in our hope to try to understand the UFO experience.

I am not attempting to reinvent the wheel with my thoughts written here, because this has been explored previously. Historically speaking psychoanalyst and father of Depth Psychology Carl Jung was the first to seriously examine and write about UFOs as a paranormal event. In his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth, which was first published in 1958, he looked at UFO cases from the point of view of social psychology, and he concluded that they were the result of shared mental images that were triggered by social anxieties.

The foundation for paranormal based hypotheses for UFO encounters was well laid many decades ago by some of the greatest minds who took the time to investigate it. This was well discussed by scientists such as Dr J Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee in the 1970s, and both of these names should be very familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in this subject. Moving onwards UFOlogy as a whole took a free fall off an intellectual cliff beginning in the late 1980s, and has landed in the mess of Disclosure, conspiracy theories, and lack of neutrality, which is where it is mired today. What I will show is the value of the Parapsychological hypothesis and models as an approach to UFO case studies despite being neglected and virtually swept under the rug by the majority of UFOlogists. By ignoring the paranormal in UFO cases we have been left with little more than incomplete and unsatisfying attempts at explanations. 

One of the greater problems that I see within modern UFO circles and in particular those “nuts and bolts” investigators who subscribe to the ETH or extraterrestrial hypothesis as the default explanation for cases they cannot explain is the absolute dismissal of high strangeness reports. Terms like “woo woo” to describe witnesses are freely bantered about in online UFO forums, and social media including by those UFO researchers who proclaim they are taking a more scientific or neutral look at UFO events.

While I can appreciate and respect a “nut and bolts” approach to the phenomenon, the one undeniable tangible vehicle to the UFO story is the human witness. To ignore certain aspects of the experience that are described as “paranormal” by the people who witness them is an act of folly that many of the “nuts and bolts” UFOlogists tend to fall into. It is these paranormal or in my view exceptional human features of these experiences where Parapsychology can play a strong role. What I am referring to here are things such as telepathy, or ESP, synchronicity, and the apparition-like appearances and behavior of the “aliens” that are sometimes reported along with the UFO experience or sighting of what appears to the witness to be an alien craft or spaceship. This is high strangeness. The general public is actually far better acquainted with cases of high strangeness or paranormal UFO encounters through pop culture, than it is by being educated via UFO study groups or investigative organizations.

And it is cinema in particular that has given us a greater appreciation of this experience. One of my, and many others favorite UFO movies is the classic American film Close Encounters of a Third Kind. From my own perspective as a UFO researcher, Close Encounters is the seminal cinematic work for the portrayal of some of the more unusual aspects of the UFO phenomenon known as high strangeness. Much like the witnesses I interviewed in 2010 who felt compelled to look at the UFO by disembodied voices, characters within this film also felt an unusual compulsion to look for the UFOs that was coupled with paranormal or psychic phenomenon.

In this respect the film in many ways gives us a much richer appreciation and understanding of the UFO experience, and its impact on the lives of the witnesses, than much of what is being offered to us today in the way of nonfiction UFO books. Most of the current popular UFO literature offers us little to no meaningful analysis of cases or innovative ideas towards attempting to resolve the mystery. Online commentary within UFO websites and forums is not much better. The UFO discussions that occur online, when not just an echo chamber for the prevailing viewpoint of the online post’s creator, often descends into heated, and circular arguments. These do not engage anyone beyond those who might enjoy watching virtual shouting matches. I have occasionally participated in UFO study discussions through social media, and the wide held and incorrect assumption is that if you do not agree that UFOs are visiting spaceships, than you must not believe they exist at all, which is very prevalent among the ETH crowd. Their belief that UFOs must be the result of aliens is as firmly entrenched as any religious fundamentalist faith. It is all rather disappointing. 

Spielberg’s Close Encounters film was strongly influenced by the research of the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek who was a scientific advisor to the study of unidentified flying objects that was conducted by the United States Air Force and named Project Blue Book.

It is to Dr Hynek that we can attribute the term “high strangeness” which he coined in a technical paper that he presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December 1969.

Almost a decade later he addressed the United Nations on the subject of UFOs and its associated strangeness in the following way: “…a global phenomenon … so strange and foreign to our daily terrestrial mode of thought… it carries with it many implications of the existence of intelligences other than our own … [It] bespeaks the action of some form of intelligence… but whence this intelligence springs, whether it is truly extra-terrestrial, or bespeaks a higher reality not yet recognized by science, or even if it be in some way or another a strange psychic manifestation of our own intelligence, is much the question.” (Hynek, U.N. address, 1978) It is these remarks that address the “high strangeness” factor in UFO reports and therefore it is of no surprise that paranormal or psychic events were included in Spielberg’s film which Hynek served as a technical advisor on the UFO phenomenon. Poltergeist phenomena, electrical disturbances, telepathy, synchronicity, and other paranormal occurrences are experienced by multiple characters within parallel storylines in the Close Encounters film, which all converge at the meeting point with an otherworldly intelligence. Popular UFOlogy is in dire need of some intellectual curiosity and shaking up.

Forty years have passed since Hynek delivered his speech to the UN, and Spielberg released his classic UFO film. A handful of researchers most notably J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallee, Jenny Rundles, and John Keel continued on with the ideas established in the 1970s and to examine the paranormal within UFO reports, but they have been continually drowned out in favor of the ETH, conspiracy theories, and the Disclosure movement.

Currently the testimonies of UFO witnesses that describe highly strange and paranormal events that accompany their experiences are often either ignored or met with ridicule from UFOlogists who would rather not deal with the more bizarre aspects of UFO reports, and the professional skeptic organizations who are openly hostile to anything other than the Nil hypothesis ie: it’s all just swamp gas and Venus. This in my opinion is a big mistake. Dr Hynek’s friend and colleague Jacque Vallee who incidentally was the inspiration for the French scientist in Spielberg’s film, notes this error on the part of UFO investigators within the following: “UFOlogists have consistently ignored or minimized reports of seemingly absurd behaviors that contradict the ETH by selectively extracting data that best fits their agenda or version of the theory. Thus, the ETH — just like the skeptical argument — is based on anthropocentric self-selection.” (Vallee, 1990) By cherry picking reports and ignoring or being unsympathetic towards cases of high strangeness researchers are quite literally losing valuable pieces of information and data that could work towards a greater understanding of the experience as a whole. 

UFOs much like ghosts, and other similar manifestations are elusive. The late anomalies scholar Hilary Evans noted this within his comparative study of entity cases. UFO pilots, religious visions, and ghostly visitors, also have a lot in common in how they appear, the circumstances in which they are experienced, and the overall effects they have had on their witnesses.

UFOs are occasionally measurable via radar signatures or leave physical traces this idea that they are at least partially psychic has been loudly denounced by the mainstream UFO crowd. This is a false assumption because the same state of being physical and psychic has also been noted in experiences perceived as ghosts of the dead, visions of the Holy Mother, and more complex paranormal manifestations such as the poltergeist. They do occasionally produce physically measurable phenomena like UFOs. These have been documented within the literature of scientific parapsychology.

In 1952 a twelve year old girl who was living with her family in Port Dalhousie, Ontario was woken up in the middle of the night by an odd humming noise. She got out of her bed with a strong compulsion to go to the window. Looking out she saw a sky filled with strange lights and disc shaped UFOs. The next morning she told her family about what she had seen, and her brother in particular told her to wake him up should that ever happen again. And it did. That very next evening the entire episode including humming and the urgent feeling to go to the window repeated itself, including the UFOs. This time she did run out of her room to alert her family and mysteriously as hard as she tried to she could not awaken them. The odd hum that she clearly recalls having heard externally while awake, on both nights, and therefore denotes a physical sound was not repeated, nor has it been ever adequately explained.

I interviewed this witness who is now a retired professional in 2014, and she recounted other UFO experiences that had occurred throughout her life, which included synchronicity and other psychic elements. She believes that what happened at the age of twelve set the stage so to speak for later events in her life and that the inability to wake up her family signifies that the experience was meant for her alone. This continuation of various types of paranormal encounters is not unusual among UFO witnesses. “Throughout my life I have had one foot here, and another foot over there, she says.”

This references the book Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallee, which was published in 1969 and recounts many high strange cases. (*UFO witness, correspondence, and telephone interviews, 2014) In a letter dated August 24th 1977 Allen Hynek wrote to Iris Owen who along with her husband Dr George Owen founded The Toronto Society for Psychical Research later to become New Horizons Research Foundation. Hynek had expressed a keen interest in an experiment in Psychokinesis, which became known as the Phillip Experiment. 

From his letter: “Your work at the Foundation has certainly shown that the mind can influence physical matter — Phillip, table-tipping, poltergeist phenomena —all attest to this. I am being driven, somewhat reluctantly to the feeling that many UFOs are caused by our own psychic energy interacting with matter somehow.” (Hynek, personal correspondence, 1977) If we consider this from a Parapsychological perspective and apply it to the Port Dalhousie case from 1952, we can speculate on the paranormal aspects of the experience as being centered in the mind of the 12 year old witness as opposed to what was seen in the sky, much like a poltergeist focus, which has been well studied within Parapsychology. 

The focus person of a poltergeist is an individual, usually within the literature a teenager, but this is not always the case, that is going through some emotional turmoil, and who is unable to express this due to the social dynamics they find themselves in. To explore this idea further we would need to make a deeper examination of the witness, preferably at the time of the event, and her family, and the circumstances of her life at the time of her UFO experience. 

Were the UFOs she witnessed a psychic manifestation and a cry for attention or help, which was unanswered by the family she could not wake up? Is this a case of a poltergeist manifesting itself as a UFO event, and possible precognition at the very dawn of the space race? Two decades after Hynek originally wrote to the Psychical Research Society in Toronto, his colleague Jacques Vallee co-authored a paper with Eric Davis, which expands on Hynek’s idea.

An excerpt from their paper Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness; A 6-layer Model for Anomalous Phenomena: “Everything works as if UAPs [unidentified aerospace phenomenon] were the products of a technology that integrates physical and psychic phenomena and primarily affects cultural variables in our society through manipulation of physiological and psychological parameters in the witnesses.” (Vallee, Davis 2001) Furthermore, in discussing the challenges of high strangeness the authors express the following: “The rational study of reported cases of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (UAP) is currently at an impasse. 

This situation has as much to do with the incomplete state of our models of physical reality as it does with the complexity of the data. A primary objection to the reality of UAP events among scientists is that witnesses consistently report objects whose seemingly absurd behavior “cannot possibly” be related to actual phenomena, even under extreme conditions. Skeptics insist that intelligent extraterrestrial (ETI) visitors simply would not perpetrate such antics as are reported in the literature. 

This argument can be criticized as an anthropocentric, self-selected observation resulting from our own limited viewpoint as 21st century Homo sapiens trying to draw conclusions about the nature of the universe. Nonetheless, the high strangeness of many reports must be acknowledged.” (Vallee, Davis, 2003) By acknowledging the high strangeness factor there is no doubt that UFO cases involving paranormal elements would be well served by utilising Parapsychology models for analysis.

Here Davis and Vallee make the strong argument for new and more innovative hypotheses as part of a multidiscipline approach to studying UFOs: “In the view of the authors, the current hypotheses are not strange enough to explain the facts of the phenomenon, and the debate suffers from a lack of scientific information.” (Vallee, Davis, 2001) This statement echoes the sentiments of Massimo Teodorani that I quoted earlier. They also argue that UAP or in others words UFOs can be thought of both as physical and as psychic. “We hope that it will prove stimulating as a unified approach to a puzzling phenomenon that presents both undeniable physical effects suggesting a technological device or craft and psychic effects reminiscent of the literature on poltergeists and psychokinetic phenomena.” (Vallee, Davis 2001) “Nuts and bolts” UFOlogists portray themselves as being scientifically minded. In this regard I would challenge them to consider what some professional scientists who have looked into UFOs have had to say in regards to high strangeness. One of the first scientific field investigations of UFOs was known as Project Identification conducted by Dr Harry Rutledge, and it has been well documented that several synchronicities were noted throughout the study. 

Astrophysicist Massimo Teodorani comments on Rutledge’s work and shares a similar experience of his own, while musing on the possibility is a “mind-matter creation” ie: a Parapsychological event: “Another point of great interest, which has been often experienced, is a synchronicity phenomenon between an observer and the apparition of anomalous light forms in the sky this occurred to scientists, too. For instance, to the group directed by physicist Harley Rutledge in 1973-1980 when he was scientifically monitoring a recurrent light phenomenon occurring in Piedmont, Missouri, USA. Rutledge himself experienced synchronic events many times, and if I must be honest and sincere this happened to me, too, 15 years ago. It happens that we suddenly turn our sight to a specific point of the sky and there see the (generally star-like) light.

This is a clear example of synchronicity, and sometimes (as it has been already mentioned) of telepathy too. The question who or what triggers this and why? Or is the light created as an archetypal form from our own consciousness due to reasons we don’t know yet, but where, once more, mind-matter coalescence occurs suddenly as a micro-creation effect? Therefore, this is a topic we should consider deeply, because it might be the signature of something extremely important that opens many doors to a supernal knowledge, and technology too. “(Teodorani, 2015 pp 208-209) 

Parapsychology has a lengthy history in studying phenomena that is both physical and psychic such as the poltergeist and this can be extended to the examination of UFO experience. Having been both immersed in the study of UFO encounters and paranormal phenomenon such as poltergeists I can confidently say there are parallels to both, and this is currently being overlooked by most of UFOlogy.

This was also Scott Rogo’s conclusion. Rogo was one of the only parapsychologists to actively examine UFO encounters and he noted several commonalities between the UFO experience and poltergeist outbreaks. One example would be that UFO witnesses have reported that they have both thought of or talked about UFOs and then later go on to see one. Sometimes they feel a strong urge to look in a certain direction and it is at that moment they experience a UFO. This can be interpreted as precognitive or synchronicity in action. Rogo went on to publish his findings in the book entitled The Haunted Universe. “In the spring of 1966 a young couple who were renting a small house in a semi-forested area of Woodstock in New York State noticed six greenish lights of about 6 feet in diameter in a nearby field. On another occasion they saw something flying close to their car and move towards a wooded area while making a high-pitch sound like a vacuum cleaner droning. They heard these sounds many times over a period of several months. Then, one afternoon the sound seemed to stop moving and stayed stationary over the house. The woman looked at all the electrical equipment in the house and could not find a source. It seemed to be located in one of the house’s walls. The couple verified that from outside of the house they could not see anything strange on the wall. But when they looked around at a nearby field, they saw a green light and a smaller red one moving away from each other until they disappeared. They were frightened by the experience, but that was not all that was going to happen. They also heard a man’s voice and the sounds of someone walking. They were really panicked at that point, but the noise and sound eventually stopped. The next day, they noticed that the grass near their house was flat and scorched, and it did not improve much during the entire summer.” (Ouellet, 2015 pp 25-26) Was this a UFO encounter or was it a poltergeist? Clearly it is both.

UFOs accounts much like dreams seem to contain a symbolic message that does not appear to mean necessarily what their content conveys. These experiences of precognition, synchronicity and the expressing of one’s thoughts in absurd ways have also been noted during poltergeist disturbances. “For example, someone who wants to leave the house after having enough of the disturbance finds his shoes in the freezer. “ (Ouellet, 2015 pg 29) Within my own research I have noted that the falling leaf pattern is something that is seen in both unidentified objects in the sky, and experienced during poltergeist manifestations of objects that appear to be pushed or dropped by unseen hands. (Demeter-St Clair 2016) In light of these similarities, it is unfortunate that the subject of UFOs remains highly contentious among Parapsychologists. The website for the professional association for Parapsychology quite clearly states they do not intake or investigate UFO reports. Part of this reluctance can certainly be laid at the doorstep of more outlandish UFO groups that maintain without any scientific evidence that the ETH is the only explanation for UFOs, and that any minute now governments of the world will confirm this for them, or the aliens themselves will make their presence globally known. The lack of intellectual discourse within popular UFOlogy and the steadfastness held to beliefs will understandably serve as a deterrent to most professionals. 

Eric Ouellet the Canadian liaison for the Parapsychological Association is one of the few exceptions within the study that is chipping away at this. Eric has created the social scientific discipline Parasociology, and he is primarily focused on exploring how societies interact with telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis or PSI. His first book on the subject Illuminations: The UFOs as a Parapsychological event gives us fresher ideas to examine by introducing the hypothesis are UFO encounters, including UFO waves a direct result of Social PSI? PSI is the anomalous phenomenon studied by Parapsychology and generally falls into two categories (ESP) or psychic phenomenon, and Psychokinesis (PK) physical phenomenon. Social PSI includes the social dynamics for which the experience takes place. When applied to individual cases and different UFO flaps some interesting insights and patterns begin to emerge. This premise builds on the ideas of Jung, and Vallee. This works well with Jacque Vallee and Scott Rogo’s findings also, that UFO witnesses tend to see what they are culturally conditioned to expect, and in a precognitive way that occasionally seems to anticipate future technology.

Ouellet writes: “People saw airships in the skies of North America at the end of the 19th century, a few years before they were flown; Scandinavian’s saw many ghost rockets in the sky just after the end of World War II and before much more powerful rockets were available to reach Scandinavia; a few years before the launch of the space age with the Soviet Sputnik satellite many people saw things in the sky that were interpreted as spaceships.” (Ouellet, 2015 pg 28-29) Could these UFOs have been apparitions of future events? One of the strongest cases for Social PSI as an explanation for a UFO wave is the Belgium flap that began on November 29, 1989 and lasted until March 1991. This UFO flap is very well defined in its time frame, and it was thoroughly documented as it was happening by both military and civilian authorities, including UFO researchers, all of whom displayed an unprecedented level of cooperation in investigation efforts.

There were numerous multi-witness reports that included various shapes and sizes of both UFOs and humanoid “aliens,” but the most commonly reported UFO was a dark triangular shape with a very bright white light in each corner and a weaker red light in the middle of the triangle.

On November 9th 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, and this set the stage for the ensuing rapid collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. While mostly non-violent there was no way for people living through it to predict the turn these events could take, and it should not be difficult to imagine the anxiety, fear, and uncertainty they were experiencing. If we consider the turbulence of the time period throughout Europe, and include the USSR, which was experiencing a similar concurrent UFO wave, the hypothesis that the UFOs were born of social upheaval becomes tangible. Instead of an individual poltergeist focus person, we have entire societies contributing to a psychic manifestation in the sky that mirrors in a very symbolic way the political and military unrest occurring on the ground. When considering the Belgium wave and the Social PSI hypothesis put forward by Ouellet UFO scholar David Halperin asks: “Can it be coincidence that Belgium, so singularly favored by the UFOs of 1989-90–sightings seemed to stop at the German and French borders–housed the headquarters of NATO in its capital Brussels? 

That the NATO symbol was (and is) a white star, while the red star was a symbol of Communism? That the most common type of Belgian UFO displayed a Jungian-style quaternity of three bright white stars (lights) surrounding a faint red star?” (Halperin, 2016) In my opinion this adds a dimension of synchronicity or a meaningful coincidence to these UFO events, and that does according to the scholarly literature play a strong role in the overall UFO experience. Could the Belgium wave have been a societal cry of help to NATO by a population that had been living under Communist rule and undergoing very uncertain times? Like individual poltergeist cases where the focus person is unable to express their anxiety in a more conventional sense, we can through the lenses of Parasociology speculate as to the effect this historic time had on people collectively and how it may have then in turn manifested as a UFO wave over NATO headquarters.

In order to reframe the UFO debate we need to formulate new models for analyzing existing and incoming data, and introduce innovative hypotheses by asking better questions than have already been asked.

I have given examples from professional scientists, and scholars, of varied disciplines, that like Allen Hynek before them, made a serious scientific study of UFOs and they came to similar conclusions regarding them. Their findings that do encompass the totality of the UFO experience including its elusive nature, high strangeness or paranormal aspects, and absurdity serves to strengthen the need for the involvement of Parapsychology and Parasociological based hypotheses and models as part of a multi-discipline approach in order to thoroughly examine UFO events. By not doing so, the current state of UFOlogy has not been sufficiently examining the experience. The steadfast clinging to the ETH is more a faith among some UFO enthusiasts that is masquerading as a hypothesis. And this is also the case of UFO skeptics that apply the NIL hypotheses as the only possible explanation for unresolved cases. This is harmful to the subject as a whole, and it certainly does nothing to further the progress of our knowledge, and our studies.

More importantly in my opinion willfully ignoring high strangeness cases or worse dismissing them as “woo woo” does a disservice to the UFO witnesses who have shared their experiences with those of us who study it. The Parapsychological hypothesis is admittedly not new, but it has been virtually ignored by the popular UFO crowd in favour of the ETH, and this unwillingness to consider anything else, while ignoring the high strangeness factor has allowed the entire field of study to stagnate. Parapsychological based hypotheses and models can more fully address the complexity, human and social dynamics of this rich and enigmatic experience. It can do this in a more flexible way than any of the current beliefs, including the ETH, because it allows for the objective and the subjective to have influence over one another while accepting the very well established physical and psychic nature of UFO events. By acknowledging the high strangeness and absurdity of UFO encounters and viewing them through these lenses we can finally begin a forward momentum. The Parapsychological hypothesis does not end with itself; it actually opens up and encourages exciting new possibilities within UFO research.

Source: https://susandemeter.wordpress.com/2019/10/10/making-mountains-out-of-mashed-potatoes-ufos-as-a-parapsychological-event/