Within the past few months, my wife and I have observed orbs from a distance outside our apartment window. A few weeks ago, I started hearing strange noises while walking my dog.
One evening, as the pup and I made our way inside, a pair of red eyes peered out from behind the trees. Whatever entity these eyes belonged to was over eight feet tall and managed to scare the living shit out of me.
The sightings and experiences I have had throughout my life are very real to me. I’d like to think I have a pretty stable head on my shoulders, but these types of high strangeness events can easily cause someone to question their own sanity. However, the fact that I shared some of these experiences with other individuals makes me think there is something to our common reality that we do not understand.
This has led me to the idea that there is a spectrum of experiences, and therefore experiencers. There appears to be some specific attribute possessed by certain individuals that leave them more open — or perhaps vulnerable — to paranormal phenomena.
Throughout my discussions with individuals who have experienced the UFO phenomenon, and paranormal phenomena in general, a theme has begun to emerge. Many of these experiencers seem to have gone through some kind of traumatic event, often in childhood.
I myself am an example of this.
I came into this world with illicit substances in my system. The first two years of my life were spent in a home filled with drug addiction, literal death, and general chaos. I went unattended in my crib as the people who were supposed to take care of me nodded off for hours. I was exposed to some of the darkest aspects of humanity at a time when I needed nurturing the most.
I was eventually adopted by my aunt (who I consider my mother) at two years old and moved across the country, far away from the horrors of addiction and psychological mayhem that I luckily have no memory of today. I went on to grow up very privileged, and I’ve been given every opportunity to be successful, admittedly with mixed results.
This isn’t to say that experiencing trauma automatically means you will see UFOs or other paranormal phenomena. There are no doubt many without traumatic experience who have seen them, and many who have been through hell and back who have not.
That being said, the presence of trauma in experiencers seems too common to dismiss as just a coincidence.
The mainstream UFO conversation has focused mostly on the nuts and bolts aspect of these seemingly physical, vehicular craft over the decades. In my opinion, this is likely due to the desire for a tangible platform for debate that a shared material reality can provide.
This makes sense as the more psychological “high strangeness” aspects of this phenomenon are nearly impossible to reproduce from a scientific standpoint and can be easily written off as a figment of the witness’s imagination.
Though this situation may seem reasonable from the perspective of legitimate public debate, ignoring such accounts of high strangeness dismisses a mountain of potentially useful data that could be helpful in augmenting the information provided by mechanical sensors like radar.
For example, there exist countless reports of biological effects on the human body from military and intelligence officials that may provide more insight into the propulsion mechanisms and materials of which these craft are composed.
That data can only come from those who experience the phenomenon, and writing these individuals off as kooks or discouraging the reporting of symptoms may turn out to be a massive mistake by the government in the long run.
Reports of high strangeness extend far beyond the usual UFO encounters to include such controversial and stigmatized subjects as ghosts, poltergeists, and cryptids. Many ufologists and skeptics alike would prefer to ignore reports that bigfoot sightings are often accompanied by orbs, or the “hitchhiker effect” from Skinwalker Ranch that several credible individuals experienced after returning home.
Luckily, there are some experts in psychology who are starting to look into certain paranormal aspects of high-strangeness experiences.
A group of psychologists recently completed a five-year research program into the paranormal. The main purpose of these studies was “to build a better understanding of hauntings and related paranormal phenomena.” This program resulted in twenty peer-reviewed papers and a book detailing their findings.
One of the main theories that came out of these findings was dubbed, “Haunted People Syndrome.” The paper on this hypothesis discusses the beliefs, ideologies, social aspects, and environmental settings of the experiencer when it comes to the perception of anomalous phenomena.
Evidence suggests that subjective and objective anomalies associated with ghostly episodes form a unidimensional Rasch scale and that these interconnected “signs or symptoms” arguably describe a syndrome model. This view predicts that symptom perception—that is, the phenomenology of these anomalous episodes—can be markedly skewed by an experient’s psychological set. This is impacted, in turn, by psychosocial variables that affect attentional, perceptual, and interpretational processes.
Therefore, we present an overview that discusses how (a) Belief in the Paranormal, (b) Religious Ideology, (c) Ideological Practice, (d) Social Desirability, (e) Latency, and (f) Environmental Setting ostensibly influence the contents or interpretations of accounts. These experiential details are similarly expected to reveal insights into the psychodynamics being expressed or contextualized via these narratives.
Future research in this area should help to validate and clarify the proposed syndrome model, as well as explore which nuances in the phenomenology of ghostly episodes reflect idiosyncrasies of experients’ psychological set versus the nature of the core phenomenon itself.
Right off the bat, I believe these authors should be applauded for taking the experiences of these individuals seriously. This strategy also echoes the work of Dr. Garry Nolan and Dr. Kit Green, who have studied the health effects of these encounters on humans in order to better understand the phenomena itself.
The authors also acknowledge that “this issue is not trivial, as surveys show that we are dealing with an ongoing and widespread behavioral phenomenon.” Recognizing a phenomenon exists in the first place, and not just postulating an explanation like psychosis or mass hysteria, is a major step when it comes to studying this subject as an issue distinct from mental illness.
They argue that “when misunderstood, these experiences can fundamentally contribute to misdiagnosis due to arcane content that often resembles positive symptoms in schizophrenia or schizotypal personality disorder.”
One especially intriguing and relevant paragraph focuses on the theory of transliminality, which is a “hypothesized tendency for psychological material to cross (trans) thresholds (limines) into or out of consciousness.” Individuals who have developed this trait more fully appear to have “a hyper-sensitivity to psychological material originating in (a) the unconscious and/or (b) the external environment.”
From a neurological perspective, it appears neuroplasticity and the levels of interconnectivity in the brain play a major role in transliminality.
Authors of published studies often cite the original definition, but the transliminality construct has been further refined in terms of state or trait neuroplasticity — referring here to enhanced, and perhaps adaptive, interconnectedness between brain hemispheres, as well as among frontal cortical loops, temporal-limbic structures, and primary or secondary sensory areas or sensory association cortices.
This more detailed description and the related hypothesis is supported by numerous studies showing that scores on the Revised Transliminality Scale consistently and positively correlate with measures of syncretic cognitions, or the dedifferentiation (or fusion) of perceptual qualities in subjective experience.
Chief examples of these cognitions include eidetic imagery (fusion of imagery and perception, i.e., structural eidetic imagery); physiognomic perception (fusion of perception and feeling); and synesthesia (fusion of sensory modalities).
The correlation between the connection of brain regions with the susceptibility to anomalous experiences may sound familiar to anyone paying attention to the UFO subject in recent years.
As previously mentioned, the research on military UFO experiencers by Dr. Nolan and Dr. Green focused on the biological effects of these craft on the human body. As they were studying the MRI scans of these individuals, they found a pattern that was too consistent to ignore.
These MRIs showed a common trait shared by many of these government officials involving the connectivity between two areas of the brain called the caudate and putamen. The brain scans seemed to show a super-connectivity between the two regions, and they found this attribute to be the result of genetics rather than an interaction with a UFO.
He explained this study and its implications in a recent interview last year.
Nolan: I was introduced to others who were, I think you people call them the Invisible College. It was people like Jacques, people like Hal Puthoff, Eric Davis, Robert Bigelow, and Colm Kelleher. Then they showed me MRIs of some of these people and most of those people had interactions with UFOs. These were Department of Defense and intelligence people, so supposedly and reasonably credible individuals.
So in looking at the MRIs of some of these people, we noticed an area of the brain that seemed to be disturbed, let’s say, or different in many of these individuals. So it’s an area that I’ve talked about before between the head of the caudate and putamen that had increased neural density. It was larger in all these individuals.
So you just ask the question, “Okay, what’s unique about these individuals?” Well, they’re all highly functioning and have to make snap decisions, so what is that? That’s intuition. One way to explain it would be intuition, or just highly intelligent.
Then, surprisingly, when we looked into the family members, we found that the family members had it, which was fascinating. So that means that structure had a genetic component, whatever it was.
Interviewer: Here’s a question. Do you have a genetic and phenotypic predisposition to seeing the UFOs or, post-contact, do you now have a more neuronally dense caudate nucleus and putamen?
Nolan: No, I don’t think it’s changed. They’re just able to, as you say, see it. They’re able to recognize it for what it might be and not dismiss it.
Interviewer: Maybe it’s allowing us to kind of widen the doors of our normal limited scope of perception. You’re seeing these UFOs that exist kind of interstitially in reality that other people just can’t see.
Nolan: Our senses are a filter to stop our brains from being overwhelmed with reality, so what we see is a limited aspect of everything around us.
Interviewer: But that is a different model of reality than people currently have today, but it’s one that I’m sympathetic to, which is that the sensory organs are not necessarily productive, they’re reductive.
Nolan: Oh yeah, absolutely, they’re reductive.
Interviewer: On a default state of almost greater omniscience but an inability to make sense of things.
Nolan: I just don’t know whether or not it is an antenna or anything like that. It just allows us to interpret better. So for instance, there’s a form of Japanese chess which is a smaller number of pieces, et cetera. So they took masters in this and they set up brainwave to figure out what area of the brain might be involved with intuitive moves, where you basically make the unexpected, but brilliant, correct move, and at those moments the caudate and putamen lit up. I find that fascinating.
We’re actually working on using both autism and schizophrenics. Because in this area of the brain in both autism and schizophrenia, can be damaged. But if you think a little bit about it, schizophrenics hear things and see things that nobody else sees. So are they all crazy?
Interviewer: Well that goes into the transmission theory. I think schizophrenics just, it’s like a transmitter being broken or oscillating between different frequencies.
Nolan: They can’t turn it off.
What Nolan is describing here sounds an awful lot like the level of interconnectedness between brain regions in the highly-transliminal individuals discussed in the paper on Haunted People Syndrome.
The fact that high-functioning individuals like fighter pilots and intelligence officers — whose jobs and lives literally depend on their intuition — are reporting these encounters makes one wonder if these traits may signify an enhanced perceptual ability when it comes to paranormal phenomena.
Although it is intriguing that these high-functioning individuals may seem more likely to have some kind of wider perception of reality, obviously not everyone who experiences the paranormal has the IQ or reflexes of a fighter pilot. In fact, I think it’s safe to say a vast majority do not.
Are there other avenues for people to have these experiences that appear to lay on the edges of human sensory perception?
Are there additional routes to access what some may call the “other side?”
Recall what was said in the paper on Haunted People Syndrome when it comes to transliminality, the notion of having “permeable mental boundaries” and how neuroplasticity plays a role in this.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of neural networks to re-wire themselves as the body grows and changes, and is most active in childhood during early development. As our brain continues to wire itself so it can learn what to perceive, many factors can influence the end result.
The paper briefly explores the idea of childhood experiences when it comes to the paranormal.
Emerging research suggests there is a continuum of “encounter proneness” that is grounded in transliminality (or permeable mental boundaries). Thus, haunt-type experiences and those who report them are not randomly distributed. We accordingly propose that clinicians approach these occurrences as transliminal perceptions, and in extreme cases, perhaps as transliminal “dramas.” However, this does not mean that expressions of HP-S are inherently or entirely “negative” or unpleasant in their content or interpretation.
Rather than restrict transliminality to a diathesis-stress perspective, this perceptual-personality variable might be better viewed within the framework of differential susceptibility, that is, a predisposition toward worse outcomes in adverse contexts and better outcomes in positive or supportive contexts.
This extends the developmental perspective of a loose mental boundary structure, which suggests that the impact of high levels may be affected by early childhood experiences. Relatedly, people with high sensory processing sensitivity have been profiled as “Orchids,” “flourishing” when raised in healthy and supportive environments, but likewise more vulnerable to the effects of inadequate care (i.e., “Dandelions”). This view parallels McCreery and Claridge’s idea of “happy transliminals,” or people who are functional despite, or perhaps even in part because of, their “anomalous experiences.”
The authors appear to be exploring the idea that anomalous experiences, and their interpretation, are largely influenced by an individual’s environment during childhood. This is an important point to the discussion here for several reasons.
The neuroplasticity of childhood experience, along with cultural influence, may influence how one interprets UFO and other paranormal phenomena. Many describe the beings they see as angelic, while others seem to have what amount to interactions with demonic forces.
A predisposition to a positive anomalous experience due to a nurturing environment during early brain development may present itself as the former. The latter may be a result of negative expectations due to traumatic circumstances during childhood.
But what do we make of the seemingly larger distribution of experiences among those exposed to trauma?
One common factor that influences neuroplasticity is psychological stress. The brain of a child who is exposed to violence, abuse, or neglect will adapt to survive in those conditions and protect the individual as much as possible.
In my opinion, this unconsciously developed instinct for protecting oneself from ongoing threats may raise the individual’s awareness of their environment somewhat permanently. If one is more aware of their surroundings on a consistent basis, the chances of noticing some kind of anomalous entity or craft existing on the edge of reality would most likely increase.
A person with a brain that did not develop in a stressful, threatening environment would also be able to ignore anomalous experiences without consequence. These anomalies may just go unnoticed, as they wouldn’t be interpreted as something requiring an explanation in order for the individual to feel safe.
Whatever the case, when it comes to UFOs and paranormal phenomena it is clear that subjective experience and how the brain is wired play a huge role in how these beings, craft, or general high strangeness are perceived. Neuroplasticity in early childhood development is a major factor in how our brains work, and our environment fundamentally affects the outcome of that process.
Traumatic experiences during childhood may raise awareness of threats permanently, including — and perhaps, especially — on the edge of our perceptible reality.
