The Uncontrollable/Unknowable Aspects of the Paranormal: PSI, UFOs, et cetera

My brilliant “friend” Eric Wargo persists in trying to corral PSI [parapsychological or psychic faculties or phenomena] at his web-site, thenightshirt.com

The task is daunting but Eric’s erudition makes for an abstruse clarification of PSI that I’m wholly ill-equipped to conjure with, mentally.

But the problem isn’t confined to understanding PSI and attendant phenomena, such as UFOs or ghosts or anything remotely connected by being a weird representation of the unreal; unreal in the sense of reality as common folk understand reality.

The problem arises from the nature of the “beasts.”

PSI and its affiliated brethren of the fringe are evanescent, ephemeral in essence.

To try and understand PSI or UFOs is akin to trying to catch fog in your hands. One can get a slightly wet hand but nothing more. Fog dissipates upon contact.

My Facebook friend Greg Newkirk also pursues the amorphous elements that haunt our imaginations. He’s a ghost hunter and seeker of UFO ephemera. [See weekinweird.com for his exploits.]

But both men, try as they might, are left, hat in hand, as it were, with a kind of understanding of their obsessional interests but little else, I’m sorry to report.

It has always been thus, and while I applaud their efforts and thinking, I’m chagrinned by the effortful failure of their intellectual and/or physical pursuits.

Like ufology, trying to rein in PSI or ghosts will ultimately prove futile. (Ask our friend Paul Kimball who has also spent time and money pursuing spirits of the dead.)

As Shakespeare’s Hamlet says to his friend Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" and there is the caveat, Within Any Possible Universe, No Intellect Can Ever Know It All which is illuminated here:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/limits-on-human-comprehension/

Curiosity is a strange and dangerous thing as we all know, but I’m pleased that a few people I admire are not deterred by the debilitating and vain results of what are edifying effort(s) to explain the unknown, and unknowable.

RR