Seeing Things

That human beings have seen odd things, since time immemorial, is evidenced by their noting (recording) their observations, sometimes, even providing proof” of their observations by drawing or painting what they saw or think they saw.

There are countless examples in the lore that has accumulated within the “literature” of ufology. (I needn’t remind you of that literature, I hope.)

But what about the examples of odd things seen and notated in the psychiatric and psychological literature, and lately in the annals of neurology?

Even the pastiche of journalistic examples is large, although too dispersed to be helpful to those wishing to cite the reportage.

My point is that we have, at our disposal, a quantity of records that indicate a lot of people have seen and reported observations of things that are outside the normal reality.

Skeptics, such as Zoam Chomsky, Gilles Fernandez, Robert Sheaffer, and Tim Printy, scoff at the tales of odd sightings that people have related to others.

And while some of those sightings may well be hallucinatory or neurological glitches, all cannot surely be set aside as malfunctions of sight or brain.

Or tales told by idiots.

As Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Cal Tech, writes in his book The Big Picture [Dutton/Penguin Random House, NY, 2016], “ … an eliminativist will say ‘and therefore they are illusions,’ while the poetic naturalist says, ‘but they are no less real for all of that.’” [Page 20]

(I shall have much more to say about physicist Carroll’s book upcoming. He differentiates the Big Bang from the Big Bang Model, the former, the Big Bang, an enigma to science, the Model explaining what happened after the Big Bang.)

I looked through Aubeck/Vallee’s Wonders in the Sky for sightings similar or like that noted in my January 14^th posting about the event reported by Micah Hanks, involving a military man, Steven, who, with others, were encompassed by a huge, black something-or-other that encompassed the island he and others were on, but faded from view when sunrise occurred.

The incident appears to be unique. While here were a few early recorded sightings with similar meteorological attributes, I found none that had the intensity recalled by Steven from his 1988 sighting.

Then there are sightings and weird episodes listed by Albert Rosales in his new 1900-1929 Humanoid Encounters book, many remembered rather than appearing originally in their time-frame.

The Rosales’ accounts have to be digested with the memory caveats intrinsic to recalled events, but the tales intrigue, whether bungled or confabulated because of their distance from the time they allegedly occurred to the time of their (re)telling, but not discounted out-of-hand.

(You know I believe that people report what they see rather accurately, even taking into account the vicissitudes of observational malfunction, the core of their observations intact pretty much.)

Odd things occur outside the normal scheme of things – ghosts, obtuse entities, UFOs, et al. – and we have to accept them as actual or part and parcel of what is known as the paranormal environment.

The world is fraught with odd incidents and oblique happenings, observations, and queer events. It always has been, as indicated by religious texts, mythical tales, and recorded history.

People see things….normal people, not just psychotics.

To discount their recollections and reportage is not scientific, or sensible.

RR