The Paranormal Part 2: Warning: Don’t watch this at home

I Know What I Saw (2009) - Full Documentary (By James Fox)

The above youTube video by James Fox is probably the best collection of testimonies I have seen from ostensively reliable witnesses who claim to have come face to face with inexplicable (aerial) objects. I don’t advise watching this video if this kind of thing causes you deep disquiet; stick with what you do understand. In fact, even a seasoned Ufologist might “confront the subject with dread” (David Jacobs, The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters 2002 edition). The witnesses in the video are not the kind of people whose claimed sighting is woven into some weird and imaginative mythology, but instead their anecdotes stand out as stark and mysterious anomalies in their otherwise relatively humdrum existences. The people concerned often remain perturbed, frightened even, by what they think they have seen. The experiences, if not the phenomena themselves, are very real, too real for comfort, in fact.

However, I don’t myself rush to conclusions about little green or grey men. UFO sightings are of similar anecdotal quality to sightings of ghosts, alien animals, little people, road ghosts, the virgin Mary, angelic encounters, ghost aircraft, ghost vehicles, cattle mutilations, alien abductions and the whole gamut of the occult. In fact, general occult anecdotes imperceptibly blend into one another and into the UFO phenomenon and form a single body of inexplicable texts that do the rounds in our society. The very bizarre nature of all these texts makes one wonder if one is even thinking about them in the right way if one expects them to unravel into a rational narrative: Welcome to the world of waking dreams. The nearest I have myself come to such bizarre accounts is when my father suffered from Charles Bonnet syndrome as he started to go blind in old age (See Part 1 of this series). If we ever solve the problem of, say, ghosts then I suspect we would also have solved the problem of UFOs and vice versa. The whole gamut of occult texts is of a piece and we must cope with them as a whole. That we must never forget.

(The first part of this series can be seen here:
 http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.com/2011/02/paranormal-part-i-noumena-cognita-or.html)