Alternate Perceptions Magazine, November 2023
An Interview with Marie D. Jones:
UFOs, the Paranormal, & Quantum Physics4
by: Brent Raynes
Editor’s Note: This great interview from the November 2006 (#106) edition of this magazine was quite thought-provoking and since I don’t have a fresh new interview for this issue, I’m going to re-release this one. Hope you all enjoy it! It’s UFOs, paranormal, and quantum physics content.
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Marie D. Jones, author of the newly published PSIence: How New Discoveries in Quantum Physics and New Science May Explain the Existence of Paranormal Phenomena, has been involved with the paranormal for most of her life, including over fifteen years as a trained field investigator for both MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) and CUFOS (Center For UFO Studies), and a member of Fate Magazine’s research community. She also formed two UFO/paranormal research organizations in Southern California.
Marie is a licensed New Thought/Metaphysics minister and pastoral counselor, holding a Master’s Degree in Metaphysical Studies. Currently she is pursuing a Doctor of Divinity status. She has studied Wicca, Hermetica, goddess traditions, mythology and comparative religion.
A screenwriter, magazine writer and book reviewer, and the author and co-author of over three dozen inspirational books, this prolific writer maintains a personal website at: www.mariedjones.com. Also a blog at: psience.blogspot.com. Marie welcomes emails: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Editor: Marie, I really like your recently published book, PSIence. The theoretical physicists should find your own investigative and scientific journey to isolate a (to borrow a term from their field) "Theory for Everything" quite thought-provoking and potentially important. There's a wonderful overview of the latest and the fascinating variety of physics theories to be found in your chapter "Quantum Physics 101," as well as your inclusion of much parapsychological, cryptozoological and ufological data, emphasizing their potential interconnections, all of which to me shows great insight and clarity of focus on your part.
Please share with our readers some about yourself, how you came to write this book, and what you hope that this book and its message will convey to its readers. Marie Jones: I’ve always been interested in the paranormal, and in metaphysics, from the time I was old enough to read, which was about age 2. My whole life has been about looking into things, trying to find connections and patterns. I’m a curious kid at heart, always wanting to know what’s under the rock. I read five or six books a week, and I devour ideas voraciously. I tend to be a concept-oriented person, as are most writers, always envisioning (and chasing down) the overall bigger picture. Over the last ten years I’d been reading a lot about quantum and theoretical physics, and how some of the most cutting edge research was pointing to an underlying truth about reality that seemed connected to human consciousness and perception. And, as always seems to happen to me when I get “hooked” on a subject, other books began falling into my lap on the same subjects, and people sort of mysteriously appeared in my life with more pieces of a puzzle I was beginning to feel a tremendous desire to put together. That led to the writing of this book, which I hope will serve as a potential springboard for further inquiry and open-minded discussion. I want readers to get excited about these concepts, maybe even expand upon them and delve deeper into them on their own time. Ultimately, I hope the book conveys that we have the potential to understand much of what we deem reality if we keep an open mind and look for connections where others might fail to see them.
Having grown up the daughter of a scientist, I have a tremendous love and respect for science (my next book is about super-volcanoes!) and believe it can indeed explain everything we see around us, including the supernatural and paranormal. The problem lies not with science, but with scientists who haven’t caught up yet to what nature is trying to tell us, to what human experience is trying to tell us. The supernatural is simply the natural not yet understood, to paraphrase Elbert Hubbard.
Editor: Can you share with us some of the most interesting, personal case investigations of UFO and paranormal phenomena that you've been involved with yourself?
Marie Jones: As for cases I’ve investigated, three stand out the most. One involved a guy who entered a very unusual fog bank and experienced missing time. His experience sounded very much like the Time Storm reports of Jenny Randles’ research. The guy was incredibly articulate and intelligent, yet when he would discuss this event, he would become almost childlike, very afraid, very apprehensive. Yet he did not want to use hypnosis to try to find out what happened during the missing time. This was at the hey-day of abductions, and I was friends and colleagues with Yvonne Smith at the time, who was just starting to work with abductees. What made this case so interesting for me was the fact it took place on a military base and a couple of years later, my husband and I were passing through the same area and encountered a weird orange fog, but we didn’t lose any timeÉat least none that we know of! Sadly, I lost contact with this person, who had become a friend, after I moved to L.A. a few years ago, then back to San Diego.
The second case involved family members who had had UFO sightings before. One day they were driving in a remote area of the county (San Diego) and came up to a very slow car they could not get around. At the first opportunity to pass the car, they did so, only to find that the occupants of the slow moving car were anything but human. They described them as having extremely long, drawn out faces, almost mask-like, but real, with eyes that just stared blankly ahead. Weeks later, these same family members experienced other UFO sightings and had their home and business buzzed by black helicopters. After about a year, their alien encounters seemed to come to an end and we could never quite figure out why, other than the fact that the area they lived in was at the time being developed and became much less remote. Their experiences, though, were highly unusual because they three family members all had repeated sightings and was my first experience with contagion I had my own sighting at the same time in La Costa, although I am still not sure what the heck I saw. It was an object moving through the dusk sky at rapid speed, one end flipping over the other end! It looked like a big square slinky!
The third involved a poltergeist case that really launched my total obsession with the occult for about ten years. It happened when I was a teenager. It was a friend from my junior high school days who was living with a poltergeist, and I reluctantly stayed overnight once and felt the presence of something move across my body the next morning. But what happened later was the kicker. Me being the bold and curious person I am, I decided I was going to perform an exorcism, since the family’s church would do nothing to help. So I went to the library and got all these books on demons and rituals and I went home and one night I attempted to do a circle in my bedroom. I was a teenager, mind you, and I did this ritual to call forth a spirit and had a very scary experience that convinced me I was not cut out to be an exorcist. That’s about all I can tell you!
Other cases were very much run of the mill, except for one rather hilarious case I encountered when I was leader of a MUFON group in northern San Diego a series of sightings that turned out to be a hoax, yet we managed to get our group on the local news (we wanted some press!) and the reporter, who was like the “hot guy” on local news at the time, came out and saw the hoax himselfÉand fell for it! So much for the mediaÉ
Editor: From your research, what have some of the most important realizations or lessons been for you about these phenomena?
Marie Jones: Much of the phenomena involve energy in some form or another. Energy being manipulated, transformed, mutated, changed, amplified, altered. It always seems to come down to some form of energy that we have not yet learned to master or understand the mechanics of. Ghosts, UFOs, vortices where time stands still, it all seems to suggest that something, or perhaps someone, is working with energy in a way we are only beginning to understand at the quantum level, where things like entanglement and non-locality and wave-particle duality are the norm. In the quantum world, things happen that are far more bizarre than a ghost or Bigfoot. I mean, we are talking about something being both a wave and a particle, and that two particles that have been in contact continue to affect one another across vast distances instantaneously faster than the speed of light. That a thing may not be real until we observe it and “collapse its wave function” so that it goes from a wave form to a solid form we can label a chair, or a dog, or a HummerÉWOW! Or that the entire universe may be nothing more than a holographic image being projected from some other level of reality, in another dimension! The quantum is paranormal, yet it’s reality at the smallest, most fundamental level. It’s spooky action at a distance, as Einstein called it. It’s magic, but magic we are beginning to take from the level of theory to provable law. Most startling of all is that at the quantum level, we the observer have a direct affect on the experiment’s outcome, meaning that there is a deep connection between everything, which physicist David Bohm called the “implicate order” that underlies the visible, knowable “explicate order.” Reality, it seems, has two levels. The one we see and the one just behind the one we see. Like Dorothy in Oz and the man behind the curtain!
Not to mention that much of what we deem paranormal is simply a matter of perception. Look at what a person living two hundred years ago would think of a teenager listening to an iPod. That would appear as magic, being able to hear music in your ear coming out of a little tiny box. Or television? Totally paranormal to a Neanderthal! Things that seem normal to us would be considered paranormal to primitive people. Things that seem normal to an advanced civilization now seem paranormal to us. It’s all relative, and all a matter of perception.
Editor: What do you say to those who might argue that you're attempting to connect too many dots, that UFOs are simply "nuts and bolts" physical visitations of extraterrestrial craft and your review of data on poltergiests, ghosts, Bigfoots, chupacabras, Electronic Voice Phenomena, near-death and out of body experiences, etc., etc., is a feeble and misguided attempt to try and isolate relationships where none exist. After all, to many they are separate fields entirely.
Marie Jones: I would remind them that guys like Einstein and Bohm understood that there was a connectedness behind all things, so I am in good company. As a writer, though, I get to boldly go where no physicist has gone before and take the concepts I present one step beyond the outer limits of the twilight zone! The ideas I present are just that, ideas. I offer no proof and don’t claim to have found the truth, just a potential piece of it. Besides, one would have to be quite feeble-minded to NOT see that all reality HAS to be connected, otherwise there would be two realities, two truths, and scientists themselves will be the first ones to tell you, there can only be one overall truth. One reality. Not billions, one for each person on the planet, although our perceived reality certainly is individualistic.
What concerns me is that people working in separate fields tend to think inside the box, to be compartmentalized in their beliefs and thought processes. So my book is clearly not for the close-minded or compartmentalized mind! The biggest problem in science is the inability of scientists from divergent fields to come together and compare notes! But you know, the same can be said for many paranormal researchers, who get so caught up in just one niche area of research, they forget the forest for the trees.
And if anyone ever dared call me feeble-minded to my face, they’d get a good dose of New York Italian whoop-ass, so let that be a warning! LOL!!!
Editor: Can you summarize for us what you what you think the Theory of Everything comes down to here between UFOs, the paranormal, and quantum physics?
Marie Jones: Well, whatever TOE or GUT these folks decide on, if it doesn’t include paranormal experiences, it is not a real TOE or GUT, because leaving out the real experiences of millions of people throughout history is not good science. It’s arrogant and ignorant to just flat out deny that this stuff is going on. But we see this kind of arrogance and ignorant denial right now with global warming (although more minds are waking up to the truth), so what the heck do we expect when it comes to the paranormal? Believe me, when more scientists think they can explain the paranormal, they will accept it. AND when more scientists have their own experiences, they will accept it. AND when more scientists can speak more openly about their belief in the paranormal without losing funding or tenure or their jobs or their reputations, they will accept it and research it whole-heartedly. Can you even imagine how many scientists must really want to dig into this stuff, but cannot because of academic politics? But there are plenty of mavericks bucking the system and writing books and doing research. So things are definitely changing! My feeling is that the Holy Grail everyone is seeking is going to be just exactly what Bohm said that there is an implicate and explicate order to reality and that everything is connected and everything influences everything else, past, present and futureÉMy fave is the Zero Point Field, a field of pure potentiality from which everything else springs forth and takes manifest form, as it’s been referred to. As for the actual mathematical equation physicists come up with to cover all of that in one theory it’s not my job! I suck at math.
Editor: What do you hope to see happen in these various fields of exploration in the future?
Marie Jones: More open dialog, more working together, more dedication to professionalism and a respect for science on the part of the paranormal community, more willingness to go out on a limb on behalf of the scientific community, and especially more books that explore and expand and excite. Every week there is another stunning news story that suggests the quantum world is the place we need to focus on to find the answers to questions about the paranormal. Last week, for example, a story came out about an experiment where some physicists at the University of Ithica in New York MADE AN OBJECT MOVE JUST BY LOOKING AT IT. And now these mavericks are going to prove that they can put one thing in two places at once. THIS IS SCIENCE!!!Yet how “paranormal” can you get? Teleportation, psychokinesis, Indian Gurus reportedly in two places at the same timeÉHELLOOOOOO!!!
