Alternate Perceptions Magazine, April 2025
A New Paradigm for High Strangeness
By Dennis Stamey
When dealing with paranormal activity, there are two major components to consider, consciousness and reality. Let’s briefly look at them both.
What is consciousness? The mystic Neville Goddard once wrote: “Consciousness is the only true reality. Everything we see and experience is formed from this consciousness, vibrating at different frequencies. Our beliefs shape and modify consciousness, meaning that everything exists within us first, and it then manifests in our world.
“All states of being exist subjectively in consciousness, waiting to be awakened into reality through belief. This means our thoughts and assumptions create our experiences. If we believe something is true, we can make it real, even from a distance! The only thing holding us back is our belief in space as an obstacle. If we shift our perception, we can impact events, people, and situations anywhere, simply by believing in the power of our consciousness.”
In an essay we similarly wrote: “Basically then, we are surrounded by energy from the dead, [this firmament being fed by the consciousness of sentient beings that have passed] a field of force if you will. It is a wall of psychism that can intuit our feelings, our emotions much like clairvoyants claim they can.”
In other words, this is an ocean of consciousness or energy with different frequencies, outside us as well as inside and reacting to the Universal Mind. Like Goddard, we believe that if you believe in something strong enough and meditate about it, whether a new love or a sports car, it might materialize in the 3D world. That’s not to imply that these desires will materialize out of thin air, but by using visualization techniques, you can set a chain of events in motion where you can attain them.
Of course, the notion of a life force permeating the universe is as old as time. Hindu philosophy speaks of prana, a Sanskrit word meaning “vital principle.” The ancient Egyptians knew it as ka, vital essence that sustained life and was also a person’s spiritual double. In ancient Greece, the Stoics originated the idea of pneuma, a universal breath that pervades everything. Aristotle and Plato talked about a world soul, or anima mundi, the unifying force of nature. The Roman philosophers developed similar ideas with the universal spiritus. Taoism and Traditional Chinese Medicine recognize qi, a dynamic energy that circulates through the body, promoting health and vitality. Qi also figures prominently in feng shui and the Chinese martial arts. Acupuncture and tai chi supposedly help regulate this energy. Native American, African, and Oceanic cultures also have beliefs about a divine energy that connects all living things. The Melanesians and Polynesians know it as mana, a spiritual life force that saturates the world.
John Keel put a modern spin on this life force when he introduced his theory of the super spectrum in his work The Eighth Tower. He wrote: “The standard definition of God, 'God is light', is just a simple way of saying that God is energy. Electromagnetic energy. He is not a He but an It; a field of energy that permeates the entire universe and, perhaps, feeds off the energy generated by its component parts.”
This essence is also analogous to the Force in the Star Wars movies, something George Lucas borrowed from New Age ideas. In the Phantom Menace, Obi-Wan Kenobi describes the Force as "an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.” When Obi-Wan dies after being hacked down by Darth Vader, his consciousness merges with “the netherworld of the Force.” The Force has both good and evil aspects, the Jedi Knights attracted to the good and the villains who serve the Seths seduced by its dark side. In Star Wars, anyone can use the powers of the Force to manipulate objects and people. However, there are those who are more sensitive to the Force because they have more midi-chlorians (or midichlorians), microscopic creatures that connect characters to the Force in their body. Likewise, anyone can use the powers of this sea of consciousness, this psychic energy, oftentimes unwittingly (Hans Solo used the Force without realizing it) to manifest something from nothing. Those who are psychic can do it easier and sometimes deliberately.
Now, what is reality? That’s a question open to multiple interpretations. As far as we’re concerned, it is anything that is knowable by logical inference or empirical observation. Someone might assert that the world is flat, another that it’s square but its true shape is independent of these perspectives. It’s an oblate spheroid no matter what you choose to believe. Someone might say that a certain political party is fascist when in fact it is democratic. Someone might believe that a story reported by a news outlet is accurate when on closer scrutiny it is twisted by bias.
New Guinea tribesmen have two basic words for color, light and dark, therefore, their reality is different than ours. They live in the same world as we do, and they receive the same impressions, yet their language causes them to see reality differently. This is why Kant described reality or the noumenal world as a thing in itself lying outside of our perceptions. We see reality only through fixed categories of knowledge.
But reality can also be dual. Our dreams seem real when we’re asleep but when we wake up, we realize that they were merely fantasy whiffs. But is it all nonsense? Carl Jung proposed that archetypes, primal, universal symbols and images that derive from the collective unconscious appear in dreams and imagination. Hence, they have a reality of their own independent of the everyday world.
Reality is everywhere; it is omnipresent. Ask any New Age disciple. Reality is also an extension of consciousness and broken down further, consciousness becomes energy vibrating at a certain frequency. Energy begets consciousness and consciousness begets reality. This is how paranormal manifestations are created. Electromagnetic energy in an area is activated either through people’s emotions or power sources be they natural or artificial (higher frequencies stimulating this energy field). The consciousness permeating this location draws archetypes out of the collective psyche. Consciousness then cloaks this archetype in a reality, consistent with the prevailing zeitgeist, and the manifestation appears (such as a UFO). Of course, the process is far more complicated than we’ve described and can probably be better explained using quantum physics. Unfortunately, that’s a field of study way over our heads. We’re only trained in historical research, not science.
When we say archetypes are we referring to Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious? Yes and no. Jung theorized that the archetypes reside in what he termed the collective psyche or collective unconscious, a long-term memory bank if you will. For years, we’ve struggled with the concept of the collective psyche, believing that it creates supranormal phenomena. To us, it was more than an inert warehouse of ideas, it was a superorganism which acted like the mythological Trickster, something that our thoughts somehow animated. But the more we learned and reflected, the more we realized that this stratum of consciousness, the second tier of consciousness as we called it (sandwiched between the universal and the personal consciousness), was indeed just a storage room lying outside time and space. The real Trickster is this qi or mana.
But here is where we differ from Jung. In our view, there are two categories of archetypes: human traits (which Jung talked about) and ancient beliefs or traditions (which Jung never really touched upon). Both archetypes can enter our realm, the traits in dreams and imagination and beliefs and traditions in 3D reality.
What’s confusing is that not all anomalous events involve archetypes. Certainly UFOs, ghosts, the fairy folk, the men in black, and cryptids are archetypal. Others, like the mystery cats, the cattle mutilators, and other paranormal marauders like the phantom snipers and slashers might be an externalization of our earliest fears concerning predators or our fears of urban dangers. Many archetypes be it winged deities, black dogs, the Wendigo, lake and sea monsters, the MIB, witches, and demons can be further broken down into the elements of nature such as wind and storms.
Some of these images can even appear in the same vicinity, a mixed bag if you will. Stan Gordon in his book Creepy Cryptids documents cases in parts of Pennsylvania where black panthers and Bigfoot were seen near UFO sites.
The paranormal can roughly be broken down into three elements: active phenomena, phenomena arising in so-called haunted zones, and borderline phenomena.
Most active phenomena (and we stress most) materialize at random often in areas where nothing strange has ever been reported. There might be a spurt of activity and then it goes away, never to return. Or maybe somebody sees a UFO or a weird critter in the woods and that’s it. Other times it may erupt, go dormant, and then erupt again years later, which suggests that the locale could be “haunted.” What we must understand is that if reality and/or consciousness, the Force, are everywhere all at once, it would be simple for paraphysical anomalies to materialize anytime and anyplace.
Active phenomena often to occur en masse during periods of fear, anxiety, or even excitement. As we once wrote: “Mass anxiety or psychic trauma resulting from wars or threat of wars as well as social upheaval can induce this high power to manifest even more weird events.” Certain areas might be affected more than others. We’re not sure why that is but as we said, the Force permeates everything.
In 1606 when London was undergoing political and social upheavals, sheep were being mysteriously slaughtered wholesale within the city and adjacent shires. During the Great Welsh Revival of1904 and 1905 there were reports of weird lights in the sky, ghosts, poltergeists, numerous riding accidents during fox hunts, and strange creatures stalking the countryside (we chronicled all of this in our book Phantom Snipers, Slashers, and Animal Rippers). A sheep-slayer on the loose in 1905 in Kent. A gamekeeper later shot an Indian jackal on an estate. But what was a jackal doing in England? Maybe the Force uses teleportation. Not long after, a predator was mauling lambs on the Isle of Man.
Another sheep-slayer returned to Kent that November and within a month destroyed about 30 sheep near Gravesend, gouging out their eyes or chewing off their mouths. Early in 1906, another rambunctious critter was inflicting heavy losses on sheep farmers in West Surrey County. On a farm near Guildford, the beast massacred about 50 ewes in one night. That March, nearly a dozen of the King's sheep had been killed on the royal farm near Windsor. Were all these depredations fallout from the revival?
Phenomena in so-called haunted zones materialize in the same locale year after year because of the belief and fear associated with an event that occurred there, be it a murder or a battle, or something that has been built there, whether deemed sacred or cursed, is etched into the autochthonous consciousness. Fake realities such as orbs (which are globs of energy), wraiths, or ghostly voices manifest whenever someone enters this corridor.
Between 1788 and 1790, a mysterious slasher was stalking the streets of London attacking unaccompanied young women. None were seriously injured. This occurred during the height of the French Revolution when Londoners were worried that a similar insurrection might occur in their country.
We believe that the most notorious haunted zone is Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which has a long history of both tragedies and paranormal activity including Mothman and the collapse of the Silver Bridge. There was a bloody battle fought between the Virginia militia and the Shawnee in 1774. In1777, Chief Cornstalk was murdered by settlers in the area after going there on a peace mission. Reputedly before he died, Cornstalk uttered a curse, declaring that the land taken from his people would be cursed by nature and that the area would never prosper. Then there’s Greene County, Pennsylvania, whose bucolic streams and rivers and lush rolling hills of farmland attract thousands of visitors every year. But it also attracts Bigfoot, UFOs, shadow people, ghosts, and other high strangeness. Greene County native Kevin Paul has penned three books on paranormal activity in the county including Politics and the Paranormal (2024). He claims that when he was five, he saw an apparition made of light inside his bedroom. Paul explains that most of the locations in the county where anomalies are most include Native American burial grounds or places where there were documented skirmishes between settlers and indigenuous tribes.
These cursed and/or haunted locales, be they forests, castles, or mundane residences, can be found all over the planet. Not surprisingly, most have a history of violence be it murder, massacres, or suicide. Don't forget the Amityville horror. Some of these histories or true, others are questionable. We’ve discussed dozens of these places in our books and articles and it’s likely there’s a haunted zone not far from where you live. They are that common.
How does a past event or a belief in a past event get imprinted? Our theory has always been that emotions including belief emit a high frequency. If enough people believe, say, a certain stretch of road is haunted, they create a vibration that hangs over the area luring the collective psyche. That might be true in part, but it’s an ambiguous assumption. Undeniably though, something has left an indelible mark on these sites.
Not long ago, a friend of ours who is a paranormal investigator reminded us about the Akashic Records. For the uninitiated, the Akashic Records are a spiritual database somewhere in the ether where all deeds, thoughts, words, actions, and decisions are recorded. Spiritualists can supposedly access this library. The famous seer Edgar Cayce alleged that all his insights came from reading these archives. The Akashic Records seem to be a 19th century concept possibly invented by Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, and refined by esotericists such as Rudolf Steiner. We always thought it was metaphysical claptrap.
But if the Force, for lack of a better word, this universal wellspring of consciousness does exist, it would naturally contain all events, thoughts, words, emotions that have ever occurred since the advent of time. Even psychoanalyst Carl Jung suggested this was conceivable when he wrote “…the brain is complete with the history of the world and every child is born with an unconscious assumption of the world. But for this we could not grasp the world at all. “
People could imprint their fears and beliefs onto the consciousness or energy that surrounds a locality, and this turn would cause the spiritual essence to manufacture anomalies in response. Beliefs and fears, from both participants and/or victims in whatever trauma took place there (assuming something did take place) as well those living in the area, are strong emotions emitting high frequency energy that could carve deep niches into the fabric of this cosmic essence.
As one of our acquaintances in the paranormal once stated: “The universe responds to your frequency. It doesn’t recognize your personal wants, desires or needs. It only understands the frequency in which you are vibrating at.”
Borderline encounters are phenomena that manifest in the liminal spaces between the waking world and unconsciousness. Most of these involve what John Keel dubbed “the bedroom invaders” or what the ancients and the medieval folk knew as the incubus and succubus or the Old Hag. Nowadays, the bedroom invaders can include your dead grandmother, witches, or little gray aliens. Almost all so-called alien abductions are borderline encounters as were the experiences reported by the contactees of the fifties and early sixties.
Judy Bates was a teacher at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe where students encountered UFOs and their occupants in September of 1994. She is now the headmistress. Bates recently admitted that not long after the sighting, she was abducted during the night by aliens while inside her home. Bates said the creatures, which she doesn't describe, placed her on a narrow table and inserted something into her belly. She thought it was possibly a "microchip." The abduction left her feeling depressed and she began taking Prozac and at one point considered suicide. The aliens returned and asked her to go with them, but Bates declined. They soon returned a second time and asked her to return with them, telling her that this was their last offer. The teacher once more said no and that she would prefer to stay with her students.
Other liminal encounters involve altered states of consciousness be it drugs or mental illness. Schizophrenics and users of hallucinogens like LSD or DMT, sometimes claim to see elfin characters comparable to the fairy folk of European tradition. The ethnobotanist Terence McKenna said the little people he saw while under the influence of DMT, “machine elves” as he called them, lived under the earth just like the fairy races.
In the article “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There: Encounters with the Supranormal” published in Fabula Volume 18, Number 1 (1977) folklorist Donald Ward presents cases of people seeing phantasms during moments of stress. Ward also talks about a 60-year-old woman he once interviewed who exercised daily to sustain her health and add more years to her life. On the morning of her sixtieth birthday, she had just finished her jog when she met two ghostly "messengers” who talked to her “about many things” and then repeated the following verse several times: “Live to be one-hundred-and-four/And then flit and flor.”
The woman later learned then that flit and flor were Celtic words meaning "death" and "rebirth". Ward explained that this person was not a church goer and suffered “from an acute case of mortal fear. Her daily jogging and swimming are clearly attempts to avert mortality, and the fact that she had just achieved the age of six years had been an unpleasant reminder of the inevitability of death.”
If these “messengers” (Ward never described their appearance) were projections from this person’s subconscious, how did she know these Celtic words? Her story in some respects reminds us of a contactee encounter. Could the creative powers of the unconscious create this or was the woman’s subconscious, prompted by fears of her mortality, tapping into a greater reality, either the Akashic Records or the Cosmic Mind (actually one and the same)? Recall how many of the contactees of the 1950s wrote philosophical discourses or channeled profound messages from the Space Brothers.
John Keel states that at the onset of his writing career, he was employed by a woman to transcribe a book detailing her dialogues with an ancient Roman named Lucretius. He approached her on Riverside Drive one afternoon and discussed religion and philosophy. She is but one of many channelers of divine knowledge including Allan Kardec, Reverend Stainton, and Jane Roberts. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a very famous mathematician in the early 20th century from India. However, this genius believed these math calculations were whispered into his ear by his goddess of his local region.
This might also explain the phenomenon known as the “third man factor” where individuals in life-threatening or highly stressful situations report sensing the presence of an unseen entity or spirit that offers them comfort, guidance, or support. Some people even hear voices. The anomaly became popular with the publication of John Geiger's book The Third Man Factor, which compiled many examples of these stories. Closely related to the old-school contactees are those who purport that they are in contact with Bigfoot, usually a clan. In most cases, the Bigfoot are not flesh-and-blood but interdimensional, which conveniently explains why nobody can see these beings but themselves and a few close friends and family members.
Many of these Sasquatch contactees are featured on the YouTube channel A Flash of Beauty. Among the most notable is Arla Williams. Williams swears that when she was six years old and living in Southeastern Oklahoma, her grandmother introduced her to a Bigfoot family. She claims that the Sasquatch are not just hairy hominids but belong to an ancient race of Star People and are here to help elevate human consciousness. William’s spiritual teacher is a Bigfoot named Kashima, which is also the name of a city in Japan.
We tried asking Williams about her encounters, which she details in her book, My Life with Hairy People, but the woman was very evasive if not defensive, probably because we admitted that we were skeptical about her narrative. She has taken photos of her Sasquatch companions, but these show only shadows in the foliage, nothing that would be considered convincing. George Adamski’s photos and one motion picture reel were decidedly fake. But this doesn’t mean these people are outright liars just that they chose to use deception to bolster their stories. One of her friends told us that she herself has had weird experiences but not with Bigfoot. When we asked what with, she wouldn’t say. Had this person been dragged into some fake reality like so many others who are close to an “experiencer”?
Raymond Fowler, an astronomer and scientific director for MUFON, wrote several books on the saga of Betty Andreasson Luca who alleges having on-going contacts with aliens since she was a child. In 1990, Fowler said that repressed memories of being abducted by aliens started bubbling out of his subconscious. Prior to that, he been having experiences with so-called “time slips,” synchronicity, seeing the same three numbers aligned on his digital clock whenever he woke up, and precognitive dreams.
There might also be a fourth element, again archetypal in nature, urban myths, but these usually show up in our imagination. They are probably campfire stories that have become branded upon the collective psyche. A few like black-eyed children, Slender Man, or crazy clowns, sometimes materialize in the 3D. During the First World War a phantom cyclist was reputedly seen by both Allied and German soldiers moving silently through no-man’s land wearing a backpack probably containing messages. There are no official records of anyone spotting such a figure and historians contend that the phantom cyclist was likely a metaphor for all the humanity which had become pulverized by the meatgrinder of the Western Front. Yet it’s plausible that he was spotted on occasion pedaling across the wrecked landscape.
Then we mustn’t forget the urban myth of crashed UFOs which began with the Roswell incident in 1947. What we find unlikely about the idea of downed spaceships is that if an alien species is advanced enough to thwart Einsteinian physics and travel far past the speed of light, why would it allow ships to repeatedly crash? Wouldn’t they have a retrieval system in place? And why would they even bother sending live crews if there was a possibility of an accident? Wouldn’t AI be safer?
The prominent UFO researcher Jorge Martin, editor of Evidencia Ovni, revealed that around 1 a.m. on February 19, 1984, a spacecraft allegedly smashed into a slope in one of the mountains of the National Caribbean Rain Forest, also known as El Yunque. He based this on various sources he was privy to, Allegedly, the whole affair was covered up by the U.S. government just like with Roswell. The craft and several alien corpses were supposedly taken to the states by military personnel working out from Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, as well as intelligence/security personnel from federal agencies in Puerto Rico. Of course, we’ll never learn where the bodies and wreckage went, if anywhere.
The El Yunque rainforest and its mountains have long been the scene of many UFO occurrences. In 1974, there was a rash of UFO sightings accompanied by cattle mutilations, cryptids. and Marian apparitions. There have also been several unexplained disappearances within the park. In 2007, there was another flap and at the same time, the government closed the area saying that a hurricane the year before had destroyed the main road. But locals believed this closing was due to the large number of sightings.
Its relevant to note that the indigenous people of Puerto Rico, the Taino, believed that the peak of El Yunque was sacred and the home of their supreme deity.
