Alternate Perceptions Magazine, July 2026
When Is Reality Not Real?
By: Dennis Stamey
In this digital age, it’s hard to imagine that some people still believe the earth is flat, yet it’s true.
I’ve been perusing Facebook groups and the Internet concerning this flat earth theory, having always been intrigued by the subject since reading Charles Fort’s New Lands as a kid. The debates pro and con are understandably vitriolic particularly from the globalist camp. These are the main thrusts of the globalists’ arguments: How dare anyone dispute the NASA photos depicting a spherical earth? How can the sun rise and set on a flat plane? How do ships disappear from the horizon? How, how, how. Science is God. Science is Everything. Science is Indisputable. Never question a high school science textbook.
While I believe that the earth is a sphere, an oblate spheroid to be exact, squashed at the poles and bulging at the equator thanks to the centrifugal force of its rotation, I’m still intrigued with the arguments of the flat earthers. I love their logic which, while obtuse, seems convincing at times (I underscore at times). It makes me think in new perspectives, similar to gazing at a work by Pollock or Picasso. Just like abstract art, their theories tend to momentarily free my brain from reality, allowing it to build new cognitive pathways that might otherwise be difficult to access. It’s a cognitive pathway that led me to some of these ideas I’m about to discuss.
I’ve long admired anyone who goes against the grain of consensual reality, even if they’re wrong. It is keeping with the spirit of Fort, the attack on the bastions of dogmatism and small-mindedness and the age-old misconception that there are absolutes and no shady areas in between. Everything is relative, everything. When I made that statement, a globalist shot back, well 2 + 2 = 4, not 5. That’s an absolute. Not necessarily dear globalist. Mathematical equations can also be relative. 1 + 1 = 2 is absolutely true in base -10 arithmetic, but if you change the rules of the mathematical structure, the equation changes.
With that we can safely establish that the universe is relative. Fine. That also leads me to believe that reality itself is relative. In my writings, I’ve tried to explain that reality is mostly subjective. If everybody started believing in unicorns, I have no doubt that unicorns would soon materialize. Reality is whatever we want it to be or what we believe to be true. The Eastern mystics are way ahead of me on this and teach, as they have for centuries, that reality bends to our assumptions. Self-help gurus on the internet are now also preaching that your thoughts, bad or good, determine how you live.
For me the universe, reality, or whatever is out there, is for the most part a formless gelatinous mass shaped by our collective thoughts, our consensual reality. We can also shape it ourselves either unwittingly or intentionally. First, before anything was created whether you believe in the Big Bang theory or God waving his hand, there was awareness, that’s it. As the Holy Bible says in Chapter 1, verse 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Where did awareness come from? That answer is probably beyond our limited conception.
This “awareness” began creating and it’s been creating ever since. That’s its purpose. Sentient life forms came into existence including Adam and Eve or their rough equivalent, their awareness or consciousness part of this universal awareness. Smacks of creationism. What about the fossil evidence you ask? Are you stupid? Evolution is an incontrovertible fact. Maybe, maybe not.
The Garden of Eden is not exclusive to the Bible. Many cultures, whether it was the ancient Greeks, the Australian aborigines, or the Cheyenne of North America, believed in a Golden Age, a time when there was cosmic order without war, sickness, hunger or need for human labor.
What happened to it? Apparently there was a flood, a war, famine, some gigantic catastrophe. It depends on which culture you choose. Or if there was such a paradisiacal period, maybe we simply outgrew it in our quest for more power and insight. The human species is a restless, unsatisfied creature that can’t remain idle for long even in the Elysian fields.
Consequently these ancient civilizations, the enlightened Greeks in particular, began noticing petrified marine organisms. Ah, the land had once been under water as the myths claim. A few Greek philosophers were also the first to formulate the earliest concepts about evolution.The Chinese, who believed in "the Age of Perfect Virtue,” began finding “dragon bones” as far back as 300 B.C. They also believed dragons existed in the days of yore, not the fire-breathing monsters of the West but majestic sacred creatures who guarded humanity.
The first Neanderthal remains, a child's skull, were found in 1829 in Engis, Belgium exactly thirty years Darwin published On the Origin of Species, However, the idea that humans evolved from apes was openly argued as early as 1774 by the Scottish anthropologist James in his work Of the Origins and Process of Language. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, roughly 70 different individuals published treatises on the topic of evolution. A second set of Neanderthal remains were unearthed in Forbes Quarry, Gibraltar, in 1848. In 1856 skeletal pieces of another Neandertal were uncovered in the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte, a limestone cave in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany. On three occasions Neanderthals, or what was left of them, were dug up in Western Europe within a thirty year span during a time when theories about evolution were being bandied about in Europe.The scientific community proposed we were descended from apes and evidence to prove their conjectures just happen to appear. How convenient.
Most of us have heard about the Peking Man, a subspecies of homo erectus found in a cave in southwest of Peking or Beijing if you prefer. A tooth was first dug up in 1921 and over the years the remains of about 40 individuals were recovered. But there are anatomical contradictions. The leg and arm bones were practically identical to modern humans, but the skulls had heavy brow ridges, no chins, and flat profiles with thick, apelike bone walls. Their brains averaged about 1,000 cubic centimeters, double that of a chimpanzee but slightly below the modern human average. Yet there’s evidence these creatures softened hides for clothes and used fire. Sounds unlikely.
Believe in it and it will appear. That has been my mantra in the last few years concerning paranormal events.
Needless to say, major fossil finds are still continuing, a lot of them involving new species that are causing paleontologists to grudgingly revise their thinking. One of the most amazing is the so-called “Little Foot,” an almost complete human ancestor fossil uncovered in bits and pieces from 1994 to 1998 in the cave system of Sterkfontein, South Africa. It’s apparently a whole new species since it doesn’t match any known Australopithecus categories. In fact, its unique mix of features suggests that it’s a previously unidentified human relative, subsequently reshaping ideas about early human diversity.
What oddities will they unearth next?
In 1966 in Illinois' Mazon Creek Formation, a 300-million-year-old marine creature was found with a soft, slug-like body, triangle fins, eyes on long stalks, and a long, tube-like snout ending in a claw-like jaw. Scientists are still hotly debating whether it belongs to the vertebrate or invertebrate family.
Remember the movie Jurassic Park where the raptors were the main bad guys? Paleontologists have made major raptor (the scientific name is dromaeosaurid) discoveries in the years following the film's 1993 release. This includes the Utahraptor (discovered just before the movie, but extensively studied after) and the North American Dakotaraptor (discovered in 2015), which is very similar in size and shape to the on-screen raptor
Another classification of raptor was accidentally found in Provence, a cultural region of southern France, in 1992 after a forest fire cleared out the area. Consequently it was named the pyroraptor.
This makes me wonder if fossils are nothing but hallucinations embedded in rock. What about reports of living frogs and amphibians found in limestone, coal, or wood that have probably entombed there for centuries? According to the Fortean Times about 210 entombed animal cases have been recorded in Europe, North America, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand since the fifteenth century. There have been experiments to duplicate this phenomenon, encasing toads in limestone or sandstone blocks for a year but with little success.
I would be remiss not to include reported finds of giants and pygmies during archaeological excavations mostly in the mid to late 1800s. I used to comb microfilm of the New York Times for this period and found story after story about skeletons of Goliaths and dwarves pulled from Native American burial mounds. In the early 1900s Ralph G. Glidden, an amateur archaeologist, was hired by the Heye Foundation to collect Native American artifacts on the island of Santa Catalina, which they had purchased, for the Museum of the American Indian in New York. Between 1915-1916, Glidden spent four months digging up graves and collecting artifacts not only on Santa Catalina but San Nicolas and Miguel Island.
Glidden assembled a massive personal collection of artifacts and skeletal remains which he used to start a personal museum at his home in Avalon on Santa Catalina in 1922. The museum used Native American bones in its architecture, including windows edged with finger and toe bones, leg and arm bones as shelf brackets, and ceiling panels decorated with vertebrae and shoulder blades. But by the late 1920s Glidden's museum was struggling, and he tried to stimulate interest by concocting wild tales about finding a race of giants on the island. He also claimed that he had discovered an Indian map that gave directions to the fabled loft Temple of the Sun God, a structure larger than Stonehenge. He even produced a photograph of himself standing next to a large unearthed skeleton. But this was later proven to be a camera trick where Glidden placed himself in the background and the burial in the foreground. By this Glidden's reputation was soon destroyed.
Should we therefore dismiss stories of giants and fabulous temples in North America? If giants and dwarves have ever been exhumed, their bones are certainly not in any museum I’m aware of unless they were packed away in crates and forgotten. But there are mysterious pre-Colombian artifacts that defy explanation, many in fact. We have the Sage Wall in Montana, Mystery Hill in New Hampshire, the Judaculla Rock in North Carolina with its mystical petroglyphs that even puzzled the Cherokee, another mysterious stone wall in the Cohutta Mountains of George, the Blythe Intaglios in California that can only be discerned from the air, and on and on,
Let’s return to the flat earth. It’s a cosmography as universal as the idea of a Golden Age, one based on everyday sensory perception since travel back then was limited. Without sophisticated tools, the ground does appear flat and stationary, and the sky looks like a solid dome. Within this dome was the sun, moon, planets, and stars. This is the same model the flat earthers use today. What about meteors? Well, they are chunks falling from shattered parts of the firmament. Eclipses are caused by a wandering dark body that has yet to be identified. What about the waxing and waning of the moon? Well, that's an optical illusion caused by the moon's light being distorted as it interacts with the dome or firmament.
Allow me to get crazy and propose that the earth was flat at one time and that everything celestial was circling around it simply because everyone believed it did. Once we began disbelieving in the flat earth model, the cosmography changed. What puzzles me is that remnants of a flat earth might still remain. For example, the White Cliffs of Dover, standing at just 350 feet. should be completely hidden behind the curve of the ocean when viewed from 31 miles away in France. Yet they are visible. The globalists respond by saying atmospheric refraction bends light over the horizon. Who’s right and who’s wrong?
Then there’s the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 that showed earth wasn't moving through space, sort of a blow to the heliocentric view of the solar system. But it did prove that the speed of light was constant, a discovery that laid the groundwork for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
There’s also the question of celestial bodies being encased in a dome surrounding our planet As a kid I taught myself to identify most of the constellations. What amazed me was how the stars appeared to align in geometric configurations. The explanation is that this is just a human recognition pattern, pareidolia as it's called, combined with a specific vantage point, which in this case would be Earth. In other words, while stars are completely scattered at varying distances and unconnected, they can line up perfectly from a particular vantage point, in this case Earth. After all, with billions of stars out there, there’s a 100% probability they will align. But I don’t find that a satisfactory explanation. The constellation Orion the Hunter, for example, distinctly resembles a man holding a weapon aloft with his right hand and gripping a shield with the left. He’s also wearing a belt, three stars in near perfect alignment, and a scabbard hanging below that. To his upper right, as if charging, is Taurus the Bull, with a row of stars forming a distinct V-shape for the horns and the bright red giant star, Aldebaran as its fiery eye.
All this seems like mental wanking so let’s move on. Forget about weird fossils and the flat earth for now. I’m still convinced though that reality can be bent. This thinking roughly concurs with the matrix or simulation theory which posits that what we perceive as reality "is actually an advanced, hyper-realistic computer simulation, possibly overseen by a higher being." The simulation theory, as any matrix nut will tell you, is based on a 2003 paper by philosopher Nick Bostrom, now head of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute.
Bostrom argued that future generations might have mega-computers that could run numerous and detailed simulations of their forebears. The odds are, he explained, that we are products of that simulation and may be "simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones".
Simulated minds, A higher being. Just keep the computer out of the equation and that’s what I think as well. There are glitches in the matrix for sure, the matrix in this case being the fabric of reality, but that’s because we control reality, either collectively or individually, unwittingly and on purpose, and not because of some software malfunction. Yet people are relating stories on blogs and YouTube channels that seem to suggest snags in the space/time continuum, not just garden variety paranormal occurrences. A person is driving down their street and abruptly everything changes, or they pass a duplicate themselves as they walk through a crowd, or they see a hitchhiker on the highway and miles later see them again. Most of these contributors are probably lying but a small percentage might be relating the truth.
The only glitch, if you want to call it that, which I experienced was about three years ago while shopping in the neighborhood WalMart around eleven one June morning. One of the assistants, who knew me, walked past from about ten feet away. She didn’t turn to speak as she usually did. I checked out and didn’t see her again. I went back there a few days later and noticed a small memorial on a table in her honor. The woman had been dead for two weeks. I told a couple of employees what I had seen but they acted as if I were nutty. She appeared very solid, not a hint of wispiness, which indicates to me that this was no ghostly occurrence but something else. A glitch in the matrix or did a part of me somehow realize that she was dead and decided to reconstruct her? I also have a theory that the dead, being nothing but pure consciousness, are able to create their own realities, so perhaps she reconstructed herself.
Here’s a story I know is true since it involved my late father-in-law who was from Manila. Years ago he was going door-to-door in the neighborhood selling flowers. He came to one house, knocked on the door, and an elderly woman came out. She instructed him to buy in a day or so and she would buy a bunch. He returned but discovered that the house was abandoned. Some neighbors told him that the woman who had lived there was long dead.
My father-in-law’s experience parallels urban legends. In fact, there are several variations on this theme. In one, travelers or teenagers stop by a bustling, well-kept home to ask for directions. The next day, or even hours later, they return to the exact spot to thank the owners or retrieve a lost item. Instead of a vibrant residence, they find a ruined, dilapidated, or completely abandoned house with overgrown weeds and caved-in roofs.
In another version, a group of partygoers are invited to an upscale gathering or mansion. They spend the entire night dancing and mingling with strangers. When they return the next day to reclaim a jacket left behind, the home is a crumbling, long-abandoned ruin.
Are urban legends archetypes, stories retold over campfires or beside the hearth, embedded in the collective psyche and like most archetypes can sometimes find their way into the physical world?
I’ve always had some doubts about an objective reality, a state that exists independently of human ideas, imagination, or observation. In Genesis, God created Adam and Eve, establishing the reality of Eden, a paradise free from pain, suffering, and death. God set the rules and provided everything they needed. By choosing to eat the forbidden fruit (the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), Adam and Eve exerted their free will. Instead of a perfect world, their careless decision introduced sin, guilt, shame, and the physical hardships of life into their reality. They essentially "built" a new, fallen reality through their disobedience.
I’m not saying that the Book of Genesis should be taken literally. If humans did appear spontaneously rather than evolving, their consciousness allowed them to make their own rules and improvisations.The Garden of Eden could be symbolic of the supernal mind that we descended from and the fall from grace the separating of our minds from this cosmic source.
Or here’s another concept being kicked around by the manifestation gurus (manifestation meaning what you assume about yourself or your environment will be reflected back) and borrowed from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The past, present, and future do not exist along a straight line. That’s an illusin.Instead everything is happening simultaneously in the “eternal now.” This is known as the block universe theory (or eternalism), a model in physics and philosophy proposing that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This single fabric where time and space are inextricably linked is called spacetime. Time is therefore just a 3D construct used for the human experience.
The manifestation gurus take this further and teach that the universe contains infinite parallel realities, a concept most of us are familiar with. Every version of your life, including all your desired outcomes, already exists in the unseen realm. Your role, according to these teachings, is to align your thoughts, emotions, and identity with the specific reality you want to access.
If there are infinite possibilities, this means that reality does exist but in infinite varieties, all squashed together. In one dimension the universe is as boring as my high school science textbook said it was, dominated by physical laws where there was evolution, the Big Bang, and heliocentric planetary systems. In another, it is governed by magic as portrayed in sword-and-sword stories complete with elves, wizards, and dragons. Maybe it’s not that belief creates reality, it allows another reality out there to appear. If we start believing in unicorns and unicorns show up, it’s because we access a world where they exist. Or if we believe aliens are visiting us as most of us do, we access a universe where there are alien visitors. The airships of 1896-1897 might not have been UFOs filtered through our frame of reference back then, but real heavier-than-air contrivances built and flown in another reality. We believed in the possibility of flight during that period and the airships subsequently appeared.
Here’s a case that was investigated by Dr. Anthony Choy, a Peruvian lawyer, journalist, and UFO investigator. Sometime in 1974, two girls and their mother were walking along the Avenida Canevaro located in the Lince district in Lima, a very busy thoroughfare usually packed with vehicles and pedestrians, headed for a relative’s house. As they turned onto the street where the place was, they suddenly detected a strange “sepulchral” silence and found themselves in what appeared to be a futuristic “park” in which the avenue was very wide, almost triple its ‘normal’ width. They couldn’t see any vehicles, everything appeared desolate and on each side were fields of short stalked wheat. They were standing on the side of what appeared to be a very wide avenue that resembled asphalt. The sky was pink, almost lilac in color and instead of seeing the large apartment complex at San Felipe they could see a huge silvery dome with pointed protrusions on the top.
They stood there admiring the panorama for several seconds not knowing what to say or do until they heard the normal street noise on the Avenida Canevaro and realized they were ‘back’ in Lince again.
If this story is true (according to Dr. Choy there have been similar incidents in the same area over the years), did these individuals momentarily slip into an alternate reality or was it a case of fake reality (what I’ve been calling simulated reality or SI) created for them?
Albert Rosales, a leading expert on humanoid sightings, found this story in a blog put out by the Church of Ufology, a defunct digital project that examined the intersection of extraterrestrial phenomena and religion, drawing parallels between UFO sightings and spiritual or occult movements. In the summer of 1995, Barbara C. Porter, her husband Spenser, and daughter were driving to Arizona State University in Tempe. Mr. Porter had accepted a teaching job there. As they were driving through the Mojave Desert, they had a flat tire. Spencer opened the trunk to get the spare and the jack, but their daughter’s metal storage trunk, with all her riding gear in it, was on top and too hot to touch.
Just then a small red sports car pulled up and stopped. A tall young man with blond hair stepped out and approached them. “Let me do that,” he offered. With his bare hands he easily lifted out Laura’s trunk, removed the tire and jack, and repaired the flat in a matter of minutes Barbara asked, “What’s your name?” as she had addressed a strangely similar individual long ago. He threw his arm up in farewell and blessing, “I am Michael,” he said. Barbara got back into her car and the sports car pulled away. They never saw Michael again; however, Barbara did remember meeting a similar individual who also called himself Michael when she was a young girl.
Michael reminds me of the archangel Michael and the fact that Barbara met him twice suggests he was a guardian angel. Or, again assuming the story is true, maybe this entity was born out of her imagination, able to actualize in the 3D.
On May 22, 2011, an EF5 tornado tore through Joplin, Missouri, killing 161 people and destroying thousands of buildings. In the weeks following, children across Joplin independently described large, winged beings that shielded them during the storm, their accounts very similar, across different neighborhoods. Were these guardian angels or were the children accessing archetypes, symbolic imagery just like Barbara?
While I loosely cling, as if my fingers were gripping the edge of a precipice, to the theory that the prevailing axioms, whether from the distant past or today, shape the structure of the universe, in the end I’m forced to lean toward what that boring high school science textbook taught me. Sorry flat earthers and creationists, There likely is an existential reality where worlds spin in perfect orbits and the universe's fundamental parameters can be predicted with extreme exactitude. But at the same time our collective consciousness frequently comes along like a mischievous imp playing its tricks, distorting time and reality, causing quirks in fossil evidence and out there in the cosmos, making us question our most stolid preconceptions. As far as time goes, maybe the past, present, and future are bundled. But I also believe, like Nietzsche and the Stoics, that it is a flat circle, that the universe and all events within it will repeat endlessly over an infinite timeline. just my hunch. If awareness, which is pure energy, can’t be destroyed, it must somehow continue
Tantalizing as the multi-universe theory is, I don’t see any evidence for it. If there are wizards, witches, elves, or aliens, I’m convinced that they are spawned from the depths of our whimsical psyche like these guardian angels. Believe in it and it will appear. Recall what George Orwell wrote in his novel 1984, “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
