Originally published 28 July 2011

One of the most striking and puzzling features of well-documented poltergeist cases concerns the trajectories of apparent polt-moved objects. Typically these objects travel not as if thrown but as if carried by someone, albeit at inhumanly high speed. Typically they are aimed at people too, and yet they almost never end up doing significant physical harm.

For those who are not well acquainted with the lore, I provide some snippets from Herbert Thurston’s Ghosts and Poltergeists (first published in a journal in the 1920s, and in book form in 1953):

[quoting Sir William Barrett, FRS, of the Society for Psychical Research:] The movement of objects is usually quite unlike that due to gravitation or other attraction. They slide about, rise in the air, move in eccentric paths, sometimes in a leisurely manner, often turn around in their career, and usually descend quietly without hurting the observers. [p. 2, my italics]

Dr. Schuppart [a respected professor of theology, in the late 1800s] … declares that every pane in his study window was repeatedly smashed, stones from six to ten pounds in weight were aimed at him but seemed designedly to miss him by a hair’s breadth, his wife was struck with blows which resounded all through the house but which nevertheless inflicted relatively little pain. [ p. 17, my italics]

[quoting from a report of a case in Bristol in 1761-62:] In spite of the vexations to which the children were subjected, a certain consideration, as has often been noticed in other poltergeist manifestations, was shown by the spook to prevent their sustaining serious injury to health. [p 25, my italics]

[from a case reported by an Austrian physics teacher in 1818:] A good deal of damage resulted, but it was noticed with some surprise that no one present was seriously hurt, even when struck by a big “stone” which seemed to be deliberately aimed and to be traveling with great velocity. Many of the moving objects upon contact with a living person or with a resisting surface fell dead as if a hand had arrested them in their flight. [ p 30, my italics]

What explains this?

The basic model that has come down from Thurston, SPR guys like Barrett, and more recently William Roll, is that a poltergeist manifestation is initiated and mediated by a person – sometimes called a ‘medium’ – in the vicinity. Unconsciously the medium ‘throws’ PK and ESP phenomena, as a ventriloquist ‘throws’ his voice; and typically the medium is a young child, an adolescent, a youngish servant, or some other youthful, stressed person who [see Note 1] uses the polt displays to ‘act out’ dramatically and deniably. Roll has suggested that in some cases the polt display could be due to an epileptic or Tourette’s-like seizure condition that hyperactivates the PK-mediating part of the brain; but to me polt displays seem more purposeful and controlled than a seizure phenomenon could be, and of course the seizure theory doesn’t explain polts’ weird non-lethality.

Is this non-lethality due simply to the absence of malice in the youthful medium? I find that hard to believe. Even if they have no intention to cause harm, young people routinely do foolish, impulsive things that bring about serious injuries (or death) to other people. How do they manage to avoid that during polt displays, especially when the trajectories and impacts of polt-moved objects often seem designed to look and sound lethal?

The network hypothesis

I haven’t read all the polt lore and the theories, and so I apologize if someone else has come up with this idea before. Anyhow, it occurs to me that the polt’s refusal to cause serious harm to witnesses in these cases may be — in addition to the fact that its intention is only to frighten — an act of self-preservation. That would be the case not only when the chief medium is spared but also when additional witnesses are spared. In other words, although there may be a chief medium of the polt displays, further witnesses are recruited into the phenomenon too – invisibly and unconsciously in a psycho-psi realm that science has hardly touched – and they participate to some extent, even if they usually cannot initiate or fully control the displays.

According to this idea, the heavy rock aimed by a polt at a witness’s head and moved at high speed stops a millimeter from his scalp and falls to the floor harmlessly, in part because the witness (maybe with the ‘help’ of other friendly witnesses) unconsciously stopped it.

I can only speculate wildly at this point about the mechanics of such an interaction among unaware brains. Perhaps the active psi-mediating brain areas would be like nodes making up their own local network, and the polt would be an emergent property of this network. [See note 2]

A more unsettling possibility is that the participants in some cases would also be joining a non-local network, an ancient Spooknet, with little or no firewall so to speak. But the Spooknet, demon-polt hypothesis seems to me to resemble Exorcist-style or Lovecraftian fiction more than real polt cases, and of course it fails to explain the benign-trajectory conundrum (unless there is some kind of don’t-kill-humans law that governs the denizens of Spooknet!).

In any case, a general network hypothesis could help explain a lot of other curious paranormal phenomena, such as the apparent ability of some polts (or ‘possessing spirits’) to speak or write with an amazing range of knowledge, including secrets about members of their audience, but with some curious limitations which suggest that these communicative entities do not have perfect ESP for declarative knowledge or for skills such as languages, music, etc. According to this network hypothesis, these entities are acting mainly via telepathy in the local network that is made up of their audience, i.e., using the limited knowledge and skills in the available brains. The larger the audience, the greater the apparent range of their knowledge and skills.

This theory could also account for the seemingly greater likelihood of weird stuff happening when more than one of the right kind of person is brought together – in UFO-related close-encounter waves, abductee/contactee scenarios, hypnotist-hypnotee relationships, spoonbending parties, spirit-possession cults, religious contexts (e.g., the Pentecost), Ouija board sessions, seances, and the reported ‘telepathic overlay’ phenomenon in remote viewing.

It also might explain this rather spooky sentence in the Bible, attributed to Jesus Christ:

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. [Matthew 18: 20]

Of course, the idea that telepathy can occur spontaneously among two or more people isn’t new at all. And even Thurston nearly a century ago seems to have allowed in at least one case – without further explanation, unfortunately – the possibility that two siblings were involved in generating a polt.

The mediumistic power seemed to center in the boy Harry aged 12, but also in his sister Anna, who was four years older. [p 12]

In general, though, I think that we in the modern West, with our individualist, reductionist culture, prefer to break behavioral phenomena down to the single-brain level – so that even if we acknowledge that polt and other paranormal displays can be group phenomena, we don’t give this possibility nearly enough emphasis or really think through its implications.

Again, this is a very speculative hypothesis, but it could be used to guide experiments and observations in polt and other paranormal cases.

Note 1. We normally think of a person in terms of his or her aggregate mental ‘agency’, i.e., all the conscious and non-conscious drives and/or selves. However, in the case of poltergeists—and presumably for spirit possession, fugues, hypnotic and MPD-type phenomena, ‘voices’ in schizophrenia and so forth—we seem to be dealing mainly (or exclusively) with the agencies that are not accessible to ordinary awareness, the ‘inner demons’ as it were. Thus, when I refer to a person who is putatively involved in mediating poltergeist phenomena, I don’t mean that this person is aware of his or her involvement.

Note 2. For some reason this reminds me of so-called quasiparticles from condensed-matter physics, which are emergent properties of macro material (e.g., ultracold superconducting metal), exist only virtually, and yet respond to their environment as if they are real.

Originally published 20 January 2011

I was just a kid when Close Encounters came out, but I remember thinking, even then, how cool it would be to have a serious, well-equipped government operation like the one depicted in the film. A bit unusually for its time, Close Encounters created a sort of ideal world in which the Feds were reasonably competent and benign, had good reasons for keeping their secrets, and approached the UFO phenomenon with a wonderfully organized, can-do spirit.

Spielberg’s film also created an ideal top ufologist, the Claude Lacombe character, who was played in the movie by Francois Truffaut. I remember being particularly interested to learn that he was based on a real person, Jacques Vallee, whose writings evidently had impressed Spielberg.

Years later I looked into the burgeoning “alien abduction” scene in America, but concluded that most of what was happening there was happening on the couches of abduction “therapists” and in the fertile imaginations of “abductees.” I never really got into what I considered the more serious and interesting side of ufology, the study of sightings and close encounters: the Jacques Vallee stuff.

Nearly two decades on, I’ve started to delve into the ufology literature again in my spare time, beginning with two of Vallee’s best-known books, Dimensions and Confrontations. I hope soon to read his new one, Wonders in the Sky, which I understand is an updated version of Passport to Magonia, his 1969 classic. But already I have a few critical observations about Vallee and ufology (and even about Spielberg), and if someone else hasn’t raised these points already, maybe some ufologists will find them useful.

1. Beware the lone scientist

The Frenchness of the Close Encounters character Claude Lacombe made him seem a man apart—a lone, heroic scientist. But in the reality of the film, he wasn’t alone; he was surrounded by other scientists as well as by engineers, doctors and other technical people. So it is in real life with normal scientists. They work on teams, in effect, in vast leagues with lots of rules, and just about everything they do can be, and frequently is, questioned by their fellow scientists—in the lab, via e-mail, at conferences, in the peer-review gauntlet before publication, in the commentaries after publication, and in the to-ings and fro-ings of the grant-proposal process. You know that expression, “it takes a village”? Well, modern scientists live in something like a village, where nosy people are always looking over their shoulders, watching for mistakes. In that world, mistakes can bring very serious professional consequences.

Naturally, that intense critical culture tends to keep modern scientists on their toes. But the lone scientist doesn’t have that assistance. The lone scientist often doesn’t even address his writings to fellow scientists, but instead addresses a popular audience. Thus the lone scientist has to rely, for the most part, on his own internalization of scientific culture. And for most of us, over a long stretch, that just isn’t going to be enough.

I think that explains why, as I read Vallee’s writings on UFOs, I was almost immediately reminded of Terence Meaden and ‘crop circles’.

Meaden had been a physics professor at a Canadian university before coming home to the UK and, among other things, taking up his crop circles investigations. He tried to interest other researchers in the circles phenomenon—he reached out to professional atmospheric physicists as far away as Tokyo and Oklahoma. But he was basically on his own, a lone scientist, and we all know what happened: A bit of methodological laxity crept in, a bit of hubris—that “trust me, I’m a scientist” stuff—and before he knew it, he was being led down the proverbial garden path by two old guys with ropes and planks.

And just so it’s clear, I’m not really blaming Meaden. I think that what happened to him might well have happened to any scientist in his shoes—any scientist brave enough to pursue one of these offbeat phenomena with little or no cultural support.

For the same reason, I don’t really blame Vallee for what I see as the shortcomings of his own work. I just think it’s worth pointing out that he was operating in an intellectually hazardous, “lone scientist” situation, especially after the US government officially gave up on its UFO investigations in 1968.

What are the shortcomings of Vallee’s work? I don’t think a full list is necessary, but the gist is pretty much the same as in Meaden’s case: Vallee emphasizes his scientific background and claims to use scientific methods, but then he routinely holds up, as “evidence,” cases that, in my opinion, an ordinary scientist would not even consider—because they rest on very-lightly-confirmed or even unconfirmed testimony, often rendered years after the supposed event. For example:

An Army officer who served during the Korean war has described an even more remarkable incident in which an orange luminous object came over a village that was being shelled by a whole artillery unit in the Iron Triangle area. It hovered at low altitude, apparently unharmed by the powerful explosions…. The next day the entire artillery unit was violently ill and had to be removed from duty, but no formal report was ever submitted to identify the source of the strange illness.

Apparently neither Vallee nor the original investigator thought it necessary to confirm this tale with other members of the unit before publishing it.

And that is an almost random example I have selected by flipping through the pages. Vallee also gives his readers many inherently dubious witness-testimony stories from South America. In fact, the Brazilian case with which Vallee grandly leads off Confrontations comes across not as a likely UFO encounter but as a likely UFO-cult suicide. He spends some pages, too, on the famous Dr. X case in France, which does not seem to have unequivocal evidence of UFO involvement, but seems to belong more in the spirit-possession/shamanic-transformation genre. (Frankly, some of the adventures of Dr. X, to which Dr. X is almost always the sole witness, remind me of the antics of the notorious “UFO abductee” Linda “Cortile”.)

In Dimensions there are quite a few historic accounts, and many are interesting, but again, they don’t always provide much in the way of conclusive or even useful evidence. Vallee for some reason includes such tales as the so-called “miracle of Guadeloupe.” Speaking of which, just consider the “miraculous” image below; does it look like something that was made by UFO beings and thus belongs in the ufological literature? Or does it look like something painted by an all-too-human 16th century artist, presumably with Church support?

This pattern of rather soft thinking seems to continue in Vallee’s writings today, e.g., in his recent musings on the causes of crop circles—next to which, Terence Meaden’s own hypotheses about linearly-sweeping atmospheric plasma vortices seem conservative.

On the whole, I’m glad that Vallee took the trouble to do all his research, much of which is fascinating and thought-provoking. His non-ET hypothesis about the UFO phenomenon certainly seems worth bearing in mind. But it’s important to understand that, though we might wish to believe otherwise (check out this homage to him on Boing-Boing), Vallee never was a Claude-Lacombe-type scientist, and, in his relatively lonely situation, maybe never could have been. If there’s a constructive lesson here it’s that ufology, ideally, should not look to such lone, “heroic” researchers but instead to the development of a society of researchers—a society bound by a fairly strict culture, and by regular interactions that help them maintain that strictness in their work.

2. The TMI problem

By far the largest problem with Vallee’s work, as I see it, is the lack of “editing” of cases. And I think it’s fair to say that that same lack of editing is practiced in the rest of ufology. I’m not channelling Phil Klass here; I’m not suggesting that all UFO cases should be dumped out and that the whole phenomenon’s a crock. I’m saying that there are plenty of very good UFO cases, and that they shouldn’t be crowded out by the weak and dubious ones.

I guess that ufologists will always want to note down almost every UFO-related claim in their databases, and there is nothing wrong with that. But if I could get them to do just one thing differently, it would be to confine their published analyses and the majority of their resources to cases that involve multiple, independent witnesses—and especially independently obtained film, photos or radar records. Otherwise, they run an unacceptably high risk that their conception of the phenomenon will be (and is being) distorted by hoaxes, hallucinations, and so forth—in addition to the fact that promoting weak cases makes ufologists look unserious. (Maybe in another post, I will go over some of the evidence regarding hallucinations, which are much more common in the population than ufologists seem to realize.)

The value of having multiple witnesses is obvious, but the value of having independent witnesses seems to be overlooked much of the time. Years ago, some friends and I went out one night and made a crop circle near Avebury in England. The next day, campers in the area reported having seen “strange lights” over the hill where we made the circle. I have the advantage of knowing that no such lights appeared in connection with the making of the circle, but even without that advantage, ufologists should give little weight to such after-the-fact reports, because they are not independent—they are connected to, and very possibly triggered by, the initial event in question. Unfortunately, Vallee’s caseload, and the UFO lore generally, are full of questionable reports like these.

3. Attempt Less, Achieve More

Vallee’s listed “reasons” for believing in his non-ET hypothesis often read as non-sequiturs, e.g.:

The total number of close encounters far exceeds the requirements for a sophisticated survey of our planet.

Of course, for all we know, UFO sightings could mark the arrivals of millions of distinct, highly developed species, travelling by a variety of modes and with a variety of motives—from surveying to tourism and even joke-playing (hey, let’s have some fun and start a religion among these dumb savages). But I imagine that other ufologists by now have pointed out the obvious flaws in Vallee’s theorizing. And in any case, I doubt that ufologists should even bother with ambitious analyses of their data and the development of grand theories.

The first reason has to do with our limitations as a species. As one of Stanislaw Lem’s characters puts it in Solaris, “Any attempt to understand the motivation of these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men.”

The second reason has to do with ufology’s particular limitations. Ufologists today generally do not have the sophisticated resources needed to collect a lot of data about the nature of alien spacecraft, if that is what these objects are. On the other hand, the scientific community does have these resources. Yet the scientific community has long been scared away from the UFO subject.

Therefore, as I see it, modern, amateur-driven ufology would accomplish a great deal simply by persuading the scientific community to get involved. They could do that by focussing on a few, unimpeachable cases (which in my view, definitely excludes Roswell), and even moreso by gathering new unimpeachable evidence, for example multiple, independent video recordings—preferably fine-grained enough to resolve shapes and structural details. With such evidence, they should simply get in Congress’s face, and in the scientific community’s face, until attention is paid and resources are devoted. Easier said than done, I know! But it seems to me that if this becomes their main focus, they have a greater likelihood of achieving something than they do at present.

4. The Spielberg Effect

One last quick thing I want to mention: Thanks largely to Spielberg, the world of Hollywood movies is one in which politicians and scientists tend to take—and are often abruptly forced to take—the UFO phenomenon seriously. I have seen other writers comment to the effect that Spielberg and other filmmakers have thereby helped the world to accept this phenomenon.

I disagree. In the early part of Close Encounters, and in his later films, Spielberg showed his frustration with the official, government, sweep-the-stuff-under-the-rug attitude towards UFOs. So partly his work has been a reaction to a trend that was already in place at least from the late 1960s. But I think the popular phenomenon he has stoked has also worsened the situation, by making it harder for the scientific community to take UFOs seriously again.

Scientists start out as kids too, and enjoy watching films such as Close Encounters. I suspect that a lot of them would secretly love to do some serious ufology. In the days when UFOs were taken halfway seriously at official levels in the US, ufology might even have been a plausible career choice. As I understand it, ufology then was much more of a “techie” activity, involving lots of aerospace and physics guys with horn-rimmed glasses and slide rules. But since then, thanks largely to Spielberg and others in Hollywood, ufology—or UFO “enthusiasm” anyway—has become surrounded by a less technical, more popular, New Agey, just-gotta-believe culture, which I think is essentially repellent to scientists and other technically trained people.

Thus mainstream science may never pay attention to UFOs, until perhaps, as in so many movies, it is suddenly forced to by the phenomenon itself. If that happens, all the contributions of Vallee and other ufologists could end up being simply ignored, and ultimately forgotten.

Originally published March 10, 2008

Modern existence is a constant affirmation of faith in quantum theory—or at least, faith in the theory’s ability to predict the behavior of light and matter. The semiconductors in computer chips, the diode lasers in DVD players, even the ticks and tocks of atomic clocks are all based on this 90-year old branch of science.

Quantum theory also gives hints about the basic fabric of reality, but these hints conflict so much with our intuitive view of things that we ignore them in everyday life. If we truly took these hints to heart, we might feel as Neo did when he took the red pill and woke up to the harsh reality of the Matrix. Like the Matrix, the current quantum model of the universe implies that our intuitive view of existence is illusory, our hunger for meaning a cosmic joke.

A basic idea of quantum theory is that the properties of particles naturally exist in a haze of uncertainty. One cannot predict the precise location of an electron, for instance; one can predict only the set of its possible locations and the probabilities of experimentally finding it at these locations. In essence, it seems that the electron exists in a ghostly multiplicity of states until one of those states interacts robustly with its surroundings, for example by the measurement process.

The “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum theory, which dominated from the 1930s until recently, held that the observed collapse of this multiplicity of possible states to one state – to the sharp reality that we normally perceive – means the simple disappearance of the other possible states.

However, it seems that most physicists now favor the “Everett Interpretation,” developed by a Princeton graduate student, Hugh Everett III, in the 1950s. Also known as the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI), Everett’s concept implies that the other possible states in such cases don’t really go away. They continue to exist in other, inaccessible universes populated by other you’s and me’s.

In this view, the you that exists at the moment of your birth splits or differentiates into a near-infinitude of you’s with every possible life history – consistent with the physical laws that pertain in your area of reality. The history of Earth and its species also move along every possible trajectory. Across the cosmos – across the “multiverse”—everything that can happen does happen.

Professional theorists and popularizers have been writing about MWI since the 1980s. Perhaps believing that downbeat themes sell fewer books, these writers have tended to soft-pedal the implications, portraying this profound shift in thinking as merely part of the grand adventure of science: Thus, Copernicus dethroned us humans from the center of the universe; and Darwin dethroned us from our privileged space in the animal kingdom; and both times we coped; and so we shall cope again with this new and stronger existential relativism.

But the relativism of MWI is not merely stronger; it is, so to speak, absolute—and it absolutely mocks our intuitive sense of agency, responsibility and meaning. How can we condemn or praise an action that someone has taken, when we know that that action, from an MWI view, had to be taken, in order to fill out the vast space of possibility? How can we celebrate a hero in our world, knowing that he or she must be a villain in another? How can we find meaning in the minutiae of our history, knowing that that history is but one random branch in a vast cosmic tree?

It is some consolation that MWI is not a sure thing. But there is currently no feasible way to disprove it, and so we must live under its shadow indefinitely. Perhaps we shall just continue to take the “blue pill” and ignore its implications. As Simon Saunders, an Oxford University philosopher and MWI theorist, told a reporter several years ago, “I’ll just accept Everett and then think about something else, to save my sanity.”

But MWI is also a stark reminder of something that Nietzsche and other philosophers warned about long ago: Science is not an unshakeable institution. It is a cultural choice, requiring faith in the value of its truths. When those truths fail to “set us free,” and instead deliver existential poison, science’s own existence may become precarious.

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