The Strange, the Bizarre, the Unexpected

I'm reading a book by the prolific Colin Wilson called The Occult.  He wrote a number of books on a number of matters, and what is called the "paranormal" was one of them.  He was the author of the existentialist classic The Outsider, which I vaguely recall having read in the days of my youth.

He seems to have been a devotee of the paranormal, or at least that part of the paranormal involving communications with ghosts and spirits, telepathy, magic and knowledge of future events.  It doesn't seem extraterrestrial life or encounters with it meant a great deal to him.  His book is full of references to cases, and highlights seances which took place in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which make his musings seem somewhat quaint.  I don't know whether they're held with any frequency, now, but they were for a time a kind of fad and associated with those who advocated a study of ghosts and the possibility of an afterlife such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Emanuel Swedenborg, Franz Mesmer and other prominent "spiritualists."  Seances were apparently full of floating musical instruments and tables or other furniture rising from the floor and moving about, and ethereal figures.  That isn't the sort of thing which I've seen portrayed lately, except in period pieces.  

I've read that Wilson was thought by many to be quite gullible as far as these things were concerned, and it seems that he accepted what he writes of for the most part, though acknowledging that frauds exist and existed.  But his review of them is refreshingly matter of fact.  I was particularly charmed by his insight, based on reports from communications with the dead, that the afterlife is not all that different from the life we live, and is surprisingly mundane.  He notes that the dead evidently have nothing very profound to relate to us, citing to the fact that they tend to mention matters of strikingly limited importance and significance.

The paranormal remains quite popular and is now perhaps more popular than ever.  It's the subject of various ghost hunter and paranormal investigator shows on TV, podcasts, You Tube videos and no doubt other media with which I'm unfamiliar.  If the possibility of extraterrestrial life is a matter included in the paranormal, it seems that even our governments have taken to acknowledging that some phenomena exist which are inexplicable, for now, and that this is a matter of some concern from the standpoint of security and has military significance as a result.

Back in the 1980s there was a show hosted by Jack Palance based on Ripley's Believe It Or Not which claimed to be devoted to an exploration of "the strange, the bizarre, the unexpected" (thus the title to this post).  I'm generally skeptical of claims made regarding the paranormal, but think that there are such things which manifest themselves in certain circumstances, though I have no idea what they may be.  I've had no "close encounters" of any kind, but what appears on camera and radar and are attested to by military pilots and personnel aren't likely to be nothing at all or mere hallucinations. I've seen no ghosts or spirits either, but would accept that there are confrontations with the unexplainable which actually take place.   

Where I would differ from most if not many believers in the paranormal is in ascribing them to the supernatural, which is to say with something outside of Nature, or the Universe.  There's much we don't know about the Universe, and what we now learn about it through the technology available to us indicates that what's been called the mechanistic or materialist view of it, like Newton physics, is lacking or limited to only certain aspects of it.  

There are strange, bizarre and unexpected things, and it's foolish to deny them without investigation.  The paranormal should be subject to the same tests of critical intelligence as any other phenomena, rather than merely dismissed.  It's difficult to accept much of what we see in popular media, of course, as sensationalism is part and parcel of every form of media in these sad times.  The tendency is to do what's necessary to attract viewers and "clicks" and messages.  But recognizing that to be the case and making informed judgments is a part of playing the game of life well, and perhaps the games of after and other life also.