The Trickster and the Paranormal

by George P. Hansen

Through the 1990s, only the Rhine Research Center and PEAR remained viable. Today in parapsychology there are probably fewer than 10 full-time researchers employed in the U.S. The decline is seen with other measures as well. In 1985, 51 papers were printed in the convention proceedings of the Parapsychological Association’s annual convention, with 46 of them of U.S. origin. In 1996, there were 24 papers printed, but only 15 were from the U.S. The trend continues, and the PA membership steadily becomes older, grayer, and attracts few new researchers or observers.

  Summary

  The pattern of initial growth, internal discord, stagnation, and decay for any one organization, or even several, would not be unusual, but the pattern is universal in psi research. Many other groups and laboratories outside the U.S. could be given as illustrations. I know of no counter example. Those groups that attempt to scientifically study paranormal phenomena by directly engaging and interacting with them, tend toward disruption, encounters with fraud and trickery, and loss of institutional affiliation and support. The research activities have never produced the growth that a normal business or scientific discipline might expect. Further, none of the groups ever became fully ensconced within a larger organization; at best, affiliations were temporary and tenuous. Those that remained viable in research for a few decades were led by individuals with prestige and personal power, such as Gardner Murphy, J. B. Rhine, and Robert Jahn. After they depart, decline is inevitable.

  This history is very curious given the intense public interest in psi and the high percentage of people who report paranormal experiences. The pattern suggests that large structured institutions are inimical to direct attempts to engage psi. The consequences for parapsychology are profound.

  CHAPTER 17

  Unbounded Conditions

  Bigfoot sightings, cattle mutilations, and UFO flaps are some of the largest paranormal manifestations. With them, no clearly defined group of people is involved but rather participation is “unbounded.” Any number of people can be witnesses; the phenomena occur over indefinite areas and for indeterminate periods of time. These are often exotic and confusing, and the conditions surrounding them are ill defined and unstructured. Examples of more structured occurrences include: séances held in predesignated rooms with known participants, ritual magic ceremonies that cast magic circles of protection with specified procedures, various cultures’ rituals to propitiate spirits of the dead, and parapsychology’s laboratory methods to constrain and designate the phenomena to be observed. In these examples the participants are known to each other, the locations and times of activities are clearly demarcated, and the beliefs, expectations, and paradigms are understood.

  In unbounded cases, roles and identities of players may be ambiguous. For example, during major UFO flaps, reports of “men in black,” visitations by government agents, and sightings of phantom helicopters are common, but their relationships to the original UFO sightings typically remain obscure. strange characters emerge who may or may not be part of some orchestrated disinformation campaign, and hoaxers sometimes infiltrate research groups in order to make their plots more effective.

  These unbounded situations are overlooked or avoided by most researchers, especially by those in laboratories, or with tenured academic positions, or with established reputations in respectable areas. Unbounded phenomena are messy; gathering reliable information is difficult, and trickster manifestations are acute. These factors conspire to discourage scientific investigation, despite the intriguing reports.

  Another drawback to studying such phenomena is that they intrude into the personal lives of investigators. The full impact of this perhaps cannot be appreciated unless one has had direct experience. A couple examples may help illustrate the possibilities.

  Ralph Steiner—A Case Study

  In June 1992, Ralph Steiner, a journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area, began investigating “Sandy,” a woman who claimed to have been abducted by ET aliens. He was called into the case because he had been researching government-UFO connections, and there were reports of government harassment in this one. A few days after his initial interview with her, Sandy disappeared from home and later turned up in Las Vegas, Nevada. She claimed to have been kidnapped and drugged by government agents and was warned to keep quiet. She returned to California, and Steiner discovered that Sandy had been previously diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. Steiner readily admits that this was only one of several warning signs that he consciously chose to ignore. But the case was only beginning.

  Events continued, and her husband and a friend of theirs corroborated Sandy’s reports. Unmarked helicopters were seen. The three claimed long contact with the CIA and other government agencies; they all reported being harassed by government personnel, possibly a rogue group outside the law. Sandy believed that she was part ET and that the agents knew of her condition. Steiner came to suspect that her psychological problems were caused by a government project. At the time, quite a few other investigators across the country held similar suspicions about other cases.

  As Steiner puts it, he was sucked into the “belief system vortex,” and he now recognizes that he was in the grip of a paranoiac idea. Sandy established a strong emotional bond with him, and they would spend many hours on the phone. During those conversations, she displayed extraordinary telepathic abilities and was able to tell him exactly what he was doing, though she was more than 40 miles away. He began having odd sensations in his solar plexus. He encountered apparent PK when electronic equipment, which had previously worked well for years, began to malfunction inexplicably. There were problems with his phone, leading him to suspect that it was tapped. One of Steiner’s colleagues had brief contact with Sandy and afterwards was visited at her place of work by a sinister figure who warned her away from the case. During the warning a helicopter ominously hovered low overhead. This confirmation, from another investigator, was compelling and unsettling.

  About two months after Steiner began his investigation, Sandy called him frantically, saying that she had been taken aboard a space ship and that the aliens had removed the outer covering of her eyes. This was physical evidence, and Steiner immediately summoned a cab to bring her to his home. When she arrived, she was wearing sunglasses, and when she took them off, Steiner saw that her eyes were almost completely black. For the next few days, Sandy stayed at the homes of Steiner’s friends and associates, and she sat for a number of sessions where her eyes were photographed close up. Analysis showed that Sandy was wearing very large black contact lenses.

  Steiner’s friends locked him in a room and confronted him with the facts, and he slowly began to examine them realistically. His capacity to rationally assess the case had slipped his grasp, and he did not regain it overnight. With the help of his friends he did, and he now realizes that in less than two months he came very close to losing his job, his journalistic reputation, his marriage and family, and his entire career. It is remarkable that Steiner had the ability to look back and write about the events with such clarity. He made an exceptional contribution in doing so.

  If Sandy was the sole hoaxer, the case would not have been particularly noteworthy, but at least two other people were involved. There are still unexplained aspects to the hoax, and the motive remains opaque. Steiner now believes that this elaborate charade was orchestrated to discredit researchers, sow dissention, and kill the credibility of genuine cases. The perpetrators remain a mystery.

  Salient aspects of the case include: elaborate deception, a nearly catastrophic loss of status, strong psi functioning, and great difficulty discerning illusion from reality. These formed a powerful trickster constellation and reinforced conspiratorial ideas. In passing I should mention that the helicopter-trickster connection was previously recognized by Dennis Stillings in a 1988 article entitled “Helicopters, UFOs, and the Psyche.”

  John Keel and the Mothman

  The Steiner case seems surreal, but it is not unique. A quarter century earlier John Keel encountered similar events. K
eel (born Alva John Kiehle, 1930-) is an unusual character who has some affinity with the trickster. Though primarily a writer, he is also a magician and

  is listed in Who’s Who in Magic. As a teenager he edited a periodical called The Jester.3 While in his twenties he traveled around the world investigating the odd and unusual, including magicians, monks, the Indian rope trick, and reports of levitations, all of which were recounted in his book Jadoo (1957); more recently he has written a column for Fate magazine. His taste for the bizarre never left, and as a journalist and author he chronicled innumerable odd paranormal events that the vast majority of other investigators chose to ignore because they did not fit into the accepted categories.

  Keel has lived much of his adult life in New York City. He knows magicians, media people, and a wide swath of various paranormal subcultures in and around that area. He was a frequent guest on the Long John Nebel radio show, and he took part in research conducted by Karlis Osis at the Parapsychology Foundation in the 1950s. Keel was primarily a free-lance writer. Despite the massive popular interest in the paranormal topics he covered, there was not enough work in that to keep him employed over the years; so he also wrote for photography and electronics magazines, among others. He was never a long-time employee of a large corporation.

  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Keel ran the New York Fortean Society (NYFS). The group was named after Charles Hoy Fort (18741932), who compiled books of odd facts (e.g., fish falling from the air) and provided preposterous, tongue-in-cheek explanations for them, thereby annoying some scientists. Fortean “organizations” are some of the most anti-structural of any in the paranormal subculture, and the NYFS fit this pattern. It was very loosely run, and the bulk of the work fell on Keel’s shoulders. It published only a few issues of a newsletter and sponsored irregularly scheduled lectures. These were held in a room rented in a run-down building in Manhattan and attracted a small but diverse audience. After adjournment the participants would move to a deli down the street, where some of the NYFS members bought something to eat and others brought their own food to consume on the premises. One of my friends described the NYFS as the cheapest bunch of guys she ever met. I attended regularly.

  In 1966 and 1967 Keel kept busy investigating UFO activity in West Virginia and on New York’s Long Island. His book The Moth-man Prophecies (1975) tells of that time in his life, and it effectively conveys the surreal nature of unbounded paranormal phenomena. Point Pleasant, West Virginia was then a center of activity with sightings of UFOs and also of a bizarre, winged monster with red eyes, dubbed the mothman. Keel began interviewing people in the area and staking out locations where there had been sightings. Soon unknown individuals began impersonating him; his phone was bugged and had other problems, and during his day-to-day activities an extremely odd, emaciated person appeared in his vicinity. It seemed like he was being monitored. It was difficult for him to tell fantasy from reality, and he readily admits that he was concerned about his mental stability during his investigation. The Mothman Prophecies is disturbing, and two researchers in the paranormal, one eminent in parapsychology, the other a nuts-and-bolts ufologist, independently described it to me as the scariest book they ever read.

  Keel spoke frequently with UFO contactees who reported receiving mental messages from flying saucers. Much of the time they made no sense, but sometimes the messages seemed telepathic. Keel would think of a question, and immediately one of his stable of contactees would call him on the phone with the answer; at other times they seemed precognitive and predicted what would happen to him. The contactees began prophesying a large power blackout for December 15. A number of their other predictions failed to occur, but this was persistent. The blackout didn’t happen, but on that date a bridge at Point Pleasant collapsed at rush hour and killed more than 30 people. Keel had known some of the victims, and the entire string of events shook him. He saw much of it as evil. It wasn’t until years later that he wrote the book, and only with the prodding of an editor.

  Keel is one of few who recognized that UFO sightings should not be studied as discrete events in isolation and that their effects are not limited to a circumscribed time and place. The consequences could extend for weeks or months and be profoundly destabilizing to the personal lives of those who become enmeshed in the phenomena. Some who had impressive sightings later experienced other paranormal activity such as poltergeist occurrences. When the paranormal events continued, neighbors, friends, and the media learned of it. Stresses built and the victims and their family became “tainted,” looked upon as odd, different, even somewhat dangerous. Keel noticed that marital break-ups were frequent in the situations. Some experiencers displayed a decided tendency to paranoia, and Keel even entitled one of his chapters “Paranoiacs Are Made, Not Born.” He was perceptive enough to recognize the same tendencies within himself.

  Keel concluded that the battle cry of the phenomena must be: “Make him look like a nut!” He saw the phenomena marginalize experiencers, who became irrational, made wild claims, and whose lives were left in shambles. These were trickster manifestations. Keel suggested that others should be discouraged from pursuing the phenomena because of the irrationality they induce. He went so far to say that “the CIA/air force plan to debunk, downgrade, and ridicule flying saucers was, in retrospect, the most responsible course the government could take.” In essence, he urged further rationalization and disenchantment of the world (in Max Weber’s senses of the terms).

  The experiences of Steiner and Keel are instructive. Both investigated events under unbounded conditions and became entangled in the phenomena of their study. They recognized the difficulty of remaining objective. Both reported strong telepathic occurrences. Both had problems with their phones. Both became paranoid and concerned about their own mental health. Neither was employed by a research organization geared to study such events. They operated with little institutional support.

  Frameworks

  Strong supernatural manifestations are frequently disorienting. There is a natural tendency to put the phenomena into some kind of framework, to reduce ambiguity, to understand them, and establish their limits. One of two classes of interpretations is often adopted. The phenomena are either believed to be of a religious or otherworldly nature (e.g., caused by spirits, demons, gods, or ETs), or they are attributed to a human conspiracy.

  The first class of interpretations explains communications of trance mediums as from spirits of the dead, credits UFO experiences to ET aliens in “nuts and bolts” spacecraft, or ascribes poltergeist effects to unconscious minds. ETs, spirits, demons, and the unconscious have common properties, and such attributions create frameworks that socially construct reality and make it easier to speak about anomalous events. For instance, I have been in a number of UFO groups discussing ETs, and if one simply replaced the word “extraterrestrial” with “spirit” one could carry on virtually identical conversations with spiritualists.

  The second class of explanations, conspiracy theories, is closely related. There are real similarities between religious and conspiratorial beliefs, and in fact, philosopher Sir Karl Popper commented that conspiracy theorizing “comes from abandoning God and then asking: ‘Who is in his place?’” He noted that rationalists are particularly prone to it.

  Both religious and conspiracy theories put the phenomena in frameworks, and some structure and limitation are thereby imposed. Action can be taken. Gods can be propitiated, dangerous humans avoided. Outsiders may see such beliefs as paranoid or as a crackpot religion, but it is not unreasonable to adopt such perspectives when confronted with strong manifestations of autonomous intelligent power.

  It can be difficult to differentiate synchronicities and other psychic phenomena from those due to a conspiracy. A minor experience of my own may illustrate the idea. In the Fall of 1989 I was asked to comment on an early version of “The Controllers,” a manuscript by Martin Cannon on government mind control that went on to become something of an underground classic in some u
fology circles. Within a few days of beginning my written commentary, I was called by a hospital in New York City and asked if I would take part in an experiment. They wanted to inject me with sodium pentothal and monitor my brain waves. This was startling because I had not before, or since, been asked to take part in anything remotely similar. I did not really suspect that was part of some conspiracy to monitor my activity, but I was taken aback.

  Psi phenomena, including synchronicities, are somewhat “ideo-plastic,” that is, they respond to, and are shaped by, the ideas, beliefs, and anxieties of the observers—a fact demonstrated in both laboratory and field studies. The phenomena also display a measure of independent intelligence. This is unlike most natural sciences, which deal primarily with nonconscious entities. When an investigator studies something that can be intentionally deceitful, and has intelligence-gathering capabilities of its own, the usual paradigms of science are inadequate. New frameworks and perspectives are needed. Indeed, in some circumstances, science may not be useful; rather, approaches taken from the field of intelligence may be more appropriate. UFO researcher Jacques Vallee made this point in his book Messengers of Deception (1979).

  Paranoia is an occupational hazard of paranormal investigation, and there is an affinity between conspiracy theories and the occult.9 This occurs in many contexts. I have known witchcraft groups that engaged in magical battles and cast spells against others, fearing themselves to be under magical attack. I have heard rumors of psychotronics practitioners directing death rays against rivals (psychotronics mixes electronics and occultism). The level of paranoid conspiracy theorizing is even greater in the unbounded paranormal areas such as crop circles,10 cattle mutilations,11 and ufology.12 Some of the rumors in the UFO field during the 1980s and early 1990s described sinister government treaties with ET aliens that allowed biological experimentation on citizens; others told of underground alien bases. Government personnel spread a number of these stories, as will be described in the next chapter. There was serious speculation that President John F. Kennedy was killed because he was about to reveal the truth of the ETs. The dynamics of these beliefs are similar to those of witchcraft and sorcery accusations extensively documented by anthropologists in other cultures.