Deep Weird, Damned Facts

The academic aversion to the most unusual forms of extraordinary experience has resulted in a gulf between the kinds of experiences discussed in the scholarly literature – which are often neatly separated into distinctive types and categories (OBE, NDE, voice hearing, encounters with light, spirit possession, religious experience, apparitions and so on) – and the writings of Fortean1 and popular paranormal researchers, who have more frequently been able to discuss a much broader range of extraordinary experiential accounts (from UFO encounters to monster flaps, time-slips, haunted houses, humanoid interactions, Bigfoot and fairy sightings, and everything in between). Fortean researchers have also had much more freedom to explore the overlaps and intersections that interweave this diversity. This book, then, is an attempt to ‘cross the streams’ of the academic and Fortean traditions of extraordinary experience research, each of which has its insights, strengths and limitations. The Fortean approach is inclusive and exploratory, while the academic approach is careful and critical.
 -Hunter, Jack. Deep Weird: The Varieties of High Strangeness Experience (pp. 17-18). August Night Press. Kindle Edition.

So this will end up tied to UFOs to some degree but going focus on the very odd cases that don't seem to be visitors from other planets using advanced technology ->

On the Friday a man came to clean the carpet and curtains in the drawing room. Later on there was a complete fusing of everything electrical. Clocks, radios, refrigerator, freezer, T.V. all the lights etc. In the evening I lay down on a sofa, closed my eyes and tried to relax. I then saw several little green men with very unpleasant expressions. They were looking at me. They seemed to be at a distance. I suppose “gnomes or goblins” would be an adequate description. I didn’t like what I saw, and I was reminded of the time I had a rheumatic illness when I was seven, and had been very alarmed by the “little green men” I had seen then. Hallucinations, presumably.

Date of Experience: 1951, Female. RERC Archive Reference: 000235.

Hunter, Jack. Deep Weird: The Varieties of High Strangeness Experience (p. 38). August Night Press. Kindle Edition.

Another example from Harpur's Daimonic reality:

...any respectable scientist will be repelled by the sheer absurdity of so many visions. He may be happy to concede that a saint’s mystical union with the Godhead is serious and important (though outside his own terms of reference); but what will he make of the testimony of the teenage girls who saw a giant feathered creature at Mawnan, Cornwall, in July 1976?

“It was like a big owl with pointed ears, as big as a man. The eyes were red and glowing. At first, I thought it was someone dressed up...trying to scare us. I laughed at it, we both did, then it went up in the air and we both
screamed. When it went up, you could see its feet were like pincers.”

Another encounter could be wildlife, a spirit, an alien, or something else entirely:

[…] both of us immediately saw something out of place […] below about 30-40 feet away from us in between the trees [there was something] tall, white and three dimensional. It appeared to be completely white and soft like light, but it did not illuminate the trees or ground around it […] it was shaped in [an] upside down V or U […] It was so white that you could see the shadow being cast on it while it was swaying like it was a real animal […]

[…] It was making creepy swaying movements with its (whole body) […] It was moving left to right in a specific motion standing on the forest floor in the same area between the trees making absolutely no sound, and there was absolutely no wind. It was beautiful to look at but terrifying at the same time. We watched it in silence as it was swaying and I started to feel impending doom (the sinking feeling in your chest) “set in” and it felt like I was going to die or something bad was going to happen. I told my friend specifically “I don’t like this,” he agreed, and we immediately left the forest […]

Hunter, Jack. Deep Weird: The Varieties of High Strangeness Experience (p. 50). August Night Press. Kindle Edition.

If we could stop to sing, instead of everlastingly noting vol. this and p. that, we could have the material of sagas—of the bathers in the sun . . . and of the hermit who floats across the moon; of heroes and the hairy monsters of the sky.

Char me the trunk of a redwood tree. Give me pages of white chalk cliffs to write upon. Magnify me thousands of times, and replace my trifling immodesties with a titanic megalomania—then might I write largely enough for our subjects.
 —Charles Fort, New Lands

The kind of stories you are not likely to make up - now you're talking!

My wife Charla and I were driving along a lonely country road during a fieldwork research session for a planned book on worldwide lore relating to beliefs about spirit routes passing through the physical landscape (Devereux, 2001a/2003). We were trying to geographically map generations-old accounts of fairy paths we had uncovered in the verbatim folklore records of University College Dublin. We were on our way to the next location on our UCD list in County Mayo to see what we could find in the way of a local memory about a fairy path belief at a particular place there. We came to a Y-junction in the narrow road. There was no road sign and unsure of what direction to take, we slowed to a walking pace and proceeded cautiously onto the right-hand fork. A level sward of low grass occupied the triangle of land between this fork of the road and the left-hand one.

Suddenly, standing on the grass, there was a figure, between two and three feet tall. It was anthropomorphic and fully three-dimensional (as we could clearly determine while we were drifting slowly past). It had sprung into appearance out of nowhere, and it caught my wife’s and my own transfixed attentions simultaneously. The figure was comprised of a jumble of very dark green tones, as if composed of a tight, dense tangle of foliage, rather like the stand of woodland a hundred yards or so beyond the sward of grass. It didn’t seem to quite have a face, just a head with deep-set eyes peering out of the green tangle. It presented a distinctly forbidding appearance. As we crawled past in our car, the figure started to turn its head in our direction, but then vanished. Charla called out: ‘Oh shit!’

We looked at each other, both of us wide-eyed and thoroughly disconcerted. ‘

You saw that?’ I asked rhetorically. The whole episode had lasted for only about half a minute or so, but it was unquestionably an actual, if transient, objective observation.

-Paul Devereux's Forward for Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience (pp. 12-13). August Night Press. Kindle Edition.

In November of 1977, an interior decorator from Sandusky, Ohio, by the name of Millard Faber was walking near the west branch of the Huron River when he encountered what Awareness Magazine referred to as “the now standard Sasquatch or Bigfoot creature.” Faber claimed to come upon a bipedal, hair-covered being that stood around eight feet tall with a slight stoop. The creature had a hairless face and glowing eyes. Upon noticing Faber, the creature jumped into the water and vanished, leaving behind a huge footprint, a broken tree limb, and a hideous stench. Faber reported his encounter to the sheriff’s department of two adjacent counties, as well as to two local papers.

However, if this portion of the encounter was “standard,” what occurred to Faber three days later was anything but. As he retired to bed for the evening, Faber became aware of a presence. He looked to the doorway and saw five pink, glowing humanoids with bulbous heads and luminous eyes, clothed in tight-fitting skin-diving suits, gliding through the air. He claimed that these beings, though hovering several inches above the floor, still made the motion of walking, and that each one was around five feet tall, again with a slight stoop. They settled at his bedside and radiated a feeling of rage at him which he believed was directly connected with his reporting of the Bigfoot sighting. He also claimed to be impressed with the notion that the beings intended to take him with them. Eventually, as so many anomalous entities do, the beings vanished, leaving Faber alone to the mystery of his experience, and open to a further occurrence where he believed he was being watched by something unseen (Perry, 1978, pp. 5-17).

Floating up the stairway was a truly bizarre being. It had a flat, orange face with large red eyes and rough red hair. As it came up the staircase, its head began rotating in an unnatural manner to face Ken, coming all the way over its left shoulder. It was right as Ken realised that this thing was wearing a light blue jumpsuit that he panicked, retreated into his room, shut the door behind him, and loaded his underwater spear gun. Still in a state of panic, Ken also grabbed his diver’s knife and sat waiting, facing the door. He heard the high-pitched noise heighten, as well as a strange ‘sliding’ noise. Eventually, the sliding noises moved past, and the high-pitched noise diminished as well. Ken collapsed where he sat and woke the next morning with his weapons still beside him. Although the creature would not reappear, and it is not stated whether Ken had any lasting effects, his guard dog never recovered, becoming completely submissive at the first sign of any danger (Randles, 1990, pp. 75-78).

ANYTHING-BUT-STANDARD: High Strangeness Entity Encounters by Zelia Edgar, included in Deep Weird: The Varieties of High Strangeness Experience. August Night Press. Kindle Edition.

A set of short dialogues related to the book Deep Weird: The Varieties of High Strangeness Experience  ->

To celebrate the launch of Deep Weird: The Varieties of High Strangeness Experience on January 31st 2023. In this video Dr. Jack Hunter explains what is meant by the term 'Deep Weird,' and in subsequent episodes he will talk with contributors to the book about their chapters and the ideas they explore in them.

=-=-=

In this video Dr. Jack Hunter talks to author and researcher Anthony Peake about his chapter in Deep Weird, where he discusses the 'egregorial model' of entity encounters.

=-=-=

In this video Dr. Jack Hunter talks to author, paranormal researcher and cosmic witch Susan Demeter about her chapter in Deep Weird, where she discusses an experimental approach to conjuring and experiencing deep weird phenomena.

=-=-=

In this video Dr. Jack Hunter talks to Fortean writer and researcher Joshua Cutchin about his chapter in Deep Weird, which uses concepts from cinematography (such as particular editing techniques), as a lens through which to understand high strangeness experiences.

Dermot MacManus tells us of a sighting which is common not only in his native Ireland but across the world. The witness was a friend of his whom he calls Miss Patricia. When she was eighteen, some time in the nineteenth century, she saw one night at about 9 p.m. a blaze of light across the lough on which her farmhouse was situated. She stared in amazement as the small fort on the far side of the water was lit up by hundreds of little white lights. She saw them “all rise up as one and, keeping their formation, sail steadily through the air across the little lough towards the other fort, not far from the farmhouse. She did not see them settle there, but...hastily retreated to the safety of the house.”

The two “forts” on opposite sides of the lough were “fairy forts,” also called raths, lisses, or forths. They can be ancient tumuli or barrows but they are more often natural outcrops of land, usually artificially shaped or
surrounded by a bank and ditch, whose provenance and purpose has disappeared beyond history into myth. The forts are said to be where the people of Fairy live. Sudden bursts of light or music have been seen and heard there; sometimes a cavalcade of horsemen is seen passing into them through a hitherto invisible entrance. The lights are fairies. They follow straight paths between their preferred places, like Miss Patricia’s two forts, and woe betide anyone who builds on the paths or obstructs their traffic. Thus we see that
odd lights have a predilection for certain places and landmarks. They are seen over stone circles or legendary hills or even certain trees. Their appearances favor certain times of day, or certain days. Miss Patricia saw
hers on Halloween, when both pagan fairies and Christian souls of the dead are particularly active. Her lough may also have played a part: lights, whether we call them UFOs or fairies, like bodies of water.

In June 1973, a young man woke abruptly at three in the morning and felt compelled to go out onto the landing. Through the large picture window which overlooked Loch Ryan (in Scotland) he saw three yellowy-orange spheres hovering above the water. They suddenly shot upwards “at a fantastic speed.” and he came round “as if waking from a trance.” He found that his parents were standing beside him. They too had awoken for no obvious reason and had felt compelled to look out of the same window at the lights.

 - Harpur, Daimonic Reality

Marie Ezanno of Carnac described the corrigans of Brittany as mischievous chievous little dwarves who lived under dolmens, danced in circles, made a whistling sound, and behaved brutally to anyone they had a grudge against.' Gwen Hubert wrote in 1928 that she had seen a pixy close to Shaugh Bridge on Dartmoor in Devon. It was like a little old man, about eighteen inches high, with a little pointed hat, a doublet and `little short knicker things. Its face was brown and wrinkled and wizened,' she said. `I saw it for a moment and then it vanished.'"

 In June 1952, Mrs C. Woods saw a little man standing beside some large boulders on Haytor, a rocky outcrop on the moors near Newton Abbot in Devonshire. `He moved out from the rock and seemed to be watching her, shading his eyes from the sun ...'30 She approached him cautiously. `He was dressed in what looked like a brown smock ... [which] came almost to his knees, and his legs appeared to be covered in some brown material. If he had anything on his head it was a flat brown cap, or else he had brown hair. He appeared to be three or four feet tall and seemed elderly rather than young.'31 When she was within forty yards of him, he dived out of sight under a boulder.

  -Patrick Harpur. The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (Kindle Locations 157-165). Kindle Edition.

In 1970, a forester called Aarno Heinonen and a farmer called Esko Viljo were out skiing in the woods near Imjarvi, southern Finland, when they came on a strange little man.34 He was only about a metre tall, with thin arms and legs, a pale waxy face, small ears that narrowed towards the head and he was dressed in green with a conical hat. Aarno felt as if he had been seized by the waist and pulled backwards. Afterwards, his right side felt numb and his leg would not support him - Esko had to drag him home. He attributed these effects to a yellow pulsating light aimed at him from a black box the little man was holding.

This classic elf or fairy had appeared, however, in unfairy-like circumstances: stances: moments before, the two men had been stopped in their tracks by a round craft which hovered above them. Then `the huge disc began to descend', said Esko, `so near I could have touched it with my stick'.35 It sent an intense beam of white light downwards on to the forest floor. It was then that Aarno was pulled backwards. At the same moment he saw the little man standing in the light beam. Eventually the `craft' gave off a red-grey mist which enveloped both the creature and the men, such that they could no longer see each other. When it dispersed, light, creature and craft had disappeared.

The intriguing thing about this encounter is the way it combines traditional European fairy motifs with modern ufological features, as if it were a transitional species.

Patrick Harpur. The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (Kindle Locations 172-180). Kindle Edition.

It was my colleague’s honey jar. Let us call him Dan. Dan is an extremely accomplished academic teaching at a prestigious institution. He is a historian adept at reading in multiple ancient and modern languages. He has written numerous books and is a recognized authority in his field. So this is not “just another story.” It comes from a source of unimpeachable integrity, honesty, and historical precision.

It goes like this. One morning in August of 1980, at the age of twenty-four, Dan was making a large batch of blueberry muffins in his kitchen. He had just finished mixing the wet ingredients with a cup of honey. Honey being honey, he got some on the lip of the jar and so washed the jar off in the sink and sat it down to drip dry. He then turned to the business of the dry ingredients. Walking over to the pantry, he reached for one of those old-fashioned metal flour tins. As he pulled the tin off the shelf, it suddenly got heavier. His unprepared hands could not hold on to the new weight, and the tin dropped to the floor. Here is what happened next, in Dan’s own words, which he was kind enough to share with me at my request:

Upon meeting the carpeted ground, the tin lost its lid and much of its powdery contents. Rather upset at myself, I kneeled to clean up the mess. Then came the electric discovery whose current still flows through me. Enough of the flour had run out to reveal that something was buried at the bottom of the tin. Naturally curious, I dug through the flour with my fingers and then pulled out, of all things, a glass honey jar exactly like the one I had held in my hands and washed a moment ago, a jar completely caked with flour—as if it had been placed in the tin still wet. Puzzled, I turned my head to assure myself that the bottle I had just rinsed was standing where I had left it. It was not.

Dan stared for two minutes, examining the situation and its impossibility: “The fact was obvious. The wet honey jar had been moved from the sink and deposited on the bottom of the flour tin. The explanation, however, was not at all obvious.”

He went through all of the usual skeptical rebuttals: that this feat was a trick or show designed for an audience (where was the audience?); that he had somehow hypnotized himself and put a wet jar at the bottom of the flour tin himself (the latter is a nearly impossible feat he later learned—he tried); that his unconscious mind had played a trick on him and somehow traded places with his conscious mind for the duration of the experience (then how to explain the fully conscious and fully remembered sensation of the tin suddenly becoming heavier?). None of these “explanations” really resolved anything, of course. They were more unbelievable than the event itself, which was already outrageous enough

  --Strieber, Whitley; Kripal, Jeffrey J.. The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

There's something about that story of the honey jar which kind of feels real to me. It's the combination of ordinary objects behaving in ways which are absurdly impossible, and yet there it is, staring someone in the face. What sounds familiar to me is the way a person becomes utterly puzzled and bemused by it, yet there is nothing one could show to another person to prove it, because everything involved afterwards just appears as its normal, everyday form. So one is left with a memory,  a certainty that the world is not the way we ordinarily think of ii.