Deep Weird, Damned Facts

Dr. Jack Hunter is an anthropologist exploring the borderlands of consciousness, religion, ecology and the paranormal. He is an Honorary Research Fellow with the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, and a tutor with the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, where he is lead tutor on the MA in Ecology and Spirituality and teaches on the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology. He is also a tutor on the Alef Trust’s MSc in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology. He is a Research Fellow with the Parapsychology Foundation, and a Professional Member of the Parapsychological Association. In 2010 he founded Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal. He is the author of Spirits, Gods and Magic (2020) and Manifesting Spirits (2020), and is the editor of Mattering the Invisible (2020), Greening the Paranormal (2019), Damned Facts (2016) and Talking with the Spirits (2014).

ABSTRACT:

There is an academic aversion to the most unusual forms of extraordinary experience, which has resulted in a gulf between the kinds of experiences discussed in the scholarly literature - with phenomena often falling into distinctive types and categories (OBE, NDE, voice hearing, encounters with light, religious experience, and so on) - and the writings of popular paranormal researchers, who have more frequently been able to discuss a broader range of experiential accounts (from UFO encounters to Bigfoot and fairy sightings, and everything in between). Notwithstanding this divide, however, there are significant themes that run through the established academic literature on religious and extraordinary experience and the canon of popular paranormal research. These phenomenological similarities suggest that even the most unusual experiences, which are often ignored by academics, contain elements that connect them to other forms of extraordinary experience (such as psychedelic, spiritual, religious, and transpersonal experiences) that are more broadly accepted. This presentation concludes by suggesting that a sense of ‘high strangeness’ might well be a core underlying feature of extraordinary experience more generally and that instead of being neglected, the ‘deep weird’ should be granted greater and renewed scholarly attention.

On August 6, 1977, 63-year-old Tom Dawson was moseying with his dog through a Pelham, Georgia cow pasture when a flying saucer descended from the sky, hovering just above the ground. Dawson, his dog, and the cattle were all frozen in place as five white, hairless, neckless humanoids emerged. The beings (three male, two female, three nude) had “sharp noses” and “pointed ears.” They briefly examined Dawson who, the entire time, could hear someone inside the UFO repeatedly shouting, “I am Jimmy Hoffa!” (Since Hoffa himself famously “disappeared” two years prior, perhaps his soul was indeed trapped inside!) The beings chittered amongst themselves before returning to the craft, which rose 75 feet into the air and disappeared.

 - Cutchin, Ecology of Souls

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

I speak with Paul Devereux and his wife Charla who shared an unexpected and startling fairy encounter in 2003, during a research trip in Ireland. This event transformed Paul's outlook on the reality of fairy sightings. Paul is a well-known author and long-time researcher into the study of sound at ancient places, ancient and traditional life-ways, the anthropology and archaeology of consciousness, sacred sites and landscapes, general consciousness studies including psi phenomena, and unusual geophysical events.

Paul co-founded and is a previous editor of 'Time & Mind – The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture.

Charla has been researching alongside Paul since the mid-1980s and is an author on wellbeing subjects such as meditation, aromatherapy and lucid dreaming.