E.L.F. INFESTED SPACES

JOURNAL OF POSSIBLE PARADIGMS
Issue 2, Fall '94
The first thing you need to do in order to solve a puzzle is to have all the pieces. Without all the pieces, you can never fully capture the whole picture. Yet with some of the pieces you can begin to appreciate patterns within the whole, and thus discern a practical course to follow towards the puzzle's completion. The puzzle analogy has been used a lot to describe the "UFO problem." Some people consider UFOs and the paranormal to be entirely different and unrelated puzzles. Others see UFOs as an index for a wide range of paranormal, psychic, mystical and apparitional phenomena; as another piece to the grandest puzzle of all: reality, meaning and human existence.

As an example: certain researchers have pointed out the increased incidence of poltergeist activity and Bigfoot sightings during and in the geographic vicinity of UFO flaps. Those researchers who don't want to consider this, in their attempts to understand UFOs as alien space craft, will dismiss such accounts. Still others will modify their hypothesis to somehow include these phenomena within the extraterrestrial interpretation of UFOs (i.e. Bigfoot are genetically engineered creatures under the control of the UFOnauts and/or poltergeist activity is a byproduct of the UFO's propulsion system).

Since the phenomena in question are "unidentified," unknowns, "anomalous," etc., we really can't say where the boundaries of each subject end or begin. This is why anomalists, aka Forteans (after Charles Fort, collector of reports regarding mysterious lights, falls from the sky, and all other things strange), are quick to point out that "a circle is measured beginning anywhere." It is tempting, and perhaps human nature, to look for simple yet all encompassing theories to explain everything we still do not understand. Several respected authors/researchers have offered evidence to suggest that much of the strange phenomena described variously as UFOs, Forteana, parapsychology, cryptozoology, etc., are all related in some presently incomprehensible way. Perhaps, as they have suggested, reality is holographic and informationaly organized, though human consciousness generally experiences it in a linear conception of spacetime.

In an effort to expand Western UFOlogy's currently narrow view of UFO phenomena, we will suggest authors and publication resources which highlight various theories and areas of interest relating to all these anomalies.

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