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Film-maker Paul Kimball believes in ghosts; he goes looking for them.

My pal, Nick Redfern, writes about the paranormal as if it’s real.

And my friend, Eric Wargo defends the idea of the paranormal at his resplendent site, thenightshirt.com.

My Spanish colleague, Jose Antonio Caravaca, who’s gotten some promotion here and elsewhere for his intriguing “Distortion Theory” (for UFO encounter events), thinks there is a psychical reality for his “external agent? (the thing that interacts with humans when they think they are having a brush with beings from flying saucers).

One of my Facebook feeds convinced me that I’ve seen my “guardian angel” and I have seen what could be called ghosts (or, at least, things of an evanescent nature that seem to have had form and substance, for a brief moment).

But UFOs?

I have a fascination with those UFO encounters that also intrigue Jose Caravaca.

But I also think some people have seen nuts and bolts things that they call UFOs (or flying saucers in the old parlance).

And I believe some people have seen odd lights that had the appearance of maneuverability and intelligence.

But are all these “witnessed” things tangible? Or are they figments of our imagination, figments understood by various psychological etiologies?

Jacques Vallee has conjured up a control agent or mechanism to explain UFOs, somewhat similar to Jose Caravaca’s “external agent” both resorting to something outside our normal, humdrum reality, a process in Vallee’s exposition and an actual entity in Caravaca’s.

Others posit the (debilitating, for me) mythical meme, The Trickster.

Freud gave us the “id” to explain the mischief making mechanism that causes us grief but he restricted that mischief to sexual misbehavior.

Jung has proffered archetypes (the Trickster is one) that aggrieve us. And he gave us the evil nature of God (the devil, Satan) in his idea of the Divine Quaternity as the component that assaults humans.

But those psychological concepts, are they real?

When dealing with the so-called paranormal, one has to bring into play the nature of consciousness, but is consciousness real? (My previous post here about philosopher Dennett indicated that there is thought in some academic, scientific circles that consciousness is illusory.)

That is matter for discussion elsewhere, I’m afraid. Most of you can barely handle the rather mundane idiosyncratic aspects of a few UFO tales related here.

For me, the paranormal (ghosts, Big Foot, Nessie, et al.)  are neurologically or psychologically induced, “real” to the percipient but not real in the debatable sense of reality as we know it or think we know it.

And Jose Caravaca’s “external agent” or Jacques Vallee’s “control system” and Paul Kimball’s elusive ghosts or Nick Redfern’s chupacabras along with most UFO stories are merely intrusions of a non-sexual “id” or an archetypal memory accumulated over a life-time of personal neuroses (or pathologies).

The paranormal is a fairy tale lying atop one’s otherwise boring life, waiting to break out when existential things get too quiescent for someone who thinks he or she should be experiencing more than they are.

Under the cover of night, the paranormal comes “alive” but only in the mind, not in the actual reality to which we seem tethered.

RR