The Age of Anomalies

(Photo by Michael Herren on Unsplash)

This week, two conversations – one in Washington, D.C., the other in Charlotte, North Carolina – arrived, independently, at remarkably similar destinations.

The first came in the form of a superb new Substack essay by American journalist and author Ben Schreckinger. The second emerged from a gathering of several hundred scientists, consciousness researchers, AI thinkers, experiencers and explorers of the unknown at the Psi Games conference in North Carolina, where I found myself giving an address.

Ostensibly, the two events had nothing to do with one another. Yet by the time I’d finished speaking at one and reading the other, I found myself wondering whether they were, in fact, describing different aspects of the same story.

A journalist enters the mystery

The article that prompted these reflections is titled Reality Shock. Schreckinger (below) is not a UFO researcher; he’s an experienced Washington journalist whose reporting has ranged across some of the defining stories of the past decade: Trump and Russia, the Hunter Biden laptop, the rise of crypto, Havana Syndrome and the origins of COVID.

That background is what makes his decision to tackle the UFO subject so interesting.

Schreckinger approaches it neither as a believer nor as a debunker, but as a reporter asking a simple question: is there a story here that serious journalism has misunderstood?

His answer is measured, thoughtful and refreshingly free of hyperbole. He doesn’t claim to know what UFOs are, nor does he dismiss decades of testimony because some of it is plainly unreliable. Instead, he patiently surveys the landscape: the history of the subject, the emergence of credible military evidence, the gradual shift in scientific attitudes, and the increasingly public struggle of institutions to deal with a phenomenon that sits awkwardly between defence, intelligence, physics, psychology and consciousness.

Towards the end of his introduction, he writes: ‘It is possible that the anomalies detected by advanced military sensors in the 21st century will precipitate one or more scientific paradigm shifts.’

Which was the part that got my attention, because, at almost exactly the same moment he was publishing his piece (or, at the very least, putting the finishing touches to it), I found myself standing on a stage in Charlotte wrestling with precisely the same possibility.

Charlotte

The Psi Games is unlike most conferences. It certainly isn’t exclusively about UFOs, nor is it solely concerned with consciousness, psi or artificial intelligence. Instead, it occupies the increasingly interesting territory where those subjects begin to overlap.

For three days, physicists, neuroscientists, AI researchers, remote viewers, psychologists, philosophers and experiencers shared ideas alongside participants (above) competing in the Psi Games’ psi challenges. They came from very different backgrounds and held very different views, but each, in one way or another, was exploring the same frontier.

Some speakers approached the mystery through quantum physics. Others through neuroscience, machine learning, near-death experiences or consciousness research. Tom Campbell described a consciousness-based informational universe evolving towards greater coherence; Simon Duan explored artificial intelligence and computational models of reality; and Riz Virk argued that the physical world itself may best be understood as a sophisticated virtual reality. Others examined psi, remote viewing and the growing body of evidence that consciousness may not be confined to the brain.

My own contribution came towards the end of the conference.

It marked the first time I had publicly presented a framework I have been quietly developing over the past several years: the Adaptive Interface Model, or AIM.

AIM grew directly out of the thirty-five-year investigation that found expression in The Light Beyond the Mountains, The Outlier Series and The Participation Dialogues. On the surface, that investigation began as an attempt to understand UFOs. It ended somewhere rather different: with the possibility that anomalies of every kind – UAP, psi, near-death experiences, synchronicities and trippier forms of what have loosely been called ‘high strangeness’ – may be telling us something profound about the nature of reality itself.

What do anomalies actually do?

What interested me most, reading Schreckinger’s essay, was how his investigation had led him to a simple but striking observation that sits at the heart of AIM: anomalies may be the precursors of scientific paradigm shifts.

To take us there, AIM asks a fundamental question about anomalies - not what they are, but what they do.

Across neuroscience, artificial intelligence and complexity science, adaptive systems tend to learn in much the same way. They build working models of the world, and those models remain remarkably stable until something happens that they cannot explain. The resulting mismatch between expectation and experience – what neuroscientists and AI researchers call prediction error – forces the system to pay attention, incorporate new information and, ultimately, revise its understanding.

Viewed through that lens, anomalies aren’t merely puzzles waiting to be solved, they may also function as catalysts for learning: events that expose the limits of an existing model and create the conditions from which a broader one can emerge.

Whether that ultimately proves to be the right explanation remains an open question. What particularly appeals to me about the framework, however, is that it doesn’t require UAP to have a single origin. They may be extraterrestrial, interdimensional, ultraterrestrial – or something else entirely. AIM leaves that question open. Instead, it shifts the emphasis to their effect. If they consistently draw attention to moments when existing models begin to fail, perhaps what matters most is that they are creating the conditions in which a larger understanding of reality can emerge.

What struck me was that Schreckinger’s article takes the reader to that same threshold.

He does not attempt to explain the phenomenon in its entirety. Instead, he argues that the anomalies now confronting us may herald one or more scientific paradigm shifts, which, in turn, points towards the same possibility AIM explores: that anomalies matter not simply because they are strange, but because they may be signalling that our present model of reality is beginning to reach its limits.

The paradigm may already be shifting

We need now to take this possibility seriously. Not because we suddenly understand what UAP are – plainly, we don’t – but because they have crossed an important threshold. They are no longer simply the preserve of eyewitnesses, enthusiasts or fringe researchers. They have become official anomalies: acknowledged by governments, debated in legislatures, investigated by scientists and discussed openly within institutions that, until recently, preferred not to acknowledge the subject at all.

Whatever one thinks of the current US administration, the PURSUE initiative – the Trump administration’s move to accelerate official investigation and public disclosure of UAP – has catalysed that process. By placing UAP firmly within the machinery of government, it has done something historically important. It has transformed the phenomenon from an object of speculation into a legitimate subject of enquiry.

That is how paradigm shifts often begin – not with answers, but with anomalies that become too persistent and too well evidenced to ignore.

Thomas Kuhn, whom Schreckinger references more than once, understood this better than anyone. Existing models rarely collapse because somebody invents a better theory. They begin to give way because reality itself refuses to conform to the old one.

Whether or not the shift is actually underway is debatable. At the very least, however, we are at the beginning of a very different conversation about what we believe reality to be.

Where the journey leads

If you’re new to this subject, I can think of few better places to begin than Ben Schreckinger’s Reality Shock.

Full disclosure: he very generously references both The Hunt for Zero Point and the work of the EXO Institute (above - you can read about EXO’s launch here)). I’m grateful for both mentions, but they’re not the reason I’m recommending his essay. I’m recommending it because it is measured, deeply reported and refreshingly free of certainty. More than anything, it demonstrates what careful journalism can still do when confronted by a subject that most people have either sensationalised or dismissed.

I also suspect he is standing at the beginning of a rather interesting journey. I know because, more than three decades ago, I thought I was investigating a mystery about advanced aerospace technology. I had no idea, of course, where following the evidence would eventually lead.

Last weekend, however, it led me to North Carolina, where I found myself discussing many of the ideas Schreckinger begins to surface with an extraordinary mix of scientists, technologists, consciousness researchers and people whose lives have been shaped by experiences that still sit awkwardly beyond the boundaries of accepted science.

Somewhere along the way, the question has quietly changed. It is no longer simply, ‘What are UFOs?’ It has become something broader – and, to my mind, far more interesting.

What are anomalies telling us about the world – and about ourselves?

I’m not sure any of us yet knows the answer.

Nor, I think, should we pretend that we do.

But if there is one thing I have learned over the years, it is that the most rewarding investigations are rarely the ones that confirm what we already believe. They are the ones that quietly compel us to enlarge our map of what we think we know.

Schreckinger’s essay does exactly that and then some.