Posthuman Blues

The "CROATOAN" fiasco has blown over. (By the way, "CROATOAN" is how the word appears in Ken MacLeod's epigraph. Strieber's article had a typo suggesting the spelling "CROATAN.")

A couple readers from the UFO UpDates mailing list have filled me in on the unexplained disappearance in the 1500s. One of these readers has an email address containing "Macleod"! Synchronicity? I think so.


What happened:

1.) I thought something was weird.

2.) I told other people I might be onto something weird.

3.) I learned it wasn't weird after all.

4.) I explained the misunderstanding: the epigraph in MacLeod's book and the disappearance in the Sahara were separate incidents. No link between the lost colony of Virginia and the vanished African tourists (beside the fact that both disappearances are unexplained).

5.) A guy with "Macleod" in his email address informs me of the fact. So some weirdness emerges out of all of this after all.

Is there any evidence of "deep structure" here? Well, "Mac" is my name. My astrological sign is "Leo"...

As insignificant and absurd as incidents like this seem, I've experienced enough of them to make me wonder if there is indeed something odd going on. The phenomenon behaves like a reflexive intelligence of some sort, quietly reminding me that it exists but without divulging any details. I have a strong intuition that the phenomenon is subjective; I can't prove that I'm interacting with some sort of acausal mechanism or intelligence any more than I can "prove" I'm self-aware.

The "nine beeps" episode with my telephone (see archives) is a case in point. Someone with an electronics background eventually assured me the beeps were caused by a "leftover" microchip the phone's manufacturers had failed to recall. Just when this seemed perfectly plausible, my phone recorded another set of beeps: eight of them this time, as if defying logical explanation.

(I have a certain suspicion that if the sequence of eight beeps could be explained in purely electronic terms, my phone would record seven of them just to keep the evidential ball rolling.)

If this acausal reaction is "real," then I suspect it's a component of a much larger paranormal spectrum governed by quantum mechanics. Jung defined synchronicities as "meaningful coincidences." Physicists think they might be rifts in the very fabric of reality.

Could the "alien presence" alluded to in a previous post be the logical culmination of undiscovered physical law? Could "aliens" be, as Whitley Strieber has speculated, the force of evolution as experienced by a conscious mind?

John Keel has written that researchers of the paranormal eventually become entwined in the very phenomena they're studying; what was once an interesting theory or crazy story becomes experiential truth. But this could be due to a blind external force or to some novel, pervasive form of intelligence.

Ultimately, is there any difference?