Peter Engelmann, December 28, 2025
Paranormal events, such as UFO sightings, mysterious disappearances, and supernatural phenomena, not only happen within notorious zones, such as the Bennington triangle, but also in liminal time spans in a certain zone.
It is like a temporarily electromagnetic charged field, where the physical conditions are altered. For example, if a thunderstorm is very close, your hair rises, radio and TV reception can be disturbed, and in extreme cases, so-called Elmo’s fire can be seen. Or electromagnetic storms coming from the sun not only create magnificent aurora borealis but also disruptions in the power grid.
Witnesses of otherworldly events describe the world around them suddenly “ensouled”, enchanted but sometimes also terrifying, altered uncannily. What was a familiar object before suddenly has a second, deeper meaning or is simply different.
A good example is in the First Twin Peaks series by David Lynch, when Agent Cooper’s room in the hotel is suddenly engulfed in bright light, and the giant appears.
It seems at certain times, a portal is opened, and a connection to the Otherworld is established. The air is charged with energy, much like electricity, but in a different way. This is when we experience premonitions in dreams and weird phenomena, such as Poltergeist-like occurrences, where a light bulb suddenly turns on by itself and becomes way too bright.
We can also speak of a heightened reality, a hyperreality taking over, which implies the supernatural, but not necessarily extreme effects. Things happen not clearly in the literal realm of reality, but in an intermediate realm where uncanny things can occur, often in a subtle manner.
If we look into myth and folklore, we find many interesting reports and traces of this phenomenon. It seems that there are liminal time spans where there is a heightened reality happens like an overlay to the layer of mundane reality periodically. We all know about Samhain, the night when the veil is thin, or about the dangerous winter nights between Christmas and Epiphany, called “Rauhnächte”. This is a time when people have visions and sometimes premonitions about the future. It is also a time when ghosts and demons are unleashed, and the wild hunt is roaming the woods and the sky.
Then there are these endless witness accounts of supernatural events within a short time frame.
Jacques Vallee described an exemplary episode in his book “Confrontations”: It happened in HAPPY CAMP, Northern California, autumn 1975, where, for a short time span, all kinds of UFO phenomena, supernatural and poltergeist phenomena happened.
Different types of sightings, often of a combination of completely different things as cryptoids, strange animals, and UFOs, within a few days, are a typical pattern. Another famous case is the Rendlesham Forest incident in the UK in 1980: USAF personnel reported various unusual observations at RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters, two American air bases located in England. Their reports included lights in the sky, a metallic triangular object in the forest, multi-colored lights moving through the forest, and higher levels of radiation.
Another famous case of heightened (paranormal) activity happened around Randolph in Massachusetts in the notorious Bridgewater Triangle in Spring 1979, where reports of UFOs put police officers under stress for weeks.
There are numberless other cases which give an impression that a certain region was under some sort of “radiation” which induced the phenomena.
Of course, there are cases where natural things like weather balloons or Drones created a mass hysteria where people misinterpreted things after some initial reports. But there is still an impressive number of reports, and it is also a personal experience that in certain moments of life, reality seems strangely altered, heightened, or full of otherworldly energies.
The important point is something which seems illogical at first sight: Often in these historical records of “paranormal episodes” it is not like what we would expect, it is not some sort of “alien invasion” with a series of UFO-sightings, but a strange mix of different kinds of phenomena and events. It might be some sort of sighting of a weird animal, the same time people see glowing orbs in the sky or some poltergeist phenomena, at the same time, people had weird dreams and visions. Often, everything is more subtle, like a sudden change in weather when the air feels different. Something which makes it difficult to lay a finger on it.
This reflects on the typical attributes of daimonic reality as Patrick Harpur coined it. The phenomena that we see might not be taken too literally; it is more like a representation of the daimons or some hidden force. Forces that don’t show their true faces to us. There is a dreamlike quality here, even if the events are literal, but their contents might sometimes be symbolic, sometimes just mysterious.
