Memos from God
JENNY RANDLES ponders the ways in which our brains create significance and shape UFO reality
I had a rough time on social media lately. Here, toxicity of argument is ramped up by the ability to hide behind avatars that turn people into warriors without consequence. My confrontations were not fortean, but I was losing focus on writing a new book that was, so it became frustrating.
Rather rattled, I hopped on the bus, as my local cat shelter needed supplies. Then, being eager to get back to work, I became anxious travelling home when we stopped at a crossing with a line of traffic leading to a major junction. I knew that once the lights turned green just a few vehicles would creep through before another long wait ensued.
The bus driver was starting to lose patience when an elderly couple appeared, one in a wheelchair, slowly starting to cross. I heard an audible sigh as the driver considered a dash forward to strand them dangerously. For a second, I resonated with his everyday ethical dilemma.
Having been a carer pushing a wheelchair for years, I wanted to root for the couple; but I could feel the conflict raging within because I also wanted to beat the lights. The couple made it and the lights changed. But I felt a pang of remorse as the driver accelerated at speed, ignoring other stranded pedestrians.
I found this trivial experience sobering given my weeks of arguing in a debate about prioritising human rights online.
By chance, as I arrived home I found the same rights issue was the subject of The Moral Maze, a BBC radio programme in which ethical conflicts are explored and debated. Here, comedy writer Graham Linehan (of Father Ted and The IT Crowd fame) was a participant. I had discussed this issue online and in private with him, as it is one that directly impacted my life. I supported most things Graham said on the issue but not all. This had become my crossroads of the soul moment.
After getting home (and feeding the cats) it struck me that this minor incident on the bus had focused my thoughts in unexpected ways. I thought of it as a ‘Memo from God’ moment; not that I believed the Almighty was making direct contact with me, just that this was one of those events that tips our thinking in a particular direction and when we are nudged by our subconscious, focusing our perceptions on normally automatic processes, to see what perhaps we could not before.
This incident on the bus did not feature out-of-body states or the suspension of
The brain is well trained to fill in gaps and to misinterpret anything not quite normal to match past perceptions
time, so it was not an ‘Oz Factor’ episode (a subject I have covered in this column before). But it did suggest to me an overlap that widened that phenomenon.
In 1982, when I experienced the Oz Factor first hand (as previously described here) it led almost magically to me resolving my problem. But this February 2020 experience suggests the Oz Factor may be at an extreme edge of a much wider and more common experience of gentle, subliminal ‘memos from God’ nudging our thinking in confusing situations and helping our brains to chart a new course.
How does this relate to UFOs? There is nothing supernatural about a jab in the ribs from our subconscious; perhaps the Oz Factor crosses a threshold as normal human senses are appropriated to guide us toward what seems to be supernormal insight.
However, I think it runs deeper. Because more gentle nudges often go unnoticed. The Oz Factor triggers altered states of consciousness, including time distortion, repressing of sensory input and access to sources of information beyond the mundane. Perhaps extreme ‘memos from God’ are priority-marked as urgent by our brain and tagged with suitable emphasis.
The brain is an amazing organ, but as we rely on it so much we take it for granted and consider it infallible. Yet it is built to do things like any machine. We misinterpret reality all the time and misjudge what we perceive, or even how improbable something is. All strange events are filtered through these flawed mental processes. These musings suggest a relevance to the UFO phenomenon.
Some years ago, I wrote a radio programme about coincidence and cited a few examples. A caller from Liverpool rang and told me how something amazing had happened to him on a building project when a particular type of tool went missing and he needed to buy one. As he walked off on the quest, exactly the item he sought literally fell out of the sky at his feet. The startled man looked up to see who had dropped it. There was no one there – although as whoever had dropped the object had nearly killed him, perhaps their absence was not too surprising!
Coincidence, yes. But supernatural? Probably not.
We always over overestimate significance and underestimate chance. How many tools go missing every day? Probably so many that need and deliverance must occasionally coincide. If this event happened another day, in another context, it would likely get forgotten; and the millions of occasions where no magical resolution follows get ignored while we focus on the tiny few in which it does.
It is easy to confer meaning onto meaninglessness, and as the brain functions by seeking patterns then this kind of event gets tagged with a significance that it may not deserve.
Optical illusions – a subject of considerable import to UFOs but rarely
appreciated – seem relevant here as well. They show just how our perception of reality is constructed inside our mind and not captured by the brain like a camera. The process often defies our expectation of objective reality. We perceive what our brain constructs but it follows patterns and rules that operate subconsciously. It can literally create things we ‘see’ that are not ‘there’. Perception treats anomalies via what in effect is a best guess scenario.
By definition UFOs, as anomalies, are perceptions we do not recognise. We assume the brain just shows us what is there. But it doesn’t. If you Google “classic optical illusions” you can get some insight into why your brain interprets anomalies as it does. Our brains routinely cross-reference common experiences when looking at something we do not recognise. They trigger major errors of perception even when no UFO is involved. So why would it be any different when one is?
Note especially the “two grey tiles” or “Cornsweet” illusion. Here you see a light tile and a dark tile. And even when the error is revealed to you and you see the true, identical colours that categorically exist beyond doubt, your brain will nonetheless stubbornly refuse to ever see them the ‘real’ way.
We experience false reality because the brain is interpreting perception as true via rules that mostly work. They just struggle when something steps outside the norm.
Our brains forge and change shapes, colours and sizes; they manufacture motion that is not happening, and more. Multiple illusions show this. The brain is well trained to fill in gaps and assume something must be there, and to misinterpret anything not quite normal to match something found among our past perceptions.
This is why we ‘see’ the letters ET on the surface of Mars (the photo is reproduced
on the opposite page). It’s why we see fairies in the sunlit gaps between trees. It’s human nature, driven by the mechanics of the brain mismatching anomalies.
A Trieste psychologist called Gaetano Kanizsa designed an illusion in which a triangle is created that is not really there. But we never fail to see it. Our visual perception always gets taken over by the brain seeking a match and ‘creating’ fiction.
Another similar illusion invents a circle just through perception of colour difference. You cannot not see the circle, but like the triangle it is not there. I modified these illusions to create one where a UFO magically appears (above). But it follows the same principle as the one designed by Kanisza. The ‘UFO’ is just empty space, but whatever you do, your brain fills in so that you see it as a ‘saucer’.
So what is ‘reality’ in terms of UFO perception? Is it there because you do see it, or not there because you know that is illusion? When anomalous perception is occurring, the rules of reality change. This matters, because anomalous perception is the start point of every UFO sighting.
A further vital point to bear in mind is that I designed the UFO illusion to resemble a disc-shaped ‘flying saucer’ – but we only regard it as a ‘UFO’ because this shape is now associated with it in our culture and stored in our brains under that tag.
If you could show that illusion to someone from 100 years ago, they will still see it as the same shape; but with no cultural history of flying saucers they would perhaps describe the ‘disc’ as a hat, or just see an odd shape appear without cultural meaning.
Optical illusions are a major clue that sometimes flying saucers are quite literally real while appearing from within the workings of our brains. We quite literally shape UFO reality.