Reality blinks again
JENNY RANDLES returns to the subject of those ‘glitches in the Matrix’ when reality seems to shift
Ten years ago in my monthly column here I first wrote about something odd that I had noticed in a number of cases (FT315:27). I came to call these fleeting unusual events ‘reality blinks’. But I never took the idea much further.
Now, to my surprise, I have come across someone else who has noticed the same phenomenon. Using the same term, that reality “blinked”, a Reddit poster described how “whilst sober” a “weird” thing occurred. This happened while he was cutting carrots and listening to an audiobook. The sound of the reading just faded away, and then back in as ‘reality’ returned round him. He said it felt like a blink in his senses, just as I had described. In response, at least a dozen people added their own accounts, in which reality similarly switched, from their perspective – seeing objects move or appear and then disappear. The consistent theme was that in a sudden if subtle way, their local reality permanently changed.
Some famous people have also reported this oddity – Somerset Maughan described how the orientation of a figure in a painting he was viewing changed as he looked at it, and afterwards it stayed ‘stuck’ in that new alignment. He and others had the sense that they had switched suddenly from one version of the Universe to a largely identical localised one, where tiny things had altered for some reason. So whether psychological or physical, it does appear to be a genuine if rare phenomenon. But can it be related to the paranormal, or indeed to UFOs in particular?
In my own case, I had seen a dark mark appear out of nowhere on a wall. Oddly, so did my cat, which was sitting on my knee. We both turned just as it ‘blinked’ into place. I thought at first it must be a fly or spider that had landed. But it was just a mark that ‘must’ have always been there. Yet we both seemingly noticed it ‘arrive’ at that moment – as if we were seeing it for the first time. Or it had just magically appeared within our reality. A glitch in the Matrix, as it were.
If this was a real effect, I could see all kinds of implications, not just for UFO encounters, but for various other anomalous phenomena. Was it a little-reported effect of consciousness – or of the nature of reality?
The question outstanding was whether this was actually a change within the world itself being perceived accidentally as it happened, or some kind of odd perception, maybe related to the Oz Factor – that unusual level of consciousness that witnesses to close encounters seem to enter.
In that state, sounds seem to fade, the mind focuses internally and it acts as a precursor to an extraordinary experience such as a UFO close encounter. ‘Reality blinks’ may be another facet of that same process. The link with my cat implies that animals as well as humans might experience the same thing and so be able to share, for example, UFO episodes. Plenty of cases do seem to support the idea. That has implications for arguing whether these events are really occurring.
Many years ago I heard from a man called Roy, from Essex. On 10 November 1971 he was walking to work in Colchester when he saw ahead a milky white, fuzzy, egg-shaped ball of light. It changed colours in a sequence, and suddenly Roy noticed that all sounds had disappeared around him, as if he were in a vacuum. Nothing around him in this busy part of town was moving, no people, no noises. The Oz Factor has always included this kind of shift, but I had presumed it was a psychological one caused by the mind focusing on the strange experience. In Roy’s reality blink it coincided with the arrival of a UFO.
This baffling experience lasted unknown moments as time became immeasurable. Then: “I turned the corner, and it was like opening a door and entering a party.” The silence, the lack of sensations all ended, and reality instantly returned – in a blink. But was it the world he had left, or a new, slightly shifted one? I could not decide which of three options made the most sense here.
Was Roy’s feeling of timelessness and newly imposed reality the result of a temporarily altered state of a consciousness, or even a kind of blackout like a seizure? Or was the strange light generating energy that distorted his perception in some way? Or perhaps there was a literal blink in reality as he moved in and out of the sphere of influence of this odd experience caused by the glowing egg? Even a shift in dimensional space?
Roy had other experiences like this over time, suggesting they were somehow linked to his own perception of the world. One of them was his first, as a teenager. He was in an alleyway in Colchester one winter evening when he sensed someone coming from behind to pass him. He stepped to one side, but saw just a small floating light. Moments later, he blacked out and found himself inexplicably at the end of the alley, all alone and yet soaking wet. “Like I had stepped in the bath with all my clothes on,” as he later described it. It was intriguing that the UFO was the least interesting thing here.
I keep coming across ‘haunted people’ like this whose story feels much deeper than a routine account of fleeting lights in the sky. It implies the possibility of a much richer human component to what is going on. The kind of thing we are dealing with in these edge cases may be the key to close encounter experiences and particularly the alien abduction phenomenon.
Consider how an ancient Roman might see an aircraft, not as what it was – a human-built device – but as something easily fitting into their level of understanding about the Universe – a god, a demon, or dragon. We need to have a broader sense of the unusualness associated with the things we now see, and not infer that UFO cases are just what we have assumed they were for almost a century. My hunch is they could be much stranger than alien visitors and perhaps are a pointer toward rather more interesting things about the Universe than beings from Alpha Centauri who learned to traverse space. Perhaps reality blinks are a clue to profound things that could unlock doors to science well beyond ‘flying saucers’.
The baffling experience lasted unknown moments as time became immeasurable