A Resonant Chaos
"If those three variables work in the right relationship with one another, you get phenomena."
To me, one of the most fascinating and unnerving aspects of the paranormal is the idea of discarnate forces of energy acting upon the physical reality we inhabit on an everyday basis. Whether these enigmatic episodes are caused by "invisible" beings inhabiting imperceptible frequencies, sporadic telekinetic manifestations, or some other unknown anomalous mechanism, the poltergeist phenomenon has been reported all over the world for millennia.
Many are familiar with the term "poltergeist" from the titular film franchise that began with the 1982 film of the same name written by Steven Spielberg. Though the movie was lauded by critics such as Roger Ebert for its focus on how these bizarre incidents affected the family experiencing them instead of gratuitous special effects, the concept of departed spirits as the source of these hauntings was a tad predictable and campy for others.
When researching tales of real-life poltergeist events, the latter may seem like an even more justified opinion. Many of these reports detail much more horrific circumstances than some R-rated spooky ghost stories could communicate to an audience.
However, it goes without saying that most of these reports have been brushed off by the public — and especially the scientific community — as either hoaxes, delusions, or misinterpretations of prosaic occurrences, such as memories of dreams.
Any stigma associated with the UFO phenomenon can be considered minuscule compared to the discussion of poltergeist-like incidents, at least in Western cultures. The idea of funded studies into such an absurd-sounding horror trope would no doubt be a non-starter in virtually every modern-day academic institution.
But that hasn't always been the case. For a time, some serious people put a lot of thought into these cases and came up with some rather intriguing theories.
Not What We Think They Are
Always one to jump headfirst into controversial explanations for the world that surrounds us, Blink-182 guitarist and founder of To The Stars Tom DeLonge connected poltergeist experiences to aspects of human consciousness in an interview back in 2022.
DeLonge cited some examples of studies conducted by a university laboratory decades ago to make the point that the initial reaction of the observer may influence the intensity of the activity's escalation.
There's a consciousness aspect to this. You have to think of consciousness, it's like the mind of God. It's not a dude in a toga, with a crown of thorns making Jupiter, you know? It's like everything you see is one band of frequencies. The highest frequency is light, unified mind. The lowest frequency would be blackness, and absence of love. Physical matter is somewhere right in the middle. So you have the ability to tune up higher or tune down lower. Behavior, and all these things in time — it all comes together.
What it means is that your brain is what's called a transducer. You're an antenna. So you create matter, and when you think something it creates it. You're not reactionary to your environment, you're actually proactive and you just don't know it. So it really matters what you choose to see and feel because that's literally what's being created for you, and people don't know this. When you're like really into some crazy shit, the universe will start creating things and we just think it's paranormal.
For example, at UCLA they were studying poltergeist events, and they found out that… if you see a book move on the shelf and it scares the shit out of you, that book will then fly off the shelf and try and hit you. So the more scared you get the more shit starts happening, and they didn't know why. Well the reason is you're a transducer of your environment. You're an antenna plugging into all these frequencies, and once you go, "Oh, that book is moving," it'll move.
Our universe, it's just not what we think it is. The whole thing with UFOs is that they're fucking around with us because of that. I would not think of a UFO as a vehicle which aliens are going to travel in….these are more like entities.
The idea that the human body and brain are a transducer of certain frequencies related to consciousness is not new. Ancient civilizations, through their texts and rituals, have described these kinds of vibrational planes of existence and wisdom for all of recorded history. It may be because of these long-held spiritual beliefs that science has resisted any serious inquiry into what our modern paradigm considers to be "paranormal.”
As I mentioned earlier, however, there are a few times when these phenomena have been thoroughly investigated. The scientists behind UCLA studies cited by DeLonge in his interview did attempt to document and formulate theories on poltergeist events, as briefly as the university allowed them to continue.
An Emergent Property
Around the same time as the legendary Stanford Research Institute remote viewing program was getting started, the University of California, Los Angeles, was beginning its research into the realm of parapsychology.
From 1969-1978, UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute (NIP) conducted studies and even trained subjects in psi phenomena. The lab also researched anomalous events at the locations where they happened — surely a proposition that would give the head of any university's administration an aneurysm if asked for today.
An interview with one of the lab's researchers, Dr. Barry Taff, provides some intriguing insight into the cases of the time and the resulting theories that were postulated. In an interview with the website Reality Sandwich, Dr. Taff explains why these poltergeist events — of which he has studied over 4,000 — may not have such a ghostly origin after all.
In defining what he refers to as Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis, or RSPK, Taff starts by explaining the difference between microscopic and macroscopic scales of telekinesis and the connection to human consciousness for each.
There are two types of psychokinesis (moving physical objects around without physical means). There’s microscopic, which works on very small scales, things like affecting random number generators, random event generators, and moving subatomic particles around. It’s usually electrostatic-based, fatigue in the individual is shown, as it’s done on a conscious level. And then there’s macroscopic, what we call ‘poltergeist,’ and that’s a whole different ball of wax.
We’re talking about the ability of moving very massive objects, hundreds of pounds easily. It’s done on a subconscious level, as there is no fatigue seen in the person at the core of it. Like the microscopic type, it’s believed that the phenomena are generated by a living human agency.
Considering both the conscious and subconscious minds require a living host to exist, it would make sense that the RSPK theory of the poltergeist phenomenon would inherently rule out the spirits of people who have passed on to the next world.
This theory also clearly ties into what DeLonge Is saying about the human organism being a transducer of consciousness, particularly when taking into account what Dr. Taff goes on to say in that same interview.
It seems to be that there are several overlapping variables at work. One is the location—either a geomagnetic or an electromagnetic anomaly site—where there’s some strong form of energy that we know of affecting the individual at the core of the phenomenon.
The second variable is that the individual is usually seizure-prone or epileptic, sometimes without knowing it. Lastly, they also suffer from ineffective coping mechanisms and problems dealing with stress. If those three variables work in the right relationship with one another, you get phenomena.
The way the electromagnetic environment affects these people is stressful. It alters their body in some way. The mechanism is called ‘inductive resonance coupling’. So, even if you’re in the right environment and you’re seizure-prone or epileptic, if the field doesn’t resonate with yours…nothing happens. And that may be based more on your emotions than anything else.
What’s also curious is that most seizure-prone or epileptic people are not poltergeist agents. It’s unilateral, not bilateral, and we don’t know what the missing variable is. This is why, with every case we approach, on top of everything else we do a medical background check of the individual and ask a lot of personal questions that, seemingly, have little to do with what’s going on.
With DeLonge and Dr. Taff's ideas taken together, it becomes apparent that we are talking about a specific type of wave — be it electromagnetic, acoustic, or otherwise — permeating and creating a resonance between lifeforms and their environment. These waves are emitted by each individual’s unique “biomagnetic field” at their own personal frequencies, some of which may resonate with the fields of others.
This could be seen as the literal interpretation of the phrase “vibing with someone” or sensing whether a person is giving off “bad vibes” without even having to speak to them. DeLonge himself refers to these simple intuitions as “the beginning of telepathy.”
Certain abnormalities within the inputs and outputs of these resonators may cause the entire system to go haywire, as Dr. Taff hypothesizes with the potentially extreme effects of epilepsy on the level of activity. His suggestion that events may also be based on the emotions of the subject at the core of the phenomenon demonstrates a very human variable at play.
There is also another aspect to these poltergeist events that have risen to prominence in UFO lore even more recently that deserves our attention in this context.
Infecting Consciousness
During his time studying poltergeist phenomena at UCLA and after, it became clear to Dr. Taff that these anomalous events tended to follow people around even after they had moved their permanent residences.
As echoed more recently by individuals who worked on US government programs located at a property called Skinwalker Ranch in Utah's Uintah basin, Dr. Taff states that these kinds of paranormal realities have the apparent ability to infect people like a virus.
Speaking to journalist George Knapp on Coast to Coast AM in January 2020, Dr. Taff spoke of a dynamic within these experiences that sounds eerily similar to the hitchhiker effect reported during the Defense Intelligence Agency's AAWSAP program.
It's a psycho-virus. It has all the qualities of a biological manifestation, but it is energetic. If you're susceptible, it theoretically can infect you. Most people [experience] nothing.
But if you're the right person, at the right time, at the right place, then you can act as what I call a biological operational amplifier. Your body is able to absorb, mix up, and remit this under the right conditions.
In the book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, the authors lay out an almost identical description of an infectious agent model that spread throughout individuals they interacted with in daily life, such as family and other children at school.
Utilizing this terminology, Axelrod was the index case who was first “infected” on Skinwalker Ranch and carried the infectious agent 2,000 miles home to Virginia with him. Within a few days or weeks, the agent had spread from Axelrod to his wife and both his teenage sons, and all three began experiencing a bewildering diversity of anomalies in their home.
Within a few more weeks the infectious agent had spread to the neighborhood and infected two teenage friends, probably at school, who lived within a couple of miles of the Axelrod home. It should be noted that the symptoms of infection from Skinwalker Ranch are not respiratory distress or death, as with COVID-19, but rather profoundly altered perceptual environments.
It goes without saying that the number of people involved in these observations are too few to draw any firm conclusions, but the metaphor of an infectious disease could be a useful one for future research on the human effects of visiting the Skinwalker Ranch.
Considering what we have learned thus far in the paragraphs above, it seems like there is a strong relationship between certain electromagnetic frequencies and the resonances between individuals. Perhaps the abnormal biological hardware of some of the people who enter areas with magnetic anomalies exacerbate this phenomenon, as in poltergeist events, or act as super-spreaders in the context of the hitchhiker effect.
But what are the energies and propagation mechanisms at the center of all of these anomalous incidents, and why are some confined to certain areas even with the ability to follow people home from across the country?
To explore these possibilities we will turn to the work of a man who may be as confounding as he is fascinating, but I will do my best to lay out his relevant thoughts.
Disturbing the Aether
Dr. Taff himself admitted that he did not know what kind of energy could be facilitating the biological resonances leading to these poltergeist events, but theorized that it may have to do with zero-point energy.
My gut is telling me that if we find out what this energy is, it could take us to the stars. This is energy that does work without heat! There are only four forms of energy that we basically deal with: electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear, and gravitational.
Well, it can’t be gravitational because the mass is insufficient. It can’t be nuclear because the individual would be dead due to ionization long before any RSPK occurred. Is it electromagnetic? When you see a 215-pound man being picked up and thrown across a room, his clothing and everything else should burst into flame by the liberated heat of the force doing it. The second law of thermodynamics. But it doesn’t get hot, it gets cold! What are we being shown here?
Call it Zero Point Energy, call it whatever you want, but whatever it is explains much, if not all, of the paranormal—from ESP all the way to OBE’s (out-of-body experiences) and NDE’s (near-death experiences). However, the way this energy couples to us is almost assuredly magnetic in nature. The problem is we can’t simulate these conditions and test it in a lab yet.
One man who has conducted a massive amount of research into the concept of zero-point energy and its interactions with the human brain is former Army Lt. Col. Thomas Bearden.
Anyone who recognizes Bearden's name knows to strap in right about now because shit is going to get a bit weird.
In his book The Excalibur Briefing, Bearden writes of Soviet experiments where the
The Soviet work that measured coherence of cyclic rhythms (heartbeat, breath, body electric fields, etc.) in Kulagina is significant in this respect. Kulagina induced electrostatic fields around objects that she moved psychokinetically. Her biofield, which is connected through hyperspace to the object being moved, is orthorotated into ordinary fields at the interface of the object. Thus an electric field is created, and also a momentum field that causes the object to move by ordinary physics.
The Soviet work appears to have established that man, earth, and cosmos are psychotronically and coherently linked; that the boundary of an object is a transducer coupling internal and external dynamic changes in one-to-one correspondence; that the transducer effect applies to both living and nonliving systems; and that through tuning and resonance, internal patterns can be incepted externally, and external patterns can be incepted internally.
As we can see, the concept of a biofield once again comes into play in connection to telekinesis. Transferring this seemingly esoteric energy from the aether (or vacuum) into electrical energy that can be used within the physical world seems to be Bearden’s explanation for these abilities.
So if this transducer effect spoken about by both DeLonge and Bearden interacts with both physical and non-physical objects and energies, we are left with a few questions regarding the poltergeist phenomenon.
Are these poltergeist "entities" just a physical manifestation of an erratic biofield?
Are the values of these biofield frequencies relative to the emotions and intentions put out by those in the surrounding environment?
Are certain geomagnetic anomalies triggering certain magnetic mechanisms in the brains of "poltergeist agents" and is that why these events seem to emanate from certain geographical areas?
Could an ongoing resonance between biofields susceptible to such frequencies explain the hitchhiker effect or "psycho-virus" aspect of ongoing poltergeist experiences?
Whatever the case may be, there seems to be an aspect of consciousness that we are dealing with here that is presenting itself at a very human level.
If telekinesis is indeed real, and thoughts can have an effect on physical objects or even materialize them, then any abnormality in that process could potentially explain the seemingly emotional, reactive, and erratic nature of these poltergeist events.