James Houran

An official‑looking cemetery sign paired with a nearby shoe brush—an art installation playfully warning visitors not to “give ghosts a free ride”—offers a compact, real‑world prompt that vividly demonstrates the recently developed Cascading‑Resonance Model (CRM) of psychological contagion, the process by which thoughts or behaviors can amplify and spread across people like a “virus.” This novel framework synthesizes emotional, cognitive, and behavioral mechanisms into a three-layer process: (a) input (suggestibility, expectancy priors, ritual affordance), (b) synchronization (attention convergence, mimicry/entrainment, social appraisal), and (c) scaling (prestige cueing, network feedback, and threshold dynamics). By mapping the features of this art installation against the CRM’s nine core mechanisms, we illustrate how contagion effects in paranormal-related contexts can emerge and intensify without invoking transmissible supernatural agents. This conceptual exercise thus offers parapsychologists and amateur investigators a mechanism-rich alternative to metaphysical interpretations, showing that clustered or transient perceptions of anomalous phenomena often reflects cascading resonance rather than evidence of external forces.

Clinical psychologists, parapsychologists, and transpersonal-oriented therapists who work with individuals reporting anomalous or exceptional experiences—terms whose clinical and research implications are distinguished in this paper—face distinctive ethical challenges when clinical care intersects with research documentation or case dissemination. Standard informed consent procedures inadequately address therapeutic misconception, role boundary ambiguity, and risks inherent to academic publication, particularly when personally significant experiences enter the public domain and become subject to uncontrolled scrutiny. We propose a best-practice ethical orientation and boundary-clarification framework designed to precede and inform activity-specific consent. Central to this approach is an “Acknowledgment of Understanding” that orients clients to the distinct purposes, obligations, and long-term consequences of clinical care versus academic research, without authorizing participation in either, operationalized through a staged consent process with separate, activity-specific documents for clinical treatment, research participation, and publication. Grounded in American Psychological Association ethical standards, Belmont principles, and both quantitative and qualitative research ethics traditions, the framework translates abstract ethical requirements into ten structured disclosure components addressing role boundaries, dissemination risks, voluntariness, and dual-role transparency, illustrated through representative clinical vignettes. The framework strengthens protections for percipients while supporting ethically rigorous practice at the clinical–research interface.

Unidentified anomalous/ aerial phenomena (UAP) reporting has intensified public and governmental attention, yet scientific adjudication remains stalled because most released materials lack the documentation required for independent verification or reanalysis. Astrobiology has increasingly emphasized the search for technosignatures—measurable manifestations of non-human technology across electromagnetic, chemical, and potentially physical domains—and a small but consequential subset of government-sourced UAP observations plausibly intersects with this category, insofar as some reports involve structured emissions, extreme kinematics, or multi-sensor correlations that, if validated, would exceed known terrestrial platforms. This commentary argues that progress in both UAP studies and technosignature science hinges less on interpretive claims than on enforceable procedural standards. Specifically, it proposes: (a) a compact, machine-readable metadata core accompanying any cited or released UAP evidence; (b) a publicly described investigative playbook incorporating calibrated sensor characterization, cross-sensor correlation, and cryptographically protected chains of custody; and (c) an independent, tiered archival mechanism enabling auditable preservation and controlled scientific access. Together, these measures would convert episodic media artifacts into reproducible research objects, align anomalous aerospace observations with established astrobiological data practices, and create a defensible pathway for evaluating near-Earth candidate technosignatures without presupposing exotic explanations.

We present the development and pilot evaluation of the Immersive Psi Test (IPT), a dual mode application for research on anomalous cognition that integrates forced choice measurement with AI supported narrative immersion to enhance ecological engagement. The IPT combines five image-based forced choice trials (“explicit psi”) with ten covert narrative decisions (“implicit psi”), using normed “enchanted” (high emotion and numinosity) and “disenchanted” (low emotion and numinosity) photographs to influence aesthetic-transformative experience. Enchantment Manipulation checks confirmed strong valence separation (d = 3.63) and broadly acceptable randomization, with only minor deviations in one trial. In a convenience-sample pilot study (N = 126), explicit psi performance with image selections did not exceed chance, whereas implicit psi via narrative choices in the enchanted condition produced a very small but statistically significant deviation above chance (p = .016; h = 0.09). Measures of transliminality and encounter proneness correlated as expected (ρ = .52) but neither predicted psi outcomes in our sample. These findings demonstrate the operational feasibility of the IPT framework and provide potential evidence of condition-specific implicit psi effects. Reliance on a convenience sample limits generalizability, so the outcomes should be regarded as a proof-of-concept versus confirmatory evidence. Future research should employ preregistered designs, stratified sampling, and enhanced randomization controls to determine whether observed effects reflect genuine anomalies or methodological artifacts.

This essay critically examines Impey et al.’s (\citeyear{Impey2025}) application of machine-learning to detect ostensible scientific misinformation, arguing that their operational definition of pseudoscience is philosophically inadequate. While the authors achieve impressive accuracy rates (> 95\%) in flagging content across domains including astrology and UFO/UAPs, their reliance on a binary “real versus fake” classification ignores decades of philosophy and sociology of science literature demonstrating that demarcation between science and pseudoscience is contested, context-dependent, and socially negotiated rather than algorithmically determinable. Drawing on foundational work by Laudan, Hansson, Pigliucci and Boudry, and Gieryn’s boundary-work theory, we show that encoding oversimplified demarcation criteria into neural networks risks creating what might be called “algorithmic pseudo-demarcation”—technologically sophisticated tools lacking epistemological grounding. The essay examines methodological limitations including the black-box problem, synthetic training data concerns, and educational implications. It is argued that effective misinformation detection requires integrating philosophical rigor with technological innovation, acknowledging epistemic ambiguity, and fostering critical thinking rather than algorithmic deference.

This online study explored anomalous, trickster-like events reported by researchers while writing about ghostly episodes. A convenience sample of 167 participants (seven credentialed frontier scientists and 160 amateur paranormal investigators) retrospectively endorsed 15 items spanning both subjective experiences (e.g., unusual dreams, emotional shifts) and objective events (e.g., missing files, device malfunctions). Subjective experiences occurred 1.6 times more often than objective events, with endorsement rates ranging from 7% to 30%. Rasch analysis revealed a unidimensional hierarchy of 14 coherent items with strong internal consistency (KR-20 = .87) and minimal gender-related response bias. The reported anomalies could largely reflect psychological mechanisms such as memory reconstruction, source-monitoring errors, or cognitive load, but their clustering and symbolic framing suggest deeper epistemological vulnerabilities—what we call a “trickster chain”—when preparing paranormal themed works. These findings may generalize to other emotionally charged or liminal writing contexts where narrative coherence is vulnerable to psychological or transpersonal disruptions, offering a novel lens on how altered states, symbolic processes, and creativity intersect in scholarly work. Our novel “Trickster-Like Experiences Inventory” therefore offers a promising tool for metascientific inquiry and invites further research into both conventional and parapsychological interpretations of anomalies or disruptions in academic contexts.