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Chapter One As I have written, I’ve spent much of my life trying to find reasonable explanations for complex and mysterious events, struggling to fit the anomalous experiences of my own as well as other people, into acceptable categories, trying to find prosaic explanations. The ironic consequence of this was that I was often compelled to shove logical observations under the rug of the mundane world, and in that sense, you could say that my imagination certainly was exercised! Because of these experiences and the fact that they did not “fit” into the “reality construct” of our society, I realized that part of our world is marginalized to an extreme degree, and this was troubling to me. I struggled mightily to bridge the gap between High Strangeness and the reality that our culture accepts as valid and real, establishing reasonable categories into which I could pigeonhole anomalies so as to not deny the evidence, while still giving credibility to the social and cultural norms of what is or is not possible. When a person knows that there are “strange things out there” on the one hand, and, on the other, that these strange things are regularly ridiculed and debunked, it becomes necessary to do something! The result is usually that a long list of terrestrial experiences are effectively fenced off from scrutiny for the simple reason that they may be considered abnormal or even sinful. That’s not a healthy way to live. Like many, many people, I never asked for strange things to happen in my life. I most definitely fought a losing battle to pretend they weren’t happening or that there was a “normal explanation” for them. I often wondered how many other people in the world had suffered because their deep realities had been ridiculed? At the most extreme end are people considered insane because their perceptions are different. But there are also vast numbers of people who have had many odd experiences who are afraid to speak of them, who hold them close inside, wondering daily if they’re losing their minds, or perhaps even whether they are being subjected to some sort of demonic torment. book LO!: Our data have been bullied by two tyrannies. On one side, the spiritualists have arbitrarily taken over strange occurrences, as manifestations of the Part Two: Charles Fort decrying the state of anomalies investigation wrote in his