1: Definitions
From science fiction to theme parks, from government cover-ups to papal succession, from farmyard mutilation to cosmic phenomena, the paranormal reads like a list of hot tabloid secrets. Only the stars are not Elizabeth Taylor or Martha Stewart, but instead everyone from government agents to grandmothers, exorcists to psychics, geologists to meteorologists. The paranormal is not restricted to the alien birth pictures on the cover of Weekly World News, but is on the front pages and headlines of CNN and the Chicago Tribune.

It might seem like there is a resurgence of interest in the paranormal these days. Perhaps it is more likely that anomalies are increasingly apparent. What constitutes an anomaly? On what is its appearance or disappearance predicated? Why do we notice or overlook the paranormal? In what part of our culture does the otherworldly reside? This essay concerns itself with definitions, descriptions, order, and clarification. These words trace a desire to bring to light the ontology of the paranormal, which cannot be achieved without examining our technoscientific culture's compulsive war with the paradoxes of knowledge and blindness.As I write, a new pope, Benedict XVI, has just been installed. This rainy third week of April in Chicago, people traveling through an underpass saw an apparition of Mary in a salt stain on the concrete wall. The image looks a bit like a Cy Twombly chalkboard painting and is, in the AP photo images racing around the web, quite beautiful. The altar below the stain casts a warm glow from countless candle flames. People sit and pray quietly as they look toward the static mark.¹ The image is a touchstone for the relation of technology to the paranormal. Technology brings that which is far close; we might never get to Chicago to see this apparition, but the image is right there in our glowing screens. The digital allows us to see as if we were God, at any time, from any vantage point, and with special powers; people viewing the apparition shot countless photos of it, claiming that the image could be seen more clearly in the camera.² Communications networks connect us to the invisible; most articles about the phenomenon mention the nomination of the new pope as part of the context of this vision, as if Mary appeared in this dark, dirty place to affirm or witness the emergence of a new spiritual leader for Catholics. Technology breaches the divisions between order and disorder; the Catholic Church makes no official statement or approval of this apparition, yet through the Internet, people all over the world are seeing, or sighting, this apparition anyway. Torn between technology and religion, today we are trying to figure out where we stand. In America we live with a politicized religious rhetoric (“faith-based” welfare reform, etc.), which seems to return us to a historical connection with Christianity in our government and personal lives. Yet we are in thrall to The Matrix, which merges the action film genre with questions traditionally relegated to Pax TV, though reset in a hip, surreal language. As when the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century aged Victorian culture tried to wrestle with its social, industrial, cultural upheaval through obsessions with spirituality, mesmerism, and phrenology, contemporary culture seems to be trying to face the encroachment of technology in the fabric of our bodies, homes, architecture, relationships, and every other part of our world. Stories of anomalies, however quickly they flit by our screens, give us opportunities to reexamine and recast our belief systems, whether we choose to allow or outlaw an experience of wonder.

2: Fuzzy Logic
Dictionary definitions of anomaly tend to cluster around asymmetries of inside/outside. Anomalous phenomena are those that have no accepted explanation within the confines of a specific body of scientific knowledge. Words like deviation and departure imply the migration of meaning from a central way station. Descriptions such as peculiar, irregular, abnormal suggest that which resists classification. All these definitions revolve around the magnetic center of the normal or common. In our skies we accept that there are the empirically certain visible objects: stars, planets, meteors. Then there is another class of invisible objects confirmed by science: quasars, pulsars, and black holes. The third category, UFOs, angels, or souls, exists outside the other privileged categories through an elaborate dismissal by institutions of science, the government, the military, etc. But it is precisely through the avenues of those methodologies that believers pass to prove their beliefs. Area 51, home to alien autopsies, reverse alien engineering, and perhaps the body of Kennedy’s real killer, can now be seen on Google’s new Maps service, which allows users to view and navigate high-resolution satellite images. Examinations of its complexes of buildings, mazelike runways, and numerous craters using this state-of-the-art technology give a certain kind of empirical credence to speculations about odd goings-on inside the ultrasecret compound. The technology, developed by the government for military and space science, is turned back on itself. This insidious frottage of inside and outside, of error and fact, of accepted and refused always characterize any discussion of the paranormal.

This is never more the case than when a central figure of our culture comes out in full support of any ideas associated with the paranormal. Near the end of his life, Thomas Edison was quoted in Scientific American as saying, “I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then, if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or manipulated by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something”³ He saw séances, Ouija boards, and voice trumpets as crude devices that did not take advantage of current technological innovations. Essentially a technospiritualist, Edison, particularly at the end of his life, was hailed as someone who, in his ability to harness technology through invention, had a unique relation with the powers of nature, even those supernatural. In the 1920s, sketches and plans were made to build a radio device to communicate with the dead, but nothing remains of that pursuit.⁴ Though not a Spiritualist, Edison, known as the Wizard of Menlo Park, lived in a time when popular culture was in thrall to a motley crew of charismatic mediums. Well aware of the emerging industrial market’s dependence upon media spectacle, he was quick to take advantage of turn-of-the-century society’s fear of electricity. In the late 1880s The Edison Electric Light Company’s publicity demonstrations of their new electrical feats occasionally ended with the trappings of a séance, complete with flashes of lighting and glowing skulls.

Electricity had all the hallmarks of an anomalous phenomenon: invisibility, instantaneousness, advanced technical knowledge, unfamiliarity, and a radical shift in lived experience. Suddenly our bodies had a completely different experience of time and space; we could see each other at night as if in full midday sun and just as quickly cast those rooms back into their familiar darkness. Before people had light in their homes and businesses, they attended electrical light spectacles, in which inventors would create elaborate dramatic, sometimes narrative, scenes to popularize and familiarize the public with the new electricity. These spectacles cast electricity in a larger-than-life spectacle, and people quickly leaped to associating electricity with the supernatural, whether God or the spirits of the dead. Half a century later, Swedish artist Friedrich Jürgenson heard some staticky voices amidst birdsong on his reel-to-reel tape recorder. When he played the tape back, he heard “Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me?” It was the voice of his dead mother.⁵ Researchers around the world jumped on the phenomenon, and today electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, is the subject of over 25,000 Google hits, novels by Philip Dick and William Gibson, and movies such as White Noise, a 2005 film with the tagline “The dead are trying to get a hold of you.” EVP and related phenomenon are victims of an uncertainty in navigating signal-to-noise ratio in communications technologies. In 1948 Claude E. Shannon, the so-called father of information theory, put forth a way to measure information via a signal-to-noise ratio. “Signal” refers to the wanted information; “noise” is something unintentionally added to the signal: “These unwanted additions may be distortions of sound (in telephony, for example) or static (in radio), or distortions in shape or shading of picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy for facsimile), etc.”⁶ Both signal and noise are information. What determines which is which? Paranormal phenomenon that leak out of our ordinary technologies are condemned as anomalies, as noise. Perhaps our culture’s investigation of anomalies, in science fiction, in the news, and on the Internet, maps a desire to grapple with the uncertain ratio. The perseverance of anomalies gives us a chance to pierce the divide and recast our assumptions about information.

1: CNN.com, April 20, 2005, http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/04/20/mary. underpass.ap/.

2: Check out this fascinating meditation on the relation between higher powers and virtual spaces: Louise K. Wilson, “Cyberwar, God and Television: Interview with Paul Virilio,” pp. 321–29, in Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, ed. Timothy Druckery, New York: Aperture, 1996.

3: Scientific American, October 30, 1920, n.p.

4: For more information see http://www.som.org/5A&S/afterlife.htm and http://www.atheists.org/Atheism/roots/edison/interview2.html.

5: http://science.howstuffworks.com/evp4.htm.

6: Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” September, 1949, http://academic.evergreen.edu/a/arunc/compmusic/weaver/weaver.html.

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