In the long history of strange events occurring in the lives of human beings, the drive for understanding has been, not surprisingly, shaped by the model of reality prevalent at the time. Thus, while our distant ancestors saw the appearance of strange, awe-inspiring non-human intelligences as a manifestation of angels and demons: entities normally bound to the spiritual domain beyond this mortal coil, modern westerners have tended to see more recent appearances of these non-human entities as the arrival of extraterrestrial entities who’ve traversed the vast expanse of outer space to get here.

In both of these described kinds of encounters, the interpretation has less to do with the elements of the encounters themselves, and more to do with the overarching meaning-making model of a particular civilization. And, of course, this is not just a time-bound phenomenon. Because, even today, a Shamanistically-oriented culture is likely to see these Others in a very different light than a scientifically-minded society shaped by the values of the Enlightenment.

In fact, when the gatekeepers of a particular society are convinced that certain kinds of described encounters just simply cannot be - as in modern western societies - then when these encounters are cloaked in a particularly potent degree of what is often termed High Strangeness, the event is just suppressed altogether, lest the witness be deemed mentally unstable or of questionable credibility. This of course doesn’t mean that such events don’t happen, but merely that they have no place to be categorized and analyzed within a particular framework.

All this is to say, the annals of non-conventional encounters from across time serve as a kind of road map for our shifting collective attempt to describe reality itself. And to separate the understanding of these kinds of encounters from the overarching meaning model of a particular time and place in which they occurred is to miss a major point of the exercise; for these matters work hand in hand, in a coordinated and interwoven feedback loop of event and interpretation.

Typically, while a certain brave subset of pioneers are willing to question the meaning model of a particular time and place, the overarching metanarrative doesn’t begin to break down - making room for new and transcendent hypotheses - until the sheer volume of outlier data has created enough collective cognitive dissonance so as to make it clear that there is no other feasible way forward than to trail-blaze a new metanarrative.