When Reality Unfolds: The Topology of High Strangeness

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Witnesses rarely remember high strangeness as terror. What unfolds is quieter—stranger. The silhouette is voided. The body stays calm. The event resists narrative. And in its place, the real begins to shift. This episode follows the emergence of two encounters—a figure by the hedge, and another in a kitchen—and explores what happens when the world fails to hold its shape.

Working through the six-layer model by Jacques Vallée and Eric Davis, we examine the phenomenon across physical, psychological, cultural, and informational layers. Rather than offering closure, the model reveals what kind of perception is needed to endure the unresolvable. It is not an invitation to belief, but an architecture for remaining—when explanation fails, and yet something real has occurred.

What does it mean to register an anomaly without grasping for meaning? What if attention itself becomes part of the event? Drawing on ideas from Gloria Anzaldúa, Karen Barad, and Jungian archetype theory, this episode explores not what is seen, but how seeing gets rewritten. The anomaly is not an object—it is a fold. And the fold does not close.

Why Listen?

Further Reading

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Listen On:

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Davis, Eric W., and Jacques Vallée. "Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness: A 6-layer Model for Anomalous Phenomena." National Institute for Discovery Science, 2003.

Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. 2nd ed. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Charlottesville, VA: Anomalist Books, 2014.