by Mike Cifone
This article examines some of the epistemological foundations and principal methodological challenges involved in integrating anomalous phenomena – particularly those related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) – into the domain of scientific inquiry. Beginning from the modal axiom that actuality implies possibility, I argue for a reformulation of empiricism grounded in the primacy of experience. I then trace the transformation of UAP research from a forensic, retrospective mode of investigation reliant on the UAP report (and hence on witness testimony) to an anticipatory, observational paradigm aiming to produce measurable data on UAP themselves (data that is not inherently mediated by witness testimony). However, I maintain that even these methodological advances will (somewhat expectedly) fall short of addressing what I call the “excessive remainder”: A persistent residue of experiential and psychophysical data that resists integration into existing scientific frameworks. To confront this, I propose a philosophical and methodological expansion of science itself – one that does not shy away from the anomalous, but instead reorients rigor to meet it. This article concludes by calling for an expanded epistemology (and associated scaffolding metaphysics) responsive to the limits of current knowledge systems yet open to the transformative potential of the unknown, without slipping into the all-too-frequent metaphysical traps of the speculative, which the history of the subject (even the recent history) demonstrates is a persistent danger time and again in the absence of a guiding anticipatory science of UAP (see, for example, the speculations of, inter alia, Elizondo, 2024; Masters, 2022, etc.).
I maintain that even these methodological advances will (somewhat expectedly) fall short of addressing what I call the “excessive remainder”: A persistent residue of experiential and psychophysical data that resists integration into existing scientific frameworks.
Actuality Implies Possibility – The Empirical Ground of Science
At the foundation of this inquiry lies a perhaps deceptively simple claim from modal logic: if something is actual, then it must be possible. This tautology – “actuality implies possibility” – has surprising power when brought to bear on the philosophical foundations of scientific inquiry, and even more so when applied to the study of anomalous phenomena such as UAP. Here, we aim to unpack the epistemological implications of this principle, not as an abstract theorem, but as a guiding axiom for a radically empirical science.
The simple claim is this: The actual is that which has been encountered in experience. It is not speculation, not imagination, not even hypothesis. Experience is the root, and science is the method by which we attempt to make sense of that root by transforming it – methodically – into structured knowledge. This transformation involves a threefold passage: From experience, to conceptualization, to instrumentation and empirical regularity. Scientific facticity emerges from the closure of this loop – experience validated through shared, replicable, intersubjective systems of observation. It was, arguably, what Descartes achieved centuries ago as he conceived of the world in terms of two simple “substances”: The thinking substance, and the “extended” substance which he identified with matter. Focusing only on the latter, he managed to secure exactitude in the realm of the material because if the nature of the physical was “extension,” then that meant that everything extended could be precisely measured, numerically. Hence, the physical was the mathematical, a kind of ironic inversion of the Platonic idealism that saw the material as a mere reflection or shadow of a more perfect ideal or formal realm – the realm of the True.
But herein lies a limitation often overlooked in standard empiricism: The assumption that only certain forms of experience – those already formatted for instrumental detection – qualify as candidates for scientific inquiry. This assumption introduces a hidden circularity. The very tools we use to observe the world are themselves built upon prior conceptual assumptions, which were in turn derived from earlier, constrained encounters with experience. This is a version of the infamous “Cartesian Circle,” as it has been called,[1] and it embeds a bias into the epistemological structure of science: What we are able to measure determines what we are able to know.
Against this, I propose a more expansive – and in some ways, more foundational – form of empiricism. Following William James, and in resonance with aspects of Spinozist monism,[2] I argue for what may be called existential empiricism: A philosophical stance that treats experience not just as the raw material of science but as its ontological ground. From this standpoint, any actual experience had – no matter how strange, exceptional, or irreducible – must be treated as a datum for inquiry. This was the essential guiding spirit of William James; his colleague, the Pragmatist philosopher C. S. Peirce, earlier advocated the formula “do not block the way of inquiry.”[3] The work of science, then, is not to delimit what is possible based on what has been codified, but to expand its frameworks in response to what is actual, even (and especially) when the actual resists representation.[4]
This has important implications for the study of UAP. For decades, certain classes of experience – especially those associated with so-called “high strangeness” – have been excluded from scientific legitimacy, not because they lack empirical reality, but because they lack the proper formatting for recognition within current paradigms. Their exclusion is often justified not by evidence but by a tacit reversal of our foundational modal axiom (as Hynek himself, one of the first to attempt to bring scientificity to the UFO problem, was to frequently point out): “It can’t happen, so it can’t be (actually the case).” This reversal is not merely philosophically flawed – it is epistemically regressive. It insulates existing knowledge systems from disruption, protecting them from precisely the kinds of anomalies that could catalyze their transformation. And Bayesian considerations here make matters only worse, since if a true anomaly is being encountered, then it seems the prior probabilities would always militate against it being accepted as an actuality, thus trapping one in what machine learning researchers would call the local optima: A region of well-confirmed information that has “worked.”[5]
To accept the axiom that actuality implies possibility is therefore to embrace a more dynamic, open-ended concept of science – one that recognizes the provisional and historically contingent nature of its own methodologies and the well-confirmed results that have “worked” in the past and continue to in the present (not forgetting that many of the theories that science surpasses still remain valid to a certain extent – e.g. Ptolemaic theory still “works” even though we discarded its cosmology and underlying physics). It is also to reject the false choice between dogmatic skepticism and uncritical belief. The real task is methodological: To create the conditions under which the strange can be studied without being dismissed, and the anomalous can be brought into relation with the known.
The real task is methodological: To create the conditions under which the strange can be studied without being dismissed, and the anomalous can be brought into relation with the known.
If this is so, then the burden of scientific work shifts. It is no longer merely to explain what is already understood to be part of the common lifeworld of ordinary experience, but rather more deeply to develop the epistemic tools required to acknowledge – and ultimately to integrate – what has already occurred but has yet to be made intelligible, to expand the domain of the possible by what is encountered as actual in experience (Indeed, do we not see the trend in science today as obviously to move into increasingly more remote and even exotic realms of the actual, accessible sometimes only by means of instrumentation, so as to increase the horizon of the possible, thus expanding human experience itself in the process, with the instrumentalities becoming part of the human experience?).
Epistemological Gradients – From Forensic to Observational UAP Science
The challenge of incorporating UAP into scientific inquiry is not merely a matter of data collection, but a matter of epistemological framing. In the long arc of UAP research, we can identify a fundamental shift that especially now is increasingly noticeable: From the forensic logic of what we should call classical ufology to the emergence of an observational-experimental science of UAP. This shift is not just methodological – it marks a transformation in the very mode of reasoning we apply to anomalous phenomena.
Classical ufology, I contend, operated largely as a kind of forensic epistemology;[6] however, it was done so often without recognizing that this was in fact its foundation and hence proceeded uncritically. It often approached UAP sightings as cold cases – retrospective investigations grounded in eyewitness testimony, material traces, and post hoc analysis. Its epistemic posture was therefore juridical: The goal was resolution through abductive inference, constrained by an evidentiary archive that was fragmentary, inconsistent, and often unrepeatable (as all historical archives are: Witnesses are often dead or the events too distant for reliable recreation or inquiry, and so on). The problem, however, was not simply the quality of the data but the structure of the inquiry: It was a science without an experimental substrate, operating without control over its object domain, nor utilizing appropriately calibrated and synchronized observational instrumentation to secure the observational foundations of its phenomena.
The forensic modality, as philosopher Carol Cleland’s (2002) work on the important distinction between historical and experimental sciences suggests, relies on reconstructive inference: Working backward from traces to causes. This mode of reasoning is legitimate and productive in fields like geology or paleontology, but in the case of UAP, the evidentiary chains were rarely robust enough to support the causal narratives being proposed.[7] Without a shared theoretical framework, or consistent evidentiary baselines, the field remained fragmented – epistemically and institutionally.
In contrast, the new science of UAP is defined by a proactive observational paradigm, more akin to what Cleland would call an “experimental” science in contrast to an “historical” one.
In contrast, the new science of UAP is defined by a proactive observational paradigm, more akin to what Cleland would call an “experimental” science in contrast to an “historical” one. This paradigm (Cleland’s “experimental science”) does not wait for anomalies to occur, but establishes instrumented environments in which anomalies can be detected, recorded, and analyzed under controlled observational conditions.[8] The Galileo Project, Würzburg’s IFEX, and UAPx exemplify this approach: They deploy calibrated, time-synchronized, multimodal sensor arrays to survey the atmospheric and near-Earth environment for outliers. These are not simply better tools – they are tools designed for a different epistemology. Alongside this, we have those methods grounded more in the emergent “techno-SETI” paradigm (the search for distant “technosignatures” that would be direct evidence of intelligent life), where a specific hypothesis is pursued upfront – what we might call a “hypothesis-driven” science of UAP as opposed to the more methodologically and logistically challenging anomaly detection strategy of, e.g., the Galileo Project. For example, Villarroel (2022) and colleagues are aggressively honest about searching for “flying saucers”: That is, structured, material, technological artifacts capable of some form of travel in space which would be detectable as an anomalous “transient” in astrophysical or astronomical terms, or as a technological artifact present (but inactive, i.e., as a technological remnant) on Earth. Of course this might appear to be fruitless or even suspect, but it’s unclear why this would be inadmissible as a respectably scientific approach, especially given that not only does it appear increasingly likely that the universe as a whole is teeming with life, but also that in cosmological time, technologically capable nonhuman civilizations with only conventional propulsion methods (plus AI, if biological lifespan is a mitigating factor) could populate (visit) large parts of the galaxy (and from this one can compute the probability of one of those civilizations happening upon Earth).[9]
This emerging paradigm reframes UAP not as retrospective mysteries to be explained, but as potential signals to be detected within a structured observational parameter space. It in fact (and significantly) borrows heavily from SETI and astrobiology, where the unknown is approached through statistical filtering, anomaly detection, and signal modeling. The methodological assumption is no longer that we must resolve every case into a known category, but rather that we must characterize the structure of the unknown itself.
This shift in epistemic posture – from forensic reconstruction to anticipatory detection – also reorients the standards of evidence. In place of forensic believability or testimonial consistency, which remain (for good reason) ever open to debate and interpretation, the emphasis is now on cross-modal corroboration, reproducibility of instrumental data, and statistical deviation from established baselines (and despite its differences from the anomaly detection method, hypothesis-driven approaches would have to depend on its general epistemology).[10] This is not a rejection of earlier approaches but a methodological elevation: It retains the anomalous as its target, but redesigns the framework through which that anomaly becomes scientifically intelligible.
This is not a rejection of earlier approaches but a methodological elevation.
Yet this observational paradigm has its own limits. It is calibrated to detect physical anomalies – kinematics, electromagnetic signatures, transmedium behaviors, or (relatively local) nonhuman technosignatures. It excels at characterizing physical properties within a defined observational regime. But it (unsurprisingly) remains ill-equipped to deal with the excess: The subjective, the psychophysical, the experiential. These lie at the edge of its epistemic reach, and raise the question to which we now turn: What remains when the instruments fall silent, but the experience persists?
That is the question posed by the excessive remainder. And the point here is not to demonstrate the facticity of the excess, but rather to attempt to indicate and then to begin to address this obvious blind spot.[11]
The Excessive Remainder – Encountering Epistemic Limits
At the periphery of scientific observation – just beyond the reach of instrumentation and statistical normalization – resides what might be called the excessive remainder: That class of anomalous phenomena which resists integration into existing epistemic frameworks not because it lacks empirical depth, but because it overwhelms the methodological protocols designed to contain it. In the domain of UAP, this remainder is often expressed through accounts of high strangeness, psychophysical interaction, and experiencer narratives that defy assimilation to conventional categories of fact.
To call this remainder “excessive” is not to pathologize it, but to mark its status as a surplus of the real – an experiential excess that ruptures the boundary conditions of ordinary sense-making. These are the moments when witnesses report cognitive distortions, time slippage, ontological transformations, or intimate encounters that seem to implicate not only the external world but the structure of subjectivity itself. The problem is not that these events are merely strange. It is that they are epistemically nonconforming. They do not yield to the current instruments of intelligibility.
And yet, they persist. They recur across time, geography, and cultural boundaries. They populate the literature of anomalistics, psychical research, and comparative phenomenology. They occupy the outer ring of Vallée’s tripartite model of UFO data – instrumental, archival, and experiential – and they are too often excluded by default. But exclusion is no longer an adequate epistemic response. It is a symptom of an impoverished methodological imagination, something highlighted in decades of sophisticated research in the cognitive sciences and especially the philosophy of mind – two longstanding traditions that have yet to enter into currency within the world of serious, evidence-based UAP research.
The challenge, then, is not whether we should take such experiences seriously, but exactly how. If the observational sciences have reached their limit in dealing with such phenomena, then new modes of inquiry are required – modes that can accommodate irreducible subjectivity, symbolic mediation, non-replicable phenomenological depth and that dimension of “meaning” that without wide acceptance or success philosophers like Frege attempted to reintroduce into rigorous scientific research in the nineteenth century.[12] We are speaking here of a science that is as much interpretive as it is empirical, and which acknowledges that the locus of the unknown may be situated as much within the structure of experience as in the structure of matter.
One path forward lies in rethinking the status of the experiencer – not as a passive observer or unreliable narrator, but as a site of co-production (of “meaning-making” to hazard an overused expression). The UAP event is not merely something witnessed; it is something undergone. The witness is transformed, and the phenomenon itself seems often entangled with the conditions of that transformation. In such cases, where meaning rises to a place of seeming metaphysical significance,[13] mind and matter are no longer separable categories. They are co-constituting poles of an encounter that resists decomposition.
Here, the resources of anomalistics, parapsychology, and phenomenological psychology may prove crucial. Researchers like Atmanspacher and Fach of the German research group IGPP have already outlined models for psycho-physical correlation that do not rely on reductive physicalism. Bertrand Méheust (2025) has argued persuasively for understanding the UFO phenomenon not as an external object but as a psychophysical event with affinities to poltergeist phenomena and other expressions of psi. These approaches do not resolve the excessive remainder – they delimit its contours, giving it shape without sacrificing its complexity. For a science to succeed here, it must be able to see its proper domain of phenomena – that is, it must open itself to the phenomenology without a priori dismissal, that is: By embracing the axiom of existential empiricism which says, “actuality implies possibility.”
In this light, the excessive remainder is not a failure of scientific understanding. It is a prompt: A demand for new epistemic forms, new methodological strategies, and a renewed philosophical courage. It signals that the boundaries of intelligibility have been reached – not to be guarded, but to be crossed.
In this light, the excessive remainder is... a prompt: A demand for new epistemic forms, new methodological strategies, and a renewed philosophical courage.
To engage this remainder is not to abandon rigor. It is to reimagine it. The aim is not to explain away the anomalous, nor to prematurely metaphysicalize it, but to develop a mode of disciplined receptivity – a methodological openness adequate to the complexity of what persists when the known has been exhausted.
Integrating Anomalous Experience – Philosophical and Methodological Innovations
If the excessive remainder marks the epistemic limit of conventional scientific method, then the next imperative is clear: We must develop philosophical and methodological innovations adequate to its complexity. To integrate anomalous experience into an expanded science is not to compromise scientific rigor, but to extend its applicability. The anomalous, when treated carefully, can serve as the crucible through which the epistemic architecture of science is both tested and transformed.
Philosophically, this entails a return to first principles. We must interrogate the ontological and epistemological commitments embedded in our methodologies – especially the persistent dualisms between mind and matter, subject and object, fact and meaning. Drawing on Jamesian radical empiricism and Spinozist monism, following researchers like Atmanspacher and Fach, I propose that a non-dualistic metaphysics is more suitable for integrating phenomena that involve co-determinations of inner and outer, psychic and physical, observer and observed. From this vantage, anomalous experiences are not noise to be filtered out, but signals from a deeper structure of relational being (or the “psychophysically neutral” base as Atmanspacher [2023] as well as Atmanspacher and Pretner [2022] describe it).
Practically, this implies the development of hybrid methodologies – approaches that borrow from both the natural sciences and the human sciences, blending quantitative observation with qualitative depth analysis. Ethnographic methods, phenomenological interviews, narrative case studies, and experiential phenomenology must be integrated into observational UAP science – not as supplements, but as coequal investigative strategies. The aim is not to normalize the anomalous but to preserve its structure while rendering it communicable.
One promising direction is the framework of psychophysical parallelism as articulated by Harald Atmanspacher and collaborators. Their work demonstrates how exceptional experiences can be studied without presupposing causal reductionism, instead focusing on lawful correlations that hold across experiential and physical domains. Similarly, research into “exceptional human experiences” by Fach and others offers scalable tools for analyzing high-strangeness events without collapsing them into either pathology or belief.
These efforts must be anchored in new epistemic virtues. If classical science emphasized neutrality, detachment, and repeatability, a science of anomalous experience will require humility, reflexivity, and participatory engagement. These are not anti-scientific values; they are philosophical extensions of what is already implicit in good scientific practice – namely, responsiveness to what the world reveals, even when it defies expectation.
If classical science emphasized neutrality, detachment, and repeatability, a science of anomalous experience will require humility, reflexivity, and participatory engagement.
Finally, such a transformation demands institutional support. Anomalous phenomena must be dislodged from the margins of research funding, graduate education, and peer-reviewed discourse. Just as astrobiology once moved from speculative hypothesis to robust scientific discipline through methodological articulation and institutional backing, so too can UAP studies evolve into a pluralistic science – one that includes, rather than excludes, its most challenging data.
To integrate the anomalous is not to solve it, but to recognize its power to reorganize our ways of knowing. In this sense, the excessive remainder is not a limit but a vector: It points beyond the known toward a more capacious understanding of experience, reality, and the shared endeavor of inquiry itself.
Psychophysical Correlations and the Limits of Efficient Causality
To further elaborate the epistemological and methodological innovations called for in this article, we turn now briefly to the work of Harald Atmanspacher and colleagues, particularly their efforts to articulate a scientifically grounded, metaphysically coherent framework for understanding psychophysical correlations. These correlations – those between the mental and the physical – have historically been ignored or mischaracterized due to the dominance of efficient causality within scientific explanation. However, anomalous phenomena such as Exceptional Human Experiences (EHE), including those associated with the UFO Experience, often involve precisely such psychophysical entanglement, where human subjects and seemingly external phenomena appear co-implicated in a shared, acausal dynamic. What does a framework that can possibly deal with such actually look like, that isn’t immediately outside the purview of the scientific?[14]
Atmanspacher and Prentner (2022) outline five desiderata for a viable scientific account of psychophysical correlations. First, they argue for a metaphysical framework in which both mental and physical domains are taken seriously and understood as aspects of a deeper, psychophysically neutral domain. Second, this framework must incorporate concepts that are either shared across or external to both mental and physical categories. Third, these correlations must be conceived as acausal – that is, not rooted in efficient causal mechanisms but rather in meaningful relationships that unfold between domains. Fourth, the framework should allow for mathematical formalization of these correlations, ideally through tools such as tensor product decomposition and category theory. Finally, empirical methodology must be expanded to include data that may be unique, non-reproducible, or irreducibly subjective (Atmanspacher & Prentner, 2022).
This expanded model finds strong resonance with UAP studies when the encounter shifts into the territory of the “exceptional” – where the UFO Experience involves high-strangeness, psychophysical entanglements, or profound subjective transformations. In these contexts, the physical and mental cannot be easily disentangled, and it becomes evident that traditional causal models fall short. Instead, what emerges is a need for a framework in which mind and matter are treated as co-arising from a deeper, neutral domain.
In a related work, Atmanspacher (2024) articulates the concept of psychophysical neutrality as a foundation of dual-aspect monism: A metaphysics in which mental and physical domains arise through decomposition from a unified, non-dual ground. The neutral domain, denoted ψPPN, is neither physical nor mental, and correlations between ψM (mental) and ψP (physical) arise not from causal chains but from this common (inextricably interrelated) source. When applied to UAP events involving experiencers, such a framework suggests (but does not in itself establish conclusively) that the correlation between the observer and the observed is not incidental, but may reflect a deeper relational ontology – a shared emergence from the psychophysically neutral.
This metaphysical perspective has important methodological consequences. It implies that experiences reported by witnesses – especially those involving symbolic, affective, or meaning-laden elements – must not be treated as noise or bias, but as indicators of an acausal psychophysical process. Measurement, therefore, must include both physical instrumentation and first-person phenomenological data. The goal is to characterize the correlation space in which both physical traces and mental impressions arise as co-products of a deeper structure.
While such a vision is aspirational, it is not beyond the reach of empirical refinement. It suggests that a future science of UAP phenomena will require new tools – not only in instrumentation, but in mathematics, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind. And while this article cannot yet offer a complete research protocol for this emergent science, it argues that only a framework like that proposed by Atmanspacher and colleagues is truly capable of handling the full range of data represented in the UFO Experience. This provides a promising trajectory for future theoretical development and experimental design within UAP Studies.
It suggests that a future science of UAP phenomena will require new tools - not only in instrumentation, but in mathematics, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind.
Conclusion: Toward an Expanded Epistemology of Anomalous Phenomena
This article has advanced a core argument: That the scientific legitimacy of anomalous phenomena – particularly those encountered in the study of UAP – rests not on metaphysical commitment or belief, but on a philosophical realignment of how science treats actuality, possibility, and experience. Beginning with the modal axiom that actuality implies possibility, I have challenged the epistemic conservatism of conventional scientific methodologies that exclude high-strangeness data a priori. We then tracked the emergence of a proactive observational paradigm within UAP studies, which signals a willingness to reconfigure evidentiary baselines – but which nonetheless still leaves much of the experiential and symbolic landscape unaccounted for.
The concept of the “excessive remainder” was introduced to describe the residual phenomena that resist this newer observational framework: Experiences marked by ontological disruption, symbolic intensities, or mind-matter entanglement that cannot be captured by current epistemic tools. In response to this, I proposed a philosophical and methodological expansion grounded in radical empiricism, hybrid methodologies, and a pluralistic concept of scientific rigor.
The section entitled “Psychophysical Correlations and the Limits of Efficient Causality” extended this framework further by introducing the work of Harald Atmanspacher and colleagues, whose dual-aspect monist model offers a viable metaphysical basis for understanding psychophysical correlations. This framework challenges the default assumption of efficient causality and instead proposes that certain mind-matter relations-particularly those found in anomalous experiences-may be best understood as acausal but meaningful correlations emerging from a psychophysically neutral domain. This theoretical position, further explicated in the appendix on neutral monism, allows for the construction of a research program that is both scientifically coherent and metaphysically expansive.
Ultimately, this article has aimed not to provide definitive answers, but to create a conceptual space where rigorous inquiry into the anomalous becomes possible – one that integrates subjective and objective, mental and material, symbolic and empirical. To do so requires epistemic humility, institutional courage, and the methodological imagination to construct a science at the limits of what science has been. What lies ahead is not the closure of mystery but the refinement of our capacity to receive and respond to it.
The excessive remainder remains. But so too does our obligation to listen, to study, and to think. The future of science may well depend on how we respond to what exceeds it.
Appendix: On Neutral Monism – Between James and Spinoza
To support the metaphysical architecture underlying the preceding discussion of psychophysical correlations, this appendix briefly clarifies the position known as neutral monism, particularly in its dual lineage from William James and Baruch Spinoza. At stake is the need for a metaphysics that can account for phenomena which do not fall neatly into the categories of the “mental” or the “physical” – but appear to implicate both, or to transcend the distinction altogether. Such a need becomes particularly salient in the analysis of UAP phenomena at their most exceptional, where experiential, symbolic, and physical dimensions co-arise in a way that defies standard disciplinary parsing.
In James’s radical empiricism, experience is “double-barreled,” containing both subject and object, knower and known, without privileging either as ontologically prior. James’s metaphysics asserts that relations are as real as their terms, and that experience itself is the basic stuff of the world – neither mind nor matter, but the “pure experience” from which both can be derived as functional roles.
Spinoza, by contrast, offers a rationalist but monistic metaphysics in which the single substance expresses itself under infinite attributes, of which thought and extension are the two accessible to human beings. This model supports the dual-aspect theory later elaborated in the 20th and 21st centuries: The idea that mind and matter are two epistemic aspects of an ontologically unified domain.
Neutral monism, as formulated by thinkers such as Bertrand Russell, Feigl, and more recently Harald Atmanspacher, can be seen as the synthesis of these two lines of thought. The ontologically neutral “base level” – the psychophysically neutral domain – does not distinguish between mental and physical aspects. Rather, it is only through epistemic decomposition that the neutral becomes knowable as either mental or physical.
In this framework, psychophysical correlations – such as those observed or reported in certain exceptional UAP cases – are not the result of causal interaction between two independent substances (mind and matter), but the co-manifestation of a deeper, unified substrate. This correlation is not “efficient” in the classical causal sense, but acausal and meaning-mediated (Atmanspacher, 2024).
Thus, the metaphysics of neutral monism provides the ontological underpinning for a scientifically rigorous, non-reductionist study of anomalous phenomena. It invites a reformulation of “objectivity” and “subjectivity” as derived from a more general domain in which neither term is primitive. Such a model is not only theoretically elegant but empirically motivated by the kinds of experiences and data points that UAP research – at its epistemic margins – increasingly brings to light.
[1]See, e.g., Hatfield (2006) for the general concept; the philosopher Dorothea Olkowski, who writes primarily on Deleuze, the phenomenologists and feminist philosophy, once used the concept of the “Cartesian Circle” in the way I am suggesting here in a lecture at the 2014 meeting of the European Society for Philosophy (Utrecht, The Netherlands), although it does not figure prominently in her published works.
[2]See Atmanspacher and Rickels (2022) for a discussion of all forms of dual aspect monism, including the Jamesean and Spinozist varieties mentioned here. This text is in many ways foundational for the epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological approach for which I end up advocating when it comes to a more robustly empiricist approach to UAP that can handle alleged cases of extreme human-UAP encounters.
[3]On this formula, see Susan Haack’s masterful essay of the same title (Haack, 2014).
[4]And here, I are indirectly replying to the work of Jeffrey Kripal (2024), who wants to focus attention on science and “materialism” as (wrongly) defining the limits of the possible and therefore in determining what can be excluded as “impossible” (this would seem to have applied to the UFO experience, historically; Hynek (1972) for example discuss how the logic of many of his colleagues had been “it can’t be, so it isn’t”—meaning, it’s not allowed by the (known) laws of physics, so it’s impossible simpliciter. What I suggest here is that the focus ought really to be on what is actual, and the conditions of the possibility of accepting the actual as actual. Perhaps this is, in fact, the true intention behind Kripal’s use of ‘impossible’, viz., to shift attention back onto what is, empirically speaking, actual – at least as far as human experience is concerned (witness his endorsement of Eire’s [2024] study of “impossible” feats of saintly power). A deeper examination of the causes (sociological, philosophical?) of the exclusionary thinking to which Kripal seems to point is beyond the scope of this essay, but is, nevertheless, an important question in itself. Philosophy, since at least Kant, has always been concerned with the conditions of possibility; but since the twentieth century, that has turned to the conditions of actuality (we can see this in the existentialist emphasis on “existence” before “essence” as with Sartre). And it is, arguably, the actual with which philosophy has had the most trouble (putting the conceptual, the a priori, before the empirical – one of philosophy’s classic, and seemingly perennial, problems). But was it the Scientific Revolution that forced the question of the actual, to philosophy’s consternation (hence inducing the rift between the “armchair” a priorism vs. the more realistic experimentalism that attempted to produce a knowledge of what is actually possible in nature)? And yet, we hear Kripal’s criticism (which really repeats the criticisms of many others): We should not read the bounds of the possible from the contours of the actual as it has so far been determined by the sciences, given their historical and therefore fallible nature: What is known to be actually the case does not in itself delimit the bounds of the possible – but only supplies to us the halo of the possible, the accompanying shadow of the actual, as it were.
[5]Here I am indebted to Dr. Kevin Knuth (see Knuth et al., 2025) for making this point so clearly.
[6]For a detailed, recent example of this logic in play, see Vallée and colleagues (in press).
[7]Unlike paleontology or geology, whose scientists can study existing (but nevertheless temporally remote) remnants, UAP scientists are often more in the position similar to astrophysicists studying distant, dissipative traces that infrequently repeat (except as classes or types of phenomena: For example, the anomalous radar trace, etc.); except that for UAP, they are not so remote: They are most often intra-atmospheric or even ground-based phenomena presenting with astrophysical-like characteristics (high luminosities, extreme kinematics, etc.). It’s as if what’s needed is, paradoxically, a “terrestrial” astrophysical science: An “astrophysics” of earth-bound phenomena.
[8]The phenomena that led to the development of the quantum theory of matter, for example, were still detectable by the measurement instruments of the time; it’s just that the exact behavior of those phenomena eluded classical concepts and the Newtonian paradigm that was then dominant. The quantum theory was arrived at by a leap of the theoretical imagination (of Max Planck, Einstein, and others) in relation to the measured factual data on the behavior and structure of matter at the microphysical scale. An anomaly must be able to cross and intersect the known in order to give us a sense of how that known can be adapted to fit the unknown in the anomaly. It is a creative dialectic between the known and the unknown, with the known anchoring us in stable factive, theoretical, and experimental structures that afford us the possibility of a systematic, structured escape from the confines of the known into the new possibilities latent in the unknown as demonstrated by the anomalous.
[9]It is very small, of course; but over four billion years of Earth’s existence (the latter two billion of which it would be relatively hospitable for visitors to stop by), it seems reasonable to expect some visitation to be the case.
[10]This surely doesn’t settle debate, but rather allows us to pass from the question of data integrity and reliability to conclusions based on data that can be held as factive and unproblematically intersubjective. As we see, the introduction of first-person or experiential data is only more complicated – it does not destroy the facticity. It introduces the problem of psychophysical relations, which are not the conventional purview of the sciences today and thus require a shift to a more robustly open empiricist framework to be able to handle such data without begging any important questions against the first-person itself.
[11]Though of course its authors would not likely endorse the introduction of paranormal excess into the scientific mix here, nevertheless, The Blind Spot (Frank et al., 2024) does just this: Attempt to point to and make room for the missing component of the radically experiential in science today. But, since the “hard problem” of consciousness is hard enough (and all paranormality presents as one kind of psychophysical anomaly or another), it’s not clear on what principled grounds the authors of such a work could exclude the excesses of the paranormal (insofar as its existence is demonstrated experientially), as Michael Silberstein points out in his recent double review of this text and Kripal’s How To Think Impossibly (Silberstein, in press).
[12]The deeper metaphysical structure of meaning in the philosophy of Frege was, according to Atmanspacher and Pretner (2022), lost on his interpreters during the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy, which eventually led to the development of what came to be called “analytic philosophy”.
[13]And here it should be absolutely clear that the ‘meaning’ discussed is not that which the experiencer attributed to the UAP event they witnessed (or continue to); rather, it is the fact of the meaning itself that is of metaphysical significance, rather than the interpretation the witness wishes to ascribe to their experience. This is, perhaps, a rather subtle distinction; but it is primary and significant. No one has an absolute insight into the “true” nature (metaphysical or otherwise) of their experiences; nor do those experiences wear their truth on their sleeve, as it were. But it is true that the meaningfulness of the experience itself can be an “objective” feature of the structure of nature – at least insofar as the view being developed here, following Atmanspacher and others, is concerned.
[14]Of course, if we identify (either explicitly or implicitly) the physicalist or reductionist with science, then it will be outside. But of course, science is much broader than what these narrow metaphysical confines would require.
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In this issue of Mindfield, the contributors center their analysis on UAP from a variety of perspectives with supplemental essays on history, healing, and intuition. Mike Cifone argues that UAP require an expanded epistemology - grounded in radical empiricism and non-dual metaphysics - that acknowledges experiential, psychophysical, and anomalous data as legitimate, even when they …
by Anastasia Wasko and Jacob W. Glazier
