This is a big fascinating universe, and I feel it is our first duty to go exploring. Our culture likes to employ the scientific process to explore the world around us. As the scientific process continues to redefine our thinking and remodel our world, there is a growing number of new science theories that lie just outside our mainstream parameters. This is exactly what makes these stories so interesting. It’s the promise of exploring new territory, of going out of bounds, the hint that just under our noses lies hidden from view some new law of physics that just may alter our world. Yes, science, in and of itself, is fascinating. Just think about this unique time we occupy in history: we know so much more about our world than any other time in history, at least in the scientific vein. (And I don’t believe for a moment that this is the only or most important method of understanding – it just happens to be the method that dominates today. Indigenous cultures used other methods, including travels in consciousness, and got even more interesting results. Just as valid, but describing a different aspect of the world.)

I love a good anomaly, those intriguing mysteries that keeps you wondering. I think they serve a very fine purpose beyond entertainment. Some anomalies point the way to radical revisions of our worldview, like signposts along the road to new realities yet to be acknowledged. Just how radically would our view of the world change, if we didn’t shove all those anomalies under the rug? What if we sat up and paid attention, heeded the clues they offer, and celebrated and sought them out to give exploration inspired new directions?

How radically? Quite radically. I think that’s what the fuss is all about, when anomalies beckon but the suppressed, denied, and dismissed by the standard bearers of mainstream thinking. That just shows what a threat a good anomaly may be!

You’d think that if the anomalies had utterly no merit, they would simply fade from the scene, and attract little interest. But too often, they are viewed through a double standard that is weighted in favor of data that supports the mainstream view of reality. Human nature to do so, sure. But it puts the anomalies that do carry a truth under a long period of suppression, and needlessly. Time is thus wasted when breakthrough information and all its implications could be helping us expand, explore, invent, understand new vistas.

Just look at the history of the fringe. It’s been such rich territory for the new ideas that work their way into that very mainstream. I enjoyed our interview with Richard Milton, author of (link to interview and book here) who explains that today we take machine-powered flight for granted. Yet, we should remember that when the Wright brothers were busily building their first airplanes, the scientific leaders of their day were dismissing such absurd efforts and pronouncing that it was quite impossible. They were initially ignored by the press, who waited years to send a photographer or reporter over to check it out for themselves, despite the eye-witness reports of passengers riding the train line that paralleled the test field. And most important – Milton points out that the first efforts got a plane up in the air for only seconds at a time. Today we can send a rocket to the ends of the solar system. So don’t be too ready to dismiss a small effect as, well, a small effect. When it may be only the limits of the first efforts at designing the technology to harness the effect.  -- Laura Lee - Copyright © 2003