Jeffrey Kripal's history of paranormal writing — arguing that figures like Frederic Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallée, and Bertrand Méheust were engaged in a genuinely scholarly project of studying phenomena that exceed current scientific categories.
Paranormal as a category: not reducible to either 'real' (literalist) or 'fake' (debunker) — the paranormal as a genuine challenge to our understanding of consciousness and matter. Four key figures: Myers (psychical research and evolutionary theory of consciousness), Fort (radical empiricism about anomalies), Vallée (UFOs as information events), Méheust (folklore and UFO parallelism). Academic advocacy for taking these phenomena seriously.
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