Fortean Winds: Anolmalous Research

Van was eleven years old the first time he saw it. A thin woman in a small mobile home in a Pentecostal community. Six grown men — large men, he specified, not people who skip meals — holding her down and failing. She was levitating slightly. Her mouth was not moving. The voice was coming from somewhere else inside her. It sounded, he said, like a frog pulling from its throat. She spoke Spanish and then shifted into a language he had never heard from her before and has not been able to identify since. The whole event lasted close to two hours. When it ended she collapsed completely. When she recovered she had no memory of any of it.

Van’s brother was there. His brother remembers it. There were other witnesses of similar ages. Van is now an adult and has agreed to go on record about what he saw. We spoke to him on the Fortean Winds podcast and the episode is below. What follows is our analysis of the case and what it connects to.

The Evidentiary Standard

Before getting into analysis, let’s establish what the case actually contains.

Multiple witnesses. Van, his brother, and several other children and adults were present. The brother’s corroboration is confirmed. This is not a single-witness account.

Physical elements that resist psychological explanation. A thin woman overpowering six large men physically is not a psychiatric symptom. Levitation is not. A voice produced without visible mouth movement is not. An unknown language that the woman had never spoken before and never spoke again is not. These are observable, physical, witnessed events. The psychological explanation for possession — which is real and legitimate — accounts for altered states, language changes consistent with known languages, and behavioral shifts. It does not produce physical phenomena that multiple independent observers agree cannot have happened by normal means.

The elephant detail. While possessed, the woman became agitated about elephant figurines in the mobile home. She insisted they were demonic. When the household was asked to bring them out, children began retrieving elephants from hidden locations in their rooms — objects that had been placed there privately, which no visitor could have known about. This is the single most analytically significant detail in the case. A person in an altered state correctly identified the location and nature of hidden objects. That is either a coincidence or it is evidence of information access that cannot be explained by normal means.

Long-term follow-up. The woman had one subsequent episode, at the same church, with similar characteristics. After that: nothing. Eight years passed without recurrence. The man who had a separate episode — different character, same general pattern, physical bite marks on his back afterward — also had no recurrence. This is not the profile of an ongoing psychiatric condition. It is the profile of a discrete event with a beginning, middle, and end.

What Psychiatry Actually Says

Possession has been in the DSM — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — for a relatively short time. Its inclusion was contested and hard-won by clinicians who argued that dismissing possession symptoms as psychosis was producing misdiagnoses and inadequate treatment. The American Psychiatric Association now recognizes possession-form identity disturbance as a clinical category distinct from standard dissociative disorders.

The overwhelming majority of cases that present with possession-like symptoms have psychiatric explanations. Dissociation, conversion disorder, psychotic episodes, trauma responses — these account for the vast majority of what presents as possession across cultures. Most Catholic dioceses require a thorough psychological assessment before an exorcism is authorized. This is correct practice. The Italian statistics cited by the Los Angeles Times suggest only a small fraction of cases presenting as possession are assessed as genuinely anomalous even by those inclined to take the phenomenon seriously.

What’s more interesting is the clinician’s perspective on the residue. Psychiatrist Richard Gallagher, who has worked with the Catholic Church on possession assessments for decades, describes a small category of cases in which the presenting symptoms — knowledge of hidden objects, speaking unknown languages, physical reactions to sacred objects, information about people in the room that the subject could not have known — do not fit any psychiatric framework he knows. He does not claim certainty about what these cases are. He does claim they exist and that treating them as psychiatric problems produces worse outcomes than treating them within the patient’s own belief system.

The paper in the Journal of Religion and Health titled “The Growing Evidence for ‘Demonic Possession’: What Should Psychiatry’s Response Be?” makes exactly this argument from a clinical standpoint: for the residue cases, non-materialist frameworks and spiritual healing within the patient’s own tradition produce better clinical outcomes than purely biological approaches. The paper is not making a theological argument. It is making a treatment argument based on evidence.

The Belief-as-Permission Pattern

The detail that Van offered that has the most analytical weight is not the physical phenomena. It is the observation about who it happened to.

In his experience across years in a Pentecostal community, possession did not happen to the most devout. It happened to the people who were “foot in, foot out” — partially in the church, partially in the world, carrying a belief system that accepted the reality of possession but not living consistently within the protective framework that belief system offered. The most committed, most consistent members of the community were essentially never affected. The ambivalent ones were.

This is significant for two reasons. First, it fits the Islamic account of djinn possession, where the same basic distinction appears: those fully under divine protection are less vulnerable, those who are ambivalent or who have weakened their protections through their own choices are more accessible. Second, it suggests that whatever the phenomenon is, it requires some form of opening or permission. It does not operate indiscriminately. It operates selectively on individuals who have, in some way, created a condition in which contact is possible.

This pattern appears in the broader anomalous research record as well. The Hitchhiker Effect — the documented pattern in which anomalous phenomena attach to specific individuals following contact at paranormal hotspots — does not affect everyone who visits those locations. Researchers at Skinwalker Ranch have noted that some individuals become repeatedly affected while others present at the same events do not. The selectivity is one of the most consistent and least explained features of anomalous contact across all categories. Possession follows the same pattern.

The Cross-Cultural Consistency

Possession is documented across virtually every human culture that has left a record. The accounts are not identical, but the core behavioral profile is consistent enough to warrant attention: a person undergoes a personality shift, often accompanied by physical phenomena inconsistent with their normal state, speaks in ways or languages they should not be able to speak, and may demonstrate knowledge they should not have access to. The event is typically followed by amnesia. Recovery, when it occurs, is often facilitated by ritual within the cultural framework of the person experiencing it.

In Islamic tradition, djinn possession follows this profile closely and is addressed through ruqyah — specific recitations — by an imam. In Pentecostal Christianity, exorcism with prayer. In Haitian Vodou, a different framework with a structurally similar intervention. The frameworks are culturally specific. The phenomenon is not. This is exactly the pattern Vallee identified in UAP encounters: the presentation adapts to the cultural context of the witness, but the underlying behavioral signature is consistent across cultures and centuries.

Right now in Chile, an outbreak of possession-like episodes is being reported among teenagers, associated with Ouija board use, involving hospitalization and physical symptoms including dehydration. Whether this is mass hysteria, psychiatric contagion, or something else is genuinely unknown. What is known is that the pattern — group activity involving intentional contact, followed by escalating anomalous symptoms in specific individuals, requiring intervention within a cultural framework to resolve — is consistent with accounts going back centuries. It does not look like something new.

The Connection to the UAP Record

We came to the topic of possession as UAP researchers, and we have not left that frame. The connection between UAP encounter escalation and possession-like states is documented in specific cases. The Skinwalker Ranch case history includes accounts of occupants of the property experiencing behavioral changes consistent with what the possession literature describes: personality alteration, compulsive behavior, intrusive experiences that did not respond to normal interventions. The Reron Farm case — which Bones references in the podcast as the direct link that brought us to this topic — involves a UAP sighting followed by a documented possession episode, multiple witnesses, credible evidence chain.

The working hypothesis is not that UAPs cause possession. The working hypothesis is that UAPs, possession, poltergeist activity, and the Hitchhiker Effect are all expressions of the same underlying phenomenon, operating through different mechanisms or in different registers depending on the individual, the location, and whatever conditions determine how the phenomenon presents. The shape of the phenomenon is consistent. The surface presentation varies.

What Van witnessed as an eleven-year-old in a mobile home in a Pentecostal community is, in the Fortean framework, the same family of event as what the Sherman family witnessed on a ranch in Utah. Different cultural wrapper. Same behavioral signature: something that selects specific individuals, demonstrates knowledge or capability it should not have, produces physical effects that should not be possible, and leaves the affected person with no memory of the encounter.

The file is open. The next episode goes into UAPs and religion directly. That conversation was probably unavoidable from the start.

See also: The Hitchhiker Effect — the pattern of anomalous phenomena that follow specific individuals. And the Trickster Phenomenon — the broader behavioral profile of which this may be one expression.