by Karen Frazier, Managing Editor
Paranormal Underground

I was talking with some friends yesterday and we started discussing all of the possible explanations that people come up with for what ghosts are. I’ve got to admit – I’ve heard several, and I’ve advanced several myself.

That’s the great thing about ghosts – and the paranormal in general. We don’t have a clue what it all really is. And so theories abound. We are allowed to flex our creative and critical thinking muscles and float a theory. It isn’t like anyone can contradict you. At least not with the facts. Why? Because the facts are few. Personal experiences make up most of what we know about the paranormal.

One thing is for certain. As long as people have been able to express themselves, they’ve been able to tell stories of the unexplained. And they’ve been able to come up with all sorts of fantastic theories. What is that giant ball of light in the sky? It must be a Divine being. When ships sail beyond the horizon and we can’t see them anymore, what’s happening? They must be falling off of the edge of the world. Why do great storms come, why does the earth shake, and why do mountains send down glowing hot rivers? The Gods must be angry.

Science caught up to every one of those things. It took time, it took study, and it took a better understanding of our universe, but science eventually did catch up and the explanations changed from an attempt to explain the unexplainable to an absolute and indisputable knowledge of what was truly happening.

Who’s to say that what we currently can’t explain will be any different? There are enough personal experiences in the world to know that something is happening. We just don’t have a physical explanation for it at this time. Will we? Maybe. Or maybe not. We are discovering more and more about the physical properties of our universe on a teeny tiny level. We are headed towards the thus far elusive Theory of Everything (ToE). When you get to the tiniest level, everything physical blurs together into some kind of energetic field from which it all arises. At some point, it seems, the physical becomes the etheric.

Maybe it is all just a big illusion. We know this. Everything that we see appears to be solid. It behaves as if it is solid. If you crash into it, you will leave a body splat – or at least a cartoon shape of your body’s outline in it as you run through it and off into the horizon. That solidity that we can perceive with our senses is an illusion. The wall that you crash through, your body, the road that you run along – all of it is really a few cells here and there floating with vast, empty spaces between them. There is nothing solid about it.

Maybe somewhere out there on the other side, there are a bunch of ghosts trying to figure out if WE are real. What are these solid objects, they wonder? How to explain them to make them fit what we know of the universe? And maybe somewhere in the heavens on another planet, there is an alien version of the SETI array that seeks the signs of us, just as we seek them. Maybe their movies center on how we will come to their planet and destroy them.

Or, maybe there is no more to this universe that what we think we know. Perhaps it is all solid and physically measurable. It could be that this is all there is, and that we are all alone in the universe.

In the end, we don’t know, and we haven’t yet discovered how to figure it out. Frankly, I’m good with that. I like searching for things. I like trying to discover. And I like formulating theories. It is creation at its finest, and in my own little universe, I become the creator. I have the pen in my hand and I write my own story. Who knows? Maybe that is exactly how it is meant to be.