More than seventy percent
of Americans believe in paranormal activity. But
even with a family-ghost story lurking in his own
background, seasoned journalist Steve Volk has
been like most of those millions of Americans-
reticent to talk about his experience in polite
company. If so many of us have similar stories to
tell, why are we so reluctant to take them seriously?
Paranormal claims don't traditionally sit well with
reporters, but Volk decided to focus his gimlet-eyed
tenacity on a new beat: the world of psychics, UFOs,
and things that go bump in the night. It's a rollicking
ride as Volk introduces us to all sorts of fringe-dwellers,
many of them reluctant to admit to their paranormal
experiences: a NASA astronaut-turned-mystic, a
world-famous psychologist who taught us about dying
and then decided death may not exist at all, and
brave scientists attempting to verify what mystics
have been reporting for millennia. Volk investigates
what happens in the brains of people undergoing
religious experiences, learns how to control his own
dreams, and goes hunting for specters in his
family's old haunted house.
From his journey into the bizarre, Volk returns with
a compelling argument that we need to allow for a
middle space, a place where paranormal phenomena
can be weird and compelling; raise crucial questions;
and, quite possibly, remain unexplainable. He rejects
the polarized options the twenty-first century seems
to offer us: to passionately embrace or hotly reject,
to revere only science or only spirituality. And he
underscores, again and again, that by raising our
most existential questions-why are we here, are we
alone in the universe, and what happens when we
die?-paranormal stories are in fact a crucial point
of connection. It turns out that these "fringe"
experiences strike at the core of what it means to
be human.