Michael Prescott's Blog

Read this book

I want to recommend a fascinating new book: The Paranormal Surrounds Us, by Richard Reichbart.  

Not only did I enjoy the book a lot, but I had the honor of writing an afterword for it. But the afterword isn't the reason to buy it. The real reason is the author's in-depth treatment of major figures in literature and psychology, examining their (sometimes conflicted) fascination with the paranormal and how this fascination found its way into their work, often in ways that have been insufficiently appreciated or deliberately downplayed. 

I was especially interested in his discussion of Tolstoy, and how the paranormal crops up at key moments of his masterpiece Anna Karenina, even at the climactic moment. 

The book also features a valuable examination of the work of Jule Eisenbud, the psychiatrist who investigated the "thoughtography" of Ted Serios. Eisenbud's careful work has been misrepresented and lampooned by some militant Skeptics; The Paranormal Surrounds Us aims at redressing the balance. 

Here's the publisher's description:

Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce, E.M. Forster and Ingmar Bergman all made the paranormal essential to their depiction of humanity. Freud recognized telepathy as an everyday phenomenon. Observations on parapsychological aspects of psychoanalysis also include the findings of the Mesmerists, Jung, Ferenczi and Eisenbud.

Many academicians attribute such psychic discoveries to "poetic license" rather than to accurate understanding of our parapsychological capacities. The author--a practicing psychoanalyst and parapsychologist, and a lawyer familiar with Navajo culture--argues for a fresh appraisal of psi phenomena and their integration into psychoanalytic theory and clinical work, literary studies and anthropology.

Excerpts from two endorsements:

"Fascinating and immensely readable, [the book's] sections on literature and culture provide the necessary foundation for building an interdisciplinary bridge, which moves us a giant step forward. ... This book is a must for all students, clinicians, and academics who want to or need to better understand and demystify our 'sixth sense."' —Ira Brenner, M.D., author of Dissociation of Trauma and Dark Matters Exploring the Realm of Psychic Devastation

"Having been immersed in the worlds of both psychoanalysis and parapsychological research, the author constructs a tour de force that coordinates the traces of psi phenomena across these and other disciplines. Moreover, not only has Reichbart written the definitive text on psychic phenomena as a topic of psychoanalytic inquiry, he has written a deeply insightful account of the relationship between psychoanalysis and science. " —Jared Russell, author of Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics

Although aimed at an academic audience, The Paranormal Ar0und Us is written in a straightforward, highly readable style. I might add that Richard Reichbart is a longtime reader of this blog, so you know he has excellent taste.

So go ahead, buy it already!

The God copout

In my last post, I mentioned the idea of a powerful collective unconscious that might somehow manifest phenomena such as UFOs. But I also said I thought this was kind of a copout. Having thought a little more about it, I wanted to explain why feel that way.

In the prescientific era, people had a ready explanation for any phenomenon they didn't understand: "God did it." (Or "the gods did it.") Thunder during a storm? It was the growling rage of a deity. A rainbow after a storm? God put it there as a sign. Crop failures, pestilence, plague? God was punishing sinners or teaching a painful lesson.

From a certain perspective, this makes sense. God is presumed to have infinite powers; he can accomplish anything; and he is the ultimate creative power behind everything that exists. Therefore it's perfectly logical to credit him (or blame him) for anything that happens that we don't understand.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn't get us very far. We never actually learn what causes thunder, rainbows, crop failures, pestilence, and plague. The only way to get real answers is to look for a clearly understandable mechanism – discharges of static electricity; the prismatic effects of water vapor in the air; boll weevils and other parasites; viruses and bacteria; unsanitary conditions, etc. As long as we are content to attribute everything that happens to the inscrutable will of an infinitely powerful and impossibly remote abstraction, we're not going to make much practical progress. The scientific era took off when people stopped being satisfied with the explanation "God did it."

The thing that worries me is that the collective unconscious is quite a bit like God. It is amorphous, hard to define, impossible to see, not amenable to proof, and credited with pretty much any kind of power necessary to accomplish anything we wish to attribute to it. UFOs? Manifestations of the collective unconscious. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the Mothman? Manifestations of the collective unconscious. Mediumistic communications, automatic writing, ectoplasmic materializations, poltergeist activity, apparitions, you name it … Manifestations of the collective unconscious.

It's a catchall explanation that actually explains nothing. Moreover, it assumes the existence of a collective unconscious that has powers far beyond anything we ordinarily observe in our own lives. For all the talk about manifesting success in love or finance by mastering the subconscious mind, most people still find love and money the old-fashioned way – by  taking concrete steps to obtain it.

The collective unconscious, much like God, is so ineffable, so all-encompassing, so unapproachable, that no possible mechanism can be imagined by which its actions are carried out. Nobody asks, "Just how exactly did God do it?" The assumption is he can do anything he wants, simply by willing it to be so. Much the same assumption seems to be made about the collective unconscious – that it can shape and mold the world however it wishes.

This requires the world to be pretty malleable, which is not at all how we experience it. In our ordinary experience, the world seems frustratingly solid. We can bang our head against the wall, but the wall stubbornly refuses to dissolve. We can strive to materialize fresh water in the desert, but unless we find an oasis, we'll continue dying of thirst. We can wish for a miracle, but miracles are rare.

We're told, through mediums, that the next plane of existence offers an environment that is considerably more malleable than our present one. Summerland is supposed to be a realm in which mental action largely replaces physical labor, a place where just imagining something is enough to make it so. Maybe so. But the point of this teaching is precisely that Summerland is significantly different from our current experience. It is not just a continuation of what we already know; it's a new kind of experience. If our world were easily remade by pure mental action, whether individual or collective, it would probably be a lot more like Summerland and a lot less like the mess that it is.

So even though the hypothesis of a collective unconscious that manifests UFO phenomena in symbolic and sometimes absurd, dreamlike terms is intriguing, I'm inclined to reject it. I'm not sure it really gets us anywhere. Of course, I'm not sure what other hypothesis works, either. As Yul Brynner might say, "It's a puzzlement."

Opening the door

I’ve been noodling a little more on the subject of UFOs after reading a second book by Jacques Vallee, The Invisible College, and part of a compendium of UFO reports edited by Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record.

What strikes me most strongly about the subject are the many similarities between UFO encounters and certain paranormal phenomena, such as mediumship and channeling, automatic writing, premonitions and prophecy, and even PK and ESP. There seems to be too big an overlap to be merely coincidental. Here are some of the parallels: 

1. There is often a baffling “personal” connection between UFO sightings and the people who report them. The same individual may report multiple UFO sightings over a period of years. Some people have reported that when they stopped to look at a distant UFO, it quickly approached them. Drivers who flash their headlights at a UFO sometimes see the UFO flash its lights back. Just as poltergeist phenomena are typically associated with a certain individual, or religious manifestations like the Fatima appearances of the Virgin Mary are associated with a core group of people, some UFO cases seem to revolve around a particular person or group.
2. People often report being in a state of altered consciousness during a UFO encounter, and sometimes even prior to it. They report a trancelike state, or numbness and paralysis, or sudden intense emotions like euphoria, peace and love, or crippling fear. Altered consciousness is, of course, a feature of many paranormal experiences, including trance mediumship, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, deathbed visions, and crisis apparitions.
3. Some people have premonitions about UFOs. They dream about the encounter one or two nights before it takes place. Or they find themselves unaccountably moved to venture outside and look up at the sky, where they discover a UFO hovering there as if waiting for them.
4. Some people feel they are in communication with the occupants of UFOs. In certain cases they believe that vast knowledge has been transmitted to them in some telepathic fashion, sometimes while they were transfixed by a beam of light from the hovering vessel. In other cases they take up automatic writing or trancelike communicating in order to convey messages from the aliens. This phenomenon has obvious similarities to trance mediumship and “spirit-directed” automatic writing, as well as to reports of a download of universal knowledge during an NDE (often when transfixed by "the Light"). Another parallel is that the content of these communications is often disappointingly trite or nonsensical. Although the recipient of this knowledge believes he has been gifted with deep wisdom about the nature of reality, consciousness, and the future, the actual communications are often extremely unconvincing and even absurd, as is often (though not always) the case with other channeled messages and with some NDE prophecies. 
5. There is a dreamlike quality to many UFO accounts, which is at least superficially similar to the dreamlike narratives often recounted by people who’ve experienced OBEs and NDEs — a magical, fairytale-like quality where events unfold with the baffling logic of a dream. Many of Robert Monroe’s OBEs are of this type.
6. As with most paranormal phenomena, UFO phenomena have proven frustratingly elusive, impossible to nail down. UFOs typically register only dimly and fleetingly on radar, and in some cases they show up very faintly even in time-exposed photos, though witnesses reported the UFO’s lights as very bright. The memories of observers can be vague or contradictory, and are sometimes lost altogether and recovered only under hypnosis – a methodology that may very well introduce false memories. The physical evidence of landings is never conclusive. Critical items of evidence have been known to inexplicably disappear. There is a tricksterish quality to many of the investigations. Even those who accept the validity of many UFO reports are split on the question of whether the observed phenomena are physically real objects or occupy some other category such as thought-forms or holographic projections.
7. One fairly consistent feature of UFO sightings is that they are introduced by a humming, buzzing noise or sensation that has been compared to a swarm of bees. Humming, buzzing, and other vibrations are typically reported at the onset of OBEs and are associated with other changes of consciousness. The whole idea of “raising vibrations” is central to the terminology of spiritualism and mysticism.
8. Finally, UFO sightings tend to come in waves or “flaps.” There is a period of excitement, with many reports coming in from various areas; then the excitement dies down; sometime later, it starts up again. The same pattern is detectable in the progress of the spiritualist movement, which quickly attained astonishing popularity in the mid-19th century, with thousands of people engaged in table-tipping and automatic writing, only to die down for a while and then periodically flare up. This up-and-down trend continued through the 1920s. (Today, spiritualism has largely morphed into other forms like the channeled “higher entities” popular in the 1970s and the fascination with near-death experiences and ghost-hunting today.) The patterns of near hysteria seen in both UFO and spiritualist movements are suggestive of “social manias,” as described by Charles Mackay in his famous book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. That’s not to say there is no reality underlying either UFOs or spiritualism. Instead, what I’m getting at is that the excitement tends to come and go in repetitive fashion. At key moments, it’s as if a match has been struck to dry tinder, causing a sudden flareup of public interest and high emotion; then the flames are doused and interest subsides. 

It’s hard to account for all these similarities. A skeptic would say that the same psychological aberrations – whether individual or communal – responsible for paranormal and spiritualist beliefs are also responsible for UFO sightings, and therefore the similarities are to be expected. This, of course, discounts all evidence for the reality of both categories of phenomena. Still, there may be some truth in it.

Perhaps there’s a deep well of irrationalism, a collective unconscious, that can be tapped at certain times, and which communicates through confusing symbols: what F.W.H. Myers called “the subliminal self,” which constitutes not only the subconscious but also the superconscious mind – a higher mind to which we are ordinarily denied access.

Suppose certain persons have the ability (usually without realizing it) to focus on or manifest the contents of this subliminal self. Suppose most such manifestations require the energy of many people, just as materializations in a séance room are said to require the combined “ectoplasm” of all the sitters, as well as the medium. I’m not saying there is such a thing as ectoplasm, only that there may be some kind of power or agency that can access the subconscious/superconscious mind and reify part of its contents, at least temporarily.

It may also be the case that more and more people can access this faculty as barriers to belief are broken down. It’s been reported that when Uri Geller came on the scene with his spoon-bending displays, ordinary people who watched him on television suddenly discovered that they, too, could bend spoons. Jack Houck, who for years has hosted “PK parties” where people bring their own cutlery and learn to manipulate it via PK, has said that the energy of a group is needed to, in effect, raise the vibrations in the room, and that the group’s initial skepticism and doubt must be broken down before dramatic effects will take place. Similarly, the spread of spiritualism in the 19th century seems due, in part, to the fact that people really were getting inexplicable results – and the more results people reported, the more likely other people were to get results. As barriers to belief were broken down, the phenomena snowballed.

This does have the appearance of a social mania or mass hysteria, but it could also be seen as the escalating activation of latent powers that are ordinarily unsuspected. (In fact, one might ask whether mass hysteria in general has a paranormal component, a kind of subliminal transference of thoughts and emotions that allows a certain state of mind to spread like wildfire and override rational restraints.)

None of this addresses the actual nature of UFOs and their occupants. Are they, in fact, thought-forms generated by the collective unconscious and manifested as temporary, quasi-real entities that come and go with the speed of thought? If so, it might explain why these sightings seem to keep pace, more or less, with the cultural and technological features of the societies observing them. A raft of UFO sightings in 1897 pretty consistently involved a vessel described in terms of a rigid airship. The first actual rigid airships were not manufactured by the Zeppelin company until 1900, but in 1897 the idea was already  "in the air," so to speak, having been patented and publicized. 

Since 1947, sightings have usually involved spinning saucers, vast triangular craft, and other futuristic machines. The saucer imagery appears to have originated in a misinterpretation: a pilot said the ten unidentified objects he'd seen moved "like a saucer if you skip it across the water." He did not actually say they were saucer-shaped, but the idea caught on, and suddenly people everywhere were seeing "flying saucers." The triangular craft and other shapes seem to owe much to science-fiction illustrations and movies. 

The (relative) regularity in the physical characteristics described any given wave of UFO sightings is perhaps attributable to their common source in the collective unconscious. When rigid airships are the coming thing, people see rigid-airship UFOs. When the saucer imagery has entered the public imagination, people see saucer-shaped UFOs. 

The subliminal self might also shed light on the bizarre, irrational, dreamlike nature of many encounters and the often nonsensical behavior and statements of the “saucer people” themselves. The pseudoscientific ramblings attributed to these purportedly super-advanced spacefarers do not inspire confidence in the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But nonsense, paradox, and nightmarish or dreamlike qualities are characteristic of the unconscious mind.

And then there are the reports of hapless humans coerced into having sex with aliens – or the well-known and often lampooned accounts of abductees forced to submit to rectal probing. Suppressed sexual desires and anxieties (penetration, whether desired or feared) are a generally acknowledged feature of the unconscious mind. If UFO experiences originate in the individual or collective unconscious, it would not be surprising to find sexual overtones in them. Certainly, Freud would have expected no less.

Perhaps the subliminal self has far greater capabilities than we commonly suppose, notably the ability to get in touch with other realities or even to manifest pseudo-realities. Perhaps it takes a certain key individual, who is in some way a generator or facilitator of the phenomena, to get the ball rolling. Then, if other individuals happen to perceive the results, their own belief systems are knocked askew and they are able to contribute to the phenomenon and keep it going or even cause it to escalate. After a while, emotions die down, the mechanism (whatever it might be) is worn out, and the sightings subside – until such time as another portal to the subliminal self, another of "the doors  of perception" (to use Aldous Huxley's phrase) is opened, and another series of sightings is inaugurated.

Is this hypothesis correct? I don't know. The problem is that it attributes so much power to the collective unconscious as to call into question any sort of facts or knowledge we might claim to have. It’s much like the super-psi hypothesis, which attributes vast creative abilities to the unconscious mind, capable of weaving a convincing illusion of contact with the dead, among other things.

Like the super-psi argument, the collective-unconsciousness idea feels like a bit of a copout – an attempt to explain these phenomena by saying they all emerge from an inexhaustible, infinitely powerful, yet unknown recess of the mind. Still, it could be true.

An alternative is that UFOs and their occupants are real, independent existents that are invisible to us under ordinary circumstances, but which become perceptible when we activate our seldom-used ability to perceive other planes of reality.

Or perhaps there is no contradiction between these two possibilities. If we could see things from a higher perspective, like a Flatlander lifted off his sheet of paper and looking down at his world from above, we might see that the same phenomenon can be both a subjective, symbolic thought-form and a real, independent entity in its own right.

Actually, I suspect something like this is probably true. I also suspect that my regular mind, as opposed to my higher-dimensional subliminal self, cannot possibly make sense of it.

Flying high

This will probably not be a very well thought-out post. I'd like to present a few ideas and send then see if there's a way of stitching them together. I'm not sure if it will work.

My inspiration for this train of thought is Passport to Magonia, by Jacques Vallee,  a well-known UFO researcher who served as the model for the character played by Francois Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The book, originally published in 1969, was initially unpopular with both skeptics and "ufologists" alike. In it, Vallee tries to associate modern-day reports of flying saucers and their occupants with much older reports of fairy folk, elves, leprechauns, angels, giants, and other "tall tales." (The subtitle, from Folklore to Flying Saucers, makes this point clear.) He sees all of these various accounts as part of a single phenomenon. As he puts it:

The phenomenon has stable, invariant features, some of which we have tried to identify and label clearly. But we have also had to note carefully the chameleon-like character of the secondary attributes of the sightings: the shapes of the objects, the appearance of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment into which they are projected.

Vallee is clearly dubious of the assumption that flying saucers are actual physical craft that have arrived from another planet, and seems to lean toward a different hypothesis, but though he allows himself a few conjectures, he does not commit to any of them.  After recounting an event that supposedly took place near Tripoli, Libya, on October 23, 1954 at three in the morning — a farmer saw a flying craft shaped like an egg land near him, saw six men in coveralls and gas masks inside, and was hit by an electric shock when he touched the vehicle – Vallee writes:

If it were possible to make three-dimensional holograms with mass, and to project them through time, I would say this is what the farmer saw. And with that theory we could explain many of the apparitions: in numerous UFO cases and in some religious miracles, the beings appeared as three-dimensional images whose feet did not actually touch the ground. But what about the other physical actions, such as the electric shocks?

I'm not sure electric shocks are an insuperable impediment to the hypothesis; who knows what sort of capabilities a time-traveling interdimensional hologram might possess?

Later, Vallee indulges in a different conjecture:

There exists a natural phenomenon whose manifestations border on both the physical and the mental. There is a medium in which human dreams can be implemented, and this is the mechanism by which UFO events are generated, needing no superior intelligence to trigger them. This would explain the fugitivity of UFO manifestations, the alleged contact with friendly occupants, and the fact that the objects appear to keep pace with human technology and to use current symbols. The theory … also, naturally, explains the totality of religious miracles as well as ghosts and other so-called supernatural phenomena.

He does not endorse this conjecture either; he simply mentions it among several other possibilities. It strikes me as reminiscent of the super-psi hypothesis sometimes used to explain mediumship and apparitions.

The most interesting – I might even say disturbing – aspect of the book is the similarity of some of the older reports to the more contemporary UFO sightings. People in past eras reported contact with visitors, sometimes described as dwarfs or "little men," and reported seeing celestial chariots that behave very much like today's "flying saucers."  The sheer strangeness of many of these encounters from earlier centuries is matched by distinctly strange elements of some modern UFO accounts, such as one in which the occupants of a UFO baked a biscuit for their human visitor and let him eat it, or another incident in which a hapless human was brought aboard a UFO and encouraged to have conjugal relations with a not-quite-human female.

Naturally, the more outlandish stories, both past and present, can be dismissed as the products of aberrant psychology, false memories, hoaxes, or urban legends and their premodern equivalents. But perhaps it is a little too easy to simply wave away the strangest stories without further consideration. When dealing with a phenomenon that is not understood, are we really in the position to know which reports are too strange to be believed? Maybe a high degree of strangeness is exactly what we ought to expect.

In any event, Vallee  makes a compelling case that the UFO phenomenon, whatever it may consist of, is not new. The idea of UFOs as products of advanced extraterrestrial technology may be new, and the visitors today may resemble science-fiction aliens rather than leprechauns or fairies, but the basic ingredients of the standard UFO sighting can be found in much earlier reports.

So that's one thing to consider. Now here's something else.

Mediumistic communications over the past century or more have pretty consistently said that departed persons will find themselves in an earthlike environment at least for a time. The nicer neighborhoods are sometimes called Summerland, and they consist of the kind of scenery the person knew on earth, shorn of its imperfections. The explanation usually given is that Summerland is the product of the collective unconscious of the spirits inhabiting it. The scenery is taken from the earthly memories of the inhabitants. The deceased F.W.H. Myers, purportedly speaking through Geraldine Cummins, called Summerland the "Land of the Lotus Eaters," meaning a place in which people were lost in a blissful fantasy. He also called it "the realm of illusion" and said that as the spirit progressed to higher planes, the essential falseness of Summerland would become apparent.

In short, Summerland is a consensus reality created by common elements in the unconscious minds of the deceased. This is why people of different backgrounds and life experiences end up in different environments. Apache warriors of a hundred years ago don't share the same world as NASA astronauts. The Apaches have one set of earthly reminiscences to draw on, while the astronauts have a very different set. With few overlapping values, the two environments are separate and distinct. We might visualize the many different planes as a vast Venn diagram, with many different circles overlapping at different points, but no two circles sharing precisely the same space. At least in the initial phases of afterlife existence (which also includes the less desirable neighborhoods, the so-called hellish worlds that are also products of unconscious thoughts made into thought-forms), the environment is a function of material residing in the unconscious.

On earth, we like to think that there is a clear line of demarcation between the objective and the subjective, and that the world we inhabit is objective even if our experience of it is, by definition, subjective. But this line of demarcation blurs when we examine it closely. Since all experience is and must be subjective, and since we cannot know anything except by experience (either our own direct experience or our experience of learning about it from some other source), it's tempting to say that our reality is purely subjective. And yet there needs to be some distinction between the kind of subjectivity that's classified as hallucinations, madness, or simply imagination and fantasy, and the "normal" experience of everyday life. As a rule of thumb, we tend to assume that if the same experience is shared by multiple people, then it has a high degree of objectivity, while if the experience is purely personal and nobody else is able to access it, then it falls into the realm of subjectivity.

But if so — if what we call objectivity consists essentially of shared experiences — then our "objective reality" becomes something more like a "consensus reality." And in that case, it starts to look more like Summerland, which is also a consensus reality. The difference between our experience and the experience of the Summerlanders would then be only one of degree, not of kind. Their environment would be, in some way, more immediately malleable, more open to the influences of mental action, than our own. We might imagine a succession of planes of reality – perhaps "planes of experience" would be a better term – rising from the earthly level, in which there appears to be a fairly clear distinction between mind and environment, to higher levels, in which that distinction becomes increasingly ambiguous, and perhaps finally to the really rarefied levels, in which there is no such distinction, and consciousness simply is everything there is.

Now, with this in mind, we can look again at Vallee's remarks. He notes that "the shapes of the objects, the appearance of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment into which they are projected." He likens the UFOs and their occupants to hypothetical "three-dimensional holograms with mass, [projected] through time." And he wonders if "there is a medium in which human dreams can be implemented, and this is the mechanism by which UFO events are generated." All of this seems directly relevant to the idea of a consensus reality in which our experience is bounded by parameters set by the contents of the collective unconscious mind.

This notion might be a little clearer if we consider my favorite analogy, the experience of playing a virtual-reality game. Suppose you're playing a game set in the Middle Ages. You are fully immersed in a computer-generated environment that is constructed out of a data set of possibilities. These possibilities include typically medieval features like castles, armored knights, longbows and battle axes, cowled monks and hooded wizards. But because it is a medieval game, the data set does not include such elements as 747 jumbo jets, skyscrapers, cell phones, sunglasses, or machine guns. These options are not part of the package of information that is used to construct this particular reality.

By analogy, the data set of the game corresponds to the collective consciousness of people in any particular era and culture. The game environment itself corresponds to the consensus reality of those people.

Now let's say that a different person is playing a completely different game that is linked in some way to the same computer. This other game takes place in the 21st century. Its data set includes all the things that were not included in the medieval data set (jumbo jets, skyscrapers, etc.).  Ordinarily the person playing this game would be unaware of you and your game, but suppose the other guy has sufficient computer skills to to hack his way into your game as  an uninvited visitor. He will then be able to operate in your medieval environment by projecting an avatar into it (just as you operate in the game world through your avatar).

But what kind of avatar will he project? If he's using the data set of the medieval game, he won't be able to "materialize" in any distinctly 21st-century form. In his own game he might be a pilot flying a Cessna, wearing Ray-Bans and a flight suit, and carrying a semiautomatic pistol. But when projecting himself as an avatar into the Middle Ages environment, he must construct (or have constructed for him) a "physical" appearance out of the available options. There are no Cessnas in the medieval data set, but perhaps the nearest equivalent would be a nautical vessel. There are no Ray-Bans, but there are cowls. There are no flight suits, but there is armor. There are no pistols, but there are magicians' wands.

And so your visitor, appearing in the medieval game, might seem to be a mysterious figure indeed – a cowled man in a suit of shining armor, wielding a magician's wand of great power, and operating a magical sailing ship that flies through the air!  

In short, the intruder could become part of your world only by manifesting himself in terms of the options available – the data set underlying the game, or the  shared contents of the collective consciousness, depending on how you want to look at it. 

As I said, the idea is not really developed. But it's something to think about.