I'm Open to the Reality of the Paranormal — and I Hate Authoritarianism. What Does That Make Me?

Former US government officials and military officers testifying before Congress on the evidence for paranormal phenomenon such as UAPs.

By EVWorld.com Si Editorial Team

A new study published in *The Journal of Social Psychology* claims that right-wing authoritarianism is linked to belief in the paranormal. The researchers, working from a German sample of just over a thousand participants, found a "moderate to weak" but statistically robust correlation between authoritarian attitudes and openness to phenomena like ghosts, astrology, and telepathy.

As someone who fits neither end of that equation, I'd like to offer a politely inconvenient data point: myself.

I am genuinely open to the reality of paranormal phenomena. I am also genuinely opposed to authoritarianism in every form it takes - communist, fascist, or anything in between. According to the study's logic, this combination should be something of a contradiction. It isn't.

And I'm apparently in good company. The United States government, not historically known for credulous thinking, has moved in exactly this direction. In January 2026, President Trump directed the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to release classified files on UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena — including materials connected to potential extraterrestrial life. This followed years of bipartisan congressional hearings with sworn testimony from military personnel, the establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to formally investigate unexplained encounters, and a provision in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requiring a dedicated UAP records collection at the National Archives. The U.S. government's official posture is no longer dismissal — it is investigation.

The scientific world is moving similarly. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Brian Josephson has spent years exploring the physical mechanisms behind mind-matter interaction. Roger Penrose, another titan of theoretical physics, has proposed that consciousness is linked to quantum wave function collapse — a framework that opens the door to phenomena mainstream science once waved away. More recently, Maria Strømme, Professor of Materials Science at Uppsala University, published a paper in *AIP Advances* proposing that consciousness is not a byproduct of brain activity but a fundamental field underlying reality itself — and that phenomena like telepathy and near-death experiences may be natural consequences of that interconnected field. Her paper was selected as the best of its issue. Meanwhile, Hartmut Neven of Google's Quantum AI Lab has proposed experiments to test whether consciousness arises from quantum entanglement within the brain. These are not fringe figures. These are people operating at the highest levels of their fields.

Which brings us back to the study's deeper flaw — not in its statistics, but in its unexamined assumption: that paranormal belief is a cognitive deficiency to be *explained*, rather than a philosophical position to be *understood*. The researchers originally hypothesized that authoritarians think intuitively rather than analytically, and that sloppy thinking causes both their politics and their supernatural leanings. When that hypothesis failed — analytical thinking style turned out not to explain the link — they were left without a mechanism.

But consider what genuine openness to the paranormal actually requires. It requires epistemic humility — a willingness to say that the boundaries of scientific consensus are not the same as the boundaries of reality. It requires intellectual independence — the courage to take seriously questions that institutions dismiss. These are not the hallmarks of an authoritarian mind. They are, in fact, its opposite.

The authoritarian craves certainty, defers to established hierarchies, and punishes those who deviate from the norm. The curious paranormal investigator, like the curious physicist, does none of these things. They are questioning the dominant narrative, not reinforcing it.

The researchers themselves wisely caution that their findings shouldn't be read as proof that paranormal belief causes far-right views, or that every believer in the supernatural is a closet authoritarian. Good. Because the leap from a correlation in a German survey to a universal psychology of belief is a long one — and the people most likely to accept it uncritically may be the ones least interested in examining their own assumptions.

Belief in the paranormal, for many people, is not a failure of reason. It is an act of it.

J. William Moore
Publisher, EVWorld.com

Resources:

• What the U.S. government has already revealed about UFOs
• US Government UAP disclosure is a psychological event.

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