Anomalies Project Update

Welcome to Field Notes from the Beyond!

Happy New Year’s Eve! As we close out 2025, we thought it would be a great time to give everyone an update on where we are with the Anomalies research project. We’ve been collecting data for a little over 2 months and are excited to give you all a little taste of what we’ve been learning. First, some information on how many people have participated so far!

Our Participants

As you can see, we’ve had almost 200 participants in the study, with many of them participating in multiple parts. It seems the topic that is most interesting to a lot of participants is psychic phenomena. We’ll keep that in mind as we plan future studies and future parts of this study.

We’ve had participants from 21 different countries! Not surprisingly, the US is the country with the most representation in the study, with 77% of participants located there. Other countries with multiple participants include the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Sweden, France, Germany, Brazil, and New Zealand. We’re really hoping to broaden international participation in the future.

We noticed that our race/ethnicity categories are very US-centric. We will get that corrected. For now, we can tell you that 81% of our participants identify as White or European American (probably also includes some folks who are not American in any way!), 14% as Hispanic or Latino/a, 6% as Black or African American (same here), 6% as American Indian or Alaska Native (might include Indigenous individuals from other parts of the world), 1.5% as Middle Eastern or North African, 1% as Asian or Asian American (same), and the rest as “Other”. Obviously, we will need to use more appropriate international categories. Sorry about that – we didn’t actually plan for an international audience at first. In our excitement to be more inclusive, we failed to update to the correct categories. We’re hoping for a racially and ethnically diverse group of participants.

We are excited to report that we have participants ranging in age from 18 through 73 and everywhere in between! This is fantastic! We were very worried about missing different age groups entirely and it doesn’t seem that has happened (at least so far). Our average age is 41.

In terms of gender representation, our participants are 59% men and 32% women, with the remaining participants identifying across the gender spectrum. We had some representation across the sexuality spectrum as well, with 69% of our participants identifying as straight or heterosexual, 12% as bisexual, 7% as gay or lesbian, and the rest across the rest of the spectrum. We would love more representation from both gender and sexual minorities.

The majority of our participants feel that they have a fair amount of knowledge of the paranormal or supernatural. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being a lot of knowledge, the average rating among participants was about 7. The vast majority of participants seek out information about the paranormal and supernatural regularly, with 54% saying daily and an additional 31% saying weekly. This doesn’t surprise us, but we’d love to hear from people who don’t know as much as well to make sure we’re getting diverse opinions.

Participant Experiences

Here’s a bit of information about some of the types of paranormal or supernatural experiences that were most common among our participants. For all of these charts, use the following key:

Green: Never Experienced

Blue: Single Incident

Red: 2-5 Experiences

Yellow: 5 or More Experiences

Ghosts:

UAP or UFO Sightings:

Witchcraft or Magic:

Working with Mediums:

Having Prophetic Dreams:

Extrasensory Perception:

Out-of-Body Experiences:

This is just a small amount of the data we’ve collected and are collecting. It’s going to take a long time to collect it all and even longer to analyze it, but we’re going to try to start sharing some of this information as it comes in.

Immediate Plans

We’re going to keep examining all of the information we’ve learned so far, but we really want more participants! We’re going to focus on recruiting over the coming months. Ideally, we’d like about 1000 participants in our first year and that’s going to take a lot of work.

Some of you have asked if there’s anything you can do to help and we really appreciate that. The best thing anyone can do for us right now is help get the word out about the study. Help us get the participants we need to prove that we can do this. Once we have a good starting point, we plan to try to identify ways to fund this project to keep it going. In order to do that, we need to show that there is interest and you can help us do that!

Share this link to the survey:

https://redcap.lehigh.edu/surveys/?s=8W4KMN3P7PJWEJXM

And this QR Code:

Future Plans

We are going to develop a website with more information about the study and results. We plan a more comprehensive annual report on the data, but will share interim results at points throughout the year. We really want this information to be public!

We also will be recontacting people one year after their initial survey participation for a follow-up. Our hope is that we can show potential funders that people are willing to participate in surveys, interviews, and more for the long term. We don’t want this to be a one-time project. We want it to keep going and keep growing.

Thank you to everyone who has participated so far! We truly appreciate it!

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Coming Up Next

Next in Field Notes from the Beyond: Defining the Paranormal

This Month on Beyond the Human: Mothman

Next Month on Beyond the Human: Xenoanthropology

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Who are we?

We are a group of scholars interested in understanding paranormal, supernatural, and anomalous phenomena from an academic perspective. We want to document and validate experiences people have and study them in a rigorous way to bring credibility to these phenomena. Join us for our monthly podcast Beyond the Human and follow us on Spotify, Instagram, and Patreon to learn more about who we are, our methods, and what we want to learn!