Guy arrested for attempted murder, details here:
[url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/09/idaho-shooting-suspects-hypersexual-martian-manifesto-is-a-window-into-an-unraveling-mind/]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/09/idaho-shooting-suspects-hypersexual-martian-manifesto-is-a-window-into-an-unraveling-mind/[/url]
His manifesto here:
[url=http://ftpcontent.worldnow.com/khq/ODOMDOCS.pdf]http://ftpcontent.worldnow.com/khq/ODOMDOCS.pdf[/url]
Basically, stressed out in college, he turned to meditation, and came into contact with entities. You can’t be wrong about what you experience, you can only be wrong about the conclusions you draw from those experiences. Was there something real here from which he drew some bad conclusions?
That gets my vote - I think he happened across something real, just a glancing contact maybe, but it unbalanced and obsessed him, then confirmation bias and all the other usual cognitive glitches we all run (and usually have a handle on) took control of his thoughts, and tipped his little ship right over.
I based that on things like this: "On a flight home after a job interview, Odom began to suspect that strangers were sending him secret messages. Newspaper headlines had hidden meanings.
“It was blatantly obvious they were doing something to me, but I didn’t know what,” he wrote. “I had applied to several government agencies before this happened, so I thought this might be their way of contacting me.”"
If I decide someone’s sending me secret messages, I WILL acquire plenty of proof via normal processes of attention and filtering, and then the pressure and stress that investing belief in these would create, would deepen any other psychologiocal cracks, until you end up psychotic - manufacturing phenomena from a mish-mash of memories and subconscious dreads and imagery, like nightmares coming to life.
Poor dude badly needed a kitty box IMO, and just didn’t have one handy…
I’m almost done listening to this
[url=http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2016/03/15-09-mu-podcast/]404 Error
which discusses that case in all it’s crazy detail, as well as a couple other similar cases, then touches a bit on gangstalking.
After hearing the intimate details, I’m more inclined to think it might be magically self created. Imagine someone with no magical foundation who suddenly began manifesting magical abilities. The increased amount of synchronicities and the weird way things seems to fall into place. You’d want to find an explanation for that trying to use logic and reason, which not being the right tool for the job, generates some pretty far out things to fit the facts.
That explanation becomes the paradigm, and the person’s magical ability channeled through that paradigm expresses it’s self according to those rules. Those weird things happening that sound too crazy to be true might actually be occurring, not from the will of some nefarious shadow organization, but from the will of the person experiencing it.
Think back to all the times you’ve shot yourself in the foot so to speak while learning magic. We have the context and resources to learn from it. Those poor fools don’t have that luxury! They just keep making the same mistakes over and over.
If their conspiracy in any way implies danger, that’s a pretty novel situation, and the person is going to focus on it a lot more than they should without the ability to let go or banish. That’s going to compound things the same way hauntings escalate. In fact, this might not be much different from self created hauntings, where the person haunts themselves with their own magical ability them blames it on a spirit.
He’s not crazy. Hyperactive, sure, but not crazy.
I’ve seen entities similar to the one he describes Remington as on the Martian surface before, and in certain cases have also seen people’s faces “disappear” to be replaced by a different visage, for varying amounts of time. Usually in ritual, though there was once it happened when I looked into a mirror in normal consciousness and that was scary, just because of how unexpected it was.
Odds are good he isn’t crazy.
Sometimes people just aren’t fit for what they uncover.