Anomaly Academy 2026-02 – Feb – Jack Hunter

Of Minds and Monsters: An Exploration of Non-Human Consciousness and the Paranormal

Presented by Jack Hunter / Saturday, February 28th (Time To Be Announced Soon)

This presentation aims to straddle the liminal space between the philosophy of mind and the science of consciousness studies on the one hand, and the bizarre world of Fortean and paranormal phenomena on the other. The field of consciousness studies has yet to crystallise its own distinctive paradigm. Rather than a single framework for investigating consciousness, the field harbours a pantheon of different approaches and various theoretical positions that are seemingly in constant competition with one another. Different theoretical positions, as well as recent developments in empirical research on the extent of mind in the non-human world (plants and animals), point in the direction of understanding consciousness as much more ubiquitous in nature than is often assumed. This opens up a huge scope for considering the wide varieties of encounters with bizarre beings documented in the paranormal and Fortean literature, which have previously been understood as ‘anomalies.’ It is suggested here that an expanded understanding of consciousness – of the development of minds in nature and the varieties they might take – could help to bridge the gap between these fields of study and shed new light on old problems of the paranormal.

Jack Hunter, PhD., is an anthropologist exploring the borderlands of consciousness, religion, ecology and the paranormal. He is an Honorary Research Fellow with the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and a tutor at the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He teaches on the MA in Ecology and Spirituality and the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology. He is also a tutor for the Alef Trust on their MSc in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology, where he teaches on the Approaches to Consciousness module, and for the California Institute for Human Science, where he teaches on ‘The Varieties of Anomalous Experience.’ He is the author of Manifesting Spirits (2020), Spirits, Gods and Magic (2020), Ecology and Spirituality (2023), and The Folklore of the Tanat Valley (2025). He is the editor of Deep Weird (2023), Greening the Paranormal (2019) and Damned Facts (2016), and co-editor of Talking With the Spirits (2014), Mattering the Invisible (2021) and Folklore, People and Place (2023). He lives in the hills of Mid-Wales with his family.