One Strange Experience, Many Meanings
A 2026 survey asks how people interpret experiences that feel outside the ordinary. The responses illuminate meaning-making—not evidence that reality briefly broke.
The Experiences
An experience can feel unmistakably strange without revealing what caused it. Researchers led by Pedro Fortes did not set out to prove a glitch in the universe. Their August 2026 PLOS ONE paper asks how people appraise nonordinary experiences: events that stand out to the person having them.
The team first tested an expanded questionnaire with 160 Brazilian participants. A second, general-population sample of 5,117 answered questions about one of 38 types of experience. These were self-reports and interpretations, not laboratory verification of the reported events’ supernatural explanations.
What Changed Afterward
The appraisals were not all euphoric or all frightening. The authors report 20% experienced an immediate negative impact and 25% some suffering or discomfort; 51% judged their experience to have a positive long-term effect. These are different questions and not exclusive slices of one pie.
- Measured: how respondents described and interpreted an experience and its effects.
- Not measured: whether a spirit, simulation error or unknown physical event produced it.
- Important limit: a survey can show patterns of meaning; it cannot settle causation for each account.
The Glitch in the Story
The fascinating split is between what happened to someone and what they make of it. Two people can give very different meanings to comparably startling moments. The paper suggests these appraisals matter for wellbeing, without reducing every report to illness or treating every report as paranormal proof.
A strange event is a report. Its explanation is another question.