Echoes of the Unknown Magazine

By: Paul Abner

I was watching an interview with Stephen Hawking when he made a statement that stopped me in my tracks.

He said:

“Religion is an early form of science. It’s what our ancestors used to explain what we couldn’t yet understand.”

Whether you agree with that statement completely or not isn’t really the point.

What struck me was what happened in my own mind after hearing it.

I sat there for a while thinking about human history.

Thousands of years ago, lightning wasn’t electricity.

It was divine.

Disease wasn’t bacteria.

It was punishment or curses.

The movement of the stars wasn’t astronomy.

It was prophecy.

One by one, humanity learned more about the mechanisms behind the world around us. As our understanding grew, many things that were once explained through myth, folklore, or religious interpretation became subjects of scientific investigation.

The mystery didn’t disappear.

Our explanation changed.

Then I found myself thinking about the paranormal.

Of every subject humanity has explored, this may be the one where speculation still outweighs mechanism.

Spend five minutes in the paranormal world and you’ll hear explanations involving angels, demons, curses, witches, magic, portals, possessions, and countless other ideas. Some people hold these beliefs deeply. Others reject them entirely.

But here’s what fascinates me.

No matter where someone stands philosophically, nearly everyone begins with the same observation:

Something happens that we don’t fully understand.

That is where the PMA framework begins.

Not with an answer.

With a question.

What if our greatest obstacle isn’t that the paranormal is unknowable?

What if it’s that we’ve never seriously committed ourselves to understanding the mechanisms behind it?

Every mature scientific discipline eventually shifted from asking what happened to asking how it happened.

Physics stopped describing falling objects and began studying gravity.

Biology stopped cataloging living things and began studying cells and DNA.

Meteorology stopped fearing storms and began studying atmospheric dynamics.

Understanding grew because people became curious about mechanisms.

Perhaps the paranormal deserves the same treatment.

That doesn’t mean abandoning history, folklore, or the countless personal experiences people have had throughout the centuries.

Those stories matter.

In many ways, they are our observations.

But observations are only the beginning of science.

The next step is asking why.

That question is what led me to develop the PMA framework—the idea that paranormal experiences may emerge through interactions between environmental systems, biology, electromagnetism, acoustics, light, atmospheric chemistry, and human perception.

I don’t present that framework as established fact.

I present it as an invitation.

An invitation to stop asking only who is responsible for a haunting and begin asking what mechanisms could produce the experiences we report?

If those mechanisms eventually point beyond our current understanding of physics, then we will follow the evidence there.

If they point toward entirely natural environmental interactions, we should be willing to follow that evidence too.

Either outcome teaches us something.

That is what science has always done.

It doesn’t destroy wonder.

It refines it.

The microscope didn’t eliminate mystery.

It revealed an invisible universe.

The telescope didn’t explain away the heavens.

It expanded them beyond imagination.

Maybe the paranormal stands at a similar crossroads.

Perhaps we are living through the moment when one way of explaining the unknown begins giving way to another—not because curiosity has disappeared, but because it has matured.

If that is true, then the purpose of the PMA framework is not to replace mystery with certainty.

It is to replace assumption with investigation.

Because every field of science began with people willing to admit three simple words:

We don’t know yet.

And in my opinion, those three words have always been the beginning of humanity’s greatest discoveries.