While I have little love for the concept of synchro-mysticism or conspiracies surrounding the Illuminati talking to each other through movies and television shows instead of just picking up the phone, sometimes the most unassuming of pop culture entries does offer treasures for the memetic magickian to think about. And seeing as one of my guilty pleasures has always been hunting down the trashy paperback novelizations of old ’80s and early ’90s action films, a collection that has proven to be all the cheaper to expand since the advent of online secondhand booksellers, I remain spoiled for choice.

In a few cases this opens up a whole different and vastly more interesting plot, such as the original novella by Stephen King which would go on to become The Running Man, but mostly these disposable texts slavishly describe what was originally seen on the screen. Not that this is a bad thing necessarily, as even those script like narratives can offer up clarification about small details lost in the celluloid haze. Yet regardless of literary conceit there are occasions when the book brings some far deeper lore, and surprisingly enough the tie in adaptation of Terminator 2: Judgement Day by Randall Frakes did just that.

What initially piqued my interest was a throwaway section at the very start of the book, one that was for some reason omitted from the final treatment of the film and would not be seen on screen until much later in that already spiraling franchise. The literary description of the time travel device which Skynet developed to eliminate the leader of the human resistance in the past is a little labored perhaps, and lacking in any real scientific underpinning, but I found it intriguing for completely unintentional reasons. And the connections I have drawn with another Fortean topic may just surprise you all.

You see, once the quickly spinning rings are out of the way and the light show had abruptly ended, the human chrononaut is replaced with a sphere of not just time but space belonging to the year 1984. Smog, beer cans and concrete, all the worst bits of ’80s consumerism teleported forward in time to a future that likely has little use for such sentimental trash. And once I began to ruminate on those admittedly fictional ideas, my thoughts turned in passing to one of the few researchers within the bounds of the strange that I would consider a personal hero. Albeit a man who would likely dismiss my line of thinking wholesale.

John Keel is widely credited with coining the concept of window areas to describe the way that certain places seem to attract more than their share of weird events over a protracted period of time. Taking the example from the book, and the way that instead of simply inserting the naked soldier into 1984 the machine swapped the area he was supposed to appear in with a small bubble of space from 2029, we see a potential explanation emerge. For a few nanoseconds both locations would have existed together, phasing through each other with forty plus years of time lurching unsteadily in either direction away from them.

I argue that in attempting to solve the problem of Keel’s ever present monsters and eldritch interlopers we need to completely suppress the assumption that all of what we see, every inch of this Earth or light year of space is in fact native to what is considered out base reality. Because if that bubble was constantly wedged open, to the point where the area in Los Angeles where he was dropped off did not even belong in our time yet was indistinguishable from those locations around it that did, then how would any of us ever know that the very ground itself did not belong here?

Following that logic, there is a chance that our realm may instead be made up of many such open doors, areas that appear native to this dimension by virtue of us placing houses in their forested boundaries and roads through their rolling hills, yet which may instead belong somewhere else entirely. Not just wrinkles in time but whole plateaus of space become stuck to the flypaper that we consider to be real, leaving those who dwell in the weirder side of nonfiction to assume that the land we claim may not actually be wholly ours. And science would know no better of course, so could offer no opinion on such stitches in space.

I am positing the working theory that our reality is less a crisp new cotton sheet flawlessly woven from a single material and instead a patchwork quilt made up of many overlapping fragments of a hundred, perhaps thousand other realms instead. As a result creatures such as bigfoot and the mothman are not coming here at all but rather staying where they actually belong. They are only seen by us because their world and ours are the same actual physical space in certain areas, such as Point Pleasant or the American national park system. The lands of the Fae are real, and we hammered a motorway right through their wilderness.

What passes for the people of those dimensions may tell similar tales of the strange things that happen in the areas that bleed into ours, of the odd bipedal ape men in khaki shorts and plaid shirts that drink foul-smelling liquid from weird metal containers and toast puffy little foodstuffs over roaring fires while shooting deer for sport. The tents ablaze with lanterns and lost hikers unable to find their way back to the eventually abandoned camp. Wandering around the wilderness and then off into unknown realms. We may in fact be just as guilty of interloping there as the bizarre creatures that Keel described visiting here.

To take this theory to its more pessimistic conclusion we are then left with a final, sobering question. If we are indeed but little better than parasites living at the edges of another’s existence, that could also explain the double edged interest supposedly paid to mankind by the Ascended Masters, Tall White aliens, men in black and all the similar groups of vastly superior beings which infest popular occult folklore. And worse, could their efforts at both guiding and in some cases curtailing human development be an attempt to deal with a growing roach problem, roaches that unfortunately just so happen to be us?