The CSICOPians are the Keepers of the Faith for the scientific establishment. Their job is to define scientific correctness, to keep the faithful from straying too far from the straight and narrow, and to make sure that our disposable national income is directed toward Big Science and not to the local acupuncturist. In our developing cultural ambience of post-modernism, the CSICOPians might envy the lesser challenges faced by their counterpart at the Vatican, Cardinal Ratzinger.

The anomalous finds no friends at CSICOP. But one might wonder whether there exists another arena where other interests might come to bear on those things that go bump in the night?

Operating out of the public eye, our intelligencers work under a different and broader mandate. Their job is to look for chinks in our armor. They cannot afford to be quite so doctrinaire or even cavalier in their scrutiny of unconventional phenomena. They cannot fall back on general principles when it comes to engaging with forces that might operate under a different set of assumptions.

Theirs is not an easy job. They must protect us from potential threats that mainstream culture believes should not exist. They must protect us in our slumber of materialism from the shadows that come creeping in the metaphysical twilight. Ironically, our own disbelief in these phenomena is our primary line of defense, but on the rare occasions when that fails, our PsiCops must be able to respond. Even in their own profession these folks have to operate on the margins and so they must be given unusual latitudes. They would have to develop their own informal infrastructure and reporting channels. This is what I refer to as the Anomalies Network.

The anomalies network is the catchall for the uncorrelated targets, unknown phenomena and even for the unusual personalities with which such phenomena are not uncommonly associated. That there should exist an anomalies network is a possibility that has not been lost upon the producers of our entertainment media, sometimes redounding to their own good fortune. This treatment may leave us entertained, but not particularly enlightened. And this is where the matter presently rests as far as the public is concerned. To proceed further would require a political authority sufficient to at least partially raise the lid on the anomalies network.

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rev. 4/9/98