Case file · High strangeness
The 'Oz factor'
British ufologist Jenny Randles's term for the sense, reported by many close-encounter witnesses, of being cut off from the normal world into a quiet, subtly altered one.
1987 CE · 53.70, -2.20 · status: claim
The account
Randles, BUFORA's director of investigations from 1982 to 1994, argued that the witness's consciousness is at the centre of such encounters. She wrote about it in a 1987 BUFORA Bulletin article, 'In Search of the Oz Factor'. Folklorist Peter Rojcewicz described a similar library experience from 1980.
The sceptical view
The effect fits known altered states such as dissociation, absorption and the onset of sleep; it is a descriptive label, not evidence of anything external.
Connections in the atlas
- Pine Bush, New York UFO flap
- The ghosts of the Petit Trianon
- Shadow people and the Hat Man
- Rendlesham Forest