The Oz Factor and the Freeze Response

 There are certain tropes that come up again and again in personal accounts of paranormal and/or alien encounters. A major one is that the person having the encounter has been rendered docile and/or mysteriously numbed, presumably by some advanced technology or extraordinary power wielded by the Other they are encountering.

You can find examples of this by listening to almost any Art Bell show that focuses on UFO encounters, but it was British ufologist Jenny Randles who noticed and coined a term for it: the Oz factor. Randles carries some weight as a writer and thinker on anomalous topics, so if she says she perceived a pattern in accounts of experiences, I’ll take her word for it. Although, not actually having any of her own books at hand, I’ll quote Lewis (2017) quoting Randles’ explanation of the Oz Factor: “a sort of inner tuning, as the percipient’s mind blocks out attention to all external sounds in order to note the message that is about to bombard his or her consciousness.”

Lewis goes on to say that in other writings Randles extends this into putting “forth this idea of Synchronistic Reality Mode and the ability for the human mind to take in this anomalous information in a parapsychological way and create a virtual reality telepresence experience.” I don’t really understand what that means and I don’t know if it’s a fair reflection of Randles’ own thought, but I do want to point out this: the Oz factor seems to involve a special mental mode which allows communication and contact with undefined, anomalistic Others.

People have bizarre, traumatic encounters they can’t understand and struggle to explain to others. But people also have completely mundane traumatic encounters they can’t understand and struggle to explain to others. A lot of peoples’ stories about UFOs focus on how they can’t get any one to believe in what happened or take them seriously. The same is true, though, about a lot of people’s stories about experiencing sexual assault or domestic violence. I’ve always wondered how ‘special’ the experiences of UFO experiencers are compared to normal human reactions in other extremely taxing, liminal or transgressive situations.

At this point I’d like to introduce Rory Miller, a veteran corrections officer and martial arts teacher who has written several books about the sociology and psychology of real-time violent encounters. In Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected, Miller describes something close to the Oz Factor as one of several types of freeze responses a person may experience when faced with a sudden threat. Miller calls it the hard-wired freeze response and writes, “Know that the hard-wired freeze response is triggered by fear, but it usually doesn’t feel that unpleasant, kind of warm and floaty with a sound in your ears like the ocean. People who have been so terrified they couldn’t move have described this state and decided that they weren’t really afraid so they weren’t really frozen. It just seemed like a good idea at the time not to move.” Which is pretty much exactly how the Oz Factor is described on all those Art Bell programs.

I found Miller’s books after I experienced threat-induced altered sensory functioning during a community “Force Options” training held by my local police department. After classroom time studying use of force policies, hearing real-life stories from officers and discussing events unfolding nationwide, community members had to go alone into a staged scenario with a fake weapons belt and decide how to respond to a call. For real officers in Richmond, if they fail their scenario test, they lose their job.

Before I entered the scenario, a detective prepped me by telling me exactly what would happen and what I should do. “Distance is time. Remember that! You will get tunnel vision and not be able to see. You will stop hearing anything. To break out of that, move your eyes right and left. Then you will be able to hear.” I thought to myself, “That’s bullshit. I know how my mind works under stress. I’ve never lost hearing before.”

The detective pushed the door open and I went into the scenario. All I saw were two guys fighting. I told them to stop and advanced on them. One charged me. I fumbled over the weapons on my belt – OC spray, Taser, gun, baton. By then the guy attacking had come in too close for anything other than baton which, as a student of Filipino martial arts, made me very happy. I was now in my comfort zone - except for someone kept tapping me on my shoulder and another guy was in my face repeating, “It’s over. The scenario is over!” The guy yelling in my face was my role-playing attacker, and the guy tapping on my shoulder was the detective. He had walked beside me and I hadn’t even seen him.

Afterwards, the detective debriefed me. He told me what I had failed to hear. One guy was attacking the other, yelling his intention to kill him. The guy being attacked was yelling for help. I hadn’t heard any of it, although I had heard yelling. My hearing and vision had been restricted and I would have been completely unaware of what I was missing without the post-scenario feedback I got. It was a fascinating and sobering experience.

Is the Oz Factor the same as the what Miller calls the hard-wired freeze response? Possibly. Miller is not the first to write about the psychological and physiological effects of confronting violence and dealing with the Survival Stress Response. USAF Col. John Boyd, by observing thinking and response to combat conditions, pioneered the OODA loop model, showing how physiological response happens and where thinking can get hung up. UFO writers tend to think in silos where the experiences they report on are so special that there can only be one explanation. I submit to your consideration that the Oz Factor is in fact the Freeze Factor and that traumatic encounters with the paranormal work by the same rules as do life-threatening encounters with the normal.

Which brings me to a point made by Jack Brewer in his chapter of the book Robbie Graham edited. Reframing the discourse around UFOs to make it of greater general relevance would require addressing and taking seriously the trauma that experiencers undergo. “Demonstrating a willingness to acknowledge the relevance of trauma shows commitment to accuracy, concern for witnesses, and helps create an atmosphere more conducive to authenticity and good quality of discussion.” (p. 45)

UFOs: Reframing the Debate (2017) Robbie Graham, ed.

Facing Violence: Preparing for the unexpected (2011) Rory Miller