About

My name is Zach Speegle. I am a retired Navy chaplain and a Marine veteran. I am also an author; you can find my writing at zacharywspeegle.com.

Why I keep this catalog

Accounts like these are often told once, to one person, and then lost. The few that are written down are usually retold by someone else, years later, without the details that would let one account be compared with another.

Remarkable Things is an attempt to do this carefully: to hear each account from the person it happened to, record it the same way every time, and publish it so that accounts usually kept apart can be read side by side.

Where the method comes from

The approach is borrowed, not invented. David Hufford’s experience-centered approach starts from what people report and takes the report seriously as a report, before any explanation. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, built his study on firsthand accounts in their own words. Alister Hardy founded an archive that collected thousands of such accounts so they could be studied together. Jacques Vallée showed the value of recording every case in the same fixed format, so that cases could be compared.

My own views

I have my own views on what these experiences mean. I keep them out of the interviews and out of the catalog.