Seeing the Supernatural: Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World
By Leo Strobel
(Zondervan, 320 pages, $23)
Perhaps I’ve been watching too much 70s TV lately. But I couldn’t help but think of gumshoe reporter Carl Kolchak, played with classical Hollywood panache by Darren McGavin (Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer; A Christmas Story) in Kolchak: The Night Stalker, while reading the latest book by popular Christian author Lee Strobel, titled Seeing the Supernatural. It makes sense, though: Strobel is a former Chicago reporter, just like Carl. Both employ down-to-earth narration to bring the audience along on their investigations, and, indeed, both are delving into the unseen world.
Strobel is, of course, well-known by evangelical Protestants for his “Case for” books, popular apologetics fare that has sold well since his original The Case for Christ in 1998. In Seeing the Supernatural, he travels the country interviewing experts (unlike in previous books, all are other Christian authors) on topics such as consciousness, near-death experiences, angels, and demons.
As Strobel correctly notes, much to the bane of skeptics, “[Y]ou don’t have to persuade most Americans that supernatural phenomena are authentic,” as popular belief in the paranormal and interest in supernatural media remain high in the 2020s. Still, his is a compelling argument, offering clearly written syntheses of decades of research that demonstrate that we are more than our material brains, that an external, real world of beings and forces exists that we might as well view preternaturally. I can almost hear Kolchak cheerfully whistling during his televised investigations.
There is precedent for Christian investigations of this kind. Scholastic theologians, in addition to offering logical proofs for the existence of God, collected testimonies of incubi and succubi (often through physical torture of suspected witches) to make their case for the reality of the invisible world inhabited by the church.
Puritans dwelt within a transatlantic world of “wonders” by the 17th century and wrote often about witchcraft, spectral entities, and strange phenomena in order to combat, from the perspective of Boston’s Cotton Mather, the Sadducees of the day. As medieval and early modern logic dictated, if witches are real, the Devil is real; if the Devil is real, then God is real. Strobel and other evangelical apologists are careful not to make so much of modern paranormal claims. After all, out-of-body experiences and angelic visitations could “prove” different religious systems. So a chapter on the Resurrection of Christ is offered toward the end of Seeing the Supernatural to justify Strobel’s biblical interpretation. He gets the limitations of the data.
Still, as Carl Kolchak sometimes stumbled, fell, and broke his camera while fighting monsters within and beyond the Windy City — actually, he fell a lot — Strobel is not without his paranormal faults. UFOs are not considered because, well, they’re not (“[W]e won’t be covering UFOs in this book”), and a chapter on ghosts and psychic phenomena largely dismisses mountains of peer-reviewed data as misguided and dangerous.
This is too bad, as the writings of eminent UFOlogists like the late John Keel (The Mothman Prophecies) could offer Strobel an opportunity to link alien creatures to otherworldly realms — Keel was, according to his critics who doggedly accepted the extraterrestrial hypothesis, “just a demonologist.”
Or consider researcher David Hufford, who has amassed experiential evidence for what he originally labeled the “Old Hag” phenomenon in The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982), or sleep paralysis with a frightening presence, a combination of occurrences that has yet to be satisfactorily explained in the lab (watch, for example, this fascinating interview with Hufford from 2007, summarizing decades of his work to that time on sleep paralysis.) This is just the kind of thoroughly examined, preponderance-of-the-data approach that Strobel privileges, not the “cheap” ghost hunting TV shows and psychic charlatans he questions.
Despite the need for a broader, more complex discussion, Seeing the Supernatural offers a valuable, sectarian, though reasonable, approach to subjects whose popularity isn’t going away anytime soon.
Now, if we could only get a second season of Kolchak!
READ MORE:
Pope Leo XIV: An End to ‘Innovation’?
Richard Ravalli has written on history, film/TV and the paranormal for most of the 21st century. He currently teaches history at Jessup University in Northern California. His latest anthology, Lucas: His Hollywood Legacy, was published last year with University Press of Kentucky.