Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [Field Notes] What Happened in 2021? Analyzing A Hidden Wave of Consciousness Shifts

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

Something shifted in 2021 — not just for Kelly, but for an unusual number of people all at once. In this Field Notes episode, she thinks aloud about a pattern she keeps running into: waves of consciousness-altering experiences that clustered around a single year, reported independently, with near-identical features and near-identical language. More than a few people, without any prompting, reached for the exact same phrase to describe what happened to them: a sleeper agent, activated. She traces the pattern outward — from veteran UFO researcher Stan Gordon's description of 2021 as the year "they opened all the cages at the Cryptid Zoo," to Edgar Mitchell's overview effect, to the measurable weakening of Earth's electromagnetic field and the approaching solar maximum — and keeps arriving at the same question: what changed? This episode doesn't offer a single answer, just a few working theories held together honestly and the growing sense that 2021 may have been a threshold rather than an anomaly. If you're a member of the anomalous class of 2021, this one's for you. Find the full transcript on my Substack. 🗒️ About Field Notes Field Notes are short-form episodes where Kelly thinks aloud—tracing patterns, chasing questions, and working through ideas that haven't yet reached their conclusion. The path of inquiry is messy and non-linear, and Field Notes is where that process lives out loud. For access to the full archive of written Field Notes, visit inquirywithkellychase.substack.com. Topics explored: Anomalous class of 2021 | consciousness shifts | sleeper agent activation | collective awakening | overview effect | Edgar Mitchell | space psychology | Earth's electromagnetic field | solar cycles | geomagnetic weakening | pandemic isolation | shared reality collapse | threshold events | hundredth monkey effect | cryptid surges | window areas | Stan Gordon | Kecksburg | high strangeness | collective observation | quantum mechanics and perception | reality porosity | precognitive dreams | non-human intelligence contact | experiencer testimony | field notes Inquiry with Kelly Chase is brought to you by SpectreVision Radio. Produced in partnership with Voltage.fm.  Referenced In This Episode Here are the episodes where Kelly talks about her anomalous experience in 2021: Cosmosis: Origins Spotify Apple Podcasts YouTube Through The Looking Glass [Pt 1]: My Initiation Into The Anomalous Spotify Apple Podcasts YouTube Support The Show Patreon: inquirywithkellychase.com Substack: inquirywithkellychase.substack.com Connect with Kelly Website: kellychase.media X: @kellychasemedia Instagram: @kellychasemedia Watch Season 1 of Comosis: UFOs & A New Reality Prime Video Tubi TIMESTAMPS 01:43 Sleeper Agent Pattern 03:37 Is 2021 a Wave 05:09 Kecksburg Turning Point 06:34 Threshold Consciousness Theory 09:01 Overview Effect Clues 10:40 Earth Field and Solar Cycles 12:43 Pandemic Isolation Theory 15:53 What It Means Going Forward Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Ryan Sprague. When I was 12 years old, my father and I stared up into the night skies, and we saw something extraordinary staring back. And whatever it was sent me on a search to find answers to the UFO phenomenon and beyond. And that search continues somewhere in the skies. Coming to you from Spector Vision Radio, the Somewhere in the Sky's podcast features conversations, interviews and roundtable discussions with scientists, scholars, historians, pop culture figures,

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The path of inquiry is messy and non-linear, and these field notes are where I think aloud about the patterns I'm noticing, the questions I'm chasing, and the budding ideas that haven't quite reached their conclusion. If you'd like access to all of my field notes, you can find them on my sub-sufficient. at Inquiry with Kellychase.substack.com.

The link is in the episode description. All right, let's get into it. Recently, I've started to think of myself as part of what I half-jokingly call the anomalous class of 2021. It's a way of naming a pattern that only became visible in hindsight. In August of 2021, I had an anomalous experience that fundamentally altered my sense of reality. It felt as though I slipped outside of ordinary space and time and was shown things about my own life, about consciousness, about the structure of reality itself that I didn't

previously have access to. The experience rewrote my belief system and quietly but permanently reoriented my values. It sent me on a path I didn't consciously choose, but which in retrospect feels strangely inevitable. I won't recount all the details here. I've spoken. I've spoken about them elsewhere for those who are interested, and I'll put the links to those episodes in the episode description if you want to check them out. What matters more for the purposes of this conversation is what happened afterward. In the months that followed, as I tried to integrate what had happened and cautiously began speaking about it with others, I struggled to find language that felt adequate. The closest metaphor I could land on was that it felt like a

sleeper agent being activated. Something dormant suddenly switched on. The shift was destabilizing, but it was also deeply clarifying. I felt more grounded, more coherent, and more aligned with something essential. It felt less like becoming someone new and more like becoming myself. What surprised me most was how quickly I began encountering other people who had been through the exact same kind of transformation. The exact details of how it happened differed. Some were eerily similar to mine, and many bore no resemblance at all. But the changes that people reported were near identical, a rapid shift in consciousness, a sudden awareness spiritual matters even in people who had been committed atheists up to that point. Deep interest in non-human

intelligences. And more often than not, the sense that one was in communication with one or more of them, the emergence of latent sigh abilities and precognitive dreams, and a deep sense of mission, often around creative work. What startled me was not just the similarity of these reports, but the language people used to describe them. Without prompting, more than a few reached for the exact same phrase I'd been using, a sleeper agent. There was a sense that something dormant had been activated, and the sense of this activation wasn't random. And again, And again, when I asked when this shift had occurred, the answer was the same. 2021.

Now, to be clear, experiences like these are not new. Human history is saturated with them. Every culture, every era has produced individuals who report contact with something beyond the ordinary. Visions, revelations, encounters, and awakenings. What we now call anomalous experience is not an outlier in the human story. It's part of its foundation. We are also still in the very early stages of taking experiencers seriously as a subject of scientific study. Outside of classified intelligence programs, yes, we see you, there is no comprehensive effort to track, catalog, or analyze these experiences at scale.

Complicating the issue is the fact that most people lack the language or context to even recognize themselves as experiencers, let alone report what has happened to them. And as a result, any data that we do have is fragmentary and anecdotal at best. So I obviously can't prove that there was an unusually large wave of these experiences in 2021. I can only say that based on what I have observed, spoken about privately with others, and encountered repeatedly in my work, the pattern is difficult to ignore. For a long time, I assumed I was dealing with a very narrow subset of anomalous experiences, ones that more or less resembled my own. What I hadn't yet considered was that this might be part of a much broader pattern,

one that extended well beyond the kinds of experiences that I was personally focused on. That changed over the summer when Jay and I were filming in Kexburg, Pennsylvania, with Stan Gordon, a veteran UFO researcher who has spent more than six decades investigating high strangeness activity in the region. Kexburg is a well-known window area, the site of repeated, UFO sightings, cryptid encounters, and other anomalous phenomena, stretching back generations. When I asked Stan whether there were particular years that stood out as high watermarks for activity, he didn't hesitate. He said that he believed the area was in the middle of one right now

and that it had begun in 2021. He described it to me as the year that, quote, they opened all the cages at the cryptid zoo and let everything out. UFOs, Bigfoot, Thunderbirds, dogmen, UFOs and an unprecedented number of orb sightings, all appearing with a frequency he hadn't seen before. Now that stopped me cold. If 2021 marked a turning point, not just for individual consciousness shifts, but for a broader increase in anomalous activity across multiple domains, then the question becomes unavoidable. What changed? I don't have an answer, but I do have a few working theories. And if you have any of your own to share, or if you are also a member of the anomalous class of 2021, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. One possible way of understanding what happened in 2021 is to think of it as a threshold event, not just for certain individuals, but at the level of collective consciousness itself.

We already know that shifts in awareness don't always unfold gradually or evenly. Sometimes they accumulate quietly below the level of visibility until a tipping point is reached. At that point, what it previously seemed rare or fringe suddenly appears everywhere all at once. The change feels abrupt even though it's been building for a long time. There are well-worn examples of this dynamic. The so-called 100th monkey effect may be more metaphor than rigorously proven phenomenon, but the intuition behind it is sound. skills, ideas, and modes of perception often spread nonlinearly.

The same logic applies in more mundane contexts. For example, there is an established phenomenon where the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle can be solved more easily the day after it's published, presumably because more people have already solved it. If consciousness works this way, if it's at least partially collective, at least partially cumulative, then it's worth asking whether 2021 marked the moment. moment when a critical mass of some kind was reached. Maybe something fundamental about consciousness itself is changing, and what we're seeing now is a gathering wave of what is to come for humanity

as a whole. This framing becomes even more intriguing when placed alongside reports of increased anomalous activity during the same period. If UFOs, cryptids, or other phenomena exist in some kind of overlapping or adjacent domain, something that's both here and not here. then it's possible that changes in human perception, rather than changes in the phenomena themselves, are what make them suddenly more visible. These things may not exist fully within the plane of reality that we normally inhabit, but instead at a boundary that only becomes perceptible at certain thresholds of awareness. That could help explain why these phenomena are so difficult to document, so resistant to capture, and so inconsistent in their manifestations. If that's true, then the

anomalous class of 2021 may not represent a finished transformation, but an early signal. A group that crossed a threshold first before the shape of what comes next has been fully revealed. After my experience, one of the first accounts I encountered that genuinely resonated with me was Edgar Mitchell's description of what later became known as the overview effect. Mitchell and Apollo 14 astronaut wrote about a sudden and overwhelming shift in consciousness while viewing the earth from space. A profound sense of unity, meaning, and interconnectedness that arrived without warning and permanently altered his worldview.

What struck me was not the content of the insight so much as the structure of the experience. It was immediate, non-volitional, and transformational in a way that felt deeply familiar. And as it turns out, Mitchell's experience was not unique. Variations of the overview effect have been reported by Ashton, astronauts across missions and generations, often with enough consistency that space psychologists eventually had to give it a name. These are not mild emotional reactions to a beautiful view. They are frequently described as enduring, cognitive, and spiritual reorientations that persist long after astronauts returned to Earth. This led me to the work of Dr. Ia Whiteley,

a space psychologist who works directly with astronauts. Whiteley's public work has often referenced the overview effect and other consciousness changes reported by astronauts, including alterations in time perception, heightened pattern recognition, synchronicities, an eight lasting sense of connection to something larger than oneself. Well, I don't believe that she has said this directly. Reading between the lines raises an obvious question. What is it about leaving Earth that reliably produces these shifts? I've wondered if this could have something to do with the planet's electromagnetic field. The farther you move from the surface of the planet, the weaker Earth's electromagnetic field becomes. Could it be that simply getting further from the full strength of that

field opens a person up to having these kinds of experiences? Obviously, there's no way to know for sure, but this line of inquiry presents some very interesting possibilities. The Earth's electromagnetic field isn't static. It waxes and wanes over long cycles, and we're currently in a period where it is measurably weakening, faster, in fact, than scientific models had predicted. At the same time, the sun is approaching a peak in its own activity cycle, which is why solar storms are suddenly producing auroras at latitudes where they would normally be impossible as the result of solar storms that normally wouldn't even register. If getting distance from the strongest effects of the Earth's electromagnetic field

could potentially cause changes in consciousness for astronauts, could it be that the weakening of the field as a whole could cause similar changes in people on the ground? Like I said, this is all highly speculative, but I think it's worthy of further inquiry. If that's the case, then the experiences reported by members of the anomalous class of 2021 might not be spontaneous anomalies, but expressions of a system under new constraints. Now, obviously, this doesn't explain everything, but it does offer a framework, that connects individual experiences, astronaut testimony, solar cycles, and reports of increased anomalous activity into a single, if still, very speculative picture. And it suggests that whatever

is happening may be less about messages or interventions and more about the shifting conditions under which human consciousness operates. If so, then the question is not simply what happened in 2021, but what kinds of experiences may become more common? as those conditions continue to change. Another possible way of thinking about what happened in 2021 has less to do with external forces and more to do with the conditions people were living under in the years immediately preceding it. I would argue that quantum mechanics is one of the most abused ideas in New Age and spiritual thinking. Because it's deeply counterintuitive and poorly understood outside of its technical context,

it can be used to justify almost any theory with relative and relative, punity. I'm generally critical of that tendency, but I'm also about to employ it myself. In the words of all Whitman, do I contradict myself? Very well then. I contradict myself. I am large and I contain multitudes. Anyway, at the quantum level, systems exist in a range of possible states until they are observed. Observation is seemingly not passive. It plays some kind of a role in determining which potential becomes actual. What that ultimately means is still debated, even a moment, physicists, but at minimum it suggests that reality is not entirely independent of interaction. At some level, we are literally co-creating our reality. If this is true, then another variable

becomes relevant, proximity to other observers and co-creators. It could be that what astronauts experience in space isn't about the electromagnetic field at all, but about distance from other humans. An astronaut in orbit is physically removed from the dense web of human attention, behavior, and shared perception that saturates life on the ground. If reality really is being constructed through collective observation, even partially, then it may be easier to glimpse something outside of that shared reality when you're hundreds of miles above it. This same idea brings the pandemic years into focus. In 2020 and into 2021, many people were suddenly isolated. for long periods of time. Daily routines collapsed. Social feedback loops were interrupted.

Time felt distorted. At the same time, people's beliefs about the world were changing rapidly. Trust in institutions eroded, assumptions about the future dissolved, the sense that reality was stable and predictable weakened. If reality is stabilized in part by shared routines, shared beliefs, and continuous collective observation, then widespread isolation could, combined with rapid belief change, could plausibly make reality feel more porous. Fewer people reinforcing the same assumptions at the same time may result in a world that feels less solid at the edges. This framing could also help explain another persistent feature of anomalous phenomena, their tendency to appear in rural or isolated areas. Bigfoot sightings,

UFO encounters, and other high strangeness events are not limited to anyone to one geography, but they do seem to cluster in places with fewer people. That pattern has always been strange. But if collective human presence plays a role in stabilizing perception, then distance from that collective may actually play a part in making the impossible suddenly become much less so. I don't know what happened in 2021. I don't have a single explanation that accounts for all the experiences people describe or the timing with which they appeared. What I do is. What I do is, do know is that the pattern is real, even if the cause remains unclear. But taken together, these ideas suggest that 2021 may have marked a threshold rather than an anomaly, a moment when

conditions shifted enough to make certain experiences more accessible to more people at the same time. And the anomalous class of 2021 may represent a glimpse into the future of humanity itself. Until next time. You've been listening to Inquiry with Kelly Chase. If you haven't already, make sure you're subscribed to the podcast. And if this episode resonated, consider leaving a comment or a review. It genuinely helps more than you know. Inquiry is brought to you by Spector Vision Radio.

Production support is provided by J.E. Peterson and Tyler Morrisett at Voltage. If you'd like to support the show, join the Patreon for ad-free episodes, monthly Zoom calls, access to our private Discord server and more. To read all of my field notes and support my written work, subscribe to my substack. You can also follow me on X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and just about anywhere else. And also, Cosmosis, UFOs, and a New Reality, the series I wrote and executive produced alongside director Jay Christopher King, is now streaming for free on Amazon Prime. You'll find the links for all of that and more in the episode description. Thanks for being here. I'll see it.

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