The Fido Sense: Dogs as Sensors for UAP, and revisiting Perception Studies

Revisiting the idea of a "sense," spiritual and otherwise

Photo by Sebastian Kvasnak on Unsplash

In the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, local people across Sri Lanka and India reported something strange. Before the wave struck, dogs refused to go outside. Elephants screamed and bolted for high ground. Flamingos abandoned low-lying nesting areas. The Sri Lankan Wildlife Department, surveying the devastation, noted a striking absence: almost no dead animals. As if they knew. [Did Animals Sense the Tsunami, Jan. 2, 2005 Al Jazeera)

Dogs, in particular, have long exhibited a capacity to sense what humans cannot. Medical studies show that some can detect epileptic seizures in advance, often alerting their humans by pawing, circling, or standing guard. Others are trained to detect cancers, blood sugar shifts, and even the onset of PTSD episodes—through scent, yes, but also behaviorally, attuned to patterns of distress invisible to both people and machines.

I wasn’t so surprised, therefore, when, in a course I teach about the topic of UAP/UFOs (not affiliated with my university), Dr. Eric Davis told us that his research group used dogs as biosensors for the phenomena. He said, “the dogs see things that humans can’t see, and it scares them. When they bark, we know something is there.” Eric is a physicist who has studied UAP his whole life and who has consulted members of Congress on the topic.

This presents a challenge to our frameworks of knowledge. If a non-human animal can consistently detect anomalies in physiology, environment, or emotional states, then our model of perception should include examination of these little understood aspects of human perception. Additionally, a dog’s perceptual apparatus is embodied, it’s not technological. It’s interesting that in media portrayals of hauntings and paranormal events, I’m thinking of the Blumhouse movies (which I like!) like Paranormal Activity, there is usually a person with a technological sensor, it could be a camera, audio sensor, etc., which is used to pick up paranormal activity that is beyond what most human beings can perceive. Probably they should feature a dog in their next movie, to be more accurate to the data.

Photo by eliza petrovska on Unsplash

Recall in a previous Substack article I discussed the spiritual sense. There is a temptation in the age of AI and quantification to believe that machines will perfect perception. But dogs—living, feeling beings—remind us that perception often provides us with valuable information, even if at this point, we cannot quantify it or understand how we attained it. Dogs seem to be participating in a kind of ambient sensing, something between instinct and environmental attunement. It’s not outsourced to a phone or device, rather, it’s embodied.

In my book ENCOUNTERS, I featured Dr. Iya Whiteley whose lifework was to train pilots and astronauts to identify their pre-verbal knowledge, non-conscious knowledge, as this knowledge would equip them stay alive in the extreme environments they were trained to inhabit, like space.

We might call this suprasensory awareness. Or perhaps, more humbly, as Iya says, it’s called listening. These days, apparently, we need to be trained to do it.