Owl Synchronicity

This is the origin story of why owls have such an importance in randonaut lore based on a mindblowing coincidence that happened in the early weeks of the Randonauts project.

During one week in 2019 there were suddenly quite a significant amount of reports of owl sightings - real and artificial ones - on the Randonaut subreddit and the Telegram groupchat - out of the blue.

In those early days the randonaut chatbot was running on a Mac mini in a living room corner of Jamal, one of the first contributors. During this week he was traveling and when he returned home and saw all the owl reports galore he surprised everyone with this mind-blowing story.

A week earlier Jamal was cleaning and building a shelf in his room. He owned this weird owl statue that he had randomly bought in a thrift store called "*Sleepy Poet Antique Mall*" he discovered during one of his earlier randonaut trips. Because the statue was in the way and he and didn't want it to fall and break he placed it onto the stable and flat surface of the Mac mini in the corner. He later forgot to pick it up to put it back where it was originally. Then he had to travel and wasn't around for a week - the exact week that randonauts around the world suddenly reported owl sightings.

Later, in an attempt to replicate the experiment, a secret item was placed on the server, the image of which was published in an encrypted form. Two weeks later, users were given a key to decrypt it. On the server was a jar of Morton salt and a bunch of coins. This time there wasn't any significant increase in amount of salt-related reports, but one of the users reported this:

*"I didn’t encounter salt on any randonauting expeditions, but in the last two weeks I actually did meet a girl with the Morton salt girl tattooed on her arm- her last name is Morton. I also found a person selling shirts with that logo on Instagram as bootleg Grateful Dead merch. I was beginning to think it was funny how much it was coming up lately."*

The Third attempt to replicate the experiment was made with a piece of meteorite. In a short period at least 3 cases of UFO sightings were mentioned in user reports.

UFO report example:

*"Saw UFOs Wednesday and Thursday at work while driving. First one might be a stretch, but birds aren't typically capable of hovering and teleporting (most likely just moving when I wasn't looking). What I'm getting out of it is seeing in context how they can hide in plain sight using variables we wouldn't normally consider. In order to make an observation vehicle seem part of the environment it took (or my brain interpreted a new type of sensory input using these expected symbols/forms) the form of a regular bird, and to make the hovering in place seem normal it was flying straight into the high winds. The teleporting thing happened anytime I looked away, with it getting closer each time. When it was right next to me it nodded to me while hovering and zipped off. The more traditional UFO was this morning before sunrise, looked like a meteorite falling in about half speed, with no trail. Visible for only about a second."*

## The OWL-Effect

Despite of poor reproducibility, this effect may have an explanation in the MMI Theory.

It is known, that the only requirements for user to be able to influence a quantum random processes are Intention and Observation. It doesn't matter what happens in between, how far the user is from the QRNG, or how the randomness is visualized, the result the user observes will have increased probability to match their expectation. Thats why randonauts are finding things they were thinking about. But the OWL-effect is based on an assumption, that reading users reports is the act of observation too. So if someone has an intention and monitors user-reports, they can influense the result of others trips. Thus seeing an owl statue on the server made Jamal to subconsciously influence many peoples anomaly generation process. This Theory, of course, has a speculative nature and wasn't proven statistically.

* Story on Reddit
* Salt experiment reddit posts 1, 2.