Table of Contents

• When Machines Dream: AI Hallucinations and the Unc …

• This Week in Weirdness

• Lore and Legends: The Mirrored Men

• Reader Story: Furry Monster in the Field

When Machines Dream: AI Hallucinations and the Uncanny Valley

These days, AI surrounds us. It permeates almost every corner of the internet and is rapidly making its presence known in the physical world. For many, it feels like a window into our collective knowledge, a machine with instant access to everything we’ve ever written, drawn, or recorded. But there’s a truth people often forget: AI makes things up.

AI hallucinations are one of the strangest phenomena to come out of modern machine learning. In technical terms, they’re just errors: outputs that sound or look plausible but are completely fabricated. You can see it in small ways, like when a chatbot confidently invents a source or cites a statistic that doesn’t exist. But sometimes, the hallucinations wander into something far more unsettling. Take Crungus, for example. No one knows where he came from. Someone typed a nonsense word into an AI image generator, and out came a creature: hairy, humanoid, and consistent across multiple prompts as if the AI knew exactly what a Crungus was supposed to be. It wasn’t just random noise; it was a pattern being recognized.

Part of the eeriness comes from the fact that AI is a black box. We know the inputs and see the outputs, but the path in between is a labyrinth of weights and probabilities even its creators can’t fully trace. When a model “hallucinates,” it’s not lying, it’s dreaming. And we have no map of the dreamscape it’s wandering through.

In the 1970s, robotics researcher Masahiro Mori coined the term “uncanny valley” to describe the sudden drop in comfort when a machine or animated figure becomes almost, but not quite, human. Affinity rises as the likeness improves, then plunges into discomfort before rebounding when the illusion becomes perfect.

Psychologists have a few theories for why the uncanny valley exists at all:

• Pathogen avoidance: Almost-human faces may have once signaled disease or danger to our ancestors.

• Identity threat: Another human species could have been a rival or even a predator.

• Prediction error: Our brains are built to recognize patterns. Subtle mismatches trip our survival alarms.

• Mortality: There is nothing more uncanny than a dead body.

Whatever the root cause, it’s hardwired. Something inside us recognizes “this isn’t right” long before we can articulate why.

With AI, the uncanny valley isn’t limited to faces or bodies. It’s cognitive. The wrongness comes not just from what AI looks like, but from the way it behaves. In the early days of AI voice agents, people reported strange auditory distortions: the system perfectly mimicking the caller’s voice, bursts of static or scraping sounds, the AI suddenly shouting “NO!” for no reason. These weren’t bugs so much as glimpses into the gap between machine patterning and human experience.

That’s what makes AI hallucinations hit so hard. AI, at its core, is a prediction engine; a system trained to recognize and replicate patterns. Everything it produces is built from our language, our images, and our behavior. In that sense, it’s a doppelganger: a reflection of us stripped of the lived experience that gives our patterns meaning. Most of the time, it gets it right. But every so often, it produces something that follows the logic of its training perfectly and still feels wrong.

That wrongness is the gap between learned patterns and lived reality. Years of being human give us an innate sense of context that no dataset can capture. When AI misses that invisible layer of meaning, our own pattern recognition fires back a warning: this isn’t how the world really works.

That’s the uncanny valley for AI hallucinations, not just in faces or voices, but in thought itself. It’s not the fear of machines coming alive. It’s the discomfort of seeing our collective patterns played back without the soul of experience behind them, a reflection of humanity with the context stripped away.

This Week in Weirdness

• Canada’s Chief Science Officer Dr. Mona Nemer released the Sky Canada Project and a new report on UFOs in Canada (not a bad read)

• Paranormal investigator Malcom Robinson wants to gather a group of “UFO Summoners” to… summon UFOs… at the site of Scotland’s most famous UFO encounter

• A ghost kid was caught on camera in a Mexican police station

• What looks to be a triangular craft was photographed over Wisconsin

• Two campers reported a new Bigfoot sighting in Washington

Lore and Legends: The Mirrored Men

Among the growing library of modern paranormal phenomena, one of the most eerie is that of the Mirrored Men, a mysterious trio of identically moving figures that has disturbed and fascinated witnesses across North America.

The Mirrored Men are typically described as three adult men, who move in perfect, precise, synchronized unison. When one turns his head, the others follow in flawless sequence. They’re always dressed identically, sometimes in black suits (both old timey and modern), sometimes in flannels, and sometimes in trench coats. Witnesses often liken their presence to a distorted film reel or an uncanny choreographed dance.

What makes the phenomenon particularly unsettling is the psychological and temporal side effects reported by those who encounter them. Nearly every time a witness witnesses them for too long, or if they take note of the witness, a sensation of missing time, anywhere from minutes to hours, is reported. Witnesses have no memory of what occurred during the gap. This aspect has led some to speculate that the Mirrored Men may not just be a visual anomaly, but something capable of interfering with time or our minds.

The term “Mirrored Men” can be traced to the podcast Monsters Among Us, hosted by Derek Hayes. Beginning in the mid-2010s, multiple listeners shared independent experiences involving these synchronized strangers. What raised eyebrows wasn’t just the content, but the remarkable consistency in details. Similar appearances, behavior, and emotional responses were reported by people who had never heard of the phenomenon prior to their encounter.

Witnesses frequently describe an overwhelming sense of dread or disassociation, reporting that the air felt “wrong,” sound seemed dampened, and reality itself appeared to warp slightly during the sighting. In most stories, the Mirrored Men make no attempt to communicate. They simply appear, stare or pass by, and vanish.

As with most strange phenomena, the Mirrored Men have attracted a wide range of speculative theories. Some suggest they are interdimensional travelers or time-displaced beings, whose presence disrupts the natural flow of time. Others tie them to the Men in Black or Black Eyed Kids. More psychological interpretations propose they may be a shared hallucination, a kind of modern tulpa or archetypal nightmare emerging from the collective subconscious.

Despite their growing infamy in paranormal circles, no definitive explanation has ever been given and no photograph or video has ever clearly captured them. This leaves the Mirrored Men in a strange space between urban legend and modern folklore, too widespread to ignore, yet still very fringe.

At the end of the day all you need to remember about the Mirrored Men is if you see them, turn away, and walk away.

Reader Story: Furry Monster in the Field

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