CHRIS MCKINNELL
Cross-Cultural Researcher in Consciousness and Human Experience
Director, Warren Legacy Foundation for Paranormal Research
Grandson of Ed and Lorraine Warren
Chris McKinnell has spent more than four decades doing something genuinely unusual: trying to understand phenomena
that most serious researchers avoid and most popular investigators never genuinely question.
THE FOUNDATION
He began formally in 1982, building a foundation in philosophy and comparative theology while simultaneously
beginning field investigation work alongside his grandparents, Ed and Lorraine Warren, whose cases would eventually
form the basis of The Conjuring film universe. By his early twenties he had been designated a demonologist within that
tradition. By his mid-twenties he had rejected the title entirely.
The rejection was not a loss of conviction about the reality of the phenomena. It was the opposite. He had become
convinced that the explanatory frameworks being applied to those phenomena were labels masquerading as
understanding. They named things without explaining them. He was not interested in naming things. He was interested in
understanding them. So he stopped talking publicly and started learning.
THE FIELDWORK
What followed was several decades of deliberate, cross-disciplinary inquiry conducted largely outside public view. He
began with cultural anthropology, spending two years living and working in Mali with West African Animist
communities during a period of military dictatorship, learning a tradition that understands consciousness, nature, and the
unseen dimensions of human experience in ways his own framework had no categories for. He moved through
comparative theology and into consciousness studies, and engaged seriously with quantum physics, not as a scientist but
as a field researcher asking whether the phenomena he had documented were consistent with what physicists were finding
at the edges of their own discipline.
He meditated in Buddhist temples in Thailand and Nepal. He trained with the Kogi people of Colombia in the Sierra
Nevada, one of the last intact pre-Columbian civilizations. He studied in Egypt and Israel. He worked within Umbanda
traditions in Brazil and Portugal and engaged with witchcraft traditions in Veracruz, Mexico. He lectured and conducted
research in New Zealand. He sat with the Dalai Lama. He served in the Peace Corps in Mali. He continued active
investigation work throughout, documenting cases across six continents through the Warren Legacy Foundation for
Paranormal Research, which he co-founded with his grandmother Lorraine Warren in 2013. He changed his thinking
multiple times across those decades. He considers that a sign of progress rather than inconsistency.
THE RETURN TO PUBLIC WORK
He returned to public presentations approximately six years ago, when he felt he finally had something substantive to
offer rather than simply stories to tell. Since then he has lectured throughout Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil, Paraguay,
Colombia, and New Zealand, and across the United States in Florida, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. He began
presenting in university settings in 1984, including a university lecture that brought him to Santa Clara, California in
1986, and has continued presenting internationally across four decades. He has built an audience of more than 187,000
across social media platforms with over ten million organic views, without paid promotion of any kind.
THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
His current work centers on a theoretical framework developed from the convergence of his fieldwork observations and
the findings of relevant scientific research. The most original of these frameworks is what he calls Temporal Overlap
Theory, a physically grounded alternative to popular explanations for what are commonly called residual hauntings.
Drawing on Einstein's relativity, the block universe model, retrocausality research, and the participatory role of collective
consciousness in maintaining temporal connections, the theory proposes that certain documented phenomena represent
localized distortions in the fabric of spacetime generated by concentrated human electromagnetic energy at moments of
extreme intensity, sustained by the living thread of collective memory across time.
He has engaged seriously with the published research of Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose on Orchestrated Objective
Reduction theory, Wojciech Zurek on quantum decoherence, Huw Price and Ken Wharton on retrocausality and the block
universe, Matthew Fisher on quantum cognition, Joe Kirschvink on magnetoreception in humans, Julia Mossbridge on
precognition, and Andrew Newberg on the neuroscience of anomalous states of consciousness. His engagement is that of
a field researcher testing observations against laboratory findings, not a scientist making claims within a discipline.
APPROACH AND AVAILABILITY
He does not use the term paranormal investigator to describe his work. He is interested not in phenomena for their own
sake but in what phenomena reveal about the nature of consciousness and the human beings who experience them. His
work begins and ends with people. He does not charge for the assistance he provides to individuals and families in crisis.
He considers the exploitation of fear to be the central problem in his field.
He is currently based in Paraguay and relocating to Brasov, Romania in 2026, from which he will be available for
university lectures, academic symposia, interdisciplinary panels, and research consultation across Europe and
internationally throughout 2027 and beyond. He will be touring the United Kingdom and Ireland in September and
October 2026.
RESEARCH DOCUMENTS