St. Remedius: Mission Statement

Why St. Remedius Is What It Is

Contrary to expectations, St. Remedius Medical College wasn’t the only organization dedicated to exploring, documenting, chronicling, exterminating, or otherwise researching extranormal phenomena. It wasn’t the best-funded, nor the largest, or the oldest, or even the one with the best archives. Where St. Remedius succeeded was in name recognition. Members of top-secret government or military facilities soon find themselves unable to function due to the need to protect classified materials, and the declassification is both expensive and extremely wearying. Secret brotherhoods soon find purchasing, procurement, and even rent or purchase of new facilities nearly impossible without answering a lot of questions that devalue the merit of “secret brotherhood.” Organizations run by philanthropic billionaires are often at the mercy of their benefactors’ often mercurial moods, and let’s not start on descendants who take issue with a grandparent willing their entire fortune to a mysterious agency instead of allowing the family to convert those funds as quickly as possible into cocaine metabolites. Staying covert means having to stay small, and staying small means fewer people involved with issues that need solving now.

St. Remedius bypassed these problems by keeping up a bold, up-front, and completely honest public presence. It actively recruited the brightest and best students for academia, and then actively harvested the brightest and best graduates for its research division. Embedded reporters got St. Remedius developments out to the public as quickly as possible, and its refusal to become a house organ for one government or another prevented everyone from worrying about debilitating budget cuts every year from politicians getting revenge for being left by their parents in a gas station parking lot at the age of five. Most importantly, instead of plying itself as a repository of secrets unfit for the general public, St. Remedius advertised.

Firstly, St. Remedius lent its skills and its staff to a series of critically-raved and much beloved documentaries about extranormal phenomena and popular delusions, absolutely savaging those for which no actual evidence existed. The remote bots wandering the depths of Loch Ness still report on the migrations of Arctic char, but a decade after a methodic search of the loch turned up no sign of a monster. (Critics of St. Remedius noted that this tied up resources with various Nessie-hunting groups that allowed the college to publicize the capture, description, and captive breeding of remaining lake monsters in Loch Morar without interference.) St. Remedius teams performed extensive testing, sometimes in front of live cameras, on alleged saint relics and UFO parts, dubious North American ape tracks and Asian death worm tunnels, and absolutely fraudulent and/or delusional claims of psychic manipulation or mystic healing, all with systematic breakdowns of the science behind the rebuttals. The surprises came at the end of each installment, when the screen flashed a gigantic big blue “BUT WAIT…” and then dropped a revelation of something that was true, accurate, and verified, usually much more interesting than the original subject. Quantum surgery, probability travel, pet miniature hodags…each segment ended not just with a surprise but with information on where to learn more.

Secondly, St. Remedius sponsored a wide series of exanormal auditions, specifically seeking individuals with special abilities or who thought they had them, with cash prizes and St. Remedius validation to those who passed. The actual auditions, though, were audited and verified by the famed ultraskeptical Zwinge Foundation, noted for its debunking of popular delusions passing for extranormal activities and powers, thereby immediately sifting out and throwing out grifters, hoaxers, and the sadly deluded. The resultant videos of Blessed Wannabes snot-bubble crying that “I DO SO have healing powers!” as they were shown the door were entertaining, sure, but nowhere near as enlightening as the Caltech student who correctly inferred the position of the much-sought Planet 9 in the outer solar system and at least ten previously unknown Kuiper Belt objects the same size as Pluto or larger solely from a modified astrological system.

Finally, St. Remedius was a master of licensing. Instead of gathering discoveries and artifacts and sealing them in vaults, the policy of St. Remedius from the beginning was to get its information to people and groups that could use them, charging royalties for their applications, and using the funds for operation and more research. Some material was kept locked and secured with extraordinary measures: the average person or company didn’t necessarily need to know exactly how the Tycho crater on the moon was made or by what isotope of bismuth was the breakthrough element in its detonation. Most, though, was passed through for industry, public works, and art, with a clear paper trail leading from artificial materials found in the Trojan point between Earth and the moon and the new luminous paint that could produce reading-level light for up to six hours without dangerous radioactive decay. And on every product, the message “This was brought to you by St. Remedius Medical College.” It was a marketing plan that, as it turned out, almost worked too well.

To be continued…

Essential Reading

Fiction:

Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song by Ernest Hogan (Strange Particle Press, 2023)
The Dechronization of Sam Magruder by George Gaylord Simpson (St. Martin’s Press, 1996)
The Everything Box by Richard Kadrey (Harper Voyager, 2016)

Nonfiction:

Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting In the Cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger (St. Martin’s Press, 2024)
H.G. Wells In Love by H.G. Wells (Little, Brown, 1984)
The Secret History of the CIA by Joseph J. Trentno (MJF Books, 2001)