The Paranormal Poll!

[seawasp]

How many of you have experienced something which would generally fall into the class of paranormal phenomena? For the general category, this includes UFOs and their associated phenomena, ghosts, psychic phenomena of significance, Bigfoot or lake monster sightings, etc.

(Yes, Bigfoot and such fall, properly, under "cryptozoology", but all of them fall into the Category of the Weird which might as well be called "paranormal" for general purposes)

In my case I've seen a UFO.

Comments

[redrose999.livejournal.com]

The odd sound that was identical to the Ohio Bigfoot sounds. To this day, I have no clue what it was and the only things that come close to it is Primate calls like Gibbons, and some apes.

I suppose it's why I'm fascinated in CryptoZoology.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I lived in a haunted house for a couple of years.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Not personally -- one time I saw something that looked like a classical UFO, but a few minutes later turned out to be an airplane seen directly head-on -- but people I know whom I consider reliable reporters have described incidents that, if they occurred as described, would qualify as paranormal. Ghosts, miraculous healings, and the like.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

I once believed my clock radio was haunted. It took a week to figure out the mundane reason behind its behavior.

[xyzzysqrl]

No.

(I felt the need to balance that one "Yes.")

[isleburroughs.livejournal.com]

I have. Three glowing orange spherical objects hovering near the horizon. It sounded like cicadas. They moved fast. Could have been atmospheric phenomena.

[melchar.livejournal.com]

I've seen a really nifty UFO [prismatically shining light that moved aimlessly around in sky for about 2 hours - at varying rates of speed]. I was at a drive-in and the light was in the forard screenward direction, so I noticed it while watching a double feature [uninspiring films]. However it was in souther Calif airspace, so I'm guessing that while it looked & acted nothing like one, it was probably a police 'copter - seen at extreme distance with atmospheric distortion.

I've also seen ghosts before. Nothing weird - mostly they looked like normal people/not transparent at all. The were just in incongruous locations or times [wearing beach wear at night and looking lost in one case, as an example]. I'd ask someone with me if they thought 'x person' over there looked like they needed help - and get a 'what person' response.

Another time it was while my sister and I were managing way too many floral bouquets [from dad's memorial service] and I saw my dad, outside, casually having a smoke - and complained to my sister about why he wasn't helping us with the dang flowers. Of course she saw nothing - and I looked back and he smirked at us - then walked around the building.

Weird stuff, but kind of boringly mundane.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

If you're including something that might simply be a forcible suggestion that changed someone's behavior, or might be me casting a spell to shield someone and cast out an intruder, then yes.

There has always been a plausible explanation, and usually persuasion or force of will is at least part of that explanation. But I firmly believe that the world is not only stranger than we do imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. I'm still unsure whether the plausible explanations are the right ones.

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

Nope. But the former commander of our CW unit refuses to this day to sleep in the officers' quarters at Fort Washita because of something he experienced. There's a lot of ghost stories about that place. It IS easy to get spooked. (I have my own beliefs about what that might have been, but that is also not what you asked about.)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I have had dreams that correlated uncomfortably with subsequent events.

I also frequently phone my best friend right when she is thinking about phoning me, but since we think about each other often, that's probably coincidence.

[kira-snugz.livejournal.com]

yes!

ghosts, and weird lights in the sky, the northern lights doing things they are not supposed to do, and noises in the woods that do not belong in the woods they were heard in.

[goodluckfox.livejournal.com]

Saw some lights in the sky once... was probably just the landing lights for a small plane, something that most people don't see when they're nowhere near an airport.

Had some dreams or daydreams or "bad feelings" about some things that came close to true... but that could have just been paranoia or wargaming out what could happen next.

(I had a bad feeling about the Columbia mission, and followed every day of the mission, and wrote a story where a wing sheared off a rocket ship causing it to disintegrate about a month or two PRIOR to the disaster...)

But I absolutely do not believe in paranormal or parapsychological things. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I suppose that pulling specs out of thin air doesn't count?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's mine, there. I've had dreams which seemed precognitive. Better, I've had dreams which felt like they were precognitive ones, even though the events didn't come to pass for months or years to come.

Since most of them amount to things that are really foreseeable I don't image this is really paranormal, but there have been a few that struck me as unlikely enough that I resolve to start writing down the ones that have that feel, which, I never do get around to.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

Nope. Never.

[rdmasters.livejournal.com]

If they are good specs, that goes beyond paranormal and into the full-on holy miracle.

As a sysadmin, I have seen too many unspec'd or badly spec'd systems.

[pedanther]

Nothing that wasn't easily explicable by some combination of coincidence and poor memory.

I've seen plenty of unidentified flying objects, but I tend to the position that just because I don't know what it was, doesn't mean it was paranormal.

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

This latter part -- saw some lights in the sky that looked unusual, but nothing that couldn't be explained by modern science. It was unidentified by me and a friend who was there, but probably for someone it was identified.

Don't in general believe in paranormal stuff but I'm open to new evidence.

[murstein.livejournal.com]

I've had several over the years, from age 14-16ish through a few years ago. UFOs that I was unable to find mundane explanations for, spellwork that worked too reliably too often to be coincidence, a few incidents that I believe were conversations with deities. Possibly a few more categories, that I'm forgetting at the moment.

[denelian.livejournal.com]

lets just start that i have LARGE issues with mirrors. this could be because i was an incredibly precocious child who taught herself to read at 3, imagination is a requisite for that role...

but... freaking stuff, like looking in a mirror and seeing my hair up when it's down, wearing different clothes, etc.

there's other stuff, too - but how much of it i really believe i saw, and how much i think i imagined [or hallucinated, although it's very TELLING that several meds make me hallucinate, and i have never, ever had *visions* in that sense when i was on something. and probably why i haven't had any visions since i started the surgery-and-pain-meds merry-go-round - for whatever reason, doesn't happen on pain meds. hrm...]



ok, now i've convinced everyone i'm paranoid schitzophrenic.... sigh

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Twice saw the Phantom Ship of the Bay Chaleur (look it up on Wikipedia), which puts me in rarefied company.

No idea what I really saw on the two occasions, but my memories of the first are an example I use to show the unreliability of memories later in life. The second time I saw it was when I was in my teens and saw an odd glowing on the bay (I wasn't the only witness by far, and there are photos showing some kind of light on the bay).

Now the first time. I was probably 7 or 8. What I remembered in later years was that many members of the family were at my grandfather's place, having just done a day of bringing in hay, it was dark, there was a violent storm, and looking out the window you could clearly see a three-masted ship flowing and on fire with little black dots (people?) moving across the deck and dropping into the water, and the damn thing couldn't have been more than a few hundred meters offshore. I can still recall it vividly.

When I hit my late teens I started being skeptical (thank Phil Klass and one of his books on UFOs), but I was in my early twenties before I bothered to look at my own memory of that night, and when I did, things stopped making sense. If it was dark, we wouldn't still have been bringing in hay. If it was stormy, we wouldn't have been bringing in hay because it would be wet. And in all the years, with all the people I recall being there, no one had ever mentioned something that would have been so ridiculously spectacular, and since the people present all lived within a thirty second drive (or two minute run) of my grandparent's house, someone would have easily been able to get a camera, which they all had in the late 1970s.

One evening I finally asked my parents, who I knew had to have been there, if they remembered that evening. Yep, because it was the first time they'd seen the Phantom Ship as well. What had we seen that night?

Some kind of indistinct glowing thing way out on the bay.

Everything else had been assembled in my head from legends and stories into what I thought I'd seen. Which I hadn't really seen.

Experiences

[saintonge.livejournal.com]

Several times I've seen something in the sky I couldn't identify, and couldn't make any reasonable guess what it was.

A few times I've had "pre-cognitive episodes", e.g., in my teens I was listening to a radio station having a contest involving guessing a name of a movie star. The D.J. said hello to the tenth caller or whomever, and suddenly I KNEW, with utter certainty, both who the actor was (iirc, Clint Eastwood), and that the caller was about to name him correctly and win the prize (she did).