Paranormal activity

Kopogero

...because I think it's safe to say I'm sick of discussing about MMO's and any MMO related stuff until 2017 I wonder if anyone else witnessed any paranormal activities in their lifetime. I've only witnessed one and it's still something I cannot fully explain and this is why.

Many years ago, don't know exactly when at one afternoon I decided to take a nap. After waking up around 9-10 pm (after at least 1-2 hours of good rest, maeby more) I wanted to open or close the window near my bed, but I was still so tired cuz I just woke up and then I heard the switch tick near the door and the light in my room just turned on by itself. Just after that my parents came home from somewhere, and I until today I cannot have any logical explanation how the light in my room turned itself on after hours of being off.

Some interesting thing worth mentioning is the house we bought I believe 2004-2005 the old woman sold it because she was all alone after her husband has passed away (but I believe this happened years afterwards). I tried to explain it multiple times how the light could turn itself on from off after hours of being off, and I simply could not make any scientific explanation that could cause that to happen, especially how it just happened right when I woke up...

Horusra

the switch is supposed to have a balance point about halfway between ON and OFF (when the lever is horizontal). Any slight movement in either direction from that point should cause the switch to flip all the way to the end in that direction.  Switches with internal mechanical faults (usually a broken piece of plastic) where the balance point isn't in the middle, but rather much closer to one end or the other. Also heating of the spring or the spring conductor in the switch will change the spring constant and may shift the equilibrium of forces to a point where it may change the state of the switch.  This can happen with power surges when you have a faulty switch, but not all the time.

H0urg1ass

I lived in Vietnam era housing on Fort Ord while I was attending the Defense Language Institute. My wife would tell me stories about being woken up at night to the sound of boots walking up and down the hallway. The first couple of times she thought I had woken up early for PT.

We also had a swinging door to the kitchen, the type that doesn't have a locking mechanism of any kind. One day she tried to open it and it wouldn't budge, not even a fraction of an inch. She poured herself a drink, tried again, and it swung right open.

I had a distant cousin who got really into Wicca. One night we were having Passover dinner at my grandmother's house and she was visiting at the time. We were all sitting in the living room chatting after dinner and her hair spontaneously caught fire. No candles, no lighters, no source of flame whatsoever.  We had to use couch dust covers to smother the flames. When the flames were gone, her hair was fine. I don't go near her anymore. Fuckin weird kid.

Personally, I don't believe in the "souls of the dead". In my religion, when you die, then you're just dead. No heaven, no hell, no purgatory. Just dead and waiting.  So I don't believe in ghosts of any kind.

ceratop001

First off killer topic thanks. I truly believe in unseen forces. I have had many paranormal occurrences in my life and most were scary as bleep. I have studied many philosophies that have to do with demonology. I am here to tell you this stuff is real and when you open the door there is no going back. Be careful with stuff like the Ouija board. If you do decide to practice black magic do so under somebody who is trained and can guide you. There are a lot of demons you can learn from and work with. There are angels as well that can guide you and help you.

Here are a few YouTube channels that specialize in the left hand path.

https://www.youtube.com/user/akhtya75

https://www.youtube.com/user/EAKoettingOfficial

This is another website from one of the most respected paranormal investigators of our time.

http://www.johnzaffis.com/

Cheers...

Maurgrim

What MMO are we talking about here in the pub section?

SpottyGekko

I think it's significant that so-called "paranormal activity" is always recorded via the most inconsistent and unreliable instruments known to man: the 5 human senses.

The data gathered by those "instruments" is then processed via the human brain.

During processing, the brain applies a whole host of arbitrary filters to the raw data, whilst it "tries to make sense of it". In some cases, if it cannot understand the data, the brain simply changes it until the data fits some pattern that's "logical".

Once the brain has finished manipulating the data, it stores the result in memory. Human memory is notoriously unreliable, and is know for "editing" it's own contents regularly. We know memories change over time, but the process is largely a mystery.

Paranormal ? Nah, just a sensor malfunction...

Vrika

Paranormal activity lies in the eye of the beholder.

There are people who can't always know the reason for everything, and then there are people who use supernatural explanations so that they can always know the reason for everything.

Kyleran

I had an old television my father gave me which would turn itself on and display nothing but static or snow.

If I turned the set on I always got a TV channel but when it did it by itself, static. No scary ghosts in the image or anything so I shrugged it off as an electrical short.

It was starting to scare the kids though and one day we were all playing in the room and it did its trick of turning on a couple of times. After the 2nd time I got annoyed and pulled the plug from the wall.

The TV stayed on.  I had to push the power button to shut it off.

I threw the TV out that day.

rensta

In india i was a witness to the dushera festival, the goddes of kullu Valley wakes up possessing the local gur.(shaman)
We were all standing in a big tight croud, talking, eating....  I told my friend: (a Russian lady living in the village for 3 years) ha!  Il invite this goddess to coffee.  My friend laughed and said let's see. 
Then when waiting, suddenly everyone froze and went silent, spontaneously, no sign no nothing.  I heard a scary voice in my head, "so you are going to invite me for coffee?!"  the voice was looking down on me,as if laughing. 
I was paralyzed and scared, couldn't move on talk. 
After around 1 minute where everyone in a huge Indian croud just stood without moving or talking, the gur got possessed, the way he was talking, everything changed.  It changed so drastically it was terrifying.  I later learnt he never wanted to be a gur, he is a kind good tempered guy, in his 20 he got informed that he was chosen to be the next gur, he ran away for a few years, you see, being a gur means predicting the future for the whole village once a year, if you are wrong they might even kill you...  When i met him he was already an old man.  The reason he came back was because the goddes wouldn't leave him alone and would drive him mad.  I have many other stories, but of other people,if you want il share. 

Phaserlight

I thought I saw a cryptid once in Colorado, with a friend... chances are it was a black bear.

Let me back up; having lived in a rural mountain village in Colorado for a year I had a handful of close encounters with black bears, anywhere from 20 - 50 yards, and this one was different.

Walking with my friend R. outside the village at night along a comfortable road, we see a black shape moving along the roof of one of the cabins.  It descends the side of the cabin rather gracefully making a sound I've never head before or since, kind of a "wopp wopp wopp".

Both R. and I see it at exactly the same moment; we instantly do a 180 and briskly begin walking in the other direction.  Black bears are known for being skittish, and although bears can also be rather curious, in most previous instances the bear had always departed the scene quickly after my startling encounter.  In one case, the bear stopped and had peered at me over the top of a bush from a healthy distance for a good while, but came no closer.

This one started following us through the shrubs along the side of the road.

For about half a block the rustling noises came closer and closer.  Neither R. or I wanted to break into a run (we knew better than that) but we were power walking hard away from this thing.  At one point I glanced over my shoulder, and although it was dark and my adrenaline was already pumping I'll never forget what I (thought I) saw: a hair-covered arm with claws reaching through the bushes not half a dozen paces behind us.

The arm appeared to be maybe four feet long.

Now, you'll say 'of course it was a bear', 'combination of adrenaline and poor lighting', and I have all but reached the same conclusion.  However, three things about the encounter still bother me, and my friend R. agreed it was very strange:

a) the way this 'bear' descended the side of the roof; there might have been a drainage pipe or something it was clinging to, I didn't get a good look, but it was very graceful and in my memory the thing practically floated.  Despite its size it moved very quickly, as though it were almost weightless.  The fact that it was on a cabin roof to begin with also struck R. as weird.

b) the noise it made; I've never heard a wild bear make a vocal sound before or since, but this was not at all what you would expect a bear to sound like.  It was high-pitched, melodic, almost curious, and a bit startled.  Kind of like a miniature bird-song.

c) the shape of the arm protruding from the bush seemed disproportionate to the apparent size of the creature I previously observed.  Again, it was dark, I'm sure my imagination played a factor here, but it didn't look "bear-like"; it sounds almost cliche, but it the arm reaching through the bush looked like it would have belonged to a great ape, if not for the claws.

At any rate I'm here typing this so my friend and I obviously survived; the bear, or whatever it was, stopped following us after about half a block.  That stated, it was a chilling encounter.  Whenever someone mentions "paranormal" it's the first thing I think of.

Phaserlight

Another time I saw a UFO:

I was inside, my SO went outside for a moment (maybe to sneak a cigarette).  I think I was doing the dishes, it's maybe 7 pm at night.

Suddenly, I hear her call my name, followed by "come quick! There's aliens!"

I would have laughed, if not for the urgency in her voice.  She tends to be a magnet for this type of thing.  In this case, though, she sounded truly frantic.

Dashing out into the lawn, I'm expecting to see some type of explainable and mundane phenomenon, but what I saw instead was truly an anomaly:

Two mushroom-shaped lights were hovering in the sky, predominantly red and yellow.  It's hard to estimate their height but initially, as they were accompanied by a faint hissing sound, my gut told me they were maybe 30 or 40 meters in the air and rather small.  Truthfully they might have been much higher; it's impossible to tell because I had no frame of reference in terms of scale... just a faint hissing.

My first thought was "firework", but as the seconds unraveled it became clear that this was like no firework I'd ever seen.

Slowly, the objects rotated around each other, dancing closer together and further apart.  They slowly drifted across the sky, in the direction over the roof of her house.  Like two miniature parachutes, but clearly under some form of propulsion if the entire thing was not an optical illusion.  They were multicolored and appeared to have solid structure.

She was looking into the sky expressionlessly, with an almost knowing look on her face.  I experienced a rushing sense of euphoria, as though I was about to have to let go of everything I thought I understood about the world.  I then let out a dumbfounded laugh.

The way they danced closer together and further apart so quickly, quiveringly, said to me 'optical illusion'.  However, the apparent structure of the objects, as well as the faint hissing sound I cannot place, amount to an otherworldy, ephemeral experience.

I remembered that I had a phone with a camera that I had left inside - I dashed into the house calling out a cautionary message to her, and returned.

In the few moments I was gone the lights had all but faded, but I recorded the following video (some mild expletives):



(the larger yellowish lights are streetlights)

The camera picked up basically nothing; the lights had diminished at that point to a faint speck (it appears as a single faint, stationary dot on the film, visible around 0:12), but notice the apparent brightness of the moon in comparison.  At the point at which I recorded, I have no idea how far away the objects were; it may have been a couple hundred meters or it may have been several kilometers.

The date on the video is October 12, 2013.

Now, I am a scientist by training, and am taught to be skeptical (I've worked both as a professional scientist for an environmental firm, and my background is in the geophysical sciences).  However, I've clearly had at least one experience that I cannot fit into any current scientific model.  I was not under the influence of any drugs or hallucinogens, but what I saw that night was enough to make me dash inside to get my camera and attempt to record the phenomenon.

It may have been some kind of strange optical effect caused by a transiting orbital body; people have reported even more spectacular celestial effects time out of mind that some have attributed to such.  However, as it's not a repeatable experiment, and subject to both perceptual and rational bias, I can't explain it other than to say that night there were some odd lights that appeared to have structure over my better half's house accompanied by a faint hissing noise, which she initially described as "aliens".  It is worth noting she was 6 months pregnant with our child at the time.

Post experience, she seemed almost loathe to talk about it.  I'm not quite convinced it wasn't her or someone in the neighborhood playing a prank on me; this would be keeping with her sense of humor, however the technical aspect of staging such a prank would be... beyond what I've seen at some headliner concerts.

We've been together for almost seven years, and when I ever bring it up (last time was years ago), the conversation basically amounts to "oh yeah, that was strange".  She maybe is not as inquisitive as I am, or feels that some stones are better left unturned.

Last thing I will say is that while in Iceland I've seen physical phenomenon such as the Aurora Borealis that are truly spectacular, so I'm not ruling out that this was caused by some natural occurrence.  First witnessing the Aurora carried much of the same euphoric rush; however, while the Aurora was majestic in its splendor, this was much more subtle yet so out of place it stands as an outlier in my mind.  It may be something that will forever be unexplained.