Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
...where is it?
I don't know about you folks, but the paranormal is beginning to bore me. UFO sightings, alien abductions, encounters with ghosts, Bigfeet, "psychic" phenomena...is it just me, or are all these things a bit blase' lately? Each type of encounter fits into its own neat little well-defined slot; each "report" may as well have been typed on a form letter. Nothing distinguishes any incident from any other within a particular category, except perhaps the town name.
Proponents of a given pet "field of study" might say this consistency amongst reports strongly suggests their legitimacy, and that of the phenomenon in general. I disagree. I have a feeling that a great number of "reports", as they're repeated in books and on many websites, are subtly altered to create this illusion of consistency. Proponents of, say, Bigfoot, more often than not agree on a certain set of "things that are true about Bigfeet"; and reports with details that may seem to contradict those things are ignored, censored, or the offending details de-emphasized.
Just as an example, let's stick with the Bigfoot meme. When was the last time you heard a report of a Bigfoot being obviously aggressive or even attacking the witness? Sure, there's that famous story from 1924 with the miners being attacked in their cabin, but a lot of Bigfoot enthusiasts consider that story apocryphal. How about since then? I'll guarantee you'll have trouble finding more than a handful. Why? I think it's because one of those things that's true about Bigfeet is that they're kind, gentle, intelligent primates who love animals and are only curious, not threatening, toward humans; and a story about Bigfoot laying the smack down on someone for little or no reason is considered too unreliable and difficult to believe by Bigfoot researchers to include in the wider-known body of anecdote (though the notion makes for some fun commercials).
Same thing goes with alien encounters. Typically, alleged encounters are quite scripted; the big bright Jetsons-car spaceship lands, a door opens, 3-foot-tall walking human fetuses with grey skin emerge and either talk about the evils of nuclear weapons, or kidnap the poor sap into their spaceship and attempt to use him to unlock those pesky secrets of the human anus that have been confusing them since they first started visiting Earth thousands of years ago. When was the last time you read a recent claim that meaningfully deviated from the above formulae?
Yet if you go back far enough in the literature, you'll begin finding some detailed accounts of alleged events that don't resemble modern claims of alien encounters at all. Take the Hopkinsville encounter in Kentucky in 1955. It starts with several people in the area noticing strange colored lights in the sky at dusk. Ho-hum, right? Wait. At the farmhouse of the Sutton family, as the evening was winding down and their friends, a neighboring family, were preparing to leave after visiting, unspecified "weird noises" were heard outside. Two men stepped out onto the porch to have a look, and spotted something emerging from the woods. It didn't look like a "grey alien". It was shiny silver, about 3 feet tall sure - but that's where the similarities end. These aliens had big, pointed floppy ears, large chins, and relatively small glowing goggles covering their eyes. Their legs were so skinny they were described as "atrophied", and their arms were long enough to reach the ground and ended in fricking talons or claws. They didn't walk, but floated just above the ground, swaying like a rollerblader as they traveled. When the creature raised its long, claw-tipped arms and began floaty-rollerblading toward the house, the two men did what any reasonable, intelligent being would do when faced with a similar situation: they used shotguns and blew the damned thing away. Or they tried - there was a sound like a rock hitting a metal bucket, and the thing flipped over and raced back for the woods.
Intrigued by the monster's failure to disintegrate in a spray of alien substance when shot, the two men began to give chase, but when they stepped off the porch, a long, claw-tipped arm suddenly reached down from the porch roof and started pulling at one of them's hair. It was a convincing argument for returning to the house, but not before another shot, another empty-metal-bucket-sound, and another tumbling alien thing racing for the bush rather than exploding. Once in the house, the entire 11-member party cowered and reloaded, spending almost all night shooting at an unknown number the things as they scampered and scratched at the roof, banged on the walls, and popped up in the windows like demonic Jack-in-the-boxes. Sometime early in the morning there was a lull, and they took advantage of the break to pile into their vehicles and race to the local police station. The police followed them back to the farmhouse and did not see any aliens, but did make note of the broken windows, lots of bullet holes, and the general fact that the family seemed to have genuinely had the living (redacted) scared out of them by something. The families reported that some time after the police left, the things returned a couple of times, but the eventual coming of the dawn brought an end to the godawful nightmare for good.
Now, hold off for a minute on "explaining" the story. Just bask in that story as written for a moment. As old is the claim is, don't you find it oddly refreshing? Perhaps a little scary? Doesn't it make you want to know more of the details? Why aren't there any exciting, weird alien encounters like this reported anymore?
Or how about claims that just don't seem to fit purely into the "UFO" slot, but seem to be an amalgamation of different kinds of paranormality? These are out there, but are so obscure that you have to practically luck into stumbling upon the one or maybe two books in total that recount them. For instance, take this excerpt about a family who bought a farm in Washington state and weird things started happening.
Waaaat - ? That's freaking great! Tell me more!
The account goes on to describe other strange noises that occurred regularly - bumps, crashes, "a frequent electronic beeping noise that would come and go with no apparent source", and
Other "haunting-like" events occurred, things disappearing and the like. One family friend who came over to help dig a ditch was allegedly followed by the shadow of a man, which "would walk up to where he was working and just stand there". The family friend quickly left for some unexplained reason.
Best of all,
What on Earth was going on here? The voices, the disappearing objects - sounds like an alleged "haunting", right? But...together with a UFO that sent threatening telepathic messages? Does not compute, and for some strange reason I love it. A similar claim involving a ranch in Colorado involves a family experiencing a grab bag of paranormal events - everything from electronic humming noises to sightings of large hairy bipedal animals to being knocked over by an invisible force to any number of UFO sightings...
The weird events continued, however.
Now, don't think for a moment that I'm arguing for the fact of any of these things as they are claimed; you know me. Explanations are beside the point. What I want to know is, where is all the awesome material like this? Who is hiding it? Where are they hiding it? Because I want this stuff. It is awesomely entertaining, and leagues better than any of the run-of-the-mill bump-in-the-night recycled fluff that we run into anymore. Does anybody have any sources of yummy goodness like this that I'm unaware of? Share them, for God's sake!
I don't know about you folks, but the paranormal is beginning to bore me. UFO sightings, alien abductions, encounters with ghosts, Bigfeet, "psychic" phenomena...is it just me, or are all these things a bit blase' lately? Each type of encounter fits into its own neat little well-defined slot; each "report" may as well have been typed on a form letter. Nothing distinguishes any incident from any other within a particular category, except perhaps the town name.
Proponents of a given pet "field of study" might say this consistency amongst reports strongly suggests their legitimacy, and that of the phenomenon in general. I disagree. I have a feeling that a great number of "reports", as they're repeated in books and on many websites, are subtly altered to create this illusion of consistency. Proponents of, say, Bigfoot, more often than not agree on a certain set of "things that are true about Bigfeet"; and reports with details that may seem to contradict those things are ignored, censored, or the offending details de-emphasized.
Just as an example, let's stick with the Bigfoot meme. When was the last time you heard a report of a Bigfoot being obviously aggressive or even attacking the witness? Sure, there's that famous story from 1924 with the miners being attacked in their cabin, but a lot of Bigfoot enthusiasts consider that story apocryphal. How about since then? I'll guarantee you'll have trouble finding more than a handful. Why? I think it's because one of those things that's true about Bigfeet is that they're kind, gentle, intelligent primates who love animals and are only curious, not threatening, toward humans; and a story about Bigfoot laying the smack down on someone for little or no reason is considered too unreliable and difficult to believe by Bigfoot researchers to include in the wider-known body of anecdote (though the notion makes for some fun commercials).
Same thing goes with alien encounters. Typically, alleged encounters are quite scripted; the big bright Jetsons-car spaceship lands, a door opens, 3-foot-tall walking human fetuses with grey skin emerge and either talk about the evils of nuclear weapons, or kidnap the poor sap into their spaceship and attempt to use him to unlock those pesky secrets of the human anus that have been confusing them since they first started visiting Earth thousands of years ago. When was the last time you read a recent claim that meaningfully deviated from the above formulae?
Yet if you go back far enough in the literature, you'll begin finding some detailed accounts of alleged events that don't resemble modern claims of alien encounters at all. Take the Hopkinsville encounter in Kentucky in 1955. It starts with several people in the area noticing strange colored lights in the sky at dusk. Ho-hum, right? Wait. At the farmhouse of the Sutton family, as the evening was winding down and their friends, a neighboring family, were preparing to leave after visiting, unspecified "weird noises" were heard outside. Two men stepped out onto the porch to have a look, and spotted something emerging from the woods. It didn't look like a "grey alien". It was shiny silver, about 3 feet tall sure - but that's where the similarities end. These aliens had big, pointed floppy ears, large chins, and relatively small glowing goggles covering their eyes. Their legs were so skinny they were described as "atrophied", and their arms were long enough to reach the ground and ended in fricking talons or claws. They didn't walk, but floated just above the ground, swaying like a rollerblader as they traveled. When the creature raised its long, claw-tipped arms and began floaty-rollerblading toward the house, the two men did what any reasonable, intelligent being would do when faced with a similar situation: they used shotguns and blew the damned thing away. Or they tried - there was a sound like a rock hitting a metal bucket, and the thing flipped over and raced back for the woods.
Intrigued by the monster's failure to disintegrate in a spray of alien substance when shot, the two men began to give chase, but when they stepped off the porch, a long, claw-tipped arm suddenly reached down from the porch roof and started pulling at one of them's hair. It was a convincing argument for returning to the house, but not before another shot, another empty-metal-bucket-sound, and another tumbling alien thing racing for the bush rather than exploding. Once in the house, the entire 11-member party cowered and reloaded, spending almost all night shooting at an unknown number the things as they scampered and scratched at the roof, banged on the walls, and popped up in the windows like demonic Jack-in-the-boxes. Sometime early in the morning there was a lull, and they took advantage of the break to pile into their vehicles and race to the local police station. The police followed them back to the farmhouse and did not see any aliens, but did make note of the broken windows, lots of bullet holes, and the general fact that the family seemed to have genuinely had the living (redacted) scared out of them by something. The families reported that some time after the police left, the things returned a couple of times, but the eventual coming of the dawn brought an end to the godawful nightmare for good.
Now, hold off for a minute on "explaining" the story. Just bask in that story as written for a moment. As old is the claim is, don't you find it oddly refreshing? Perhaps a little scary? Doesn't it make you want to know more of the details? Why aren't there any exciting, weird alien encounters like this reported anymore?
Or how about claims that just don't seem to fit purely into the "UFO" slot, but seem to be an amalgamation of different kinds of paranormality? These are out there, but are so obscure that you have to practically luck into stumbling upon the one or maybe two books in total that recount them. For instance, take this excerpt about a family who bought a farm in Washington state and weird things started happening.
Waaaat - ? That's freaking great! Tell me more!
The account goes on to describe other strange noises that occurred regularly - bumps, crashes, "a frequent electronic beeping noise that would come and go with no apparent source", and
Other "haunting-like" events occurred, things disappearing and the like. One family friend who came over to help dig a ditch was allegedly followed by the shadow of a man, which "would walk up to where he was working and just stand there". The family friend quickly left for some unexplained reason.
Best of all,
What on Earth was going on here? The voices, the disappearing objects - sounds like an alleged "haunting", right? But...together with a UFO that sent threatening telepathic messages? Does not compute, and for some strange reason I love it. A similar claim involving a ranch in Colorado involves a family experiencing a grab bag of paranormal events - everything from electronic humming noises to sightings of large hairy bipedal animals to being knocked over by an invisible force to any number of UFO sightings...
The weird events continued, however.
Now, don't think for a moment that I'm arguing for the fact of any of these things as they are claimed; you know me. Explanations are beside the point. What I want to know is, where is all the awesome material like this? Who is hiding it? Where are they hiding it? Because I want this stuff. It is awesomely entertaining, and leagues better than any of the run-of-the-mill bump-in-the-night recycled fluff that we run into anymore. Does anybody have any sources of yummy goodness like this that I'm unaware of? Share them, for God's sake!
