Have you ever had a "supernatural" experience? How did you rationalize it?

[cresur]

Title is pretty self-explanatory. I've seen many on this board have apparently had some bizarre things happen in their life, but still managed to keep their cool and shrug it off as normal, however unlikely, occurrences.

So I was just wondering about the thinking processes involved, and what you knew (or learned through research) that helped shed some light on it, etc.

I'm asking because I guess I want to build up a "skeptic mindset". I mean, I think I don't believe in the supernatural/paranormal/whatever solely because I'm not terrified of it.

For example, once I was having a couple friends over when all of us started talking about ghosts (it was Friday the 13th and the subject naturally came up). Then at some point we all saw an empty bottle of coke, rested for more than a day on top of a clean, uncluttered, parallel to the ground table, which was on the other side of the room (but still in our view) just hurled itself a couple meters to the wall. They jumped up and were absolutely terrified, pale, shaking. One of them wanted to leave. I was just... WTF? What the hell happened there? I inspected the bottle, checked for air currents, tried to recreate the jump with a sudden, strong blow of air from my lungs, but the bottle would just tip over and then roll over the edge of the table to the ground. All the while trying to calm them. From this day I have a hard time getting my friends to come here, or stay for long. I have no idea what happened there either. Must've been a heck of a wind blow, in a closed room with air-conditioning on.

One of them (present in the bottle episode) recently went to my kitchen to get some water, made some strange noise back there and came back pale and shaking, saying he'd seen a man in my pantry. They ask me how I can live here, if I don't see or hear anything weird, etc. Well, I do. I think I see stuff out of the corner of my eye all the time, everywhere (not just in the house). I hear noises in the house when I lay to bed to sleep. I've had sleep paralysis and imagined it was a very nasty demon pounding in my back, keeping me from getting up. While it was worrisome at the moment, I managed to "awake" my pinky toe and climbed up from there to a world where nothing much was going on. In fact it was daylight. So it could always be whatever. It just doesn't spook me. I guess it's the lack of danger music playing in the background.

So, what I think I lack is the know-how to actually dismiss the supernatural hypothesis. Specially in a way that is defensible to the believers and terrified.

And that is why I ask: how to rationalize it?

 

[Normal Dude]

Speaking of things flying in the kitchen, last night I unwittingly made a spatula jump halfway across the kitchen. I had put in a small pot (personal serving sized) of stew which was on the stove, and without thinking turned the heat up to max and turned around. Five seconds later the spatula is clattering on the floor five feet away. The sudden heat must have made one heck of an air bubble (or whatever technical term there is for it) at the bottom of the pot that came up and launched the spatula out.

As for your soda bottle, it is hard to conjecture without having been there.

 

[kittynh]

well, I'm able to live with "I don't know".

Because really the jump to whatever explaination I'm able to give is just frankly...too silly.
Like ghosts, something weird happens. Since I know culturally about ghosts that will be my "I can't explain this so I will assume that the dead come back to visit us and play with our utensils for some reason unknown to anyone. Of all the things the dead could do, playing with a spatula or bottle is high on their list."

There are probably a LOT of explainations, or there may be no good one. But just making the assumption that the weird light in the sky is proof that on some planet far away they beat the odds and have the most advanced technology in the UNIVERSE to over come ALL the problems of space travel, and to just show me some weird light (which NASA and amatuer astonomers as well as professionals and people monitoring the skies for terrorist attacks on a nearby hot target do NOT see and do NOT scramble jets to come get)... well it's just silly. If aliens invade, I rather think we'll know it. If ghosts come, I rather think they will let us know they are here.

I've had a few really weird things happen. Before 2 important people in my life died I woke up the night before they died and I told my husband they were "going to die". He was totally weirded out by it, but like me, he also knew these people were ill (both with cancer, though both were doing quite well, so this was totally unexpected). I did not live near these people, so I had not seen them. In each instance it was a "shock" to the family when the loved on died - because they were doing very well- and certainly I was quite upset. Especially about my good young friend that had a kind of cancer that was easily curable and she simply had a bad reaction to her medication.

I could have gone all "hey I have some psychic power that knows when people will die" . But I just went, "oh well, I was thinking of them, and had a really strong dream and it was just something that happened." I didn't go hang out my shingle as a psychic. And as I expected, the next time somoene else close to me died (my cousin, and I was quite close to her) I found I had sent her a letter and a care package in the week following her death. (her husband had lost my phone number and was in shock, so there was a delay in my finding out). Never happened again that I've known about a death ahead of time. Cant explain it, but hey, does everything need an explaination? Or do we always have to jump from "well that was strange" to "let's suspend all the laws of physics and nature so I have an explaination".

I work with people that think they have seen a UFO. It's spooky. It's unnerving. They really KNOW what they have seen, and indeed I believe they believe it. But that doesn't mean we can just throw out science and reason and even in the cases of many religious people I work with...their most profoundly held spiritual beliefs. (Fundies dont' believe in UFOs, or aren't supposed to. It causes them a lot of anguish if they see one).

Do you want the truth, and can you live with not having the truth right now. Or would you rather live with a lie, that gives you an explaination.

I opt for truth every time.

 

[Quinn]

I went through a several-year-long phase of believing in out-of-body experiences. I experienced something weird that I couldn't explain, but that sounded a lot like what I had heard about OOBEs. So I looked up OOBEs on the net, and what do you know, there were a bunch of people describing them, and they sounded just like what happened to me, so that must be what was going on! Then a few years later I learned about sleep paralysis, and felt simultaneously relieved and really dumb. Examination of my own reactions to that experience is how I first learned about confirmation bias, and is what led me to become the skeptic I am today.

 

[tsg]

Title is pretty self-explanatory. I've seen many on this board have apparently had some bizarre things happen in their life, but still managed to keep their cool and shrug it off as normal, however unlikely, occurrences.

I've never had a supernatural experience.

I have had a couple of things happen to me that I couldn't immediately explain, but that just makes them "unexplained", not "unexplainable".

So I was just wondering about the thinking processes involved, and what you knew (or learned through research) that helped shed some light on it, etc.

I'm asking because I guess I want to build up a "skeptic mindset". I mean, I think I don't believe in the supernatural/paranormal/whatever solely because I'm not terrified of it.

It really comes down to just being willing to accept "I don't know" as an explanation for something weird happening.

For example, once I was having a couple friends over when all of us started talking about ghosts (it was Friday the 13th and the subject naturally came up). Then at some point we all saw an empty bottle of coke, rested for more than a day on top of a clean, uncluttered, parallel to the ground table, which was on the other side of the room (but still in our view) just hurled itself a couple meters to the wall. They jumped up and were absolutely terrified, pale, shaking. One of them wanted to leave. I was just... WTF? What the hell happened there? I inspected the bottle, checked for air currents, tried to recreate the jump with a sudden, strong blow of air from my lungs, but the bottle would just tip over and then roll over the edge of the table to the ground. All the while trying to calm them. From this day I have a hard time getting my friends to come here, or stay for long. I have no idea what happened there either. Must've been a heck of a wind blow, in a closed room with air-conditioning on.

Without having been there I can't tell you what happened. It could have been a gag perpetrated by one of your friends. It could have been any number of things. It could (and I'm not saying this to insult you) also be a case of your memory embellishing the event. Memory tends to fill in the gaps.

One of them (present in the bottle episode) recently went to my kitchen to get some water, made some strange noise back there and came back pale and shaking, saying he'd seen a man in my pantry.

He might be the perpetrator of the gag or he might have imagined it. Or it was something else. The point is we don't know.

They ask me how I can live here, if I don't see or hear anything weird, etc. Well, I do. I think I see stuff out of the corner of my eye all the time, everywhere (not just in the house). I hear noises in the house when I lay to bed to sleep. I've had sleep paralysis and imagined it was a very nasty demon pounding in my back, keeping me from getting up. While it was worrisome at the moment, I managed to "awake" my pinky toe and climbed up from there to a world where nothing much was going on. In fact it was daylight. So it could always be whatever. It just doesn't spook me. I guess it's the lack of danger music playing in the background.

Houses make a lot of weird noises that can sound creepy if you don't know what's going on. They settle, the pipes might bang, the ductwork might "oil can", the furnace or the boiler or the hot water heater might make some strange noises. Houses are more like machines than they are static structures. I think I see things out of the corner of my eye all the time. They don't freak me out unless I'm already freaked out about something else, usually my imagination. But again, the point is, we don't know.

So, what I think I lack is the know-how to actually dismiss the supernatural hypothesis. Specially in a way that is defensible to the believers and terrified.

And that is why I ask: how to rationalize it?

The supernatural hypothesis is dismissed by a complete lack of evidence. The only reason it still exists is the tendency to fill in the gaps of "I don't know" with explanations that "can only be" whatever it is the person claiming them wants it to be. "We don't know" is exactly that: we don't know. "We don't know" doesn't mean "it had to be X because what else could it be?" It could be anything. We don't know. You don't know what made the coke bottle fly off your table. It doesn't mean it was anything supernatural, just unexplained. Not unexplainable except for a lack of information.

 

[JoeEllison]

I went through a several-year-long phase of believing in out-of-body experiences. I experienced something weird that I couldn't explain, but that sounded a lot like what I had heard about OOBEs. So I looked up OOBEs on the net, and what do you know, there were a bunch of people describing them, and they sounded just like what happened to me, so that must be what was going on! Then a few years later I learned about sleep paralysis, and felt simultaneously relieved and really dumb. Examination of my own reactions to that experience is how I first learned about confirmation bias, and is what led me to become the skeptic I am today.

I had an "actual out of body experience." Since I already knew about how many things could happen to your brain when you are near death, I never assumed it was anything more than a physiological reaction to me being almost dead. And, I have also suffered from sleep paralysis and looked it up, so I know how your brain can play tricks on you, no mystical silliness required.

 

[Quinn]

I work with people that think they have seen a UFO. It's spooky. It's unnerving. They really KNOW what they have seen,

This, to me, is the most important point to get across. Watch any TV show with people who think they've encountered ghosts, aliens, chupacabras, whatever. Almost without exception, their last line of defense after hearing about other possible explanations is a stubborn, defiant, "I know what I saw." Every time I hear that line, I want to grab those people and scream, "No you don't! You think you do, but you're quite simply utterly and demonstrably wrong! And the very fact that you don't realize how wrong you are makes your opinion on the matter all but worthless!"

People spend their lives assuming that their perceptions are a reliable indicator of reality. And a lot of that isn't their own fault, since teaching the wrongness of that assumption doesn't seem to be a high priority in most educational systems. Furthermore, when the fallibility of their perceptions is pointed out, a lot of people take it as a personal insult. But if you can manage to get that point across in a non-insulting manner, and demonstrate that everyone's perceptions (not just theirs in particular) are prone to massive error, I've found that goes a long way. Once people realize that their memory of what they think they saw is not more trustworthy than mountains of verifiable evidence to the contrary, they tend to become a little more reasonable about such things.

 

[KS_SKEPTIC]

NEVER!!!
But I keep looking!!!
I for one don't believe in the so called supernatural/paranormal whatsoever!!!

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." --Carl Sagan--

"Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition." --Isaac Asimov--

 

[Soapy Sam]

I spook myself all the time.
I live alone and yes, I find it spooky, sometimes, in the dark, especially when I wake from a nightmare and don't know if I'm dead or not. (Hint- if you're worried about it, you're not).
I can make myself shiver and go goose-pimpled at will. It's quite enjoyable in a ticklish sort of way.

But, when stone cold sober and wide awake, have I ever seen / heard / felt anything I felt was paranormal?
No.
Nor do I expect to.

 

[Gravy]

For example, once I was having a couple friends over when all of us started talking about ghosts (it was Friday the 13th and the subject naturally came up). Then at some point we all saw an empty bottle of coke, rested for more than a day on top of a clean, uncluttered, parallel to the ground table, which was on the other side of the room (but still in our view) just hurled itself a couple meters to the wall. They jumped up and were absolutely terrified, pale, shaking. One of them wanted to leave. I was just... WTF? What the hell happened there? I inspected the bottle, checked for air currents, tried to recreate the jump with a sudden, strong blow of air from my lungs, but the bottle would just tip over and then roll over the edge of the table to the ground. All the while trying to calm them. From this day I have a hard time getting my friends to come here, or stay for long. I have no idea what happened there either. Must've been a heck of a wind blow, in a closed room with air-conditioning on.

That's the most likely explanation you can think of for this Friday the 13th event, when you were discussing ghosts?

Really?

 

[Pope130]

Years ago I had the idea that I had prophetic dreams. Some of them were quite dramatic, improbable and detailed. It seemed convincing. I decided on an experiment. I kept a dream journal, recording all I could recall. After comparing the journal to real world events I conclude that I did not have prophetic dreams. I'm convinced that I was a victim of confirmation bias. As an aside, keeping a journal seems to improve my memory for dreams. Since most of them were unpleasant I stopped keeping a journal, and now don't recall most of my dreams.

Robert

 

[Lynx2174]

Nothing out of the ordinary has happened to me.

I'm rather young, though. Still got almost 3/4ths of my life expectancy before me.

 

[Tiktaalik]

I don't know about supernatural, but I've seen several FOs that were U until I took the time to watch them for a while.

And I've "creeped myself out". Most notably, recently, a couple years ago I lived in eastern Montana on the Canada border. Very small town. There be bears there, big ones. Once, while walking home from a friend's house in the dark, I made the mistake of aiming my flashlight out into a small clearing surrounded by deep, dark woods.

There were eyes.

I could not see the bodies, only the eyes. And there were lots of them. There were yellow eyes, reddish eyes, and greenish eyes, as well as some not-very-reflective eyes. Some of them were high up, some were very low down, some were in the middle. And they were all...looking...at me...

 

[David Wong]

For example, once I was having a couple friends over when all of us started talking about ghosts (it was Friday the 13th and the subject naturally came up). Then at some point we all saw an empty bottle of coke, rested for more than a day on top of a clean, uncluttered, parallel to the ground table, which was on the other side of the room (but still in our view) just hurled itself a couple meters to the wall.

I've always been interested in the supernatural, particularly ghosts (I wrote a horror novel, I think) and I've read hundreds and hundreds of ghost stories, and UFO stories, and the like.

What I find fascinating is that the person who's already interested in UFO's invariably gets a visit some night. They may have five or six sightings in a year.

The person who likes to talk about ghosts, sure enough, gets visited by one. Bunch of guys, standing around, telling creepy stories, suddenly a poltergeist knocks a bottle across the room.

Why do you suppose that is?

 

[suicidesamurai]

Then a few years later I learned about sleep paralysis, and felt simultaneously relieved and really dumb. Examination of my own reactions to that experience is how I first learned about confirmation bias, and is what led me to become the skeptic I am today.

I get sleep paralysis sometimes but I've known what it is so I never attributed anything else to it. I've never had an OOBE or hallucinations of aliens sticking things up my rectum, though.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

For example, once I was having a couple friends over when all of us started talking about ghosts (it was Friday the 13th and the subject naturally came up).

Naturally?

So, what I think I lack is the know-how to actually dismiss the supernatural hypothesis. Specially in a way that is defensible to the believers and terrified.

It would depend on what supernatural hypothesis you are considering. (Do you have one?)

Pretty much any of them have one thing in common: they usually aren't explanations at all. For instance, if you say "It was a poltergeist," what exactly does that mean?

They also come with a lot of overhead (that is, they would raise far more questions than they even purport to explain). To me, that lack of parsimony is the "extraordinary" in "extraordinary claims". If a hypothesis requires rejecting or seriously overhauling entire branches of science, it would require a lot more than an anecdote or even a one time event that I thought I saw.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Once, while walking home from a friend's house in the dark, I made the mistake of aiming my flashlight out into a small clearing surrounded by deep, dark woods.

There were eyes.

I could not see the bodies, only the eyes. And there were lots of them. There were yellow eyes, reddish eyes, and greenish eyes, as well as some not-very-reflective eyes. Some of them were high up, some were very low down, some were in the middle. And they were all...looking...at me...

That was you? We were holding a revival meeting. Honestly.

 

[JohnWS]

I had a prophetic dream once. I dreamed about whirlwinds or tornadoes or something, only to wake up to find there had been one locally (extremely unusual) about 15 miles away IIRR. I just put it down to coincidence.
---------------------------
I was also thinking along the lines of Kittynh above:

I could imagine these supernatural beings talking together. One says 'Hey it's Halloween. I'm going to go and manifest myself in front of some guys, as a terryfying, seven foot, semi-transparent fiery demon. Then I'm going to write all their names in blood on the wall, before turning into luminous smoke and disappearing under the door accompanied by a deafening, unearthly screeching sound. .....Or I could knock over a pop bottle again'

 

[Locknar]

The OP suggests the false premise that “supernatural” events are real, and that skeptics simply rationalize them away.

Having an experience one can not readily explain hardly makes it “supernatural”.

 

[cresur]

Thanks for all the input on the bottle, but I was not looking for an explanation. I just mentioned it to sort of make my point that the reason people cling to the "supernatural" is because they are terrified of the weird events in the first place.

It's like "not knowing" what is going on makes them feel powerless, vulnerable. If you have an idea of what's going on, you can start thinking of how to control it. If ghosts are messing around in your house, you can try not to piss them off, try to see if they want to make contact, or attempt an exorcism. However, if your household items are simply randomly moving around by themselves, you're out of luck. I think that's the mechanism that makes people want an explanation -- any explanation -- so bad.

I can live with not knowing. I know that I will likely never, ever know what happened to that soda bottle; if anything.

The supernatural hypothesis is dismissed by a complete lack of evidence. The only reason it still exists is the tendency to fill in the gaps of "I don't know" with explanations that "can only be" whatever it is the person claiming them wants it to be.

That's a very good reasoning. Not very popular, though. For people, all the evidence needed for a ghost to be around is some bottle taking a leap.

That's the most likely explanation you can think of for this Friday the 13th event, when you were discussing ghosts?
Really?

---

Bunch of guys, standing around, telling creepy stories, suddenly a poltergeist knocks a bottle across the room.

I'm not sure what you both mean by this. If you're saying we were impressionable and it was an hallucination of some sort, I would totally agree if we had seen a ghost or heard voices coming from the attic or something completely sensorial like that. But if you're saying that it was an hallucination of some sort, it should include all of us hallucinating that I went to pick up the bottle and placed it on the table again. The recollection all of us have of this is the same.

Or, perhaps they didn't really see where the bottle "landed" and when I went to pick it up they filled up the gaps. I don't know, I'm an enthusiast magician and I'm aware that our perceptions are easily fooled, specially in a time of distress like that, but that idea just doesn't feel consistent with my experience. Are you saying all of us just heard something that startled us (probably the bottle just tipping over the table) and imagined the same thing while still sitting on the couch? And I just imagined going for the bottle on the ground and taking it to the table? If that's the case I'd better look for a good neurologist.

Some paranormal believers say paranormal events only happen when there's a medium, and the medium is fine-tuned with the event. That's why it only happens to people who already believe on the event in some way (like being scared of it beforehand. Hey, that's their idea, not mine. Just mentioning.) So to them it would make perfect sense that we were talking about ghosts and then one was able to manifest itself.

But the idea that was all just hallucination... I don't know. Like I said, if it was just seeing or hearing something. But I got up, I walked, I touched the bottle, I moved around. And I was fully awake at the time. It's just too weird.

> So, what I think I lack is the know-how to actually dismiss the supernatural hypothesis. Specially in a way that is defensible to the believers and terrified.
It would depend on what supernatural hypothesis you are considering. (Do you have one?)

Well on this case the popular consensus is ghosts. But I'm not considering any supernatural hypothesis. I think the bottle just jumped.

See, I think it's not entirely impossible for some unidentified natural phenomenon to exist which causes something to appear to move by itself. It'd be rare because it would depend on a *very* specific set of circumstances (therefore it appears to be random), but if real it could explain part of the reason why, at some point in history, we needed to come up with the idea that there are invisible, immaterial beings out there that can affect the material world. Because I'm sure things like that have happened for thousands of years.

The OP suggests the false premise that “supernatural” events are real, and that skeptics simply rationalize them away.

That was not my intention. I said "rationalize" meaning how do you bring reason into the equation, to dismiss any paranormal mumbo-jumbo. As I made clear on the message. Anyway, I thought saying "supernatural" between quotes was enough to make it clear that I don't think it's real. The same way another thread says "'proof' of time travel".