Question of the day:
Have you ever observed a miracle — something that could only happen through supernatural intervention? Or have you ever observed something you thought was a miracle at the time, but not anymore?
Recent Comments
- PamBG: Facetious. No, there is no free will in heaven, because everyone knows that... on John Piper and Divine Command
- Len: So you’ve met my ex. on Can I hear an Amen?
- Rich Wilson: Sounds remarkably like William Lane Craig. on John Piper and Divine Command
- FO: But yeah, this is awesome, Jesus had to die ’cause a woman ate an apple. on Why Are You Here, Jesus?
- Michael: The bill does not apply to religious organizations for the... on Mr. Conservative on religion and politics
- Isilzha: I need that as a tattoo! on Can I hear an Amen?
Funny $&#!@ From 9 Laughs
I'm one of the contributors to 9 Laughs:
Subscribe by Email
Archives
No, and no. Even as a Christian I was skeptical enough not to see miracles in every coincidence.
A miracle? Yeah.
F*%#in’ magnets… how do THEY work?
You owe me a new keyboard. ;)
Yup…that’s coffee coming out my nose.
I feel like I am missing out on an Internet experience. I have never laughed coffee out my nose.
Don’t let them kid you. It’s agonizing.
Once when I was very young, at the dinner table, my dad told a very funny joke while I was eating tomato soup with barley. The inside of my nose felt like it had been sandblasted for the next two hours or so.
I once did that with soda. Hurt. A lot.
Milk ain’t so much fun, either. I don’t think the nose was evolutionarily designed to have food/drink passing from it.
To bring this full circle, while many people are weirded out by needles and can’t figure out how heroin users ever get started, for me the one that’s blown my mind is people who snort cocaine. How does it ever seem like a good idea to run solid power up your nose at high speed when every prior experience doing that in life has been agonizing?
The only current medical use of cocaine is as a local anaesthetic in lidocaine, xylocaine, etc. It even works as a 5% cream – so it numbs as you snort.
At the risk of … and with apologies to …
Did you hear about the blonde who snorted Candarel powder.She thought it was diet coke.
LOL @ Len’s joke.
The only current medical use of cocaine is as a local anaesthetic in lidocaine, xylocaine, etc. It even works as a 5% cream – so it numbs as you snort.
I know, but the mode of action can’t possibly be fast enough to numb the initial snort of the initial use, can it? Before the tingling sets in, there’s gotta be at least 20 seconds of OH FSCK MY NOSE!!!
Macho.
We actually used to do it on purpose by holding one nostril and then drinking through the other.
hmmm whats that extra taste… yummy ;)
I once snorted some black pepper in order to prove a (stupid) point. Wouldn’t recommend it.
Dare I ask what the stupid point was?
I drunkenly claimed that black pepper doesn’t make you sneeze when you inhale it, contrary to popular myth, so when one guy jokingly presented me with a small handful of pepper I snorted it. It was a spur of the moment thing.
And no, it didn’t make me sneeze, but for the rest of the evening my nose was running, so I probably might as well have.
I’d have to say: myth plausible – provided we’re talking about an occasional sneeze. If we’re talking about the kind of uncontrollable sneezing portrayed in cartoons, it’s myth busted.
I once did that with tequila. Hurt. A lot more than soda.
the funniest UF thread I have ever read
Group of my friends used to snort Tabasco on dares. Poor choice, really.
Not a miracle, per se, but I did observe something that was very very eerie and it freaked out both of us a great deal (me and my friend).
In high school, he and I were sitting at lunch talking about worthless things like most lunch conversations. Somehow we landed on the topic of “What if you could get a tattoo on your tooth?” This isn’t something we had ever discussed before nor had anything even remotely related come up. Then suddenly, AT THE EXACT SAME MOMENT, we both leaned back in our chairs on the hind legs, pointed at our right eye tooth with our pinky finger, and said “Look, a fish!” in a weird and similar voice/tone/sound. We both did it as a kind of joke to demonstrate how stupid a tooth tattoo would look. We both just sat in silence amazed at how amazingly weird it was that so many of the actions we did were exactly the same. It totally freaked us out because the “coincidence” was just too great to accept. I know it sounds retarded when I type it out like that, but it was very very very weird and by far the weirdest things I have ever experienced in my life.
Definitely not a miracle but puts a small idea that we might have some sort of telepathy that we are not yet aware of.
Like I said, i am aware of how stupid what I just typed is, but it is absolutely true and it totally creeped us both out.
Synchronism doesn’t quite explain it does it?
Well it was not coordinated so by definition I do not think that Synchronism explains it.
Maybe the wrong term. but no I’m not talking about pre-planned actions. I’m talking about something like spontaneous simultaneity.
Synchronicity.
Also an excellent album by The Police.
Quantum Entanglement, ha
I loled
This sounds like a business opportunity for unemployed scrimshaw artists who can no longer obtain whale bits.
No.
I have had one thing happen that I can’t really explain. I would not go so far as to say it’s a miracle, but it does constantly stop me from being an all out atheist and in the more reverent agnostic camp. It was a situation where a girl told me word for word something that I had been praying about. It was not in some sort of cold reading situation, but she just walked up to me and said, “Jesus wants you to know…fill in exact wording of my prayer.” It was pretty intense. I am totally open to the possibility of it being a coincidence, but it always gives me pause. There’s obviously much more detail, but I wanted to just give the rough outline.
I obviously don’t know enough about your particular situation, but you should consider that there may be more reasonable explanations that pure coincidence. Often in these situations, a somewhat surprising result gets exaggerated in your memory over time. It is possible that the person roughly guessed what you were praying about (perhaps even based on something you said earlier, then forgot), and did that just as a joke or a prank, or just to see if she could. You were surprised, since you were young and she guessed so well. Later, as you try to remember it, you add in details that weren’t really there, like she “word for word” guessed what you were praying.
This happens a lot and is well-documented. What you think you remember may not be what actually occurred.
I would have to agree with Michael on this one. Have you ever seen the movie Final Cut with Robin Williams? It is a strange movie with so much potential that it never lives up to. But it does explore that piece, how our memories become exaggerated over time and how one event can become drastically altered through the compounding of imagination and the impressions of the brain on the event. Spoiler alert…..Robin Williams character remembers taking part in a kid falling 30 feet to the ground off a beam, he goes over to the kid and finds what he thinks is a lot of blood and assumes the kid is dead. Later on in the movie we find out the kid actually lived and the “blood” was simply some red paint that had knocked over when the kid fell. He remembers it in the end. The brain is constantly attempting to make connections, to finish ideas and statements, to make sense of the outside world. Just think about how you could finish most sentences you read. The brain is already making assumptions. These connections are compounded when tied to a deep emotional response which can alter the event in our minds. Not saying that what you are claiming didn’t really happen, but try as best you can to remove the emotion from it and go back and remember it again. Try to remember details that were irrelevant to the emotion (the location, the shirt you were wearing, etc…) and see if that helps trigger a different memory of the situation. I have tried this many times with childhood events and it brings a whole new perspective to them.
And the miracle in a Robin Williams movie would be…. when he starts to emote, or to portray feeling, he actually follows through with portraying deep feeling to which we can relate, instead of dipping his toe in and then suddenly changing the subject?
Like taking on finding the “Grail” a mental patient wanted, and by the end he’s waving it around. A reviewer said we start to wonder why they bothered to get the “grail” – then we start to wonder why we cared.
Or maybe he only belongs in voice impersonation and comedy…
I always liked Robin Williams… “liked” is not quite past tense; I’m not ready to give up on him yet.
He’s done great TV drama work; there was a Homicide: Life on the Street episode that was stand-out, as well as a Law & Order: SVU episode.
Miracles? I am one. I once was blind but now I see. :)
Be nice to me today (just this one day eh?) would ya? It’s my b-day! (me and Hitler, ugg) I’m suffering from an acute onset of oldness, take it easy on the ol’ man. All the best guys (and gals).
Happy birthday, John.
Thx BR…
Yup, have a good one!
Happy birthday!
Latest tests have shown that the more birthday parties you have, the higher is your life expectancy so… enjoy it!
That’s a… it’s a… a miracle! God designed it that way! It can’t possibly be a coincidence!
Wishing you many, many more JC! :)
Happy b-day John.
Happy b-day darling!
Ah, Cheers! Hope it’s a good one.
Happy birthday, John!
Happy birthday for yesterday, John – sorry I missed it (time zones, I guess).
I too am a miracle. I once was blind but now I see. Just exactly the opposite of what you meant :-)
Happy Birthday fellow Aries =)
I’ve witnessed/experienced a few things that I can’t explain and don’t think can be explained naturalistically — not sure that’s a good definition of miracle or not, though.
Here are the most remarkable “healings” I’ve personally witnessed.
I saw a girl who was born without a complete tongue (she had a little stub in the back of her mouth, couldn’t speak) grow a tongue. I didn’t actually see it grow back, I guess. We saw her one night, saw the stub she had for a tongue, and then saw her a day or two later (don’t remember exact details), and her tongue had completely grown out. I can’t prove this, and I know how crazy it sounds. I understand skepticism here.
But here’s an explanation of why I can’t prove it to you, at least: This happened in a small village in Honduras. There are no doctors in the area (literally, it’s a small agricultural village in a 3rd world sense), so obviously none can vouch for it. There’s a video of the 2nd day we saw her, where’s she’s beginning to learn to speak … obviously that video doesn’t prove anything either.
I also know a young woman who was born with flat feet. When she was about 16 or so, she went to a Dr. because of the pain. They x-ray’d her, etc., and concluded that she needed extensive surgery and/or orthotic (spelling?) inserts for the remainder of her life. Some people in the church prayed for her. A few weeks later she went in for a second set of x-rays, and the bone structure in her feet had changed to normal, healthy structure. If memory serves, the parents released the x-rays and the testimony of the presiding physician (who was admittedly flabbergasted by it all) to the press; I don’t think the story ever went anywhere, though.
But, I’ve seen a LOT more people not healed than healed. The two above are remarkable to me because they are completely independent of medical intervention. I know lots of people who have been “healed” of not-so-serious physical ailments through lifestyle and nutritional changes, along with prayer (my dad beat cancer that way).
I’ve had a variety of things happen like Noophy explained above, to the point where it couldn’t just be a cold reading. But I’m not sure those are miracles (since I’m not really sure what an agreed upon definition of the term would be).
As a halfway on topic aside, I know that none of that qualifies as empirical evidence for any deity, much less the Christian God, but those experiences certainly do impact my choice to believe.
1) Twins, one of who had been mutilated.
2) Orthotics (in the words of George Carlin) are like religious faith – sometimes you need them for a short period to correct something, but if you have them for life you end up crippled. I know this because I wore orthotics to treat my fallen arches (flat feet) in my late teens.
I find it a lot easier to believe that the people who you’ve mentioned were playing some kind of Miraculous Healing Top Trumps with other religious people (i.e. lying to them) than that nature has run against it’s course.
Exactly– there are reasons people fake miracles…. $$$$$.
Again, I wouldn’t believe me if I were you. But FWIW, no one profited from these two experiences. I assure you of that — I’m willing to stake my personal reputation and integrity on these two stories.
If it helps any, I believe that you believe; I have no doubt whatever about your sincerity – I just don’t believe you are correct :-)
Custador, I mean this honestly — I wouldn’t believe me either, if I were you. Your alternatives (#1 and #2) aren’t correct either, but admittedly, they’re hardly exhaustive of other natural interpretations.
Sorry, how can you possibly know if the girl had an identical twin?
Well, I did meet the family, spent time in their home, and spent a day in their village (which was not more than 100 or so people in size).
It’s possible that they were lying. I didn’t contact the authorities looking for birth defects or search every nook and corner of the village or interview every single person in the village.
Actually, it is more your “choice” to believe what is easier for you to comprehend. In reality, your possibilities are no more provable in that situation than the information provided by brgulker. Sometimes it’s easier to “accept the odds” than it is to “step out on your own”.
On the other hand, if I put my mind to it I bet I could find a thousand examples of people who’ve faked “miracles” – but I’ll bet you dollars to pesos that you can’t find a single, authenticated, provable “miracle”. If you could, the Randi Foundation would pay you a million US Dollars, so go to it.
If I recall, brgulker didn’t say they were examples of miracles. In fact, she wasn’t sure. But my question to you would be how does your 1000 examples fit the situation that was described? Granted, your examples may truly be examples of faked ‘miracles’; but unless one of them can show how the situations described above were faked, then how are they relevant?
Please keep in mind, I’m not out to “find a miracle”. I’m more interested in objective thinking. Your response essentially “waved off” the comment using information that was no more provable than what was presented. Now, what you presented is a possibility, but it brings us no closer to an explanation than the situation itself.
My point was more that you are “choosing” to believe that there was nothing special about the situation, and not because the possibilities you provided proved that fact.
No I’m not. I’m making a value judgment on the idea that they could have been miracles based on my knowledge that lots and lots of people fake miracles for money and that there has never been, in the entirety of the history of the universe, a provable supernatural event – in fact, there hasn’t even ever been a supernatural event which has any evidence for it so far as I can tell. See, if you keep that mind of yours too open all kinds of shit will fall in ;-)
With all due respect, you are basing your judgement/decision on “the odds” and not on the situation at hand. It is rational like that which proves why it is so hard for anybody to change what they believe or think. Everyone states that they are looking for that one example (or bit of evidence) that will make them change their mind, but most people will never find it because they base everything on probability instead of the situation itself. Many people seem to believe that for anything to be true, then there has to be many examples of it when in actuality it only has to occur once for it to be true.
(Again, I’m not stating that this situation is THE evidence you or anyone else is looking for. I’m just trying to point out how you are coming to your conclusion or “choice”.)
you’re clearly not familiar with occam’s razor
So a bit like doing the lottery then … you’re bound to win this week.
When the odds are “one hundred percent record” versus “zero percent record”, there is no way to choose the latter unless you’re an utter, utter retard.
I think you may have answered my question there Custy …
@LRA
Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia on the definition of Occam’s Razor:
“…that the simplest solution is usually the correct one. In science, Occam’s razor is used as a heuristic (rule of thumb) to guide scientists in the development of theoretical models rather than as an arbiter between published models. In the scientific method, Occam’s razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic, and certainly not a scientific result.”
Notice the word “usually”. Even Occam’s Razor acknowledges the possibility.
@Custador
You are again dismissing brgulker’s situations. Just for the fact that they haven’t been proven fake stands to reason that your “100% vs 0%” record is wrong. An open mind means to account for the possibility until proven incorrect. That is all I’m referring to. Your judgement of fact (or the perception thereof) is not based on anything concrete. It is just your opinion or “choice”. There is nothing wrong with “choosing” what you believe. That is fine. As long as you realize how you came to that conclusion. Was it based on fact, probability, or word of mouth? Things to think about.
Thank you for the dialogue. It has been fun.
Look, people have told me their miracle/possible miracle stories before. Upon closer inspection, there is always a reason that they are not miracles/ possible miracles. One of the most common reasons is that ministers (like Benny Henn) are making millions off of fooling people.
That is wonderful. But how does that information relate with brgulker’s situations? Do you know (or have proof) that her situations are examples of ministers are lying in order to make millions of dollars.? As I’ve tried to point out to Custador, you can’t use the evidence that proved right for one situation as the foundation for all situations. Either the situation must be addressed or the source of the situation must be addressed, and so far I haven’t seen anything for either yet. Therefore, as someone with an open mind, I have to assume that there is a possibility that what she said is true.
“Therefore, as someone with an open mind, I have to assume that there is a possibility that what she said is true”
Yes, and no. I trust him (I always thought of brgulker as a he, or is he a she?) and I believe his story. I’m pretty sure he saw that. But the explanation about a supernatural event requires great proofs.
1.- Witnesses are not 100% reliable in any case. Much more where the event was time ago. Even when they don’t lie, what they saw may not be what they remember to see.
2.- Brgulker is not a doctor -I assume- and he didn’t examine closely the little girl. Why must he have done? He simply saw her tongue and it seemed to be underdeveloped, so they where praying for her. I’m pretty sure that after the miraculous healing you would have liked to examine her tongue before, but it wasn’t possible anymore, previously you weren’t as curious.
And people do lie for a bunch of reasons. You must be pretty sure it wasn’t a trick.
3.- Maybe she was naturally healed. I don’t know a lot about our tongue, but I don’t think it can regrow. However it could have been some kind of muscular paralysis -maybe even mental- and it simply disappeared by believing she was going to be healed. Placebo effect do exist. That way brgulker really helped her to cure herself.
So we have two possible explanations: he was tricked or she was healed. All our previous experiences show that the trick is pretty probable. I can’t dismiss (and I won’t) at all that she was really miraculously healed, but I’m going to think -with the lack of further proofs- that he was tricked.
Let’s have another example: you go to a magician show and he splits a person in two. You may think it was a trick or that magic do exist. According to your previous comments you seem to think that both possibilities have a 50% chance of being true. Are you sure that is the scientific way to understand reality?? Even when you know it is a pretty common trick along magicians, you can’t dismiss that this time it was magic, can you?
Again, if I would have the possibility I would like to check the facts by myself -or better, by a bunch of doctors- because I think brgulker’s examples are interesting and deserving further examinations, but without that possibility, my conclusion is -and I think it is the logical one- that he was tricked.
(I think that when you are the witness of the show you tend to believe it more than when you aren’t)
Then again for all we know maybe nature does act like that sometimes, though it may be rare. See, even if it did happen, does’t mean – as br mentions – that it’s actually a miracle. Nature does strange shit sometimes.
“I know that none of that qualifies as empirical evidence for any deity, much less the Christian God, but those experiences certainly do impact my choice to believe.”
Exactly. Yet they are evidence of something. I think the term “miracle” suggests something rare, so by that definition the majority of the sick and injured would not be healed. That’s what makes an isolated case a miracle. It would be a special category of (I like this) things that cannot be “explained naturalistically “
I truly wish that religious organizations had a default policy to bring in a team of skeptics when these types of things happen.
I’m also struck by the seemingly capriciousness of the events. Why these two out of all the prayers that you have seen?
As a Pentecostal minister for a decade (in a system that expects the miraculous), I never saw anything that couldn’t reasonably be attributed to natural explanations.
The Catholics are fairly critical of reported miracles, and I think they even have to send people out to check reports of miracles. They are also highly motivated to prove them hoaxes: finding Mary’s face in a piece of toast doesn’t do much for the church’s image.
The cleanest way to deal with this is to bring in expert outsiders.
I don’t buy your assumption, which seems to be that outsiders would be any more objective and/or neutral to any potential miracle. I think it’s more likely than not that outsiders would have just as many biases; they’d just be opposites.
So, according to your opinion, why are companies forced to have extern auditors?
Auditors of a company are one thing, but in cases like this, where opinion can so easily sway someone’s perception of facts to fit their own preconceived notions… I’m not saying it’s impossible, all I’m saying it’s possible, too.
I suggested experts. By that I meant team members trained in various appropriate disciplines. All biases are not equal. If I were making the decision, I would look for experts who I thought were focused on fact finding. It’s far fetched that anything like this will ever happen but it would add something of value to the issue.
Fact finding investigators are used all the time in many settings. Can they be unduly prejudiced? Yes. Are they as likely to be prejudiced as untrained insiders? No.
I guess I misunderstood (and read my bias into) what you mean by outsider. My apologies for that misreading; it’s my fault.
We must have differing definitions of “fairly critical”! ;)
Fairly crictical you say …
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/05/nun-cured-pope-parkinsons-ill
They assign like five independent doctors to look at each reported case of “miraculous healing.” If there is *any* medical explanation for what might have happened, even an outside possibility, it is rejected as a miracle outright, because the Catholic doctrine of miracles assigns theological importance to the complete inexplicableness of miracles according to any natural explanation. If the doctors don’t find anything, then it goes to an entire department in the Catholic church; in cases where sainthood is in question they get devil’s advocates to look at it: this is where we get the phrase “devil’s advocate” in the first place.
Now, they certainly *will* declare things a miracle which are at the time inexplicable, while a skeptic wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean that these things aren’t examined closely. With regard to the above article: that’s called bad press. The Catholic church actively tries to avoid it (although lately they can’t seem to get away from it at all.) It only makes sense for a massive geopolitical institution like the Catholic church to stay away from any kind of “miracle” with an evidence-supported naturalistic explanation.
Pretty sure they got rid of the Devil’s Advocates. Quite recently, IIRC, mid 1980s. And sure enough, the number of beatifications shot through the roof right after.
Yep. Beatification of MoFo Theresa is the latest good example: A woman in India claims to have eaten a cracker with an image of MoFo Theressa on it and had her stomach cancer cured – the church is conveniently ignoring the testimony of her husband, who’s been loudly pointing out all the chemo and surgery and radiotherapy that she had.
Well, I said “few,” not “many.” I also mentioned that I’ve seen a lot of people prayed for and not healed. I mentioned those two because they’re the only “healings” I’ve personally witnessed in which there was literally no other medical intervention. The other of the “few” would be experiences, such as Noophy’s example.
And again, I’m not anticipating anything other than skepticism. I wouldn’t believe me if I were you (or anyone else who comments here). Just sharing my answer to the question :)
Er..ahem…In case you hadn’t noticed, I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. I didn’t say I did. But I didn’t say I didn’t…
Oh. That former post was not sarcasm. I like the phrase “things that can not be explained natiuralistically.”
Heh, I missed your first comment reply. Well, I’m being honest about what I saw and the conclusion to which I’ve come as a result. There may be other explanations I haven’t considered that are purely naturalistic. But so far, the only thing I can find is some type of “supernatural” (really don’t like the word) explanation.
But so far, the only thing I can find is some type of “supernatural†(really don’t like the word) explanation.
Personally I have always liked the Greek-derived word “anomaly”, in that it literally describes what sort of event it is (one that does not obeys or occurs outside of the known rules) without implying an efficient cause for it.
I like.
I hear you, nomad. I was replying to Question I Thority, in case it wasn’t clear enough.
To be clear, I wasn’t being critical of your experiences. I’m interested to know how you would interpret the scarcity and seeming arbitrariness of these types of experiences?
Would, “I can’t” be okay? Cause that’s the best I got.
Yes, of course. I wonder if I would have slipped so easily past liberal Christianity if I had seen similar anomalies.
“I saw a girl who was born without a complete tongue (she had a little stub in the back of her mouth, couldn’t speak) grow a tongue.”
So god does heal amputees and cripples. Just not when the cameras are rolling.
Must be Stage Fright. Maybe if he hadn’t have stopped his therapy when his son was born he’d be cured of that by now.
For what it’s worth, BRG, I’m glad you posted those stories. Obviously I don’t believe those actually happen, and you clearly don’t expect me to, but they are at least interesting. I was wondering whether you had had any of those kinds of experiences.
But honestly man . . . Honduras? You know people do that kind of thing to mess with foreigners all the time . . .
FWIW, Michael, I’m wishing I hadn’t.
Posted the stories, or gone to Honduras?
FWIW, I found the stories interesting, but from what my significant other has told me about her time in Honduras, it boasts a distressing Person-to-AK47 ratio.
lol, the stories. Honduras is an interesting place, and I’m really glad I’ve been able to go. Hopefully, I’ll be returning more often over the next few years.
But like dwade watching the re-grown limbs, you forgot your camera.
Funny how that works.
But then, we have Photoshop.
But then, we have Photoshop.
That brings up an interesting question. Given that the human ability to make simulacra of reality is approaching the level that to make convincing records or portrayals of events that have not or cannot occur is a trivial task, how do we deal with the resulting epistemological quandary? Do you now only accept “evidence” if you yourself experienced it firsthand?
I’d be unlikely to believe anything like this had I not actually seen it myself, FWIW.
But it makes you wonder just how much of what we “know” is based only on the reports of others. I am reminded for some reason of the scene near the beginning of Pulp Fiction, where Vincent is relating to Jules what day-to-day life is like in Amsterdam as compared to Los Angeles.
I used to love Pulp Fiction – until I found out a) how to give an intracardiac injection in real life, b) why an intracardiac injection of adrenaline would have killed Uma Thurman’s character stone dead in seconds, and c) how you really treat an overdose of opioid drugs.
Learning can spoil your enjoyment of all kinds of things :-)
It’s this, meets this.
I dunno, I still enjoy Leverage, for instance, even though I know most of the “hacking” is ridiculous.
Ever again, God evades cameras and evidence, leaving anything to test and measure and repeatability! Doing nothing for anyone outside the gullible “choir” being preached to.
Where did I ever claim to be offering evidence about anything? Where did I claim to be trying to convince anyone?
I was just answering … the Question of the Day.
“saw a girl who was born without a complete tongue (she had a little stub in the back of her mouth, couldn’t speak) grow a tongue. I didn’t actually see it grow back, I guess. We saw her one night, saw the stub she had for a tongue, and then saw her a day or two later (don’t remember exact details), and her tongue had completely grown out.”
I find the example very interesting, and I am also skeptical, of course. Just one question: why did you saw that person’s tongue in the first place? Was it a casualty or where you doing some medical help in honduras?
I usually don’t go in the street and just stop to examine someone whithout a limb, and I’m pretty sure there are some people without tongues in the city I live but I never met them. I would say it is too much of a casualty for you seeing her without a tongue and then seeing her again, unless there is a good reason for it.
I saw it because we were in her village, and we were asked to pray for her. We were on a mission trip, a combo of holding services, providing food, building infrastructure — the kind of stuff you’d expect from a short-term mission trip.
We saw here again because we were in the village for more than one day.
Uhu – some charitable Christians come to a third-world village, are asked to pray for a little girl with no tongue, and boom! her tongue grows back two days later? I’d have been yelling “set up!” right there myself :-)
No.
No.
To preface this story, let me say first that I have been an atheist since before I knew there was a word for it. That said, I had one extremely weird experience that to this day I cannot explain. One summer when I was 10 years old, I was walking home from a library pretty much adjacent to the apartment complex where I lived. All that was between the library and the complex was an empty field owned by the utility company with some high-tension power lines running through it (obviously not the best of neighborhoods).
Anyhow, I’m walking home when all of a sudden I feel as though someone shoved me from behind, hard. I turn around expecting to see some prankster standing behind be, but no one’s there. That was strange enough, but when I finally get home I find that my parents are freaking out. Apparently, I had been missing for hours. It was about noon when I left the library, but it was almost 5pm by the time I got home.
I have no idea what happened. Any reasonable explanation I can come up with has something to do with the powerlines I was walking under, maybe I just stood in that field for hours in some kind of catatonic state and the “shove” was what the sensation of snapping out of it. The thing is, my friends had been out looking for me. They went to the library THROUGH THE FIELD to look and really anyone who stepped out of my apartment would have been able to see me standing in that empty field. To this day it weirds me out to tell the story.
There are any number of reasons a person can go into a fugue state. This certainly sounds like one.
This. Sounds like somnambulism to me.
From my understanding, fugue states are usually triggered my trauma and usually last longer, and I can’t imagine how I was sleepwalking. Plus, neither of these explain how know one saw me standing there for almost 5 hours when they were actively looking, unless the theory is that, in my fugue/sleepwalking state I wandered about evading detection for a couple hours then stepped on the spot where I started and woke up.
I’m definitely open to some theories, never really considered that sharing the story on the internet might help find an answer.
Electrical arc, maybe (though I’d have thought you’d have had burns and maybe melted shoes)… Electromagnetic effect of high capacity power cables on the brain? A bird hitting the wire and falling onto your head, clonking you hard enough to give you a concussion and a couple of hours of traumatic amnesia (extremely common with blows to the head, by the way)? There are infinite possible causes in the sane and rational world, as with all of these things. The “God of The Gaps” approach is just lazy :-)
Fugue states can be triggered by petite mal seizures as well. And that’s just your brain hiccuping, It can happen to anyone.
Yep. It has to happen twice in forty eight hours before they’ll even consider it to be (one of the hundreds of types of) epilepsy.
My sister was severely epileptic, having both petite mal and grand mal seizures quite regularly (it eventually killed her). I’ve seen how strange the things epilepsy can do to you are.
My sympathies, Ty. I think sometimes people don’t realise how unpleasant a condition epilepsy can be. I’ve had a patient who was in a permanent fugue with absolutely no awareness of the outside world at all because of epileptic seizures.
Yeah, sounds like a seizure.
I have never had an epileptic seizure, or really anything remotely like this, but I have had diabetic seizures at night. While it is likely that I will never know about most of the seizures I have (I am asleep, after all), there have been three occasions when it woke up my mother, who then woke me up. In the most severe case (also the first case, and the only one in which I went to the hospital), I was brought to a semiconscious state quickly, and I was awake and aware enough to state who I was, where I was (even though I was at a camp far away from home), and what time it was, and that I was in an ambulance. When I reached the hospital, I fell back asleep. Hours later, I woke up, and was again fully awake and aware.
But I don’t remember any of that. At all. When I was awake in the hospital bed, I was having relatively normal conversations with my mother . . . so she tells me. But all I can remember is a couple hours after that when I remember “waking up” again, this time to an extent I can actually remember. This implies there were several hours when I was able to have relatively normal conversation (on top of quite a bit of time when I was pretty much babbling nonsense) that I have absolutely no memory of.
But yeah, it is a bit surprising that nobody found you in the field. Is it very large?
When I was that age, the pre-teen just-about-to-hit-puberty state, I used to get muscle spasms all the time that felt JUST like someone was poking me in the back or grabbing my shoulder. Sometimes my brain would actually “insert” the feeling of a person standing behind me. Once I got past my growth spurts and out of puberty however, they stopped. Probably something similar here.
Any possibility, from the description you gave, that a person could have actually pushed you, but you passed out, and they got worried they might take the blame so they left you there?
In the literal, supernatural sense of the word, “miracle,” no. In terms of a sense of wonder at the beauty of the physical universe we live in, yes.
It has always struck me that people who want supernatural miracles are a bunch of ingrates– as if the perfectly natural universe we live in we not enough!
“Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
“If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another, and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.” ~ Albert Camus
“…Once for each thing. Just
once; no more. And we too, just once. And
never again. But to have been this once,
completely, even if only once: to have been
at one with the earth, seems beyond
undoing.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke (from the Duino Elegies)
I like your answer
:)
Awesome!!!
I agree with this and was going to put that as my answer once I finished reading all the replies. Well, not word for word! Everything that is just can amaze me, I don’t care if it is an everyday occurrence. Babies being born, the sky being the perfect color, patterns, music especially for some reason. I might be the least into-music person you’ve ever heard of relatively, and yet how amazed I can be that the waves of sound can be arranged into songs, and that just about anything that makes a sound can be tuned so songs may be played if one wanted to. It seems that much more mysterious than, say, language arranged into poetry or even a coherent sentence, or colors arranged to make a painting look like life, to me. Those things seem rather obvious, materials seem more obvious for coordination than sound, although language is sound, and it is also meaning. It’s all very much astonishing that we have the world we have, and that I was born a person to see what this is and call it wonderful.
There are a lot of ordinary things with even obvious to me scientific explanations that I find to be wonderful, yet of course many things I cannot explain to you myself, I do not think they are supernatural, just that I am not knowledgeable how they work. Many people’s estimation of miracles or faith in god may depend on a personal coincidence of favor, where I look in awe how many coincidences are happening simultaneously, any of which was statistically bound to happen, quite numerous among them, minutia nobody even sees or is in range to see, all the universe or even outside my window.
I look at things which can be known but remain unknown with, I think, due awe. The hairs on my head are indeed numbered, but I’ll never have the inclination to count them. That is quite weird to me to think of something calculable, that someone like god would just know, all these things that go about unknown and uncounted. This only tells me that whatever is unknown now may be known someday. Whatever has no explanation now has an explanation not observed or discovered yet. If a true miracle were to occur right in front of me, I could not trust me to call it a miracle, due to circumstances that are too small or too fast for me to have seen, or involving a property known already to science but nothing I’m personally aware of. How does a bird fly, for example? I can not see any strings carrying it, and I have not studied the physics – it happens somehow, but it’s not a miracle, and all miracles I might ever see would act in accordance with that general pattern. It is not supernatural, I just missed something, I just don’t know exactly how it works. Someone does know or someday will know or could know and explain it to me. That is what is really cool.
Nope
My mother is convinced God healed her arm; she had tendinitis or whatever you spell that (I can’t check now, typing from iphone). Then she was convinced God healed my hip – I felt a ridiculous amount of pain for about six months, was scheduled for surgery even, then it abruptly stopped. Now I know her arm was possibly placebo effect plus basic care. The hip probably got more eroded and ruined the nerve endings there. I never did think of it as miracles; since I never believed. Just as mysteries. I do so love mysteries (and solving them).
I’ve recently read that lots of people having pain in the hip region (or other regions for that matter) have broken or at least hurt hip-bones that doctors didn’t recognise on the x-rays.
That happened with my knee. I had a hairline fracture that caused me pain for ages.
Thing is, I’ve arthritis – it was pretty clear the cartilage had deteriorated and that I needed a hip replacement. Which is why I think it probably just deteriorated further. I was even scheduled for surgery, but they didn’t get the prosthetics delivery in time, so I didn’t do it. Since I don’t feel pain anymore (unless I stress the joint), there’s no reason for me to do it anymore… at least not yet.
Hope you never have to have that surgery. Stay healthy.
Thanks :)
My brother had a terrible car accident when he was 18 – he was in the ICU and we were basically waiting for him to die. I was waiting for the pay phone (ok, this was 1986) and I felt myself starting to lose control. All I could think about was how he was my only full-blood sibling and I was going to lose him. Right as I was about to totally freak out I heard a voice in my head tell me that he was going to be all right.
He did survive. For a long time I thought that I had been spoken to from on high by an angel. Now, though, I realize that my mind understood more than I did – that I had to keep it together for my mother’s sake and that my brother was far more stubborn than anyone gave him credit for.
He’s 42 now, has two kids, and uses his scars as a scare tactic whenever a kid in our family gets a driver’s license. :)
I’ve experienced numerous things that, while maybe not ‘miraculous’ are certainly strange, defy explanation (I’m sure that comes as a shock to you guys, ha) here’s just a few:
————–
When I was a young believer I got off track (err…sin) and found myself partaking in a couple ‘activities’ that I shouldn’t have. In the very middle of them an elderly female spiritual mentor calls me out of the blue (I hadn’t spoken to her in weeks and she lives in another town miles and miles away) and said ‘Father spoke to me and told me that you were doing ‘this’ and that’ (and she was spot on), tell me is it true?’ Ugg, I slumped down in my chair, feeling shocked, vulnerable and ‘found out’ I mustered a wimpy ‘yes’ in response to which she replied something to the effect of “Father says to knock it off’. She prayed with me and hung up the phone. True story.
————-
In our teens, my g/f and I (future wife, mother of my 4 kids, now ex-wife) were out for the night in my finely tuned 70 Chevelle (white w/black vinyl top, cragers, dual exhaust, classic, sweet ride) and along came another kid in his ‘hot rod’ raring (sp?) his engine signaling that he wanted to race me. You know us young, stupid, hormone driven, macho guys, we’re always competing so off we went roaring down the (45 mph speed limit) street late at night at very high speeds. We were flying when all of a sudden the car began to come to a slow, controlled, methodical stop as if someone had let off the accelerator and had their foot on the brake in spite of me holding the pedal all the way down, I couldn’t understand what was happening (as the other car flew by me). 80, 75, 70, 65, 50…slowly in a controlled and deliberate manner until I came to a residential street and threw my hands up in the air so angry (embarrassed in front of my g/f is more like it) when all of the sudden, in the same way that I had no control over the gas pedal the steering wheel turned (on its own) to the right bringing the car to a complete stop. As soon as it stopped and before we could get out of the car, the left front tire suddenly fell strait over on its side off the car’s axil and laid in the street, I couldn’t believe my eyes. If that had occurred when we were racing, well let’s just say I wouldn’t be here today telling you guys this (strange but true) story.
————–
About 15 yrs ago I attended a mid-week fellowship. I almost didn’t go because I wasn’t feeling well, had developed a terrible sore throat, it was red, swollen and painful to swallow, inflamed. Sounds wimpy I know but at the time the darn thing hurt like you know what. I hadn’t told anybody (it was just a sore throat after all and I’m a guy right, gotta be tough ya know) and so I arrived late as the pastor was already sharing. I tried to be as discreet as possible so as not to disrupt the service and all and was glad that he was facing the other direction when I came in. Suddenly he stopped what he was saying in mid-stream and looked over at me and said these words ‘like that sore throat you walked in here with but is now gone’. And it was, completely. I went into the bathroom, all the swelling and redness had disappeared, no pain, everything was back to normal. Very strange indeed.
——————-
When I was 18, after high school me and some friends took a trip up the east coast, up I95 all the way to Bar Harbor Maine, to Acadia national park, etc, really cool trip. One night after the other two guys had fallen asleep I went walking downtown by myself. All of the sudden a little blue car drives up to me and the driver says in an urgent but calm voice ‘get in the car’. I can’t explain it but I somehow just knew to do what he said, that he was there for me and so I did, I got in this strangers car in the middle of the night in strange town. I got in and asked him ‘what’s this about’ and he said ‘look in the mirror, that guy was walking behind you (I was totally unaware of him, that he had been following me) and he intended to harm you’. Here’s the strangest part…he drove me straight back to the place I was staying without me ever telling him where to go. I got out of the car completely perplexed, like I had just lived through an episode of The Twilight Zone.
I’ve got many more, some even stranger, but that’s enough for one day.
When I was about 20 years old, I woke straight up from a dead sleep and sat up. I saw the shadow of– what looked like– a monk on the wall across from me, and I felt the most sincere and deep feeling of peace I had ever known. I lay back down and went soundly to sleep. At the time, I thought an angel had visited me. I now know that I experienced something like hypnagogia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogic_hallucinations
Oh man … that happened to me the other day. I was having one of my random pain/fatigue episodes and I fell into a really deep sleep, when I woke up, I could barely move and I swear there was someone at my bedroom door staring at me. At first I thought that my landlady had let a repair person in (she doesn’t seem to get the whole 24 hours notice thing), but when I finally was able to get up, there was no one in my apartment, and my landlady was gone. Full on sleep paralysis is creepy, even when you are aware that is what’s happening. I’m glad your hypnagogic hallucination was more pleasant. ;)
Sleep paralysis is some crazy shit.
I’m glad I am no longer a little kid who is convinced it is demonic attacks.
No. Lots of weird things…prescient dreams, a longtime ability to reach for teh phone about 2 seconds before it rings, strong intuitions that end up being the very right decision at the time…but then all these things could be mind tricks, electromagnetic fields of some kind, my own instincts, honed by natural selection after eons into a superb unconscious filter that I call intuition. Also, some things, like the answer the phone thing, I call useless clairvoyance. Reaching for the phone 2 seconds before it rings…so what? What does this do for me?
To me, ‘miracle’ isn’t just mysterious, it’s a great thing. Like why don’t I grow back that tooth I had to have the root canal in? Or why don’t I wake up one morning not needing glasses? On the health front, I hear poeple claim the same “it was amazing” story not thru prayer, but by seeing an energy healer who waved stones over them. Our bodies & minds have strong healing capabilities & you can access that all kinds of ways. “I prayed & it got better” is no kind of proof.
Here’s something weird that I definitely considered a miracle at the time.
When I was 7 or so, my younger brother who was around 3 at the time was walking around our yard playing with some small toy, and not really paying attention to where he was going. He eventually ambled around the side of the house to our fish pond, which was about 3 feet by 5 feet wide and around 6 feet deep with straight walls. So of course he ends up falling in, and I saw this while standing about halfway between the pond and the back door. I thought for a moment about going to grab him myself, but then thought he would probably just pull me in as well, so I went to get our mother.
I suppose she heard me yelling before I got inside, because she was on her way out as soon as I reached the door. When we both rounded the side of the house, so that the pond was in view, my brother was already standing next to the pond, dripping wet. My mother and I were both very relieved and asked him how he managed to get out on his own. His response was that a man pulled him out.
I don’t consider this a miracle, but It’s unlikely that someone could have reached the pond, pulled him out, and then gotten away in the amount of time he was out of my view. That would be at most 30 seconds from my recollection.
In any event, I just consider this something that I’m not sure about. I assume that he went into some survival mode and grabbed the side of the pond and lifted himself out instinctively. Then his young mind manufactured being pulled out to explain this. I’m no psychologist or neuro-scientist, but something along those lines makes more sense to me than a god who randomly saves children who are 10 seconds from being saved anyway and allows others to die.
Your assumption sounds like the most probablt explanation to me.
A similar thing happened to my other half when he was 6 and a dry stone wall collapsed on top of him. He doesn’t remember, but his older brother and cousin saw him push the rubble off himself and get up.
No, I haven’t. The fact that I would like to hasn’t cut it.
Coffee Jedi definitely has some issues with f*#&ing magnets, ha.
I heartily wish – nay, earnestly desire – that everyone had the capacity and ethics to distinguish between what they would like to be true, and what actually happens.
Well, I certainly wouldn’t say that there is anything miraculous about knowing that someone has died before anyone tells you, but this did happen to me while I was in college. I was sitting in my apartment when the phone rang, and the thought “Grandpa’s Dead” popped into my head. Surely enough, it was my mom calling to tell me just that. It was really strange because I had known that he was going in for surgery (exploratory, nothing really invasive), but I didn’t know when. I don’t have any real explanation, but I’m sure that there wasn’t anything supernatural involved.
I’ve had similar weird death previews. My husband’s ex MIL lived nearby in town in a nursing home. We’d take her out to lunch from time to time. A nice enough person but she was nothign special to me. One night I had a dream in which she was no longer loopy from age, & she was looking earnestly at my husband, telling him she had important things to tell him, to teach him. The next morning I felt quite odd & insisted we should call & visit. She died 2 days later.
I don’t even know what to think about this kind of thing. I barely knew the woman.
Out of six and a bit billion people on the planet, a fair chunk will dream about a relative on a given night. Odds are, out of those dreamed about relatives, a few will peg it within a few days. It’s just maths.
When I was little I used to think I was haunted, later I found out it was sleep paralysis.
Never have. Never will.
Miracle? You bet. I grew up in a fundy home, and instead of being in a loony bin I’m a functioning atheist. Praise the lawd.
haha…nice miracle you got there…just wish it happened to more people!
Most things that people perceive as miracles are just things they do not understand. I believe it was Arthur C Clarke who said “popcorn is a miracle if you don’t know how it works”. The remainder, when investigated, turn out to be exaggerated or wholly false from the beginning. Though Jefferson Starship’s song Miracles was one of my favorites, I think the whole field of miracles is just magic tricks for the superstitious.
I’ve seen some weird things. I have seen ghosts with my own eyes. I watched a cloud shift into an image of angels and demons battling while at the Grand Canyon. I watched the Indians beat the Yankees 22-0.
The thing is, wanting to see something can often make you see it and wanting to remember something will shift your memory to fit what you want.
I didn’t really see a ghost, I just wanted to so bad and believed I could so much that my eyes fooled me into thinking simple tricks of the light were more than they were.
I didn’t watch a cosmic battle in the clouds. Our brains are designed to find patterns and make familiar shapes out of unfamiliar things. I just used my imagination.
Strangest of all, I wasn’t at that Indians game. I watched it on TV, but despite my memories, despite what I know to be so, I never actually went there. I just thought I did for so long that eventually my brain changed what I remember to fit what I thought.
So for all you who have strange stories you can’t explain, keep in mind that simply trying to remember them will distort those stories beyond recognition, especially if you want it to mean something.
I can testify to that Indians game. I mean, people claim they really did beat the Yankees 22-0. It’s even in the record books. But it couldn’t really have happened, right? The Indians winning?
No, seriously, the Indians game thing was pretty weird, because he was totally convinced he had attended the game.
But weird as it seems, this kind of thing really isn’t that uncommon. How many times do kids get into arguments over what one of them just said. Literally moments after you say a phrase, you are liable to misremember what you actually said as what you meant to say. Of course, most of the stories posted above are far more significant than just some phrase, but the point is really the same. Far more people claim to have been present at JFK’s assassination than were actually there. The same is now becoming true of watching the World Trade Center collapse. People often say things like, “I will never forget where I was that day,” but they are probably wrong. They won’t know that they forgot, but they really replaced their memory with imagination.
One of the best examples of this is UFO sightings. A combination of suggestion from the media, sleep paralysis, and later confabulation of the details of the encounter (perhaps with the help of a suggestive “hypnotist”) often lead to reports of alien encounters that are very bizarre and detailed that could not result by pure hallucination and are too frequent to explain as pure lies. In A Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan relates these alien encounters that became popular in the late 1950s to demon encounters that were so common before then, stretching back even to the early middle ages. So it seems this has happened to people for a very long time.
I think it is difficult for people to accept that what they remember may not just be inaccurate, but radically divergent from reality. Yet without accepting this possibility, people are forced to accept far more troubling concepts of the supernatural.
Lol, this isn’t a miracle of anything, more of a complaint, but does anyone know anything about taste, or the sensation of taste in a dream-state? I know about the whole alpha-beta-zeta whatever…
Well uh, basically, from my nightmares alone I’ve developed (over the last decade or so) a fear/hatred of birds. Not all the time, but occasionally–perhaps once a year, I will have a nightmare involving birds: their feathers near my face, the taste of their dead flesh near my mouth trying to get in, their eggs and being close to half-born fetus’ inside the shells, having to eat them. I can taste this disgusting, indescrible taste and there’s this horrible *crunch* and usually I wake up sickened and wanting to spit, and avoid eating anything for a couple of days.
Yeah. Kinda didn’t need to share that, but if there’s any PhDs in the area…. So help me jeebus I would be grateful.
Years ago, there was a game called Mastermind (I think – not really important), whereby one player put four coloured pegs in four holes (behind a small screen) and their opponent then had to work out the correct colours in the correct holes within 10(?) attempts. A correct colour in the correct hole was rewarded, as was a correct colour in an incorrect hole (but with a different reward – also coloured pegs I think). But no idea of which peg or hole was correct.
Anyway, I knew fraternal twin brothers who could always get the correct answer on the first attempt, even if they were in different rooms and the initial pegs had been set out by someone else (so no collusion by the twins).
Should have added: I saw them do it several times, also when I was the one setting the original pegs.
This sounds like a very good magic trick. Do you remember how the guess was revealed? I’m guessing the trick took place around that time.
I dreamt the tsunami that hit Asia about a week before I heard it happened. Some of the videos that I saw in the news afterward had certain aspects that were identical to the ones in my dream. For nearly a year after, I got goose bumps when I thought of the amazing coincidence.
I used to stare alot at the sky & once I saw some clouds disappearing into the midst of the blue. It was as if there was a cut in space & an invisible vaccum was pulling it in. My husband says it was more than likely an alien space craft guised in invisibility hovering & the clouds just passed behind it. Ive thought of all explanations possible but his makes the most sense to me.
Aliens? Of course, much more probable than a hot air current ;-)
That’s pretty impressive. How did you go about that one?
Ah, yes, invisible alien spaceships, ALWAYS the most sensible explanation.
Wouldn’t the whole point of an invisibility shield be that it shows things that are behind it? Sounds like they should ask for a refund on that defective piece of sh*t.
Also, if you replace “it was more than likely” with “the most ridiculous, unbelievable, and stupid thing he could think of at such short notice was” and you might be close to what he actually meant. At least, I hope so. It’s possible, of course, you married him for his limitless credulity, matched only by your own, and thought you’d better snap him up while you had the chance.
I think, in this case, even Rimmer would have a hard time attributing that to “ALIENS!” ;o)
No miracles. Just the usual ghosts, premonitions, deja vu and coincidences that saved me from great harm. All of which can be “explained” by synchronicity. (Thx LMNOP)
Another close call last night. Would you believe, bullet holes in my house?
This thread has turned into more of a “strange occurence” thread rather than a miracle one, so I may as well mention something I’ve never been able to understand: premonitions. They happen to me a lot, probably once a month, and whenever they do I think for a moment about when I would have originally experienced this event (in a dream) and through that memory try to assemble what would happen next. Usually these are just a couple seconds in length, and I always feel like if I was participating more in the event rather than silently predicting what would happen, then the natural chain of events would unfold more truly to the dream I had. But I can never know; if things happened three times, deja-vu^2 would become a popular phrase.
One useful occurence happened to me when I was much younger, probably around 10 or so, and I was sitting on the floor with my brother talking to me. I immediately realized this had occured in my dreams and predicted, with accuracy, what he was going to say next. I forget now what was said; likely it wasn’t important because he was talking to a 10-year old.
Anyways, things like this always keep my mind open to the supernatural, and while I’m agnostic and not at all spiritual in practice I have a bit of fatality in my day-to-day activities, believing that they’re unfolding deliberately and only because I am not conscious of the significance of reality.
I’m not sure at all how dejà -vu works -probably LRA could explain it better- but I think is something like that:
Your brain thinks that what you are seeing has happened before, it remembers it as the situation developes (but not really before) tough you think you are really remembering it. It’s an illusion. I’ve had lots of situations like the one you are describing, and I’m pretty sure that either I’m remembering a pretty similar situation or my brain is playing tricks.
Oh, or maybe Matrix is having an actualization, of course.
Here is something strange that happened. I was I don’t know how old, maybe 27 or 28, had to live with my parents for a while then. Not drinking or taking any drugs. What is the name of this game I had been playing a lot? It is an old game on a black screen with green lines where you are in a tank and the horizon never changes with cubes and pyramids to block your path, tanks and supertanks come at you and every once in a while this bumblebee missile flying thing with a terrible noise starts homing on you by surprise. I hate that noise, but it is important to the story, if you know the game I am talking about.
I was at the time not playing the game. It wasn’t open on the computer, I may have played it within an hour before, but it was closed, gone, done, not playing it no how. I heard that missile noise, and I think if you know that game, you know it makes a person a little tense to hear it. For some reason, I jumped up from the computer and ran to look out the back door. It’s a computer game noise not attributed to the game, but however, I went from one end of the house to the other just to take a look outside. What I saw looked like a pair of headlights on a car, just as bright, 2 lights white and round-shaped, only vertical, that is, one light over the other instead of side-by-side, in the corner of my backyard – everything about the light looked like a pair of car headlights from this perspective except the position. Still hearing the buzzing noise, it rose to the sky and zoomed off into the distance. It is the most inexplicable thing I’ve ever seen and to this day do not know what it was or why it sounded just like my game. I can explain a noise that I hallucinate if I have played a game too much, but not what I saw out the door, and nobody else saw it with me. Cars do not come into my backyard, there is no access there except from our driveway, although one could be further away behind the yard and the other house, it would then look farther away than the corner of the small backyard, and not fly away like it had or make the identical noise to the game.
Full disclosure, this may have happened within a few months of my parents getting a computer and my first real exposure to the internet – one of the first things I looked up had to do with something creeping me out on tv, a movie or something called “What happened to the McPhersons?” who were videotaping their Thanksgiving gathering only to be shown being effed with and eventually abducted by aliens, f’reals. It looked real to me on tv, so of course I wanted to look up on the internet what really happened to them because it had to be fake somehow. After that, I just went about the rest of the internet like, now I’m stuck here or something, lol. No aliens. What happened in my backyard? I have no idea. It went away too quickly for me to see what it actually was, but at the time, it scared me of aliens for a bit.