When do you accept that there are vampires around you, that you're back in time, or..

[Bricker]

... whatever?

By this I mean... in the many stories that thrust normal people into extraordinary situations, a common element is the time it takes for the normal person to understand and accept what's going on.

Three people found dead and drained of blood, but, "Vampires? That's crazy talk!"

You're walking down the street and all you see are 1950's-era cars, fashions, and newspaper dates, but "Is this a joke? Why doesn't my cell phone work?"

Kolchak, the night stalker, suffered this a lot in his career as a mid-1970s TV series newspaper reporter who constantly ran into the supernatural. I can understand his editors being skeptical at first... but as the series continued, I couldn't help but imagine the conversations he'd have:

KOLCHAK: The city is being stalked by zombies!
EDITOR: Zombies? That's ridiculous! OK, I admit you were right about the vampire, the werewolf, the ghost, and the mummy, but zombies are just a legend!

So - what's realistic for characters to see or hear before they accept that the bizarre is real, at least as a working hypothesis?

And... is that different from you might react yourself if placed next to the bizarre?

- Rick

[Papermache Prince]

One of the things I like about the USA network series The Dead Zone is that the people around the precognitive Johnny Smith do believe him, because he has been right so many times. This includes the local sheriff who takes official actions based only on Johnny's predictions.

One thing I've learned: if aliens land a saucer in your back yard, by the time you can get anyone else to look, it will be gone.

[Vlad Dracul]

I always wondered that about Scully on "X-Files", too.

Having seen so many movies, I think I would recognize the signs of supernatural events pretty easily. Having recognized the situation, I would strive to deal with events as they occurred, and worry about explanations later.

I mean, if a bunch of people have turned up drained of blood, and for some reason I'm going INTO the situation instead of OUT of it... it's not going to do any harm to have some garlic and wooden stakes with me, right?

As for what's realistic... I think the movies are probably pretty accurate on that. Most people are very slow to change their preconceptions, and if you ask them to accept what they've already decided is bunk, they're going to resist.

[Master Wang-Ka]

It's been my experience that people believe what they need to believe.

In some cases, they believe this so intensely that we lock them up for their own safety.

In the Jeff Rice novel, "The Kolchak Tapes," that the old "Night Stalker" TV series was based on, Rice addressed this issue very nicely, thank you.

NOBODY believed it. Not even Kolchak. Eventually, the cops and Kolchak develop the idea that the murders are the work of a loony who THINKS he's a vampire.

Kolchak's investigations lead him to the information that the killer is likely one Janos Skorzeny, an Eastern European with an odd and checkered record that, if believed, would make him something like a hundred years old. Even THAT isn't enough to convince Kolchak, much less the cops.

Kolchak does begin to develop doubts, though, after a serious scuffle between Skorzeny and several police officers... in which the medium-sized Skorzeny grabs an officer twice his size, and pitches the cop over a fence like a sack of laundry.

Even then Kolchak does not voice his suspicions. At least, not loudly. He's afraid of being labeled a kook. He does, however, convince the cops that carrying crosses and holy water are a good idea... because we have established as FACT that Skorzeny is insanely dangerous, even barehanded... and if Skorzeny thinks he's a vampire, perhaps the crosses will do some good. The cops grumble, but even they see the logic in it.

The book -- unlike the TV movie -- does not end with Kolchak wandering into the vampire's lair, alone, at night. Kolchak tracks Skorzeny to a rented house, and Kolchak accompanies a substantial force of police officers to the place, where it turns out that crosses and holy water are very much effective (there's a hilarious scene involving Skorzeny and his coffin, which Kolchak has found earlier, and poured about a pint of holy water into. When Skorzeny tries to hide in the thing, he winds up erupting out of the coffin, screaming and hissing and "acting like he'd been shot in the can with buckshot," as Kolchak puts it.

Only when Skorzeny has been run to ground do we discover that the chief of police is also convinced. He pressures Kolchak into driving a stake through Skorzeny's heart... then arranges for Skorzeny to be cremated... and offers Kolchak a choice: keep your mouth shut, and preferably leave town... or face charges of murder.

I wish the book was still in print. It wasn't what I'd call a great novel, but it dealt with the issue of "belief in the supernatural in today's world" better than any other book I've ever read.

[hroeder]

When do you accept that there are vampires around you, that you're back in time, or..

Every morning when I get up.

[vibrotronica]

This thread reminded me of the stupidest line in Star Trek history. In the episode "Remember Me" (http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/st-tng/episodes/179.html), Beverly Crusher says "Well, if there's nothing wrong with me, there must be something wrong with the Universe!"

[Baldwin]

It would take some serious evidence to make me believe in any of that stuff. Ockham's razor hasn't lost any of its edge over the past seven centuries.

Of course, in tv shows like "Kolchak" or "The X-Files", you can hardly turn around without running into convincing evidence.

In L. Sprague de Camp's classic time-travel novel Lest Darkness Fall, the protagonist is cast back to fifth-century Rome, and only reluctantly accepts the fact, on the basis of overwhelming evidence. Then, being a de Camp protagonist, he gets right down to business.

[Balance]

The best anyone can do is to reason and act on the evidence of their senses. If presented with evidence consistent with time-travel, vampirism, or any other such phenomenon, I would include it as a working theory (along with more likely theories, such as elaborate hoaxes or delusional killers). Thus, presented with a body drained entirely of blood with only two small wounds on the neck, I would make a point of acquiring certain traditional anti-vampire items--they could be useful against either a real vampire or a killer with vampiric delusions. I would not, however, go around indiscriminately pegging hapless goths to the ground without further evidence. Likewise, with a time-travel scenario, I would begin looking for the mechanism behind the phenomenon, while also looking for evidence of a hoax. More simply put, I would not be convinced until I had irrefutable evidence, but I would operate on the assumption that matters could be as they appeared from the beginning. There is little to be gained in a crisis by assuming that your senses are deceiving you.

As for fictional characters--it will vary with the character. A normally superstitious character might believe immediately, if the situation fits his superstitions, while a hard-headed businesswoman (for example) might resist the idea of anything so far removed from her practical, orderly world past the point of reason. An intelligent, competent biologist might fall between the two, analyzing the new evidence and discarding hypotheses until only the extraordinary answer remains. Proper characterization can either be done beforehand to explain the character's response to the situation, or developed by using the character's reactions to the extraordinary to establish his patterns of thought.

[Zebra]

"When do'?

How about When did?

[moriah]

Hey, epistemological skeptics are presented with overwhelming evidence that things exists every friggin' moment of their lives, and they still have doubts.

Peace.
------------
I zee nuthingk, I know nuthingk.

[lurker anonymous]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Vlad Dracul
I always wondered that about Scully on "X-Files", too.

Having seen so many movies, I think I would recognize the signs of supernatural events pretty easily. [QUOTE]
:D
"I saw the movie and I read the book...
when it finally happened to me I sure was glad I had what it took"
Neil Young
just giving you a hard time there...:D

[The Tooth]

"Let's split up."

Uh oh.

[El Elvis Rojo]

I asked a similar question like this a while back...what would happen if a small army of skeleton warriors started killing people in your town, how long would it take officials to believe it?

Again, it all came down to proof, and even then, it's not something that many people will believe right off the bat. Supernatural stuff just doesn't mesh with our brains, and we'll try any kind of "logic" to help show us that "It's just some guy(s) in a good costume". Basically, until you're cornered by the thing, you won't believe it's real.

As for time travel, I have a feeling that's a lot different. If suddenly, I ended up in 11th Century England, I don't think it'd take that long for me to realize I was out of place. I'm sorry, I just don't know that many people who could set up a hoax like that. So, after initial shock set in, I don't think it would take too long to accept that fact and start trying to understand "How'd I get here and how can I get back?" There's just way too much substancial evidence to help show you're in a different time, whereas with zombies, vampires, and most other supernatural stuff, good makeup, costumes, and a loose grip on reality are all very easy to come by, thus making spooks a bit harder to believe.

[Homebrew]

"Supernatural stuff just doesn't mesh with our brains,..."

Then how do you explain the number of churches in every town in the U.S.?

[NE Texan]

Originally posted by Vlad Dracul
it's not going to do any harm to have some garlic and wooden stakes with me, right?
Well, normally I would agree, but for you, Vlad... it might do you harm. ;)

[Chronos]

It would depend on the set-up. If, for instance, I were conducting some sort of elaborate fundamental-physics experiment, or even a time-travel experiment, I would be a lot more open to to the possibility that I had time-jumped than if I just walked around the horses and suddenly the world was different. It would also depend on the sort of evidence I was confronted with: Some stuff simply cannot be hoaxed. If the Moon was waxing gibbous last night when I went to bed, and it's crescent now, then something weird sure as heck happened. Likewise, if the modern city I'm in suddenly turns into an old-growth forest (with the same geography and topography, and no light pollution on the horizon), well, that wasn't the work of a few hoaxers.

But to echo a few other folks, you don't need to know exactly what the situation is to be able to act intelligently. If I'm being attacked by... something..., and I've got a gun, I'm going to try to shoot it. If that doesn't work, then I might try clubbing it with a crowbar. And if the crowbar works but the gun doesn't, I'm not going to care much that it worked because wrought iron is anathema to fey, I'm just going to make sure to use the crowbar first against the next one of those things I meet.

Of course, it's important to keep in mind that if "supernatural" things exist, they're under no obligation to follow the "rules" set out for them in fiction. Trying to classify the beasties as "vampires" or "werewolves" or whatnot might actually be a disadvantage, rather than just classifying them as "thing that survived a lead bullet but not a silver one, last time I fought one".

[Shortie]

Originally posted by Chronos
Of course, it's important to keep in mind that if "supernatural" things exist, they're under no obligation to follow the "rules" set out for them in fiction. Trying to classify the beasties as "vampires" or "werewolves" or whatnot might actually be a disadvantage, rather than just classifying them as "thing that survived a lead bullet but not a silver one, last time I fought one".
Or, of course, "thing that survived one bullet but not two". Few things as irritating as people in monster movies failing to repeat a tactic that either only just failed, or slowed the bad thing down \ hurt it noticably. Anyway, also see Cecil's guidelines on vampire killing, there are dozens, and almost all are quite different from today's pop-culture ones (sunlight insta-killing them wasn't even in Stoker, let alone earlier stuff).

I was thinking about this the other day, after reading the thread about how you'd react if you received a Hogwarts letter, and I'd go for a few casual violations of the laws of physics, which is pretty standard (reversal of entropy, violaion of C of E, etc). Even if there's nothing that couldn't possibly be faked today then I could still be convinced, unless there's a really good reason for anyone to bother messing with my head.

[Dr. Rieux]

Originally posted by The Tooth
"Let's split up."

Uh oh. "Good idea--we can cause more damage that way."

[Lumpy]

My 2¢

1. If I saw a Tyrannosaurus walking down the street, I would call 911 and report an intruder trying to break into my house. That would be a lot more likely to get a patrol car to respond than trying to convince the dispatcher that a dinosaur was outside. Although I could say "either there's a tyrannosaurus outside, or else I'm hallucinating like a s.o.b. Either way I think you should send someone."

2. Has anyone ever pulled a Scare Tactics type hoax where an elaborate effort was made to convince someone that something paranormal had happened? Maybe as a psychology experiment?

[RikWriter]

Originally posted by Lumpy
My 2¢

1. If I saw a Tyrannosaurus walking down the street, I would call 911 and report an intruder trying to break into my house. That would be a lot more likely to get a patrol car to respond than trying to convince the dispatcher that a dinosaur was outside. Although I could say "either there's a tyrannosaurus outside, or else I'm hallucinating like a s.o.b. Either way I think you should send someone."


Hmmm...maybe the best thing to do would be to say "There's two guys with rifles firing at people in the street." That would bring lots of cops, heavily armed, as opposed to the perhaps two patrol cars that would respond to an intruder.

[shy guy]

Time travel is kind of iffy. I'd probably accept time travel into the distant past fairly readily. But if I got transported back to like, 1993 or something, there's no telling how long it would take me to notice let alone accept it.

[levdrakon]

For monsters it would take awhile to convince me it wasn't a crazy person/elaborate costume. I probably wouldn't believe I was the only one noticing vampires etc. It would have to make the news wouldn't it?

For time travel I'd question my own sanity before accepting it was real. At least until it became evident that I knew things that haven't happened yet and then they come to pass and people around me witness & independently confirm that maybe I am from the future.

My knowledge of history isn't that great though & if I went very far back I might not be able to predict anything that would happen in my lifetime. In that case maybe I could demonstrate some scientific knowledge & convince myself I'm not nuts. I might succumb to paranoia though, thinking it's all a vast conspiracy to drive me insane. Is that ironic?

One thing that is to me somewhat plausible or possible would be being abducted by aliens. That doesn't involve time travel or mythical monsters. To my mind it could happen just like I could win the lotto tomorrow. Not likely, but possible. Hopefully the aliens would be nice enough to show me the earth at least once more before taking me back to the "home planet" or wherever. Otherwise I might still question my own sanity. I'd be thinking, "this is either a really weird loooong dream or I'm nuts." Eventually I guess I'd figure this bizarre situation isn't going away so nuts or not, might as well make the best of it. I've wondered what I would do if I were someone like John Crichton in Farscape (minus the wormhole part). Would I accept that as reality as quickly as he did?

[Dung Beetle]

I start hoping for the supernatural explanation right off. Unfortunately, it always falls through.:(

(goes off to inspect the back wall of the wardrobe)

[BwanaBob]

Originally posted by Lumpy
My 2¢
Has anyone ever pulled a Scare Tactics type hoax where an elaborate effort was made to convince someone that something paranormal had happened? Maybe as a psychology experiment?

I remember some years back a show like Scare Tactics where they set this woman up. Her boyfriend drives her out to some secluded area and his car stops working. Lights and noise are produced off-road to simulate a spacecraft landing. A professionally made-up alien comes out of the bushes brandishing a weapon and yells at them in an alien language. I think the guy runs off and the woman is on the verge of a coronary, screaming bloody murder!

Then of course the floodlights are lit and all have a good laugh.

I would have shot the prick for setting me up like that.

Anyway, she sure was convinced the "supernatural" was happening.

[Diceman]

I would have shot the prick for setting me up like that.And if I was on your jury, I would vote to acquit.

For something like a werewolf or alien or some other kind of "monster," I probably wouldn't believe it until a series of reputable doctors had examined the corpse and concluded that the thing in question was not human.

[Diceman]

My lunch break ended before I could finsh my post. I hate it when that happens.

If I suddenly time travelled to, say, the 19th Century, I think that I would realize it pretty quickly. The evidence would be overwhelming. A hoax would end up looking like a movie or a historical re-enactment. The fact that I could go anywhere and see nothing anachronistic or erroneous would be pretty hard to dismiss.

[acrossthesea]

If something happened in real life where someone told me "I've just seen a vampire" (alien, monster, time travel, we're all dead, we live in the matrix, etc) I'd believe them to some extent from that alone because there is so much unproven in our world and anything could be possible.

In movies it always seems to happen when the character or characters find themselves face to face with the thing itself.

[Charger]

Several years ago, I was planning a Halloween party with a girlfriend of mine. We discussed different pranks including one where we try to convince all of our friends that her and I switched bodies. It seemed funny at first, then we realized no one would ever believe us, no matter what. Then we realized that if we really did switch bodies, no one would ever believe us. Which makes one wonder, how often in history have two people switched bodies and ultimately learned that it's not worth trying to convince anyone, and to just dealt with their new lives.

[Chronos]

Some more thoughts on time travel... If I brought any sort of technology with me (that is to say, I'm not stark naked), and I travelled into the past, then I could get pretty good evidence from the reactions of other people to my technology. I mean, is anyone in our world going to pay you a month's wages for a ballpoint pen or a wristwatch? Travelling into the future, I'd find the nearest major university, and ask around at the physics and math departments about recent developments.

What's more interesting is the question of how to convince everyone else that you're from the future/past. I once had a (surprisingly vivid) dream that, due to an experiment gone awry, I was transported to my mom's hometown, 1945. I first went to Gramma and Granpap's house, because I knew that even without recognizing me, they're hospitable folks, but my next step after that was going to be hitchhiking to Los Alamos, where I'd have the best chance of finding someone who could understand what'd happened. But once there, I'm not sure how I would have proceeded, and I woke up a good bit before that... So, how do you convince the locals that you're from the future, assuming a shoddy knowledge of history? Or even harder, what if you travel the other way?

[Curate]

I think Stephen King had a useful way of dealing with the belief problem in "salem's Lot" when he made the first true believer a young person who hadn't yet developed adult attitudes about reality.

In their version of the "Inferno" Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle transported a science fiction writer to Hell. It's unclear to me now as I try to recall the details 20 years later, but I believe that character coped by telling himself that he was in some future society's version of a Hell-themed amusement park. From a practical standpoint, if what he was experiencing wasn't real, it called for the same reactions from him as if it were.

[TigoleBitties]

I believe the best example I have seen is a short story Stephen King wrote for "The Book of the Dead" - a series of short stories based around What if Night of the Living Dead came true and zombies roamed the earth.

In it, a woman living on a island off the coast of Maine (where else?) tells of the how society begins to hear small reports of stuff and believe it to be more cult like. Magazines report it...Time does its first ever "bagged" version to keep kids from seeing it, but the general consesus is it is a virus with living people going insane and eating people. Some believe it to be from a outer space 'thing' sitting up above the earth and so on..


The big change...the one that gets a lot of people believing... happens when it hits the National Wire and Tom Brokaw does his thing on national TV. The story describes Tom instructing parents to make their kids leave the room, then shows a 3 minute interval of scenes of carnage from a remote news crew filming obvious dead people, who then themselves get lunched up by an oncoming throng of zombs on National TV.

Personally, I think society would deny anything until it went and bit them on the ass UNTIL Television said something about it. And even then, some would go about going bananas by trying to give it a logical reason (hey I know...a million people decided to dress up like the living dead and murder people...yea haha nice joke).

Me personally, I am opt to believe anything...there is a lot we dont know bout this world.

[Gunslinger]

Originally posted by Bricker

You're walking down the street and all you see are 1950's-era cars, fashions, and newspaper dates, but "Is this a joke? Why doesn't my cell phone work?"

If I had my camera (http://3weasel.20m.com/images/PHOTOG1.jpg) with me, I'd take a picture of somebody with the flash. If they just cursed at me instead of cursing and then asking "What the hell is that thing?", I'd accept it and go to the nearest newspaper and apply for a job. :D

[joshmaker]

I like the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer handled this question:

Xander: Yep. Vampires are real. A lot of them live in Sunnydale. Willow will fill you in.
Willow: I know it's hard to accept at first...
Oz: Actually, it explains a lot.

Personally, I don't know what would convince me. After all the odds that vampires and such are real is a lot less than the odds that I have gone crazy and started to hallucinate.

[delphica]

One thing that often happens in movies is that two characters burn a lot of time doing a "yes it is!/no it isn't!" thing in these situations. The person who has seen a vampire announces "it was a vampire!" and the person who didn't see it comes back with "that's impossible!"

I would like to think that in this situation, especially if the other person was someone whom I already knew, I would invest the 10 minutes or so to have a normal conversation. If I was the vampire-sighter, I would start off with "I saw something that seems nearly impossible, but here is what I saw, and this is what it led me to believe, for these reasons." Likewise, if I was the other person, I would try to ask some questions and figure out if there were other possibilities and at least be accepting that something unusual was going on even if I didn't specifically believe it was a vampire persay.

On the time travel side of things, and getting people to believe you were from the future/past -- I think I might try to seek out some crazy conspiracy people. Well, maybe not the crazy ones. I think once I had accepted the fact that I had gone back/forward in time, I might feel that since I had done something that I previously thought impossible, that I should be open to the possibility that people who already believed in it were perhaps not so looney after all. Or, even if they turned out to be looney and happened upon a belief in time travel coincidentally, at least they wouldn't try to send me to a mental institution.

[Ranchoth]

What would convince me?

Lets say, I'm in walking in the park, and I'm attacked by a zombie. Assuming that I survived, and managed to escape, what would convince me that it was supernatural?

As others have said, I would, reasonably, assume at first that it was someone dressed up in a zombie costume, either playing a prank on me, or actually trying to murder me. The only thing that might start me thinking otherwise would be if there was something very obviously "inhuman" about the zombie. (Like if it didn't have a head; or if it was just a skeleton; or if it had been visibly walking, but ended up being broken in half and didn't "die."

In any case, having witnesses to the attack other than myself would help. And preferably, photographic or video evidence as well.

But what would be the REAL clincher? What would convince me, if the attack had happened to someone else?

The zombie itself. Captured alive (or "un-alive").

If they were able to catch the thing (Maybe using those "rabies snare" thingies?), if an in-the-flesh zombie was brought forth, in chains, to a press conference, then I'd believe it.

But of course, for anything but an undead creature (Like an alien, or a werewolf, a Yeti, etc.) a corpse would suffice. Preferably still warm.

But time travel? Nothing. Nothing would convince me that I wasn't just insane.

[Ranchoth]

Originally posted by El Elvis Rojo
I asked a similar question like this a while back...what would happen if a small army of skeleton warriors started killing people in your town, how long would it take officials to believe it?


Elvis Rojo, I just have to ask...when did you post that question? I'm really sorry I missed it.

[Triskadecamus]

Here's a time travel scenario, where the problem is exacerbated by a complete lack of objective evidence.

You wake up one morning. You are eighteen. The thing is, though, you remember being fifty seven, yesterday. You remember your life with about normal detail, and you seem to be in the right place for you, at eighteen. You look in the mirror. You look like you remember yourself looking at eighteen. Scars you got later in life, and grey hair, and bad teeth are all gone. The only thing that made the trip is your mind.

Or did it? Are you actually a deluded eighteen year old, who "remembers" a fictitious thirty nine years of life that has not happened? Are you going to try to change a history that is the only thing that makes you not deluded? How long before your already hazy memories of the next two or three years get overwhelmed by the accumulation of new memories of the next two years?

Are you really going to remember to buy Apple? Is it going to be as good as you remember it was?

Are you going to try to convince anyone?

What about the delicate balances you might overturn? Tell someone about the Cuban Missile crisis? What if it comes out differently? Save Kennedy? What if stopping Oswald doesn't work?

How are you going to convince anyone of anything, without getting yourself committed, or worse, jailed. Talk about guilty knowledge!

Oh, and if you are eighteen, think about waking up "knowing" all this. You know about things that right now, you don't think have happened. You know the date of the World Liquidity Crisis. You know exactly when the Long Island Sound tidal wave will hit. You know the next triple crown winner. But telling everyone that there were sixty bank CEO's involved in a scandal that caused a world wide market crash won't work, if you don't have some sort of evidence.

Who do you tell, and how much do you tell? If you do convince someone at the FBI that you know about everything that will happen for the next fifty years (because you have a great memory and worked at the New York Times for forty of those years) just where do you suppose you will spend those forty years, this time?

Or, do you doubt even your own memory, until real events start to prove you right? What if little Mary doesn't react the same this time? Maybe your memory was wrong, or maybe your maturity and emotional strength were a lot more appealing to her than you managed to be last time. So, do you dump Mary, and wait for Susie, since you married Susie last time? If you don't, those children you loved so much will never be born. So maybe it was all a dream.

And maybe it was a guy on the knoll who shot Kennedy, until some punk kid in texas rammed his car with a pickup truck, early on the morning of November 22, 1963. But Oswald was there too.

Tris

[Lumpy]

Triskadecamus, your scenerio was the basic plot of Peggy Sue got married, although that was done as a comedy. It's also the theme of any number of stories along the lines of "what if I had my life to live over again?".

It would depend on a lot of things. First, would history even repeat itself a second time, or are too many events dependent on random factors to ever happen again? Are you in a position to do anything with your foreknowledge of the future? And given your personality, would you end up making the same mistakes you made originally?

[Pushkin]

Originally posted by Lumpy
It would depend on a lot of things. First, would history even repeat itself a second time, or are too many events dependent on random factors to ever happen again?

Have you not watched Red Dwarf? The Kennedy assassination is a whole tin of worms, especially if you do actually want it to work :D

Originally posted by Lumpy
Are you in a position to do anything with your foreknowledge of the future? And given your personality, would you end up making the same mistakes you made originally?

A hellish scenario for me. So much of what I've done and more importantly the people I've met have been through mistakes or erroneous behaviour on my behalf. If I had to repeat it again I don't think I could.

If I did get thrown into the past I wouldn't want to upset the boat too much either. I get along ok in this world, not too far into the past I could get along but if I changed the world by upsetting one small event I'd have to learn to live in the same world with a whole new set of rules. Not nice. I'd try to use my knowledge of the past to know where to avoid, what to invest in etc to make things as comfortable as possible.

[C K Dexter Haven]

There's a more serious side to this discussion, which Alfred Hitchcock has used on occasion.

The first, along the sci-fi lines, is in THE BIRDS, where officialdom doesn't believe the birds are attacking. It's not as far-fetched as zombies and vampires, and most people don't believe it until they themselves witness an attack (and even then, it's not clear that some of them believe it.)

The second, far more subtle and more serious, occurs in Hitchcock's early film, THE LADY VANISHES. The scenario is that a train has been side-tracked (literally) and surrounded by murderous spies (this is before WWII). One of the characters doesn't believe it, and says something like, "It's all just some sort of misunderstanding." He fashions a white flag and walks out of the train, and is shot. The others then believe.

Hitchcock used that kind of gimmick a lot. Cary Grant's character in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, for instance, finds himself in abnormal circumstances (abducted from his club in broad daylight by bad guys who have confused him with someone else.) He can't convince the cops OR his mother that it really happened.

So, it's not just a plot device for supernatural or sci-fi films. During and after the Holocaust, it was a grim reality: people didn't believe that the Nazis could be so murderously cruel. Some Holocaust deniers still don't believe it, despite overwhelming evidence.

Similarly, some people don't believe that the astronauts landed on the moon, despite overwhelming evidence.

Pick your example, they're all around us. People don't want to accept things that are contrary to their inner sense of the way they think the universe should behave.

[Bricker]

Triskadecamus:

There was a book that explored this exact time-travel/rebirth variant; the protagonist lives dozens of "life-variants," suffering a heart attack in his fifties and "waking up" as a teenager. He does the get-rich-because-I-know thing, the duplicate-my-former-life thing, and along the way discovers other people also reliving. As I recall, in one cycle he discovers another such person when she unites George Lucas and Steven Spielberg before either of them hit it big as she produces a "dolphins are intelligent beings from another planet" SF blockbuster. I also remember them trying to find others by placing ads in papers in 1970 saying things like, "If you remember Hinckley shooting Brady and others, if you remember hostages in Iran, call 800-xxxxx."

I wish I remembered the name of the book.....

[jjimm]

When I was a really irresponsible teenage idiot, a friend and I told his sister there was an escaped madman on the loose. Then we told her we were going out. He didn't actually leave the house - he hid and made spooky noises. Meanwhile I got a knife and covered it in ketchup, which I then tapped on the living room window.

She was certainly convinced that there was a psycho coming to get her.

Needless to say she didn't speak to me for a year, her brother and I were grounded for two months, and I had to write a letter of apology to her and to her mother. :smack:

[MEBuckner]

I wish I remembered the name of the book.....
Replay (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/068816112X/qid=1061733956/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-3001454-8413535), by Ken Grimwood.

[Vlad Dracul]

I'm a bit surprised at the number of people who would sooner believe in their own insanity than in a paranormal situation. That decision doesn't SOLVE anything!

Consider: if you look around, realize that all available sensory input confirms that you're 18 again, and then decide "Okay, I'm seriously insane." What do you do then?

Even if you believe none of it is actually happening, you still get hungry and sleepy and horny, injuries still hurt, being laughed at is still embarrassing, spending all your time hanging around the asylum in your bathrobe is still boring as heck.... :)

[Chronos]

But time travel? Nothing. Nothing would convince me that I wasn't just insane.Never work under the assumption that you're incurably insane. Not because it can't be true: It can be. Rather because such an assumption is useless. If you're willing to accept that level of insanity, then you might as well consider everything before the weird event (whatever it was) to be hallucination, as well or instead. And if your delusion is so detailed that not only can you remember life in the 20th century, but you can delude yourself into thinking that you can reproduce useful technology from the 20th century, then go ahead, have some deluded fun.

[Ranchoth]

Who said I wouldn't? I'd just do it, secure in the "knowledge" that I was actually tied to a bed in an asylum somewhere. (But at first, I'd probably worry that I was actually out wandering the streets somewhere, putting myself and others in danger)

Come to think of it, that would probably result in my taking insane risks with my life...because, after all, if everything's a delusion, then either I couldn't die, or I'd be better off dead anyway.

[Fornit]

Everyone would've believed if it wasn't for those pesky kids and their stupid dog!!

[MiamiHurricane]

Originally posted by Ranchoth
But time travel? Nothing. Nothing would convince me that I wasn't just insane.As I understand it, Ranchoth could be presented with evidence sufficient to convince him or her of the existence of zombies, yetis, etc., but not time travel. That seems odd to me. While I've never had any credible observation of any "unnatural" beings such as extraterrestrials, "undead", or yetis, I have experienced time travel. We are all doing it right now, so at least the concept isn't totally outside of my experience.

I guess I'd be more likely to be convinced that I had jumped forward in time than that a vampire was lurking in the abandoned house on the hill. I've traveled forward in time before. OTOH, traveling backwards in time is another kettle of fish altogether...

[Bricker]

Originally posted by MEBuckner
Replay (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/068816112X/qid=1061733956/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-3001454-8413535), by Ken Grimwood.

Bingo! Thanks much.

[Ranchoth]

Originally posted by MiamiHurricane
As I understand it, Ranchoth could be presented with evidence sufficient to convince him or her of the existence of zombies, yetis, etc., but not time travel. That seems odd to me.

That'd be "he," BTW. Thanks. ;)

And the reason that a zombie or a Yeti would be more believable to me than time travel? Well...

A fantastic creature would be just that: a creature. Even if it was undead, it wouldn't necessarily shake one's entire world view, like suddenly arriving in another time period would.

Unless I was the only one who saw it, of course. Then I'd just think I had suffered a bout of insanity.

I guess it all comes down to outside corroboration...I suppose if I was swept into another time with a large group of other people, or if the people I met in the past actually believed that I had traveled time, I'd be a little more "open" towards accepting the time-travel possibility.

...or, like Chronos said, if I'd been working with a high-energy particle accelerator (or the like) moments before being swept back in time, that'd probably help to convince me, too.

[Chronos]

I guess I'd be more likely to be convinced that I had jumped forward in time than that a vampire was lurking in the abandoned house on the hill. I've traveled forward in time before. OTOH, traveling backwards in time is another kettle of fish altogether...A distinction I should have made. When I refer to "time travel", unless specified otherwise, I mean into the past. There are a lot of plausible ways to explain a jump forward: You fell into a coma, you got "frozen" somehow (literally or otherwise), you went through it normally but lost part of your intervening memory, etc. Given any evidence that I had gone forward, I would very easily latch onto such an explanation. Going back, though, would be a mojo big deal, no matter how you slice it.