I used to have a flight simulator that had an auto-land feature, where you would select it and it would land the plane for you. I don’t remember whether I genuinely believed this or if it was just a “what if” thing, but I imagined a bunch of people in some Flight Simulator HQ, sitting around on their computers, and these people were professional pilots. So whenever someone selected the Auto-Land feature, they’d get on their computers and be able to control your airplane and land for you. At the time, it actually seemed much more practical than programming the simulator to land for you.
I believed there was an opaque sphere surrounding the world. The stars were little holes in it, and that’s where rain came from, through the star-holes. The sun was a bigger hole (the moon, however, was about a few blocks across and moved around inside the sphere). This explained why you couldn’t see the stars or the sun when it was raining, because for some reason there was a big sea of water washing over the outside of the sphere, blocking the light. This sphere slowly rotated around the Earth, and sometimes really tall buildings would scratch the inside of the sphere, this was why they were called skyscrapers. I thought airplane contrails were these scratches (once I saw one that happened to appear to end at the point of an antennae on a local building).
My nephew and niece believed that people changed sex and race at certain times in their life.
My sister thought that the saints must be very scary people, because you wanted to be hiding in the lumber when they came marching in.
I used to believe that as soon as you buried a dead animal/pet, it’s body would go up to heaven and only the bones would be left. A few times I did experiments with butterflies and other bugs/etc [the fact that butterflies don’t have bones to begin with, never crossed my 5 yr old mind] by burying them and then digging them up 5 minutes later. Unfortunately most of the victims weren’t exactly dead when I buried them…
Because my mother, myself and all of my siblings have bright blonde hair and bright blue eyes, but my dad has dark brown hair and dark green eyes, I always assumed he was Italian and remember asking my mum this.
I used to believe that thunder was God moving around his furniture up in Heaven and making alot of noise doing so.
My sister used to always scare me when I was younger and we were alone by acting all normal then suddenly turning to me with a distorted face and say “…I’m the deviiiiillll! I’m the DEVIIILLLL!!!” then go back to normal and ask me what was wrong. I actually used to believe that the devil was talking through her and she still does it now. It doesn’t have the same effect as it did so many years ago, but part of me still shivers when she does it.
Raising hands on the Fringe Benefits mixup. I thought the Fringe applied to fringe, like in O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A’s “The Surry with the *fringe * on the top.”
I thought if I took an egg from the fridge and wrapped it in a sock and put it under the couch by the heat register that in a couple of weeks I would have my very own baby chick.
This experiment only happened once.
I saw two dogs stuck together, butt to butt, when I was about 8 and all the mom’s in the neighborhood were in a panic and the dads were throwing water on the dogs to seperate them. To this day, I haven’t a clue of what that was about.
I thought that since electrical wires carried electrical current, which was very very bad and I should never ever touch. That since birds could sit/hold on the wires, they therefore, must be electric birds.
We had an above ground swimming pool surrounded by lotsa trees. It was always cold water swimming. Not fun because none of my friends ever wanted to swim in my pool. Pansies.
Anyways, I was convinced I could warm up the water by taking a tea kettle full of boiling water and just pour it along the edge of the water all around.
My mom said no.
When I was about five, my brother was 12 and naturally a God in my eyes for a short while. He was at boy scout camp and the family came to visit on family day or some such nonsense. I followed him everywhere, much to his embarrassment. Finally, he grabbed a leaf next to the path that he and a friend were just starting out on ( me close behind) and got near me with it saying, " This is poison ivy, back off." I ran away shrieking like a little girl.
It took me until well into my twenties to realize that no idiot would actually grab poison ivy to scare away a pesky 5 year old.
Oh, and I thought hedge hogs were pigs that lived in hedges.
As one of six girls in my family (with no brothers), I was totally unable to believe the things they told us in sex ed class. I knew perfectly well that God would NEVER make anything that looked like the diagrams that were labeled male.
I also knew that:
If I didn’t curl up just the right way in bed, so that I could see the door, the window, and the furnace register at the same time, something would come out of the one(s) I couldn’t see.
If my dad practiced medicine long enough, he would get to be a doctor.
Canada is an island in Lake Erie.
Rabbits lay raisins, and baby rabbits hatch out of them.
My daughter enjoyed this thread so much she asked me to share this little gem:
A girl in one of her high-school classes didn’t know that meat was the muscle of an animal. She believed that there was a special meat organ that you had to remove from the animal after it had been slaughtered. <i>That’s</i> where you get meat.
They do!!! And they are only as unresponsive as you want them to be. If you spend a bit more time understanding their ways, you’ll find them very responsive indeed.
Back to the OP:
people on the transistor radio lived inside it
if I saw a photo of a toy train on the back of a cereal packet, and I cut out the photo, I’d have the toy train and would be able to play with it. My family had a hard time dissuading me from this - I thought they were just being unhelpful.
I believed that it might be possible that my family’s life might be a TV show for some other people, maybe off in a parallell universe.
Like many other posters, I thought I could see Europe at the other side of the ocean.
I once saw a big bush near a friend’s house, growing little pods, and I became convinced that these pods could hatch gremlins, like the ones from the movie.
I believed that the U.S. was the only country where you could be a Christian without being in danger of being executed by the government. Yep, fundamentalist Christian upbringing again.
I beleived that if I dug a hole I would eventually A) Unearth buried treasure from pirates ( forget that I live in Michigan) and B) Find a quick route to China and have my name mentioned in the history books.
As a child, I believed that clouds came from smokestacks. I can remember passing factories spewing dirty smoke into the air and thinking, “It’s going to rain today, look how gray the clouds are.”
When I was three I believed that like a bug, air planes passing overhead would eventually land in my swimming pool. My mother told me that an air plane wouldn’t fit in my kiddie pool. What was she trying to pull? I could see, they were little.
I used to think the reason my throat hurt when I was sad/angry/hurt was because the nurse stuck a tube down it after I was born.
I thought evolution was directed. I remember wondering how long it would take for hippos to become intelligent, because of course, it was only a matter of time.
I remember asking my parents about the moon-following thing too, not because I thought it was, but because it damn well seemed to be, and that was freaky.
I thought moths hatched from mothballs.
I thought I was having a conversation with my cat. I’d talk, he’d meow. I’d talk some more, he’d meow.
This one was very central to me: I believed there were fundamental differences between we humans and other animals. This pretension permeated my every thought and action.
One more: I thought that when a farmer was angry with his cows, he would use a magic wand and turn them into hay bales. See, 'cuz in some fields there are cows in random places, and in other fields there are hay bales in random places, so obviously the two must be connected. Because I never actually saw this occur, that must mean that the farmers did this at night.
I remember being crushed when I learned you didn’t have to be from Chicago to play for the Cubs. I assumed that baseball players played for the team of the city they grew up in.
When I was 4, my then 6 yr old sister convinced me she was born in France.
There used to be a kid’s themepark (imagine a really scaled down Six Flags) in the Chicago area called Kiddieland.(I think there is one left) In any case, my parents would only take my sisters and I there when it was our birthday. So being the brillant children we were, we deducted that you were only allowed to go to KiddieLand if it was your birthday. So whenever we were in the car and we passed our ‘local’ KiddieLand, we would marvel at how many kids had their birthday that day. Mom and Dad bit their lips and never tolds us the truth.
Oddly, we never gave any thought to the fact that our youngest sister, whose birthday is in December, never got to go.