As a kid, I always was absolutely fascinated by the supernatural, and I read tons of books about ghosts, UFOs, etc. I’m a pretty rational person so realizing that most of that stuff is bunk was pretty disappointing. What I’m looking for is examples of things that seem pretty ‘out there’ but are actually within the realm of possibility.
Example: I always thought lucid dreaming was a pretty crazy fringe thing, and I thought it was pretty cool to find out that it’s fairly commonly attested to and somewhat rationally explainable (i.e., maybe scientists don’t exactly know why it happens, but it works within our scientific notions of the world and doesn’t fall into “you just have to believe” territory").
Things that empirically happen but are attributed to irrational causes can be put in this thread too. For example, if millions of people are waking up with scars on their leg and are convinced it was the Giant Pink Toothy Icelandic Rabbit, clearly that explanation (probably) cannot be true but the fact that the phenomenon actually occurred interests me.
Ball lightning hasn’t been conclusively shown to exist but it is way ahead of ghosts and UFO’s. Groups of reliable witnesses have reported seeing it up close. Here is Cecil’s take on it.
Maybe this is in the category of “cool phenomena I didn’t even know existed until I learned about it.” In this case, it was in a physics class, where I learned about Heiligenschein.
There are many times when I am out walking on a dewy morning, experience this phenomenon, and think, “Damn! That is so cool!”
The Toynbee plaques are something that we attempted to cover in GQ once and didn’t get very far despite much effort. They are these plaques made of a strange substance that have just appeared as embedded objects in the streets of many U.S. and world cities. No one has ever reported how they got there. They often reference Stanley Kubrick and the planet Jupiter. I am sure that they are of earthly origin but still very strange.
Some nutjob is undoubtedly hand-cutting these out of the kind of rubber mats we used to play with in preschool, the brightly colored ones with shapes, letters, and numbers cut out.
The first time I saw a large scale bioluminescent tide in Santa Monica, I was pretty geeked out.
It takes your brain a minute to determine whether or not there’s a strange alien craft hidden just beneath the water, waiting to lunge forward and… okay, not really.
Scintillating scotoma and other migraine aura symptoms are pretty out there. If someone told me that I’d be audience to my own visual fireworks show with temporary vision loss I’d have thought I was going crazy. That is, until I went partially blind and got to see all the pretty shimmery stuff for myself.
Some other seemingly-crazy migraine aura symptoms include:
Auditory hallucinations
Olfactory hallucinations
Visual hallucinations
Numbness or tingling
‘Alice in Wonderland’ syndrome (feeling physically very small or very large in proportion to your environment)
Aphasia
A more complete list of migraine aura symptoms and information can be found here.
One of those locations that have the lights was studied by a professor a couple years ago, and I’ve heard nothing since. He stated that the lights occured on rare ocassions, but when the area was viewed in infrared, lines could be seen to converge and form balls. The balls sometimes became visable to the human spectrum of sight. The lines where likely magnetic lines of force, I don’t remember for sure, and would like to see information on it again.
I love the Toynbee tiles. There are 2 here in Cleveland. When I found out about them a few years ago, I took a few hours to walk around the city and track them down. The one in Tower City is really cool. I hope somebody would have the foresight to save these things and not shred them when it is time to repave.
Also the Tunguska Event kind of freaks me out. I know that we are tracking many NEOs, but in all reality, one could drop by very unexpectedly.
Supernumerary Rainbows
Sundogs
Parhelic Circle
Circumzenith arc
Zodiacal Light
Reflected Rainbows
Lowitz Arcs
Rainbow Pillars
Fogbows
Blue Moons
Orbital Resonance
L4 and L5 Lagrange Points (“Trojan points”)
Water Bells
the Ranque-Hilsch Tube
the Brown Mountain Lights (and they ain’t space ships)
Bishop’s Ring
Haidinger’s Brush
Mach Bands
and a zillion other phenomena you can find in Minnaert’s The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air or Walker’s Flying Circus of Physics or other such sources. If you’re looking for iffy stuff that’s either as-yet-unexplained stuff on the Cutting Edge mixed with Misreporting, Error, and Downright Lying (and you get bonus points for distinguishing the cases), try William R. Corliss’ books and website on unexplained phenomena.
