I’m talking about stuff that made you, the informed skeptic, wonder if there really is something to them, and they are as of yet not disproven- NOT CREEPY OR EVEN LIFE-CHANGING THINGS YOU SAW OR EXPERIENCED OR HEARD (not that those aren’t cool and that I don’t believe you, but I want to hear about **things that I can read about and examine from academic perspectives and such, not personal stories ;)). **
Like, for instance, there’s this guy named Prophet Yahweh (legally changed his name to that- used to be Ramon Watkins), who resides in Las Vegas and claims to have the ability to summon UFOs using passages from the Bible. He says that he developed this ability after studying the Old Testament in its original Hebrew form and gaining knowledge related to UFOs from his studies. See this video of how he seemingly summoned a spaceship for the Las Vegas news reporter.
Are you wowwed? Don’t be too hasty- he prophesied that he was going to cause spaceships to come down and hover over Las Vegas over a period of 45 days last summer, but a few days after the period when his prophecy was supposed to happen, he announced that he was going to begin a 50 State UFO Summoning Tour 2005, during which he would travel to every state in the United States and summon UFOs for media outlets to film and photograph. He claimed to have been abandoned by all of the media in Las Vegas, resulting in the UFOs not coming during the 45 days he had prophesied.
The same year he started all this was the year he had developed an interest in weather balloons. That’s one explanation. Anyways, he’s going up for the James Randi challenge at the end of January!
So what all do you have to share? I’m expecting a lot of responses- Dopers are, after all, investigators of a broad range of things, especially strange and mysterious- and I will bookmark them to for future investigation.
Well, there are plenty of mysteries left in the natural world.
For instance, how do pigeons navigate home, even when their home has been moved? How do eels and salmon find the way back from Sargasso Sea to the little rivers in Norway where they were born? How come every generations learns how to type faster then the previous?
Check out http://www.sheldrake.org/intro/ for instance. I think Sheldrake researches just what you are looking for in your OP, mysteries of the world like the ones mentioned above. FWIW: many people on this board say Sheldrake’s a quack and has been debunked.
They can’t, can they? I’ve always been told that you couldn’t have a homing pigeon’s home be on, say, a boat or something, 'cause the bird would just return to where the boat used to be.
Priceguy, on his site Sheldrake describes some experiments with homing pigeons, that investigated just that: pigeons homing to mobile lofts.
In his book (but nog on the site) Sheldrake gives anecdotes of pigeons finding homes and persons that had moved hundreds of miles in random direction.
On the site, he gives just a few anecdotes, eliminates obvious alternative explanations (memory, polarized light, magnetic fields etc) and proposes experiments on how to test his own hypothesis, “morfological fields”.
If he’s a quack, then I gotta say he’s an interesting quack.
Cool stuff guys, but is that it? Just stuff about the natural world? The Dope is for us geeks, and we geeks get into the X-files, unsolved paranormal mystery type crap all the time w/ the books and the comics and the websites and stuff… I mean, I know none of you are the Lone Gunmen and actually deal with unsolved mysteries of the universe for a living or something :rolleyes:, I 'm talking about stuff you read about and the mystery still isn’t solved; even Cecil can’t debunk it (but PLEASE don’t talk about something Cecil’s written on, assume I’m gonna read all those cause I am ;)), and avoid obvious topics like the holy grail or shroud of turin or Roswell (Cecil did those, anyways), but more obscure wierd stuff you’ve read about or been to sites about.
Okay, I’ve got another mystery to share w/ you that I actually remember and that counts as actually contributing so this doesn’t count as an illegal bump, mkay?
At my school, at the end of my Junior year of high school (in 2002) we had a problem called Big Boy in the mens bathroom in one hallway, a mysterious fellow who could apparently crap a piece of feces as big as… well… here, here’s an attempt at recreating it’s size in a drawing :D. It really was that big- and that flat at the ends, leading us to believe that no human anus could have produced it (a human anus would make something more tapered…); maybe this was someone’s perverted art project. But the color of the whole thing was so well blended and all, and it was so well done, that I’m convinced that it was a huge, unbelievably big, light brown hunk of human feces.
And it’s a mystery to me to this day (as I’m sure it will be to everyone who attended the school) as to who could have squeezed something like that out…
So anyways, ANYONE HAVE ANYTHING ELSE TO ADD? THIS IS PATHETIC GUYS THIS WHOLE SITE IS ABOUT COOL STUFF LIKE THIS. FERCHRISSAKES. LAST CHANCE.
Well, OK, if you insist. This is pretty mundane stuff, but I think I made a mistake in not going out and buying a lottery ticket that day.
My wife got this recipe from a friend for some kick-ass cookies. On our usual evening talk, she tells me about it, and then mentions the flour. It is a whole-wheat type of flour. She says, “Guess where it is from?”
Of course, there is not freaking WAY to guess where the flour is obtained. I make one logical assumption, which is it ain’t something you’re gonna find in a USA grocery store. So I think of all kinds of countries, and just pick Egypt for giggles & grins.
Dead silence on the line.
Dang, it was from Egypt!
Like I warned you, pretty mundane, but even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while.
If you haven’t yet heard of the Toynbee Tiles, here is a good introduction, complete with several links that will help you to delve ever-further into the mystery.
This was a very special and very strange moment, and I must share…
This summer, I was at the Walker Art Institute (in Minneapolis.) They had an art exhibit that consisted of a virtual dolphin on a screen. If you typed in a question on a keyboard, it would answer you. (Case-based reasoning software, I think…) Some of the answers were just random and odd, but a lot were very interesting. Nobody who was typing the questions identified themselves in any way, obviously. Well, there I was, typing away, and the dolphin suddenly said, “Your name is Kathy, seeker.” !!! Yep, you know what the end of this story is… that’s my name. I was rather freaked out and went into another room to look at some other art. The second I came back into the room, the dolphin (which was answering my friend’s questions) suddenly said the same thing.
!!!
I really can’t think of any logical explanation for this. We were there for at least an hour, and didn’t see the dolphin address anybody else by name. And I don’t see any way it could have gotten my name anyway. The conclusion…
???
In 1969 while flying a 1965 260 HP Piper Comanche at 9,500 feet on a heading of about 160 degrees magnetic in Eastern Oklahoma at 165 MPH indicated airspeed, I was passed in level flight by a duck that was also in level flight about 50 feet off my right wing tip. Three of us were in the plane and we all saw it.
OK, so in college, my senior year, several friends and I are sitting around just talking, half watching a movie, and we get to talking about various internet flash videos we have seen. Anyways at the exact same time, a friend and I both yell at the top of our lungfs:
“You got a lobster and you got a magnet!”
You see, this was a line from a flash video we all enjoyed our freshman year. It was about…well…a lobster and a magnet, and was set to a catchy tune. It was just so random, that of all the crazy internet videos out there, we both chose to yell out that exact phrase from that exact one.
