Just the other morning, one of my friends phoned me to tell me she was trapped in her house. She had gotten up, had a cup of coffee, and then gone outside on her front porch for a cigarette. In her driveway was a SWAT team member, suiting up. The SWAT trucks were parked in the street, there were squad cars everywhere - but no sirens. She asked the guy in her driveway what was going on, and he said he was not at liberty to say, but that she should go back in the house. She said she was getting her kids ready for school, and they needed to leave in just about 15 minutes. He told her he didn’t think the kids would be going to school.
So, she’s on the phone with me and wondering aloud what’s going on, and she spotted another neighbor standing in the driveway next door, wearing a bathrobe. She asked the enighbor what was going on, and the neighbor said she didn’t know, but the SWAT team wouldn’t let her husband out of the driveway to go to work.
As they watched, they could see the cops and the SWAT guys swarming over another neighbor’s house, but could not see what was going on. About 20 minutes later, the SWAT guy rang her doorbell and said that everything was under control and she could now take the kids to school. Again, she asked him what was going on and he said he cold not tell her. That was Thursday, and today is Saturday, and she still doesn’t know what was going on. No newspaper stories or news reports from ANYWHERE.
My parents asked me to do a favor for them. This was back when I was still living at their house. A woman was supposed to stop by to pick up a package. My parents had to leave for a bit. Could I keep an eye out in case she showed up while they were gone? Sure, I said. No problem. They showed me the package on the dining room table. It was a flat box, the kind of thing that might contain jewelry.
A couple of hours go by and, sure enough, there’s a knock at the door. There’s a heavyset woman with dark hair standing in the doorway. She tells me that she’s there to pick up a package from my parents. Sure, I say, hang on. I get the box, hand it to her, and she leaves. No big deal.
Now the story gets strange. Later on that day after my parents got home, there comes another knock on the door. A few minutes later my parents call me. They say that the person has arrived to pick up the package, could I please grab it off the table on my way to the living room. Whaddya mean, say I, I gave that box to the lady a couple of hours ago.
I walk into the living room and look at the visitor. With a start I realize that it is not the same woman that had arrived earlier that day. This person was younger, thinner, and blond.
I confusion I walk back to the table. And the package is sitting right there where my parents had shown it to me that morning.
So I have two questions. One, who was the woman who arrived for the package earlier that day, and two, how did it get back into the house?
On a previous incarnation of the SDMB, I remember that someone had recalled hiking out in the boonies of Nevada with their friend once, and run across a compound of seemingly abandoned track of homes, boarded up, surrounded by new barbed-wire fence, and with guard dogs roaming about. But no guard, or any other sign of human life.
What the hell that place was STILL bugs me, leaving me with visions of some X-Files/“The Prisoner” secret low-budget base.
Almost certainly a WWII Japanese internment camp, many in Nevada. Still classified as late as 1998 as a military instalation (go figure) and a favorite target of Urban Spelunkers like myself.
A couple days after my family and I had moved into a new house (I think I was about 13), we heard gun shots coming from the intersection down the street from our house. When I was able to get a good view of the scene (after the emergency crews arrived) I saw a car crashed in the ditch by the side of the road and a bunch of police officers standing around. There didn’t appear to be any witnesses talking to the police or any other plain clothes civilians standing around. I remember watching the ambulance drive off slowly. It was hard for me to sleep at night after that. Never heard a word about it.
When I was in high school, we were sitting around having class like any other day. The normal, productive, learning-enriched kind of class that every public high school has, y’know? Suddenly, we hear the PA crackle on and the principal’s voice booms out of the speaker, “The fire has been contained. It was small.” And that was it. WTF? Everybody just kind of sat there in stunned silence looking at each other. I never found out what all that was about.
I have read several books about the high Artic, and many authors have mentioned that there was a HUGE military hospital, in Northern Greenland, near Thule. Supposedly, men too badly injured to ever leave the hospital were kept there until they died.
Knowing about the USA an its legal system, I think this has to be legend…in the firts place, the relatives would be suing the government, demanding to know the whereabouts of their relatives. second, if the US govt. reported these men as killed in action, the relatives would demand the remains.
It doesn’t add up…plus, imagine the expense of manning a giant hospital in the high artic-how would the staff members ever keep the secret.
Anybody ever heard of this?
Sometime during the Fall of 1999, I took my family to Big Bend National Park for a quick day trip. While at Santa Elena Canyon, where the Rio Grande emerges from a spectacular 1500-foot fault scarp, I heard the loud roar of an airplane or helicopter. I looked up, expecting to see the Border Patrol, and saw instead a small, single-engine plane fly from the south just barely clearing the top of the Sierra Ponce in Mexico. Usually the Border Patrol and/or Air Force get on these things, chase them, and a big news story ensues (especially one so obvious and blatant witnessed by both park visitors and employees!), but I never heard anything about it. I scoured local, state, and national news looking for at least some sort of minor story on a chase, or even a bust (the local paper, at least, reported every Border Patrol bust of any size), but found… nothing.
Okay, I haven’t thought about this incident in years, but here goes: one summer day in Kansas, my family was driving on one of the main streets of my hometown, and we saw a tree and lawn in the backyard of one of the houses that was covered in snow! My dad, who was driving, did not believe my mother, my brother, and me when we began to shout that we saw the snow in that backyard - he thought we were joking with him. My two sisters were also in the car, but I’m not sure they remember this event, because they were very young. When we all got home, my mom and I jumped into the car and returned to the house - nothing strange at all was there. It was very eerie… I can still see those tree branches bending down, laden with snow… My only guess is that someone did it as a joke; but then again…
You’re probably thinking of me. I searched and it looks like that post is long gone, though. Guess I’ll tell the story again, since there were a couple of bizarre things that happened that evening.
A friend and I were hiking in the red rock canyons, several miles outside of Las Vegas. We left around 9 AM and started out on a cleared path, but when it came to an end, my friend advised that we continue on rather than turn back. I questioned the sanity of this idea, but he claimed prior knowledge of the area’s geography, said his route was actually a shortcut back to our car, and wondered why the people who made that trail hadn’t just made it circular. Later, I found out that all of this was BS. My friend was weird that way.
We ended up in lost in a couple of massive canyons, which we spent the entire day trying to get out of. We hopped on unsteady rocks, ducked under giant, precariously-placed boulders, and came too-close-for-comfort to a couple of rattlesnakes. A few times we thought for sure our path was obscured and we were doomed, but we’d always find some dangerous path onward.
It wasn’t a very fun experience, especially for someone who had never climbed a damn rock in his life. We had no water, no food, and no cigarettes, only a sturdy glass pipe and an ounce of crappy dirt weed. I stopped smoking the pot early in the day due to thirst.
When we emerged from the canyon and into the desert, the sun was setting. The first sign of civilization we’d seen in ten hours was certainly a curious one. Smack dab in the middle of the desert was what looked like a basement. Just a basement, completely empty. It was a big hole in the ground that had walls and a floor and nothing else. No sign of recent or future construction, either.
We shrugged and continued onward through the desert. We walked a little while and came upon a giant, vertical cliff rising out of the sand to our left. It must have been at least a couple hundred feet high. A flash of light coming from the face of the cliff caught our collective attention. And then another one, from a different place. We strained our eyes in the fading light and were able to make out several natural “cubbyhole” formations in the sheer rock. In one of the cubbyholes, we saw a shadow move, and then what was obviously a flashlight blinking on and off several times.
Needless to say, we were pretty freaked out. We stopped and watched for a couple of minutes. There were people in other holes with other flashlights, at least three of them. All of their spots were at least a hundred feet in the air, at positions that would be completely inaccessible - either from the top or the bottom - without some kind of professional rock climbing equipment. What the hell were they doing?
I’m normally pretty shy, but oddly not so when my heart starts pounding. As loud as I could, I shouted, “HELLO! You there up in the cliffs!”
A rapid movement could be seen, one of the shadows ducking back into his hole. No answer. I then yelled, “We’re lost hikers! We need help!” Deafening silence was the only response.
We were pretty unnerved, but had no choice but to continue on. That was when we came upon the neighborhood Ranchoth mentioned. The whole community was surrounded by barbed-wire fence, but we really needed some help, so we found a point where the ground was washed out, and scurried under the fence. We were still within view of the flashlight guys, and nevously hoping that they weren’t training sniper rifles on us or something.
Inside the community, every individual property was fenced with the same barbed wire. The houses weren’t, however, boarded up, as Ranchoth mistakenly remembered. Rather they looked somewhat new. Most were fairly fancy; I’d put them in the $200,00-$300,000 range.
Some had lit doorbells with intercoms at their iron gates, but out of over 20 houses in the neighborhood, not one had lights on. Without exception, however, every yard had snarling guard dogs. I tried ringing a few doorbells and asking for help through the intercoms at all the houses that had them, but didn’t receive any response. No cars could be seen, but all of the houses had closed garages, so I could tell for sure.
The road leading out of the neighborhood was blocked by a gate. We climbed over it, continued down the road for a long, long while, and eventually found help. I wish we’d have asked the people who helped us about the funny little neighborhood, but we were just so happy to be safe that we didn’t really care at the time.
I was hiking in Paria Canyon in Arizona once, and we had an F-15 (I believe, I think that’s what the military buffs I was with said it was, and I agree it looked like it) fly over us inside the canyon. Never figured out why he was flying so low, where he was going, or where he came from.
Man, some of those are just creepy!
I can’t really think of anything that I’ve experienced myself that’s truly inexplicable. But then I’m only 16, and I have plently of time.
Probably practicing terrain following. Some missions require fighter-bombers to approach the target at high speed only a couple of dozen feet off the ground - sparsely populated remote areas (such as a lot of Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico) are a great place to practice this sort of thing.
Ooh, ooh, I have one. Those lights over Arizona. What was it, Phoenix? Tucson? You remember - they were on the news, what, five years ago, flying in a V like formation. I remember seeing them on the news and being fascinated, hoping they signified what I thought they did. I watched and waited for some explanation, for months. Yet I never heard it mentioned again. I’ve never found an explanation, either - not that I’ve really scoured for one, but I still wonder.
In high school, I cleaned offices to make extra money. I usually went in the evening, which left me driving home around 10 or 11 at night. One such night, on the way home, I pulled up behind a car stopped at a red light. Something didn’t seem right about the way the driver was sitting in the car, but I really didn’t think anything of it until the light turned green. The car in front sat motionless. After waiting a few moments, I lightly beeped my horn. Nothing. Another few moments, another beep, slightly more assertive. Nothing. I flashed my headlights a couple of times. No movement, car or driver. By this time the light has not only turned red again, but has turned green again and red again.
I back up a car length and swing over beside the car in front of me. The driver is sitting behind the wheel, his head tilted all the way forward so that his chin is resting on his breastbone. He was wearing a campaign hat (the kind drill instructors and, I think more to the point, South Carolina state troopers, wear), which I think accounts for the strange look of his head when viewed from the rear. I bee-beeped my horn a couple of times. He never stirred. I sat and watched for what felt like five minutes but was in fact probably only a couple of cycles of the light.
Then I drove off, not knowing what else to do. Dead? Asleep? Passed out? I don’t know. I never found out.
The wife and I were driving home from the store or something and we passed an old house probably about a mile or so from ours. We both noticed a figure standing beside the house and I slowed the car down. It was someone in a black hooded robe with a “Scream” mask. When he (or she) saw us slowing down to look, he kind of raised his hands toward us. Now, had it been on or near Halloween, no big deal. This was in April, however. We both wondered what was going on, so I turned the car around a couple blocks later and drove by the house again. The figure was gone. We’ve never seen it again. Probably just some kid screwing around, but weird just the same.
Suddenly, we hear the PA crackle on and the principal’s voice booms out of the speaker, “The fire has been contained. It was small.” And that was it. WTF? Everybody just kind of sat there in stunned silence looking at each other. I never found out what all that was about.