What's a weird thing that you have personally witnessed?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Well, a little more than painted. My girlfriend-at-the-time took a sculpture class and they first had to make themselves mallets for wood carving. She was given an old bowling pin to cut down and shape. It had already had the bottom sliced off. There was a thick layer (maybe 2mm?) of plasticky stuff on the outside that had to be peeled off to get to the hardwood underneath.

My entries for the thread:

Walking home from the school bus stop when I was in 5th or 6th grade, I saw a yellow rat snake that was at least 6 feet long stretched, it seemed like, all the way across the road. (It was a very narrow, rural road, with only like 6 houses on it). All my life my dad had been showing us snakes and teaching us to identify them and handle them. I knew what it was, though I’d never seen one that big. I picked it up and it wrapped itself all the way up my arm. I took it home to a terrarium we had. We kept it a few days, and then let it go.

Driving home at night from spending Christmas out of state once, in the last 45 miles or so before home, we started seeing more and more cars on the side of the road. The road was mostly bare pavement – there was a bit of ice and snow in places, but nothing too difficult. At one point, there were just lines of abandoned cars parked on the shoulder. Turns out that earlier that day, there had been a completely unpredicted snow and ice storm. People had been stuck on the interstate for 8-10 hours trying to get home. Eventually, people left their cars that couldn’t handle the conditions and either walked to nearby lodging or got a ride from someone whose vehicle was better equiped for the conditions. We just sailed through, only a few hours later.

Also came home as a kid to find baseball sized chunks of the asphalt driveway strewn around (with corresponding holes in the driveway) and a small tree knocked over, and smoke filling the garage. Firefighters told us lightning had struck the electric meter, traveled under the driveway blowing out chunks as it went, and knocked over the little tree. That strike took out multiple appliances in the house, as well as the pump for our well. The chunks were really weird to see, though. Freaky. I never would have known lightning could do that.

Later, in high school, I was standing at the kitchen window when I saw lightning strike a telephone pole on our property and blow a big chunk out of it.

Oh, and just after we moved to that property, one night we saw lights moving around in our yard, which was huge. It was a couple of sheriff’s deputies in their cars trying to sort of corral a Brahma bull that was loose. After a few moments of them driving around our yard, the bull was off again and they were gone.

82

This happened to me on my 1970 something Subaru. At relatively low speed (30 mph?), the hood opened and flipped right back against the windshield. Fortunately, I was on a lightly travelled road and was able to stop without hitting anything. IIRC, the hinges broke but remained attached and I never replaced anything.

83

A well-dressed white woman in Manhattan picking a live pigeon up from the sidewalk and causally shoving it into her purse.

84

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

85

I was driving down a winding country road when I noticed a bright light in the sky was following me. UFO? Chopper? Low flying plane?

Stopped the truck…it was Venus.

I was walking along the piers in SF there is one which is unused and goes nowhere. On the pier there were some unusually dressed gentlemen, robes and such. I saw one guy who was clearly a “handler”. I asked him what was going on, he said it was His Holiness the Pope (not the Rome one, obviously). He asked if i wanted a blessing. Why not? I approached, kissed his ring, His Holiness said something (he spoke very little English i found out) and I was blessed. Not often you meet a Pope.

86

I-94 Eastbound near IL-IN border no less than 4 cars within a 100 yards of each other all with at least one flat tire.

87

Not exactly weird, but not commonplace (at least, for me): I was a security guard for an upscale (read: touristy) shopping mall. Patrolling the empty halls one Sunday morning, I got flagged down by someone from one of the restaurants about an employee that had had a seizure. I follow them into the restaurant and there’s a man on the floor – eyes wide and unseeing – with a busboy holding his tongue down with a spoon. I kneel down to tilt his head back and clear the airway, calling for EMTs on my radio.

Then I notice the color of his skin. I’ve never seen that shade of blue/gray on human skin before – or since. I could not tell if he was black, white or Martian. A couple moments later, the color came back into his dermis and he SAT UP! Then he got to his feet and started lurching around the restaurant, obviously confused, ignoring everyone’s pleas to sit down and wait for EMTs. He could have passed for Irish: pale, freckled face, red hair (I didn’t think hair color was affected by lack of O2. Maybe it was just the contrast of the blue/gray skin against the red.).

EMTs arrive and take him away and I shake the busboy’s hand and tell him Good work, thanks! and that was that. Never heard another word.

88

Probably either a construction crew lost some nails, or else a malicious person deliberately scattered some.

89

When I was somewhere around 10, so somewhere around 1960, my mother and I saw a UFO.

Very bright white light, travelling rapidly across the sky, and producing no sound whatsoever; entirely silent. Steady course, not rising or falling, and continuing for several minutes; not a quick flash like a meteor shower.

We watched it until it disappeared, then we looked at each other. She didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what it was. So, we said: It’s a UFO. We can’t identify it!

(We didn’t assume it was extraterrestrials. But we never did figure out what it was.)

90

Was driving into a small Texas town. Trees lined the road at regular intervals, and a railroad track ran parallel to the road on the other side of the tracks. The sun was going down, shining through the gaps between cars of a freight train going by. The light scanned across the trees, making them appear to revolve.

91

It was most likely a weather balloon (check out the below video at the ~51 seconds mark).

92

Wrong shape and wrong speed.

It was thin and elongated, not round; and it was moving very fast in a straight line.

I still don’t think it was extraterrestrial; but I don’t think it was a balloon.

93

I saw, once, an aurora of the sun, whilst on some fairly potent LSD. It was fairly cloudy and the effect, I suppose, was from a sun dog (though I have never seen one of those in non-cloudy sky).

The look was a shifting circular rainbow around the indistinct sun, quite incredible.

I would never have believed it had actually happened, but I was with a completely sober friend at the time.

94

I saw this happen once on a stretch limo, the kind with 4 rear wheels. As it took a right turn ahead of my taxi, one of the rear left wheels went rolling across the road and hit a bus bench. My taxi driver never even mentioned it.

Another time I was out in the boonies on a dirt road behind an old pickup. We came to a stop sign where you could get on a paved county road. All of a sudden there was a big crunching noise and the pickup tilted over to one side. I got out to see if I could help, thinking a blown tire. Nope, the front axle broke clean in two. The tire was angled inward at about a 45 degree angle, wedged in the wheel well. No help with the car, but I gave him a ride into town and dropped him at a garage.

A non car one. Back in my youth, we were going to an after hours club. A couple of guys ahead of us were in a shouting/shoving match. They moved it out onto the street and one suddenly pulls a gun and fires six times at the other, maybe 10 feet apart. He must have been one lousy shot because both of them took off sprinting in different directions. Kind of put a damper on the night out for us, we all decided it was a good time to go home.

95

Sorry for posting again right away. This reminded me of something from this summer. I’m out working in the backyard and I start hearing a scrape, pause, scrape, pause from out front. So I go to see what it was and there was a small woman, barely five feet and 100 lbs. She has an oversized tire, wider than the sidewalk, looped by a rope around the back of her neck while she’s facing the tire. She walks backwards until the rope is taut, then pulls the tire towards her by pushing the rope outwards as far as her arms could stretch. Over and over down the block. I must have seen her a dozen times this year.

I saw something similar when I was about eight, except is was orange and mover rather slowly back and forth across the sky for about 15/20 minutes. This was back when I had read Chariots Of the Gods and other crap so I was positive I had seen a genuine UFO. Until the next days paper explained it was a single engine plane with scrolling advertising lights on the sides like you used to see on old bank signs with time and temperature. At least I wasn’t the only one, many adults had called it in to police.

96

Couldn’t you hear the engine?

We would have assumed it was an ordinary plane with for some reason odd lighting, except that it was silent. (And no, there wasn’t a following sound that seemed to be becoming from behind the Whatever.)

– we were out in the country, there wasn’t much of anything in the way of competing noise. Planes were ordinarily quite audible.

97

Nope, too far away. Couldn’t hear a thing or read the message, just saw the lights. At the time, the only place I had ever seem something like that was the Goodyear blimp.

98

Driving down the freeway…a jeep, about 50 feet ahead of me and one lane over, was just speeding along when… one of it’s wheels just came off… It went bouncing the opposite direction up the freeway–narrowly missing a car next to me. In the rear view I saw another car swerve to avoid it.

The jeep, now off-kilter and kicking up a lot of sparks, didn’t pull over to the shoulder…it continued on to the next off-ramp.

99

Winner winner pigeon dinner

100

Waiting for a bus here in Portland, land of bad drivers. As we’re standing there, a car pulls up to the stop sign and is waiting for cross traffic to abate. As she’s sitting there, a car coming from her right cuts the corner to make the turn and slams into her head-on. They both climb out of their cars and the wronged person starts yelling at the idiot driver, who calmly retorts “Well you don’t need to get so upset; it’s just an accident.”

Many years ago, I was on the highway heading for Victorville on the first leg of my vacation trip to MN when a van passed me at a good clip. The highway was 2-lane blacktop, with lots of washout dips, etc. As I say, she was really moving and as I rounded a corner, I saw up ahead of both of us there was a farm truck trying to turn left off the highway. I guess she didn’t see him for whatever reason and swerved to the right at the last second. She hit the dirt berm at the side of the road and the van shot upward and rolled completely over in the air before slamming back down on all four wheels and plowing into another dirt pile. I’ve only seen that sort of thing in a movie.