Time travel is kind of iffy. I’d probably accept time travel into the distant past fairly readily. But if I got transported back to like, 1993 or something, there’s no telling how long it would take me to notice let alone accept it.
For monsters it would take awhile to convince me it wasn’t a crazy person/elaborate costume. I probably wouldn’t believe I was the only one noticing vampires etc. It would have to make the news wouldn’t it?
For time travel I’d question my own sanity before accepting it was real. At least until it became evident that I knew things that haven’t happened yet and then they come to pass and people around me witness & independently confirm that maybe I am from the future.
My knowledge of history isn’t that great though & if I went very far back I might not be able to predict anything that would happen in my lifetime. In that case maybe I could demonstrate some scientific knowledge & convince myself I’m not nuts. I might succumb to paranoia though, thinking it’s all a vast conspiracy to drive me insane. Is that ironic?
One thing that is to me somewhat plausible or possible would be being abducted by aliens. That doesn’t involve time travel or mythical monsters. To my mind it could happen just like I could win the lotto tomorrow. Not likely, but possible. Hopefully the aliens would be nice enough to show me the earth at least once more before taking me back to the “home planet” or wherever. Otherwise I might still question my own sanity. I’d be thinking, “this is either a really weird loooong dream or I’m nuts.” Eventually I guess I’d figure this bizarre situation isn’t going away so nuts or not, might as well make the best of it. I’ve wondered what I would do if I were someone like John Crichton in Farscape (minus the wormhole part). Would I accept that as reality as quickly as he did?
I start hoping for the supernatural explanation right off. Unfortunately, it always falls through.
(goes off to inspect the back wall of the wardrobe)
I remember some years back a show like Scare Tactics where they set this woman up. Her boyfriend drives her out to some secluded area and his car stops working. Lights and noise are produced off-road to simulate a spacecraft landing. A professionally made-up alien comes out of the bushes brandishing a weapon and yells at them in an alien language. I think the guy runs off and the woman is on the verge of a coronary, screaming bloody murder!
Then of course the floodlights are lit and all have a good laugh.
I would have shot the prick for setting me up like that.
Anyway, she sure was convinced the “supernatural” was happening.
And if I was on your jury, I would vote to acquit.
For something like a werewolf or alien or some other kind of “monster,” I probably wouldn’t believe it until a series of reputable doctors had examined the corpse and concluded that the thing in question was not human.
My lunch break ended before I could finsh my post. I hate it when that happens.
If I suddenly time travelled to, say, the 19th Century, I think that I would realize it pretty quickly. The evidence would be overwhelming. A hoax would end up looking like a movie or a historical re-enactment. The fact that I could go anywhere and see nothing anachronistic or erroneous would be pretty hard to dismiss.
If something happened in real life where someone told me “I’ve just seen a vampire” (alien, monster, time travel, we’re all dead, we live in the matrix, etc) I’d believe them to some extent from that alone because there is so much unproven in our world and anything could be possible.
In movies it always seems to happen when the character or characters find themselves face to face with the thing itself.
Several years ago, I was planning a Halloween party with a girlfriend of mine. We discussed different pranks including one where we try to convince all of our friends that her and I switched bodies. It seemed funny at first, then we realized no one would ever believe us, no matter what. Then we realized that if we really did switch bodies, no one would ever believe us. Which makes one wonder, how often in history have two people switched bodies and ultimately learned that it’s not worth trying to convince anyone, and to just dealt with their new lives.
Some more thoughts on time travel… If I brought any sort of technology with me (that is to say, I’m not stark naked), and I travelled into the past, then I could get pretty good evidence from the reactions of other people to my technology. I mean, is anyone in our world going to pay you a month’s wages for a ballpoint pen or a wristwatch? Travelling into the future, I’d find the nearest major university, and ask around at the physics and math departments about recent developments.
What’s more interesting is the question of how to convince everyone else that you’re from the future/past. I once had a (surprisingly vivid) dream that, due to an experiment gone awry, I was transported to my mom’s hometown, 1945. I first went to Gramma and Granpap’s house, because I knew that even without recognizing me, they’re hospitable folks, but my next step after that was going to be hitchhiking to Los Alamos, where I’d have the best chance of finding someone who could understand what’d happened. But once there, I’m not sure how I would have proceeded, and I woke up a good bit before that… So, how do you convince the locals that you’re from the future, assuming a shoddy knowledge of history? Or even harder, what if you travel the other way?
I think Stephen King had a useful way of dealing with the belief problem in “salem’s Lot” when he made the first true believer a young person who hadn’t yet developed adult attitudes about reality.
In their version of the “Inferno” Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle transported a science fiction writer to Hell. It’s unclear to me now as I try to recall the details 20 years later, but I believe that character coped by telling himself that he was in some future society’s version of a Hell-themed amusement park. From a practical standpoint, if what he was experiencing wasn’t real, it called for the same reactions from him as if it were.
I believe the best example I have seen is a short story Stephen King wrote for “The Book of the Dead” - a series of short stories based around What if Night of the Living Dead came true and zombies roamed the earth.
In it, a woman living on a island off the coast of Maine (where else?) tells of the how society begins to hear small reports of stuff and believe it to be more cult like. Magazines report it…Time does its first ever “bagged” version to keep kids from seeing it, but the general consesus is it is a virus with living people going insane and eating people. Some believe it to be from a outer space ‘thing’ sitting up above the earth and so on…
The big change…the one that gets a lot of people believing… happens when it hits the National Wire and Tom Brokaw does his thing on national TV. The story describes Tom instructing parents to make their kids leave the room, then shows a 3 minute interval of scenes of carnage from a remote news crew filming obvious dead people, who then themselves get lunched up by an oncoming throng of zombs on National TV.
Personally, I think society would deny anything until it went and bit them on the ass UNTIL Television said something about it. And even then, some would go about going bananas by trying to give it a logical reason (hey I know…a million people decided to dress up like the living dead and murder people…yea haha nice joke).
Me personally, I am opt to believe anything…there is a lot we dont know bout this world.
If I had my camera with me, I’d take a picture of somebody with the flash. If they just cursed at me instead of cursing and then asking “What the hell is that thing?”, I’d accept it and go to the nearest newspaper and apply for a job. 
I like the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer handled this question:
Xander: Yep. Vampires are real. A lot of them live in Sunnydale. Willow will fill you in.
Willow: I know it’s hard to accept at first…
Oz: Actually, it explains a lot.
Personally, I don’t know what would convince me. After all the odds that vampires and such are real is a lot less than the odds that I have gone crazy and started to hallucinate.
One thing that often happens in movies is that two characters burn a lot of time doing a “yes it is!/no it isn’t!” thing in these situations. The person who has seen a vampire announces “it was a vampire!” and the person who didn’t see it comes back with “that’s impossible!”
I would like to think that in this situation, especially if the other person was someone whom I already knew, I would invest the 10 minutes or so to have a normal conversation. If I was the vampire-sighter, I would start off with “I saw something that seems nearly impossible, but here is what I saw, and this is what it led me to believe, for these reasons.” Likewise, if I was the other person, I would try to ask some questions and figure out if there were other possibilities and at least be accepting that something unusual was going on even if I didn’t specifically believe it was a vampire persay.
On the time travel side of things, and getting people to believe you were from the future/past – I think I might try to seek out some crazy conspiracy people. Well, maybe not the crazy ones. I think once I had accepted the fact that I had gone back/forward in time, I might feel that since I had done something that I previously thought impossible, that I should be open to the possibility that people who already believed in it were perhaps not so looney after all. Or, even if they turned out to be looney and happened upon a belief in time travel coincidentally, at least they wouldn’t try to send me to a mental institution.
What would convince me?
Lets say, I’m in walking in the park, and I’m attacked by a zombie. Assuming that I survived, and managed to escape, what would convince me that it was supernatural?
As others have said, I would, reasonably, assume at first that it was someone dressed up in a zombie costume, either playing a prank on me, or actually trying to murder me. The only thing that might start me thinking otherwise would be if there was something very obviously “inhuman” about the zombie. (Like if it didn’t have a head; or if it was just a skeleton; or if it had been visibly walking, but ended up being broken in half and didn’t “die.”
In any case, having witnesses to the attack other than myself would help. And preferably, photographic or video evidence as well.
But what would be the REAL clincher? What would convince me, if the attack had happened to someone else?
The zombie itself. Captured alive (or “un-alive”).
If they were able to catch the thing (Maybe using those “rabies snare” thingies?), if an in-the-flesh zombie was brought forth, in chains, to a press conference, then I’d believe it.
But of course, for anything but an undead creature (Like an alien, or a werewolf, a Yeti, etc.) a corpse would suffice. Preferably still warm.
But time travel? Nothing. Nothing would convince me that I wasn’t just insane.
Elvis Rojo, I just have to ask…when did you post that question? I’m really sorry I missed it.
Here’s a time travel scenario, where the problem is exacerbated by a complete lack of objective evidence.
You wake up one morning. You are eighteen. The thing is, though, you remember being fifty seven, yesterday. You remember your life with about normal detail, and you seem to be in the right place for you, at eighteen. You look in the mirror. You look like you remember yourself looking at eighteen. Scars you got later in life, and grey hair, and bad teeth are all gone. The only thing that made the trip is your mind.
Or did it? Are you actually a deluded eighteen year old, who “remembers” a fictitious thirty nine years of life that has not happened? Are you going to try to change a history that is the only thing that makes you not deluded? How long before your already hazy memories of the next two or three years get overwhelmed by the accumulation of new memories of the next two years?
Are you really going to remember to buy Apple? Is it going to be as good as you remember it was?
Are you going to try to convince anyone?
What about the delicate balances you might overturn? Tell someone about the Cuban Missile crisis? What if it comes out differently? Save Kennedy? What if stopping Oswald doesn’t work?
How are you going to convince anyone of anything, without getting yourself committed, or worse, jailed. Talk about guilty knowledge!
Oh, and if you are eighteen, think about waking up “knowing” all this. You know about things that right now, you don’t think have happened. You know the date of the World Liquidity Crisis. You know exactly when the Long Island Sound tidal wave will hit. You know the next triple crown winner. But telling everyone that there were sixty bank CEO’s involved in a scandal that caused a world wide market crash won’t work, if you don’t have some sort of evidence.
Who do you tell, and how much do you tell? If you do convince someone at the FBI that you know about everything that will happen for the next fifty years (because you have a great memory and worked at the New York Times for forty of those years) just where do you suppose you will spend those forty years, this time?
Or, do you doubt even your own memory, until real events start to prove you right? What if little Mary doesn’t react the same this time? Maybe your memory was wrong, or maybe your maturity and emotional strength were a lot more appealing to her than you managed to be last time. So, do you dump Mary, and wait for Susie, since you married Susie last time? If you don’t, those children you loved so much will never be born. So maybe it was all a dream.
And maybe it was a guy on the knoll who shot Kennedy, until some punk kid in texas rammed his car with a pickup truck, early on the morning of November 22, 1963. But Oswald was there too.
Tris
Triskadecamus, your scenerio was the basic plot of Peggy Sue got married, although that was done as a comedy. It’s also the theme of any number of stories along the lines of “what if I had my life to live over again?”.
It would depend on a lot of things. First, would history even repeat itself a second time, or are too many events dependent on random factors to ever happen again? Are you in a position to do anything with your foreknowledge of the future? And given your personality, would you end up making the same mistakes you made originally?
Have you not watched Red Dwarf? The Kennedy assassination is a whole tin of worms, especially if you do actually want it to work
A hellish scenario for me. So much of what I’ve done and more importantly the people I’ve met have been through mistakes or erroneous behaviour on my behalf. If I had to repeat it again I don’t think I could.
If I did get thrown into the past I wouldn’t want to upset the boat too much either. I get along ok in this world, not too far into the past I could get along but if I changed the world by upsetting one small event I’d have to learn to live in the same world with a whole new set of rules. Not nice. I’d try to use my knowledge of the past to know where to avoid, what to invest in etc to make things as comfortable as possible.
There’s a more serious side to this discussion, which Alfred Hitchcock has used on occasion.
The first, along the sci-fi lines, is in THE BIRDS, where officialdom doesn’t believe the birds are attacking. It’s not as far-fetched as zombies and vampires, and most people don’t believe it until they themselves witness an attack (and even then, it’s not clear that some of them believe it.)
The second, far more subtle and more serious, occurs in Hitchcock’s early film, THE LADY VANISHES. The scenario is that a train has been side-tracked (literally) and surrounded by murderous spies (this is before WWII). One of the characters doesn’t believe it, and says something like, “It’s all just some sort of misunderstanding.” He fashions a white flag and walks out of the train, and is shot. The others then believe.
Hitchcock used that kind of gimmick a lot. Cary Grant’s character in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, for instance, finds himself in abnormal circumstances (abducted from his club in broad daylight by bad guys who have confused him with someone else.) He can’t convince the cops OR his mother that it really happened.
So, it’s not just a plot device for supernatural or sci-fi films. During and after the Holocaust, it was a grim reality: people didn’t believe that the Nazis could be so murderously cruel. Some Holocaust deniers still don’t believe it, despite overwhelming evidence.
Similarly, some people don’t believe that the astronauts landed on the moon, despite overwhelming evidence.
Pick your example, they’re all around us. People don’t want to accept things that are contrary to their inner sense of the way they think the universe should behave.