Has anyone ever seen anything truly unexplainable?

[karadan]

I saw something last night which has rocked my socks off. I've never actually seen anything i can't explain but last night.... I can't seem to accept what my brain is telling me what i saw actually was... There must be another explanation.

Anyways, I'll let you know what i saw once i have a few stories. I'll probably sound like a nutter, but i don't care. I know what i saw was real and i trust my eyes, my judgment and my ability to rationalise.

Anywhoo, what have you lot seen that has totally baffled you?

[joeactor]

Sure, I've seen many unexplainable things.  As an Agnostic, I don't think that everything has to have an explaination or reson behind it...

That being said, here's a good example:
My grandmother passed away many years ago while I was living in Columbus, OH.
I was driving up to Cleveland for the funeral service and noticed the sky was a very odd shade of Green/Blue.  I'd never seen that color before, and haven't seen it since.  When I arrived at the viewing, my grandmother was wearing a dress in that exact shade.  Coincidence?  Probably.  But still freaky none the less...

Other unexplainable things:

"Friends" and "Seinfeld"
(and the list goes on!)

JoeActor

[Will]

American Idol's nielsen ratings are beyond my understanding of the universe. How a show that redundant is so successful I will never understand. Same with CSI/Law and Order and their various incarnations. It's the exact same thing every week, but millions upon millions tune in religiously.

Other than that, I can't think of anything. Karadan, would you mind sharing your unexplained experience?

[Tom62]

I've had a couple of deja vu's. The night that my mother died I had a preminition that something bad would happen to her. I also remember sharing a dream with my younger brother when I was 10 years old. And I've seen a UFO passing over our house.

[myleviathan]

As a teenager I once danced on a grave in Saint Augustine, FL. Both irreverent and completely retarted. I regret it now. The next night as I was lying in bed wide awake, I saw a bearded, white colored, severed head float right at me and disappear.

[Will]

A UFO is probably explainable.

MyLeviathan, don't do drugs.

[susangail]

Countless prayers "answered" when I was a Christian (about as many as those that went unanswered). You could probably call these coincidences or whatever.

My dad voting not only democrat, but for Hilary Clinton. If that's not unexplainable, I don't know what is.

I can't really think of any "good" experiences, but unexplainable things happen. Usually I stand baffled for a minute or two and then get on with life. There probably is an explanation for a lot of them but, for me, it's more interesting to leave them unexplained than to rationalize them out. IMO, life is spicier when some things are left unexplained  

[McQ]

Have to agree and say that I think Will's experience is the most inexplicable thing. Ever.  

Other than that, I have seen one or two things that I couldn't explain at the time, or others couldn't explain until further investigation. Most interesting was at a star party (that's an astronomy thing where amateur astronomers with big telescopes and no other hobbies get together and show people all kind of celestial sights) in Pittsburgh, PA. The same year that O.J. murdered two people, coincidentally, but I digress....

Star party, Pittsburgh. Around dusk, people gathering for the evening noticed a shiny object in the sky to the west. It was blinking and mving in an erratic pattern in a small spot in the sky....making turns too fast to be an aircraft. "Not even a military aircraft could make those sharp turns!" said one observer. No one could figure it out. And as it was making all these cool maneuvers, it was gaining altitude rapidly. Very cool. Most people thought it was something very close to us moving really fast. Interesting that they were CONVINCED that it was close by.

Anyhoo...I happened to be trying to nail it in my Celestron C-8 telescope, and boy did I ever! It was......
a weather balloon with its equipment package swinging wildly beneath it, setting sunlight glancing off of it, making it appear to be going even faster and more erratic than it was.

How mundane. It was a bitch to keep in my field of view, but I managed it. About 200 people were ready to call it a real UFO that evening. A couple were still not convinced that I saw the weather balloon in my scope, even after I watched the balloon gain its maximum altitude and burst like a Jiffy-Pop pan, sending the equipment package down. I lost sight of the package because it fell way too fast for tracking in a scope.

However, I knew that there were weather balloons being launched from near that area, and it wasn't the first time I had seen one. But just try to tell people that it was something easily explained when they want to believe it was something else. You know what happens then? They think you are part of the "cover-up". Jeez!

On to something I couldn't explain... triangular shaped lights moving slowly over my neighborhood, when I was 15 years old. Couldn't make heads or tails of the shape of the actual aircraft, but that triangle was something I had never seen before, and never since.

My guess is that it was.......something I simply was not familiar with. And since that time, my memory has been subjected to all kinds of suggestion and faults. So it'll never be explained to me, but it was probably just a plane. I can live with that.

[crocofish]

I can't recall anything that I have seen that is unexplainable.  There are times I have wished that I could see a ghost or UFO, or have some psychic experience, but so far it has all been fantasy.

[curiosityandthecat]

I lived in a haunted house.

No, seriously.

I recently decided to chronicle all my unexplainable experiences. It's somewhat of a lengthy story. So, for the sake of brevity, here's a link to the story: The Thing Behind the Door.

(I apologize for the Lovecraftian title. It just seems fitting.)

[karadan]

Thanks for the posts guys and gals.

Well, i've always tried to rationalise everything i see and if i come across something i don't understand, i ask questions until i find an answer. Last night however, i saw an object move across the sky like nothing else i've ever seen before. I'm sure it is explanable in realistic terms (i'm not about to proclaim it is from outer space) but its uniqueness has really startled me.

I live in a small village just off Dartmoor in Devon, UK. We have the luxury of having the best night skies. Whenever it is clear the Milky way almost looks like a cloud. Anyway, i spend a lot of time on my roof terrace star gazing (usually when i am having a cigarette). Last night i came outside and the first thing i noticed was a bright star in the sky. At first i was startled at how bright Venus seemed to be but as i looked closer i realised it wasn't venus because it was moving. It slowly - almost languidly - floated directly above me at a uniform speed from NW to SE. Its brightness intensified at its apogee, then waned as it went away although the light itself was never broken. There was entirely no sound. It probably took about 4 minutes to cross the sky from horizon to horizon. When viewed on the horizon the object was way brighter than any other star in the sky but when overhead was far brighter. It seemed far closer than any passenger aircraft would ever go and it didn't have any flashing lights. At a guess, i'd say it was 1 - 2 thousand feet up. When directly overhead i'm sure i could almost make out a shape whereas earlier it has just looked like a bright point of light.

I've seen many satellites. They are easy to spot and they have familiar characteristics. This bright object displayed none of these. I'm a rational person with a love for science. This is the first time i've ever seen something which has truly confused me. I really cannot explain it. Unfortunately i don't really have the vocabulary to accurately explain exactly what i saw and the emotions i felt whilst witnessing something so inexplicable first-hand. I just hope people take my word for it - that yesterday there was something very odd, flying in the night sky at 10:42pm over Chagford, Devon, UK.

[crocofish]

I recently decided to chronicle all my unexplainable experiences. It's somewhat of a lengthy story. So, for the sake of brevity, here's a link to the story: The Thing Behind the Door.

Good ghost story.  Pretty intense.  Interesting that it was so vivid, and it wasn't just a ghostly image seen briefly in the distance.  Were their any known stories to tie the experience with, like someone dying while trapped in the bathroom?  Maybe it was hallucinations caused by too many hours of playing Doom.  

When I was a young kid, there was a natural spring in the neighborhood; and by the spring there were the remains of a spring house (a house used for collecting water from the spring) dating from the Civil War period.  I used to hang out there looking for frogs and stuff, and one time a couple adults were there setting up photographic equipment.  When I asked what they were doing, they showed me a book about Virginia ghosts, and in the book there was a story about a ghost that appears by the spring house at night.  Supposedly, a crime of passion occurred there back around the Civil War, and the ghost of the guy who was killed haunted the spring house.  I was too young to be allowed to go there at night, so I never had the opportunity to see the ghost.  Soon after meeting the photographers, a road was built right over the spring, and I used to wonder if the ghost would appear at night in the middle of the road.

[LARA]

Well I haven't ever seen anything inexplicable, but since I tend towards pareidolia I have seen some very awesome things others might miss.  My favorite was the time in my old house when the curtains said "HI".  Quite literally.   A small spot of sunlight had come through a hole on the side of the aluminum windows and lay on the curtain pattern (brown with a series of dashes) so that the pattern they created actually highlighted an "H" shape and an "I" shape out of the dashes and lines.  Quite startling and very clear.  I didn't get a photo unfortunately.  The second time I've seen words in light patterns was at my new home.  We have a door with frosted leaded glass and the light was coming through it so that it hit the wall.  My daughter who is young and sees alphabet letters in everything said it reminded her of a kid's doodle.  We sat around looking for words in the doodle.  I could make out a few with my hypersensitive psychocreative apophenic powers of perception   , seeing the words "cell", "see" and "ice" as the patterns moved across the wall. I took a few photos, but there weren't really clear enough to get anything but the barest traces of the lovely window scribble.  I would imagine we could catch the lightshow same time next year and get better pics since all the angles would be the same, but you'd have to have the same hyperactive pattern matching craziness we do to get the effect.  Those are just a few really, as I tend live in a world of letters and faces and hands and remarkable clouds when I'm in the mood, but I have my big toe firmly placed in reality at all times, so I know it's just my imagination and I don't usually discuss that subject with others since I'm afraid they would be very unkind about it.

[McQ]

Thanks for the posts guys and gals.

Well, i've always tried to rationalise everything i see and if i come across something i don't understand, i ask questions until i find an answer. Last night however, i saw an object move across the sky like nothing else i've ever seen before. I'm sure it is explanable in realistic terms (i'm not about to proclaim it is from outer space) but its uniqueness has really startled me.
I live in a small village just off Dartmoor in Devon, UK. We have the luxury of having the best night skies. Whenever it is clear the Milky way almost looks like a cloud. Anyway, i spend a lot of time on my roof terrace star gazing (usually when i am having a cigarette). Last night i came outside and the first thing i noticed was a bright star in the sky. At first i was startled at how bright Venus seemed to be but as i looked closer i realised it wasn't venus because it was moving. It slowly - almost languidly - floated directly above me at a uniform speed from NW to SE. Its brightness intensified at its apogee, then waned as it went away although the light itself was never broken. There was entirely no sound. It probably took about 4 minutes to cross the sky from horizon to horizon. When viewed on the horizon the object was way brighter than any other star in the sky but when overhead was far brighter. It seemed far closer than any passenger aircraft would ever go and it didn't have any flashing lights. At a guess, i'd say it was 1 - 2 thousand feet up. When directly overhead i'm sure i could almost make out a shape whereas earlier it has just looked like a bright point of light.

I've seen many satellites. They are easy to spot and they have familiar characteristics. This bright object displayed none of these. I'm a rational person with a love for science. This is the first time i've ever seen something which has truly confused me. I really cannot explain it. Unfortunately i don't really have the vocabulary to accurately explain exactly what i saw and the emotions i felt whilst witnessing something so inexplicable first-hand. I just hope people take my word for it - that yesterday there was something very odd, flying in the night sky at 10:42pm over Chagford, Devon, UK.

Interesting sight. Can't say what it was, but I have to disagree with the statement in which you said, "I've seen many satellites. They are easy to spot and they have familiar characteristics. This bright object displayed none of these.

In fact, your description matches that of satellites extremely closely. Yes you've seen them before, and you haven't seen any that look like that particular one. I would say that over the past thirty-odd years that I've been an amateur astronomer, I've logged thousands of satellites (I have about two dozen notebooks' worth of detailed astronomical observations, including satellites, which I track via computer), and they can look very different.

That said, I'm not trying to say that what you saw had to be a satellite, but you probably shouldn't discount the possibility too quickly just because it doesn't look like ones you've seen before. When I first saw the International Space Station, I couldn't believe how much bigger it appeared and how amazingly "CLOSE" it looked. Keep in mind that when looking at flying objects, especially at night, that peoples' judgment of distance is horribly flawed. Even pilots and people with good eyesight, or people who are familiar with aviation, astronomy, etc., cannot accurately judge distance of objects very well, and are often mistaken by many miles when estimating distance to flying objects.

Meteors are good examples. People swear they see these objects as anywhere from a couple of hundred feet above them, to a thousand feet or so, when they are often more than 50 miles away.

So while very interesting of a sighting, it seems very much like things I've encountered dozens of times before. But again, not saying it had to be a satellite, it could be a lot of things, most of which are prosaic and not as much fun to wonder about.  

[crocofish]

I'm not trying to say that what you saw had to be a satellite, but you probably shouldn't discount the possibility too quickly just because it doesn't look like ones you've seen before.

I was also thinking that it was possibly a satellite.

Since karadan did give a time and place as "10:42pm over Chagford, Devon, UK.", I think it might be possible to confirm if a satellite went over that area at that time.

I'm not an amateur astronomer, but a quick Google search finds a number of satellite tracking programs.  A free Java tracking program from NASA that runs in your web browser shows an interesting 3D view of earth that you can drag around with 900 satellites in the image.  Unfortunately, it show the current time, and I don't see a way to change the satellite position time to a past time.  What is revealing about the 3D image is that there are satellites way out in geosynchronous orbit, and there are many satellites that hug the earth closely.  The close satellites visually would be moving pretty fast.

Satscape looks like it might be able to show satellite positions at a particular time.  Haven't tried it myself.