Mystery

February 22, 2005 6:11 PM

Have you experienced the inexplicable?

In August, 1994 a friend travelling in a separate car, flagged us down and pointed to the night sky where we saw six orange/red lights moving in unison. Two of the lights moved higher and to the left. About a minute later the rest moved to the right and they all came to a standstill. We watched this for about twenty minutes and then raced home to get a video camera. When we returned they were gone.

The next day the paper reported that about 35 people all around the area had seen these lights, including the police who had watched them from the top of the police headquarters. Defence HQ and the airport had no explanation and the Bureau of Meteorology said it did not have weather balloons in the area.

So these lights were unidentified, flying, and objects of some sort and no they did not look like garbage bags with flares attached.

Do any of you have an answer for what we saw or seen something yourselves that you couldn't explain?

posted by Tarrama to grab bag (40 comments total)

My mother in law swears that one night while driving through the Florida Everglades, she and my father in law nearly hit a bigfoot. They were driving along a dark road and a lumbering eight-or-nine foot "thing" covered with fur stepped out into the road from behind a tree. It raised its arms and let out a roaring bellow and they slammed on their brakes. It kind of swung its arms at them like a bear and roared again and crouched its frame and then LEPT into the reeds and was gone.

My father in law says that he hit the gas so hard, the car just slid back and forth in the gravel for a moment, unable to catch traction. When it did, they fishtailed down the road, swerving back and forth until they hit pavement.

It wasn't until they were miles away that they realized that they both had gone hoarse from screaming.

I want to call "bullshit" on them, but it's the only story they share that they both agree on and the details never, ever change.
posted by ColdChef at 6:37 PM on February 22, 2005

How far apart were these lights? How big was each light? How fast did they move? How long did they stay stationary before you left for the video camera? How high in the sky were they? What was the time of night? What's the local terrain like?

I'm not trying to be obnoxious: I think that these are all useful pieces of information that might help us explain what you saw.
posted by mr_roboto at 6:47 PM on February 22, 2005

I once stopped and leaned on a tree, quite winded from backpacking uphill in the snow all day. As I stood there catching my breath, I watched a jet-black human form, lithe and apparently female, with cat-like ears and long claws (but no eyes, simply dark fur over her entire face) run out from behind a tree and dart silently away through the woods.

The really inexplicable thing is that I then went and spent four nights sleeping in those woods.
posted by scarabic at 6:56 PM on February 22, 2005

My father is not a native to Wyoming and liked to take the family on weekend-long road trips to give the strange and interesting bits a look-see. We were driving through the southwestern corner of the state which is oil country – desert, oil rigs, abandoned strip bars, etc, when my father started yelling and pointing at the sky. There was a giant something up there, streaking toward Earth. As we all gasped, it exploded into flames and came crashing down just over a sand dune. We could see smoke, but not the wreckage and spent several hours traveling up and down oil field roads trying to get near the spot, but never found it.

He swears to this day that it was something 'from up there', but it was probably just a meteor or some other space junk. Several years later, he met a guy that was obsessed with UFO's and gave us a free appraisal on our house after my dad took him to the spot.
posted by dual_action at 6:59 PM on February 22, 2005

I was sitting on my bed one night in my dark bedroom, and I saw a blacker than black snake-looking thing slithering through the air. I had my hands up in a vaguely defensive position, and the thing slithered toward me, touched my finger, and I felt something akin to an electric shock.

It seems oddly similar to scarabics cat lady, actually. I don't think I've ever told anyone about it before.
posted by Doug at 7:03 PM on February 22, 2005

As I remember they were about twice the size of the largest stars we could see. They moved slowly to start with, then moved very fast as the two groups separated and formed into a one o'clock position. I just checked with a friend who was there, who thinks the two groups rejoined at a very fast speed. I don't remember that part unfortunately. It was about 9.30pm on a very clear night and the lights appeared to be above the Botanical Gardens here in Tasmania. This particular part of the Gardens is a large hill covered in bushland with no lights. Other people stated they saw them hovering over the Derwent River.
posted by Tarrama at 7:12 PM on February 22, 2005

Mine's a little different, since I've lived with it for 20 years. My wife has this uncanny and unsettling ability to sense traumatic events in those that are emotionally close to her. She said it first happened when she was 11 and her grandma was in a car accident and went through the windshield; my wife, sitting at her desk at school, suddenly sensed the accident, including the feeling of the windshield and the blood dripping down.

She has had similar experiences with me when something happens and she feels it. For instance, I was startled into wakefulness on a trans-Atlantic flight. I happened to look at my watch and it said 1:30 a.m. When I landed, my wife asked me if the flight was okay. When I said it was, she asked what happened at 1:30 a.m. because she said she sat bolt upright in bed and knew something was bothering me.

About a year ago, she bluntly told me that her first boyfriend died. I asked if her mom told her, and she said that no, she felt his fatal heart attack. A couple days later, her mom mentioned that she had seen the guy's obit, and he died the same day my wife talked about feeling his heart attack (and we live 1800 miles away).

These are just a few examples; this happens regularly.
posted by Doohickie at 8:13 PM on February 22, 2005

Doohickie - creepy. My grandma has a similar ability.

I have, on two ocassions, wished to win at games of chance and then subsequently won them. These were the only two times I had actively 'wished' to win at such games.
posted by sid at 8:37 PM on February 22, 2005

Coldchef: A co-worker told me almost the exact same story, but she described it as a giant badger and it screeched. And they apparently hit the thing and never stopped to see what it was. So ... totally like your story except for many different parts. Not a joke, she was extremely serious about the entire matter, though she knew it sounded like hokum.
posted by user92371 at 8:42 PM on February 22, 2005

Here's my inexplicable thing, from a prior AskMe discussion

Also, my current house is haunted. Footsteps, slamming doors. You get used to it after a while.
posted by anastasiav at 8:43 PM on February 22, 2005

I'm about as sceptic/agnostic as they come, but one time I tried a firewalk for the heck of it, and damned if I didn't end up walking barefoot across hot coals on a starry evening in the mountains east of Albuquerque.

It was proceeded by a lot of group-bonding, energy-building stuff, starting with trust falls and culminating (before the walk) with each of us placing the sharp end of an arrow against the soft spot at the base of his/her throat, with the other end held by someone else, and then leaning forward until the arrow snapped. A mind-over-body thing.

I remember no fear or pain during the firewalk, which was about 20 feet long. We each did it a few times. The coal pit was too hot to stand within 5 feet of for more than a few seconds.

Funny thing - as soon as I started to drive home, leaving the group (and any group "energy" we had accumulated), my feet started to really sting. No burns or anything, though.

I'd kill to see a UFO.
posted by gottabefunky at 8:44 PM on February 22, 2005

When my first partner died, I couldn't find his checkbook. I needed to know what bills he'd paid. It was over a week since he'd died (the first week I had no way to deal with such trivial crap). I assumed it was at this office, but when I collected his stuff, it wasn't. Then I had a dream and he told me where (suit pocket). That was correct, of course.

In 1973 I was standing on a road going down into Snake River Canyon, in Twin Falls, Idaho. Looking down into the canyon I saw a human shape, at least 12 feet tall, moving fast among the trees at the bottom. It seemed to cast its own pale white light. All I saw was a glimpse, but the dog reacted too.

In December, 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States selected the POTUS based on no known legal precedent or law. This, in the "Land of the Free" and the "Stronghold of Democracy". Maybe if I still lived there I'd understand, but to me, its truly inexplicable.
posted by Goofyy at 8:54 PM on February 22, 2005

When I was a freshman in college, four friends and I decided to take a road-trip for spring break. We left from Portland, Oregon in the early afternoon so that by early evening we were passing through Roseburg, Oregon on Interstate-5. Just at twilight, a large (10-15 meters perhaps) orb or disc, very bright with a white light, crested from behind a hill. This hovered for a few moments, moving very slightly from left to right, up and down. There seemed then to be a strange type of almost inaudible or sub-sonic hum like a change in atmospheric pressure that immediately preceded the orb moving extremely rapidly away from us into the sky.

Oddly, no one said anything at first as we continued at full speed down the freeway. Then, in unison, 5 or 10 minutes later, we simultaneously erupted into a chorus of "Did you freakin' SEE that?!" We all agreed--uncannily so--on the details and those with whom I'm still in touch, still do. That was a very memorable trip.

Also, on more than one occasion, I've seen very tiny red or amber colored lights moving among the stars above the Central Oregon woods. Perhaps six or eight or ten of these pin-pricks of light would form shapes, like a rotating circle, then reshape into, say 2 parallel lines, then disappear and reform.
posted by maniactown at 9:35 PM on February 22, 2005

Once when I was about 7 I thought I saw a UFO. It seemed to me that the bottom was shaped as a shallow pie plate, with circular multicolored lights set about the circumference. It was probably just a weird plane or something - it scared the shit out of me rather than made me take a good look, since aliens are here to abduct and probe us.

A week or two ago I saw a sweet meteor over the skies of New York. I suppose it could have been a crashing UFO though.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 9:41 PM on February 22, 2005

Firewalking isn't paranormal, much as it might seem so:

Scientifically speaking, there is no trick and little risk to it. As Dr. Ken Kihlstrom, a flamboyant physicist who walks on fire every year with his freshman students at Westmont College in California, points out, high temperatures by themselves can't burn you very quickly; it's stored-up heat energy that burns. "Say you reach into an oven while you're baking bread," he explains. "If you touch the air of the oven you won't burn yourself. If you touch the bread, you probably won't burn yourself. But if you touch the side wall, you'll leave half your hand behind. They're all at the exactly same temperature. the difference is how much heat they contain at that temperature." And coals at any temperature, he says, have a low heat content.

[From a google cache of Minneapolis/St. Paul CityPages.]

And yes, it is possible to be get burned if (say) there is a stone among the coals.
posted by WestCoaster at 10:07 PM on February 22, 2005

I've experienced life. I find it pretty inexplicable. But that's probably a whole other discussion.

One summer as a kid aged about 12 I collected beer bottles hoping to make enough to buy a new bike. I developed a thoroughly uncanny knack for finding them, including a feeling that I should stop, walk into the bush twenty feet, and dig under the leaves. Where I found a dozen or so bottles just waiting for me.

I often invent new things as I'm falling asleep. Anything I imagine that's really good seems to get announced in the paper within a few weeks or months. Quite irritating, that, not that I'm actually likely to ever get around to implementing one of my brilliant ideas.

Finally, just yesterday I almost posted to AskMe about a half-dozen orange-red lights that I observed in 1994, as they reeled in unison through the nighttime sky before disappearing...

...not really
posted by five fresh fish at 10:24 PM on February 22, 2005

Oh, and I once wanted very much to show up a schmuck about something or other, so I said I could flip a coin heads every time. He naysayed and explained how that was impossible and all.

Then I flipped heads a dozen times in a row. I stopped, figuring I was pushing my luck!

Odds: on the order of 1:4096. 0.02%. This assumes a fair coin (it was).

Mind, it's entirely possible that I was somehow cheating. Just the right flick, time and time again. Never have repeated a run like that, though...
posted by five fresh fish at 10:34 PM on February 22, 2005

Nothing too significant, but a life full of small intuitions and unnatural senses of familiarity that only seem to increase with age. I'd like to say that it's a product of the subconscious anticipating what are cause/effect relationships, but it's unexplainable, more or less.
posted by angry modem at 10:59 PM on February 22, 2005

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
posted by LarryC at 11:07 PM on February 22, 2005

I had pocket aces cracked twice in the same limit hold 'em game, both times by quad twos by two separate players. Unbelievable!! It still makes me angry.
posted by jonson at 11:13 PM on February 22, 2005

I once stood in line behind a guy who bought a Jessica Simpson CD.
posted by Justinian at 11:57 PM on February 22, 2005

FWIW, a lot of these types of things can be easily explained by two things; brain chemistry and the selection effect.

Ever experienced serious deja vu? I've occasionally seen an image or heard someone say something and I absolutely know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I've been through the exact same thing before. I know it. But I haven't... it's just a glitch in brain chemistry (or maybe the Matrix). Since experience happens entirely within the brain, we cannot ourselves distinguish between what our brain is telling us is true and what is actually true without external verification. It's impossible.

Secondly, the selection effect. Two issues here; People tend to remember the times they "predicted" an event, and fail to remember the times they didn't. Have a feeling something bad happened? If you later get a phone call and hear that a friend died, you're going to remember that. But you are less likely to recall the times you got a bad feeling and nobody called, or that something bad happened but you didn't get a feeling about it.

Folks get bad feelings and such all the time. There are 6+ billion people on earth. So, simply by pure statistical probability, some of them are going to have those bad feelings in close proximity to bad events a lot more often than random chance would dictate. Does that make it paranormal? No, it just means that there are a lot of people having lots of feelings and such.

Or look at it this way: If everyone in the USA flipped a coin over and over as long as it came up heads, and stopped as soon as it came up tails, a bunch of people would come up heads 25 times. Was that paranormal? I mean, the sheer odds against a coin flip coming up heads 25 times! They must be lucky! No... it's just chance. Random chance.

As to the lights in the sky and so forth... uh. You saw VENUS, understand? Nothing but VENUS.
posted by Justinian at 12:07 AM on February 23, 2005

I have never experienced, and don't believe in, the spooky stuff, but I'm not here to be a party pooper, so here's part a story I just saw on Yahoo! News about Oetzi the Ice Man, another "curse of the mummy" sort of thing. I say this stuff is normal chance. Believers in weird stuff will think it's Oetzi's revenge or something:

Science has also been unable to explain a series of sinister accidents since the iceman was discovered.

Forensic medic Rainer Henn, one of the first to touch the mummy, died in a car crash on his way to a lecture about Oetzi. A mountain guide who helped with the find plunged to his death, and a journalist who filmed the excavation died from cancer.

Last October, Helmut Simon fell to his death in the Alps after a sudden onset of bad weather near the spot where he had discovered Oetzi.

Walter Leitner was close to the scene the night Simon died.

At the time, he was explaining his iceman theory to a team of U.S. American journalists when they too were suddenly engulfed by the storm and had to be rescued by helicopter.

"At that moment I thought of my survival rather than the curse; of my family; my daughter's birthday the next day, and how I would maybe not be there," Leitner said.

"The next day, when I arrived at the institute, people were saying, 'Have you heard, Helmut Simon went missing in the mountains', and that's when I started feeling a bit queasy."

posted by pracowity at 1:05 AM on February 23, 2005

A family member is a hyper-rational type of person who believes that when you die, there's no life beyond death, no ghosts, no heaven, no hell, just a body, a bunch of carbons that disintegrate.
During the early 1990s, she was working at a swanky dermatologist clinic in LA as an anesthesiologist, putting people to sleep before their face-lift or peeling.
One day, in walks a young patient, early 30s, no history of heart-failure or any other medical condition which would raise a red flag during anesthesia.
After a moment of pleasantly chatting with the patient, the anesthesiologist is overwhelmed by a strong urge to prepare emergency injections, the type of drug cocktails you prepare for geriatric patients with a long history of heart failures. Note: these are expensive cocktails, once in a syringe they can never be reused, and it's pure waste to prepares such concoctions when your patient is a healthy 30 year old. At one point, the doc gathers her wits and stops filling syringes, but this urge once again overwhelms her to finish the emergency preparations.
Once the emergency syringes were filled for a dose that would bring a horse back to life, she then prepares the actual anesthetics for the face-lift, a weak concoction, typically administered through I.V.
[I.V., intravenous, is a simple procedure. You first pierce a vein on the hand with a holder, then attach the relevant syringe to the holder to pump in the drugs. The advantage is that once the holder is in place, one can swiftly interchange syringes without repiercing a vein.]
After hooking the patient to the ECG, once again checking the patient's vitals, the anesthesiologist pulls out a holder from its sterile container and gently inserts the holder into a perfectly normal vein. Just an empty holder, without any drugs. A perfectly normal vein.
Immediately, the ECG goes flat.
The patient's heart stops.
Absurd: it's an empty holder, no drugs. Nothing. Nothing: the procedure hasn't even began.
As if in a slow-motion dream, with decades of training for this eventuality, she hits the alarm, reaches for her prepared emergency syringes and starts steadily injecting.
Vaguely aware of a nurse that entered with a defibrillator, the anesthesiologist concentrates on the dead patient, disbelief searing her mind, injecting the emergency syringes, getting angrier and angrier.
A few moments before the defibrillator was to be applied, the ECG springs back to life. The patient wakes up, a bit dazed, looks at the pale anesthesiologist and says in the most normal, conversational tone:
"I'm so sorry. I wanted to die but when I was at that corner, seeing how hard you tried to save me, I took pity on you and decided to come back."
posted by ruelle at 1:19 AM on February 23, 2005 [1 favorite]

Incidentally, that doc still doesn't believe in ghosts, hell, heaven, etc..
But she does assert that:
1) humans may have a gut instinct similar to animals that sense fear in their prey or earthquakes before they happen.
2) the brain is for the most part an insufficiently understood organ.
posted by ruelle at 1:36 AM on February 23, 2005

This is a bit different than the others, but frankly I don't understand how my husband and I found each other. We really are two peas in a pod.

We met at college, in a session where freshman go to pick classes and get them approved by the university (to make sure you are taking your core classes). There are dozens of these to choose from. We happen to pick the same one, and happen to know only one other person in the room, which happens to be the same guy. My to-be husband happens to wear these boots that he never wears, and I think they are cool so I notice. That started our friendship and which turned into more.

Before we became more, I was dating someone with a drinking problem. Having alcoholic parents, once I realized this guy had a problem, I swore of alcohol and anyone who drank alcohol (as the saying goes for COA, you either become one or you marry one). It so happens that Steve was never interested in drinking (not even a beer when watching football) nor drugs (never even tried any). He just didn't see what the big deal was. It is amazing to find someone like that, esp. in college, and esp. when I needed it most.

Then it turns out we agree on almost everything. We get along so well, it is even weird to us sometimes.

We consider ourselves incredibly lucky to have found each other.
posted by evening at 4:41 AM on February 23, 2005

They were driving along a dark road and a lumbering eight-or-nine foot "thing" covered with fur stepped out into the road from behind a tree. It raised its arms and let out a roaring bellow and they slammed on their brakes. It kind of swung its arms at them like a bear and roared again and crouched its frame and then LEPT into the reeds and was gone.

Was this in 1998? It was probably me. I had a little too much to drink that night.

Seriously, though, isn't anyone going to at least try and actually answer the question?

It could have been a reflection off or a refraction through an atmospheric layer. The source could be streetlights, boats, or a distant flare somewhere out on the ocean. I would strongly suspect some explanation like that if the lights moved in perfect synchronization, indicating that they might be multiple reflections of a single source light. I'm just guessing there, but I did once see a mirage that made a distant freighter look like it was floating above the horizon.
posted by sfenders at 5:06 AM on February 23, 2005

I traveled to Venice from Paris, and the first person I picked out from a crowd of strangers (to ask for help in finding a cheap hotel) turned out to be the sister of someone living in the same dorm with me in Paris who I had a crush on. Totally by "chance."
posted by ParisParamus at 5:19 AM on February 23, 2005

A friend did that on a business trip in Germany. He was lost in a medium-sized town (50,000?) and looking for the company. He drove up to the first person he saw and said the name. The lady, who spoke little English, got into the car and gave directions as best she could. When they got there, it wasn't a business, but a residence. He tried to explain that he wasn't looking for a residence, but she insisted. He rang the doorbell only to meet the owner of the company... the old lady was the owner's mother.
posted by Doohickie at 5:41 AM on February 23, 2005

you are right, sfenders. by the time I started reading all the responses, I forgot that the question was "seen something yourselves that you couldn't explain." I guess we're all feeling chatty.
posted by evening at 6:10 AM on February 23, 2005

My mother in law swears that one night while driving through the Florida Everglades, she and my father in law nearly hit a bigfoot.

Just for the record, bigfoots (bigfeet?) in Florida are skunk apes.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:12 AM on February 23, 2005

My mother's mother & father went to China in the 1920's as missionaries. Grandmother had had a conversion experience in her teens in which she "saw" Jesus. While this may be open to interpretation as a hysterical event or not, what is of particular interest to me is that years later, when in China, she was alone working in the garden and got a feeling like you may get when studying in a library alone at night and suddenly feel someone's eyes on you - a presence. She turned around and there stood Jesus, with her brother. Her brother smiled and told her, "Don't worry Minnie, everything's alright. They then turned around and took a few steps & disappeared. Later she received a telegram ffrom the States and, of course, her brother had died. The time in China that she saw him corresponded to the time of his death in the States. Still gives me gooseflesh everytime I tell it.

She told me this when she was 89. You gonna argue with your Grandma? Not me - I believe.
posted by Pressed Rat at 8:14 AM on February 23, 2005

Two inexplicable events occured in my childhood. One or both may have perfectly logical explainations. Both freaked me out badly.

At age 11, I was at a slumber party. We played "lift"-- the game where a group of people stand around a body lying prone on the floor, chant very several minutes, and then in unison say "lift." Only using two fingers on each hand everyone tries to lift the person off the floor. There were 6 of us lifting another 11 year old. It felt like to me she was floating up over our heads-- that is to say I, for one, didn't strain in the least. Nobody giggled. We were all freaked out. Wa it group hypnosis?

At twelve, I also had several conversations with another friend and a Oiji board. After three days we looked up the person supposedly talking to us in the encyclopedia. This person was a very minor, very obscure person from the 18th century. We never, ever touched the Oiji board again. Was my friend playing an elaborate hoax?
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 8:47 AM on February 23, 2005

the brain is for the most part an insufficiently understood organ.

This is the only thing I've ever heard that even begins to explain everything people have experienced.
posted by spaghetti at 8:56 AM on February 23, 2005

Or look at it this way: If everyone in the USA flipped a coin over and over as long as it came up heads...

Then, sure, statistically it's likely there'd be a lot of people flipping umpteen heads in a row.

How likely is it, though, that when one gets a gut urge to flip heads a dozen times, in front of a bunch of people, after having boasted about the ability... that one actually would pull it off?

Statistically, it's quite unlikely.

But the brain thing explains it well enough: for a moment, I was able to control my thumb for the flip, and grab the coin from the air, in such a way as to ensure heads. Never be able to do it consciously, probably never have the subconscious confidence to do it again, but for that one minute, all was gold.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:15 AM on February 23, 2005

Deja vu. All the time. Not important deja vu, not significant deja vu, but still deja vu. I think and imagine things in terms of images in my head. Occasionally, images come to me. Weeks or months later, I see them. For an example of the mundane nature, I had gotten an image of a storeroom in a company I worked filled with disassembled furniture of a particular type, style and color in a certain place. Now this room was usually used to hold paper, old equipment and the company Robotron machine. Sure enough, a few months later I walked in and there it was in the exact configuration I had "seen".
posted by plinth at 9:26 AM on February 23, 2005

My first husband's family had a haunted portrait of a young girl. Everyone in the family saw her at one time or another; she looked a bit like a neighbor child, Heidi. His grandfather came over for dinner one night and saw a child standing in the dining room. "Heidi" he said "come sit down, don't just stand there." She stood still and then, as the actual Heidi came in the door behind him, slowly faded away. I saw her once, sleeping over when we were first married, in the middle of the night: I woke up out of a sound sleep to the feeling of a hand on my chest. It was really distinct and I thought it was my husband, then woke up enough to realize that I was alone. I sat up and saw her, just for an instant. The portrait was given to another, distant, family member in the late 90s and she completely stopped appearing at my ex's parents house. . .but she started showing up at the portrait recipients' house, although they had never heard the stories.

I've actually seen several other ghosts in my life but that 's the one with the most corroborating evidence. Although my roommates and I all saw a soldier in WWI uniform come to the door of our rented Charleston, SC house, repeatedly. He'd walk across the porch, the screen door would bang, and he'd be gone.

And I have deja vu exactly like Anastasiev describes above, so does my mother, and so do both my children. Fairly useless, although it did save me from getting busted for smoking in high school once.
posted by mygothlaundry at 10:12 AM on February 23, 2005

Pressed Rat-

My mom had a similar experience with her brother, except it happened several years after he died, and Jesus sat that one out. In the middle of the night Mom heard the front doorbell ring (no one ever used the front door, as the side door opened onto the driveway). When my dad wouldn't get up, she went to the front door. She saw footsteps in the snow approaching and stopping at the door. When she turned around, there appeared to be a light on in the living room. When she went to turn it off, Uncle Joe was on the couch, smiling at her. He told my mom everything would be okay. My mom tried to wake up dad again, but he just harrumphed and went to sleep. When she returned to the living room, it was dark and Uncle Joe was gone.

Also to do with death: My dad had been ill for some time. The night he died, I was dreaming of him- a very vivid dream. As the dream evaporated to the sound of the phone ringing, Dad said goodbye. When I answered the phone, it was Mom telling me Dad had passed on (although I knew it before I answered the phone). That one coulda been a coincidence, but it was still kind of odd.
posted by Doohickie at 2:21 PM on February 23, 2005

This is incredibly mundane in content, but:

Once when I was a teenager, my Dad got me, my mom and big brother and cousin together to repaint the inside of our house. One day, we were up doing my room. Every room in the house had all the furniture pushed to the center of the room and covered with plastic sheets. Suddenly, I turned to my brother and said "I bet you the video for Poison: Nothing but a Good Time" is on MTV right now." He seemed to relish the idea of proving me wrong so we went downstairs, dug out the TV and plugged it in. And much to our mutual amazement, there it was playing.

I will always cherish the memory of the look on his face.
posted by scarabic at 6:37 PM on February 23, 2005

fivefreshfish - on a related experience I once guessed the toss of a coin 31 times in a row - now work out the chances of that...

Oh and also once I saw a couple of Egyptian gods (I believe Anubis and Thoth) stood next to my bed but that could be ascribed to some really awesome LSD.
posted by longbaugh at 10:30 AM on February 24, 2005