91 replies to this topic

[SpiritWriter]

We often see that unexplained phenomenon is shared between one or more people who afterward describe the event in the same way.. on these threads I see skeptics challenging the validity of these phenomenon, but I never see the shared experience aspect challenged.

Examples:

1.Five people live in a house that is haunted, two of them can see the same ghost and give it the exact same description. All family members witness things flying around in the house at the same time. Other people who come over also have heard voices in the house and had never heard anything like this before.

2. three people are together in a field and all of them see three large brightly colored orbs in the sky that come close to the ground and suddenly fly off at great speed leaving a light trail

3. Three people witness a creature that looks like a werewolf, he is standing upright and is 8 ft tall, he chases them and they all go to the bathroom on themselves. Each of them describe seeing this creature clearly and each description of sequence of events and physical characteristics of the monster is the same.

4. 2 people enter the astral realm together, first they are at the beach looking at the water but then suddenly both of them are standing on a high ledge on the top of a mountain, they both are amazed and can see the exact same things.

These examples are similar to some that I have read about, heard about or have experienced with others in real life. Let's pretend that lying is not an option.. to the best of your ability how can you explain Shared Experiences?

You dont need to use these examples, you can use your own or stick to general terms. I'm just trying to explain the sort of thing I mean...

Edited by SpiritWriter, 05 March 2013 - 07:06 PM.

[SpiritWriter]

Any thoughts?

[Brian Topp]

Yes but the sad thing is, none of these things happen, other wise it be captured on video, physically or camera.

Except you get people who tell stories with no real backing except stuff from kid books. When evidence is expected to back up their claim, the story teller suddenly telling every one they can only because she/he is gifted with powers and can go between realities, battle demons, see things, hear things and oh yes, have sexual relationships with god.

Stuff you read in comic books or see on the scifi channel.

I would like to see glass vanishing into thin air when they land on you, infact the whole world does.

Edited by Brian Topp, 06 March 2013 - 04:42 AM.

[SpiritWriter]

Brian Topp, on 06 March 2013 - 04:40 AM, said:

Yes but the sad thing is, none of these things happen, other wise it be captured on video, physically or camera.

Except you get people who tell stories with no real backing except stuff from kid books. When evidence is expected to back up their claim, the story teller suddenly telling every one they can only because she/he is gifted with powers and can go between realities, battle demons, see things, hear things and oh yes, have sexual relationships with god.

Stuff you read in comic books or see on the scifi channel.

I would like to see glass vanishing into thin air when they land on you, infact the whole world does.

Lol No, you failed at passing the requirements of this challenge. Can you at least try to explain it without passing the buck to your same old arguements? I am not trying to come off rude or put people in positions that there is no answer, but really.. try to think about it. There are a lot of shared experiences out there.. I cannot explain them away personally because I believe in stuff like that but I wonder what some of the popular train of thought would be in situations like these.

[Jinxdom]

Honestly, I don't. I had some weird experiences that cannot be explained by the simple oh you just had the same thing on your mind, when in fact me and the people involved were pretty much didn't know each other until the dream then met afterward and had a huge deja vu. When it comes to those situations, I let them do the talking first, as to not fill in any blanks. Just approach and sit down close enough to see if they come to me. Which normally they do. (Happened with 4 people, one whom I dated for quite awhile who happens to be one of the girls in the next one)

Once you take out all the normal things. it could possibly be what do you have left?

Most of the time when you go looking for something like this you will never find it.

Sometimes it just happens with strange coincidences. Like Spirit Writing for instance, I lived in a house of believers for awhile, and decided to try it out except just write down questions with answers. I left the house and met up with one of the girls and went with my current friends who didn't believe to New York, the person we all met was an entertainer with the same name, I got from the writing. My friends who didn't believe got a business card, the girls got balloon animals, and then how I answered the questions I wrote and how it would say it would meet me in real life was exactly the same way, I wrote.. Most of all the guy focused his attention on me the most. Yes it could of been just a lucky string of coincidences, but it was just too many for me to be just chance. Also the pictures we took never came out, by the time we got home the business card was gone; It was placed directly from his hand in to his wallet in to his back pocket buttoned, It was there at dinner(Jekyll and Hyde, not to bad but was tad bit more expensive then I liked it to be.) , it was there after the show, It was there when we paid the toll(I kept checking) ,it wasn't there after we got back to the hotel.. Still can't explain it, and I still haven't been able to find any information on the entertainer. Don't remember what happened to the balloon animals. I still can't believed it happened. The couple who took the pictures were p***ed the pictures didn't come out because of the look of shock(that is the rarest look you will ever see on my face)on my face when he kissed my cheek in a way mentioned exactly in the notebook; that was what shocked me. The only thing I have is the notebook, unless something happened to my storage unit, I don't know about.... and that really isn't proof of what happened and besides NYC has a tendency to run high on crazy. So all I have is my testimony and that of my 3 friends. Hard to press mass hysteria if real objects actually existed and interacted with people who don't believe in that sort of thing and didn't even know it was that sort of thing.

I rarely talk about those things because who in their right mind would believe? I wouldn't, yet it still hurts my head, even after all these years. (Been roughly 10)

Do I believe I have super powers? Not one bit. Do this things happen when I'm under the influence? Not these ones, and the ones that do, I disregard completely.

Yes when talking about my friends, I keep it vague.

[Beany]

Brian Topp, on 06 March 2013 - 04:40 AM, said:

Yes but the sad thing is, none of these things happen, other wise it be captured on video, physically or camera.

Except you get people who tell stories with no real backing except stuff from kid books. When evidence is expected to back up their claim, the story teller suddenly telling every one they can only because she/he is gifted with powers and can go between realities, battle demons, see things, hear things and oh yes, have sexual relationships with god.

Stuff you read in comic books or see on the scifi channel.

I would like to see glass vanishing into thin air when they land on you, infact the whole world does.

What, if there's no video or picture, then it didn't happen? Is that true of just paranormal stuff or everything in general?

[*Frank*]

SpiritWriter, on 05 March 2013 - 07:05 PM, said:

Let's pretend that lying is not an option..

Err... no, let's not. I would think that lying is quite a valid option. You're asking for skeptics to explain these reports and then saying we're not allowed to use one of the most likely of explainations. If someone were to post a report on this forum similar to your examples, we would be able to question them and form our own opinions as to whether or not they are being truthful.

Without knowing the details of any of these reports no one can begin to explain them.

[notforgotten]

My wife and I used to see orbs at the same time. We used to see the same spirits. We even experienced mental telepathy through a spirit medium. A spirit would echo my thoughts and my wife would hear the spirits echo in her mind. Once aliens were in my bedroom at about 3am and my wife and I both experienced something each that indicated they were truly there.

[Rafterman]

SpiritWriter, on 06 March 2013 - 05:20 AM, said:

Lol No, you failed at passing the requirements of this challenge. Can you at least try to explain it without passing the buck to your same old arguements? I am not trying to come off rude or put people in positions that there is no answer, but really.. try to think about it. There are a lot of shared experiences out there.. I cannot explain them away personally because I believe in stuff like that but I wonder what some of the popular train of thought would be in situations like these.

My first question would be "how do you know it's even true?"

If we're talking internet forums, there's no way to be know if it truly happened or if it's simply just made up by a poster.

My second question would be "how do you know they had shared experiences?"

Were the events truly witnessed by more than one person or, for example in your werewolf tale, did one person claim he/she saw a werewolf, and then they all freaked out?  Mothman is a fantastic example of this.  Or is it a case of one person in a family telling a story enough times that the rest simply regurgitate it and expand on it and eventually convince themselves that they witnessed said phenomenon as well?

A couple years ago, there's was a post on here about a woman claiming she woke in the middle of the night, couldn't move, and saw a creature sitting on her boyfriend's chest.  After struggling for a bit, she came out of her paralysis, shook him awake, and the creature left (into a vent if I recall).  In her tale, she stated the boyfriend clearly saw the creature and fully corroborated her story.  On the surface, a truly shared experience.

In my skeptical mind, however, I see textbook sleep paralysis on her part and him simply being awakened suddenly, being told a fantastical tale, and convincing himself that he experienced it as well.  And it certainly doesn't hurt that both were hardcore believers in the paranormal.

In the cases of mass sightings - UFOs, religious events, etc. - I find that the stories have been so embellished over the years that if you really look at the facts reported at the time, you get a much different story than what is commonly accepted.  Fatima is a great example of this.

Edited by Rafterman, 14 March 2013 - 03:15 PM.

[SpiritWriter]

*Frank*, on 06 March 2013 - 11:30 PM, said:

Err... no, let's not. I would think that lying is quite a valid option. You're asking for skeptics to explain these reports and then saying we're not allowed to use one of the most likely of explainations. If someone were to post a report on this forum similar to your examples, we would be able to question them and form our own opinions as to whether or not they are being truthful.

Without knowing the details of any of these reports no one can begin to explain them.

I only ask you not to use lying as an option for this exercise only. If you wish to believe all shared experience stories are lies there's no one stopping you. But I think it's hard to believe that all of these reports are untrue to the people who experienced them. This thread is purposed for you to stretch your mind a little and think of other options.

Edited by SpiritWriter, 14 March 2013 - 04:17 PM.

[Rafterman]

SpiritWriter, on 14 March 2013 - 04:14 PM, said:

I only ask you not to use lying as an option for this exercise only. If you wish to believe all shared experience stories are lies there's no one stopping you. But I think it's hard to believe that all of these reports are untrue to the people who experienced them. This thread is purposed for you to stretch your mind a little and think of other options.

Not sure how much there is to discuss since you've laid out the only two options - 1) they're lying and 2) they believe what they've experienced is true.

The only other option is that they really experienced something, which we know cannot be true.

It's really that simple.

[Esoteric Toad]

I have noticed on the "ghost hunting" type shows that they obviously are all hard core believers. They are going into situations in which they are already expecting to find what they believe in. Automatically this would cast doubt on the entire visit if looked at critically.

As far as shared belief. I think it is too easy to believe that people do not "fib". It may be completely innocent, to fib to fit in. Look at society in general, people are social creatures, we want to fit in with our niche. This is why the skeptics (like me) seem so harsh. Why would I believe one person or a hundred if all I have is a story? It has been proven that people do lie to fit in. People of the same faiths will likely experience the same euphoria around an event, who wants to be left out???

With all of the claims that have been made throughout history by people (alone or in groups) the time of affordable technologies and realistic individual scientific study should, at least in my opinion, take the mysteries out of these things once and for all. That in itself would be incredible and would likely lead to further amazing explainable mysteries. Think of what we have learned and try and understand it...some of it boggles the mind and yet science chooses to ignore these sorts of claims...I have trust that science hasn't ignored them, they have explained them as real events created by the human mind, it's desire to socialize and it's inability to take in every bit of data and sometimes glitches and produces broken memories. Nothing supernatural (think about how many times you have seen something ordinary or told something and completely misunderstood the prosaic). Hope that didn't ramble too much. JMO of course.

[Frank Merton]

Yea, that hits it; people interpret things the way they expect.  A group of like thinkers will do nothing but reinforce each other until they all have a memory that is much the same.

Reading some of the earlier posts here, I don't think lying is really the first option.  Frauds come in two types, the for-profit fraud (which doesn't have to be money) and the pious fraud, which is when something is believed so strongly evidence is confabulated.  A lot of miracles and so on are of that sort.

[SpiritWriter]

I had an experience with my boyfriend where we were sitting in the house and my daughters bratz fm cruiser (Bratz car with built in radio) kept going off. I took the batteries out and it still kept going off. We both heard it at the same time and did not convince each other of it later. We were sitting on the couch and looking at each other like wtfh...  Its not a matter of trying to fit in or being very into the paranormal.. its a matter of the fact that this thing was actually continuing to go off without any batteries in it. Thats one example.

I concure these things are rare because I havent had an abundance of shared experiences and there seem to be a lot of people who can't relate,  but I have had some.. I know im not lying for one and I dont normally assume others are lying either. I think skeptics are trying to build theories around thier own disbelief, and to think people would generally lie in my opinion comes from a mindset of a person who is used to lying or being lied to as a way of life. I know people like this but that doesn't mean its regular.

I personally dont like being told I misremembered something and refuse to let a skeptic come along and rearrange my memories.perhaps these experiences are less reported because someone came along and said "oh you dont remember that right because theres no such thing as ghosts" and then, buying into popular opinion they change thier mind about what they experienced, which fuller dullifies the spiritual recognitionn that was more prevelent in the world in prior times.

Why do we assume the mind is frail? If two people see the same ghost or have the same experience but have only perceived this with thier minds then they have pretty amazing minds. On the above examples that I first listed I experienced the last one mentioned, both me and my friend were suddenly standing on a high ledge which would have been something like a mountain, we looked down and could see a forrest of trees under us. Both of us saw this.. awesome!

If we cannot trust our minds with these things.. can we trust ourselves with anything? How do you know you really walked your dog today? Theres mud on your shoes and your wife saw you leave and come back again. But its possible that it didnt happen because both of you just assumed that walking the dog is a cool thing to do?

Edited by SpiritWriter, 14 March 2013 - 07:13 PM.

[CrimsonKing]

I am not really sure there is a good answer for your question spirit.I do not go with the interpret the way we expect  thought simply because the few paranormal events i have experienced came out of nowhere and i am a big skeptic of others experiences without any proof.If no one else had seen exactly what i saw at the exact same time i would have just let it go as my eyes playing tricks on me but this has not been the case for me with the few strange happenings i have witnessed.I do believe in other dimensions and maybe sometimes things slip through for a short time.Just a thought