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Not quite human


tommydoggs

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When I was growing up, I lived on a farm down a quiet road, mostly fields and forest. My friend was coming to visit me by bike, I was about 12 or 13 years old. Not long before he got to my house a man stepped out the thick bush along the road. About 6 feet tall, somewhat overweight and dressed rather ordinary. What he did next is just strange.  He grabbed the handlebars of the bike and proceeded to twist them into a pretzel! Never said a word, never laid a hand on my friend. Just disappeared back into the woods. He got to my place and the bike was just a sight to behold, it would have taken a ridiculous amount of strength to do something like that especially as you Gen-Xers know that bikes in the 80s were all made of steel! We weren't scared, more shocked than anything. ..we went walking down the road later that day and saw him wandering near a campground,  blank look on his face, going to no particular destination. Obviously we weren't going to approach him and never saw him again after that. Anyone else have encounters with people that seem really off, like they're just not of this world?

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Welcome to UM!,

It will be hard to get any traction, because all you have is a story.

Do you still hold any evidence?

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I've heard of people with various forms of retardation being able to perform feats of extreme strength. Those who can do it don't have the mental blockers that regular people do, and so they simply use their full strength and are capable of amazing things.

I've heard of people also who are just simply really strong. 

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To me it sounds like someone who had a mental illness - and great strength to boot. Your friend was fortunate that he was not dragged into the bushes and murdered.

Did you and your friend tell your parents of this incident ?

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Mental illness is a possibility for sure. I've tried to replicate the feat (I'm fairly strong myself) to no avail. Told my mom but she's a skeptic's skeptic! 

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9 minutes ago, Timonthy said:

Welcome to UM!,

It will be hard to get any traction, because all you have is a story.

Do you still hold any evidence?

Timonthy - I think he said it was in the 80's when this took place. If I'm correct....what type of evidence would you expect ?

Maybe a picture of the twisted handle-bars from the bike ? :rofl:

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It was back in the 80s and the bike wasn't mine anyways. The lack of social media at the time probably didn't help!:rolleyes: We have to hope people are honest Timonthy,  sometimes it's the only way to share the story.

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11 minutes ago, tommydoggs said:

Mental illness is a possibility for sure. I've tried to replicate the feat (I'm fairly strong myself) to no avail. Told my mom but she's a skeptic's skeptic! 

So your mother didn't believe you guys ? I imagine that your friends parents would not have been very happy - since they probably had to replace the bikes twisted handlebars. Not to mention the stranger that had approached their son.

I would think that this incident would have been reported to police - as it's not everyday that a strong 6 foot man leaps out of the bushes to terrorise kids.....then vandalises their bikes :huh:

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Sometimes people have a glitched up nervous system and they can exert a lot more force than normal (though this tends to cause injuries to them). Depending on how the handles were bent would determine how much strength in needed. I've bent 6' pry bars (a very big crowbar) in a nice U/L shape trying to move an machine at work. It takes force and leverage.

3 minutes ago, Astra. said:

So your mother didn't believe you guys ? I imagine that your friends parents would not have been very happy - since they probably had to replace the bikes twisted handlebars. Not to mention the stranger that had approached their son.

I would think that this incident would have been reported to police - as it's not everyday that a strong 6 foot man leaps out of the bushes to terrorise kids.....then vandalises their bikes :huh:

Agreed.

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I'd tend to agree about the 80s. I lived in a rural setting growing up in the 80s, and a weirdo wandering around yelling at teenagers really wouldn't have thrown many red flags at the time. People were a lot more accepting, and trusting, back then. People hitchhiked across the US, and I picked up many a hitchhiker at the time. There was trust then, and not Fear, like we have today.

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The bike was a BMX and in pretty good shape. I agree with you DieChecker, people didn't make that big of deal or weirdos back then and didn't help that mine and my friends parents weren't the type to call cops...pot smoking in the 80s got you thrown in jail! :unsure:

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2 minutes ago, DieChecker said:

I'd tend to agree about the 80s. I lived in a rural setting growing up in the 80s, and a weirdo wandering around yelling at teenagers really wouldn't have thrown many red flags at the time. People were a lot more accepting, and trusting, back then. People hitchhiked across the US, and I picked up many a hitchhiker at the time. There was trust then, and not Fear, like we have today.

Being the 80's or not - I feel that any young person / and or even an older person would be rather startled and taken aback by some big dude that came out of the bushes and attacked their personal property. This guy could have escaped from a mental institution for all we know. As I said earlier...it's lucky the boy wasn't murdered.

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It is strange Astra. The fact that it was only the handlebars being bent is a truly weird statement,  even for the mentally ill. I guess it was his lucky day.

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16 minutes ago, Astra. said:

Being the 80's or not - I feel that any young person / and or even an older person would be rather startled and taken aback by some big dude that came out of the bushes and attacked their personal property. This guy could have escaped from a mental institution for all we know. As I said earlier...it's lucky the boy wasn't murdered.

Meh. We also had rattlesnakes, and wild dogs. We had shotgun toting pothead hippies who would chase us through the woods. We would go get hay with my father and sit on top of the bails on the way home, 9 feet above the ground with no seatbelts at 45 to 50 miles per hour. We'd ride our bikes, even as 10 year olds, the 12 miles to the nearest store, or go the 10 miles to swim in the river and never think at all about any dangers. I don't remember anyone ever being overly concerned about such things back in the 1980s. 

It possibly was lucky the boy wasn't killed. Such things did happen. It is just that no one dwelled on it, with constant hand wringing and fear of what Might Possibly Happen.

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6 minutes ago, tommydoggs said:

 I guess it was his lucky day.

Oh for sure. And I think this odd person was very human btw. (not 'quite' human as referred in your title)...

It was obviously someone who had mental issues of sorts.  And I hope they got him off the streets so he could have gotten the help he needed...before he had possibly hurt someone.

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6 minutes ago, DieChecker said:

Meh. We also had rattlesnakes, and wild dogs. We had shotgun toting pothead hippies who would chase us through the woods. We would go get hay with my father and sit on top of the bails on the way home, 9 feet above the ground with no seatbelts at 45 to 50 miles per hour. We'd ride our bikes, even as 10 year olds, the 12 miles to the nearest store, or go the 10 miles to swim in the river and never think at all about any dangers. I don't remember anyone ever being overly concerned about such things back in the 1980s. 

Rough and tumble days...anything goes....and boys will be boys I suppose.

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It's good to have constructive skepticism, helps to weed out the stories that are weird from things that are harder to explain, glad my first story wasn't shredded by trolls! :D.  A lot less was known about mental illness back and we'll never know what truly happened after that day but still makes for an interesting story!

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7 minutes ago, tommydoggs said:

The bike was a BMX and in pretty good shape. I agree with you DieChecker, people didn't make that big of deal or weirdos back then and didn't help that mine and my friends parents weren't the type to call cops...pot smoking in the 80s got you thrown in jail! :unsure:

Don't happen to remember what kind of BMX by any chance? There are different kinds of BMX, and have different weights and composite due to that.

I'm asking for more detailed information about the bike itself because I grew up in that era in the boonies too- and my brother was part of the group of guys that did everything stupid on wheels that could be done. And they wrecked the dickens out of some bikes. Twisted up handlebars weren't impossible, even the more solid styles could come home bent up from hitting something too hard a time or few. Handlebars and cranksets were the stuff that seemed to get screwed up the most on those bikes. Frames got damaged too sometimes.
Those were fun times. One of the guys grew up to be a stunt director for one of the big parks like Universal or Disney- guess when you figure out how to accidentally destroy it all, it works well to a job on how to do it without wrecking the equipment, lol.

Anywho. Don't know what kind of a bike rider your buddy was, if he was just a nice peddler or rougher than that. But yeah, it was possible to bend and wreck handlebars on BMX bikes in the 80's. Maybe the handlebars weren't in as good shape as you thought. Maybe your friend took a header and accidentally wrecked his bike and made up the story so his folks wouldn't get peeved. Or is is possible that your friend was picked on, and older kids might have messed up his bike by hand or perhaps ran the bars over with a car- and he didn't want to fess up to having that problem either for whatever reason? Or maybe he saw something he shouldn't, and the bent bars were a warning to keep his mouth shut, and he had to make something up to cover?

 

I'm not saying that it couldn't have been a random 6 foot tall weirdo with amazing strength just so happened to be in the woods and stepped out just to bend a kids handlebars and go away again. What your friend said could have been true. But it also sounds like the average crock a 12 year old kid would make up in the 80's to cover for something else.

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My friend wasn't a crazy stunt rider and the fact that it was in the middle of the country means there wasn't anyone around...saw him moments after it happened. Honest kid, didn't make up stuff like that. I saw the guy that did afterwards, my friend pointed him out to me. In all likelihood,  it was a mentally ill person and it still takes alot of strength to bend steel handlebars with your bare hands.

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23 minutes ago, tommydoggs said:

it still takes alot of strength to bend steel handlebars with your bare hands.

Depends on the alloy and leverage advantage. Bending steel is actually easy once you get it to move. Bike handle bars are made of tubing. Tubing that's been welded together and this creates micro cracks at the point of weld making the material weaker. Those are weak points. So someone with a naturally high strength level can bend them easy. 

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