Close Encounters of this Year

Glendon over at The Flying Trilobite had a cool piece of art with a character who had the Mars face as its own. As I haven't been in a paranormal mode for almost a year, this picture of course helped trigger this years wander down the unreal road.

Now first off I'm not a true believer. Far from it. At best I could accept some paranormal phenomenon as the product and evidence of a multi dimensional reality as outlined by modern string theory. At the same time I emphasis I'm still a skeptic. The closest to a story I find compelling is the Skinwalker Ranch (warning if you click around this website it has annoying noises if you out click from the Skinwalker story pages), but I'll be blogging about this later in the week.

To me the paranormal is more just really good horror fiction "based on" real life. Normal horror doesn't real grab me, but the idea that these things could be real has hooked me right in since the X-files.

This year I had two quick funny stories that emphasis how 99% of "phenomenon" sightings.
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The UFO

So me and Andy were hanging out in the senior wing stair well, which is an open windowed room. I noticed these two very bright lights hovering in the sky, and they tracked with our field of depth when we moved around looking at them.

Immediately, I noted that an odd thing was we were seeing these lights through another room's window. Technically the lights were behind the corner of the building, but that corner's room's curtain was open allowing us to see through it to the botanic garden. However the lights moved perfectly in the sky as we moved around our limited vantage point, but they appeared to be legitimate objects in the air.

So trying to confirm this we went outside, but due to our now being at ground level there was too many obstacles to see that area of the sky...

It was enticing to think we were seeing flying saucers.

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That is till we got back to the stair well and moved the couch. Suddenly one of the lights continued to move from the sky onto the curtain of the room!

Further investigation by looking outside I found two tall bright lights on the other side of the building which would be the perfect distance to mimic our field of depth when reflected by that window.

So much for my UFO sighting. It just goes to show that one needs to REALLY think about and investigate these things looking for rational and ordinary explanations. This UFO held up to 15 minutes of rigorous investigation before we figured it out. So it shows that people can see things that they really believe and doesn't become clear right way, but it still wasn't real!

The Monster

So one night during my student teaching I got up to go to the wash room in the middle of the night. Looking up in my sleep haze I was scared awake by this scene you see here (taken about a minute later). Yes it is just a box with my hat on it, but out of the corner of my eye it looked like Freddie Cougar for a moment.