All that i ask its: fromthe big list of paranormal stuff that people knows, which one its real to you?

In the poll you will choose all the options that you think that correspond to real stuff.

In the thread you will explain why (or why not).

May want to work on tidying up the spelling. “Ghosts and Huntings”? “Shhh! Be vewy quiet! I’m hunting ghosts and gobwins! Huhuhuhuhuhuh!”

Looking forward to your fixing it up!

There's no need for multiple options, since there is no "paranormal" to verify, why believe in it. "Paranormal" means outside that which is normal. In other words, it exists in the imagination, fantasy, and within the realm of speculation.

The only valid choice was the last, "I don't believe in [the] Paranormal." None of the other choices have ever been demonstrated by evidence to have substance.

Unfortunatly i still being with many time to work on the poll.

Oxygen: what so you sugest instead of "ghost and huntings"? At least an option with "ghosts" would be more normal i suppose. Give sugestions.

SkinWalker: i must disagree with you. There are some paranormal things that are real. Scientists and people in general just dont want to accept it.....so dumb they are! MAybe they are just a normal phenomenon from nature, why do not study it?

SkinWalker: i must disagree with you. There are some paranormal things that are real.

Sure. They're real. Voodoo is real. If a person believes in Voodoo and a Voodoo priest tells them they're going to get sick, then they'll probably get sick. But what real isn't the Voodoo but that person's beliefs.

But if you start attempting to apply a "reality" to the paranormal, you're going to run into a wall everytime you try to prove that reality.


Scientists and people in general just dont want to accept it.....so dumb they are! MAybe they are just a normal phenomenon from nature, why do not study it?

Sure. The "dumb" scientists. It must be all that education they receive that dumbs them down. But I'll agree with you that their may be "paranormal" things that are simply an unexplained part of nature, but then that would mean they're no longer "paranormal" but rather normal. This is all speculation, however, since none of the paranormal things you listed have ever had demonstrable and useful evidence to support they're existence. Indeed, many of them have had evidence shown that disproves them as a phenomenon.

Pseudoscience is a plague on science. It crops up and demands the attention of a weed in a well-groomed lawn. The more it is ignored, the more polluted the lawn becomes.

Not all of those are paranormal, and a few of them are very "fuzzy"/unclear terms which could be considered paranormal, but also could be otherwise.
You probably should have also pointed out that paranormal is not the same as supernatural (which is by definition impossible).

Options arent comprehensive enough.

instead of all the stuff,you could change the same to simply paranormal and normal.How do you define paranormal exactly? mention the defintions please in you site.

What's quiromancy?

What do you mean by an UFO? It's just an unidentified flying object.
Do I believe in unidentified objects? :bugeye:
And why couldn't any prehistoric civilization have developed space technology?

p.s. I don't believe, I either know or don't know. Belief is of no use in science.

I’ve experienced unusual things in my life, and I certainly don’t believe in the boogey man, but how do I explain the weird stuff? For me, experiencing unusual events is like finding true love. It either happens or doesn’t. You don’t wake up one morning and say “At 10 A.M. I’m going to find me a pretty girl, get married, and live happily ever after”.

How do the skeptics explain “love”? Two people meet each other going to work, fall in love, get married. Does that mean EVERY TIME two people go to work, they’ll end up getting married? Can’t duplicate that RANDOM event ON DEMAND, so by the idiot logic of the skeptics, falling in love and getting married is a scientific impossibility.

Skeptics say “direct your clairvoyant abilities at 10 AM to determine tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers”. No can do. Unusual events for 99% of ordinary people who claim to get them happen very randomly, and can’t be channeled “on demand” like ordering fries at a fast food restaurant.

I am a REAL scientist - Undergraduate degrees in Computer Science, Digital Electronics, Geography, and Social Science; Graduate and post-graduate degrees (on full “Fortune-500” math scholarships) in Computer Science and Engineering. I like people, I like science, and I have a very open mind.

I’ll give you ONE example from my personal life, though I have had many such random experiences. A friend and co-worker of mine passed away, and we were driving to his wake. All five of us are “Fortune 500” professionals (three degreed engineers, two professional secretaries).

It’s a two hour drive. We’re talking about music, cars, work. We mentioned he liked pop music and listened to FM 101. About 15 minutes away from the funeral home, I asked the driver (a secretary), “Do you know what time he passed away yesterday?” She answered 5:47 AM. Immediately after she said those words, the car lurched, the engine stalled, and we started coasting.

She shifted into neutral, and re-started the engine. One of the other guys in the car pointed to the digital clock on the dashboard which had re-set itself. It was flashing “5:47” A.M (It was 8:30 at night), and the radio, which was previously tuned to a news station, was tuned to FM 101. The mathematical odds of that event happening at that precise time were (1440 min/day) x (120 min/travel time) x (40 radio stations) = 6,912,000 to 1

Now, can I repeat that? No. If I’m going to another wake & ask the same question, it won’t happen again. Statistical anomaly or unusual event? I’d say that’s more than a coincidence, because it’s a SCIENTIFIC FACT that science still doesn’t understand the human heart.

Archer, let's suppose this is a true story, it's a very interesting anomaly to say the least.

However, let's say that your story is tight and cannot be attributed to mundane reality or sheer coincidence, there's still the issue of credibility of the author. No offense, but I don't know you. I don't know how unimpeachable your truthtelling ability is. I don't know how reliable your memory is. I don't know how skilled you are at writing about the real event as it really is. That's why your post as well as many writings on the internet or old printed records frequently fall down to the author credibility issue.

To be fair, the same can be applied to me. I've had quite a number of strange events in my life that seem to merit extraordinary explanations. I could talk about them to try as possible indicators of the paranormal or extraordinary. However, you don't know me. Nobody on this website (I think!) knows me. Even if someone here happens to be a passing acquaintice in real time, that person doesn't know me well enough to determine how honest I am as well as how reliable my recreations are compared to the actual events.

At best, postings like yours and others can make us go, "hmmmm...". The more credible you or others become, the louder the "hmmmm..." becomes.

-_- you know whats an ufo.

You cannot speak in believieng on that way....there are evidences about ufos you know?

Evidence of unidentified flying objects, but no evidence that they are alien in origin, or that they have the same origin for that matter.

I’ve experienced unusual things in my life, and I certainly don’t believe in the boogey man, but how do I explain the weird stuff? For me, experiencing unusual events is like finding true love. It either happens or doesn’t. You don’t wake up one morning and say “At 10 A.M. I’m going to find me a pretty girl, get married, and live happily ever after”. "Finding true love" is down to the biological necessity of the species to reproduce, and our physical make up is designed in such a way as to make it happen. If you had woken up one morning and said "At 10 am I'm going to find me a pretty girl" etc, and then actually done so, that would have been paranormal.


How do the skeptics explain “love”? Two people meet each other going to work, fall in love, get married. Does that mean EVERY TIME two people go to work, they’ll end up getting married? Can’t duplicate that RANDOM event ON DEMAND, so by the idiot logic of the skeptics, falling in love and getting married is a scientific impossibility. Creating straw man arguments in that way is what we skeptics call "idiot logic". Since people do in fact fall in love all the time, generally (but not exclusively) with people that they are in regular contact with (which certainly includes ones co-workers), and has a specific biological reason and outcome, this doesn't qualify as "paranormal" at all, but in fact "perfectly normal". Just because the precise mechanism for "love" is not entirely understood does not mean that it is in the realm of things for people to debunk.

Your strange event was quite remarkable. But there are thousands of funerals every single day all over the world in which such events do not happen. In the context of the number of funerals taking place daily all over the world, a chance of 6,972,000 to one against means that something of similar remarkableness happens somewhere once every year or two (worldwide).

Silas - Creating “straw man arguments”? :)

I'm just sharing a thought here on an unusual single event. For goodness sakes, dood- this is a thread on the unusual. Yet you're quoting comparative relationships on a world wide scale without use of "scientific method controls" and not verifying them with standard deviations. Your remarks have no more or less validity than mine. :rolleyes:

Yonatan - the credibility issue is certainly a technicality. (And even though I don’t know you personally, I’d like to hear of some of your experiences. I respect the objectivity and clearly professional character of your response.) Continuing our dialogue-

What about human emotion? There is absolutely no test known to science that can confirm the existence of emotions. Does anyone have a probe they can stick up your nose that will indicate love, hate, envy, anger, sadness? Will the emotions you feel and their intensities show on an LCD panel? Suppose you threw me in a NASA lab, and said “Prove you like the color red and hate the color green”. I have six college degrees - I couldn’t. You couldn’t. No one can.

Does that mean emotions don’t exist? Does ANY skeptic on this board DENY the existence of human emotions, even though no one has EVER “scientifically” confirmed their existence? You just know I have them because I say I have them.

I just see unusual events as adjacent and akin to emotions. They simply exist because you experience them. The number of variables that must come together to, lets say, have two perfect strangers fall in love could be an algorithm with millions of interacting decision diamonds (looks, money, security, social standing, height, mood, etc.) or just one (love itself).

Perhaps the same applies to unusual events. As events unfold in our daily lives, some kind of algorithmic lexicon develops and pieces just fall into place randomly to generate the unusual event. Consequently, when the pieces are related, as in my experience going to the wake, there is a high probability those related pieces were responsible for the event. ;)

Consequently, when the pieces are related, as in my experience going to the wake, there is a high probability those related pieces were responsible for the event.

Not really. It just means that despite your increased education and status in society, you are just as susceptible to being astonished by coincidence and victim of embellishment or "flashbulb memory" as the rest of the nutters that believe in all the paranormal junk.

As to "love" and other human emotions, there's no doubt that H. sapiens experience emotions, other animals appear to as well, which is noted by several researchers, some of whom have published books like When Elephants Weep or Mining the Minds of Animals. Some of the work might be reaching a bit, but I think we can all agree that animals are capable of experiencing emotions like fear or anger.

But in the realm of "measuring emotions," we certainly can. We know that certain primary emotions are controled by the hypothalmus and integrated into behavior, as demonstrated through ablation and stimulation studies (on cats as I remember) as well as other observations made in neuroscience. The limbic lobe of the brain, where the Cingulate gyrus and the Parahippocampal gyrus reside, has been observed to affect "secondary" emotions (like embarassment). Humans that experience Kluver-Bucy Syndrome, which affects this lobe, experience impairments or stimulations of certain secondary emotions, such as increased apathy. The Amygdala has been linked to the emotions that are learned and, indeed, studies in which the Amygdala connections were severed in rats resulted in the elimination of "fear" responses.

So emotions can be measured, at least to the extent to which regions of the brain that affect specific emotions can be identified. But "Love" (in the respect that you used the term) is most likely just a trick of DNA to convince us to procreate. There is certainly nothing "paranormal" regarding love (or any other emotion). And if it were as "magical" as human poets are inclined to suggest, then wouldn't the rates of divorce, adultry, incest, cuckholding, frigidness, etc be less significant? Wouldn't the person who married more than once in his/her lifetime be a rarity? That these answers aren't favorable to "love" easily dispells any magical or paranormal explanation and is highly suggestive of a physiological/neurological one.

The "magic of love" is mostly a social construct anyway. Monogamy is valued by Western cultures (among others) and being "unfaithful" to one's partner is considered taboo. Therefore, the cultural norm is to declare one's "heart" to another -but that doesn't keep the individual from being attracted to others of the opposite or same sex.


it’s a SCIENTIFIC FACT that science still doesn’t understand the human heart.. Really? I was under the impression that science has a pretty good grasp on coronary processes and physiology. (http://www.oucom.ohiou.edu/CVPhysiology/BF001.htm)


I am a REAL scientist - Undergraduate degrees in Computer Science, Digital Electronics, Geography, and Social Science; Graduate and post-graduate degrees (on full “Fortune-500” math scholarships) in Computer Science and Engineering.I have a ten-inch penis. Both of our claims have some similar characteristics: they are equally possible; both irrelevant to performance; neither means shit on an internet forum; and both speak more about our egos than the facts. You'd do better to post you CV somewhere else and let your words speak for themselves in a forum like this.

In the end, you appear to be an alleged six-degree holding woo-woo.

What are your “science” credentials, Silas? Any REAL math in your background? Or are you just “acting” like a scientist, pretending you have any credibility yourself? (Imitation of TV courtroom drama applied to a dialogue? Who's REALLY using “idiot logic” here?). :rolleyes: And an impertinent one at that.

Contrary to what you've said: science can demonstrate the existance of emotions in humans as well as other animals; your "love" argument to support the paranormal was, indeed, a strawman; while this is a "thread on the unusual," it resides in the Psuedoscience sub-forum of a science board and this is where we discuss the negative aspects of pseudoscience and occasionally expose it; your anecdote about the funeral was just as likely to be an embellishment of memory than an accurate account; even if it was an accurate account, Silas' point of the sheer number of significant events (such as funerals) that occur daily implies that some will be associated with other significant events through coincidence; science understands the human heart to the extent that it can be replaced with an artificial duplicate.

Coincidence, however, is what creates the illusion of something paranormal. For poeple who have "six degrees," yada yada..., the question then becomes: why would someone with that education continue to believe in the paranormal, etc?

The answer: people in that category now find themselves skilled at defending beliefs they've held since when they were ignorant.

no such thing. drugs + lonliness = paranormal

Oh, he wasn't that impertinent, SkinWalker! :) I am just a computer programmer rather than a professional scientist. On the other hand, there's nothing about specifically being a professional scientist that precludes acceptance of some very strange notions. I only recently found out that the famed Turing Test in its original form should not really be the Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence that people think. Turns out that that genuine certified genius Alan Turing actually thought that the way you would tell which subject was human and which was the computer was that the computer would not succeed in paranormal tests!


I'm just sharing a thought here on an unusual single event. For goodness sakes, dood- this is a thread on the unusual. Yet you're quoting comparative relationships on a world wide scale without use of "scientific method controls" and not verifying them with standard deviations. Your remarks have no more or less validity than mine.Well, if your statistical analysis had no validity, why did you even mention it? But, like I say, you've caught me out. I actually know no scientific methods whatsoever. I always try to demonstrate my point of view only with the use of reason. You quoted a 7 million to one chance against something happening which happened, and I merely pointed out the fallacy of believing that such a large number meant that coincidence was ruled out, since the individual events which combined actually happen all the time, so they were all bound to come together for somebody. The chances of winning the (UK) National Lottery are approximately 14 million to one, but somebody wins it nearly every week.

That I don't remember the complicated statistics methodology I once studied does not actually remove the force of my point.

... The chances of winning the (UK) National Lottery are approximately 14 million to one, but somebody wins it nearly every week...

Not sure where you dug this info up from, however the people that usually do the mathematics to work out your chances tend to forget that the national "Lotto" has 3 machines to pick before they juggle the numbers. This causes the mathematicians to miss out the "Decreased" chance of winning the lottery by a multiple of 3.

[I had a little conspiracy going on that if Parallel universes were proven to exist and people could cheat on the lottery through a chain of small paradoxes that the only way to defeat them would be to have multiple machines with multiple worlds so they wouldn't know which result out of the three was the correct result, of course anyone bearing all three 6 digit numbers on their ticket would obviously be looked into. However it's just a fragment of fiction currently.

In fact the same parallel system is what I believe paranormal activity is manufactured from when it's not being manipulated by Scientologists or Parapsychologists]

Huh? The chance of winning the lottery is based on picking 6 numbers from 49.

Six different numbers from 1 to 49 are going to come out. The number of machines they pick from is irrelevant. The chance would not change if they used Lancelot every week.

Silas, i think that it was you that in the previous page of this same thread said that there are no evidences that ufos are aliens. YOu know what? you are correct.

First, when i say "ufos" i am speaking about the phenomenon that everybody knows, the strange flying objects that sciences does not explain (the 5% of ufos that are really strange indeed). So, "ufos" in this acception does not refer to an asteroide that was mistaken by an "ufo", etc,etc.

In my country (Portugal....the reason for wich my english its so bad...we speak portuguese:-)) there are some interesting and old books (70s) about ufos. These scientists are very serious about their job and you can see that they use a scientific aproach to ufo study. They dont take any thing for granted and they give some interesting information or "hints" on how we shoucld see the phenomenon.

One of the first things that they say its that the word "ufo" its "charged" of mysticism and induces people in mistakes. They prefer to speak about (next its my translation to english) "unknow aerial phenomenons" (uap).

In the very beggining they say that UAPs must have, possibly, one of the fowllowing origins:
1) It comes from this universe. Its an alien origin (the most typical aproach) or its a terrestrial one. In the last case we can have two possibilitys: they came from a secret part of our planet and maybe they are different beings OR they are just human made.
2) It comes from another universe/dimension, whatever you call it. In that case, "dimension" here includes "time" dimensions. So, maybe (just maybe) the UAPs come from the future. For example, they could be "humans" (or aliens) coming from the future.
3) They are spiritual entitys.
4) Dont remember what they say in point four but i think that its an open point to another not explored possibility.

You m ay argue that some of these possibilitys are stupid, but at least they (the scientists) have explored something. At least they gave some ideas, since there none of them.

Another thing thet they speak about, its the fact that UAPs (or ufos if you prefer) are inteligent. In all things that they do (the movements in the sky, etc) seems to be from inteligent entitys (they call entitys, because we dont know what they are: aliens, humans, spirits, robots, whatever). It seems that its not a natural phenomenon (atmospheric, etc).

Another thing, they think that possibily the UAPS are not american, russian, japanese, whatever, secret technology, because there are many documents and evidences that UAPs are more ancient than we think. At least they are before 1900 (XIX century or less).

For example, in another book, one of the authors give many strong evidences that the Fatima Aparition* (read above) its an UAP apparition. They give so many clues, proofs, evidences and testmonies that you will see the case with different eyes.

All of these its just to say that there are people studying the UAPs with a nice aproach, leaving back all the "mystic" stuff. There are good works out there and we should keep analysing it.


*Pope John Paulo II was an adept of that phenomenon. Do you remember the 3 little shepards (it was in Portugal that occured this case) that had a vision of Maria (Jesus Mother) saying things to them? Do tou remember the "third secret of Fatima"? Thats the phenomenon that i am speaking about: "Fatima Apparitions". There were some of apparitions in different ocasions. Dont remember the details of the case.

My position is:

There are aliens. The Universe is so vast and filled with unimaginable numbers of stars that it is inconceivable that we are the only sapient beings.

There are UFOs. Most of the supposedly mysterious video footage of UFOs are of course simply aeroplanes. What even the UFO chasers don't recognise is that the reason that all UFO video footage is out of focus and too far to really capture, is that if you're close enough to see it clearly, you can see that it's a conventional aircraft, and therefore not worth videoing (if you believe in UFOs). The one other UAP as you term it, "mysterious hovering lights in the sky", seems to be particularly associated with earth tremor activity, which has led to speculation that what is going on is a piezo-electric effect (same thing that powers your gas cooker lighter), though it's very hard to pin down and investigate scientifically. (Ball lightning is another such effect.) Alien abduction stories are a mixture between hallucinatory experiences from schizophrenics, people who just want publicity, and sleep paralysis sufferers. (I suffer from sleep paralysis myself, so I know whereof I speak).

UFOs are not visiting aliens. The distances and energy requirements for insterstellar travel are so incredibly huge that it is beyond all reason to think that they've come all this way just to pick up midwestern farmers and stick probes in their asses, turn cows inside out and make pretty pictures in wheat fields.

Silas,
I don't want to go off topic with this thread but the numbers of machines that can be picked from increases marginally a random seed.

namely how I would work out the numbers is this:
49*48*47*46*45*44 = 10,068,347,520

which is the total of 6 number combinations between 1 and 49 where no two numbers are the same.

However my suggestion is that having 3 machines to choose from adds a random seed of a multiple of 3, ergo:
49*48*47*46*45*44*3 = 30,205,042,560

Since the machines are different from one another and will cause the balls to fall differently they are actually a factor, However you can get to the point of some really hideously silly calculations when attempting to weigh up chaos, for instance the guy that starts the balls rolling might take a different route to work from normal on a bank holiday when the traffic has conjested the road, however these factors would not alter the actual "roll of the dice" per say, but when the die rolls.

On a note of phenomona:
"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
- Abraham Lincoln

My point here is that some people can be out to trick those that will listen for either a slide of coin or just the prestige from being heard. Others that are less fortune are more likely to be "Fooled" by the previously mentioned people, either by hearing a story they tell or having a tricked pulled on them.

Quite frankly the tricks I'm talking about don't have to be straight forward "Magician/Illusionist" magic, but can involve a great deal of specialist equipment found in some notibly (Military, Academic and Corporate alike) laboratories around the world.
For instance it's possible to insert Sound or Visual apparitions into a persons head through the use of Radiological equipment, however it's not exactly cost effective.

It's possible to manipulate matter at it's molecular level, this is proven through the genetic manipulation of corn in certain corncircles (Gene-Resequencing).

[I could explain the potential conspiracies of "Mass Eugenic systems for Viral Outbreak Control" or "Resequencing smokers genes so they live longer and continue buying cigarettes for both the corporations profit and the governments taxation" or perhaps its all just a rehash of the lead up to the second world war with some underlining evil movement waiting in the shadows. These however would be best left for the conspiracy thread.]

Quite simply my take is that Paranormal activity or phenomona is likely to be a hoax created in one of many different ways, it's just a question of how guilible the audience is.

I was reminded from another thread I found what the correct formula is for picking 6 number out of 49:

ⁿC_r = n!/((n-r)!r!) = 49!/(43! * 6!) = 13,983,816.


However my suggestion is that having 3 machines to choose from adds a random seed of a multiple of 3, ergo:
49*48*47*46*45*44*3 = 30,205,042,560

Since the machines are different from one another and will cause the balls to fall differently they are actually a factorThat doesn't make any sense, Stryder. Only one machine is used to make the draw itself. The reason for having three machines is so that if one machine has a bias in it, that will be eliminated by another machine not having a bias in it. In case you try to cheat the system by always picking 38 because Lancelot picks more 38s, the machine is not chosen until after the cut off for the lottery. But there are still 14 million combinations of numbers, only one of which can appear.

When the paranormal is completely discounted because of a lack of evidence, it shows that the person discounting it has no desire to make new discovery. A person that is skeptical in the extreme of refusing to see possibility is doing so because of a conscious or subconscious fear of change or desire for order. People were labeled as witches or demons because of psychological disorders, and after discovery of these disorders, people were labeled as crazy because they tried to buid aircraft. Thomas Edison was called the Wizard of Menlo Park by people initially because he was doing things that they couldn't understand and therefore they could attribute to magic. By refusing to even allow for this you distinctly show that you have no respect for the unknown. My advice to anyone that feels this way is to be careful and watch yourself. Maybe you are right, but what if you're not?