Do you believe in the paranormal?

[GoNative]

Originally Posted by TalnSG

In the situation I described, I really thought I was dreaming or hallucinating. I would not allow myself to believe that my grandmother came back and walked through her house like she was saying good bye to it all. At least I didn't believe it until 20 years later I heard my cousin who I thought had been asleep through it, tell someone about experiencing it. We then went to the third one who had been in the room who confessed thinking the same as I had, that she was having a vivid dream. I can't say whether this was a case of telepathy allowing the three of us to share a single dream simultaneously, or if in fact our grandmother came back and said goodbye. I am open to either interpretation, I just know something very unusual happened that night.

Can I come up with a plausible, rational explanation? Probably I can but does it matter? If you beleive in what happened and if it brought you some comfort then that's a good thing.
Only thing I'd say is that few of us have memories that can remember things all that well 20 years later. When talking to someone else and comparing a memory from so long ago it is easy to remember it in such a way that it conforms with the memory of others. There is always a tendency for people to want to have reinforcement and confirmation from others so there is a tendency to fit your memories into a group mindset.

To illustrate this many years ago I worked in a max security prison. One night we had a riot and a number of us officers were taken hostage for a time. When it was all over we had to write reports of what had occurred. We did not collude with each other when writing the reports and all of us ended up having quite different recollections of the sequence of events and those involved. Some years later though after having discussed the riot as a group there became a sort of concensus on the events of the night. Our memories changed somewhat to fit into the group concensus.

[MikeB]

This is a real tough subject for me. In the context of my own personal paradigm, the lack of corroborated evidence can only lead me to conclude that what we regard as paranormal phenomena is something else and that there is almost always a better explanation than one of supernatural disturbances. It stands as a good rule to remember never to attribute a supernatural explanation to something that might be explained, albeit difficultly, with a standard rational explanation. With this in mind I would logically come to the conclusion that there probably, though not certainly, is nothing to this at all. Or I would have, had I not have experienced a series of what I could only regard to be quite frightening paranormal experiences. Experiences which left me, at the time, with very little doubt as to their authenticity. As the years go by this small amount of doubt has grown, fed by a steady stream of logic and the understanding that eye witnesses make notoriously bad reporters of facts as they were. Nevertheless, I'm still reluctantly inclined to believe that there's perhaps something genuinely supernatural to it, even though I would naturally tend to dismiss myself I were looking at my account from the outside.

[tangomike]

My grandfather was a Japanese-American serving in the United States Army during World War II. He was stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in the beginning of the war as part of the 100th Infantry Battalion.....later to be reassigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat team.

He told me stories of the Pearl Harbor attack as a kid which always facisnated me.....he said after that day he knew 2 things. That ALIENS exist and that Japanese-Americans faced a dark future. That morning in 1941 my grandpa was walking from the barracks in on Sand Island to the Infirmary because he was coming down with a fever and wasn't feeling good. All of a sudden explosions started coming from the Harbor and maching guns strafed the building next to him. He ran to the barracks and joined other soldiers to fight back agains the Japanese...they had small arms and were shooting at the planes from towers and rooftops.

In the midst of the pitched battle he saw 4 disk shaped craft hovering above the Harbor apparently watching the battle. With bomb and bullets flying around he thought nothign of it until the battle was over then started talking about it with other soldiers. They had all seen the metal disks in the sky and thought maybe it was a Japanese weapon or somesort.

Also I read that during the US operations in Guadacanal, disk shaped craft watched the ensuing battles.