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Fortean Thoughts Occasioned By A Claim To Have Seen Nessie

HenryFort said:
typical aural simulacrum (tm) ... for an acoustic phenomenon you wouldnt favour an acoustic source ?
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Yes, but having lived in a building with the same issue, sometimes a footstep is not plumbing, not the wind and not squirrels but a footstep. Once you rule out the other possibilities, there it is.
 
HenryFort said:
typical aural simulacrum (tm) ... for an acoustic phenomenon you wouldnt favour an acoustic source ?
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The sound was distinctly that of a man in hard soled shoes walking across a wooden floor. There was nobody else in the house. Sure I'd favor a prosaic source but I can assure you it wasn't rattling heating pipes, creaking rafters, tree branches scratching on the walls, settling floor joists, or a TV left on in the next room. I know I won't convince anyone of that but if you'd been there you'd agree with me. That's the damned thing about these experiences.
 
IamSundog said:
Agreed. I don't presume to know what the root cause of this was.
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I've been in the same boat except in my, 'our' in fact as at least three people heard it, it was the sound of a dog sniffing and padding about. Went on for a month or so. Never really had a clue what was at the bottom of it. I'm not sure if I wouldn't be better equipped to explain it if it were t happen now though.
 
Lb8535 said:
Yes, but having lived in a building with the same issue, sometimes a footstep is not plumbing, not the wind and not squirrels but a footstep. Once you rule out the other possibilities, there it is.
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IamSundog said:
The sound was distinctly that of a man in hard soled shoes walking across a wooden floor. There was nobody else in the house. Sure I'd favor a prosaic source but I can assure you it wasn't rattling heating pipes, creaking rafters, tree branches scratching on the walls, settling floor joists, or a TV left on in the next room. I know I won't convince anyone of that but if you'd been there you'd agree with me. That's the damned thing about these experiences.
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oldrover said:
I've been in the same boat except in my, 'our' in fact as at least three people heard it, it was the sound of a dog sniffing and padding about. Went on for a month or so. Never really had a clue what was at the bottom of it. I'm not sure if I wouldn't be better equipped to explain it if it were t happen now though.
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but when we see a collection of artefacts or a configuration of nature that for instance resembles a human face (bole of a tree/crumpled bedcovers) do we look beyond the simulacrum and need a compelling source, or do we accept that this is the meaning of resemblance ... should we treat aural simulacra (tm) any different
 
Get back on (LNM) thread, folks! Or find a more appropriate thread for your rambling reminiscences...
 
gotta be ten years -and several boards- ago

i also invented the selfie
 
Eponastill said:
Couldn't Justin and his passenger have Seen Something and photographed it that was essentially immaterial and difficult for us to explain at this time ie couldn't the LNM be a bit like a ufo or a ghost?
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Yes, indeed. They could have.

Eponastill said:
I'm just pointing out that you wouldn't necessarily demand such Realness from other fortean things.
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There is a good reason that an almost infinite amount of people throughout history have had encounters with strange things/creatures/beings and not one of them has been able to produce a "solid and quality" piece of evidence to "prove" it. See Harpur's "Daemonic Reality" and the work of John Keel.

Eponastill said:
...after all, there have been stories from the loch for a long time (the Saint Columba episode).
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There have, or appear to be. All histories are invented. Hundreds of Saints saw hundreds of unusual things...we don't know about most. Why's that? Because nobody made a big deal about them. The Nessie "story" is manufactured. Just like all stories. This isn't to say there isn't an almost myriad of possibilities concerning what may or not be involved with the Loch. Just that the stories, at least, are human creations.
 
davidplankton said:
Any accounts of high strangeness at the Loch which don't involve a large aquatic animal?
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Interesting point. Again, something that John Keel wrote about. Stan Gordon has done a lot of work on people's Bigfoot experiences that seemed to have involved UFOS (or vice versa). I find all of that fascinating. Keel wrote that in areas of UFO flaps he found there were very often many reports of ghosts, cryptids and other strange phenomena.

About ten years ago my brother stayed at an isolated cottage by Loch Ness. His wife and he both noticed sudden and strong wafts of the smell of cigarette smoke. Neither smoked and they were miles from any other houses. One morning they woke up, walked into the kitchen and the lightbulb had apparently unscrewed itself from the fitting and fell to the floor, landing (unsmashed) on the hard stone floor. At night they could both hear faint music emanating from nowhere apparent.
 
Coastaljames said:
Interesting point. Again, something that John Keel wrote about. Stan Gordon has done a lot of work on people's Bigfoot experiences that seemed to have involved UFOS (or vice versa). I find all of that fascinating. Keel wrote that in areas of UFO flaps he found there were very often many reports of ghosts, cryptids and other strange phenomena.

About ten years ago my brother stayed at an isolated cottage by Loch Ness. His wife and he both noticed sudden and strong wafts of the smell of cigarette smoke. Neither smoked and they were miles from any other houses. One morning they woke up, walked into the kitchen and the lightbulb had apparently unscrewed itself from the fitting and fell to the floor, landing (unsmashed) on the hard stone floor. At night they could both hear faint music emanating from nowhere apparent.
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Have you seen Shallow Grave? :eek:
 
Coastaljames said:
Interesting point. Again, something that John Keel wrote about. Stan Gordon has done a lot of work on people's Bigfoot experiences that seemed to have involved UFOS (or vice versa). I find all of that fascinating. Keel wrote that in areas of UFO flaps he found there were very often many reports of ghosts, cryptids and other strange phenomena.
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I keep thinking that there is only one phenomena which doesn't know what it appears to be until someone witnesses and imprints a form on it.
 
jimv1 said:
I keep thinking that there is only one phenomena which doesn't know what it appears to be until someone witnesses and imprints a form on it.
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Yes, I agree. Certainly what Harpur concludes in probably my favourite book on the paranormal - "Daemonic Reality". As does Keel in a less academic manner in "Mothman". Fairies, UFOS, Bigfoot, ghosts, strange events. There is only one event occurring, and that is an occasional and unexpected insight into something bigger...a spiritual and mystic world-soul if you like. How we interpret it is depends on us and what we bring to the event. If we interpret the event as a UFO and someone else interprets it as an angel it tells us nothing about the event and everything about the two observers. Everything is subjective perception. Except objective "realism" which is a human construct. Hence it's proved impossible to capture such "scientific" events that happen millions of times all around the world every single day. You might as well try to photograph some oxygen. It's not going to work.

Such an idea is actually ancient - Neo-Platonism. And most indigenous people's live their lives in this way with no thought of it being odd. Also- see the modern ideas of "unified theories of the paranormal". Also there's a lot of quantum physics stuff on the matter that seems to assert that multiple realities are not only likely but scientifically inevitable.
 
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It is an interesting hypothesis. It came to me while reading the UFO Encyclopedia. Witnesses first remarked on seeing a light, then experiencing a paranoic or fearful reaction with an embellished physical sighting. Pilots are outmanoeuvred, people on lonely highways are abducted etc. I used to think that this was the result of a localised electromagnetic anomaly having an effect on the brain. Eartlights, if you will. Which brings us back to the grating granite and quartz around Loch Ness.

Perhaps we should have a new thread along the lines of 'The Unified Fortean Phenomena Theory'.
 
jimv1 said:
Perhaps we should have a new thread along the lines of 'The Unified Fortean Phenomena Theory'.
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We do. It's the 'living in the Matrix' thread.
 
jimv1 said:
Perhaps we should have a new thread along the lines of 'The Unified Fortean Phenomena Theory'.
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Of course, all are welcome. I guess, for me though, unless you're super-careful you yet again try and put something into a box and slap a label on it when the event is no more likely to be able to put into a box as water can be kept in a sieve.

Which is pretty ironic.

I like the idea of some big-eared cosmic trickster sprite, in the spirit of Groucho, refusing to join a club that allowed him in ;)
 
jimv1 said:
It is an interesting hypothesis.
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I think the vague basis of it started working into my mind even as a child, when I read that in 1850s America..."aliens" were seen visiting and landing all around the country, traveling in, er...hot air balloons.
 
jimv1 said:
I keep thinking that there is only one phenomena which doesn't know what it appears to be until someone witnesses and imprints a form on it.
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I've read variants of this idea and I have to say I mostly disagree with it. I would think that if fortean events are essentially without form and are given shape exclusively by the observer's mind, they would be almost infinitely varied and especially would be entirely different across cultures. But while they do vary somewhat across cultures, they still conform to a fairly small set of recognizeable types and within each type exhibit mostly consistent features and behaviors. To me this shows that they are distinct phenomena with their own actual properties.

What they do share apparently is the ability to be there one second and gone the next, as if they can move in and out of our reality from some other plane. Maybe they all originate in the same other plane, like sea creatures that surface occasionally from the ocean but are distinct entities.

At the same time, there *is* a subjective aspect to at least some fraction of these events, where simultaneous observers experience things differently. So some of these beasties interact with mind in a way we dont understand. But even in these cases there is I think almost always a common core to the experience.

My two cents.
 
^ Good post, thanks for sharing.

IamSundog said:
I would think that if fortean events are essentially without form and are given shape exclusively by the observer's mind, they would be almost infinitely varied and especially would be entirely different across cultures.
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Reality tunnels...as the good Robert Anton Wilson talked about...Maybe there is an infinite and varied amount of experience but we get it funneled and sorted. Particularly by culture. I bet if we were to learn about some experiences had by...Kalarahari Bushmen, or...Ukranian Orthodox monks, or...Australian aboriginals then we would hear about some stuff that doesn't fit neatly into our "paranormal" boxes.

When we open a book about ghost sightings it's full of events that fit the boundaries of things that we call "ghost sightings". Anything different isn't going to be there. And, sadly, it probably won't be anywhere. No books, no documentaries, no movies because it doesn't fit. Just how it works. We have these boxes - UFOs, lake monsters, cryptids, ghosts, fairies...but they are all objective constructions. Again- they tell us everything about our perception and need to order whilst telling us nothing about the actual events.
 
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Ringo said:
Well, I for one, would love for Nessie to be a ghostly apparition of long departed Plesiosaur. I mean, how wicked would that be. A loch haunted be the restless spirit of a dinosaur. I'm all for it.
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Eponastill said:
Just to be devil's advocate, is it necessarily true that the LNM has to be a solid fleshy thing to show up on a picture? I mean we might be prepared to entertain the idea that ghosts appear on film (assuming we're prepared to entertain the idea of ghosts at all, which we should as forteans should we not, as there are so many tales of them?)

Couldn't Justin and his passenger have Seen Something and photographed it that was essentially immaterial and difficult for us to explain at this time ie couldn't the LNM be a bit like a ufo or a ghost?
..........
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I touched on this in an earlier post, if plesiosaurs have ghosts the why aren't they all over the place e.g. floating around my living room. If we think that ground / sea levels have changed thereby hiding them then why no saurian sightings in mines?
Why are there no ghosts of recent aquatic life - if I go to the beach at low tide why isn't the air full of spectral cod or dolphins? ;)
 
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