I'm still very much a Fortean. I've had too much deep weird happen to me, which has led to me questioning the nature of reality practically every day.
Me too. In my late teens and early twenties I was dabbling in magic. I once raised a cemetery and a bunch of us saw things I'm sure could only be described as ghosts (that was a night), I've turned tables, I once saw lights in the Pennsylvanian sky that hung for three quarters of an hour then moved slowly off into the distance (I've no idea what can do that, but it could have been anything), my family has had a psychic approach us unsolicited to tell us things that only a particular deceased family member could know, and made predictions that all came true (I still think
almost all psychics are fake), and I've asked fairies to return a lost object and it turned up ten minutes later (probably coincidence). I'm sure I once saw a coypu in Norfolk, but I don't know whether that counts as a cryptid (they're supposed to have been eradicated in Norfolk, having been introduced by humans). Do you know what I learned from all this?
Nowt! It doesn't impact our lives, at least not in a way we're going to understand unless science finds the means to actually, properly investigate such things, so we're no longer interpreting them through the lenses of cultural conventions and personal intuition.
But there's just so much to the world of Forteana! What about dreams (what are they, what do they mean, why do we have them)
Our sleeping imaginations.
or how people can vanish so completely
There are a lot of people in the world. Some inevitably will.
or The Hum? It's not all UFOs and Bigfoot (I agree, probably twaddle) and ghosts and all that traditional stuff.
Thing is, I don't think it's twaddle. There's got to be a reason so many places have legends of hairy, humanoid primates, that are not dissimilar to hominids we know existed once, even if their physical existence now is improbable (if so many places have them, we'd have definitive proof of at least some). And, so on. But until there's actual proper data to study, we'll never have anything but supposition.
I came for the ghosts but have stayed for the dialogue of 'ghost or timeslip?' and other threads where everyone wades in with their perspective.
What I saw was no timeslip. But that's not a story I wish to share. But there's still no resolving any specific case.
This is one of the most respectful sites on the Web as far as I can tell, and it's great to hear so many perspectives on things (even the things I consider twaddle).
Granted, but I'm not sure I'm actually a fortean anymore. The site's great, but I spend less and less time here.