• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Most Convincing Piece Of Evidence For Supernatural

Seattle21 said:
What is the single most compelling piece of evidence for any supernatural happening or Fortean occurrences you know of?
Click to expand...
Are you asking in general what would be a compelling piece of evidence, or are you asking us to nominate a known piece of evidence from a particular incident?
 
No matter the religion, if one is religious they are believing in something unseen.

Since I believe in the paranormal, it is comparatively the same idea without physical proof needed.
 
Terms need defining. By supernatural do we mean 'unknown to science' - e.g. ball lightning, rains of frogs, bigfoot, UFO's/ET's - or do we mean 'of the Spirit world - e.g. ghosts (other than poltergeists), ectoplasm, etc. or, finally, the area that most appeals to me the unexplained and extremely unlikely but not actually impossible ranging from telepathy and esp to the very high strangeness but apparently physical - centaurs, time slips, giant spacehoppers.

The last category interests me so much because IF there are any genuine cases and IF they could be investigated, they may open up whole new areas of science. Time slips , if they weren't so rare and we could analyse them, might tell us fantastic things about the nature of our universe.

It's so unfortunate that modern science shuns anything Fortean even more determinedly than in Charles Fort's day. But that's a separate topic.
 
Other people can convince me of things.
 
Frideswide said:
Personal experience. It's not transferable.
Click to expand...
Personal experience is mostly witnessed by chance. Transferring a chance experience to others will always remain questionable because seeing is believing in what you see, and you can't expect others to take your experiences as proof of anything.
 
charliebrown said:
No matter the religion, if one is religious they are believing in something unseen.

Since I believe in the paranormal, it is comparatively the same idea without physical proof needed.
Click to expand...
I have seen and heard things - briefly. But they were convincing to me regarding my religion. I wouldn't attempt to convince others for the reason Sid gives. I have met others with similar experiences, though.
 
A really complicated story, so this is the quick version.

I would see the word “seek” constantly in the strangest places like for example, inside a Chinese fortune cookie.

Out of curiosity I googled “ seek “ and it is the word in the exact middle of the Hebrew Torah ( the five Books of Moses ) which is ( darosh or darash ).

The meaning of all of this is God telling you to seek your destiny.

I classified this as being on the level of supernatural because of the number of times I came across this word in a few days.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Seattle21 said:
What is the single most compelling piece of evidence for any supernatural happening or Fortean occurrences you know of?
Click to expand...
Mine is the piece of paper on which was written (instructed by the medium) the 3 initials of her name, the initial of her home town, and the date and age of death , of my wife nearly 12 months before I met her.
 
I mentioned in another thread the phenomenon of jordkast. When a large piece of soil suddenly moves to a new place, on it's own. I don't see a normal explanation for that, while at the same time it just seems too dull to have been made up by someone.
 
Something which confuses me is dowsing. I mean on-site dowsing, not remote dowsing. Many tests have been made that show that under trial conditions it doesn't work, and yet it is still widely accepted as a perfectly rational thing in rural areas and even some companies make use of professional dowsers.

In fact I live next door to one. His other skill is as a steeplejack. He is entirely fearless of heights. Which, TBH, is pretty much opposite to me.
 
Cochise said:
Something which confuses me is dowsing. I mean on-site dowsing, not remote dowsing. Many tests have been made that show that under trial conditions it doesn't work, and yet it is still widely accepted as a perfectly rational thing in rural areas and even some companies make use of professional dowsers.

In fact I live next door to one. His other skill is as a steeplejack. He is entirely fearless of heights. Which, TBH, is pretty much opposite to me.
Click to expand...
I remember one guy that used the dowsing rods to show the audience the ley's at Stonehenge when I was visiting that site some years ago. They seemed to work well for him (a guide/talker at Stonehenge).
 
Sid said:
I remember one guy that used the dowsing rods to show the audience the ley's at Stonehenge when I was visiting that site some years ago. They seemed to work well for him (a guide/talker at Stonehenge).
Click to expand...
My neighbour uses the traditional forked willow wand and grows willows to ensure the supply. Hazel apparently also works.

Being fey for a moment, I wonder if the problem with the tests is that there will be one or more people on site who know where the items to be detected are. Also the ground will have been recently disturbed. May one or both of these factors disturb the 'fluence' whatever it is, that makes dowsing work? Standing waves may take time to build up.

Of course, putting my sensible head back on, I shouldn't believe it for an instance.
 
Years ago someone brought dowsing rods down my (then) local, and showed me how to use them. Very weird. They would cross over pints of beer without me applying any pressure. Except Guiness. Don't dowse for Guiness, you won't find it.
 
charliebrown said:
A really complicated story, so this is the quick version.

I would see the word “seek” constantly in the strangest places like for example, inside a Chinese fortune cookie.

Out of curiosity I googled “ seek “ and it is the word in the exact middle of the Hebrew Torah ( the five Books of Moses ) which is ( darosh or darash ).

The meaning of all of this is God telling you to seek your destiny.

I classified this as being on the level of supernatural because of the number of times I came across this word in a few days.
Click to expand...

Nope, I was dumped by a girl years ago and was gutted. I saw her name all the time for a year or so afterward.

It's what you are fixated on and not supernatural.

You get fixated on something and you will see it all the time. It's how the brain works.
 
In the past we lived in a house on top of a hill for 30 years until my wife fell and broke her leg in an ice storm.

Our family finally convinced us we had to move since all bedrooms and bathrooms were on the second floor.

We did find a one floor house ( an almost an impossibility in our area ) that was just as old as our first house on the hill.

After we moved into the house we are living in now, all kinds of noises started to happen.

All kinds of noises in the attic, at night, foot steps all over the house, and temperature drops in the house.

In time, all of this faded away.

But this was weird !
 
I saw a UFO, once, many years ago - in 1974, to be exact. Or - let me put it this way - I had an experience that I can best describe using the UFO model; a glowing green disc, full-moon sized, drifting slowly across the sky. I described my sighting on a so-called Skeptic forum a while ago; the replies were drearily predictable. The consensus was, "you're mistaken, you didn't see anything, don't bother us with this nonsense again"; no interest in speculating what might have caused it. None of them were there, of course, but they all "knew" that "it didn't happen."

More recently I had an experience that I could best describe using the ghost model; the sound of footsteps in an empty room. You can be sure I didn't tell those "skeptics" about that.
 
Sid said:
I remember one guy that used the dowsing rods to show the audience the ley's at Stonehenge when I was visiting that site some years ago. They seemed to work well for him (a guide/talker at Stonehenge).
Click to expand...
Hmmm. A pleasing circularity:
How do you know the dowsing works?
Because I successfully used it to find the leys.
I can't see any leys. How do you know they exist?
Because of the dowsing...

Back to the original question: "convincing" evidence for me would be proof beyond reasonable doubt that a phenomenon really existed. It would then no longer be "supernatural", but merely "natural, but not yet very well understood."

Persuasive evidence, on the other hand, would be enough to make me start to believe there might be something in it, but without dispelling all doubt. The phenomenon would remain in the realm of the supernatural.

The ones that leave me in that uncomfortable position between doubt and acceptance include poltergeists, the yeti, and appearances of people to their loved ones at the moment of death — even though they are many miles apart at the time.
 
Mikefule said:
Hmmm. A pleasing circularity:
How do you know the dowsing works?
Because I successfully used it to find the leys.
I can't see any leys. How do you know they exist?
Because of the dowsing...
Click to expand...

Ha, quite.

The "truth" of ley lines for a start is totally flaky. Funny that they were never documented or discussed anywhere until about 1846. And not popularised as a "thing" until 1925.

And dowsing? I think it is a mixture of unstable equlibirum of the rods, the ideomotor effect and sheer occasional luck.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top