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"WeirdSpace" / The Oz Factor

So many stories of WeirdSpace come to mind reading this thread.
Here's one-

I had lived in a shared house for about 12 months...quite happily, tending the garden on my time off, cooking meals, fixing up my living space so it was comfortable for me, basically enjoying life away from the oldies.
Until one incident that changed all that. One night after working a late shift I had come home and was relaxing watching TV and playing with our new pup. The pup was going over to the corner of the room staring at the wall...I assumed he wanted to play with his puppet that was hanging up on the picture rail (don't ask!). As I stood up to get the toy down I distinctly heard a rustle from outside the window. I actually SEEN a shadowy figure of a man, THROUGH the wall (!!) moving along the fenceline brushing past the bushes outside. Don't ask me how I saw it...perhaps my mind put 2 and 2 together and projected this image into my head but it was as real as I sit here today.
I totally freaked...I let my older dog outside to see what the hell it was and she run out barking, chasing this intruder over 2 fences. I went out and I could see this person who had just jumped over my 2 fences out on the street just standing there outside the neighbours house at 1am in the morning. I got my dog to sit next to me as I waited to see where the hell he would go next...i really expected him to walk away...did he?...NO!
As I crouched there behind my car with my dog trying to keep her quiet, he approached the house yet again...this time coming almost to the front door. At this point I stood up, big stick in hand (with lotsa nails in it...yeah!) and told him to "Get the F out of my yard."
He backed up real quick and I told him I would let the dog go if he didn't leave NOW!. We were only a few feet away from each other at this stage. He left. I assumed he was a drunk walking home from the local tavern chancing his luck peeping in windows.
I couldn't sleep that night at all and was outside as soon as the sun come up, I found his footprints on top of the rubbish bin that was stood next to our garage...he had been sitting up on the garage, with full view inside our house...he was possibly there as I walked passed on my way home from work.
As you can imagine, this event scared the hell outta me when it was all over with, at the time though I was more defensive of my property and was ready to give him a good doin' over if he didn't leave.
Since that day though, living there was the pits...it was gloomy, I never felt comfortable, I let the garden grow weedy, the whole idea of freedom was ruined for me in that one night. I lived there for another 12 months or so, but it was never the same...not a home anymore. Just some weird space where I sometimes slept and washed my gear. I would frequently stay over at other peoples houses just so I didn't have to be there.
Well, thats my little contribution to the WeirdSpace thread...hope you found it wasn't too far off topic.
I do have stories of depression to contribute...but i'm too depressed and can't be bothered with it all at the moment.
*sigh*
 
Mothfox,

I hope your life is depression-free too.

I have found the same experience with medical people - They seem to have no understanding whatsoever about depression and related problems, despite their extensive education in this field. They don't seem to listen, and often don't take you seriously. My recovery has been thanks to my own determination, and the help of my family. The medical proffesion has all but hindered my progress.

Although, in their defence, I have found some areas of the health service to be more than helpfull, and knowledgable, especially some special nurses I have met over the years.

Fiktishus, you story sounds really creepy!
 
beakboo said:
My feeling is it's the other way round Chatsubo, the fact that we're short on seritonin makes us more sensitive to whatever it is that causes "hauntings" and "vibes". Possibly.
I think I'll start a poll. Any suggestions before I do?
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And she was as good as her word. Please all vote in my finely crafted poll.:)
 
The "Oz Factor" refers to the strange sensation when something odd is occurring eg. UFO sighting, ghostly vision, etc.
Everything seems to be quiet, nobody else seems to be around and it's almost as if reality itself is distorted (as in the Wizard of Oz). ...

I'll see if I can find some links for Jenny's Oz Factor together with some examples...

Edit:
Yup!
Here ya go...

http://www.ronaldstory.com/oz_factor.htm

and a story with an example...
http://www.ufobc.ca/History/1990/mission1999.htm
 
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(Copied from 'Odd Silence'):
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/odd-silence.23324/

Unearthly silences often seem to be the prelude to a multitude of strange happenings - from timeslips to UFO sightings. The term 'Oz factor' was coined by Jenny Randles to describe this experience. She explains "It derives from the Frank Baum stories about the land of Oz, where Dorothy is magically transported into another reality and then brought home again."
Oz Factor: Set of symptoms described by close encounter witnesses that suggest they have entered an altered state of consciousness. Includes distortion to the passage of time and apparent disappearance of ambient sounds, such as bird songs. Often a prelude to a CE 4, but also found in psychic experiences of a not strictly UFO nature, such as the NDE (near death experience)
Source: The Little Giant Encylopedia of UFOs
Click to expand...

Personally, I wonder if the 'Oz factor' might be caused by the percipient experiencing a sudden change in the rate at which they experience time. Insects, for example, appear to experience time at a very different rate than we do. Mosquitos can fly between raindrops, and flies are virtually impossible to swat. From their point of view, we humans must seem to move in slow motion.

But why do we experience time-flow at the rate we do? Considering that our brains have so much more 'processing power' than the brains of insects, surely we must have the capacity to percieve time-flow even faster than they do? Of course, the problem then would be that our brains would be working much faster than our bodies were capable of responding. Our limbs would seem to move in slow-motion. Even performing the set of actions necessary to, for example, make ourselves a cup of tea would seem to take hours. It would be quite intolerable.

Indeed, if we started thinking too fast, we might even perceive ourselves as being paralysed. And because we would be aware of the space between sounds, it might seem that the world had fallen completely silent. We would, to borrow Randle's terminology, have entered the Land of Oz. ...
 
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Yes, it's true that a strange Oz factor silence can precede weird experiences. I even know where it begins now; for me at least. At the top of the nose and sort of inwards from there. The sudden silence and nose-sensation are sure tip-offs for me, but it's all very quick, and then the weird experience is happening. But the nose-thing and the odd (total) silence go together and it's a very strange sensation.
 
When I was younger I remember for brief periods of time (up to 5 seconds) the world would seem to go monochrome and like a stop motion picture animation.

It stopped happening when I hit my teens, also at the same time my christmas eve/easter reoccuring dream stopped.
 
I think it was Jenny Randles who popularized the term "Oz Factor" but now you've got me curious--who used the term first? Keel?
 
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I assumed that Jenny Randles INVENTED the term "Oz Factor." But might it have been somebody else? Keel, as you suggest?

By the way, nobody knows for certain where L. Frank Baum came up with the name Oz. The two main theories are that he was a great fan of Charles "bOZ" Dickens and/or that he owned a two volume dictionory, divided into A-N and O-Z.
 
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Peni would know!

Wiki says Randles coined the phrase "Oz Factor". Didn't Keel describe a similar phenomenon though? *answers self* Actually, he probably did; I just don't know if he gave it a discrete name. Damn, and I think my brother stole my Mothman book.

I think Bannik used the term "high strangeness" and I'm pretty sure he's one o'dem overseas people. :)

This page attributes the term "high strangeness" to Dr. J. Allen Hynek who addressed the United Nations on the subject of UFOs on November 27, 1978.
 
It was definitely Randles who coined "Oz Factor" - I've got a book somewhere or other in which she claims the credit for doing so. In Mothman Prophecies Keel talks about UFO percipients entering a "hypnotic-like trance" - which I guess is roughly analogous to the Oz Factor.
 
Leaferne said:
I think Bannik used the term "high strangeness" and I'm pretty sure he's one o'dem overseas people. :)
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I'm one of those over-mountains-of-toxic-sludge people (from New Jersey). I use "high-strangeness" because it refers (I think) to the contents of the experience (dancing cows, pancake-cookin' aliens, etc.) while "oz factor" refers more to the receptive mind-set of the percipient. Granted the two usually go hand in hand but I think they refer to two seperate aspects of the same phenomena.
 
Peni doesn't actually know for a fact where the name "OZ" came from, but the story told in publicity materials during Baum's lifetime was that he was searching for a name and spotted the easy pronouncability of the label on his second file cabinet. This is certainly possible and is presumably the story Baum himself told his marketing people. However, it has always sounded to me like the sort of glib explanatory fable authors tell because other people insist on reasons and sources for artifacts that your brain threw out with no particular effort when you needed something. So much of creation happens while you're not looking that authors don't worry about it much. He needed a name and he pulled one out of the air. The air's full of stuff like that, if you're paying attention.
 
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In attempting to explain "OZ factor/high strangeness" concepts to outsiders to Fortean/Paranormal speculations I've sometimes used a comparison to "the electric stillnesses before storms," which seemingly everybody has experienced. Now here I've always thought of my comparison as being an analogy, when maybe it's more correctly described as a model. Things DO seem to get screwed up and re-arranged at those times and just possibly that could include our relationship to time.
 
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rynner2 said:
Oz factor - you beat me to it, Jima!

I'm surprised you hadn't heard of this before, Garrick - altered perceptions form a large part of most paranormal stuff.

Skeptics would say it forms the whole of paranormal experience, but I want to know what alters the perceptions - is it something external? We know magnetic fields can cause these effects - so what, in a haunted house, creates the magnetic fields?
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Could you share more information about this? Where could we find studies that describes these effects caused by magnetic fields? I always saw paranormal researchers looking for magnetic anomalies in haunted places but I never understood why.
 
VitaminMan said:
Could you share more information about this?
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Sadly all three of the above members have long since left the board, but in terms of magnetic effects on the brain start with Michael Persinger. His work taken as a whole has caused a lot of controversy (and all Forteans should beware of 'theories of everything'), but on this particular subject he did some intriguing work.
 
FrKadash said:
Don't want to start an off topic chat but I always wondered what happened to Old Time Radio, last I heard he was popping up every now and then.
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Last seen nearly five years ago. His health had been poor prior to that, and he'd had tech issues. I hope there's a corner of Cincinnatti where he's quietly archiving away.
 
stu neville said:
Sadly all three of the above members have long since left the board, but in terms of magnetic effects on the brain start with Michael Persinger. His work taken as a whole has caused a lot of controversy (and all Forteans should beware of 'theories of everything'), but on this particular subject he did some intriguing work.
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Thank you very much, I will start there:hoff:
 
Reading the earlier threads made me think of the house we moved into when I was ten, which really launched me on a lifetime of depression. Large windows, plenty of light coming in and it looked like there was a perpetual brown-out in the house. We were there only a year but I remember the autumn, winter and early spring were especially grim.

I did begin to think that my depression caused me to view it that way, except the whole family disliked it. Horrible things happened there: a teenage neighbour sexually abused my sister and I under the guise of babysitting; my father exhibited violent behaviour, which eased off as soon as we moved. Everyone seemed to become a little unbalanced. There were constant arguments; even the neighbours were odd.

I was terrified of the dark stairs and the smaller box room, which I ended up sleeping in and having constant nightmares. When we moved it was almost like coming out of underwater, a horrible murky underwater at that, but the depression remained because that place marked me, well, all of us really. So I don’t think it was me; I think it was the place, the atmosphere that was malevolent.

On the other hand, places like Avebury, I find it feels like stepping into an electric current which recharges and brightens (Also Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey)
 
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