The Fortean/paranormal/conspiracy thread

[Devon Malcolm]

On a different note, and I'm not sure where else to put this, when I was in Stockport bus station, one of the WiFi networks I picked up on my phone was called GCHQSurveillanceDroneXIV. what's that all about?

[Undefeated Steak]

On a different note, and I'm not sure where else to put this, when I was in Stockport bus station, one of the WiFi networks I picked up on my phone was called GCHQSurveillanceDroneXIV. what's that all about?

 

Some smartphones now work as mobile internet hotspots. I assume somebody nearby changed their name to this.

Similar to how people used to change their Bluetooth name in to "uR a DiCkHeAd" or whatever. 

[Devon Malcolm]

So I am not about to be hunted down like Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State?

[waters44]

 

 

How come we can sometimes tell when the phone is about to start ringing? Can we subconsciously feel the waves?

Ive always wondered this. Similarly, I wake up two minutes before my alarm goes off all the time. Doesnt matter if that's 6 o clock or 10 o clock. Lots of other people have said the same thing happens to them too.

 

That one is easy, it's because you subconsciously know what time your alarm is going to go off when you go to sleep. More so if it's a recurring alarm like one to get up for work.

 

 

I get what you're saying, but how does our brain know what the time is?

 

Last Wednesday I needed to be up at 6:30, which is completely different to my normal routine. I set my alarm for 6:30, and I wake up at 6:27. To me that is a bit freaky. It happens a lot, but I agree that perhaps our body clocks have a part to play when we are in a normal daily routine.

[Undefeated Steak]

So I am not about to be hunted down like Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State?

 

I can't make any promises. 

[King Coconut]

It's not a million miles from a theory I read in pre-internet days about iron particles in the ground or in buildings being able to hold information like some naturally occurring magnetic tape. Ghosts - particularly those that perform a set routine and don't interact with bystanders - would simply be a replaying of an event that had inadvertently been recorded to this supernatural videotape. Disembodied voices would be sounds captured where there's only enough iron to record audio.

 

I can see how this might work with audio, as everything in the world has acoustic properties and can theoretically be used as a microphone/speaker. I have problems understanding how it could work visually. There are no naturally occurring video cameras or projectors/TVs, so essentially you'd just have a recording medium, but no way of getting video onto it.

 

Can you expand a bit?

Edited October 14, 2014 by King Coconut

[Surf Digby]

Not much, I'm afraid. This was the best part of twenty years ago and a friend had printed this out whilst at college, professing it to be the definitive scientific explanation behind ghosts.

 

It's one that's ticked away in the back of my mind, but I can't decide whether I buy into it or not because - as you said - storing this demonic data is one thing, but how is it being captured? How is it being reproduced?

This is, of course, assuming it is just visible light being recorded and not something else. Qi, perhaps, or maybe a fragment of time itself?

 

Of course, this wouldn't account for the ghosts that do speak to people.

 

I was thinking that maybe it was related to the psychokinetic phenomena of people that can "force" images directly onto film without the need for a camera, but then, why would they force a recording of themselves walking down a flight of stairs with a candle into the environment, unless they're deliberately being a dick and want to scare people?

Edited October 14, 2014 by Nostalgia Nonce

[King Coconut]

Your 'fragment of time' comment has been going through my mind since last night. That's definitely something that could be plausible.

 

At least, more plausible than psychokinesis, which is bollocks' bollocks.

[Guy Bifkin]

 

 

 

Go on then, what were they?

 

 

 

I also lost an hour of my day once. I can prove what time it was at 2 separate points in the morning between 8:00 and 11:00 but during that period I walked to school and arrived an hour later than I should have. Not quite as exciting as the door-ghost but hey-ho.

 

 

That's quite common in people who have suffered a concussion.

 

 

Is not remembering whether you'd suffered a concussion or not also quite common amongst them?

 

 

I think we both know the real reason behind this strange phenomena.

[King Coconut]

You swore you'd never tell, Poppet.

[Loki]

Given all the bizarre subatomic particles shooting through the planet every day, and the increasingly complex physics involving time, anything's possible when it comes to repeating fragments of time in a particular location.

 

Slightly off-topic, but I read a recent scientific theory which neatly ties together a bunch of things that have always been woolly.

 

Essentially, it's about black holes and the fact that we don't really know what happens at the core when all the matter they suck up is compacted down to a singularity. Where does it go? It should explode.

 

Well, we know of another phenomenon which involves a singularity, huge volumes of matter and an explosion.... so the theory is that there are multiple universes, each one created by the a Big Bang which is a singularity from a black hole in a previously existing universe.

[Undefeated Steak]

Recently I've been philosophising about universes and how unlikely it is that EVERYTHING shares the same timeline and space. I'm not even talking about inside our universe, or other parallel universes, but there must also be things that we can't even contemplate out there that have no resemblance to the atoms or particles or time or whatever that we know.

 

Time could almost be a sense to us, like taste or sight. Just because we've found a simple way to measure it doesn't mean that it's the correct way. I very much doubt that it's linear in the way that we think of it being.

 

The most basic demonstration of this is when we first look at a clock or watch and the second hand seems to stall. That's just our mind misinterpreting time itself.

 

 

 

.... Shit, I'm I a tin foiler? 

[King Coconut]

Well, either you've misunderstood the concept of time as we know it since Einstein, or you're tin-foiling it up. Sorry dude.

 

You started well though. It's not only unlikely that everything shares the same timeline, it's demonstrably false. Absolutely everything in the universe is on its own timeline, relative to everything else.

 

Regarding the second hand stalling; a clock isn't linked to the concept of time in any way. It's just a device that's been invented to mark the passage of time. If a stalling second hand was a result of us misinterpreting time, then it wouldn't be confined to clocks. You'd see stalling people in the street, stalling aeroplanes in the sky, and so on. Stalling hands on a clock are the result of bad batteries or not being able to accurately measure a second in your head.

[Astro Hollywood]

Here's another Astro favourite. It's written in an irritatingly tabloid way, as it's from a November 1953 issue of the Liverpool Echo,  but even though it's phrased like a children's story, it's creepy all the same.

 

 

It was the days leading up to Guy Fawkes Night, that magical time for the child between Hallowe’en and Yuletide.

 

David, a 12-year-old child from a prefab on Rycot Road, and Alan, his 11-year-old friend from Hale Road, decided to play cowboys and Indians in the Little Woods.

 

The time was 4.20pm. An autumn mist was drifting in from the direction of the distant airport runways, and darkness was falling fast, so the two boys built a small fire in the woods.

Alan’s prized ‘toy’ was his bow and arrows, and he dipped the head of a wooden arrow into the fire, and when it was alight, he fired it into the air. It climbed like a rocket into the darkening sky and arced over the crowns of the bare-branched trees into the murky depths of the misty wood.

 

Alan expected David to make some complimentary remark about his archery, but his friend was busy looking at something else in the wood with a transfixed expression of fear and wonder.

 

Alan turned to see what David was gazing at, and was startled to see a strange-looking animal about 20 feet away. By the light of the flickering fire, the two boys saw an enormous tabby-coloured cat, about four feet in height – and it sat there with a peculiar face. Its blue eyes were human-looking and full of wisdom. ‘Hello children,’ the feline said in a clear, rather well-spoken voice.

 

The boys reacted to the speaking cat by fleeing from the woods onto Western Avenue, where they narrowly missed being hit by the 82E bus. The bus driver beeped his horn at the children and continued on his way. Minutes later, the boys reached Alan’s home on Hale Road and blabbed out their incredible story, but no one believed them. A four-foot-tall cat was unbelievable enough, but a cat that spoke?

 

The boys bravely returned to the wood on the following day at around the same time, and again built a fire. The oversized striped cat came slinking silently out of the wood towards David and Alan, who were, as you would expect, quite nervous. The cat arched its great back, then sat by the fire, and from the other side of the flames, the boys watched tensely. The cat started to speak. It gave its name as a word that sounded like Semeel, and claimed to be a guardian. Semeel warned the children to stay away from the wood, and said that a certain man they knew was out to kill them. The cat then vanished back into the wood.

 

The boys went to their homes and told their parents what the giant cat had told them, and both lads were scolded for telling silly lies. What’s more, the man supposedly out to kill them was on holiday in Wales. However, a week later, this man was found dressed as a vagrant in the woods. He had built a den there after secretly returning from Wales.

 

The police discovered he had attempted to abduct a child five years before in Widnes, and the man confessed it had been his intention to abduct David and Alan.

Semeel was seen by the boys on three more occasions, but when the area was cleared for building developments, the enigmatic speaking cat of Speke was seen no more

Edited October 15, 2014 by Astro Hollywood

[Surf Digby]

Stalling hands on a clock are the result of bad batteries or not being able to accurately measure a second in your head.

Do you not have that (what I assume is a) trick of the mind where the first movement of the second hand seems to take a lot longer than every subsequent one?