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Ask HN: Have you ever experienced any paranormal or unexplained phenomena?

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• rnernento 5y ago
  This is Hacker News, at least build an app to track these or something...
• jqpabc123 5y ago
  You mean like maybe dreams that actually came true?
• gdsdfe 5y ago
  Well I came across someone that can read minds, I still have no idea how she did it and nobody believes that my story is true.
  • mathieubordere 5y ago
    How did you test her capabilities?
    • gdsdfe 5y ago
      Well this encounter happened between July and November 2020. A relatively young couple, 30ish, moved in to the building in the unit on top of mine. Keep in mind this an old Montreal building, so lots of wood and you can pretty much hear everything ... She would basically tell her partner what I was doing/thinking or even dreaming, the relation wasn't amicable at all they would wake me up at night and I would blast the TV to retaliate and things spiraled for a few months until I moved out.
• geranim0 5y ago
  i'm experiencing life day afrer day, does that count as unexplained?
• reportgunner 5y ago
  Yes.
• BurningPenguin 5y ago
  I wrote some code that worked on first try. Does that count?
• vegasbrianc 5y ago
  Every time I compile something
• ryannevius 5y ago
  Consciousness
  • hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    I have the same feeling. Not only that, but since learning about the properties of subatomic particles, and how different their behavior is from everything we experience every day, I have the feeling we are in a kind of Truman Show. Every time we find some answers, we discover another layer of mystery. It is as if we had two lives: one conventional, with our partners, work, worrying about Russia etc., and another one, where the universe is made up mostly of void, with the rest of the space being filled by what we currently call quantum fields organizing in particles forming our experience of the universe and being, down to photons reflected from surfaces and striking cells in our eyes so that the brain can flip the vision upside down and interpret it with some anticipation, so even our idea of "present" is somewhat illusory. Frankly, the reality itself is just amazing.
• onion2k 5y ago
  Some sprints I manage to get some code written in spite of how many meetings I have. I can't explain it.
  • scruple 5y ago
    > I can't explain it. Keep digging, the truth is out there.
• beeforpork 5y ago
  Paranormal? Unexplained phenomena? You mean like: 'WTF?' That's exactly what I see for like every second bug in our software. Every day! EDIT: Our software ist not that buggy!!
• QuadmasterXLII 5y ago
  We all have iphone cameras with image stabilization and autofocus, bigfoot only visits you if you have a 240p manual focus camcorder and a hand tremor.
• u2077 5y ago
  Stuff in my browsing history appears on HN anywhere from 2 hours - 2 days after I visit the page. And not just obvious stuff like news.
• cehrlich 5y ago
  Everything I do always ends up fitting exactly into the amount of time that is available to do it, whether that amount of time is excessively short or excessively long.
• gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
  No, but smarter people than me have also thought about this kind of thing. I recommend the book “deciphering the cosmic number” which is a biography of Wolfgang Pauli and his efforts towards studying the paranormal.
• soco 5y ago
  Many years ago I was rowing at night with a few friends, two small boats on a little lake. One of us noticed across the night sky a satellite or something like the ISS, so we looked at it in awe. The light then took a 90 degrees turn, went on and after a while it disappeared. We packed our stuff immediately and went home.
• phphphphp 5y ago
  I frequently have experiences where I’ll think something and it’ll happen, like “I haven’t heard from x in a while” and a few minutes later an email from them arrives. There’s lots of rational explanations (like, if I was thinking about them then whatever inspired my thinking could have inspired theirs) but it’s to the point where it happens so frequently that if one day it’s plausibly demonstrated that we are in a simulation or there’s some mystical way that we can influence the universe, I’d believe it. The more this happens, the more I understand how people end up believing in manifestation and the like. Obviously it’s not true, but my dumb lizard brain cannot help but believe the pattern has some meaning.
• sva_ 5y ago
  I was once camping at a lake with some friends sitting by a campfire, and the wind was calm. Suddenly it became really stormy out of nowhere for about 5 to 10 minutes, and then the wind became completely calm again. We were looking over the lake and there was some light in the air, which was seemingly ascending. It would sometimes jump left and right, which looked extremely unusual. After a while it was like passing infront of us over the lake and we heard some weird loud noise that echoed over the lake. We couldn't tell how far away it was due to darkness and its movements being pretty weird. It was a really weird experience and we still sometimes talk about and ponder about it. It was probably just a plane but the way it moved just looked so unusual.
• desmond373 5y ago
  So when I was young I dreamt far more often than I do now and in one of these dreams I had a frighteningly real experience of some kind of dark spectre hanging over me. I remember a terrific pressure in my ears and the whole world feeling like it was moving away from me. Felt like I was awake in terror for hours that night. Where I lived, earthquakes were very rare, this was my first time experiencing one. I also had poor ear canals so the pressure was likely a mix of blood rush and pressurized ear drums. As for the spectre, coming from a dreaming state to so many different stimuli, my mind must of just though up something I would see as imminent danger. The earthquake was around a Mag. 3.
• vibemasterxl 5y ago
  The fact that anything exists at all. I’m not talking about matter-antimatter asymmetry or consciousness, but rather the fact that there is no causality-compatible answer to “where did the universe and whatever it exists within come from?” For all the arguing about creation vs evolution etc, this sure seems like a glaring issue sitting out in the open that folks don’t often acknowledge. And when it is brought up, people often get sidetracked with something like gravity or matter-antimatter as above. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and it hurts my brain, and it also scares me. It seems definite to me that there must be some truly incredible quality of existence which allowed it to come to be out of nothing, one that I don’t have even the slightest hope to even explain or probably even understand.
  • WithinReason 5y ago
    Exactly my thoughts. My conclusion was that the idea of cause and effect is something that only applies inside our universe, and not in the system our universe is embedded in (whatever that is). In other words, to us time is a basic feature of existence, while on some most basic level it's not. That's why existence itself seems to counteract our most basic intuitions.
    • caeril 5y ago
      > time is a basic feature of existence, while on some most basic level it's not I've come to two conclusions, only one of which is correct: 1. We are in a continuous universe, and time is a human construct. The only thing that actually exists is force interaction and momentum/velocity. Time is merely an emergent property of these things, and one that we use to measure, as humans. God may or may not exist. 2. We are in a discrete simulation, and time, specifically the Planck Time, is derived from the clock frequency of the computing substrate. God exists, or some form of god, because a simulation implies the existence of a Simulator. Currently leaning to option 2, but who knows?
      • WithinReason 5y ago
        In both of your described scenarios time would still exist (because cause and effect would still exist), they are just different abstractions. When I say "time doesn't exist outside our universe" I don't mean it's an illusion, or that it's something else that we think. I mean it literally. On some most basic level outside our universe there's nothing that could be construed as time, so there's no cause end effect.
• ergonaught 5y ago
  1) A family member died, unbeknownst to me, when I was young. The night he died, while I was reading a book, I felt the weight of a hand pressing down on my shoulder. I was distracted by reading so instead of being startled, I merely touched the area with my hand and looked over my shoulder, noting that no one was present, while continuing to feel the hand. 2) One day in high school, for no apparent reason whatsoever, I informed a friend that I believed something bad was going to happen to their vehicle. Later that day, someone unknown to me (ie: not someone I might have “overheard” discussing this) broke into it and stole things. 3) In my 20s, driving at night with a friend along a highway that bordered a US army base, with giant evergreen trees along the boundary there, a flying object with dozens of lights appeared on the other side of the trees, matching my speed, and only slightly higher “altitude”. This went on for a minute or so. After we reached the destination, I began telling other friends about the weird encounter with a helicopter we had just had, and the friend with me looked at me like my brain had fallen out and exclaimed that was definitely not a helicopter. (The encounter was silent, and whatever it was flew at about 50 mph at 20-30 feet above ground, so he had a point, but I had fully bought into “it was a helicopter”.) Could go on, but this seems a fine place to stop.
  • jerrysievert 5y ago
    same experience as #3 for me, but in the coastal range in Oregon. no sound, above the road, then gone after about 5 minutes. neither of us in the car thought it was a helicopter. timeframe was late 90's.
    • ergonaught 5y ago
      Early 90s and Tennessee for mine.
      • bstrdsmkr 5y ago
        This is super interesting. My grandmother and her best friend always told an almost identical story. They were in Morgan County, Tn. Also early 90s
  • 5y ago
• poisonarena 5y ago
  Seeing a lot of reddit style joke comments or 1 sentence answers. I am really hoping to read some more in depth personal experiences, and critical analysis of others experiences.
• tluyben2 5y ago
  I know how to explain them because they were dreams, but I can lucid dream on command (for the past 30 years; took 1 year of training) and I had many very realistic experiences other people would describe as religious apparitions or paranormal activity. Like chatting with my future wife, chatting with my dead grandfather, seeing christ, seeing satan, Grudge like Japanese girls under my bed etc.
  • watercooler_guy 5y ago
    > Grudge like Japanese girls under my bed etc. That’s a hell of an experience to mention casually! Did you wish for these terrifying encounters and they happened? Or the control over your dreams isn’t that fine grained?
    • tluyben2 5y ago
      Not that fine grained, but I enjoy nightmares very much. Best horror movies you actually feel you are part of. Usually they are about zombies or robots (galatica cylons from the old show to be precise); those are excellent and I am immortal there so a bullet or laser hits me then I can just go on and I can fly when I want too (in actual life I have terrible fear of heights; I cannot stand games like The Climb in VR for more than seconds).
  • poisonarena 5y ago
    how did you train to have lucid dreams? As soon as I realize I am dreaming I immediately leave my dream
    • tluyben2 5y ago
      I never believed in anything religious or paranormal so I figured that people who have outer body experiences are, in fact, lucid dreaming. There are many books to learn OBE; I got one from the library and trained from it; one year, every night when I was 19. And that was it. I think the book was from a guy called Monroe and was, outside the drivel about OBE, very practical with lessons and exercises to practice OBE.
• vibemasterxl 5y ago
  We have a PHP app that uses an EOL framework and several EOL libraries (unsupported for many years) that has passed several security audits.
  • anotherhue 5y ago
    I'm sure there's a scientific explanation!
• terramex 5y ago
  I was laying on grass in Tenerife reading R.A.W.'s "Prometheus Rising" when I saw big white circular object in the sky. It was quite big, moving in zig-zag pattern for several minutes and then became smaller and disappeared. I recorded a video with phone but it was your typical 'ufo' recording - shaky white small dot with autofocus missing all the time. The phone unexpectedly turned off and died few weeks later before I transferred video anywhere. The lesson was to backup my phone as I do with PC and never buy Samsung again.
  • poisonarena 5y ago
    Quite a book to be reading while witnessing something strange, did you enjoy the book?
    • terramex 5y ago
      It was fascinating read at peculiar time in my life and it made the whole experience much more memorable. I would love to re-read it in few years.
  • hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    In which part of Tenerife was it?
    • terramex 5y ago
      In some park in Santa Cruz, I don't remember the name as I was there only for 1 day.
• aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
  A relative experienced, or clearly perceived experiencing, out-of-body during labor with child.
• heresie-dabord 5y ago
  What is typically meant by "paranormal"[1] is at best a mildly amusing excursion into exploring the credulity of humans. As for the "unexplained phenomena"... You might not have an explanation, but if you can study it closely and reproduce it reliably, you may be on the path to knowledge. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/paranormal https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/paranormal
• jzellis 5y ago
  Recently my TV has been turning itself on at night. I looked at the settings on my Kodi box and realized the CEC settings could be doing it, so I disabled power management over CEC and rebooted. It's still doing it. Did it last night. My wife thinks it's ghosts, but she's Irish, so.... :-D And our house is nearly 200 years old, so if some poor bastard didn't die here at some point I'd be frankly shocked.
  • jrs235 5y ago
    My TV does this once in a while. I attribute it to a neighbor having a similar tv and their remote signal is sometimes able to affect ours.
• ripply 5y ago
  It was snowing out and a shadowy figure appeared at the front glass door, my mom sees it, I see it, the dog sees it and goes nuts barking. The figure flees and follows the sidewalk, I watch it cross the entirety of the window and I immediately go to the front door and look for foot prints. There was nothing, it was actively snowing but not a heavy snow that would have been enough to cover foot prints in 10 seconds. I walked around testing it and could see my footprints just fine.
• psyc 5y ago
  Not counting things that could easily be perceptual glitches or false memories (those are fun), only once. I had a sudden premonition, based on nothing, that something really bad had happened to my best friend. It was so strong I spent the next day in a panic trying to determine if she was ok. This was very uncharacteristic of me and it was just all consuming. I then got a call from a friend of a friend that she'd been in a car accident, died, been resuscitated, and was in a coma. (She's ok now.) The only explanation I can think of is a coincidence between my having an unprompted fit of delusional paranoia, and her having a car accident at the same time. She is a generally disaster-prone person, but I don't normally worry about it, and that's the worst thing that ever happened to her. There are people who can verify that I was in fact out of my mind and flipping out before anybody knew anything had happened.
• torbica 5y ago
  I had a dream maybe 20 years ago. Each couple years I have same dream extended for another couple minutes. It starts as recap of previous time and then it continues. It is not nightmare neither some trauma and I know it will happen again.
  • poisonarena 5y ago
    When I was in young through to my late teens I also had several 'repeat dreams', maybe 2-3, with very fantastic and vivid surroundings, and as I got closer to my 30s it stopped happening and now it never does. Sometimes I attribute it to using alcohol or marijuana later in life. Would like to go some weeks and months without partaking to see if it repeats
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• yread 5y ago
  no
• otikik 5y ago
  I think humanity has a sort of built-in attraction for the "unexplained". I know some intelligent people who are definitively capable of skepticism (they ask themselves the right questions when buying a car, or a house) but they seem to "lower their guard" when presented with, frankly, quite obvious quackery. Every time I have been presented with "evidence" for the paranormal, I can always come up with rational explanations almost immediately. It often boils down to "that person must be lying" or "this is clearly a forgery". Yet I still feelt the attraction from "the unexplained". After all, all discoveries have been done after grappling with it. And discovery is good - it increases survival, so your genes get passed down. I fortunately found a way to channel those energies in a more satisfying (to me) way: science! It turns out if you look at the borders of what we know, you will find lots of interesting and exciting mysteries. In Astronomy, Dark Matter and Dark Energy are two examples of unexplained mysteries. On the other side of the spectrum, there's Quantum Physics, where reality becomes "pixellated" and our intuition stops working, there's lots of unexplained stuff. Questions like "what is Gravity, really" or "what is time". Every new answer we get opens 2 or 3 new questions. We are still far away from implementing practical Nuclear Fusion, which would be really helpful with climate change tbh. How do we overcome the Coulomb Barrier and make deuterium atoms produce energy in a way we can use? In biology, we are currently deciphering how DNA works. It's a whole programming language and operative system originated from Nature itself, without a conscious inventor behind it. Isn't that neat? And how the hell are we supposed to make sense of it. It's like a big hack. We will need computers to make even partial sense of all of it. Speaking of computers. We are doing advances in AI, but we are still far away from "Real" AI. But Nature somehow managed to do it in less than 2 kilograms of biomass. In Math, if you dig a little deep, things get just weird, fast. Just, pick a favorite. (Mine is Russells Paradox). Most of these mysteries you cannot encounter just by walking on a dark alley. You have to work in order to even understand them. You can (in theory) validate everything yourself (admittedly, no one does this, we all walk upon the shoulders of giants). Instead of ouija table to talk with the spirits, you use a telescope, and a bunch of math, to try to figure out a puzzle set up by the Universe. Once I started doing this, I found I didn't "need" the supernatural.
• DougN7 5y ago
  I’ve had deja vu a few times in my life but one time it happened with enough time beforehand that I wrote down what was about to happen and showed it to a coworker. Then we both sat and watched it happen exactly as I described. It involved someone else saying something and then walking up to a board and drawing something, and I had drawn what they were about to draw, and pre-quoted what they would say. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t shown it to the coworker before.
• MattPalmer1086 5y ago
  I've had a few unexplained experiences. Once when I was a student, my girlfriend asked me to close the bedroom door. For some bizarre reason, I instantly pointed at it and commanded it to close, and it slammed shut. Apparently I didn't actually say anything, so I must have just thought it. There were no draughts, the door was heavy and didn't move on its own, and more to the point, why did I even do that? I don't make a habit of attempting telekinesis! I'm sure it was just a bizarre set of coincidences, but it was pretty weird.
• gpas 5y ago
  Some years ago I was pushing my mtb on a gravel path parallel to a trafficked road. Sweating like crazy, high heart rate, it was an early summer afternoon. All of a sudden I felt an unusual cold, very cold breeze. Strange as the temperature was almost 30C, no wind, and the sun was shining. Seconds later I instinctively turned my head to the road on my left just in time to notice a car going off road and crashing on a tree. On the news the day after was the story of the car accident where two young guys died on the crash. My rational mind says it was just a coincidence but I get goosebumps every time I think about that day. We don't understand everything that's for sure.
• scantis 5y ago
  I once woke up in the middle of the night and yelled something about my dog. I felt real panik, my girlfriend tried to calm me down. She probably thought I have a weird dream or something. I was so wide awake. She was so sure everything is fine. I told her she is probably right, but I have to look anyway. I just had to. When I found him he was laying on the side under a display. He was still moving his legs and his tounge was hanging out to the ground. He was breathing quite rapidly. I picked him up and put him on his feet, but he just kept walking and his tounge was still out. I put him in a box and watered his tounge and pet him for an hour. His legs were going and going, but he could move his tongue from time to time. Like he was annoyed by the water, he kinda scoffed and it broke his breathing shortly. I kept dripping water on his tounge and he sighed a few times. I felt horrible. Eventually he snapped out of it and looked at me exhausted of his ordeal, drank a little, licked my hand and fell asleep with normal breathing. He was fine the next day. I can not explain this, but this dog and I had an emotional connection that went through closed door, walls, stairs and even over reassurance of my girlfriend and the comfort of a warm cosy bed.
  • emerged 5y ago
    Or you subconsciously were able to hear him subtlety wheezing or squealing or thumping his tail.
    • scantis 5y ago
      That is a possible explanation. Somehow this information was transferred to me and struck the exact right nerve. I don't know how and the strong emotions can alter perception after the fact. For me it was absolutely paranormal and still is.
• irvingprime 5y ago
  No, never. By the way, what three letter agency (which, obviously, I have nothing but respect for) do you work for?
• humansuit 5y ago
  To be honest, I try not to entertain thoughts about paranormal stuff I might have experienced. If I start believing that I've seen the future or heard someone else's thoughts, I have to be concerned about my mental health. Maybe those experiences are real, or maybe I'm having a manic episode with an approaching psychotic break. It's a risk I can't take, so I round every questionable experience up to "it's not real." Regardless of circumstances. But boy oh boy, would I rather believe in psychic powers than in mental illness. Savor the mystery. It's a luxury not everyone can enjoy.
• drakonka 5y ago
  Not paranormal, but unexplained: When I was a kid I was very sick with some kind of very severe immune reaction. While trying to figure out what was wrong with me, the doctors discovered that I have tachycardia. After the immune reaction went down and things became less critical, my mom took me to another hospital to get a followup EKG. This hospital had just gotten a new EKG machine (these were the types of machines that printed the results out on a very long strip of paper). When they hooked me up to it, the machine did not work. Not sure exactly how this manifested, but basically they could not get any measurements. They thought the new machine was just faulty, and to confirm they tried to use it on the child in line after me while we waited. It worked just fine on him, so they hooked me up again, and again it suddenly "broke". They checked me for metal or any other items that might interfere with the machine, and tried having a few other kids go before me as well, but the machine worked for all of them. I never did end up getting an EKG to get my heat checked, until years later as an adult.
• bstrdsmkr 5y ago
  My brother, his girlfriend, and myself were on the way to a Halloween party in rural Tennessee on a fairly empty stretch of highway (though it was around 3pm). We reached a quiet point in the conversation and after a few seconds someone said "that's funny," to which all 3 of us in the car replied "what is?" There's no way for me to appropriately convey the timing that 100% convinced me none of the 3 of us said "that's funny"
• bloak 5y ago
  Suddenly waking up about a minute before the alarm clock goes off happens to me, and other people, surprisingly often while none of the obvious explanations seems sufficient. Perhaps the explanation for that phenomenon would also explain some ghost stories because a lot of ghost stories involve someone becoming aware of something without there being an obvious mechanism.