Supernatural Thoughts

[Tenspace]

What if a friend, a dear friend you trusted with your life, told you of a supernatural occurrence witnessed by the crews of two ships in the middle of the Atlantic ocean one night in the 1970'? Would you believe him? Or would you quietly nod and chuckle inside?

Here's my story.

"What, you've never seen Them? C'mon."

"I've seen some weird shit, but nothing I'd chalk up as being unexplainable."

"Well, let me tell you what happened to me back in the '70s. I was a hand on this ship, we were towing an oil rig from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Sea. Our speed was like one knot. This was a massive machine, unimaginable to someone who's never seen one. We had a mile and a half of stainless steel cable strung between us and the rig. Tons of metal moving slowly across the ocean.

It's late, dinner's done and everything is dark. I'm standing with a couple of mates and we see a light in the sky, in the distance. Nobody really gave it a second thought.

The light kept getting closer, slowly. A few of us began to notice that it was heading toward us, and it didn't look like a plane's lights. Suddenly the damn thing dropped from what had to have been over a thousand feet, right down to the surface and stopped. Everybody stood motionless. The captain spoke started to speak, but just as he did, this thing dropped below the water and sped right for us!

It passed on the starboard side. We all ran over and watched. It was enormous, at least 200 feet in length, of no discernible shape. All I can tell you is that it was green, and it was about thirty feet under the suface of the water moving faster than anything has a right to move underwater, maybe 80 knots, given the time it took for it to circle the rig over a mile away and come back. It was less than two minutes.

"We just stared at each other It continued past us and went toward the rig, circling around to port and coming back up. After passing us again, it went a mile ahead, shot out of the water and disappeared at what had to be a thousand miles an hours. Gone."

They called the crew on the oil rig, who confirmed what they saw. Confirmed, as in "Holy shit, did you guys see that?!?! and Fuck, what the hell was that!?"
===

I would like to hear the opinions of others. I have no doubt that my friend is telling the truth. He could also corroborate the story with former deckmates, but that would cost money. And we're not a church.

Not to be insulting to your friend, but...
Does your friend have anything of substance other than his and his friends word for it?

E_E

[Tenspace]

evident_enigma wrote

Not to be insulting to your friend, but...
Does your friend have anything of substance other than his and his friends word for it?

E_E

Not really. There were no video recorders on board either ship; this was thirty years ago. No one to his knowledge attempted to take pictures. They all just passed it off as some of the weird shit you see when you're out on the ocean for months. At least thirty crewmembers between the two ships witnessed the event.

Like I said, he could locate some of the other deckhands but it would cost money. If anyone is seriously interested in investigating this, contact me offline and I will see about getting some leads for you to get started.

Noone had a camera. Noone saw anything with any detail. What, no waves from a several hundred foot high speed undersea craft going 80 knots? This story smacks of an imagined event.

If anything happened worth investigating it would have been worth investigating 30 years ago. I'd be asking him what they were smoking that night.

It's easy to say me and a bunch of guys saw something when I don't have to confirm it. And isn't it suspicious that people all over the world have amazing stories that can't be explained but oddly enough nobody ever has any hard evidence to support those crazy claims? Why do you think that is? And the few UFOs, Lock Ness Monsters and Bigfoots that appeared on camera have all been proven to be hoaxes. Face it, Ten: People have an obsession with wanting to believe the unbelievable.

If you want to believe this story, you might as well throw in the towel and become a theist all together.

Damn it, Archy! Every time you post I get hungry.

[Tenspace]

ArchyDeluxe wrote

It's easy to say me and a bunch of guys saw something when I don't have to confirm it. And isn't it suspicious that people all over the world have amazing stories that can't be explained but oddly enough nobody ever has any hard evidence to support those crazy claims? Why do you think that is? And the few UFOs, Lock Ness Monsters and Bigfoots that appeared on camera have all been proven to be hoaxes. Face it, Ten: People have an obsession with wanting to believe the unbelievable.

If you want to believe this story, you might as well throw in the towel and become a theist all together.

"want to believe" makes me sound like an X-Files groupie. There's no want to it. I am looking at this objectively. Notice there was no embellishment on my part; the story is posted as he told it to me an hour beforehand.

You guys seem to be missing my point. I'm not asking whether or not it really happened.

I'll ask again.

What would you do if the most trusted person you know told you a story like this?

Tenspace wrote

"want to believe" makes me sound like an X-Files groupie. There's no want to it. I am looking at this objectively. Notice there was no embellishment on my part; the story is posted as he told it to me an hour beforehand.

You guys seem to be missing my point. I'm not asking whether or not it really happened.

I'll ask again.

What would you do if the most trusted person you know told you a story like this?

Then let me rephrase my answer for you: I wouldn't believe him - or the most credit that I would give him is that I'd believe that HE believes he saw something. Nothing more.

[Erik]

That's a tought one, Ten. I'd be inclined to ignore it. Perhaps people living where I live are ovely sensitive, but I've found that challenging the truth of something someone believes or experienced, even in a diplomatic way, is a hard row to hoe.

My own way of dealing with something like this is to address some aspect of it over time. For example, I might bring up with that person, days or weeks after our conversation, and in connection with some completely different story, the notion that eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. Or that our brains can fill in details based on portions of events we witness and portions of the same events told to us, by which we complete a picture that is false. I might propose this by showing how I have done this myself with our own family stories, only to find a completely different truth later. Hopefully, the listener is able to apply that principle to their own experience.

[a different tim]

I'd be inclined to think they were sincere but deluded. Something like this actually came up with a very close friend who studied history and philosphy of science with me. She was a little shocked to hear that "no anecdotal evidence" included her anecdotes as well, even though she was a close friend of mine. I wouldn't expect anyone to believe me in such circumstances. And they'd be right.

Humans have a long history of fooling ourselves with this stuff. There are many natural explanations for underwater lights, and we aren't good at judging scale and distance without some kind of yardstick.

My dad has a story that he loved to tell me every time I scoffed at a History Channel UFO show. When he first moved into the house I grew up in, right after getting out of military intelligence, he was driving down the main road in town when a giant black UFO with three white lights floated over him silently and followed him to the gas station. Evidently the papers said it was some lunatic with an ultralite trying to freak people out, but he insists it's a conspiracy because that would have made a lot more noise and because no aircraft he knew of (and evidently he knew all of them) was anything like that.

Yeah, I have a difficult time thinking my dad is crazy, but it's not really a matter of trusting the person. Michael Shermer, I believe, has a story of an abduction hallucination he had on a long distance bike race. He had the advantage of being an educated skeptic, cognizant of the fact that his body had been through the ringer and he shouldn't trust what it told him, but someone without such knowledge, and who wants very badly to tell a good story, probably wouldn't be so prudent. Then there's the issue of false memories that Erik brings up.

It's very possible that this guy's crewmates have a very different story, or even no story at all, especially if this happened thirty years ago and they haven't talked much about it since then. None of that means your friend is crazy, just that he's a normal human being and isn't skeptical of his memory or perception.

[Victus]

I follow the evidence. I accept that my friend believes such a thing (isn't actively deceiving me), but without further evidence I would probably do one of the following...

1) Conclude it never actually happened.
2) Conclude that something happened, but that the actual events are not being accurately described by the witnesses.
3) Conclude that something happened, possibly even as described, but that there is a rational explanation (even if we are unaware of what it is).

Sometimes talking to Christians on their forum they tell me about miracles they saw - ghostly or demonic people. When they say "I can't possibly have been imagining it - do you think I'm making this up?" I just feel inclined to answer "Yes, I do think you imagined it, made it up, saw something other than you think you saw, or embellished it. Bring me a videotape next time."

Tenspace wrote

What if a friend, a dear friend you trusted with your life, told you of a supernatural occurrence witnessed by the crews of two ships in the middle of the Atlantic ocean one night in the 1970'?

The funny thing about multiple eyewitnesses is that the more you have, the more likely they all are to be wrong. In a large group there is a great deal of pressure to go with the flow, and conform to whichever version of events the group agrees on. Those among the crew who did not see anything remarkable could easily have been convinced by the others that they did. If they had no outside interaction until their return home, they'd have nothing better to do but tell themselves the story over and over again, which would have further validated it in their minds.

Re crowd pressure - "Independent Witness," Henry Cecil.

The problem with miracles/religious experience is that you will only deny an eyewitness if there is reason to do so. That means you can't refute a theist's account, because they have no reason not to believe the account - it fits with their worldview. From the atheist's point of view, we need to find a different explanation, because it wouldn't fit well.

I personally hate people getting all first-handy on me. I suspect that if I actually spoke my mind whenever anyone came out with some bullshit about ghosts, ghoulies or jesus that I'd quickly find myself without many friends. The vast temptation is to say, "what's more likely, you clown, that you were mistaken or convinced of what you say you saw, or that somehow, something so damn obvious has escaped the wisdom of centuries of scientists?" The problem, then, is that you end up trying to come up with a rational explanation for what they 'saw' that doesn't include them being blind, drugged up, sheep, or just plain stupid - and that leads to corners.