What is the strangest thing to ever happen to you or that you've witnessed?

originally posted by: Mike Stivic
First, I would like to say thank you for this thread,it's a nice change of pace from the political b.s. swamping the boards..

I have a few odd occurrences but I will share a quick one..

When I was younger we lived in Connecticut, and both sets of grandparents lived in Jersey.

Tom's river and Bricktown to be exact.

Every summer me and my sister would spend a week each with our grandparents, she would stay with one set for a week and I the other for a week then swap for the second week. (We tried visiting them together for a week but we would argue to much.)

I was thirteen years old taking a bath,my father's father was at work walking the beat in Elizabeth,and my grandmother was in the kitchen.

I started having insane chest palpitations, as if my heart was beating out of my chest like in the old cartoons. It lasted about thirty seconds then faded
(Remember I'm 13 with no heart problems).

As soon as they stopped completely I got dried and dressed and went into the kitchen where my father's mother was on the phone talking to my parents in Connecticut, it turns out that my mother's father had a stroke just a few minutes earlier..

The exact time I was having those palpitations...

Coincidence? I don't know but it freaked me out..


On a side note he survived the stroke

Respectfully,
~meathead

You are clearly close to family. I've been there. My mother would know of one of us was hurt, and apparently I got hat from her. Hubby got a rod in the eye once, when part of a field exercise in the Army, away from home. At the same exact time it hit him, I felt something hit me in the eye, and yet nothing was there. When he called hours later to tell e about it, I knew which eye, and what time it happened. Felt my mom's back pain sometimes, across several states.

I've shared this on ATS before twice, so I will copy it to share here. Still, to this day, the strangest thing to happen in my life:

This thread reminded me of something that happened to me that is very ATS-worthy, but that I rarely think or talk about. Truly one of the most frightening moments in my life. I don’t think I have told more than one or two people outside of those who witnessed it, and I honestly think it may be because I don’t want to be labeled as crazy.



I was in the Army and it was a boring week of classes inside of a hot and humid building on a warm summer day. This was at a base in the southern US, approximately 10 years ago…actually it was almost certainly 2003, because I remember some of the people at the time. Lunch choices were MREs at the building, or if we could be fast enough we could race across post and get something from a restaurant. A friend who was the driver of a HMMWV suggested we grab the MREs and then take off for a leisurely drive during lunch, at least to cool off in the moving vehicle. Four of us did just that.



On board the vehicle was some kind of camera system that I want to say was experimental for some reason, but it basically looked like a ruggedized police cruiser dash camera. I believe it was on and recording constantly when the vehicle was in motion, but I can’t be sure I remember that correctly. I did not get a good look at it and did not find it too interesting.



There was a small monitor for playback of the video in the vehicle, but as I recall it had a tape or a disc or something that would usually be removed in order to view the images full-size on a larger screen somewhere, for instance to examine evidence after a crash.



On with the narrative…



We drove around some barriers and into an abandoned housing area of the base. The paved roads were starting to be overtaken by trees on each side and grass down the middle. I checked online satellite images just now out of curiosity, and it appears the area still looks just like it did back then. There were very few buildings remaining and it did not look like the area was traveled much.



We were driving down a very broken-up paved road when we saw what was clearly a black box on the side of the road. I don’t think any of us thought it was a big deal, so we did not look closely. I would say it appeared to be roughly 10 inches square, was dirty as if it had been there a while, and appeared to be matte metal or plastic. I don’t remember seeing any holes, handles, or anything on it. I only saw it for a second or two, and I did not think it was important, so I really cannot be sure.



One guy in the truck didn’t see the box, and when someone else made a comment that it could be some kind of unexploded ordnance (we were not EOD, so we were not experts), he got agitated and suggested we go back for a look just in case it was something dangerous that should be reported. The driver turned around and we went back, but the box was not where we had remembered it. The time between the first sighting of the box and our drive back down was about 30 seconds, and there were no trees near the place where we saw the box, so we couldn’t figure out how it just seemed to disappear. There was no way a person could have grabbed the box and ran away in that time, and the treeline was too far from the box for them to seek cover. I think we were all starting to get nervous at that moment. But we had no idea what was about to happen.



The driver knew how to operate the video system and review the tape, so he suggested we do that. We thought that was a good idea. He rewound the video to a random spot, which brought us back about 5 minutes. The monitor was tiny but we were all watching and wanted to see if the box was a figment of our imaginations or something. I don’t think we ever expected to see what we saw. When the video came to the part where the box should have been on the side of the road (wow, I am actually literally getting goosebumps just typing this and thinking of the incident!), there was no box. Instead there was a really weird image of a soldier standing there, in our modern woodland camo BDU, with minimal load bearing equipment, staring at the vehicle as it drove by. The soldier was not a solid form, it was like a mirage or something, you could see him (it was a male) but could see right through him. The box was not there at all. We were sitting about 50 feet beyond that spot where we were viewing this, and I swear my entire body just went into this scared stiff mode that was just unreal. I was an experienced law enforcement officer and soldier myself, and I was probably as frightened at that moment as I ever was during a life-threatening man-made situation. I remember that we all went silent. Someone finally said, let’s not turn around, let’s get the “F” out of here, and we did as fast as we could.



We never told anyone about that incident, and frankly for some reason we never spoke about it again. To this day I have no idea what we saw. I suspect we accidentally came upon some sort of invisibility cloak testing or something along those lines. I believe that the box was what we were “supposed” to see, but whomever was out there was taken by surprise by our sudden arrival on the road, and realized that the box needed to disappear so we would not get curious.

a reply to: LadyGreenEyes

Thanks for your reply, sorry it took so long to respond.

I've heard stories of twins who could feel each other's pain miles apart,and this seemed similar.

You are clearly close to family

We shared a special bond, he was a good man.
I miss him dearly.he was gruff,he was also a beat-cop like my fathers father(same precinct funny enough), but had a heart of gold, he passed in 2006..

R.I.P. Gramps .

Respectfully,
~meathead

a reply to: therainmaker

Wow that is a really fascinating report! I suspect the same as you, it seems very plausible to me.