The Jack-o'-lantern

I don't want to hijack your thread, since this is about your experiences. Especially since I've posted and even made a podcast about my encounter.

Long story short. Driving down the highway in the Ozark National Forest at night I saw what I thought was a tree. It was night and I had my high beams on. The tree turned around and walked back into the forest. It was a Bigfoot. I saw it with my own eyes. I know it was a Bigfoot.

I don't care if anyone believes me or not, I know what I saw.

Now, back to you,

RE: mrwupy

I read (once upon a time) an excellent research article done in Israel by a psychologist who interviewed around 50 individuals and they were asked to recount their most unusual personal experiences. Then they were to read and rate the other's experiences within the group. The results were that while rating their own experiences as very probable, they tended to dismiss the other's experiences in the group as improbable.

I feel that this is largely due to the fact that people who have these anomalous personal experiences have a hard time describing them accurately. When I interview people, I generally may spend several hours talking to them and inevitably more and more detail arises as the narrative is expanded into the greater context of the situation. This is a normal process which adhears to what is known as the Labovian Model of the Oral Personal Narrative. Dr. Labov is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His works in the area of personal narratives is outstanding.

Here is an outline of one of his papers on Narrative pre-construction

Before a narrative can be constructed, it must be pre-constructed by a cognitive process that begins with a decision that a given event is reportable. Pre-construction begins with this most reportable event and proceeds backwards in time to locate events that are linked causally each to the following one, a recursive process that ends with the location of the unreportable event--one that is not reportable in itself and needs no explanation. Comparison of such event chains with the sequence of narrative clauses actually produced will help to understand how the narrator re-organizes and transforms the events of real time in the finished narrative

In short, brief summations of anomalous personal experiences generally lack believability because of the fact that very much of the details of the experience has been left out, or that in the narrative's pre-conception phase details that are not considered relevant by the informant are left out. This is why two people can have identical anomalous experiences and recount them to one another, with neither one identifying the experience as identical. It is very critical to understand this pre-conception phase when investigating like-phenomena.

I figure as long as both of them are yelling, "HOLY CRAP!!! DID YOU SEE THAT!!!" it can be counted in the witness column.

There is more going on in this world than any of us can explain.

I suppose that's a part of the wonder of being alive.

I know it's the main reason I love being a part of ATS. Here I can find the things that I cannot find in my day to day life. Here perhaps I can finally find the truth.

I'm hoping anyway,

wupy