Well this is the first entry of my blog. I have been playing around with the idea of creating this blog for a couple of years now but have been reluctant to do so. I am always very sceptical of anything I read having to do with the supernatural and so I would expect, and hope, others would do the same with mine. Yet although I support scepticism, I can’t help feeling just a little bit insecure that possibly people might think of me as a fraud or nut case. Any way, be that as it may I have finally worked up the nerve to put a few thoughts, stories, and experiences up on the web to see if I can generate any interest.
In this blog I will be telling stories about various aspects of the supernatural: everything from ghosts, to UFOs to God. However, this blog isn’t about promoting the belief in any of these. Conversely it is also not a criticism of such beliefs. I’ve created this blog to act, hopefully, as a tool for me to better understand inexplicable events that have happened to me, and hopefully to act as a forum for others who have had similar experiences.
Here is the format that I think I will follow. I intend to put up, on a weekly basis, accounts of curious or inexplicable things that have happened to either me or people that I have known. One of the problems with stories of the supernatural is that you can really only trust what you know has happened to yourself, and sometimes not even that. Any story handed down is always open to suspicion. And then every time it is passed on its credibility becomes more open to question. There is nothing that can be done to rectify this. There is no way to certify a story as true. However, I have noticed that there can be patterns or commonalities in supernatural stories, which I think can be used as clues. Either as clues as to whether the story can be trusted, or as clues to try to explain what may be happening. After I tell each story I intend to give it a little grading as to how much I trust the story and think that it has something to say. Of course my personal prejudices will come into play here. I will also tell stories that I think have no legitimacy at all if I think it is anyway entertaining.
For now I do not intend to allow comments from readers, but after a while when I have sort of gotten into the meat of my thesis I will open up the flood gates.
So I should begin with a story. However, I think I will begin with a story about something that happened to me that I thought at the time was pretty darn strange, but I now realize has a natural explanation. It is a lesson that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions when we think something is supernatural.
The story begins about twenty years ago when I was canoeing in Algonquin Park, Ontario, with some friends. By nightfall the weather had completely clouded over and it had begun to rain. On top of that there was no moon in the sky that night, so it was pretty close to pitch dark by the time we crawled into our sleeping bags. I remember when we turned out the lights not being able to see my hand in front of my face. So we just closed our eyes and went to sleep to the sound of the rain on the tent and an owl in the distance.
Any way, for some reason -- I can no longer remember why, if I ever knew -- I woke up in the middle of the night. I was immediately startled to see that the whole tent was completely lit up. Strangely though, the light didn’t appear to be coming from any direction. Everything was just visible. I sat up straight looking around trying to figure out what was up. I was just about to wake up my friends when all of a sudden everything slowly turned dark again and I couldn’t see a thing. It pretty much freaked me out. I wondered whether it was a UFO or what.
I tried to think of an explanation. The only thing that I could think of came from a memory of a story I was once told by this hiker that had I met along the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire. He was walking the whole length of the trail, starting in Louisiana and ending in Main. He was telling us about all sorts of adventures he had had in his life. One of them was when he was bicycling across the U.S. and one night had mistakenly camped in a field being used by the Green Berets for combat manoeuvres. He was awoken in the night by flares that lit up the sky as paratroopers dropped in down around him. This story seemed to offer a possible answer for my situation because Algonquin Park is right next to the Petawawa army base. However, my location at the time wasn’t any where near the base, and if it had been manoeuvres I would have heard a lot more action going on.
The incident remained as a mystery to me for about five years. Then one night I awoke in the middle of the night at home and experienced the same thing. My bedroom was all lit up as if it was day, but there didn’t really seem to be any source of the light, other than that the windows were brighter than the room. Once again the room gradually went dark. Then the reason suddenly occurred to me. There must be situations in which the rods in the retina of the eye become hypersensitive, presumably due to long periods without exposure to any light. When you then open your eyes some dim light gets in, but just like a cat with night-vision everything is easy to see. Once the rods become saturated with light they lose their sensitivity and everything goes dim again. I have never researched this effect. I probably also have some of the details slightly wrong, but I’m sure something like that must be happening.
Well, that is my analysis of what what must have happened. Perhaps you have a better explanation. I'll give you a chance to comment, but later.
Next week I promise you a real story of the supernatural.
