Having left the bright lights of the city, we found ourselves on highway 17 north riding through mountains which were dim, dark shapes on both sides of the road, lit only by a newly risen moon. Suddenly a brilliant streak of light cut through the sky ahead of us. "Wow! a shooting star!" exclaimed John.
"Looks like it landed right on the other side of the mountain," said our friend. "Maybe someone threw a flare from a mountain on the other side of the road." Neither observation seemed convincing to us. After all, we had seen shooting stars before and knew what they looked like. But our friend was not at all sure that is what it really was.
An hour or so down the road, still in dark desert mountainous country, she casually said "Keep your eyes peeled for Bigfoot."
"Big Foot?!" John explained incredulously.
"Yup," she replied. "There's strange things going on out in this countryside. Weird creatures, secret experiments, stuff like that. You wouldn't believe it....."
She was right about that! But it was her story, and we could tell she was sticking to it.
Our story, of course, was that all those kinds of rumors were ill-founded and unlikely.
And our story, like hers, was based on many assumptions, some of them unexamined.
After she dropped us off at home, John said, "Isn't that interesting? Three intelligent people seeing the same thing, and having very different interpretations. She seems to have an outlook that says anything is possible, and might happen any where, any time. It certainly makes life pretty exciting and interesting for her."
That gave me pause. It made me wonder if choosing to see life in that way might not have certain advantages over the very sensible, rationalistic, somewhat scientific filters people like me and John have, which pretty much excludes Big Foot and UFO's and other unexplainable, unprovable things many people claim to have experienced. Of course, there is always the outside chance there is something to those stories......and if so, maybe life is more mysterious and marvelous (literally) than we allow if we live in a mind box with pretty thick walls.
I think of what people in my grandparent's generation would have thought if they heard about so much we now take for granted; walking on the moon, talking on computers to other people while seeing them (as in Skyping) and more wonders than I can name. Most of them would have dismissed what are modern realities to us as foolish fantasies. They were wrong, of course.
And we might be too. We shall see..... In fact, tonight, John and I are going with our helpful friend to a movie at the local Raddison hotel on the subject of UFO's. I'll blog about what we see, and our story about it, tomorrow. Meanwhile, what's your story about the "paranormal?"
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