american nerd survey

Have you ever had any sort of encounter/experience/what have you with something that you'd consider paranormal?

Dave Indish: I once saw a man in a grocery store who bore a striking resemblance to Hitler... does that count?

Mark Kalar: Have I ever… Most of them I’m not currently at liberty to discuss (national security, etc.); however I can tell you about an early one. It was right around 1980, so weird shit was going down all over the place anyway. I’m hanging out at my neighbors’ house, and I went into my friend Mary’s bedroom to get a board game she had left in there. I walk in, and there, standing in the open closet, is Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He waves, says he just stopped by to say hello, and then he’s gone.

Stephen McClurg: The first time I ate pizza-flavored Combos. It was winter, and I remember sitting by myself in a neighbor's treehouse. I don't know, something happened.

Reed Miller: Paranormal? I don't know.

I can tell you this. This planet is crawling with alien agents studying us Jane Goodall-style. You know those people you meet who basically seem normal, but not quite? They are aliens. Just like Ford Prefect. It's so obvious once you think about it. I'm not talking about the REALLY freaky people like Michael Jackson or those long-haired guys that do swordfighting with SCA in college. Those people are just too weird. If they are aliens trying to blend in, their cover is clearly blown and they'd have been recalled to their home planet long ago. No, I'm talking about those people you meet who don't seem to blink quite often enough or smile randomly at irregular pauses in conversation, or have impossibly perfect hair or slightly reptilian eyes - like Anderson Cooper.

Keith Pille: I spent a summer as the hall director for one of the dorms at the University of Minnesota, Morris; there were maybe four students total staying in the building, and they all lived either on my floor or in the basement. The rest of the building was locked. But every night, without fail, I'd hear furniture moving around above me. I'm a cold rationalist, for the most part, and I'm pretty sure that there's some perfectly reasonable explanation that I'm just not seeing (in fact, one that occurs to me now is that maybe one of the upstairs rooms just happened to be unlocked, and campus ne'er-do-wells knew about it and hung out up there); but at the time, it freaked the shit out of me.

Of course, I was sort of stir-crazy that summer because I'd often go for a week without actually speaking to another human being. Everything freaked the shit out of me. At one point, I was honest-to-god convinced that a bunch of crows were organizing against me.

Don Pizarro: Two incidents from grade school between the ages of 9 and 11: In the first, a bunch of us were hanging around a drainage grate during recess.  One of the guys in our group had a comb and a thought flashed into my head, "Someone's going to bump into him and he's going to drop the comb right through the grate." Three seconds later, it happened.  In the second, we had just finished making clay pots, and this one kid was being a jerk with his, bragging about how good it was.  Again, in a flash, I just knew he was going to trip and it was going to shatter.  This time, it took only two seconds.

Coincidence?  Precognition?  Or, weird reality-warping powers like Billy Mumy's in The Twilight Zone?