More than 50 million Americans claim to have come in contact with paranormal activity in their lifetime. Whether this involves spiritual entities, cryptid sightings, UFO spottings, or even demonic hauntings, these stories are typically suppressed by our response to rationalize what it is we see.
In Encounter Recounter, I will explore Lincoln Park students’ individual paranormal, supernatural, and/or unexplained stories they’ve experienced. This column will go into theories, possible explanations, and/or an openness to say we just don’t know.
Our first interviewee is Elea Steffek, a junior writing and publishing major. This strange incident occurred when she was fourteen at a bonfire with her parents and grandparents, who also witnessed the unexplainable event.
“Well, a few years ago, I was in my backyard roasting marshmallows with my grandparents on my mom’s side. Randomly in the sky, my mom (she’s kind of a nerd about these things) pointed out a weird thing in the sky,” Steffeck said. “It didn’t look like a cloud or anything like that, but it blended in with its surroundings and wasn’t moving. And it kinda just disappeared when we looked away.”
When asked what kind of paranormal activity she believed this could possibly be, she responded, “I think it was an alien or an alien ship. Definitely an alien, though.”
Steffek assured me that she had never seen something like this again after the initial sighting. Her rational explanation of what she saw that day falls under the category of potentially being a “group hallucination” in which have been recorded before regarding experiences like these.
Mass hallucinations, by definition, are an occurrence where individuals, typically in physical proximity of each other, all witness a similar hallucinatory event. While rare, this is still a probable cause of how they all saw such an unnaturalistic object.
A secondary explanation Elea has is the UFO, simply being a “solid-looking cloud,” appeared to be more visible than regular vapor. However, considering how many people saw it and couldn’t exactly recognize this as such a situation, this theory is less likely to be true. Although, cumuliform clouds are known to take a very dense form and could, perhaps, be the hypothetical UFO.
After this experience, Elea and her family were believers in the paranormal–particularly believers in alien life forms. Before this incident, however, Elea had never come in contact with anything even semi-supernatural. She has expressed that this sighting alone has further convinced her of life outside of Earth.
One in ten Americans report that they have seen unidentified flying objects, and 42 percent of the population believe in UFOs in general. Are you one of them?
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