I'm sorry, but this is one of my pet peeves. Unidentified Flying Object means exactly that -- unidentified. By calling it an alien you are claiming to have identified it. I would like to know how you make the huge leap from "I don't know what it is" to "it's an alien."

Patient named Bill came into the ER via ambulance, chief complaint ventricular fibrillation, defibrillated successfully at scene by shock, and 4 more times en route. During the ER stay, he fibrillated 6 more times, before banging him with the paddles for third time, I said, to myself and to the code team, " Dammit, Bill, knock it off!" He promptly converted to a healthy rhythm. He converted from fib to healthy rhythm 3 more times on verbal command.

This is not supposed to happen.

We transferred him to ICU.He was not talking during the ambulance and er segments of the stay, but woke up in the ICU. and I looked in on him a couple of days later. He said that he had heard me calling him back each time, and reported experiencing the 'walk toward the light' phenomenon. He continued to be fibrillate periodically, and died after a 5 day ICU stay.

Ghost story? Dunno. Ironraven says it best.

Hi CBGW,

I agree with your comment on UFO's.

What my father (and his friend) claims to have seen in the early 1950's is a circular metal object with flashing lights on it. It settled over a railway yard in a small southern Ontario town, then flew away so fast it was like it disappeared.

The reason he believes it was from another world is because he has no earthly explanation for it?

Mike

My buddy and I were sitting about 400 yards into JaR cave near Mt. Adams middday. We were taking a break from climbing over the big break down boulders. The cave is one in a series of long lava tubes from a flow several thousand years back. We turned off our flashlights to conserve, as light was unnecessary for communication. About 7 minutes into the break, I notice a dimly flickering light downhole about 70 feet or so. The rough lava really sucks up the lumens, and the light was initially so dim I thought my eyes were maybe a little screwball, so I asked my buddy if he could see it. After a moment, he confirmed it wasn't just me, so we wondered if maybe someone else was in the cave ahead of us and coming back our way. We sat and watched the light flicker and dance on the walls of the cave, noting that it didn't seem to be getting any closer or farther from us, nor changing in average intensity. After a couple minutes of this, we decided to hail the other spelunkers, and shouted out a greeting, but got no response. We did it again, and the light went out. We decided someone was playing around with us, so we turned on our flashlights and proceeded down the cave.

After about 10 minutes, we'd traveled another couple hundred yards or so, and encountered no one, nor found any sign of any other activity. We decided to turn off our lights and sit in the dark again and see if we could detect the light. As we sat there in the dark, looking ahead of us, we saw nothing. I turned back to my friend, and noticed a faint flutter of light over his shoulder. It was the same sort of light we saw before, but now it was behind us. I told him to look to confirm, and when he did, we both got real quiet. The light was a dim yellow, and danced like a candle flame in a gentle breeze. We were perplexed.

We decided to creep back to the light in the dark, which is not easy because you can't see where you are going and the breakdown is as bad as jetty rock, so it is slow going. As soon as we started back out the cave, the light quit. We stopped and waited for about 15 minutes, but the light did not return. We turned on our lights and proceeded to where we figured the light was, and sat with our lights off again, but no more light returned.

What you have to understand about these caves is that they are a very sterile environment. Basically it is a hollow lava tube 40 feet or so under the ground running more or less in parallel with the surface. The temperature is around 40 degrees, and the humidity is saturated, with water almost continously dripping from the roof. The mineral content of the soil is very poor, so leaching is practically non-existent, except for the occasional silica nodules hanging an inch or so down off the roof. Bats will occupy space near the threshold where outside atmosphere penetrates enough, but past 50 feet or so, nothing dwells in there, no plants, no animals, no insects. No one we've talked to in the grotto (a spelunking group or club in the region) has ever seen any sign of life beyond the threshold area, and certainly nothing that self luminates. Likewise, our examination of the area in the cave where we felt the lightsource must have been revealed nothing that would lead us to believe an ambient light source was present.

We never saw the flickering light in that or any other cave in the system since then, though we've been downhole dozens of times. We concluded that whatever made that light wasn't something you would expect to find in the cave, and never returned.

Absolutely.

I would cite to the wisdom of Socrates, in claiming to know nothing. "[W]hereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know."

And as far as the original question, Yes. Not sure if i can say ghosts are real or not, but I believe there are things that science as we consider it, cannot explain.

There was a time when people had no earthly explanation for lightning, and so they dreamed up some story about Thor's Hammer.



Following along the same line of thought as others in this thread:

Science doesn't claim to know everything. On the contrary, the scientific endeavor is to learn more than what we currently know. And an important part of the scientific method is not to reach conclusions without sufficient evidence.

The question, then, becomes a philosophical one, that being in the absence of empirical evidence, can a person accept the notion that reality is something other than what can be proven or disproven. Our existence, for the most part, seems divided between what we all can agree through consistent measure is real, and what we individually accept as the most likely explanation at the time for things we cannot consistently measure. The lure of such shows as ghost hunter, in search of, and all the other metaphysical inquiries have at least some basis in science, even if the conclusions reached by some remain quite speculative. Even in science there is a certain amount of creative, subjective influence in order for new discoveries to even be considered. For instance, is the currently accepted explanation of the existence of black holes the only explanation? Of course not, but for now it makes the most sense. Eventually technology will develop to the point where the reality of black holes can be more solidly measured, confirmed, and explained. Likewise, the notion of the atom is something we can still only experience indirectly, lacking the means to verifiably study such small particles through direct observation. We can do the math that establishes the likelihood that such phenomena are as we describe them, but again, it is not the only explanation, and often times future events serve to redefine our original notions and thus improve our understanding of our own existence in some small way.

Back in high school I was confronted with a most Socratic assertion; that being what is the proportion of the sum total of mankind's knowledge to date in relation to all that can be known? The logical conclusion being that mankind's current knowledgebase is relatively insignificant when compared to all knowledge. Therefore, in the vast amount of information not presently available to us, there must exist the knowledge of a reality we can barely even imagine in the slightest amount (even if your surname is Serling). Therefore, to say our existence is somehow limited by the breadth of only what we know in our lifetime is to discount all the possibilities of what our existence could be, while simultaneously affirming that we can never become more than what we can hope to know while we are alive.

Yes, that is what is called a paradox. Such is the essence of mortality.

If you really want to be scared, learn more science. Link is screwy. At this page click on the subject titled "Stop", third row down, far right side.

There a whole lot of spookiness in what we DO know.

-Blast

Uh, Blast, that page says that the universe appears to be fine-tuned, almost, shall we say, designed by someone?

I think we have a name for that someone.

Anyone?

Anyone?

My name for that entity is: God.

This statement in no way places any limitations on the methodology that God uses or the logic that he/she employs, or the time system that he/she utilizes. Furthermore, my affiliation with my God is strictly in the Request and Thankfulness departments of his organization of which said organization remains unknown to myself although others may claim to have an inside template of it all.

For the record, I feel that what we do know (facts), are but 1 grain of sand when compared to all of the grains of sand that make up this Biological Entity that we refer to as: Earth