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“”My mom and I found this book in an abandoned old house when I was a kid. Creepy, right?

—https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1744488799

Mysteries of the Unexplained: How Ordinary Men and Women Have Experienced the Strange, the Uncanny, and the Incredible is a 1982 Reader's Digest book about every paranormal topic the authors could think of. Like most books in the genre, it contains "mysteries" that aren't actually mysterious (like the Coso artifact), anecdotes based on tall tales, hallucinations, and outright lies, and mildly interesting coincidences (OMG, two people with the same name met each other???).

It covers everything from ghosts to faith healing to ancient astronauts. It has a few good qualities, though. The authors are slightly skeptical, though in a rather teach the controversy way ("yeah, cattle mutilation might just be insurance fraud/people not knowing how animal teeth work. But wouldn't it be more fun if it were aliens?"). They also cite their sources, which is always good practice, even when your source is the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

So what's in the book, anyhow?

The Endless Search for Answers (Introduction)

The book's epigraph is an Albert Einstein quote: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." This an obvious appeal to respect, and the quote certainly shouldn't be thought to mean Einstein believed in magic.

The introduction begins properly with this: "Close in importance to the basic human needs for food, shelter, and companionship comes the urge to create an orderly world governed by dependable rules and to develop a reassuring structure of beliefs. This urge, since the beginning of recorded time, has provided a receptive audience for seers, scholars, scientists, and experts of every persuasion." Of course, let's just lump seers, scholars, and scientists into the same category. Then they get all weaselly on us: "And yet there are events that seem to say that our rules, our beliefs, even our common sense, may sometimes let us down." (Emphasis added.)

The introduction goes on to say that while everyone used to believe in woo, not as many people do today! "For many, existence has become something defined by politics, economics, and discoveries made in laboratories." Yeees, economics definitely exist and aren't a social construct at all. "And yet an instinct for the unknown persists..." so instead of writing a book about the frontiers of science, we wrote a book about woo! Take that, materialists!

Then they JAQ off for a bit, and end with another weaselly flourish: "yeah, this COULD all be fake, but, I mean, there are so many of them! Surely some of them have to be true!"

Beyond the Walls of Time

This part is all about spooky premonitions and stuff looking older than it should and CREEPY COINCIDENCES.

Prophecies

The introduction to this section puts "planning a lunch date" and "predicting the end of the world" at opposite ends of the same spectrum. It also all but says that precognition is definitely real (it also mentions vardogrs). It draws a difference between premonition/precognition and prediction: to predict something, you have to set out with the intention of making a prediction, and use some kind of -ology or -mancy. Or, hallucination via drugs. Then it admits that prophecies are all but useless, on account of them only occasionally coming true—but isn't it creepy how some of them did come true?

Some highlights from this chapter:

• Biblical prophecies predicted stuff about Jesus! But wait, the Jews don't agree. However, that view "has no logical bearing on the prophetic connection between Old and New Testament events" (actual quote!)
  • See Biblical prophecies#Non-prophecies for a decent refutation of these prophecies.
• Once, the oracle of Delphi knew what Croesus had cookin'.
  • Because stories from the BCE are totally reliable.
• Maybe Carl Jung's "synchronicity" explains this stuff? Hey, it hasn't been proved wrong! (No, really, they actually make an argument from ignorance)
  • Also contains this gem: "The vexing thing about techniques of prediction that rely on signs, of whatever kind, is that no connections seem to exist between the signs and what the signify. [...] Such devices, however, are still considered to be useful omens."
• Nostradamus.
• Cyrano de Bergerac wrote some very early sci-fi. Therefore, uh, um, prophet?
• There's a slight delay between something happening and us seeing it; somehow this explains how we could see into the future.
• Emanuel Swedenborg had a vision of a fire.
• Once, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a book about a guy named Richard Parker who was shipwrecked and subsequently eaten by his shipmates. Then, that exact thing happened to an actual guy named Richard Parker!
• Mark Twain's spooky dream about his brother's coffin that CAME TRUE
• Hermann Volrath Hilprecht had a dream that led him to stick the right bits of finger ring together. "Perhaps Professor Hilprecht had, in his subconscious mind, solved the riddle of the fragments during his hours of study and devised the dramatic dream to bring its findings to his conscious attention. [...] Or could it be that the priest of Bel traveled through 32 centuries to guide the latest guardian of his ancient treasures?"
• An 1898 novel describes a shipwreck similar to the 1912 wreck of the Titanic.
  • The author of the book, Morgan Robertson, denied that he was clairvoyant (to paraphrase, "I like big boats and I cannot lie / you other writers can't deny / that it's easy to predict those maritime-y trends / 'clairvoyance' is 'round the bend.")
• Duuuuude, there's like, multiple dimensions of time, so, like, everything sorta happens at once, you know what I mean?
• A fiction article by Eugene P. Lyle Jr., written at the end of WWI, predicted "War in 1938". It got a lot of stuff wrong (most notably the outcome), but he still apparently had a "gift of prophecy".
• According to a 1956 study by W. E. Cox, fewer people board trains that crash.
• Alex Tanous predicted the death of John Lennon! Or, well, some unspecified "famous rock star".

helpful stuff

https://archive.org/details/MysteriesOfTheUnexplained