[Fred Reed] My father, now dead, a mathematician without the slightest leaning toward the esoteric, once told me of driving by night with a friend through the hill country of North Carolina. Suddenly a large truck, lights blazing, came over a crest, passed through their car without a sound, and disappeared in the night. My father said that after a moment he asked, "Did you see what I saw?" The friend answered "Yes." They said no more about it, to each other or anyone else. They would have been thought mad.
Over the years I have talked to various people, apparently sane, who have had unexplainable experiences. Some of these had dreamed of the death of someone who shortly thereafter died in the circumstances of the dream. Others were more similar to my father's experience. Several remembered a sudden and terrible sense of the presence of something evil -- this latter now called a "panic attack," which explains nothing. Those involved seldom wanted to talk of such things in a scientific age for fear of being ridiculed.
But, one might reasonably ask, what could science, or scientists, know of these things? They can be neither proved nor disproved, nor repeated for study. And of course a number of equally improvable exploitations are ready to hand: the narrator is lying, or suffered a momentary imbalance of this or that neurotransmitter in his brain, or transitory dementia, or the delayed result of the ingestion of hallucinogen, and anyway the whole idea is so silly that we needn't talk about it. Geez, it's the kind of thing they believed in the Dark Ages.
Second or third reading obligatory.
|