James Randi @ Caltech - My Out Of Body Experience

I'm not often involved in that serious situation gives you my situation somewhat different I'm looking into an astrologers claims or I'm looking into some sort of a of a pseudo-scientific think pretty well obviously to pseudo-scientific thing but I always have to remember an experience that occurred to me we all have the easy answer of well I guess that's a ghost or it must be paranormal it could be poltergeist and we walk away from it because we can't or won't look a little further into it some years ago rather than New Jersey well my house I must tell you first of all is a strange sort of a place it's sort of a wayside stopped right in directions conjure of mountebanks various characters of ill repute who will come by identify themselves to me and there's always a spare bedroom or a sleeping bag available to someone or other and I also walk in I feed people there I've never seen before in my life and pretty soon I get to think that I don't want to see them again either because they drink up all my beer and ever contribute I came home after a couple of days away by car was very very tired and came in on a weekend it's a Saturday night and my foster son alexis was in the kitchen and he was helping a couple of magicians drink up the beer and I walked in I said guys I'm very very tired I'm going to bed I'll see in the morning and they said fine and I guess they carried on until late at night I went in fell asleep woke up the next morning came staggering into the kitchen and time to see them eating up more of my groceries and for more breakfast at this time sat down got a half a cup of coffee unto me and straightened up at the table and Alexis looked at me my foster son he said what's with you I said wow I think last night I might have actually had a classic example of the OOBE that's the out-of-body experience it seemed when scientists or a parapsychologist even are able to are able to express something in two or three words or a word with three or four 'some and syllables in it it immediately becomes scientific so they call this other body experience it's hyphenated and it sounds pretty good hoby it means that you somehow find yourself out of your body and looking down on it or from a distance or whatever and Alexis looked to me said sure you I said hey you got to be honest it appears to me as if I did undergo such an experience okay give us a description and the two magicians at the table leaned closer over their bacon eggs and wanted to hear what I had to say said well I remember waking up in the middle of the night I remember last night I couldn't get to sleep I was super tired but then of course as soon as you hit the mattress you're staring at the ceiling and that happened early so I turned on the television receiver and it had some program or other on it and it went on and on and on and I guess I fell asleep and I remember waking up little tonight and I felt that I was in a position like this spread-eagled against the ceiling of my bedroom and I'm looking down at this bed rather large bed I fresh around a lot at night and Alice who was my black cat at that time of course was curled up in the middle of the bed so that I had to be way over at one side and I was way over at one side trying not to disturb the cat of course you wouldn't dare do that she's taken the exact center of the bed curled up in a big black ball and as I'm up against the ceiling I noticed that the room is lit in sort of a grayish light look down at the television set it and there's static all over the screen you know the white noise sort of thing and confetti on the screen and that's illuminating the room and I'm seeing myself in bed scrunched over at one side and this big chartreuse sort of a green bedspread on it with Alice the black hat in the middle of it and I noted that I she opened up her eye she had green eyes the same color as the bedspread it almost looked like two holes punched right through her head it was and she looked at me and as cash do she went and went right back to sleep now that was a very strong current results and I could tell you right now at this moment yes I really believe believe I'm not convinced of it but I believe from the evidence is presented to me I had an out-of-body experience that matches the description that we've all heard about so many times but fortunately for me in a way I'm not really dead set against having my belief structure disturbed or having new facts come in that will disturb my previous convictions and matters it doesn't really disturb me that much but fortunately for you so that I can give you this anecdotal experience which i think is very powerful and fortunately for me I am able to tell you what actually had happened Alexis looked at me and he said I got two things to show you he went to the foot of the stairs and came up with a big transparent laundry bag he had taken it halfway down he never took it all the way down to the laundry room he took a half way down this way kids do and he brought it all the way upstairs and inside I noted bunch of sheets pillowcases and the chartreuse bedspread he said that's been here there since yesterday then I don't have the chartreuse bedspread on my bed I dashed to the door looked in and it was this oh god I lost it some place thank goodness son it is terrible hunting scene I don't know where I got it somebody left it I don't know but it was the only one that I use when the other one was in the laundry he had taken that one off put it in the laundry and the other one was on there so I couldn't have seen Alice in the middle of the hunting scene I would have noticed that and he said look out on the patio I looked outside he said Harry here one of the magician's is highly allergic to cats I put her out yesterday around 4:00 in the afternoon she hasn't been in the house since and she's not very happy about it all I looked out and there she was on the patio and had been out all night she could not have been in the bedroom curled up in the middle it was a dream an hallucination if you will it could not have happened physically I had two very good pieces of evidence that it could not happen now that's important folks in that if I did not have either one or both of those pieces of evidence I would now have to say to you to the best of my knowledge I had an out-of-body experience but all the other out-of-body experiences we here out we have to wonder now those folks are not quite as skeptical about the subject as I am in most cases if they don't have some convincing evidence to the contrary what's to stop them from saying I'm absolutely certain I've had an out-of-body experience because there is no other explanation for it except the possible and rather parsimonious conclusion that they were either dreaming or add some sort of a hallucination whatever it might have been a bad pork chop for all we know now I ask you to consider it that carefully and please don't forget it because it is a good example of how even the arch skeptic haha could possibly have been taken in for more of James Randi and the Educational Foundation make sure you visit Randi org

Channel: JamesRandiFoundation

Views: 142,384

Rating: 4.7866216 out of 5

Keywords: james randi, jref, out of body experience, superstitions, ghosts

Id: 1NwKkbd2e-c

Length: 7min 16sec (436 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/cooldudeconsortium]

Good stuff. I heard about that article here. I don't think Newsweek has been taken seriously for a while, but this pushes it clear in to Reader's Digest territory.

[u/PWC1004]

OP, could you also post this video to r/AtheistVids?

[u/WeaponsGradeHumanity]

He's still alive you know. What are you going to do when he actually posts a response to that article?