10 Unexplained Paranormal Events That Changed History – When history reaches a fork in its path, most often its fate is decided by powers beyond the comprehension of most mere mortals. Which is to say that it’s usually the rich people in power, the governments and military leaders, who will affect the course of things. Mainly by waging war on each other, or making great scientific discoveries, or spying on their populace.
All of the biggest events in history – the Moon Landing, two World Wars, the 1966 World Cup win – were decided by forces outside of most people’s reach. Then there are the time when those outside forces aren’t just the establishment who treat the world as their plaything, beholden to their whims. Sometimes, those forces are something…other.
Most tales of paranormal activity will be waved away as nonsense, a mistake of the mind, a trick of the light, or else an outright lie. It’s easy to discredit things you don’t understand. And yet, sometimes these phenomena leave an ineffable mark on the annals of history, changing the world even if most of those living on it don’t believe they exist.
When something strange happens, people tend to question it. When loads of people see something strange happen, then you’ve got a whole new fork in the road that you never even knew existed. From the UFO sighting recognized by the Pope to that wretched Bermuda Triangle, here are ten unexplained paranormal events that changed history.
10. Miracle Of The Sun, Approved By The Catholic Church
How much do you need for something to be considered an event that changed history? How about the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church? With some cajoling, The Miracle Of The Sun was finally recognized as an actual, Biblical miracle on on 13 October 1930, a good twenty years after the event itself. And it was a doozy.
At around lunchtime on Sunday 13 October 1917, in the town of Fátima, Portugal, thousands of gathered beneath storm clouds which were interrupted by an an opaque, spinning disk in the sky, which then blasted a dazzling ray of light down upon the on-lookers, many of whom claimed to see an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in it.
Right? This was a thing that really happened, was viewed by between 30,000-100,000 people of varying ages, and has since been confirmed as a miracle by the Roman Catholic church. Despite some theories about space dust and tricks of the light, though, science has been unable to explain exactly what all those people saw.
9. The Poltergeist Curse Claims Everyone’s Lives
In most time travel fantasies that involve changing history, the catalyst for a butterfly effect throughout history is more often than not somebody dying. You kill Hitler, or you stop Abe Lincoln from dying, or something – and history changes. When somebody dies, you’re removing a person’s decisions, interactions and all from the world.
Which is why the Poltergeist Curse has had such an ineffable effect on history. For most, the Poltergeist Curse is simply that people keep making unnecessary sequels and now a remake of Tobe Hooper’s classic haunted house movie; or else it’s being damned to hear your know-it-all friend endlessly tell you about how Steven Spielberg really directed it.
Spielberg is definitely responsible for the untimely deaths of dozens of people involved with the films. He okayed the use of real human skeletons – not props – in the first movie, and since then an unexplained cursed has claimed the lives of most of the main cast in violent and tragic circumstances, and even the novelization writer was killed in a car crash.
8. Haunted College Dorm Sealed Off Forever
The haunting of Room 428 may have only changed history in a very small way, but it’s certainly significant. Reports of hauntings in the dormitory room at Ohio University in Athens stretch back decades, with the Wilson Hall building of residence for students the home to a ghost who died under mysterious circumstances in the seventies.
Stories since have ranged from the violent death of a young woman in the middle of an occult ritual, astral projection conducted by its occupants, along with multiple honest-to-goodness poltergeist sightings reported from multiple people – students and teachers – with objects being lifted and hurled violently through the air.
Since then, Room 428 of Wilson Hall is completely sealed off. Not as a prank, or a publicity stunt on behalf of the university; it is of the very serious opinion of Ohio University that the room is uninhabitable, and so it has been totally closed off and nobody’s gone in since. Well, apart from one SyFy reality series about visiting haunted houses.
7. The Roswell Crash Changed Everything
If you’ve heard of Roswell, it’s either because you were a child of the nineties who didn’t have particularly discerning tastes when it came to television programming, or because you’re aware of the conspiracy theory which inspired that soapy-sci-fi alien love triangle mess in the first place. Almost seventy years later, its ripples are still being felt.
Covered up as a crashed weather balloon (and possibly something to do with spying on Russia), there are many who still think the government secrecy over an unidentified flying object landing unexpectedly in somebody’s living room was a sign of US involvement with extraterrestrials. Area 51 being just down the road didn’t help.
Even if the crash didn’t involve an actual UFO – and it almost certainly wasn’t followed by an alien autopsy, as Ant and Dec will tell you – the whole incident was a landmark moment in the paranormal community, and to this day has changed pop culture to the point that just saying “Roswell” will inspire images of flying saucers. There was even a Google doodle!
6. Those Blokes Who Stare At Goats Managed Some Success
The US military will try all sorts of weird, esoteric, Fortean means to defeat their enemies. For a while they were attempting to synthesis a “gay bomb” which would make enemy armies put down their guns and start smooching each other, the CIA dosed people with LSD to try and brainwash them, and then there’s a little thing called the Stargate Project.
Sadly nothing to do with the inexplicably long-running series of TV shows (soon to be rebooted with another movie by Roland Emmerich), the details of the Stargate Project were made famous by Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book The Men Who Stare At Goats – itself later adapted into a film with George Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey.
A new age hippie lot in the seventies were contracted by the US army to look into how things like ESP and remote viewing might be integrated into warfare. Including staring at goats until they died. Obviously your common or garden soldier isn’t being trained with such weapons, but their innovations in subliminal messaging were used in the Waco siege.
5. Ancient Artifacts Question Our Whole Notion Of History
Current estimates – based on fossil records and the like – reckon that modern human beings have been farting about on Earth for something like 200,000 years. However, it took a long, long time for us to do anything intelligent with our evolution above the other apes, instead being content clubbing each other over the heads and the like.
So how, then, do you explain the Dropa stones, discs dating back 12,000 years, which are covered in tiny, hieroglyph-like markings? Or even more perplexing, Klerksdorp spheres, 3-billion-year-old pyrophyllite deposits found in mines that have grooves or ridges carved around their outsides?
Nobody knows. Seriously, scientists have been pondering over it for ages. The UFOlogist answer is that they’re leftovers from ancient extraterrestrial visitors to our fledgling planet, in which case those bits of handicraft and language that they didn’t take with them? They may well have given early humans the inspiration for…well, all of civilization.
4. Morgellons, The Disease The CDC Don’t Recognize
A significant amount of zombie stories – films, books, games, whatever – begin with a slowly creeping sense that something is wrong. News reports of an infectious disease nobody has ever seen before, most frequently accompanied by a member of the US Center for Disease Control talking about how they’ve never seen anything like it.
That is happening right now. Sort of. The CDC have gone on record saying that they don’t know whether a condition called Morgellons Disease, which results in painful sores appearing all over the sufferer’s body, represents a new disease, whether it’s contagious, and categorized it as an “Unexplained Dermopathy”.
There’s a change in history, occurring alongside a change in many poor buggers’ physiologists. Some think Morgellons are a hysterical delusion, that people imagine they’re ill, but the boils all over the body – as yet unexplained by the frigging’ CDC – are stark proof. A horrifying illness that nobody really understands. Find your local mall ASAFP.
3. Everyone Dies In The Bermuda Triangle
It’s still up for debate exactly what the heck is going on in the Bermuda Triangle, that large stretch of ocean (estimated to be between 500,000 and 1,510,000 square miles, between Miami, Puerto Rico and Bermuda), but what everybody knows for sure is that a whole lot of boats, planes, and other forms of transportation that enter it never come out.
Plenty do, of course, and it wasn’t even included on a recent list of the world’s ten most dangerous waters for shipping. Some have suggested that UFOs are abducting people there, or that leftover technology from the lost city of Atlantis draws people down into the murky depths it apparently inhabits nowadays. Spooky.
Something weird’s going on there for sure, with multiple civilian and military vehicles being lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Bombers carrying weapons and Navy ships alike have been mislaid in the mysterious stretch of ocean, which had a somewhat significant effect on how many casualties there were in certain World War II battles, for example.
2. Bloop Suggests There Is Life Out There…Underwater
Humans spend so much time looking to the stars for weird and wonderful creatures, they almost forget how much there is still left on Earth to surprise us. After all, 95% of the world’s oceans remain unexplored by humans – below a certain depth, the pressure is impossible to survive for us. So what kind of weird creatures are hanging out down there?
Imaginations were further stoked to that topic by “Bloop”, a recording of a sound deep beneath the waves taken by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which was really low-frequency and crazy powerful, unlike anything they’d ever heard before. The closest comparison was ice quakes (icebergs falling apart underwater).
Some were fine writing “Bloop” of as that, but others less so. The source of the Bloop was about 1,760km from the location of Cthulhu in HP Lovecraft’s stories, which is terrifying. Obviously that Elder God isn’t the one making a racket down there, but Bloop reminded us there is intelligent life out there, waiting to be discovered…but it’s not in the skies.
1. The Battle Of Los Angeles Vs Aliens
Also known as The Great Los Angeles Air Raid, this might be one of the most widely-reported and still unsolved mysteries in modern history. The facts, such as they are, are these: from late 24 February to early 25 February 1942, the US military responded to an unprovoked, unidentified attack by enemy forces above the skies of California.
The incident came a scant few months after the Pearl Harbour attacks, meaning America had just entered the war and were a little jumpy. Still, they wouldn’t unleash a barrage of anti-artillery fire on absolutely nothing. At first it was assumed to be a second attack by Japanese forces, but that was swiftly debunked.
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox waved it away as a “false alarm”, but didn’t explain the bright lights in the sky which caused the army to fire in the first place. UFOlogists assert that this was one of the most significant paranormal events in history: first contact. Or rather, first contact, and the aliens were absolutely not friendly.
Even if the Battle Of Los Angeles wasn’t the first time humans and extraterrestrials met, the event at least had another tangible effect on history: since then, reports of UFO sightings, and the military’s interactions with which, have increased exponentially…