A Pterodactylus and a globe of light

Earlier this month, "G" of the Junior Ganymede posted about an unimaginably bizarre experience he had had. (See also my comments here.) I don't know how large a readership the Junior Ganymede has -- I would guess the figure is in the hundreds or low thousands -- but almost immediately one of the readers posted a comment, beginning, "Something almost identical happened to me about a month ago," and proceeding to relate an experience that was indeed extremely similar to G's.

Or think of Whitley Strieber, publishing Communion -- a "true story" so far beyond the pale, so unremittingly loony, that one would expect it to elicit nervous laughter at best -- only to find himself deluged with hundreds of thousands of letters (now archived at Rice University) from readers saying, "I thought I was the only one!"

More things, Horatio.

I will be posting about some strange experiences of my own -- so strange that I don't even know how to classify them -- on the off chance of discovering that someone else has experienced the same sort of thing.

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Early this year -- I believe it was one of the first two Sundays in February -- I was doing some housework in the dining room, which is not really a proper room at all but is separated from the living room by a large bookcase which faces the living room and was, I am told, put there for sound feng shui reasons.

Suddenly, I "saw" a little black reptile crawl very quickly up the back of the bookcase and disappear. I immediately thought -- with a ludicrous degree of taxonomic precision -- "That's a Pterodactlyus antiquus!" What it actually looked like, though, was the 19th-century concept of P. antiquus -- without the head crest that paleontologists now believe it had, for example. If fact, it looked almost exactly as if the drawing below had come to life.

I found this drawing shortly after the experience, by Googling "pterodactylus antiquus," and immediately recognized it as what I had seen. I don't know its exact source, but it's obviously "vintage." I devoured an unconscionable number of dinosaur books as a young child and may well have seen the drawing before -- but if so, it must have been at least 30 years ago. There's no reason it should have popped out of the recesses of my mind in 2020 and come to life! (I should also mention that my personal mental image of Pterodactylus, while also lacking a crest, has always been yellow in color, not black.)

The reader will have noticed the scare-quotes around the word "saw," which I shall now explain. It was very definitely in what is called the mind's eye that I saw it. This was not a visual hallucination, and it was certainly not a flesh-and-blood animal. At the same time, neither was it an example of imagination as I now experience it. What it most closely resembled was the imagination of very early childhood, when mental imagery, while still entirely distinct from eye-mediated vision, is much more literally imagery than it is for adults. The main thing that made it more like seeing than imagining, though, was what I might call its given-ness. Rather than developing organically out of my train of thought, as vivid fantasies normally do, it was abruptly imposed on me after the manner of sense-data, in a way that made it seem as if it in some way belonged to the objective world.

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A week or two later -- either St. Valentine's Day or the day after -- I was returning home from a nighttime ramble and saw (in the ordinary sense of the word saw) what I took, for a split second, to be an absolutely gigantic shooting star, easily over a full degree in angular diameter. Then I realized that it was actually much closer, and therefore much smaller, than I had originally thought -- a bit larger than a basketball, perhaps. It was a slightly oblate spheroid in shape and glowed white, about as bright as an ordinary household lamp. It streaked across the sky but then rapidly slowed to a stop just above my house, after which it descended and appeared to land on the roof. (My roof is flat and is surrounded by a low wall, so there was no way to see from the ground if it had really landed or not.)

Unlike the Pterodactylus, this object looked entirely real, and the first thing I did was go up on the roof to look for it. There was nothing, though. I then went back outside and retraced my steps a few times, thinking without much conviction that it must have been the moon reflecting off someone's window or something and that I might be able to replicate the effect.

Finally I gave up, went inside, and asked my wife if she had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. She hadn't. I asked what she had been doing at 11:00 (the time I had seen the object), and she said she had been upstairs doing a meditation exercise.

"What kind of exercise?" I asked.

"I was visualizing a bottle full of white light."