What is the strangest illusion you've ever seen?

[Loren Booda]

No wonder that people have superstitions when science furnishes no immediate answer to natural phenomena!

What did you experience?

 

[Huckleberry]

I was driving a straight shot from Seattle to Milwaukee several years ago. The next day just before dawn, somewhere around the Minnesota/Wisconsin border, An enormous tumbleweed came rolling across the road. The thing must have been ten feet tall. I swerved into the other lane to avoid it and then realized that there was nothing there at all. Not long after that I pulled into a rest area to sleep for a few hours. I had heard that the animal that kills the most people in the U.S. is deer. After worrying about deer jumping out at me all night I was almost taken out by an imaginary tumbleweed.

Then there was this one time in Mexico I was watching the sillhouettes of a traveling circus on my bedroom cieling. The hue shifted as I watched. Occassionally some of them would appear to come closer to me than the other vague shapes. I remember the shapes of giraffes and elephants and clowns, lots of clown heads. The entire time I felt like Goldilocks, trying to make sure my heart wasn't beating too slow or too fast, but just right. The experience seemed to last for hours, but my internal clock wasn't working. A minute could have been an hour for all I could tell.

It was a terrifying experience. That isn't the way I would choose to die and I thought that night it was entirely likely I might. I had been smoking some pot earlier and I suspect that it may have been laced with something else. I don't think the priests at the church I was staying at would have been happy to find an overdosed american in their church.

 

[rewebster]

No wonder that people have superstitions when science furnishes no immediate answer to natural phenomena!

For me, it's the double-slit experiment