The key topic I've found that binds seemingly unrelated issues of stories, folklore and urban legends - with those of paranormal topics, Fortean, UFO, religion and such is MYTHOLOGY...and also, actually "storytelling."
There's a close relationship between mythology as it pertains to stories and lore and myth-building as it pertains to "eyewitness" accounts and "witnessing" (means both "to witness, see" and "to witness, tell of an experience). In short, all these topics are connected by the fact that we, as humans, need to both listen and be heard in order to interact with another in the world. We mostly deal with each other through language, hearing and being heard and all of this involves varying degrees of PERCEPTION...
We also myth-build ALL THE TIME, every one of us...in order to relate an event, we "tell stories" to get our points across - and all of the storytelling, whether an actual archetype-filled story (like the myth of Perseus versus Medusa) or the story of a real life event that happened yesterday - is subject to perception, memory issues, "presentation." Therefore, while we experience the physical (and more), we generally speak the abstract into existence in our explanations of what we felt, physically, what we felt emotionally, psychologically, etc. The temporal is used to tell of what we try to define as concrete (if we can "identify" and describe, then "emotions" and "mental states" become as concrete as we can make them)...but do you see all the discrepancies and exceptions needed here? We're constantly in a world of conflicting concrete and temporal and in the end, it's usually the abstract, airy, non-touchable things in the world that are most important to us...the non-touchable things - words!
Stories, "versions of events." Myth-building, stories, myths, true accounts...they're all quite interconnected.
What happened as I was studying myth-building, versions of events and true accounts is that I saw that old folklore and folktales I was encountering and studying for the past few years held the same features as new ghost-encounter, BEK encounter and related accounts I've been bumping up against more recently. SOME (but definitely not all) of the present-day Shadow People sightings are interestingly close to the old Springheel Jack accounts in the Victorian era in England. Many modern UFO accounts and "extraterrestrial beings" described mirror a few strange creatures described in the Bible...
It's possible that our human psyche, language, the way we process information and then share information has us all quite connected, including repeat descriptions of events, creatures and phenomena that have been going on for years and years, ages and eons. This is just something to think about and consider, of course...and it's not MY idea - that is, this explanation for a myriad of connected, unexplained things is not MY brand new idea...the ideas have been proposed by people from our modern era, like Charles Fort, Loren Coleman, John Keel, Jason Offutt, David Icke, Alex Jones, and too many other modern era personalities to mention here.
Truthfully, I don't have any concrete answers or explanations for all the things above, but I hope that readers who enjoy my articles at Hub Pages, on my current Urban Legends blog and from a few other sites I write articles on - will feel free to engage in discussion with me (and the general blogging community) on these topics.
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