An event or perception is said to be paranormal if it involves forces or agencies that are beyond scientific explanation. Many paranormal events are said to be experienced only by those with psychicpowers, such as extrasensory perception or psychokinesis.Some events are perceived as paranormal due to ignorance. For example, parapsychologist Charles Tart explains how he first got interested in the paranormal: There was a time, years ago, when I was highly skeptical of any paranormal claims of any kind. One of the things that convinced me that there must be something to this is a strange experience that I personally went through. It was wartime. I was at Berkeley, California, and everybody was working overtime….the young lady who was my assistant at the time worked with me until very late this one night. She finally went home; I went home. Then the very next day she came in, all excited….She reported that during this night she had suddenly sat bolt upright in her bed, convinced that something terrible had happened. “I had a terrible sense of foreboding,” she said, but she did not know what had happened. “I immediately swung out of bed and went over to the window and looked outside to see if I could see anything that might have happened like an accident. I was just turning away from the window and suddenly the window shook violently. I couldn’t understand that. I went back to bed, woke up the next morning and listened to the radio.” A munitions ship at Port Chicago had exploded. It literally took Port Chicago off the map. It leveled the entire town and over 300 people were killed….She said she had sensed the moment when all these people were snuffed out in this mighty explosion. How would she have suddenly become terrified, jumped out of bed, gone to the window, and then – from 35 miles away, the shock wave had reached Berkeley and shook the window? There is no need to perceive this event as paranormal, according to James Randi, who recorded this story. A shock wave travels at different speeds through the ground and through the air. The difference over 35 miles would be 8 seconds. Most likely the shaking earth woke up the young lady in a fright and 8 seconds later the window shook. She and Tart assumed that the explosion took place when the window shook, making her experience inexplicable by the known laws of physics. This explanation only makes sense, however, if one is ignorant of the known laws of physics.

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