ozoneocean wrote:
I was thinking about incidents in South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, and India where the less educated people conflated movie monsters with traditional beleifs to come up with bizzare stroies
And Puerto Rico. Woman sees horror movie, sees something in her back yeard and describes it exactly as said movie monster and a legend is born when the media christens it the goat sucker or more familarly Chupacabra. (carefully and diligently researched and verifed explanation for this particular phenomenon. If only others were so easy. Like how the described behavior and apearance of Bigfoot mirrors that of bears on their hind legs, but they're not bears on their hind legs they have to be something totally new and mystical.)
Someone sees or experiences something they can't qute explain or something familar in an unfamilar way and *poof* the bear on its hind legs is Bigfoot. A mangy mutt is a chupacabra and a raccoon becomes a six foot tall wolfman with red eyes. Look up rods, skyfish, solar rods. Someone who never saw a flying insect in a photograph happens to catch one in flight and suddenly its an unknown cryptozoological animal when it's a phenomena known to photographers since forever.
Don't get me started on nightvision UFOs. Untrained people misusing military equipment and suddenly the night sky is awash in battles of UFOs.
Then of course there is also mis-remembering. You see you precieved that pointer as moving when in fact if you had been paying attention the other girl moved it. You become convinced it was spirits and *poof* your Ouija board is haunted. Stage Magic tricks work like that. Suckers born every minute who will beleive anything. It's all the human mind and the ability of an observer to mis-perceive what they're looking at and then mis-remember it as something else yet again. Scarf is entirely correct. I'm too much of a trained observer who actually did confabulate the memory of a car accident I was in. The huamn mind makes up stuff and mis-remembers and makes connections where none exist all the time and suddenly we're in a world of spirits and ghosts.
And like this stuff happens everywhere including among the most sophisticated supposedly intelligent people not just Joe Hick in Pohdunk or Rasad the magical thinker in India. Alien abduction phenomena and devil worship false memory phenomena?