Deep Weird, Damned Facts

It was my colleague’s honey jar. Let us call him Dan. Dan is an extremely accomplished academic teaching at a prestigious institution. He is a historian adept at reading in multiple ancient and modern languages. He has written numerous books and is a recognized authority in his field. So this is not “just another story.” It comes from a source of unimpeachable integrity, honesty, and historical precision.

It goes like this. One morning in August of 1980, at the age of twenty-four, Dan was making a large batch of blueberry muffins in his kitchen. He had just finished mixing the wet ingredients with a cup of honey. Honey being honey, he got some on the lip of the jar and so washed the jar off in the sink and sat it down to drip dry. He then turned to the business of the dry ingredients. Walking over to the pantry, he reached for one of those old-fashioned metal flour tins. As he pulled the tin off the shelf, it suddenly got heavier. His unprepared hands could not hold on to the new weight, and the tin dropped to the floor. Here is what happened next, in Dan’s own words, which he was kind enough to share with me at my request:

Upon meeting the carpeted ground, the tin lost its lid and much of its powdery contents. Rather upset at myself, I kneeled to clean up the mess. Then came the electric discovery whose current still flows through me. Enough of the flour had run out to reveal that something was buried at the bottom of the tin. Naturally curious, I dug through the flour with my fingers and then pulled out, of all things, a glass honey jar exactly like the one I had held in my hands and washed a moment ago, a jar completely caked with flour—as if it had been placed in the tin still wet. Puzzled, I turned my head to assure myself that the bottle I had just rinsed was standing where I had left it. It was not.

Dan stared for two minutes, examining the situation and its impossibility: “The fact was obvious. The wet honey jar had been moved from the sink and deposited on the bottom of the flour tin. The explanation, however, was not at all obvious.”

He went through all of the usual skeptical rebuttals: that this feat was a trick or show designed for an audience (where was the audience?); that he had somehow hypnotized himself and put a wet jar at the bottom of the flour tin himself (the latter is a nearly impossible feat he later learned—he tried); that his unconscious mind had played a trick on him and somehow traded places with his conscious mind for the duration of the experience (then how to explain the fully conscious and fully remembered sensation of the tin suddenly becoming heavier?). None of these “explanations” really resolved anything, of course. They were more unbelievable than the event itself, which was already outrageous enough

  --Strieber, Whitley; Kripal, Jeffrey J.. The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained