What’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to you that you still can’t explain?

In 2008, I was lying in bed watching some of the US presidential election on TV. I had no real interest in politics and am not from the US, but it was just something to put on while I fell asleep.
I dozed off then woke up in the middle of the night, and I vividly remember hearing these words come from the TV: "John McCain is the next President of the United States." There was a picture of him on the TV and I think there were some results underneath which showed the votes. Not really caring either way, I turned the TV off and went back to sleep.
When I woke up the next day and went to college, I was absolutely fucking shocked when people were talking about Obama winning. I checked several news sites and they all confirmed Obama had won.
It genuinely feels like I slipped into some alternate reality or some shit because I can remember that line so strongly, and I'm absolutely certain that what I saw on the TV was that John McCain had won.
Could be down to me waking up and possibly being half asleep, but it felt more real than that. It's so weird.

Okay so I've told this story before.. completely changed my perspective on my beliefs.
One day, I was making food for my young one. He was maybe a bit over 2 years old? Maybe 3. Anyway, I made him food and said "anything you don't eat, I'll put into a baggie".
He then asks "what's a baggie?" I show him the sandwich baggies in the drawer and then explain that grocery bags can also be called "baggies", say "see?" then showed him a plastic grocery bag from the cupboard.
His eyes get all wide then ge starts sobbing. Alarmed, I ask him what's wrong and he sobs "No baggie!!!! No baggie!!!!" I asked him why and he says, still crying, "My old mommy... she put a baggie over my head and I died!" He then immediately stops crying, like nothing had happened, and went to play with his cars. I tried to coax him into repeating what he had just said, like "what? Hun, what do you mean? What did you say?" And he looked at me like I was bonkers and just said "huh?", apparently not remembering what he had said moments before, even after I brought it up at multiple different times of the day.
All of this was completely out of character for him, and nothing like that ever happened again. He was never told about death or shown it in any media at that point or anything else like that, so I was baffled.
It definitely made me rethink my stance on things like reincarnation and stuff like that. It was.. too strange. Never could explain it.
- He was never told about death or shown it in any media at that point or anything else like that
  ... of which you know. He may have happened to catch some sort of media about this and parroted it for a moment.
  Otherwise, yeah, that is bizarre and downright disturbing!
- That's really wild. I've heard a bunch of stories like that, however not quite as scary haha.
  I have these flashes of memory from my childhood, some go really really far back to 5 years or younger (i'm 34). Memories like my grandfather who passed when I was 5, or an accident I had when I was 1 or 2 involving my finger and a supermarket automatic door. Among those flashes of memory that's been in my head my whole life is a large theater with large red drapes everywhere, it's not a very clear picture but I distinctly remember looking up at the domed white ceiling, ornate pillars, amphitheater shaped room with seatrows rising slightly as they go back. I have never been to such a theater, even now, and I have no idea why I have had a memory of one my whole life even as a child who had never been to or seen a theater before. I sometimes wonder if it's a lingering memory from a past life.
  
  I have a memory like that. I can remember details going way, way back farther than I should be able to remember (no previous life or anything). One day I decided to delve as deeply as I could to find my earliest memory and I swear I remember an image like you described of my arm with a huge medical bracelet on it from inside an incubator.
  Unfortunately that memory is fading. I'm 45 now and every year it gets worse. I just don't remember the details I used to and am finding more and more things that I completely forgot happened only a month later. The older members of my mom's family all suffer with mental decline that almost approached Alzheimer's like symptoms. They say to take your B vitamins. We will see if that holds.

In my early teens (way before cellular), I heard the land line phone ringing in the kitchen. I ignored it. A very short time later, when I went into the kitchen to grab a snack, I noticed the phone wasn't plugged in.

I have a distinct memory of walking out into the forest as a kid with my father, sibling, and dogs. I knew those woods like the back of my hand. I still know them well and could go back in and find distinct trees and paths.
But this memory had us crawl under a dense thicket of branches and we found ourselves face to face with a pack of wolves. Five of them. They all came out from over this mound ahead of us, one stood on top. The others moved around to the sides kind of or in-between us and the one on the mound.
I distinctly remember not being afraid. My dogs were calm. My family was calm. The wolves were at ease. I looked the one in front of us in the eyes and felt warmth. And then, one by one, they turned and left.
Ive tried to go back to the exact spot several times, but it's not there. I've checked satellite imagery. I've gone through the other woods that my family frequented for hiking. Nothing.
So i dismissed it for many years (~20ish). It came back as a distant memory a few years ago and I asked my brother and sister if they'd remembered it. They didn't. And I don't remember which one was with me. So I went to ask my dad. As I started asking about it, he explained the rest of the memory. He, too, remembers it. But he also couldn't find his way back there. It was my brother who was with us.
Neither of us can explain the situation.
There are several other things, but that's one of my greatest life mysteries, for sure.

This happened when I was 16. I caught a glimpse of a man jumping and waving his hands in the middle of the road, briefly illuminated by my moped’s headlights as I was turning onto another road. I stopped immediately, wondering what the hell I'd just seen. My friend, who was riding behind me, stopped alongside and asked if I'd seen the same thing. We turned around and went back - less than a minute later - and the man was nowhere to be found.
The thing is, there was a deep ditch full of water on the other side of the road, with a huge open field on the other. The only plausible escape route would’ve been through that ditch and into the woods, but there were no signs of that - and it wouldn't have made sense anyway, since he seemed to be deliberately trying to get our attention.

About 16 years ago my bicycle got stolen from the bike rack at my apartment, lock and all.
6 or 7 months passed and one day something caught my eye as I was getting home. It was my bike, returned to the same rack. The lock was missing, but otherwise it was in good shape.
- This just happened to me. I can not fathom how they stole it with my big chain lock through the bike frame and the wall mount. Guess I'll wait a few months for it to return. But I can't explain how they took it.
  
  If I've learned anything from the Lockpicking Lawyer, it's that most locks are pretty easy to defeat. Bike locks are just increase how long it takes to steal a bike.
  
  Chains are easy. A simple pair of bolt cutters can get through fairly thick chains. A parent of wiser care giver is often the reason they get returned.

Oh lol yeah. I did "magic" once and it freaked me out so bad I never tried it again.
So I was a bit of an edgy person and fascinated by religion. I bought a book about black magic on ebay or some shit, it came with a drop of blood from the previous owner I realized when I got it in the mail, which was kind of creepy bit you know, authentic?
So yeah, I am reading and it is fascinating stuff. I love the overall concepts and the metaphysical implications, but you know, I don't actually believe in that stuff, so I decide to try it out..
The next day I go to work in a factory, we built trucks/lorries or what it is called in english. I try the techniques I read in the book, about highly specific manifestation and willing into existence. I visualize a sort of trade, and specify the factory will stop for an extended period of time, but not enough to cause any irrepairable economic harm or loss of employment, and certainly no physical or great emotional harm, only economical at a level far removed from the average floor worker. About an hour goes by, and everything stops. Apparently, the engines have not arrived from Germany, due to some delivery chain issue. We cannot continue the line as we are out of engines and they can only be inserted at one specific point, so everything stops until we get more. We all laugh and start just chilling around the factory, there is nothing to do anyways and we already cleaned everything imaginable the first 30 minutes or so (you would not believe how fast cleaning gets done when over a thousand people are ordered to clean because "well we can't just have you standing around"). Now I want to make clear no big stop like this ever happened in my entire time there, especially not because of something that wasn't a big fuckup by someone on site. I got kind of freaked out and never really touched that book again lol.
I have some other ones, but no one else was around for those so they are easier to just blame on me not being very mentally stable at the time.
- what book and which method of highly specific manifestation?
  the guys from last podcast on the left did magic for a while and they similarly stopped because it kept working and was freaking them out that they were getting into deep.
  
  The Black Arts by Richard Cavendish
  I don't remember the specifics of the mental process, this was like 8 years ago. But it was some sort of manifestation technique, probably in the first half of the book
  
  My wife practices witchcraft, and I have begun to lightly look into it and attempted a few things.
  My experiences, and what others would say is this....
  Magic is not a 5th level wizard casting a fireball spell. Magic is subtle. Magic is coincidence that you willed.
  You're not gonna hit the jackpot on the lottery, but you might find that you have the money for what you needed during the ritual through, shall we say, happenstance?
  Intent is paramount. Will is secondary.
  If you want a good primer on "real" magic, I suggest looking into Chaos Magic. Liber Null is a book to start with, and is generally recommended. That being said, it assumes a little bit of the reader, and a general understanding of the concepts is advised before reading.
  Of course, it could all be bullshit and, like I said, coincidence. However, as research into quantum physics advances, I'm less and less doubtful of "random" things causing long term effect. That being said, I'm human. I inherently have biases no matter how hard I try not to.
  Also: I bounced around their podcast based on subject, can you list any specific episodes they discussed this?

I was at an old civil war mansion late at night with a girl and we were drinking. She started telling me about how the place was supposedly haunted and how some people had seen strange things like blood coming up out of the floorboards. I laughed and called bullshit. Suddenly, an acorn hit me on the head - but it didn't fall down, it flew through the air and hit me on the side of the head. We both looked at each other for a second and got the hell out of there. Someone playing a practical joke? Maybe. I wasn't going to stick around to find out.

In my 30s I somehow became very attractive to women and got laid a lot.
- Well, good for you I would say! Did anything change physically?
  
  Physically not so much but I just got more confidence.

I saw a big ball of light in the sky years ago. It would drift, hover, zigzag, move in all very strange ways. I researched it for years and couldn't find an explanation for it.
- I had a friend who grew up in Oklahoma during the 70s. He taught me how to make crop circles and UFOs to freek people out. It isn't hard actually.
  One classic UFO technique is to take a large white (can be black, but white works better) garbage bags and attach it to a simple square frame made out of something lightweight like a coat hanger or balsam wood. It has to have an X crossing the middle where you place a candle. Fill the bag with a hair dryer (or just wait for the candle to do it) and the lift will take it up like a hot air balloon. It will get tossed around in the wind in erratic patterns and since it is largely unrecognizable most people will have a hard time approximating size and distance. As a result, it will look like a large moving in impossible ways looks like it is farther away, and that makes it look like it is moving faster than possible, and changing directions in ways that a helicopter or airplane would not be able to do). Instant aliens.
- I had one similar in Florida once years ago .... 25 years ago now I think ... and this was in Fort Lauderdale.
  I was lying in bed in a cheap motel staring up at a sky light and I could see a few stars but not many because of the light pollution. I saw a satellite or a plane in the sky and I started to follow it. Moving from west to east. I didn't think much of it, I've seen lights like it many times in Northern Ontario.
  Right directly overhead, in made a right angle turn north .... then a right angle turn back east and continued on its way. It never stopped or slowed down, just turn, turn and kept going.
  I couldn't believe it and thought maybe it was a bug on the glass? A helicopter? A speck of dust? It was weird because it followed a steady path across the sky first did a weird right angle turn twice and moved on.
  I told my wife who was with me and she didn't think anything of it and said I probably just imagined it. Maybe I did? But I'm very certain of what I saw because I was so shocked by it. I wasn't drinking, no drugs (legal or illegal) and I haven't had anything like it happen to me before or since.
  
  Yeah mine had right angle moves too. It would drift diagonally, a bit wobbly, then a 90° turn, then float upwards, down, diagonal, all over the place. It was a solid ball of light, like a meteor, except it was bright whte/silver. Fuzzy around the edges. Then it dipped beneath the horizon and that was the end of it.
- Ball lightning maybe?
  
  I immediately thought of Slay the Spire's Defect character.
  
  What I saw could fit that description, but the description is very vague. So I'm not totally convinced, but not totally dismissive either.

Back in 2012 I was at a music festival in Australia called Earth Frequency. The festival grounds are like a valley, up along one ridge was the festival itself, paths leading up to it on the festival side of the valley, and the camping was up the other side of the valley going up and over the ridge opposite to the festival. Myself and two others were sitting on a car at the top ridge of camping overlooking the festival, others were grouped around us.
Now I must preface this by saying I was on psychedelics, but I was not tripping balls I had mild visuals and some colours in the dark and that's about it. One other was also on psychedelics, while everyone else was some degree of stoned or drunk as you do at a music festival with friends. The three of us on the car noticed something and was trying to figure out what it was: Three lights, equidistant like a triangle, rotating clockwise. It sort of looked like it was floating in place over the festival, but it also could have been much further away and only looked like it was hovering over the festival from our perspective. The distance of it was one thing we were trying to figure out, but we were also trying to figure out what it was. To me it looked like a kite, triangle shaped with fairy lights or some sort of light source at each point, but it wasn't oscillating with the wind like a kite and it was consistently rotating at a steady rotation so it couldn't have been a kite. We thought maybe some sort of projection or spotlight from the festival, or some sort of mundane test for a laser show, but it looked like the lightsource originated from the thing itself and not some sort of reflection, and even if it was a reflection it still doesn't explain what it was.
We kept staring at it, might've been for almost 10 minutes before someone asked us what we were talking about/looking at, so we pointed it out and others started joining in to figure out what it was, asking all the same questions as us about distance or the light source or its steady rotation. The weirdest part was how steady it was, like unless it's rotating on top of a really tall sturdy pole there's no way it wouldn't at least oscillate up and down, side or side, or something. We kept watching it until suddenly the rotation stopped, all three lights sorta jumped up at the same time, then shot into different directions like bright shooting stars. We jumped around frantically, like "Wtf was that?!" Some of us thought we saw a UAP or UFO, it felt like our group was the only one who noticed it because people were asking what all our commotion was about. The day after we asked everyone we could if they saw what we saw, we met one other couple that saw and described exactly what we saw but from a different angle, neither could figure out if it was above or behind the festival.
I still to this day have no idea what we saw and have no explaination. I'm not much of a UFO guy, I want to believe, but to this day I find myself pondering from time to time what that was.
- Reminds me of doing shrooms with a guy I met at Freqs Of Nature festival, he tells me "I need to sit down a bit" so we do, and after an hour of silence goes "woah. I was just contacted by aliens".
  Man I will never forget his face, stone serious. We went back and danced after that.
  I wanted to share some unexplainable experiences while on psychedelics but since you are on psychs no one believes you :(
  
  I wouldn't have believed me either, if it weren't for the crowd of lucid people around me confirming exactly what we all saw.

Back in the early 2000s I ordered a dvd of John carpenter's In the mouth of madness due to a friend telling me about it. About an hour before me and my little brother prepped for the movie by eating a bag of shrooms. Then we grabbed the DVD package, and when we opened the cardboard package on the DVD black ants just poured out, like hundreds of them. We we're kinda freaked out but saw it as a good omen for the horror to come.
We popped in the movie and watched in complete darkness. Not much interesting or unexplained really happened after that, besides getting mind fucked by ancient inescapable horror while tripping balls. I remember for weeks afterwards being freaked out when the house made noises and a feeling of being watched. I rate the experience a Cthulu/10

Not to be edgy, but being born.
Lots of bits and pieces behind that one. Lucky doesn't come close to describing it. "Inconceivable" is more literal.
Same goes for all of you lot too.
- Yea wtf even is life?
  This must be The Bad Place

I survived to adulthood.

Dropped my toast butter side up, I'm a magic man yup
Probably just times I scared myself getting hyped up to hear or see something, haunted basement as a kid, alone at night in an unfamiliar forest, etc

How I ever fell in love with such a goddamn coward of a man.
- People can hide sides of themselves for a while, even unintentionally, which is why it's important to not jump the gun. The question is what you do now with the knowledge that you have.