The Long Way Home

One of the most fascinating types of timespace anomaly is a sudden loss of orientation due to a seeming change in the environment the subject is quite familiar with.
It is also one of the easiest targets for self-styled skeptics, who are all too happy to simply and flippantly attribute such events to some (usually, and utterly unscientifically, left unidentified) brain malfunction, even when there is no real evidence that would point to the likelihood of such an event in any given subject. Just because something could happen, it doesn't follow that it did happen.

Such things - as all events, really - should be studied individually, if we ever hope to understand their origins and dynamics.

Here is a real story of such an event. It happened in Tagawa (Fukuoka), Japan, around 1950 - 1955, to the mother of a very dear friend of ours, called Seika.
It is perhaps important to note that the person to whom it happened - the mother - is known to be an extremely rational and no-nonsense person, not given to flights of fancy.
At the time of this event she was a young schoolgirl, perhaps 10-15 years old (probably while she was still in elementary school, according to Seika).

Here is her story.


Mother visited one of her girlfriends, just like many school girls do. Probably before dinner time (or before it got dark), she decided to go home.

She was all too familiar with the area but suddenly she couldn't find a road. It's not that she forgot how to get home - there was no road where there should have been one. I suppose she found herself standing on a country field with no road.

She decided to think she'd been fooled by a 'fox' or 'racoon dog'. She went back to her friend's house and told them what happened. They let her stay there overnight.

The next morning, she found the road and went home. I remember sensing her 'pride' when I heard her talk about it. (That she wasn't fooled - that she was smart enough to go back and wait till the road appeared again.)

Awarded: It is called the Apple Highway, 2009.

Japanese folklore, rich in "ghosts" and other so-called paranormal phenomena, has a preferred culprit in such cases: kitsune, "the Fox".

But I don't think too much should be read into the attribution of this type of anomaly to "the Fox". I suspect said "fox" is just an umbrella mythic figure that serves as a pop explanation for anything that trascends the ordinary experience of life.
It should be mentioned, however, that its attributed action often seems to be illusion-inducing.
And this could be significant.

Anyway, stories like this one can be found practically all over the world (but it's not often than one can find a reliable almost-first-hand source).
Here is a very interesting story from 1941, which, however, sadly lacks the geographic coordinates one would like to see.

Two points seem to stand out as possibly related: the "squeaking" pillar or whatever it was, and the military airfield that is mentioned in passing. Because of the anonymised nature of the account we can't know where it happened. Could it be that at the time of this event, in 1941, there were some sort of experiments conducted by the military in the vicinity? After all, this was precisely the time when World War II precipitated the development of the radar and other such devices.

Just something to ponder about.
It is certainly much more rational and "logical" than just dimissing it - dismissing everything and anything that transcends the usual experience of our limited senses - as fancy.