Hey _Morpheus, I agree with you. You did call him a fabled genius, which he definitely was. But, I had the fleeting feeling that you wanted to cancel that out by immediately saying that he was also a legendary liar. My intention with the linked article was to show that SOME OF THE CLAIMS might actually have been reality and not lies.
Talking about PERSONAL EXPERIENCES I can 100% understand that they carry a bit more weight than just hearsay. However, sometimes it's also hard to believe or understand what people claim to have witness.
Case in point, when I was aprox. 11 years old, I lived in the north coast of Honduras in a town called Trujillo. There was in town absolutely no TV signal (this was around 1977). The only official ways to get there was through a very damaged dirt road through the mountains (only during the dry season) or on a boat, a small DC3 plane also came once a week or so.
On that town, there was this very poor garifuna (black caribbean) 11 year old girl who was participating in a garifuna ancestor's ritual called dugu. We were also very good friends.
The weird thing is that this girl comes running to my house during a break in their ritual (she lived very close) and tells me how she just had seen her auntie crawling up a wall like a spider and speaking with a weird manly voice that her family claimed was some ancestor. I was completely astounded and she was totally scared!
To this day I can't explain what she actually saw. For years though, I used that as an example of the power of the demons... In fact, it was until many years later that I saw something similar in a movie. I couldn't understand how this poor little girl with no access to TV (absolutely no signal in town), no access to cinema or anything of the sort claimed that she saw what she said to have seen.
So I definitely believe that hearing from somebody talking about their own experience is much more interesting and, maybe, even compelling than hearsay. And sometimes there is no explanation to the experience.
vivalavida
