The thing is, we haven't seen anything like that. There are no reliable records to indicate that anything like this has ever happened on Earth.
Define "reliable."
This is actually something
I've brought up before, but my feeling that even the stuff that is "reliable".... really isn't. And over the past several years we've seen how easy it is to astroturf falsehoods and bury the truth. That's why we've got tons of people nowadays who believe in a thousand genders.... and part of the reason for that is because papers supporting their beliefs are easily found while papers against are buried or outright retracted.
Considering that and COVID, I find it very easy to believe that maybe paranormal shit exists and is actually pretty documented, but the science journals just don't want to acknowledge it.
Humanity--particularly the more "intellectual" side of it--seems to have a predisposition towards debunkerism. I've
mentioned this in the past with regards to James Randi--if he ever claims to debunk anything, its always treated as valid, even when his supposed debunking involves him blatantly making shit up. Yet just because he's a debunker, he's treated as a valid source.
Fact is, as long as you're dealing with fellow human beings and human society, there will always be cognitive biases, and its those who claim to be above such things that are most susceptible to them.
I do agree with Agent Scully on one thing though: you should never go in
looking for paranormal explanations, but instead only consider them if none of the natural explanations completely add up.
On that note the belief in ghost sightings is a funny thing when you think about it. Even if they do exist on some level its interesting that when somebody says they saw a ghost its usually the ghost of somebody from the relatively recent past. Say the 18th or 19th centuries for the most part. Its interesting we never have sightings of, say, ghosts of roman legionaries, ancient greeks and egyptians or neolithic hunter gatherers wearing animal skins and such. If ghosts existed why aren't we hearing stories about people seeing these ghosts of long dead people? I mean dead is dead right? Whats the difference between a ghost of somebody who got killed in iraq vs some neolithic hunter who got killed by a cave bear or a roman legionary who died fighting in gaul? Yet somehow its always some civil war/revolutionary war era ghost or somebody haunting a 19th century house or whatever. This implies that either there are no ghosts or that said ghosts are not a permanent thing for whatever reason. Law of entropy maybe?
Who says we don't see ghosts of those things?
I mean, I imagine part of the reason most ghost stories
we hear are because we live in America (I'm assuming), itself a relatively young nation (and before you say it... I have heard of Native American ghosts being sighted). So
of course most American ghosts are gonna be relaively recent.
I imagine if we lived in Egypt, were fluent in Egyptian and browsed Egyptian internet (and assuming this isn't like, a taboo subject in their culture or something) then we'd probably hear tons of stories about dead Egyptians, sightings of pharoahs, people getting sent to the Shadow Realm after losing a card game, so on and so forth.
Hell, when it comes to foreign-language stuff, I've found it can be a pain to find info about things
I know for a fact exist, like specific movies or novels, due to the good ol' language barrier. Like seriously, try to find Japanese horror movies from the 1980s. Chances are the only ones you'll dig up are the ones that got an international release... but would you take that to mean that Japan only made like seven horror movies in the 1980s?
