The original post: /r/glitch_in_the_matrix by /u/RyderBukow3 on 2025-01-19 12:20:29.

I recently found this sub by accident, and I’m glad I did. It proves we’re not crazy, nor is it legendarily rare to have any of these experiences.

Me, my best friend and my die-hard materialistic-atheistic family have had so many “glitches in the matrix” that I would need to write more than 10 posts to describe them all. We have all failed to explain each and every one of these events, and mentioning them in family conversations is sort of “taboo”. Fortunately, this is not the case with my lifelong best friend.

Here’s an early experience that my friend and I had about 15 years ago.

At a birthday fire camp, we left our group of friends and went for a walk in the woods (it’s a forest that we know perfectly well, having played here every day since we could walk) to talk privately about some stuff that had been going on in our lives lately.

After about an hour it was getting cold, so we turned around to go back to the fire camp. As we were walking and chatting casually, we saw a man in a red jacket walking slowly down the trail about 100 meters ahead of us. Nothing out of the ordinary as this place is full of hikers. Since he walked slowly, we got closer to him with each step.

When we were 4 meters behind him, preparing to pass on his left side, he approached a thick tree that crossed the path and disappeared from our view for a brief second. 5 steps later, so about 3 seconds, we went behind the tree and… well… there was nobody. Long, 200m straight road ahead, and muddy hills on the sides and no sign of a living soul. This man in red disappeared, which is impossible even if he was Husain Bolt at his peak or Spiderman and jumped into the bushes. We stopped and looked at each other: “What the hell?” “Where did he go?” We started looking for this guy, thinking he is playing with us by running around the tree, or whatever else came to mind, but nothing made sense. No footsteps in the mood either. We were desperate to find him and couldn’t do this for like 10 minutes. Finally, we started laughing hysterically saying it is impossible.

Eventually, we returned to the camp and told our friends about this event.

As I know this is not an uncommon type of story. The reason why I chose it is because there is no logical explanation other than group hallucination. Me and my friend were sober.

Thanks for reading, have a great Sunday!