Back in 1971 in a small Village in the North of Italy, close to the Alps, I was a young girl around nine years of age playing with my brother who was a couple of years younger than me. It was a sunny summer day; school was over. My brother and I were on the balcony of my grandparents’ house. It was located in the countryside in the midst of a field of apple trees. The house and the courtyard were enclosed with a wire fence and a gate closed the entrance from the country road. It was a big and isolated house built after World War I. Every day my grandfather was away working in the village and my grandmother would be in the kitchen cooking lunch. No one else was in the house or around it. The balcony where we were playing was on the second floor of the house. Around the house was a pavement of smooth stones. There were no tree branches close to the balcony.
That day we invented a new game. We started to throw our toys over the balcony. Our balloons and rubber toys were rebounding from the ground below the balcony, but never so high that we could get them back. When we didn’t have any more toys to throw down, I would run downstairs to pick up everything. I never saw anybody around the house and we also had a dog that would bark if any stranger had approached.
I had gone down stairs several times. At the end of our new game I decided to throw down even the big pillow from our couch. I felt a little guilty because I was thinking that my beloved grandmother wouldn’t be happy about that, so I decided we could do it only once and than stop. Furthermore our lunch was almost ready.
When I let the big pillow fall down from my hands I was surprised that I didn’t hear the thump that all the objects had usually made when they had hit the ground.
We couldn’t lean far over the balcony because the banister was quite high for us, so I couldn’t see directly what was happening to our pillow. After few seconds I saw it literally floating in the air. It was slowly coming up and it was flying perfectly horizontal. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and I had to ask my brother if he was seeing the same thing! If he hadn’t been with me at that time I would have thought that I was dreaming with my eyes open! Because I was a little taller than him I was able to bring back the pillow when it reached the highest part of the banister and was just in front of my eyes. We immediately stopped playing. We were not only surprised but probably shocked. We tried to tell my grandmother what had happened. Of course she didn’t believe us. She thought we were making fun of her. For who could believe that story? I wouldn’t have believed it either. If you go around talking about it people can think that you are crazy and who can blame them? There are crazy people that talk about things that happen only in their minds. Some like to invent stories to attract others’ attention. We cannot believe every story we hear from other people.
Later in life when we were teenagers, I spoke with my brother about what had happened. Sometime I would think that I had been dreaming, and I needed to be sure that he also remembered that odd and extraordinary event. He always confirmed that he remembered very well what had happened long ago.
I dare to write about what I saw at that time only because I had a witness with me, my brother.
But what really happened? Who knows? I really cannot explain it. However I know surely that it was the first of several unexplained episodes that occurred in that house. Since that day I have thought, “not only birds can fly!”
I have read some books about parapsychology in an attempt to find some kind of explanation for what happened. Maybe the most suitable explanation was that some children have still a kind of power to move objects, a power that comes from the mind. This ability will be lost in adults under the constriction of our culture. We don’t know everything about our mind and our energy. How to repeat such event? How to understand it? How many other things we cannot really explain? I never found an answer for what happened. Since that time I just believe that not only birds can fly and that our life, our world and the universe is an everyday mystery.
Sent in by Cinzia Sevignani, Copyright 2010