Lancer
© NUFORC via Motive
A woman was driving around suburban Chicago when her Mitsubishi Lancer was gently bumped, though no cars were around. When she pulled over her car was massively dented.

We want to believe, but this story of being magically assaulted by an unidentified source sounds questionable to us. According to the woman:
The entire left side of my car appears to be scorched but no paint was removed.

I was driving 40-45 miles per hour heading north toward I-94 East towards Chicago on Lake Cook Road. While I was in the middle lane, I felt a nudge on the left of my car which made my car shift to the right. I did not swerve out of the lane and gained control back quickly.

I slowed down and as I got my bearings, I realized that my left side mirror was knocked off and so I turned right onto Revere Drive and put on my hazard lights.

I got out of the car and saw that I had several dents on the side of my car. There were two that were deeper and larger than the others; one was located in front of the rear wheel and the other was in the center of the driver door.

I called 911 to file a police report and the officer said that I was side swiped by another car but, there were not any cars around me before or after the hit and also there were no paint scratches from other cars on my car.
We happen to know this area quite well as we used to drive up towards this part of Northern Illinois to stretch the legs out on our review cars. The damage is curious as you would expect more scratching from car-on-car action. Plus, you'd expect the person to remember. We put our knowledge to work and have two theories.

The first involves the woman traveling, as she says, eastward toward 94 on Lake Cook Road. Most of the road has high visibility, low traffic in night. This would make it easier to see someone coming. The only part of the drive where it would be harder to notice another driver would be here, near Portwine Road and the Potawatomi Woods Preserve. Were a car to go to far here it could strike a car traveling eastbound, knock into it, and it would appear to the inattentive driver as if no one was around.

The second theory involves the peculiar timing of the event. It occurred at 11:20 PM on November 4, 2008 - the day Barack Obama was elected president. This was right after CNN announced his victory. Our guess, given that this is a more Republican area of Chicago, this woman is a Republican or Libertarian. She's at a party, drinking more and more as the night goes on and she realizes the Republicans are getting stomped. Ohio falls. Florida falls. The announcement is made and she gets in the car. Drunk. Mad. The spectacle of African Americans being re-enfranchised still dances in her head and she accidentally plunges the car sidewise into the ditch, thus creating the damage. As a cover she drives home, calls the cops, concocts a crazy story and voila. There it is.