LONG POST AHOY! Way back in the mists of time...say, the early 2000's...I think I made a thread like this. Glad to see another one pop up. I've been meaning to post in it for days, but never got the time to finish typing up this thing.
Here's my deal: I'm a hardcore skeptic. My "Bibles" are Sagan's "Demon Haunted World" and Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things". I really think that there is a non-supernatural explanation for basically everything, and that we (or our possible AI progeny) will one day have a complete understanding of the universe and its inner workings. I'm a strict materialist - "stuff" is all there is. No souls, ghosts, gods, angels, demons, etc.
I classify UFO sightings/Alien visitations outside of the paranormal. Nothing supernatural is required for these things to be real.
There's also Clarke's famous quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It is impossible, given our current understanding of physics, for a craft to move at anything approaching the speed of light, let alone surpassing it, or traveling between dimensions, or via some exotic means that we can't even grasp. But there is a teeny, tiny, infinitesimal bit of wiggle room, so I can't completely discount the idea that *something* is going on.
That said, I really do believe that the vast, VAST majority of UFO/Alien stories can be readily explained or debunked. Most are probably normal aircraft or classified military stuff or hoaxes. I also suspect there's something about the human brain that we just don't grasp yet, some artifact of our evolution that causes such experiences, or environmental effects like slight carbon monoxide poisoning, but...
All of that is preamble to some stories I'm about to give you from me and my family, so you understand where I'm coming from and realize that I haven't made up my mind one way or the other about these particular incidents.
First, we'll start with my dad. He's had weird things happen to him dating back to his childhood.
Incident #1:
He's 7 or 8 years old. It's the late 1950's, and he's playing in his backyard sandbox outside of Detroit, Michigan. He suddenly hears an incredibly loud, low humming noise. He looks up, and sees passing maybe 50 feet above him (his estimate), a large, multicolored, glowing sort of hypercube thing. He uses hypercube to describe it because it seemed to be made of multiple polygonal shapes that were shifting and rotating as it hummed through the air. It just passed over him and disappeared over the horizon of suburban rooftops.
Incident #2:
He's about 10 or 12 years old. He goes with his parents, brother, and sister for a camping trip on the shores of Lake Superior. Two odd things will happen on this trip, only one of which will seem odd until 30 or so years later. First, he standing at the edge of the lake with his mom and dad, fishing. There's a flash, and something streaks over the lake and disappears over the horizon. My grandpa is startled, and says, "What the hell was that? Did you guys see that?" Everyone confirms that they saw the same thing. They are shaken, a bit, but mostly curious.
Incident #3 (plus my personal connection):
The same camping trip as above. Everyone remembers a group of deer coming really close to their campsite and hanging out for a long time. They all described it as being pretty weird that they got to see so many deer up close and that they seemed to be completely unafraid of humans. Years later, when my dad reads "Communion", he will come across the moment where Whitley Strieber remembers being unnerved by owls looking into his cabin windows at night. In the book, this is revealed to be a memory block...he remembers owls instead of Grays. Hypnosis allows him to break through this screen memory and to recall the "true" events of his abduction. This will send a chill of recognition/fear down my dad's spine as he recalls the deer incident for the first time in decades. When my dad tells me this, I get my own deep chill as I remember a recurring nightmare I had as a child of a group of monkeys coming into my room and right up to my bedside. The nightmares caused me to sleep under the covers, smashed up against the wall, for months. I had trouble sleeping again for weeks after my dad told me all of this. Neither one of us likes to think about it much, but neither of us really thinks we were abducted. And I have to say that I think "Communion" is bullshit and Strieber is insane, but the freakout factor at the time of our "realization" cannot be overstated.
Incident #4:
He's in his early twenties or late teens, working for an irrigation company installing sprinkler systems as a summer job. He's returning as night falls from a job site out in the country, driving down a lightless, tree-lined 2-lane road. He's alone, driving a POS 1950's pickup truck with a bad electrical system. He has to turn the lights off frequently so that the truck doesn't die. Everything plunges into inky darkness every time he does this, and he has do drive, slowly, with no lights down a spooky road for miles at a time. Suddenly, as if from a megaphone from hovering helicopter directly overhead, he hears a booming voice say "TURN ON YOUR LIGHTS!" After recovering from the initial startle, he immediately sticks his head out the window and looks up. Nothing. No sound, no helicopter, just black, empty sky. Shaken, he turns on his lights and returns to the shop without further incident.
I suspect that this incident - which alternately creeps me out and makes me laugh - was just fatigue, hallucination, and paranoia from my dad's pot-smoking hippy ways. But taken in context with his childhood stuff, it deserves inclusion here.
Incident #5:
I will have to talk to my dad later to get the details - this is one of those stories that is fourth or fifth hand hearsay, so it's hard to know what the real details are or what to make of it. Back in the early 1970's, my dad had a friend/business associate who claimed that his uncle/grandfather/somebody in his family was a high-ranking military official at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and that in the 1960's this person confided in his nephew/grandson/whatever that he had seen the Roswell bodies and craft pieces when they were transferred there.
As for me, the only things I have had happen are more easily dismissed.
-The monkey dreams mentioned above. Still don't like thinking too deeply about this one.
-Frequent, unexplained nosebleeds at night (and during the middle of the day) during junior high and high school. I would wake up with a blood-soaked pillow at least every 6 weeks or so. Allergies?
-Woke up once to extremely bright light shining through bedroom blinds, light moved away before I could peek out of the blinds. I lived on the third floor of an apartment building, so it was probably either reflected headlights or a police helicopter, but I didn't hear anything...at all.
-One "nightmare" about 10 years ago where I "woke up" to see a Gray standing right next to my bed, staring at me. I remember trying to - unsuccessfully - scream, then waking up screaming for real.
Congratulations if you made it through all of that. Hope I managed to creep somebody out at least a little bit. Again, I think it's all probably got mundane explanations. It's fun to speculate though.
