Tag Archives: aliens

Alien Day Parade

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student Athlete
Residence: Palo Alto, California
Performance Date: 5/1/22
Primary Language: English

Z. grew up in a rural town in Western Oregon called McMinnville. Nestled between farms and long stretches of highway, McMinnville is home to the Alien Days parade.

He spoke about the parade as one of the town’s biggest attractions. I grew up in Oregon as well, and many of my classmates and teachers growing up would make the drive to McMinnville once a year to go and celebrate aliens and their presence in the Universe and McMinnville, in particular. Z. said:

“Alien Days parade in McMinnville is a tradition–one of the biggest alien celebrations/congregations in the US, if not the world. Apparently there have been a bunch of sightings in the area and the local culture is super connected to it. People from all over visit, and share stories and perpetuate myths. That’s been going on forever as well.”  

The three-day long event gathers together people in a variety of alien-like costumes, participating in activities from trivia contests to story telling to barbecues.

The tradition has been happening since the 1950’s when one of the most famous photos of a UFO were taken in McMinnville on a plot of farm land. The photos are some of the only ones to have been taken that seem to have no explanation from the US government. The parade brings together people from all over to celebrate their belief in the myth of aliens who come to visit Earth from other galaxies. Because of their origin outside of our universe/reality, these stories could be classified as either legend or myth, depending on how you look at it.

To read more about the Alien Days parade, follow this link: https://visitmcminnville.com/about/articles/ufo-festival/

The Anunnaki: A Myth

Nationality: American
Age: 56
Occupation: Director of Administration
Residence: Tiburon, CA
Performance Date: 4/21/18
Primary Language: English

Hrmm, I mea- I’m not sure you wanna use this.  Alotta people have ridiculed Sitchin’s work and if you submit this, people will probably think that your Mom’s a nutcase (laughs).

 Okay so here goes: The Anunnaki are the (quote) “ones who came from heaven.”  They’re told of in the Sumerian texts and the story goes, at lease according to Sitchin in his Earth Chronicle books – which’s been wildly panned by all the scholars – is that the Anunnaki were extra-terrestrials who came to the Earth about five-hundred-thousand years ago to mine for gold. They uhh that they needed the gold to replenish their atmosphere on their planet called Niburu.

 So because Nibiru takes thirty-two-hundred years to circle the sun, they lived incredibly long lives. The miners – the Anunnaki – got restless and wanted help with their work, so the Anunnaki used their scientific expertise and created the Adamu – that’s Adam in the Bible – by mixing their DNA with the native creatures already existing on the planet. I always found it interesting that this story is probably the basis for the Adam and Eve story in the Bible. 

The Informant has always been interested in unconventional explanations for nearly everything. The disclaimer above is genuine, her interest does not entail belief. She believes stories can be valuable inherently, with truth underlying them playing a lesser importance (a natural folklorist!). I’m almost certain she first learned of the Anunnaki for the first time on the show Ancient Aliens. It piqued her interest and she began reading Zecharia Sitchin.

According to Sumerian mythology, the Anunnaki are descendants of the sky-god, An. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, there are contradicting accounts of the Anunnaki, including the number of gods or even their function. Perhaps there were rivaling religious factions even in 2144 BC.

The mythology is written in stone, literally, but the academic world has widely rejected Stitchin’s creationist myth of the Anunnaki as an alien species responsible for creating homo erectus as a slave race to mine for gold. He has been accused of misrepresenting the Sumerian texts and mistranslating Sumerian to fit his claims.

Although this myth turned creationist myth is strange, oddity is a characteristic of mythology. The truthfulness of sacred myth, by definition, is questionable. Stitchin’s work is a good story and surely an interesting premise, but nonetheless a blatant exaggeration of the surely sacred to the Sumerian people in Mesopotamia.

The Impossible Aircraft

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Engineering Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 3/29/2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Bengali

Item (direct transcription):

My encounter with aliens was when I was flying back from Bangladesh about two summers ago. In the skies above Canada… um, this might have just been some weird aircraft or some weird, uh, phenomenon with the wind. Anyways, we were flying towards California, right, at a very high rate of speed, and I saw this—looking out my window—very far away I saw this tiny streak of, like… light going in the other direction. And it was flying pretty fast—in the other direction.

It had a smoke trail behind it. No, not behind it! In front of it! Which was the weird part. Like, then I guess you can’t call it a smoke trail, exactly. It looked like something was being emitted from the front, and it was, like, following that. It was so weird! But it was also very far away… there were no clouds in the area, though, so it couldn’t have been a cloud.

At the time, I had no idea what it was! Because no plane flies like this! I thought it was some kind of, maybe like, alien craft, or something. I don’t know. Maybe some secret government experiment.

Background Information:

The informant was very insistent in the validity of his testimony. He is certain that he saw this impossible aircraft. He thinks it must have been a high-tech craft built either by aliens or by a top-secret government project.

Contextual Information:

The informant accompanied his story with a simple drawing to illustrate the aircraft.

Analysis:

This story matches the format of a typical memorate. The informant has linked his experience to common American folk beliefs in aliens and top-secret government aeronautical projects.

Unexplainable Alien Voice

Nationality: Russian
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: U.S.A
Performance Date: 04/15/2018
Primary Language: Russian
Language: English

The following story is collected from my friend. She lived in Russia for the most part of her life. Then she lived in England for few years and now lives in L.A. She talks about an event, which she considers to be unexplainable. This interview is done face-to-face. “A” refers to me, the collector. And “B” refers to the participant.

 

A: “Did you have any interesting experience in the past?”

B: “Yes. Okay so the story is this; Me and my friends were watching a movie together, and the most interesting thing ever happened to me… Guess I am kind of a boring person. It was me, my friend, and her sister watching a movie and then suddenly, the volume of the TV goes down to almost silent. Then we heard two guys in a very low voice talking in a language that is not distinguishable. Like a language that comes from outside of this world. Then a few seconds later volume of the tv goes up by itself. And movie continues. Me and my friends freaked out. I talked to my dad about this and he said, maybe it’s the people outside in the street and their radio interfered with our system but that does not make sense because we were watching it from a DVD player, which I don’t think has the ability to receive radio transmissions. Also, it was 10 years ago and we didn’t use the internet, so it can not be something related to that too. And I am not crazy, you can write that down, because my two friends heard it too. Very weird.”

A: “What do you think it was?”

B: “(Silence)… I don’t know… UFO”

A: “Do you believe in aliens?”

B: “I believe there are other intelligent beings in the universe… but I don’t prefer the word alien.”
In my opinion, she can not explain what really happened but she thinks it does not belong to this world.

 

Stalked by Aliens

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Minnesota
Performance Date: April 25, 2017
Primary Language: English

(Actions/further descriptions, added by interviewer, are in parentheses.)

I had this one teacher in seventh grade, uh, my science teacher… and she was just a huge joke with the entire grade… and I guess all her other students, like, ever, because they… the general consensus was just that she was crazy, because… well, there’s a lot of reasons, actually, but… but the big one is, she’s, like, convinced that she’s being stalked by aliens. (Laughs.) Like, straight-up, dead serious convinced. And she told us this story once, about how she was stalked by aliens twice, and it was like… uh… it started off something like…

So she was, like, in her twenties or something, and she was driving alone, and she noticed that this one car had been following her for a while, so she… she pulls into this gas station and the other car just drives by. And she still waits there for a few minutes, like, just to be sure. Uh, but then once she’s back on the road, after a few minutes, she notices that the same car is still following her, so she, like, looks over at it, and she sees… she’s like, (in a mock Southern accent) “it was the strangest-looking man I ever saw!” (Laughs.) Um, so then she gets to her parents’ house, right? And the dude is still following her, so… uh, so she parks her car inside the garage, and then she goes out the back and knocks on her neighbor’s door and, like, asks if she can spend the night there, ’cause she would’ve been home alone at that point. Uh, so the neighbor lets her stay there, and the… the car, the dude’s car is just parked across the street from her house, and it’s there all night, and then, uh, finally, like, that night or the next morning or something, he’s gone, and she goes back home and everything is normal. But then, and this is, like, ten years later or something. Like, she’s moved to a different state, she’s gotten married, changed her name, she has a daughter, she drives a different car and everything… ten years later, she’s driving down the road, and she… and there’s this car that’s following her, right? And so she looks over and it’s the same car with the same guy in it, and it follows her all the way home, again! So she gets home, she locks all her doors, and runs to her daughter, and she’s, like, super agitated and, like, telling her daughter to hide under her bed and stuff, and then all of a sudden the doorbell rings, and she… You know those houses that have, like, the… the intercom things, where you, like, press a button and you can talk to… Yeah, so her house had that. So she, over the intercom, she goes (in a mock Southern accent), “What do you want?!” And he… So her house, her front door, there’s these, like, windows, uh, really narrow windows on either side of the door. So the dude, like, slaps a hand against each of those windows on either side, and, like, she still can’t see him, his face or anything, like, it’s blocked by the door, um, but it’s just his hands on her windows, and he just goes (in a deep, gruff voice), “I WANT YOU!” (Laughs.) And so then she calls her neighbor, who’s this big, burly, like, construction or maintenance dude or something, and he comes out of his house with this giant pipe and chases the guy off, and, yeah, the, I guess, “alien” dude just drives off in his car, and… and I guess she hasn’t seen him since.

 

Thoughts:

I find it interesting that my informant’s teacher saw a “strange-looking man” following her and assumed it was an alien. I am also unsure as to whether this teacher truly believes she was stalked by an alien and was truly afraid, or whether she simply made this story up to make her students laugh. Her reputation among students as “crazy” seems to stem from her belief in aliens, as well as other bizarre behavior which other students of hers have told me are due to her belief in/interaction with aliens.