Tag Archives: aliens

Alien Almost-Abduction

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Works at local novelty shop
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 9 2016
Primary Language: English

Informant (L.P.) is an 18 year old student. I had heard her enthusiasm for telling ghost stories the week before, and set up this interview. L.P. has spent some time in NYC over the past several years. This interview is conducted at my house one Saturday evening.

After sharing several ghost stories, L.P. casually adds “one time I almost got abducted by aliens.”

L.P.: “I was in New York at aunts apartment asleep and this Alien screamed into my ear really loud, and I woke up & saw a white flash but my eyes were closed. I felt light inside of my brain but nothing was there. Then my Aunt came into the room all freaked out and told me I screamed, and I didn’t even know.”

I suggest this sounds like sleep paralysis

L.P.: “I had a mark on my arm, it was red & had dots in it.”

While the alien abduction was likely a memorate from a severe instance of sleep paralysis, L.P. firmly believes in the supernatural from ghosts to aliens, and enjoys the thrill of firsthand experience. In my findings, people who believe in, and actively search for these mysterious entities are the most likely to encounter them in one form or another.

Blue Mountain Flying Saucers

Nationality: American
Age: 81
Occupation: Retired Dietician
Residence: Berkeley, CA
Performance Date: March 18, 2015
Primary Language: English

Informant: Grandma Johnson once saw a flying saucer. Yes, she saw it—saw it hover, and then it landed in a field by her house. And when she went to go look at it, there was a—a burnt place, in the field. A burnt area.

Me: Did anyone else see it?

Informant: Not that one, no. Grandma Johnson saw that one. But one of the other families in town—their two little girls, they saw a flying saucer land near their house. And they wanted to go out and look, too—to investigate—but their parents, oh, they wouldn’t let them. They were hysterical! They wouldn’t even let them outside, they were so worried they’d go looking.

The informant (my grandmother) was born in Missouri and has lived in Berkeley, CA for close to sixty years. She has always been a remarkably hard worker; she was raised by her uncle on his farm, where she more than carried her own weight, and, after completing four years at Penn State (where she was the only female Chemistry major at the time), she insisted on paying her uncle back every dime of her tuition. The informant moved out to California, went to graduate school at Mills College, and became a nutritionist working with nursing homes and other care facilities to develop standards for feeding different types of patients. After having two sons, the informant became the President of the Parents Association for the Head-Royce School in Oakland, CA and remained an active member of the Claremont Book Club.

“Grandma Johnson” is the informant’s mother (born and buried in Blue Mountain, Missouri, despite having moved to Berkeley, CA for several years to be cared for by the informant), so the date of this flying saucer viewing would have occurred a little fewer than one hundred years prior to 2015, the date of the collection. Today, a Google search of Blue Mountain, Missouri yields one major result—the Blue Mountain Methodist Camp. The area, the informant says, has not changed too much; the landscape is still predominately rural, low to lower middle class, and religious.

UFO and flying saucer sightings tend to occur in regions of America (specifically America; the United States has an undeniable fascination with extraterrestrials) where there is less light pollution and a lot more open space (a flying saucer landing in a city would cause innumerable damage, but a landing in, say, a corn field, might be more discreet). The informant delivered her mother’s encounter with a flying saucer to me in a way which I believe indicates that the informant, too, believes in extraterrestrial contact with Earth.

The Hat

Nationality: Korean American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/18/2014
Primary Language: English

The Hat

My friend was born in the U.S. He is currently a second year at USC.

The riddle goes like this:

Q: There are three people who were abducted by an alien. They are each blindfolded and put in a straight line. They are told that there are two black hats and a white hat. Each one of the abducted people is wearing either a white hat or a black hat. The last person in line can see both people’s heads in front of him, the second person can only see the first person’s head, and the first person can’t see anything. The alien then says that if they can guess the correct color of the hats, then they will be let free. Who speaks up and what answer would he give?

A: The person standing last in line would speak up only if he sees that the hats in front of him are the same color. If the colors were opposites then person in the middle would speak up. The middle guy would know that the person behind him is quiet because the hats in front of him are two different colors. By this deduction, the man in the middle knows that whichever color hat he is wearing is the opposite of the hat color he sees in front of him, and the same as the color of the hat color behind him.

The Analysis:

Me: Where did you hear this riddle?

J: My friend, Daniel Chun.

Me: When did you hear it?

J: I heard it about a month and a half ago. After sophomore accountability, we were just chilling in another friend’s room.

Me: Do you guys do this often?

J: Oh yeah, we just chill, share stories, talk, and stuff.

 

It should be noted that there was a similar riddle to this one about hats and prisoners but without aliens.

 

“Flash, flash” legend

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: College Student
Residence: Providence, Rhode Island
Performance Date: 4/18/13
Primary Language: English

The informant describes the legend of  her aunt’s experience with extraterrestrial life.  The informant describes that this story has been shared and told many times within her family and is generally accepted as truth within the family.  The informant explains that this legend holds importance for her because it happened to someone she is close with and trusts. The story goes as follows:

One calm night, Aunt Jane was lying in her bed looking out over the ocean.  She was still awake late into the night, as she is known within the family for sleeping very little.  As she was looking out over the ocean she saw a “flash, flash” on the horizon.  A few seconds later, she saw the same “flash, flash” again, but this time it had traveled really far on the horizon.  There was no possible way it was a boat or a plane or anything like that.  So she kept watching it and it was moving really fast still and the next thing she knew, a really bright green light swooped down through her front yard, around the house, and flew off into the distance.  Aunt Jane is wholeheartedly convinced this was an interaction with a UFO.

The informant’s story of her aunt’s interaction with a UFO is quite entertaining and relates to similar legends of individuals interacting or seeing UFO objects.  It is hard to say what the green flashing light was, but what is more certain is that the story demonstrates the interest people have in extraterrestrial life.  There is a certain fascination people have with finding or interacting with life outside of what is known to man that may have some cause in the abundance of these legends.  It is also interesting how the informant’s entire family is convinced that this event occurred to the person they know.  This may demonstrate the increased belief one holds when hearing events that have happened to those close or related and trusted.

Bermuda Triangle

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Florida
Performance Date: April 16, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Basic French

So when I was a kid, uh, when I was like 4 or 5 probably, I first heard about this whole thing with the Bermuda Triangle? My brother told me about it, probably. And he told me that basically it’s this place in the Atlantic Ocean where if you fly over it you, like any of the planes that would fly over it would crash, they’d all crash, and like everyone would die. That’s like the 7 year old kid version, I guess. But . . . and then over the years I heard that it was more like there were mysterious disappearances and stuff, um. Wait, who was the famous pilot? There was a famous pilot, uh, uh, uh . . . um, Amelia Earheart, maybe? . . . There was a famous pilot who went down in the Bermuda Triangle. And there were a bunch of maybe World war 2 related things as well, where planes went down mysteriously, like, without any weather or anything, they would just go off radar, and then they would, the plane would disappear. Um, so a lot of people would dispute that it was like aliens or something. Some sort of mysterious energy, like magnetic energy over this triangular area of the ocean that made planes crash, and then the pilots were like abducted or something, or taken by, by the squid people of the Bermuda, I don—something like that.
It was kinda scary, cause we traveled a lot when I was younger. And we would fly over the Bermuda Triangle sometimes, and I would be like, “Uh, oh! We’re going to die! We’re gonna get captured by the squid people!”

The unexplained disappearances and technological failures of the Bermuda Triangle remain fascinating, because in a world where all seems explainable, all of us still feel helpless and ignorant in the face of the ocean, or when in an airplane flying across the globe. American explanations for the Bermuda Triangle tend to be exclusively scientific, or science fiction oriented. American is obsessed with science and the future, but when we were pushing the limits of technology during the time when circumnavigating the globe by airplane was becoming possible, planes, such as Amelia Earhart’s, would at times disappear without a trace. That mankind still did not possess the technology to fully explore the globe by air fascinated the nation. Even now the legend of the Bermuda Triangle is prevalent. My friend is particularly fascinated by it because he traveled as a child and was very frightened of their plane getting lost.
In this case his older brother, who did not believe the story, told him the story to scare him. When my friend grew older, however, he no longer believed the story either. Growing out of believing in stories like the Bermuda Triangle or the Loch Ness monster are signs one is maturing and entering adulthood.