When I was a kid, somewhere around kindergarten or first grade, I developed a fear that stuck around for several years. This fear was responsible for many sleepless nights, hiding under the covers, hoping not to be found; hoping nothing would happen to me. Although it's somewhat my parents' fault for instilling this fear in me, I don't blame them. No, I place all the blame on one man: Robert Stack.
The mid to late 80's was an interesting time in television for a young child. On one end of the spectrum, you had the lovable Disney show, Ducktales, whose theme song we 30-somethings can still sing by heart and smile, fondly remembering those afternoons when we would get home from school and sit around the living room chowing down on Fruit Roll Ups and Jello Pudding Pops with our friends. On the other end, you have Unsolved Mysteries, whose dissonant theme song is what nightmares are made of. Conjuring images of ghosts and murderers, I would have to leave the room when this show started.
The song, as terrifying as it is, was not this great fear of mine that I mention. Some people fear clowns, some fear heights, some fear enclosed spaces or nuclear war or dying alone. My fear was much scarier than any of those things, at least to me. I was afraid of alien abduction.
My childhood before Unsolved Mysteries was a sort of naive utopia, where the greatest dangers were going upside down on carnival rides or getting hit by a pitch in baseball. But when Robert Stack introduced me to the concept of alien abduction, I learned that my perfect, innocent world was full of scary things; serial killers, ghosts, bigfoot. Why had nobody warned me?
(Serial killers were real, but that type of thing didn't happen in Morton, IL. Surely I would've already seen a ghost if my house were haunted. And the Sasquatch live in the Pacific Northwest. But aliens...they can be anywhere, and they can take anybody.)
Unsolved Mysteries was not a work of fiction. These were based on true stories. Real people, actually getting taken by these pale-skinned, black-eyed beings, boarded on their ships and being experimented on. Painful experiments. I remember one story of the aliens sticking a needle into someone's eye, and that was what I feared would happen to me. A couple movies, Communion starring Christopher Walken and Fire in the Sky, affirmed all my fears, as both of these films were also based on true stories.
Things got worse when I discovered the paranormal section at the library. There, I was able to learn more about aliens thanks to Time Life's Mysteries of the Unknown. All the books I checked out from like 2nd through 5th grade were about the paranormal. I was the expert. And I believed everything I read and everything I saw on TV about the subject.
One time I saw a show where someone said that most alien abductions happen between 1 and 3 A.M. So if I were awake between those times, I would not be able to go back to sleep out of fear. If I woke up to go to the bathroom at 1:15, I would hold it until 3; thinking, "okay, I'm safe now." My goal was always to fall asleep before 1:00, because if I were asleep, the aliens wouldn't take me. My bedtime prayer every night included, "God, please don't let me get abducted by aliens." (I'm dead serious; you can't make this stuff up.)
I don't know how old I was when I started to question whether or not aliens were real; embarrassingly, it probably wasn't until high school. My rationale was, "Look at how many people report the exact same thing, so how could it not be real? Maybe they're doing this just to get on television, but it seems like there are way too many people for that to make sense. Maybe it's a conspiracy of some sort, but there's no reason why. There has to be something to it. The most logical explanation is that they're telling the truth."
It wasn't until college that I learned about sleep paralysis. Essentially what happens is your mind halfway wakes up but your body is still paralyzed. When this happens, you can have hallucinations of creatures, often-times performing types of torture on you. For hundreds of years, people reported encounters with the Incubus and the Succubus, two demons that would perform painful sex acts on you in the middle of the night. The correlations between the experiences of sleep paralysis, the Incubus, and the Succubus were uncanny to the experiences detailed by alien abductees.
Finally, everything snapped into place. These abductees aren't lying. They're experiencing sleep paralysis and believe their hallucinations are real.
My questions shifted from, "Will I get abducted by aliens?" to "I wonder if aliens are even real" to "How could I be such a dingus to go from like 1987 to 2002 without understanding that there was a perfectly rational explanation for this? Why was I so gullible? Why did Robert Stack and Christopher Walken want to ruin my childhood? Why was there never a show called Solved Mysteries hosted by someone more comforting, like Fred Rogers or Bob Ross, with a nice happy theme song? Why? Why? Why?"
I may never know the answers to those questions, and I don't really know what my point is in telling this story to begin with, but I know that I no longer fear being abducted by aliens. In fact, I don't believe they exist. If my kids ask me someday whether they should be afraid of them, I'll say, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself...and Sasquatch."
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