Fears from my Childhood

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."

Yanny, Laurel, and Jesus

"Shut up," I said aloud after I started the video. "Yanny, Yanny, Yanny," repeated the nasal voiced man as I thought, "There is no way in hell anyone could hear 'Laurel' in this." If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll explain. A viral Twitter post provides an audio clip of a man speaking, and like the Great Dress Debate of 2015, the internet can't decide what he's actually saying. Around half of the people think he's saying "Yanny," while the other half think it's "Laurel."

I fell into the "Yanny" camp. Crystal clear, plain as day. I listened repeatedly to no avail, trying to see how someone could possibly hear "Laurel." At this point, I assumed it was probably some sort of inside joke. Those in the know are trying to make us who hear "Yanny,"  which it clearly says, feel like we're crazy because we can't hear what they do.

That's what I thought...until I plugged my headphones in, hit play and heard the deep baritone repeating "Laurel, Laurel." I did a double take. I checked to make sure I was indeed listening to the same audio sample; I was. I tried to listen again to get back to "Yanny," but I couldn't hear it anymore. Only "Laurel."

I wanted to figure out how this was happening, so I found clips online of the voice being sped up and slowed down. There are specific points where I could hear it switch from "Yanny" to "Laurel" and back again. And now that I've heard both, I can go back and forth hearing it both ways. It turns out there's some science behind this. A portion of it lies in the ambiguity of the low-quality audio, some happens because of the similarities between the sounds being used, and some of it is just personal bias.

Maybe this is why we mishear song lyrics, like Elton John's "Count the head lice on the highway," Jimi Hendrix's "'scuse me while I kiss this guy," or the Saved By the Bell theme song's "If I can have an enchilada, it'll be alright." Or maybe this is why when I say, "Time to get ready for bed," my kids hear, "Run around the house like you've just chugged three Red Bulls."

Regardless of the reasons behind it, people experience this recording differently. The same audio sample is heard differently by different people, yet their individual experience is genuine. Likewise, those of us trying to follow Christ experience Him differently from each other. I believe Jesus is calling us all to him, but we hear that call differently. For example, the more I know about Jesus and who he was, the more I'm convinced that Christians are called to be pacifists. Yet, I have friends who, through their deep convictions and understanding of Jesus, deeply believe that there are times when violence must be utilized to do the right thing.

We are both responding to the same God's call. We both genuinely believe what we hear. We even both point to the same scriptures sometimes to back up our views. What often happens is we get into an argument about who is right, who is wrong, and why, eventually ending with "Well they're just too [stupid, naive, stubborn, brainwashed, etc.] to get it." This does little to help anything other than bolstering one's own rigidity, and at the same time, it belittles the other person's spiritual journey. I believe this is the reason we have so many denominations.

In John 17, Jesus prays for unity for his followers, that we be one as He and The Father are one. What does this look like when we have so many different denominations and exponentially more individual views? I think the keys are grace, humility, empathy, and love. I've known so many faithful followers of Jesus who believe differently from each other and from me, but I can tell by their actions they are in Christ and trying their best. Give people the benefit of the doubt; most people following Jesus sincerely believe they're doing so the best way they know how.

This doesn't mean we embrace relativism, or that there is no objective truth, but it means we try to understand where people are on their journey and why. Or as the prayer attributed to St. Francis puts it, "Grant that I may not so much seek...to be understood, as to understand." Maybe we will learn more about Christ, the other person, or ourselves through this. Take my pacifism versus just war example; maybe as a pacifist trying to understand someone who believes just war, I will better understand God's justice, and they in turn will better understand God's peace. I can’t do this if I’m grasping on so tightly to what I already know to be true that I'm arguing instead of listening. It doesn't mean my beliefs on violence change. What does change, though, is my understanding of God and my relationship with the other person. By assuming the best, keeping an open mind and heart, and genuinely trying to understand, we avoid what could become malice and instead cultivate love.

Father, will you answer Jesus’ prayer for unity? Make our collective and individual pursuits of You relentless, yet clothed in grace, humility, empathy, and love.