As I slowly (and I do mean slowly) eek out an episode here and there of In The Light Of… on Kindle Vella, I watch lots of YouTube videos for inspiration.

What’s my story about? A friendly guy in the present day who helps people deal with UFO abductions. I’m trying to make the UFO sightings phenomena different from just showing Little Green Men or the infamous Greys. I want my tale to be as close to unique as I can get it. As you can imagine, that’s a feat.

But this article isn’t so much about the story, but the inspiration. I’ve gotten into following various UFO sites and have absorbed a ton of videos, reading the books of J. Allen Hynek (who I like quite a bit). Videos, however, have been eye opening. The latest from The Paranormal Scholar, Beyond Creepy, and others offer well researched accounts of people who saw UFOs, aliens, or were abducted.

You know what I realized? No matter whether you believe in UFOs or not, many of these encounters, especially the lesser known ones, are creepy and cringe as hell.

Not a lot of things disturb me. I watch a good deal of bloody, disgusting things and growing up partly on a farm I saw a lot of guts and blood, decay, maggots, etc. But UFO encounters offer unsettling accounts of bodily assault, torture, SA, mental illness, and in a few cases, suicide.

When human beings become test animals in a godforsaken laboratory.

Sure, this topic often prompts more debate about whether or not the accounts ever took place at all. You know as I do how contentious this subject is, even after the government released its findings on UFOs, or, sorry, UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). Or should I say they released a paper that neither confirmed nor denied, but then turned around this year and denied? Honestly I can’t keep up.

But consider this, UFO stories contain within them the same level of scares as spooky stories told around campfires.

Barney and Betty Hill are perfect examples, an interracial couple who were abducted in New Hampshire in 1961. After witnessing a UFO while driving home. Cue the inevitable (and frightening) missing time the couple experienced that they seemed to be unaware of until someone pointed it out later. Both would go on to unravel what happened to them, even getting hypnosis to recount details. Now, things shift here or there, but this case, called the Hill Incident, stands out because the couple weren’t trying to get attention.

Imagine going home and finding suddenly you feel odd, as if time has missed you. You behave differently, paranoid. You feel an overwhelming need to remove your clothes and inspect your body for what, damage? Violation? You don’t know. Odd powder is on your dress that destroys the fabric, but you never used such a powder, nor knew what it was. Impressions exist in the trunk of your car for objects you never had, and they make compasses act odd. Your watches, watches on two distinct people, stop working at the same time.

All of this might run like dementia. But in two people, at the same time? For me it reads like a horror film, a well done one that forgoes the jump scares for subtle, terrifying atmosphere. Nothing is more scary than your world changing around you, but you can’t recall how. You’re all alone, bewildered, trying to figure this out.

Hypnosis (I know. I doubt its veracity, too) reveals disturbing visions of men in black, eyes removed from heads boring into your own eyes, trapped in the mind so harshly, so bizarrely, you blocked it out. What was the purpose? The complete lack of fully knowing, the loss of memory, the helplessness…pure dread.

The Aldershof Incident of the 1970s is truly a nightmare. A truck driver roving along the backwoods highways of Wyoming, in the dark, encounters giant aliens that not only would frighten the heck out of me in that situation, but also do real harm. I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods in the dark, gothy night-lover that I am. But the idea of something unnatural popping out would have me running.

We often have horror movies that portray a masked killer going after young people. There’s a high amount of helplessness, screaming, cursing, fighting back.

UFO encounters remove any ability to do anything that might help you out. You become a passive, albeit horrified, observer as beings do whatever they want with you, then toy with your clothes, objects, body, mind, emotions, etc. You end up back in your car, scarred but left with a form of existential Alzheimer’s and a gnawing itch telling you something is terribly wrong. And the horror story of your life is not condensed into a single night of running from evil, but drags out over days, weeks. Months. Decades.

And even if you end up remembering what went down, then what? There’s no escape to the city, where the police can find you. No reassuring voice of a loved one who shows up to hug you. No military backup, ability to grab a weapon, defend yourself. Nothing.

You get nothing. You are left disturbed for life. Most of humanity will never believe you. I’m thinking now that UFO abductions outstrip vampires, werewolves, serial killers, or a zombie apocalypse. In any of those scenarios, you have a slim yet noticeable shot at survival, at sanity, at finding peace.

If aliens have their way with you, you’ll never know any of that ever again. That has me shook.

People are right. I def need to stop watching YouTube so much. I already have trouble sleeping as is. Stay alert, Threaders.