Why I'm Here at ATS and What Led Me Here.

I just wanted to give this thread a bump. Great OP, really good stories by a lot of people. One of the reasons ATS is so great!

Wow, incredible story, but it sounds sincere to me.
I'm also interested in the subject and similarly have read books about ufo's and such (Erich von Däniken),
left by my grandmother in old boxes in the attic, who already passed away before I was born.
This also spurred my interest in "unearthly" matters from when I was very young (about 10 yrs old).
I've heard stories about ufo's from other people and I've experienced weird things, that would fall under the category of paranormal/afterlife, however I've never had close encounters myself in that aspect (I'm very sceptic, seeing is believing).
Thank you for sharing this.

ok here's mine. sorry it's kinda long.

when i was a kid i checked out a book in the school library (part of a series about bigfoot, the bermuda triangle, the loch ness moster, etc.) it was called "project blue book" a short book describing ufos in a relatively kid-friendly format. my dad saw the book and said, "hey, my uncle worked on that." he told me his uncle pulled him aside (the only boy, who would become man of the family) and told him the government found a crashed ufo with "3 skeletons in the desert with 3 legs each." and the reason he told my dad this was because he believed dad would have to deal with this at some point in his lifetime (dad's still alive, so i guess that's still possible). as a kid i assumed "the desert" meant the sahara lol. later i realized it was probably roswell. based on his description i think he never saw the aliens (only the most obscure and bizarre cases ever reference 3 legged aliens, that i have found). i don't think he heard the story directly from superiors, either. i think by the time he heard it, it was distorted by many tellings and maybe also some sexual innuendo (you know how military guys are). for a while, i wondered if my dad was messing with me, so i asked him again as an adult. he confirmed it and gave more detail, that the uncle got promoted to (i think) brigadier general at his retirement as an honorary position. so he was high ranking. i DO think the guys investigating cases for blue book had to know their real job duty, whether it was "geniune investigation" or "explaining away and debunking".

my mom told me she saw a bunch of ufos as a kid, with her best friend. they were in her friend's backyard at night, she describes it as a bunch of brightly colored lights zigzagging around in the sky, doing impossible maneuvers.

i saw my first ufo in my early 20's, driving on a highway at night. it could have been military aircraft. a strange formation of many craft, each with 4 yellow lights forming a diamond shape (not a perfect diamond, the front light was too far ahead) imagine a military jet had a single yellow light at the nose, tail, and each wing tip, now picture one of those followed by 3 more in a v formation, then another single craft, then 2 more v formations.... it's easier to draw it than explain i couldn't count them because the curving hoghway made it really hard to keep track of which ones were new and which ones i already saw, but there were at least 10 craft with 4 lights each, possibly 16 or more. they flew north along the texas coast. (i was driving east).

not long after that (maybe 6 months or so) a customer i knew came into the restaurant where i work and said he had a weird encounter. he was driving east on the same highway during the day and he came to an area where 3 pickup trucks were all stopped, and his truck started to stall. a small white (i think) ball of light zipped into his truck through the back window. he had to explain this several times for me to understand that the light had enetered his actual truck, i kept assuming he meant it was in the sky. but it zipped back out, and he started his truck again and came right in for a drink. he was visibly shaken. he had told a few tall tales before so i didn't entirely believe him, but at that moment a stranger walked in and asked "did anyone see the trucks stalled on the highway?" turns out he was another one of the trucks' drivers, only he never saw any weird lights and just couldn't figure out why all the trucks broke down at the same time, in the same place. neither of us told that guy about the light, either... it seemed too weird.

the last ufo i saw has a much weirder and more elaborate backstory, and i hesitate to tell it. i have always had nighttime anxiety, and i've always been scared of the night sky. some nights are worse than others. i also have elaborate, detailed nightmares about alien abductions and really hate to see pictures of "alien gray" faces. in the dreams, i usually feel like the noses are different (from the classic depiction) but when i wake up i can't remember what the noses actually look like. they are small, but they have some kind of weird shape that's totally different. so occasionally i consider the possibility that i may have been abducted. or i may be repeatedly abducted. here's my most vivid and elaborate dream, (and least nonsensical) i'll try to keep to short.

THE DREAM
i was on an alien spaceship, but i was somehow also aware that 2 people had breached security at a us military base (although that was somewhere else and i was never there). i was walking down a hallway with a large group of humans and a hologram of an alien told us all to go through a doorway, which was a hole in the floor, and the door itself was a pattern of hexagrams (a lot like bee honeycomb) that opened. i went through the door into another area and i was with an alien that i knew (i think of him as "the anesthesiologist" because he kept me calm) and 3 aliens that i didn't know. i don't remember what they were going to do exactly, but i remember that I DID NOT want to do it, so i looked to the alien that i knew because i thought he might be more likely to listen. i grabbed his upper arms and very strongly psychically told him "this is wrong, you know this is wrong" until he changed his mind. he actually did come around to my way of thinking, and immediately the other 3 aliens killed him on the spot. at that moment, i 100% knew they were NOT the type of moral, ethical being humans should associate with and they did NOT have my best interests at heart. so i was immediately resistant to them. they managed to get me into a room with one other girl, and one smaller shorter alien who kept trying to regain control of my mind, but i wouldn't let him. i wouldn't look at him, i kept my face turned away and kept saying "leave me alone!" he was so focused on me he didn't notice that the other girl started to feel really sorry for me. she attacked the alien to get it to leave me alone. she ended up holding it by one arm and one leg and swinging it around the room, she must have bashed its head into something because she killed it. we looked at eachother and looked down at her arms, the fight had left marks and bruises on her arms. we looked at the marks and looked at eachother both knowing that meant she would have physical marks on her body as evidence of this when she woke up.

because of this, and many other (usually shorter, less detailed) dreams like it, periodically i wonder about abduction. i stumbled across a few theories about how to check yourself for alien implants, i thought, hey, what's the harm in looking? the only method i found that didn't involve serious equipment involved using a strong magnet (it called for a neodymium magnet, which i didn't have, but i have some really hefty refrigerator magnets) so i passed the magnet over my body trying to find areas where i felt "pulling" like something metal might be in my body. i felt such a slight pull in only a few areas (particularly behind and to the left of my left knee) that i couldn't rule out it being psychosomatic (all in my head). so i gave up and went to bed. i woke up the next morning with strange pain in my inner right arm, in one small, localized area. so that day i tried the magnet again, on my arm i particular, and felt the pulling again, but still it felt too faint to conclude anythi

sorry i ran out of space.... sorry it's so long

so the second night i had nightmares about aliens and woke up the next morning with a LOT of weird, small sore spots in my limbs. it really freaked me out, and i theorized that maybe they actually were implants and the magnet was actually blocking some sort of signal when i used it, and they were giving me new ones to replace the malfunctioning ones. so i stopped even attempting the magnets, and i was REALLY freaked so i stayed up late watching movies to distract myself, which worked really well, until i saw a gigantic ufo through the window that had just passed directly over my house. it was a row of red lights along the edge that i saw (that looked like a straight line from my angle so i can't determine shape). from my eyes to the window is 12 feet away and if i drew the ufo on the window it would measure about 14 inches wide, and less than an inch tall. if it was the size of a commercial plane, it would have to be landing less than a mile away to look that size, so either it was HUGE or it was really low altitude. either way, it scared the crap out of me, and i was afraid to sleep at night for a long time. i forced mysrlf not to think about aliens at all for several months before i was able to fall asleep normally and easily again, and it took a couple years to be able to think and talk anout ufos without getting anxious and having night anxiety again. but i'm ok now that's why i'm here. (if i disappear for a while that means i got anxious again).

i think the hardest part of dealing with this subject is the ambiguity. there are never any real answers, you have to develop a strong ability to accept that there's a lot we don't know and we probably won't ever know. for me, that's worse than the paranoia. is it abductions or dreams? did aliens rip my pajamas or did i do it by thrashing around in a nightmare? was that red ufo proof of abductions or just a totally bizarre coincidence? theres nothing that ever seems to definitively prove anything, one way or the other.

That story is... Disturbing, to say the least. Have you tried the magnet check ever since?

My own reason for being here is decidedly less grandiose. I am simply here for a simple reason that I am sure many share: Curiosity. I have no great tales of my own to regale, unfortunately. While I have heard several interesting stories there is only one "strange" thing I have experienced myself that I am capable of remembering at this time, and it is not even anything significant.

Two or so years ago, I was lying in bed at night in the pitch black. I believe I was experiencing sleep paralysis at the time. Anyway, as I was laying there on my stomach about to drift off back into the land of dreams, I had an extremely vivid image flash in my mind and it was like a jolt of electricity had run through me. What I found strange was that it was an experience that only lasted about four fifths of a second. The image I saw was of some sort of triangular shape, possibly a pyramid though I can't recall if it was 3D. I don't believe there was an eye at the top of it, so the Illuminati can be chucked out the window. The only colors were in the yellow-red spectrum, absolutely no blue, green, purple, white, etc. And I think there was something like deep red lightning around it.
Anyway, strange experience, probably just a dream (if a non-standard one.) Key things to note is that my memory is incredibly hazy, so the only things I can say with absolute certainty are that its shape made me think "Triangle" and the colors it contained were all red-type.

My family has a history of strange phenomena associated with the paranormal. While I won't really go into details at this point, there are a few odd things my mother has spoken to me about dealing with her own experiences as well of those of the rest of my (extremely small number of) relatives.

What I am most keenly interested in are the UFO/Sci-fi type things, however. That's what the majority of my attention is focused on when I visit this site, as well as political things. I have a firmly ingrained feeling that something is deeply wrong with the current state of this world. I don't know for certain what it is, and I don't know for certain how it could be fixed, but there's a sickening feeling I get when I truly stop to think.

Wow what an old but good thread. Blaine how did the conversation go with your wife?

a reply to: anotheramethyst

Sorry for the delayed reply. This is an old thread and I forget to look in.

Thanks for sharing about your experiences. I really enjoy reading about others real life experiences first hand.

a reply to: Eilasvaleleyn

Sleep paralysis seems to be not that uncommon. I went through a phase of that as a child and it was frightening to say the least.

That state when we are between sleeping and awake does produce some interesting experiences.

UFO's are what brought me here to begin with. I'm always amazed at how many have had experiences or are at least fascinated by the topic.

originally posted by: sputniksteve
Wow what an old but good thread. Blaine how did the conversation go with your wife?

Sorry, you lost me there?

a reply to: Blaine91555

I believe in the telling of your story you mention that now you had done it, you had to do it all over again with your wife that weekend. I got the idea you hadn't shared this before and were about to. You mentioned it wouldn't disturb her and I was just curious how she took it and what her thoughts are/were?

a reply to: Blaine91555

Yeah, it wasn't the sleep paralysis that was strange, it was that single, vivid image.

a reply to: sputniksteve

OK. Knowing me, she accepts things as true. She's not interested in discussing it though as I think she finds the whole thing a bit scary.

a reply to: Eilasvaleleyn


no i never tried the magnet thing again!!! pretty sure i never will. i've been looking for excuses to get xrays though... i would love to find some other way to check for them. that triangle thing sounds weird. any chance it was a regular egyptian pyramid? or was it more like an insignia?

a reply to: anotheramethyst

Closer to an insignia. The biggest issue is that I can't remember it clearly enough so I can't be confident any description I give isn't just my brain thinking up after the fact. All I can be absolutely certain of is that it was triangular, a still image (or at least it didn't give a "3D" impression) and there weren't any cool colors. Only reds and oranges, maybe a few yellows. No blue, no green, not even any purples.

The only things that make it worthy of noting is the extremely short duration of the experience (about a second or slightly less, maybe two if you want to say that my perception of time was distorted a bit.) No dream I've experienced before or since has been like that, because I know that I'm not forgetting something, the entire thing was that short. Aside from that, there was the electrifying sensation I experienced (like where you feel like you're fallen and slammed into the bed, but slightly different.) My eyes shot wide open.

having gnomesayin a superior gnomesayin vocabulary gnomesayin isnt gnomesayin that hard gnomesayin these days gnomesayin.