Not even in the top hundred

Five years ago, I was jogging down Route 9, a block from where it split East to West Market Street, a course of exercise I undertook a few times a week, weather permitting. A thin man with dark, short hair walked toward me, caught my eye, and glared. I thought I'd seen him in some UFO context, either the Pine Bush UFO Fair or a talk at the now-defunct Enchanted Cafe, a coffeehouse that regularly held such events.

The man seemed particularly angry at me, and I couldn't parse why. I am such a tangential and innocuous speaker and author on the subject. A believer could be put off that I do not take it utterly seriously, but I am keen, knowledgable, and delighted; there are better targets for ire.

I passed him, his glare unabating, and put it out of my mind. UFO people are inherently weird--sorry, but we are--and I doubted my (lack of) interaction would nestle in his long-term memory.

I jogged another twenty-five feet, and he was again walking toward me, only angrier, but now wearing a blatantly fake, long black wig that could have been from a Wayne's World Halloween costume, topped with a blue baseball cap. His glare was now abject fury.

I jogged past him again, more amused than perplexed. Technically, if he broke into a sprint, cut through a parking lot, and had the wig and hat ready, he could have turned the corner again before I got there. Perhaps what I perceived as fury was the burning in his lungs from having raced to pull off this inexplicable stunt.

I continued my jog, having considered it a funny curiosity of no more import than relating the anecdote on social media.

I saw him only once more, to my knowledge--he possibly turned up other times, and I managed not to be aware. I waited at the same corner for the walk signal, and noticed him on the opposite corner, staring at me without breaking. I might have waved, finding the stranger's unfounded hatred wacky. What could I have done that he had held such a grudge while my sole recollection was that I might have seen him at a UFO event--though I cannot recall which. The safe bet was the Enchanted Cafe, thirty feet from where he stood, but I couldn't swear that was right. Even now, it feels like I must have seen him somewhere else.

I recently read Budd Hopkins and Carol Rainey's book Sight Unseen as research for a book I might write. I am primarily interested in Hopkins' hypnosis, what little they mentioned about the Linda Napolitano case, and getting quotes about their theory that aliens and their ships can become invisible--and why would they ever be visible if they didn't have to be?

I plumbed most of these depths in the first half, but I am a book completionist when possible.

I came to a section where a woman runs into a Charles Manson-adjacent figure who reappears at impossible distances, staring at her. I read about bizarre men and women--not aliens, but oddly dressed and bothering people who are interested in or affected by UFOs or the like. They were not quite Men in Black, who at least are overt, but just curiosities without satisfying explanations.

Hopkins implies, then outright suggests, that such people are transgenic beings. Not hybrids of humans and aliens--that is genetically dubious, akin to stating one could comingle an alligator and penguin if one of them evolved on another planet--but humans whose genome has been gently tweaked so that they better serve the alien agenda, much as we might insert an artic fish gene into a tomato to make it winter hardy. It is, to be sure, a tougher pill to swallow when the other option is "sometimes, people are just aggressively odd."

I do not know the particulars of the man I saw. It is peculiar that he stared at me, exponentially more so that he did so twice in the span of a minute, once wearing a bad wig. I can decide the motive was to freak me out in some way--though it barely dented me--or to have strange fun for his own reasons. Maybe it was a prank, but those usually have an audience or at least reveal to the mark that they have been made to look stupid. The method by which he did this is improbable but not impossible. I usually have my headphones in, playing a podcast, so I could ignore the scurrying of someone running to retrieve their Wayne Campbell wig and then tearing around the block. I was likely playing Pokemon GO, though not actively, which could have slowed me enough that I could have covered only a block--perhaps he had expected I would have already been where he was going to come out. There are factors that make it more sensible, though still not sensible. As for the time he glared from across the street, I had ruined his weirdness by shrugging it off, forcing him to do cardio for nothing. It's enough to put a chip on anyone's shoulder.

There are people who call themselves targeted individuals subjected to gang stalking, who believe a vast cabal assaults them by looking at them in public or having three yellow cars drive by in half an hour, employing mind control weapons when needed to make them hear voices. It quickly races out of control and bears not a few overlaps with the symptoms of having a schizoaffective disorder. If someone who believed they were a targeted individual had this man act like a tryhard loony, it would be the rock on which they would build their terrified church--I suspect self-described targeted individuals slip effortlessly into cults like QAnon. However, I've seen weirder.

I was once flirted with by a Russian woman who believed she could control light with her mind. I've shaken the hand of the world's preeminent cryptozoologist, then vexed him by writing I didn't love his museum yet (he was not fully moved in). I went skywatching with people who claimed airplanes were disguised spaceships. I've spoken in front of three sweet grandmothers who schooled me on the Reptilian agenda. I've taught astronomy to a boy who believed there is a dome over the flat Earth through which one cannot pass and who believed white people are dogs mutated by the Devil. I have shared snacks with a woman who knows there are transdimensional Sasquatches in her backyard and written extensively about her philosophical opponent a town away, a Bigfoot influencer who knows they are undiscovered hominids. I spend a day each summer listening to the stories of UFO experiencers, who usually decline to buy my books. One has to be weirder than a man in a hat to phase me. Short of being an actual Grey alien, I am probably going to politely listen to the person and remember enough to regurgitate in fiction later.

(This is not to say gang stalking isn't real. I've been on the internet long enough to have encountered trolls and SWATing. However, gang stalking as a persecution complex is just as real.)

What I did not think then, and what I persist in not thinking now, is that he was a transgenic human facilitating the alien agenda by cosplaying. Likewise, I do not think he was a screen memory to mask my abduction, as I lost no time and this was on the corner of two major roads, so it was not empty of people; someone would notice.

Better than most, I understand how seductive the idea of succumbing to the paranormal can be. I have seen people make these experiences, or their sometimes willful misinterpretations, the cornerstone of their lives. Maybe it is because they want to fill the sort of hole in themselves others often plug God into. Perhaps it is because it lets them feel special.

I do not intend this to disparage people who have had inexplicable experiences. I am not ready to discount the corpus of Fortean phenomena because a few people love the idea that they are the chosen ones. This is not about abductees or Bigfoot researchers, though they might need to provide citations in mixed company--and I admit some of their theories compel me to hear more, to want to believe.

When I was young, in the middle single digits, I levitated to the top of my bunk. It was enough that my sheets had pulled off. I would have touched my nose against the ceiling if I were not in the bottom bunk, but this was not the arrangement. I woke fully and plummeted the two or so feet onto my single mattress, shaking the bed and waking my brother, who asked what had happened. I couldn't explain it, and we went back to sleep. It was not merely the hypnagogic sensation of floating. I was held aloft, albeit not far. It never recurred, though I admit to trying to figure out if something in my brain had done it if I might be a powerful psychic who lost the password to my powers.

It feels real in the way childhood memories do, so it happened. It may not have happened as I recall, though. Supposedly, we never remember the thing; we only remember the last time we accessed the memory. It might have been a vivid dream that carried over a little into my waking, and falling back to sleep created the dream of shaking. It is, one must admit, the likelier course of events than that some interior or exterior force caused me to float.

Ten years later, as I've told many times, an imp grabbed my finger from between the mattress and wall of that very bed. (I hope the mattress was different, even if the bed was not.) It was entirely tangible. I can recall the tiny fingers as they gently wrapped around one of my fingers and squeezed. They were fully formed, as though a person had been shrunken down, not stubby or stunted; it was not a rat's paw, which I often felt once I had a few pets of that species. It was a brief gesture, conveying nothing like menace, as it might if it came with the prick of claws. I responded to this by finding my largest knife and sliding it along the wall so that I might, I suppose, mutilate this little thing. It was only after I tried to clear out under my bed to search for it properly that I accepted it was too cluttered for something that could have held my finger to have been there.

I did not know the term "hypnagogic hallucination" at the time--which is surprising, given that I immediately vented my kindergarten literacy by consuming every book my elementary school library had on the subject of the paranormal. However, that is what this gremlin must have been. That I reacted with terror instead of curiosity--as I would if I were fully awake--underscores it was a hallucination. I am otherwise more welcoming to otherworldly things and wouldn't immediately leap to slicing their arms off for trying to shake my hands.

There have been a few other hallucinations over the years. Once, I was petrified of a glowing spiderweb above my head before realizing I had been wearing a sleep mask and could not have seen this. In another, Amber made faces by the foot of the bed, only they were next to me at the time and did not know why I was asking what they were doing. A third was Amber having let a golden retriever in a party hat into the bed. I sensed its fur, its smell, and its texture. I felt fond of it, as though it were a dog I knew, and I was not too upset Amber had done this, but I asked why. They pointed out that we did not have a dog, let alone a golden retriever in a party hat. Their tone suggested the breed was the least likely part of my hallucination.

Amber came to bed after me the other night, and I apparently said, "It's intimidating." They asked for clarification, and I smiled and said, "Your hair. It's intimidating." I didn't recollect this until the following evening when I had them confirm this had happened--they had basically forgotten as well. I vaguely recall being startled because their hair reminded me of spiders, which I rather like on the whole but might not want to have en masse in my bed.

If I knew the earmarks of paranormal phenomena but not the explanation of hallucinations on the edges of waking--and especially if I could belong to a welcoming community should I believe I was a haunted abductee rather than a person with a normal enough brain--I might lean into feeling beset and blessed. I might believe a bizarre person in a wig was a Man in Black trying to intimidate me rather than just a guy doing something nonsensical.

last watched: Ghosted
reading: Once and Future Me