Dear God, jinwicked, are you me? When I was about five, I overheard a “news” story about people claiming to be abducted by aliens. This absolutely terrified me. It was my biggest fear for years. I would sneak into my little brother’s room every night to sleep because I thought they couldn’t get me if I was in a room with someone else. My parents even took me a to shrink, but I told her I was scared of fire, not aliens. Because, see, if I admitted my fear of aliens, they would know and would come get me.
Your neice could be experiencing sleep paralysis. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is an experience in which a person wakes during sleep and finds themselves unable to move, and is sometimes accompanied by the sensation of some sort of presence. I have bipolar affective disorder and experience this regularly and it can be absolutely terrifying. The reason I’m bringing this up as that sleep paralysis is believed to be the explanation of many accounts of alien abduction, as the sensation of a presence can be quite elaborate and the experience can last for quite some time (meaning up to five minutes or so, but believe me, if you are experiencing it, it can seem like hours, and it can occur several times in one night). Anyways, just thought I’d share. If she doesn’t seem to be disturbed by the experience, it probably isnt a problem.
Any chance you owned a copy of the book Communion? I don’t know about anyone else, but I remember seeing the cover of this book for the first time when I was about 10, and it scared the crap out of me, to the point where I would deliberately look at the other side of the store as I walked past it’s shelf in the bookshop.
Seems to me that if Little Miss Five saw the cover of that book somewhere in her home, the image might startle her enough to reappear in her dreams that night.
Oooh, where in Ohio? What if she’s right? I volunteer to take a shift watching the sky above their house some night!
Actually, I have to agree with the sleep paralysis thing and an active imagination. I was a little older than her when I first remember experiencing the phenomena, but since the cultural boogey-man back then was The Boogey-Man, that’s what I thought I saw. I remember months of trying to lay exactly in the middle of the bed after that so the Boogey-man wouldn’t get me, cause if I slept up against the wall he could reach up the crack between bed and wall, and you didn’t dare sleep near the other edge in case an arm dangled. Oh, and closet doors had to be closed. Years later, when I had the experience again, I realized it was the bedroom curtains billowing when the furnace kicked on, but it took forever for the feeling to go away and my brain to recognize common objects. Over the years it has happened many times, and each one is frightening while it lasts.
So, the Grey’s have started to bother your niece - perveted little space freaks. Mostly harmless, except for the psychologoical trama and sexual violations. The best advice I can give you is to have your niece wear one of these at night to protect her from their mind control, and give her a baseball bat. In Earth gravity, the Grey’s are weak enough that even a child can beat them senseless. And due to that treaty they have with the Freemasons, Sanrio and myself, if your niece fights back they are fairly limited as to how they can respond. (They aren’t allowed deadly weapons on Earth - neutralize the mindcontrol devices, and they can’t do much to you or your niece.
Hah! This reminds me of this story . . .
This one time, on Q’tarrak Eve, around 88603b, me and the guys went over to Antares and found this great little bar. Bill, being the ‘sober’ grey of the group decided he’d be designated driver. You see, the problem with Bill is, that you get one molecule of Beetlegeuse in him, and he’s all downhill from that.
So anyway, we go inside and the place is just hopping! Greys, blues, greens, Andorians, you name it, just great! Well, this one non-humanoid comes up to Bill and buys him a drink, and he politely obliges, “Aw come on M’rekk, just one, and then I’ll head back to the dish!”. :rolleyes:
About half a cycle later, whaddya know? There’s Bill over there, conspiring with U’llahu and Zeke. They’re talking about harrassing some “cattle” on this planet called “Earth”. U’llahu says, “Hey, I heard they got sentient beings over there. Not too advanced, but fun to f*ck around with! Lets go mess with 'em hic!” The three of 'em were pretty messed up at this point anyway. “Hey Oplozk, you in?” “Nah, I gotta get home to the spawnmate and brood.” “Aw, come on, it’ll be fun!”. I say, “Naw, I can’t. Remember when she got mad at me the last time we dropped antimatter on Antares ‘B’? She’ll kill me!” So after about 20 millicycles later, these three fall out of the bar ass over ankle, and pile into the dish.
I head home, and the spawn mate is already breathing plasma. She lays into me, “Oplozk, just where in the rim regions have you been? I’ve been here all day, caring after the brood for kilocycles! Do you think 18,000 xenomorphs are going to take care of themselves?!?” I defend myself as best I can, but eventually convince her to head off to her stasis container. Not much later, I do the same thing. . .
. . . So I get up the next morning and flick on the monitor. There’s some new signal I’ve never gotten before. Must be that new Orion station everyones been talking about: “And in other news, a weather baloon crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico early on this evening. The Army Air Corps showed debris from the wreckage, and reiterated that there were no alien bodies or spacecraft recovered from the site. . .” Weather balloon? What’s that?
Anyway, it was a couple of megacycles later, and I still hadn’t seen the three stooges. I was starting to get worried. But then Hrellha pulled me aside and explained to me that Bill, U’llahu, and Zeke had gone to “Earth” to mess with the “cattle”. Apparently, a hammered Bill was at the controls when they hit the atmosphere at too low an angle, and all three ended up crashed on the surface. They were going to try to rescue them, but the sentient apes on the surface must have gotten ahold of them, because their distress transponder died out.
Weird, eh? And that’s why I don’t drink Beetlegeuse on Q’tarrak Eve.
Tripler
Besides, it tastes like crap anyway.
Bravo!
Yep, me too… I remember having seen commercials for Time Life Books of the Unexplained for a long time, and then suddenly one day, I absolutely flipped out screaming and crying. I had to sleep on the floor in my parent’s room for years, read everything I could about UFO’s and aliens, and deal with horrible, paralyzing nightmares. WTF?
If you read a lot of creation stories, there’s a lot of similarity in, well, a good number of them. There’s the “something crashed onto Earth” story, the “gods who live in the sky” stories (quite a bit more common), and some other ones.
So, maybe life on Earth was started by aliens, eh? The rate of evolution from nothingness - single celled - complex organism went really, really fast (I read the odds of it in some book, and it was very, very low).
AHEM. Sorry `bout that.
Or maybe people have just always been fascinated by the unkown - and what’s more unknown than space? Gotta make up stories.
And it’ll make some people less lonely to think that earth’s not the only living planet in all of the entire universe.
Oops. Forgot to answer the OP.
I think that the chances of an alien civilization being anthing like us are very slim. Very very slim. The path that humans took is certainly not the only path that could be taken (just look at all the different cultures on earth that value completely different things). Plus, there’d be different resources and animal life on their planet. Maybe they’d just have completely different values from us, and would view us as “evil,” as well as vice-versa.
Of course, that’s assuming that a “civilized” society eolved at all. Why are aliens only thought of as High Tech and Civilized?
Maybe there’s a planet where cats are dominant.
Or ocean planets with squids and stuff.
They’d still be aliens, just not what most people think of “aliens.”
Fast by what standard? We’ve still got only the single instance to judge by.
I bet Mom & Sis believe these “aliens” are really demonic (NOT an opinion limited to Fundist C’tians- Whitley Strieber, Brad Steiger & John “Mothman Prophecies” Keel also hold that some alien/UFO phenomena overlaps greatly with demonic lore) and that your materials are giving them a “foothold” for entry into their home (that is more a Fundist belief), and hence had to be tossed out.
I think they were totally wrong to throw it away. They were morally obliged to return it to you. Then again, if they really believed that material was allowing “alien-masquerading demons” access to your niece, they surely felt an overriding moral obligation to get rid of it soon as possible.
I’m a conservative C’tian, interested in the whole UFO/alien phenomena & believing there is indeed a malevolent spiritual element to some, but not all, of it. Hopefully, your niece is just having nightmares & neither being harrassed by whatever or reacting to abuse. See if you can discuss it with her in as non-leading way as possible. If something IS happening, it’s not harmless ETs taking her for space rides.
Dave Barry, of all people did a decent piece on a guy who claimed to be photographing aliens. He interviewed a number of people who had investigated the alien abduction phenomenon, and one of them pointed out something veeellly intelesting:
No one cliamed to be abducted by aliens until the comic books started a facination with little green men. Up until then, people with a need to tell wild stories focused on things like the CIA and the Masons.
As for whether a little kid could ever come up with something like this, the answer is, “of course.” Don’t pretend to know everything she’s ever seen or been told.
Once in 2nd or 3rd grade (older than five, obviously), I became fairly convinced that there had been a church picnic in my backyard. I told one of the highschoolers who had been there supposedly, and he told me it just wasn’t true. I had dreamed it.
Oh man, I used to get freaked out about alien abduction stories too!
Hell, I remember when I was fifteen, my friend’s mother rented Fire in the Sky: The Travis Walton Story. We watched it before we went to the high school football game that night. She lived near the school and the football field (which was at the middle school, rather than the high school), so we would always walk to and from the game.
Well, that evening, after the game we started walking home. We usually took a short cut behind this one house and it was pitch black. Both of us were still a little freaked out, so we were walking with our arms linked.
Then my friend thought she saw something. She screamed, I screamed, and we tripped and fell running back up to the middle school. We ended up calling her dad on the pay phone and having him come and get us.
And yeah, maybe your niece saw a picture of Michael Jackson…
Count me in for “Freaked out about the alien abduction stories” when I was a kid.
When I was a kid, my parents were divorced, so I’d go stay with my dad and that set of grandparents on the weekend. They loved to watch Unsolved Mysteries, Sightings, all those UFO kinda shows. And I’d watch them too, of course, I didn’t have much of a choice. And I’d get freaked out, of course, especially because most of these took place in the dark, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere…
I should mention they lived out in the country. You know, in the middle of nowhere. Very dark in the middle of the night. Scary as hell when you’re laying there, head full of little green men and white lights, in the pitch dark. Especially since my bedroom window faced the road, which meant that I’d occasionally get these bursts of white light and a low rumbling sound from the cars going up the road.
A couple things here, since I might as well be the one to throw a hand grenade into this love-fest:
I was not there to hear this little girl’s account. But judging from the OPs description alone, everyone’s assumptions of “I saw Close Encounters and was terrified of aliens for ten years” or “she’s experiencing sleep paralysis and having a total panic attack as a result” does not follow at all. The girl never said that she was scared of these people at all. YOU all invented that, as an easy, knee-jerk explanation. In fact, she merely said that she PLAYS with these people. You folks are incorrect, and are ascribing a completely different phenomenon to her.
Second, it is, of course, utterly impossible to say that a child has been exposed to absolutely NO pop culture alien/ufo references in this day and age (unless the child was raised in a lab … but then she’d probably have more serious emotional problems). So it’s certainly possible she picked up this sort of thing without anyone being really aware of it. And the OP’s statement that the family has always been really into UFOs doesn’t help the case.
But, to set the record straight, Podkayne is simply incorrect in stating
Apart from the much more dubious evidence of recovered memories, there have, indeed, been cases where people not involved in the abduction itself have (a) noticed the absence of an alleged abductee during the period in which the event apparently took place (b) seen strange activity, but remembered it as something benign and explainable. For instance, David Jacobs reports:
This sort of thing suggests that something real (whatever it is) is, in fact, taking place.
(Sigh. Hadn’t hoped to get into a firefight, but I suppose it’s inevitable now…)
Well then. There ya have it. Aliens are among us. And abducting us for some unexplained purpose.
I’m sorry toadspittle, but Podkayne’s statement is entirely correct. You’ll note, it says “verifiable physical evidence.” What you contend falsifies that statement is in no way, shape, or form, physical evidence. It’s an anecdote; it’s heresay - it’s a story.
In fact, your source, David Jacobs, seems to rely heavily on what you call dubious recovered memories when making his assessments of “abductions.” This hardly helps your case.
I stand corrected. You’re right. Witness testimony is good enough for court, but not good enough for science (and I mean that–not trying to be snarky).
But re: Jacobs, I’m fully aware of his use of regression, and have interviewed the man. He, himself, acknowledges the technique’s limitations and dangers, notes that there’s a lot of confabulation going on, esp. w/ less-rigorous/skeptical hypnotists, etc. But he does not rely solely on recovered memories, and does his best to find other corroborating evidence (as quoted).
Just trying to point out that the problem does extend slightly beyond the tinfoil hat brigade, and that the group’s attempts to explain the girl’s situation–alien abduction aside–were based on a false assumption (that she was afraid).
I read somewhere that memories of “abductions” are actually memories of birth-the big eyed, no mouths/noses would be the doctors with masks on, the bright lights, etc.
Although I don’t know how to explain the anal probes-do they do that?
Baby thermometer? Those went in a most undignified place. I think most of us are thrilled not to remember babyhood before the advent of ear thermometers 
Tripler, if you could extend your story into a novel, you’d make a fortune. The aliens might come to complain though…