So, NASA has revealed that they recorded unexplained ‘music’ from Apollo 10’s mission to the far side of the moon. Reports say that Pink Floyd wasn’t involved, so any weirdness in space = aliens!
I dunno about you but when I was a youngling I was shite-scared of aliens, probably due to not appreciating just how big space is. I think it was because they were in the realm of possibility and there would be shit all we could do if they had nefarious intent.
What about you?
I didn’t see the exact place I would have put it, so I checked the “scientific” option because from about age 8 until many years later I dreaded The Bomb! We lived close enough to a major air base that we had regular take-off and landing traffic there – in the distance. I would lie awake counting one-one-thousand up to five-one thousand expecting a blast. Fortunately none ever came, but it terrified me to have that waiting period.
Other than that, just your basic garden-variety boogers! 
The bogeyman. Whoever HE was…
Yeah I’d probably put it in that category, I tried to divide them as the mundane meaning things that do happen, scientific meaning things that could be possible, and the supernatural meaning things that, let’s be honest, probably don’t happen.
Ghosts! Ghosts and vampires, but mostly… ghosts! There was a house one block over we all knew was haunted.
Definitely the mundane - specifically, insects (arachnids, too, if we’re being pedantic). Only at night, though, when I was alone. I’d wig myself out by imagining that little speck high up on my bedroom wall was actually a spider, and what if it bites me, or what if it crawls into my mouth when I fall asleep and lays eggs in my stomach, or what if my whole room is infested with tarantulas and they crawl all over my blankets and - MOMMY, DADDY, HEEEEELP!!!
I also remember being scared of taking baths, because I thought a portal or something would appear in the side of the tub and a great white shark would swim through. Yeah, I don’t know either.
I was definitely most scared of things that were real, whether they were things that I never actually had to face (tornadoes, house fires, rabid animals) or things that I did (bees, heights, the dentist).
My father killing me. At least until around age 8 or 9 when I realized that was unlikely and I didn’t have to fear anything more than a severe beating.
In the 70s & 80’s it was all Stranger Danger trying to lure me into his panel van by asking for help finding his puppy and insane housewives stuffing Halloween candy full of cyanide needles. That’s assuming that the Soviets didn’t go all The Day After on us first. So I guess the mundane scared me more than anything else (though I don’t remember actually being scared).
What I remember the most was being afraid of dying in general. My first panic attack I was maybe ten, I thought I was having a heart attack in bed because I couldn’t catch my breath after thinking about breathing too much. I was afraid to think about breathing after that, and whenever I’d catch myself thinking about breathing I’d think I might stop. This happened most nights when I wasn’t lulled to sleep by the distant sound of Carson’s monologue.
Sock monkeys
My mother starving us (me and my siblings) to death or otherwise killing us because she decided we didn’t love her enough. My second greatest fear was some idiot social worker adding her in the process.
Gobblers or male turkeys. The ugly, repulsive beast would run after me aggressively.
For a while - alien invasion ( H.G. Wells and Jeff Wayne combined with a vivid imagination).
After that, WW3 - there was a period when The Day After, Threads and several nuclear war documentaries were all on TV or the movies around the same time and the idea that nukes flying was imminent seemed to be everywhere, at least, that’s how it felt to a 10 or 11 year-old me.
Underlying all that was a quite dread that my parents would divorce - I don’t know why, they are still married 40 years later :smack:
I voted for the mundane, by which I mean the extremely mundane, things that not only exist but also weren’t an actual threat, like dogs and older kids and doing badly in school. I did go through a period of extreme fear of being trapped in a fire after seeing the movie The Towering Inferno. Still a pretty mundane threat, but at least it was an actual danger.
I was genuinely scared of ghosts even though I didn’t really believe in them and never had any type of experience with one. That may not make a lot of sense but it was just the remote chance of seeing one that terrified me for some reason.
Full-scale nuclear war was another fear but I was a child of the 80’s and just accepted it as a simple fact. I grew up near Barksdale AFB, home of the B-52 bombers that had the highest concentration of nukes in the world back back then. Our teachers and even parents just told us that we probably wouldn’t even live to graduate high school but it wasn’t anything to worry about because we would be vaporized instantly. Believe it or not, kids take that type of prediction better than you may expect but it does cause some anxiety. Movies like Red Dawn and The Day After were used to alleviate our fears.
That They would Find Out.
Not sure WHAT they’d find out, but the idea of getting caught just terrified me.
The imaginary. I was afraid of the dark; I was afraid of little noises at night; I was afraid of what might be creeping up right behind me…
The best defense was that I knew I was just making things up. But at night, in the dark, in a sleeping bag in the woods, when the campfire has gone out, those little forest noises are endlessly suggestive.
(Also, paw, in the next sleeping bag over, farting all night…)
You mean other than my evil dad? Tornadoes. Years later, friends would tell me, “Man! Your dad was scary!”
Fireworks, balloons, needles.
I’ve gotten over 2 of the 3 
I think I was a little too young during the Cold War to be afraid of nukes, and I didn’t watch too much sci-fi that wasn’t from A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away so I wasn’t afraid of aliens. And the only robot I knew was Buck Rogers’ Twinkie so I was not afraid of them.