I Am an Atheist Alien Abductee… and that sounds completely insane. Trust me, I know. But before your brain immediately files me under “needs medication” or “watched too much X-Files,” allow me to make my case.
I grew up in a loving family, did well in school, and graduated from a good university near the top of my class. I volunteered in my community, joined a fraternity, and belonged to an academic honor society. After graduation, I worked for Fortune 500 companies before starting my own business. Today, I own a successful company, employing dozens of people, have a family, and pay more taxes than I’d like to discuss. In short, my life is remarkably normal. Well… except for the alien abductions.
You see the problem.
These are not memories I “recovered” decades later under hypnosis. They are not drug-induced. They are not fantasies I cooked up after binge-watching science fiction movies. I never forgot them because they never went away.
And believe me, I tried very hard to explain them away. Sleep paralysis? Well, you don’t float out of your bed with sleep paralysis accompanied by two grey aliens… False memories? But they still keep happening to this day and no, it’s not a dream. I know when I’m dreaming and when I’m awake. Seriously, I wanted literally anything else to be the answer because if you’re an atheist, admitting you’ve had experiences that sound like they belong in a supermarket tabloid is not exactly a great career move.
At least belief in extraterrestrial life has one thing going for it: the universe is unimaginably vast. Given the sheer number of stars and planets, most scientists consider extraterrestrial life inevitable. Gods require faith. Aliens merely require statistics. Unfortunately, statistics became personal.
I have many memories, but I’ll share a couple.
One night I woke up in bed and immediately felt that familiar terror. Not ordinary fear. The kind of fear that makes every cell in your body scream that something is horribly wrong. I couldn’t move. Then the sheets came off. I began floating upward at an angle, looking down at my empty bed below me. I drifted toward the ceiling, passed through it, and blacked out. And before anyone says it: people experiencing sleep paralysis don’t typically report levitating through drywall.
Another time I woke to find myself outside, floating high in the air, looking down through the kitchen window of my house. Then I began floating toward it. Through the glass. Into the kitchen. I moved down the hallway toward my bedroom, then the all-to-familiar of terror washed over me as I became paralyzed.
As a child, I usually kept my eyes closed during these experiences because I didn’t want to see whatever was taking me. But on this occasion I had made a promise to myself: Next time this shit happens, open your eyes. So I did and saw what looked like a reptilian being. At least the head. Large eyes. Cat-like pupils. That was enough for me. I promptly abandoned my scientific curiosity and slammed my eyes shut again.
Years later, an ex-girlfriend who lived with me began having similar experiences. What’s interesting is how differently she interpreted them. I thought extraterrestrials, obviously. She thought angels and demons which is understandable since she came from a religous household.
Same experiences. Different framework.
Being curious, I once asked religious people online whether they had ever seen angels or demons and the descriptions were surprisingly familiar. Very familiar. Many sounded remarkably similar to what abductees report. This taught me something important: People often interpret extraordinary experiences through the lens of their existing beliefs. A religious person may see a demon. A New Age believer may see an interdimensional being. An atheist may reluctantly conclude that something physical is happening, despite wishing otherwise.
Then something happened that made dismissal much harder. My sister eventually described experiences that were strikingly similar to my own. The same types of beings. The same procedures. The same fear. And those same, big, black, peircing eyes.But unlike me, she found religion through those experiences and became a born-again Christian.
Same phenomenon. Different conclusions.
If you read the work of researchers like John Mack, Budd Hopkins, and David Jacobs, you find thousands of reports spanning decades and countries. People consistently describe similar beings, similar environments, similar procedures, similar memories.
Now, does that prove aliens are responsible? No, but it does raise an interesting question: Why are so many people from every place on earth and of every vocation reporting the same thing? Mass hallucination? Sleep disorders? A misunderstood psychological phenomenon? Actual extraterrestrials? (The latter, of course, is my explanation choice) The consistency is difficult to ignore and that’s what makes this topic so frustrating. I don’t know why exactly they take us or what exactly will happen in the future. What I do know is that they happened to me and to people close to me.
I passed a polygraph regarding these experiences. Make of that what you will. Polygraphs aren’t perfect, but neither are they meaningless. I took it because I needed to explain to my then fiancé, now wife, what she may be getting into. I knew I would sound crazy but at least she could see I was telling the truth, or at least I believed what I was sharing the truth with her.
I find myself in this uncomfortable position because I realize many people won’t believe me. If I hadn’t experienced these events myself, I probably wouldn’t believe me either. And frankly, I envy those who can dismiss the whole thing. Life would be much simpler… But here we are.
