What is a memory? How does the mind organize its experiences to create a cohesive narrative of what it experiences? There are, no doubt, entire sub-fields of neuroscience and psychology devoted to this question, and if you think I’m going to spend hours online tracking down the literature, you’re nuts. I mean, you’re nuts, anyway. How do I know? Because being at least a little insane is a necessary component of the human condition. How do I know that? I don’t, but we both know I’m right.
So when I tell you I have a memory of witnessing a UFO but I can’t say for certain that I actually witnessed a UFO, it’s because I don’t trust myself enough to give you a definitive answer as to whether or not it happened. Because, like you, I’m at least a little bit crazy.
What complicates this memory is that I was not the only one present. There were two other people with me at the time. This event took place (if it took place) towards the tail end of my senior year of high school. I don’t remember the month, but it must have been either shortly before or slightly after graduation. I had recently started dating a girl on whom I’d had a long-standing crush. I’ll call her “Angela” because that is her name. One night, we decided to go to with the movies with my best friend, Bradley.
We lived in a small town in New Jersey, about halfway between New York and Philadelphia. Until recently, the town had been primarily agricultural, and there were still stretches of farmland and woods that hadn’t been developed. We were driving through one of those woodsy stretches after the movie when we saw something.
The best word I have to describe the object is “fireball.” When I say “fireball,” what I mean is that it gave the appearance of something bright red-orange and luminous, about a hundred feet above the tree line, traveling from right to left from our perspective. I don’t remember who saw it first The thing was slow-moving and soundless. Undoubtedly, we had some kind of conversation about it along the lines of, “What the hell is that thing?” Our best theory in the moment was either meteor or small aircraft on fire. We decided to follow it the best we could, but those windy wooded roads prevented us from tracking it for much more than a few minutes, and we soon lost the object.
My next memory about the experience comes from the following morning when I eagerly checked the local newspaper, The Courier News, to see if a plane had gone down in the area. There was nothing in the newspaper.
So here’s where, to my mind, it gets weird. I mean, strange sky fireball is weird but explicable, yeah? Glowing fireball could be a lot of things, but what doesn’t make sense to me about the memory is that none of us talked about it ever again. That’s weird, right? Three people see something very strange, attempt to follow the object, fail, and then never talk about it again? It’s not like we had a ton of important matters at hand that we needed to get through first. We were teenagers. We didn’t have anything to talk about. So why didn’t we talk about this? Why didn’t we have the natural follow-up conversation? I don’t know.
(It looked kind of like this, which is from a video taken by a guy named Alex Sandel, who believes he witnessed a meteor. Here’s a link to his story.)
Maybe we can just chalk it up to cognitive dissonance, the discomfort that comes from witnessing something you don’t understand and so your brain just puts in an off-limits file cabinet. This seems to be the case with a lot of witnesses. For example, I was talking about this experience with a friend of mine who had a similar encounter while on a walk with a UFO researcher. The researcher, well-known, had never actually seen a UFO himself until this moment. The two of them saw some kind of object they could not identify or explain. The researcher who literally makes films about UFOs did not record the incident because, he said at the time, nobody would believe him. It’s like a kind of apathy that happens to people when they have these experiences; something shuts off. That same friend told me that this phenomena is called, in UFO circles, “emotional dampening.”
Was I dampened? If so, gross.
I puzzled over the incident for decades until I was talking about UFOs with my own children and I told them I had had this experience and that I had been with two other people but that I suspected that neither of them would remember it at all. That’s weird, too, right? Why did I think they wouldn’t remember? As it happens, I’m still in intermittent touch with Angela, so I decided to text her.
Here's a portion of that conversation:
Michael Ian Black:
Hey, I have a weird question for you
Angela:
Hi, what’s up?
Michael Ian Black:
Ok, I have no idea if you remember this but I have a very distinct memory of being with you and Brad one night coming home from the movies. We were driving and saw what looked like a fireball in the sky. Red. We thought maybe a small plane was crashing and tried to follow its path but couldn’t because it went behind trees and we couldn’t drive in that direction.
It disappeared and that was that.
The next day I remember looking at the Courier News to see if a plane had crashed and didn’t see anything.
Angela:
Hmmm… I honestly do not remember that. I feel like I would absolutely remember that bc I it would have freaked me out. Are you sure I was there? I can’t imagine not remembering something like that.
Michael Ian Black:
It’s so weird - my memory of it is that we never talked about it afterwards. It was just like a weird thing that happened and then we didn’t talk about it. It’s also possible that it never happened and I somehow invented this memory.
But why would I just invent such a specific memory, with the addition of looking in the paper the next day?
Angela:
My thoughts exactly! Maybe I forgot? Again though, that seems unlikely too.
Michael Ian Black:
Right?!?
Either way it’s weird. My daughter and i were talking about UFOs and I told her my memory and I said I didn’t think you’d remember
But why would I think you wouldn’t remember?
Unless I just made it up?
But in that case, wouldn’t I know I made it up?
Either way it’s weird.
Angela:
Wow, I absolutely wish I did remember! UFO s are definitely a real thing as far as I’m concerned. And yes, to have such a specific memory doesn’t seem made up. Weird indeed!
Which brings me back to the question, “What is a memory?” People misremember things all the time but do they just invent memories out of nothing? I have no other memories like this. Was it a dream? As a matter of fact, I did have a recurring dream when I was a kid (although the dream only happened twice) that a UFO landed in my backyard and there may have been creatures or not. It’s been so long that I don’t remember much more about the specifics, but what was always clear to me was that it was a dream. I’ve never mistaken any other dream for an actual event from my life so why would this be only one? And if it’s a real memory, why would Angela not also remember it?
(I would ask Bradley, but I haven’t spoken with him in years and this seems like a weird way to get reacquainted.)
Anyway, I’d be curious to know if any of you have had similar experiences, either with UFOs or odd memories or both. It’s bothered me for years. It still bothers me. By the way, if you’re interested in UFOs but don’t know where to start, I highly recommend the UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast.
Wow, I’ve had a very similar experience and it actually happened with some very close friends when we were in high school as well. We were out at night riding horses as a group back in the late 70’s.
We lived in Orange County CA, and we would periodically drive out to the Inland Empire to a town called Norco to ride horses at night on Friday or Saturday nights. It was a way to get out in the woods and for us to get high, being that smoking weed had a stigma about it in those days. None of us were cowboys or horse-people by nature, we were city kids trying not to get caught getting stoned…
One night we were riding together, there was about 6 people each on horseback. All of a sudden my horse got really skiddish and started acting nervous. He took off running away from this bluff that we were next to. About 3 more riders said they experienced the same feeling with their horses. And they all followed me.
As we got away from that bluff, we all began to hear this unusual noise in the sky. Then it appeared over the hills. It was a large craft, rounded in the front and came to a point in the rear as it faced us. It had bright lights in white, orange and blue that were swirling all along the edges of the round part. It hovered over all of us, and then just took off and disappeared over the horizon. It was the strangest thing that I’ve ever seen in the sky, and a couple of us were there wondering if that was in fact a UFO.
I was convinced that it was, based on the speed that this ship took off and disappeared from sight. And a couple of the other guys that I was with agreed with me. There were two others that didn’t see what we saw because they didn’t follow us when our horses got spooked and took off running away. Those two were skeptical and making fun of us, saying that we were just really high and imagining things…
The next day I looked in the Orange County Register newspaper, and it had an article about an unusual spacecraft that was seen in 6 western states flying around and disappearing from sight quickly.
That solidified my claim of what we all saw with our own eyes. The horses even felt the presence of that UFO. We all talked about it to our friends that weren’t there and some believed us, others were skeptical saying that we were stoned… I know what we saw. And it’s been confirmed being seen in other states. Similar descriptions were made in that newspaper story.
When one of the friends that was actually there that night and believed he saw the same thing, passed away last year from a long illness, I spoke with a couple of the other friends that were there with me that night. I asked them if they remembered seeing that UFO, and they all laughed and said yes, how would they ever forget something like that. They also brought up the fact that Andy, the friend whose funeral we were at, often brought up that night throughout the years since. He remembered it also. Over the years we both talked about seeing that thing, and he said we should always remember that night.
So, in our case we have had conversations about seeing that spacecraft. And, I guess that means that it really did happen to all of us. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in my lifetime… I just wished that horses could talk!
I wonder if when we experience something that feels surreal or out of the ordinary in our lives, we subconsciously log it in our brains as something associated with a dream because of how strange it was. And maybe as time progresses this experience fades or gets pushed out of our memory bank along with the real dreams that we can't recall anymore.