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Off The Map: Travels Into The Weird
By CJ Hurtt

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And If A Ship Meets Your Car

I’ll start this off by saying that I don’t really believe in aliens. Well, I believe that life can be thriving on other planets. I just doubt very much that the Earth is the only place in the entire cosmos with intelligent life on it. I just don’t think the saucer people visit us.

That said, there is a certain disembodied memory that has been with me for about twenty four years. This memory has nothing before it and nothing after it. It just floats around, disconnected to any other event, in my head. It just is. I’m ninety-nine-point-nine-nine nine-into infinity sure that this was a dream. All the same, I think I’ll share it.

This, whatever it is, happened when I was about four years old. Grandma and I were returning a car to one of her friends. It was strange because grandma was driving and she never actually bothered to get a driver’s license. She wasn’t prone to breaking the law.

We were driving along in the misdemeanor mobile when without warning, the engine died. Not just the engine, but the air conditioner and radio to boot. Grandma hit the brakes and we looked around. No one was moving, all our cars were dead.

We all got out of our cars and looked at each other. Then, we looked up. In the sky, which was now dark, was a large triangular shape with flashing blindingly bright lights.

Everyone got very still and very quiet.

I tried to ask my grandma what it was but my throat was seized up. I couldn’t make a sound. No one else seemed to be able to either. There we were, on a street corner in Williams California, mute and terrified and unable to look away.

Eventually the lights faded and the sky lightened and we were ourselves again.

That’s all I remember.

From the ages of seven until ten, I would occasionally hear someone call my name when there was nobody there. I would hear it very clearly and it scared me to death. I told my parents about it and they laughed it off as being nothing more than me being hyper-imaginative. Not too long after my tenth birthday, it just stopped happening and hasn’t resumed.

When I was twelve, I read a back issue of OMNI magazine that had an article about alien abductees. In the article was a list of things common to people who have been supposedly abducted, but had been hypnotized to forget the experience. Very high on the list was dreams of U.F.O.s and the audio hallucination of someone calling your name.
Needless to say I was freaked out a little about that.

I do not believe in alien visitors to our planet and I do not believe I was abducted. What I do believe is that certain fears get externalized by people’s minds in very similar ways.

My wife and I recently saw the Spielberg remake of War of the Worlds. When the aliens first show up in that movie, the sky turns dark, an e.m.p. blast disables vehicles, and there are bright flashes in the sky.

These kinds of events are common in UFO reports. I believe that most of these experiences are hallucinations and the rest are misinterpretations of military tests and/or natural phenomena. But, what makes people all hallucinate nearly the same thing? What makes the mind see things in this particular pattern?

What is it that drives the fear?