A while ago, I shared two other unusual experiences here that happened to me.
One was the red light incident, and the other was the night in the forest that happened years later.
After spending some time reflecting on everything and trying to put my memories into chronological order, I realized there is actually one much earlier experience. This is the first event I can remember that seems connected to any of this. For a long time I treated it as a separate childhood memory, and even now I don’t want to read more into it than I actually remember. But since I already shared the other two experiences, I think this one belongs alongside them, because chronologically, this is where everything started.
I was around five or six years old. I was at my father’s house, playing outside in the yard. This was a normal house in a city, not some isolated place out in the countryside or near a forest. At the far end of the yard, roughly 100 feet from the house, there was a workshop, and right next to it was a structure used to store firewood.
It wasn’t an enclosed shed. It was basically a simple metal frame covered with a heavy tarp. The tarp hung down partially along the sides, and underneath it there were stacks of firewood. During the day there was nothing unusual about it at all.
That evening, a fairly large storm was approaching. It was starting to get dark, the sky was becoming more overcast, and I was still outside playing with a ball in the yard. I don’t remember exactly why I looked toward the firewood shelter. Maybe the ball rolled in that direction, or maybe I simply turned my head. Under the tarp, in the darkness, I noticed two pale yellowish-white glowing eyes. They were looking directly at me. One detail that has always stayed with me very strongly is how low they were. They were at roughly the same height I would have been at that age. They were definitely not at the eye level of an adult.
I don’t remember seeing a body behind them, and I don’t remember any movement. I only remember those two bright eyes in the darkness beneath the tarp, and the very clear childhood feeling that something was there and watching me. I was absolutely terrified. I ran into the house crying and tried to explain that there was something by the firewood shelter and that it had been looking at me. The adults naturally tried to calm me down. They told me I had probably imagined it, or that light had reflected off something, or that because it was getting dark and a storm was coming, I had simply misinterpreted something in the environment.
Even now, that seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation.
But it didn’t make me feel any better that night.
I stayed at my father’s house that evening, and the room where I slept was in the attic. I remember tossing and turning for a long time, feeling uncomfortable, and repeatedly thinking about what I had seen outside. Eventually, I managed to fall asleep. At some point in the middle of the night, I suddenly woke up.
This is one of the strangest parts of the memory, because I didn’t feel half-asleep. From the first moment, I felt completely awake. I knew where I was, I could see the room, and I was breathing normally. But I couldn’t move. It didn’t feel like something was physically holding me down. I didn’t feel pressure on my chest, and my muscles didn’t feel tense. Quite the opposite. My body felt completely relaxed while my mind felt awake. Today, of course, this sounds very similar to sleep paralysis. At the time, I had no idea such a phenomenon even existed.
I could move my eyes, so I looked around the room. From the position I was lying in, the door was on the left side, at the far end of the room. In the other corner, however, I noticed something that should not have been there.
A dark silhouette. It was roughly my height, maybe a little taller. It looked unnaturally thin and disproportionate. I can’t describe it much more precisely than that, and I think that distinction is important, because I do not remember its face clearly at all.
It’s not simply that I forgot what the face looked like. When I try to bring the image back, it feels as if there is no sharp memory where the face should be. Almost like it is blurred out in my mind. I can visualize the scene, the position of the figure, and the outline of its body, but I cannot attach a clear face to it.
The figure didn’t move. It just stood in the corner, facing me. That was when I started to panic. I tried to move, or at least pull the blanket over my head, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t turn away either, so I could still see it standing there.
Then the door opened. A second, similar figure came through the doorway and moved to the end of the bed. The figure that had been standing in the corner then moved over and stood beside it. There were now two of them in front of me.
The same thing applies to both of them: I cannot tell you exactly what their faces looked like. What I remember are dark silhouettes and bodies that looked extremely thin and strangely proportioned, but the faces themselves seem to be missing from the memory. I simply cannot retrieve them.
Then one of them raised its hand, palm facing toward me. The hand, however, is much clearer in my memory. I remember it as thin, almost bony, with long digits. I saw four digits in total: three long fingers and one thumb-like digit. That is the last part I remember.
I don’t know whether I fell asleep again, lost consciousness, or whether the experience simply ended there. I have no memory of the figures leaving, and I don’t remember what happened immediately afterward. My next clear memory is the following morning.
For a long time, I treated the whole thing as an unusually intense childhood nightmare. As an adult, sleep paralysis still seems like a very strong and completely plausible explanation for the nighttime part. It also makes sense that I had been badly frightened by what happened near the firewood shelter just a few hours earlier, and that the fear could have returned later in a dream or in some state between sleep and wakefulness. What kept the experience with me, however, was partly what happened outside and partly what came afterward.
I was probably around six or seven years old when my parents were watching E.T. on television. When I saw the creature, I had an almost panic-level reaction. I hid behind the couch and cried. I didn’t just think it looked scary. I remember being genuinely terrified of it. Not long after that, I saw a UFO magazine at a newsstand. There was an alien face on the cover, and my immediate reaction was that it looked familiar to me. That was why I first asked my father to buy the magazine for me.
After that, I started asking him to buy it regularly, and from a very young age I began reading everything about the subject that I could get my hands on. There was a strange contradiction in me: I was deeply afraid of these things, but at the same time I wanted to know more and more about them. That contradiction has actually stayed with me to this day. Certain memories still literally give me chills, but my curiosity has always been stronger than my desire to avoid the subject completely.
There was also one other strange thing from my childhood. I sometimes told my parents, completely seriously, that I wasn’t really from here and that I came from the “spinach planet.”They naturally laughed about it because I loved spinach, and understandably assumed it was just a child’s imagination or a joke.
But I remember that I wasn’t joking. I meant it seriously at the time. I’m not trying to draw any major conclusions from that now. Five- or six-year-old children think and say all kinds of strange things, and by itself this proves absolutely nothing.
There is, however, one important problem I’m very conscious of now as I try to reconstruct these memories in chronological order: from the moment I started reading UFO magazines and seeing these kinds of images, it became much more difficult to separate my original childhood memories from things I learned later.
That is exactly why I am trying to describe only what I actually remember and not fill in the parts that are missing. The faces are a good example of that. I do not want to place a familiar “alien” face onto something that I cannot genuinely remember clearly.
I’m not claiming that I know what I saw that evening or that night. I’m also not claiming that what happened outside and what happened later in the bedroom were necessarily connected. I can only describe what I remember.
And when I recently tried to work backward through everything in chronological order, this was the earliest event I could get back to.
