Alien Abduction

ISSUE #67

To all those who joined us for last week's Guestwyrms—willkommen, bienvenue, welcome! If you signed up late and happened to miss Mobs' playlist, catch it here or at the "Past Issues" button below.

This week we're back to me, and I'm coming in hot with some real Jeff material here. I've been reading Communion by Whitley Strieber, which is by now a famous alien abduction narrative and an alleged true story. Movies don't really keep me up at night anymore, but certain books do; between this and House of Leaves last year, every August I read something that scares me out of sleep.

I never used to think aliens were scary (I'm a ghost man, myself), even though they're scientifically likely and lately have been popping up in the New York Times. "The Greys" always looked too silly to scare me before—like goggle-and-flipper kids at the pool—but the descriptions in this book, and the common mythology established over hundreds of abduction stories, are too weird not to stick in your subconscious.

And so I've seen them the past two nights. The first was just noises, normal shit that put me on edge in my heightened state, and shadows in the corners. Last night, though, while dozing off I remembered them, and I jolted awake. There's a shadow in the crack of my door, a figure that comes up to my waist. I stared at it a long time, and then I started to smell them (people say they remember the smell, like cheese with a hint of sulphur). Right before I grabbed my phone to shine a light on it, the door pushed open—and the dog walked through. The smell was probably me.

The weirdest part about alien abduction stories is the "missing time" aspect, how the abductees often lose four to ten hours at a time and don't have a single clue as to how. The memories of abduction only resurface under hypnosis, and often expose a trail of many occurrences over the years. If the stories don't lose you at the little guys, they usually do here.

But there's something about missing time that I relate to profoundly. I often feel so different from my memories—much like I was taken from my old self and can never go back to that life. Forever changed. I think we all feel a little stranger as we grow older. It's scary. Maybe these lapses of time morph themselves into myths of abduction, our minds' way of making sense of how much we forget. Or, maybe they're really out there.

So, front to back, we're doing an alien abduction playlist this week. Track order is important with this one (when is it not); I'm replicating how my own journey would feel: it starts and ends with the earthly Fred Thomas, and peaks in the cosmos with Duster's "Constellations." Enjoy!