Unsolved Mysteries: A Childhood Phobia

So I recently told a childhood story here, about Labor Day, which made me start thinking about other childhood stories that writers might find entertaining/useful/quirky... As a fellow RTG author posted, some of the best ideas we get come from life.

As a 6 or 7-year-old, I used to love mysteries. One night I begged my parents to let me stay up and watch the scary show called, "Unsolved Mysteries." Little did I know that one story on that particular episode would haunt me for years to come...

The blond little girl was taunted out to the backyard in the middle of the night. She saw bright lights overhead, couldn't understand what they were. A stuffed animal was tucked against her right side as she reached up towards the lights...and she was abducted by the hovering alien craft.

And then she was returned to her home, not knowing what happened while she was gone. She still had that stuffed animal, too.

Well, being a kid with an imagination well beyond my years, I asked myself...Had I ever been abducted? Would I be taken away and then brought back? Would I remember whatever tests any aliens conducted, if I WAS abducted? When were they coming for me...?

I stayed awake that night, thinking the street lights streaming through my window were changing from their normal fleshy hue to red, green and blue. I thought I saw shadows shifting against my walls. After running to my parents' room every night for a week, they started putting me to bed on the floor in my sister's room. All my sister said to me was, "You're seriously scared of aliens, Courtney? That's stupid. They don't exist."

After a month, I went back to going to bed in my room. But I always waited for exhaustion to take me to slumber. That was over two decades ago. The irony of it all, you ask? Ha! Now I live in an area well-known for what happened to a man whose story was made famous by the movie, Fire in the Sky...

Every now and then at night, while the stars shine bright, I wonder what the heck is flying in this vast Arizona sky... All I can say is that LIFE itself is a continuing mystery, with plenty of the inexplicable. Fiction is simply a reflection of it. I'm just glad I got over my phobia...