I Want to Believe
Can a recovering skeptic rediscover his curiosity?
“Because, all the evidence to the contrary is not entirely dissuasive.”
Fox Mulder, The X Files, S1E2
Monster of the Week is released every Tuesday (unless it isn’t) and features stories about the paranormal, the unknown, and other high strangeness. This is the pilot.
It was the summer of ’98 and I was staring out my bedroom window, nose pressed firmly against the cool glass. Somewhere, downtown as well as I could figure, three bright lights zipped through the dark. This was it. The moment the 90s had been preparing me for. From Independence Day, to The X Files, to the ubiquitous Green Alien that could be found on stickers, temporary tattoos, and cheap flea market jewelry. They had arrived.
Nothing prepares you for the feeling of seeing a UFO. It’s like that first big drop on a roller coaster, only it just keeps going and going. Down, down, down – taking your stomach with it. Looking back on it now, I understand why no one ever stops to record their encounters with the unknown. I didn’t have a smart phone then of course, but if I had, it would have gone untouched.
There was no question about what I was seeing, either. These were UFOs. I mean that literally, of course. By every account they were unidentified, they were flying, and they were certainly objects. But I also mean that in the cultural sense, too. These were flying saucers. Alien spacecraft from another world here to abduct cows and probe unsuspecting college students. And there I was, witnessing it all.
I was raised Southern Baptist (gross, I know) but, the thing is, I never really believed in God. I went through the motions, sure, (said my prayers, paid attention in church, etc.), but I don’t think there was ever a time when it was more than just a habit I’d inherited from my parents. But aliens? Bigfoot? Chupacabra? Now these were unquestionably real. They were flesh-and-blood. I’d read stories about people who’d seen them. Look, I’m not saying it was logical. I was twelve, give me a break. But the truth was out there. And now I had proof.
I must have watched those lights for at least an hour. Eventually my mom walked by and saw that I was still awake. I begged her to look out the window. Part of me wanted to know I wasn’t crazy, and part of me (a much larger part of me, if I’m being honest) wanted her to reassure me that it was nothing. Or that I was dreaming. Or give me some kind of rational explanation. When she finally relented and came to the window, her response was…underwhelming. Memory being the sticky, unreliable narrator that it is, I can’t tell you what she actually said. But in my mind, it went something like this:
“Big deal. Now go to sleep.”
My mom has never used the phrase “big deal” in her life, but I can imagine her saying something to that effect. It’s funny, the way we remember our parents as we get older. She was younger then than I am now, and yet I still see her in that memory as this towering, all-knowing figure. And, as it turns out, she did have an answer. Because the next morning she happily informed me that my “UFOs” hadn’t been unidentified, flying, or objects for that matter. They were spotlights.
Now, you might be thinking, “You confused spotlights for UFOs, really?” And to that I say, go find Duncan, Oklahoma on a map and get back to me. We weren’t exactly swimming in spotlight-worthy opportunities. But that night, a grocery store was having its grand opening and the owner had rented some spotlights to celebrate. Also, again, I was twelve. So, suck it.
A part of me (again, that much larger part) was relieved. There were no aliens. No one was coming to blow up the town with a death ray. The veil had been safely reapplied to my reality. But there was a smaller (and surprisingly resilient) part of me that was disappointed. I had, if only for a moment, felt something miraculous. It was the full weight of my beliefs fulfilled, only to be ripped away.
That disappointment would inform the way I approached the paranormal in my adult life. It made me cynical. Dismissive. A skeptic who held no space in his worldview for anything that didn’t adhere to the scientific status quo. In short, it made me boring. Believing that we’ve somehow seen and catalogued everything under the sun is such a tedious way to see the universe.
The author John Green (shameless name drop) recently told me that he approaches the world by generally believing people when they tell him what they believe in. Five years ago, I would have found that absurdist.
“People can’t be trusted with their own experiences! Our senses fool us all the time! Confirmation bias is rampant!” I probably would have said.
I believed anyone telling a story about their encounter with the unknown had to be mistaken. But recently, after spending time thinking about my “UFO” encounter, I finally understood why. In my view, everyone was seeing spotlights – whether they believed it or not.
But as the man once said, I want to believe. See, I’ve been thinking a lot about what John told me, and I’ve realized that I don’t want to be the kind of person that dismisses people’s experiences out of hand. In a way, it’s a full circle moment. I’m that kid with his face pressed against a window again, gazing at the sky. But at the same time, I’m holding space for the possibility that we’re just looking at spotlights.
Which brings me…here. To what I’m calling Monster of the Week. This is the place where I plan to draw, erase, and redraw the borders of this new belief. And maybe, somewhere in the stories I find, rediscover that feeling I had all those summers ago when I looked out my window and saw the world I knew fall away.