One thing I love about Brian, apart from his cheeky sense of humor and the way his sleepy early-morning voice makes him sound just like Dick Cavett, is his skepticism vs. my credulity when it comes to the occult, the unseen, spooky coincidences, ghosts, spells, foretelling the future, space aliens, and “the harmless delusion of crystals,” (i.e., most of my rings and necklaces).
Brian loves ghost stories, vampires, and all kinds of folklore — but to him they’re little more than fanciful tales meant to scare people in the most delightful way.
But then Netflix released a four-part series called Encounters. Brian’s cousin Marie was a consultant on the fourth episode, which takes place in Japan. Marie’s mother was Japanese, and their family’s Buddhist temple is near the site of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Also, Marie wrote a memoir about the temple in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, which I just realized I need to read. After an earthquake and tsunami caused a meltdown in the Fukushima reactor and the area was evacuated, unusual things were sighted around the power plant by a whole bunch of witnesses.
“We have to watch this show,” I said as soon as I saw the poster for the series on Marie’s Instagram.
“Actually, we don’t,” said Brian.
Brian and Marie have been good friends all their lives, a fact that I shamelessly exploited when I continued to insist we watch Encounters. “Marie will ask if we watched it,” I said. “She’ll want to know what you thought.”
CAUTION: SO MANY SPOILERS AHEAD
The first episode describes an event that took place in 2008 in rural Texas, and right away I believed everybody’s story. Unusual lights hovered over fields and moved unpredictably across the sky, and it was all captured on military radar. Who could dispute that? Brian could. “Lots of unexplained things float through radar,” he said, a bit grumpily, “it doesn’t mean that the only explanation is space aliens.”
One man they interviewed about the lights not only believed they were alien spaceships, but he homeschooled his children by reading the Bible to them and interpreting scripture in a way that allowed that the wheel Ezekiel saw in the sky was also a spaceship. This man was sincere and loved his kids, and Brian was like, I’m sure he’s very nice but he’s also dangerously wrong and this is one of the reasons why we need to strengthen public education.
But I was all, Mr. Christian Homeschooler was not the only one who saw the lights, and are space aliens really such a ridiculous explanation? Apparently Brian didn’t read Whitley Strieber at the impressionable age of 24, as I did. Reading Whitley Strieber was nearly as upsetting as having a Catholic upbringing and watching The Exorcist at age 11. Actually, by the time I was getting over The Exorcist, Whitley Strieber came along and made sure I wouldn’t sleep for another thirteen years.
The second episode of Encounters takes place in Zimbabwe, where in 1996 a large group of children at a rural private school described seeing a spacecraft and were “spoken” to telepathically by the non-human being who came out of it. The show had footage of the kids being interviewed by a Harvard psychologist soon after the encounter, and then the show did follow-up interviews with them as adults, including this one guy who said all the other kids were lying. This guy had also been a student at the school, and he claimed that on the day of the non-human visitation he told some kids how a shiny rock over on the other side of the playground was actually a spaceship, and he believed that his stupid story resulted in 62 kids having a mass delusion about seeing an alien spaceship. For sure, my man, your shady-ass charisma was so convincing that even the headmistress, a lifelong educator, saw the spaceship, though she didn’t admit it until decades later because she knew she’d lose her job if she did. So it’s this one punk’s word vs. 63 traumatized people who BBC, police, and medical interviewers agreed could not have faked the level of upset they had over this encounter. On top of that, their trauma was compounded by decades of friends, family, and media mocking and gaslighting them.
Brian and I were able to talk about this episode afterward without getting quite as irritated at each other as the first episode, though I was incredulous that Brian found the shady asshole’s story credible. But I decided to listen to his side, and it was interesting to explore the show given that Brian was raised without religion, whereas I grew up steeped in the spookiest of all religions, and each of our foundational experiences are still at the core of our thinking. We can both look at the same mysterious and incorporeal phenomenon — take ghosts, for example — and Brian will say they’re just manifestations of pre-modern people’s imaginative search for explanations, and I’ll absolutely agree with him while also secretly thinking my dad’s spirit was super angry at me for moving his stuff around after he died.
The third episode took place in Wales, and was definitely the eeriest one because aliens fit right into Welsh faerie folklore, where non-humans have been hiding in the mystic glens and glades since ancient times. This episode had another group of school children reporting a spaceship, as well a few shook local residents who came face-to-face with lights, ships, and/or a being tall enough to look at them through a second-story window.
I was hoping that Brian would like the folk aspect of this episode, and he did. To him it was another demonstration of how people’s descriptions of phenomena are affected by the beliefs and vernacular of their times. For me this episode also solidified my belief that if an alien shows up at my bedside, there’s not a goddamned thing I can do to stop it: these guys have stealth on their side.
The final episode of Encounters took place in Japan, and the non-fearful tone of this episode was a pleasant twist. The three people who’d witnessed spaceships, hovering lights, and/or aliens (an artist, a total kook, and a Zen priest) all described the event in positive, life-affirming terms. There was also a section describing the Utsuro-bune, a 19th-century folk story about a young woman who wore “long, smooth clothes of unknown fabric” whose boat washed up on shore below where Fukushima is now. Since she didn’t speak Japanese, people at the time believed she was a princess escaping from another land, whereas certain 21st-century people now interpret this story as an alien encounter. People also claim that the lights they witnessed hovering over the Fukushima nuclear power plant after the meltdown were alien ships reducing the radiation leakage, which they claim also happened at Chernobyl? I have not been able to find any source for that online, but yay if it’s true? If aliens could also restore the Amazon rainforests and bring peace to the Middle East, that would be fantastic.
We ended our watch of Encounters without either of us changing our minds about aliens, but it makes me think back on a recent night when I noticed my cat Richard staring out the window in the family room. I was all, “Richard, wtf are you staring at?” when I caught a glimpse of a figure in white flashing by. It gave me a chill. Prowler? Alien? Ghost, or reflection of a ghost silently hovering behind me?
If it was an alien, it didn’t come to my bedside that night, and I thank it for also not abducting Brian or burning a circle in our backyard. Though if it had taken Brian and brought him back with his pajamas on backward, I’m 100% sure he’d wake up the next morning and, sounding just like Dick Cavett, he’d say, Last night I had the craziest dream.