Encounters With the Third Kind
ENCOUNTERS WITH THE THIRD KIND: THE MEMORY TWILIGHT ZONE by Zoe Curran / art by Naomi Tomlin SOMETHING IN THE SKY
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our car careens around sharp turns as you make your way home on a dark, forested highway. You drive through unfamiliar territory tonight, far from streetlights and neighbors. Even the trees look different out here. You’re passing a road sign when you first hear it: a high-pitched whine infiltrating the car through the cracked windows. The whine ascends to a scream. You notice a spotlight piercing through the darkness, cutting across the treetops, shining through your windshield. In a moment of panic, you crash into the highway barrier. Suddenly, the spotlight is on you. You finally see the source of the sound and light: a wide, chrome saucer hovering 50 feet above you, beaming you up! A door begins to open, tall grey figures illuminated within. You wake up the next morning in your own bed. Outside your window, your car is intact. And yet, your body is covered in scratches and you can’t shake the image of the saucer and the tall grey figures. Who took you that night, and where did you go?
THE ORIGIN OF THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL When reading the story above, could you see the bright saucer lights and hear the crunching car metal as you collided with the highway barrier? What features can render a false memory easy to believe? To begin untangling the neural complexity of false memory formation, we must first understand how memory salience can change how, and what, we remember. Salience is defined as being particularly noticeable or prominent; therefore, a salient memory is one that readily comes to mind out of a sea of surrounding memories. Cultural relevance plays a key role in the salience of a memory. For example, iterations of the alien abduction narrative have invaded popular culture since the early 1960s. The true origin of this narrative actually belongs to the Puritan fisherman James Everell [1, 2]. As documented by John Winthrop, governor of the mid1600s Massachusetts Bay Colony, Everell claimed he saw a mysterious light that “ran as swift as an arrow” darting across the marshland of “Muddy River.” Future fishermen described seeing the same unexplained
GREY MATTERS JOURNAL AT VASSAR COLLEGE | ISSUE 2
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