“It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”
― Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.
My Journey into the Heart of the Alien Time-Freeze.
I am the eldest of my parent’s three children and the only male, and however much I adore my two sisters, a part of me also wanted a brother while I was growing up. When I met Jimmy, the son of my mother’s friend and coworker at the Daycare facility, he quickly became the brother I never had.
Early on, I wanted nothing more than to spend all the time with him that I could, though this desire certainly diminished over time. It had little to do with him as a person, understand. And however strange it came to be, after I last saw him shortly after my family moved in 1988, when I was about nine or ten, and just before his family also moved, though in his case out of state, I’d somehow managed to forget about his existence entirely.
It was seven years before memories of him came flooding back, and this was after most of my UFO and alien memories did — and before my past life memories and the subsequent “astral projections,” for the record — and the bulk of it involved the absolute hell that was his home life. After a good amount of time, during which I recalled other down-to-earth memories regarding my time with him at his house, I found that, through our friendship, he had not only shared his hell with me.
No, I’d apparently shared my hell with him as well.
At least so far as I’ve recalled, we only shared three sleepovers. One was at my house, two were at his. When he had stayed over at my house, we were both excited, and I even let him borrow my beloved pajamas with the little “choo-choo trains” on them. Given I’m rather imaginative by nature, at one point in the evening I began play-acting one of my favorite scenes from my favorite movie as a kid, the 1953 film, The War of the Worlds, which starred Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. And I did it without an announcement.
I crouched behind the open door of my sister’s dark bedroom, pointing at this ugly, yellow lamp we had for the longest time. It had a yellow, saucer-like base, from the center of which extended a yellow pole, out from which a ribbed, golden, adjustable neck sprouted, at the end of which was a light bulb without a lampshade. To me it looked like the iconic alien craft from the movie, and in character, this is what I expressed to Jimmy. The eldest of my two younger sisters, who was nearby, knew how my imagination operated, so she fell right into character along with me, reinforcing the play. Jimmy, however, freaked the fuck out. He was terrified, bursting into tears, and no matter what my parents or I did, we simply couldn’t calm him down, and his parents eventually had to pick him up that night and take him home, after which my mother scolded me.
Never got those pajamas back, either.
In retrospect, when I remembered this at sixteen, the memory struck me as odd. It actually kind of pissed me off. After all, I’d hidden behind doors and beneath beds in cowardice, terrified as his insanely religious and relentlessly abusive father beat the everliving fuck out of Jimmy and his three siblings with a belt right in front of me.
“Spare the rod,” the violent cunt liked to say, “and spare the child.”
Sure, halfway through the night I spent at his house, at least on one occasion, I’d grown terrified, presumably about his father, and climbed out of his bottom bunk, where I was sleeping beside him in the room all of the kids slept and was only able to fall asleep peacefully under the bed, but I had never demanded they call my parents to come pick me up and take me home, to my domestic-abuse-free household. I endured all that and he couldn’t handle a small dose of my imagination? Really? Brother-from-another-mother or not, I couldn’t help but think to myself: what a little bitch.
Then, at the end of all my other memories of him, came the memory regarding another night I had spent at his house, however. I’m sure this was the last. After that, I connected the dots. Maybe that would help explain his reaction, despite his horrific home life.
During that sleepover, we didn’t sleep in the singular bedroom the four kids typically slept in, but in what they called the toy room. This was, incidentally, the room in which I’d first met Jimmy. It was just Jimmy’s older brother, Junior, Jimmy and I, sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor of that dark room, with the door open, and the green nightlight illuminating the hallway. We had finally gotten to sleep when I suddenly found myself wide awake, in a heightened state of consciousness, enduring what I can only describe as the most eerie, penetrating silence imaginable. While I didn’t make the connection at the time, or even when I initially remembered it, this experience was somehow familiar to me and sent off alarm bells in my mind.
I remember looking to the left, toward the bodies of my best friend and his eldest brother, who so worshiped his father and so hated me at such a deep level. I reached out my hand and shook Jimmy, who was the one right beside me, begging him to wake up. He didn’t move. Wouldn’t budge, as a matter of fact. He wasn’t snoring, and I wasn’t even confident he was breathing, and my anxiety rose to insane levels. Was he dead? Were they both dead?
Then my attention was drawn beyond them, towards the far right corner of the room. A figure slowly stepped through the wall, and despite no obvious external cues, I knew he was male. My immediate thought was that he looked like an Eskimo, though this sense came strictly through his garb. He wore this black cape or robe underlined in white that covered his entire body and seemed, at first, to wrap around his huge, bulbous head – hence the Eskimo association. Eventually, I realized that this wasn’t a hood over his head after all, but a very high collar also underlined in white that exceeded the height of his head, at least from the angle I was viewing from the ground. In any case, his black, guitar-pick head was dominated by large, slanted, glowing red eyes, also lined in white. As he slowly stepped through the wall, dozens of other beings, shorter in stature, ran out of the same area of the wall he had walked through, though they seemed to run along the walls, or at least the wall to my left and his right. At least at this point, none of the others looked at me or paid me any mind, but this guy, who I somehow knew as The Leader, was staring directly at me. As a matter of fact, our eyes were almost immediately locked.
While I could never manage to recall exactly what we spoke about, I know that I was aggressive in my communications, as I feared they intended to take my friend and his brother this time, and that we engaged in this heated conversation strictly mind-to-mind. After that heated, vaguely recalled chat, there is time missing. Things happened, I feel certain, but they’ve never surfaced in memory.
The very next thing I recall is looking in the other direction, unable to move anything but my eyes, my perspective fixed on the open doorway to the toy room and the hallway beyond, eerily lit by that nightlight with the green-colored bulb. For a seeming eternity I desperately tried to call out their mother’s name, but however much insane effort I put into it, I was utterly unable to force my stupid, ineffectual mouth to produce so much as a low-volume grunt.
There was another childhood incident that came back to me in that flood of memory when I was sixteen that’s relevant here, too, and it occurred in the field behind the first house we ever lived in, which I explained in detail elsewhere, so I’ll spare you and won’t rehash it all here. In summary, I had gone into the field behind my house one day to play in the sandbox and watched as people slowly left. Once alone, I felt as if a shadow had fallen over me, and being observed like one might observe a bug they caught and trapped in a jar. While I don’t recall having looked up, I do recall the paradoxical experience of ascending while at once remaining in the sandbox while data was being “downloaded” into my brain. I was thrust into what I’ve since determined either constituted a sort of high-speed virtual reality program, insanely vivid, telepathically-induced dream scenario, or a higher-dimensional space. I rushed through everything from the wormseyeview to the birdseyeview, soaring across infinite fractals, higher dimensions, parallel universes, alternate realities, geometric patterns, and spirals, journeying from microcosm to macrocosm, above and below, painfully yet blissfully overwhelmed, graciously yet regretfully on overload. In the end, I found myself back in that sandbox, alone in the field behind my house, noting it was clearly later than it should be and knowing I’d be in deep fucking shit once I got home.
Most relevant here, however, was something I experienced and formerly articulated in an earlier post, namely UFOs: Sightings, Encounters, & Recurring Dreams, Part II, regarding the dawn of this experience.
“Immediately, the world around me suddenly took on a rather ominous edge, an almost sinister quality,” I wrote. “It was as if someone had pressed the cosmic pause button, leaving an intense still and a penetrating silence.”
While there were no others around me, no apparently immobilized bodies to poke and prod and beg to awaken, that same ominously still, suspended sort of atmosphere permeated the experience – and there is one more childhood memory that I relived in my flashbacks at sixteen that seemed to place emphasis on this element of the experience which I feel compelled to express and explore here.
My family took many vacations when we were young, and often we’d go camping in our pop-up trailer, with one relatively frequent location being a particular campground located in Geneva, Ohio. My parents always brought our bicycles along and we’d ride around the campgrounds, along the roads and the trails, and then return to the camper to have food, sit around the campfire, and go to bed. There are a host of memories of these (and other) vacations that stick out as strange, but I’ll focus here on a particularly bizarre incident.
One summer, as I was riding by bike along the roads, I encountered this short, younger kid with curly hair, who was also riding around on his bike. Without so much as a word, he rode up to me and slammed his fist into the top of my head with considerable aggression. I’m not sure which was more intense, either – the physical pain or the confusion inspired by the unprovoked violence. I asked him what his problem was, and he only returned with a threat to kick my ass as his cold eyes drilled into my own. I vaguley recall him telling me about his father and what a badass he was. Taken aback and rather pissed off, I told him to leave me alone as I peddaled away, and he followed behind me, threatening to find me later. Eventually he seemed to get bored, turn away, and once he was out of view I returned to my campsite. I don’t recall if I told my parents about it, though I assume I didn’t, but in any case, my naturally-paranoid mind obsessed over the potentiality that this psychopathic little asshole might find our campsite and make good on his threats.
At some point early the next morning, I awoke to the distinct sound of deliberate knocking on the camper door. Judging from the light bleeding through the windows, it was early morning. The sun seemed to just be rising. No one else in the camper made so much as a peep. My sisters were in the bunk above, the parents just across from us, yet no one budged an inch. Ambient sounds were suspiciously absent. Judging from my position within the camper, and the general vibe, the entire universe had been made still — again, as if someone had pressed the pause button on the cosmic VCR.
However alone I felt, I knew I wasn’t. Not exactly. Then I heard that distinct knocking again.
Looking now to the doorway to the camper, which was made out of a bubbled sort of glass, I saw the blurred, dark silhouette of someone standing right outside on the steps. This person was short, incredibly skinny and had a big head that appeared to be entirely bald. Desperately grasping for some semblance of an explanation, I quickly concluded, in total fucking terror, that it must be the kid I had seen the previous day, here to fulfill his promise.
Despite this suspicion, it didn’t really make sense to me. Still, the figure remained, and I next recall what I can only describe as inaudible whispers, as contradictory as that sounds, after which I blacked out.
To be clear, I can’t even speculate as to the sequence of these memories, or all those other memories that came along with them when I was sixteen, only that they all came back to me between 1994 and 1995, and that these three occurred before when my family moved in 1988, when I was nearly ten. All I can assure you of is that in all these experiences – and more, though in these three memories, it was most prominent – the general “atmosphere,” so to speak, was identical, and that fact has always bothered me, always made me curious.
Even early on, in the research that was inspired by my flashbacks, I was aware that there was some sort of acknowledgment of this phenomenon, to at least some degree among UFOlogists, specifically abduction researchers, who recognized – thanks to Budd Hopkins, who I’m fairly certain was the first to identify it – what was known as the “switched off” state. This was intended to designate the immobilized state of the abductee, or others in the vicinity of the abductee who might otherwise be able to confirm their abduction. It was taken, at least early on, as suggestng that they had been placed in a state of technologically-imposed suspended animation or perhaps telepathically-induced paralysis. To some degree, particularly given I was striving to grapple with far more seemingly insane notions at the time, this seemed at least a rational take on, for instance, the apparent lack of alertness to the deliberate knocking on the camper during the Geneva experience or the disturbing lack of reponse of Jimmy during the incredibly fucked up toyroom incident. Once things calmed down, years passed, and I had time to reflect and subject those childhood experiences – and many subsequent experiences, I should add – to scrutiny and detailed analysis, however, it didn’t escape me that the “switched off” state didn’t quite cover my experiences, nor the others that I’d read by that time.
To the contrary, while I considered British paranormal researcher and UFOlogist Jenny Randles the kind of fringe researcher that I best not take seriously if I truly wished to come to a better understanding of what was happening to me and others, and furthermore what the UFO phenomena meant as a whole, I eventually found myself unable to ignore the fact that my aforementioned experiences were best described by what she referred to as the “Oz Factor.” As I’ve been able to discern thus far, she first coined this term in her 1983 book UFO Reality, then elaborated upon it in later books and articles. While I suspect I may have read a book of hers back during high school, I have not done so since, so all that I’ve managed to access so far regarding her has been through second-hand sources, though such sources have provided alleged quotations of her works, and a single article I found on the net which proved to be quite illuminating.
In this article, “Essay on the Oz Factor and the Strange Sensations of Altered Reality Reported by UFO Witnesses,” she describes having noticed certain themes when she began her UFO investigations, particularly with respect to close encounters. The first mentioned was what she referred to as a
“… zone of influence surrounding these close encounters. If you were inside of it, then you experienced the episode in all its glory and as a total reality. If you were outside of it, then the UFO sighting might as well have not happened. Even if the witness said that little aliens got out, formed a brass band, and gave a full concert before taking off again, nobody outside the zone of influence seemed to be capable of knowing a thing.”
This reminded me of a case in Budd Hopkins and Carol Rainey’s book, Sight Unseen, where both explore the experiences of those whom Hopkins calls Sam and Jenny Washburn and their two sons, John and Andy – specifically the family’s apparent 1978 abduction from a playground in Wynnum, a residential area in Greater Brisbane. Of particular interest here is the fact that the four of them were allegedly “switched off” and abducted while others were present in the playground, yet no one seemed to have noticed this occurring. Rainey, focusing on the aspect of apparent invisibility here, cites cases in which energy or light was projected from beneath a hovering UFO onto the area below, either in a beam, a cone, or a curtain, and goes on to posit (p 88) that in the Washburn case:
“… the descending UFO was radiating – outward around itself and downward – an ionized plasma of excited molecules in the infrared or near-infrared range. As we know, that is in the spectrum just outside the human visual range. Everything on the ground enveloped in this ‘umbrella’ of infrared light would have been affected. It would have been as if the craft hovering overhead had dropped an enormous drape over the scene below. Any person or object within that radiated infrared cloak would have to be unseen by other people – even those less than twenty feet away. The Washburns ‘ otherworldly drama – mother and children levitating up, father paralyzed below in a photographer’s pose – would have gone unnoticed by anyone else on the playground.”
This could perhaps help explain Randles’ “zone of influence,” and the aforementioned notion of technological or telepathically-induced suspended animation could perhaps explain their “switched off” state, true, but it would not explain other strange elements of close encounters that I’ve not only experienced myself, but have heard about elsewhere, and which Randles, in her article, went on to explain.
Later she discovered other “symptoms,” as she put it, which were again far more typical in close encounters than mere sightings. While all were interesting and relevant to understanding the phenomenon as a whole, they don’t all seem to have relevance to the matter at hand, though I feel confident that two such “symptoms” she mentioned most certainly do. For one thing, she mentioned that she “would be told that during the experience, time seemed to disappear and lose all meaning. It was as if the encounter were happening in a timeless, magical void.” For another, she took note of “claims that at the onset of the episode all ambient sounds faded away – bird song, the wind in the trees, distant train noises, et cetera. All of these clues pointed towards an isolation factor at work, as if the witness were being singled out and put into a cocoon whereby he or she could experience the UFO, whereas anyone outside of it could not.”
While I’ve often considered it, I dismissed it as too much of a leap. This notion I refer to is something like what Rainy described, but that rather than the aliens hovering their craft above an area and beaming down an umbrella or curtain that merely rendered both their craft and a selected geographical locale or “zone of influence” invisible, they were in effect somehow “freezing time” within that geographical location. After all, this would explain not only the so-called “switched off” state but the sudden absence of ambient sounds, the sense of isolation, as well as the apparent invisibility explained by Randles, Hopkins, Jacobs, and other researchers and witnesses.
I always considered it too much of a leap because it required accepting not only that the craft could generate energy that could be focused to freeze time within a selected geographical area, much as could have been the case in the aforementioned Washburn case – weird, but apparently within the limits my mind could entertain – but also that selected objects and individuals in that area could be rendered somehow immune from these effects, which somehow pushed things more than a bit too far and exceeded my boggle threshold.
Then, in my leisure time, as I’m watching a sci-fi show that somewhat relates to my intellectual interests but I simultaneously regard as a lighthearted avenue of liberation from those intellectual interests, I come across a scene in Resident Alien, Season 2, Episode 13, in which Harry suddenly experiences a “time-freeze” and encounters a Gray alien bearing the voice of fucking Sulu from the original Star Trek. I just barely saved myself from shitting my pants, and it had nothing to do with Sulu. Despite this time-freeze, Harry and the Gray Sulu alien could move about freely.
I thought to myself, “What the fuck – others have contemplated this?”
As I continued watching the show, this time-freezing ability of the Grays cropped up again and again, as well as other elements that fueled my suspicion that they had someone doing research on the general subject of UFOs and aliens, and if so, whoever he was, he was doing a damn good job. In a behind the scenes video I came across on YouTube, the guy was even called out as the one who researched this shit, and he should be commended.
In any case, the time-freeze scenes brought me back to that old suspicion, to those former flashbacks, and one day, on my drive home from work, my mind leaned heavily on the subject, which I couldn’t help but feel demanded a deeper look.
And so I looked deeper.
Reddit Anecdotes of Localized Time-Freezes.
“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut.
Once I finally decided to put my mind to it on March 22, 2023 and began some internet searching, it was amazing how many examples I came across in which time, in localized areas of varying sizes, seemed to have stopped. Most of these experiences I came across on Reddit, I should also mention, most specifically in the subreddit Glitch_in_the_Matrix. In the course of reading these accounts as well as the comments, which often provided similar accounts from others, I also came across some proposed prosaic explanations that I subsequently explored, and some of them made sense with respect to a small number of cases.
There was a case or two where a witness would see a singular bird seemingly frozen, hovering in mid-air, for instance, but this, it turned out, could be sufficiently explained in a perfectly mundane way. Hummingbirds can hover, after all, and are in fact the only kind of birds that can sustain such hovering – though honestly, this wouldn’t fit the descriptions in the accounts I’ve read. Other birds can seemingly hover, at least for short periods, however, utilizing what is known as intermittent flight. Here such birds fly in the conventional flapping style for a time and then glide on the headwind, seemingly hovering, as it saves energy. This could clearly explain the cases I’ve read.
In other cases, lone individual humans were seen to be frozen, however, either by a single witness or multiple ones, but it turns out that this can also be explained by well-understood phenomena – in this case not atmospheric, however, but neurological. As one response to a post I came across early on pointed out, there is a type of generalized seizure often referred to as petit mal seizures, though more often and accurately described as “absence seizures,” which typically last no longer than 30 seconds. Typically they occur in children between 4 and 12 years of age, and rarely over 20, and can be triggered by hyperventilating or strobing lights. You might observe the kid moving or talking when they abruptly stop, as if they were put on pause, only to continue what they were doing or saying shortly thereafter without any awareness of their “missing time.”
Absence seizures may also occur in conjunction with other types of seizures, and if these absence seizures occur more than once, this may suggest that one has epilepsy – a condition that usually begins between the ages of 5 and 20, but one can apparently develop this at any age. Among the potential causes, mini-strokes are mentioned, and this struck home with me, as it immediately reminded me of what my parents once told me they observed in my maternal grandfather just before he died in the mid-1980s. He would be in the middle of saying something and it would be as if he were suddenly put on “pause,” and a short while later he would resume speaking and moving as if there had been no time loss at all. They said he was later diagnosed as having had a series of mini-strokes.
Illuminating as this all is, the fact of the matter is that absence seizures become rather ridiculous as an explanation when the observed individual is frozen in such a manner that one would expect them to fall over due to the force of gravity, as in the case of being amid running – and yet such anecdotes exist, and by seemingly sincere witnesses. Other factors, such as the length of the freeze, might also make such an explanation absurd. One example, provided by a Reddit user by the name of Princessa22 in a comment, provides one suitable example, and in addition my paranoid mind suggests it may have a potential association with the broader topic at hand here:
“I was driving home one night after work (it was winter so it was already dark around 7PM). I live in a smallish suburban neighborhood, nothing out of the ordinary, mostly families. I don’t know all of my neighbors, but I know several of them and most I at least recognize from seeing them walk dogs, work in the yard, etc. Anyway, as I pulled onto my street, I look to the right a few houses down, and I noticed a streetlight blink. And underneath the streetlight is this woman (who I recognized as one of my neighbors, but have never spoken to her) completely frozen looking up towards the sky with this horrific look on her face. She looked mid-stride, like she was running.”
Unfortunately, there are few other details, as the user has subsequently deleted her comment. In any case, even accepting that one can sufficiently explain instances such as hers as a neurological or psychological issue with the observed, it would certainly be far more challenging to explain those instances when a witness reports more than one individual seemingly caught in a state of suspended animation. Take, for instance, an experience submitted by Couch-for-Sale:
“This was about a month ago and I keep thinking back on it, I hope I can find some kind of explanation for this as I’ve never experienced anything like it before or since. I (21 f) go for runs with my dog most nights when I get home from work. I’ve been at my parents house since March because campus housing kicked us out due to the virus. Its a safe and chill area, so I’ve never had anything weird or concerning happen when we run at night.
Until like a month ago in early June, we went for a run at 11:00pm. After a while we both started back at a walking pace to get a cool down, and I noticed a man walking a German Shepard dog parallel to us on the opposite side of the street.
After a moment of us walking parallel to [each other] I looked again and they had both stopped. I first thought okay, the dog probably stopped to pee. I kept walking, and my dog stopped to smell something so I looked back at them again. I don’t know how else to describe it other than they were frozen. Both the dog and the man were in the middle of taking a step, but they were completely still. As if the universe just hit pause as they were walking.
It was late at night but it was all pretty well lit with the street lights, I’m very certain that this wasn’t the darkness playing tricks on my eyes. It was well lit enough for me to easily see that the guy was wearing a blue Nike brand hoodie, jeans, and sunglasses (all weird attire for a gross 90 degree night in South Texas) and that the dog had a colorful bedazzled leash. The decently strong breeze didn’t move the [guy’s] baggy hoodie or the [dog’s] thick fur. I couldn’t see his eyes because he was wearing sunglasses (at night?) But the dogs eyes were forward and weren’t blinking. It was an extremely unsettling stillness that I’ve never seen before, the closest thing I can compare it to is character animation failing in a video game so it just ends up stuck in place. I had stood there for at least 2-3 minutes because I was able to start and finish a song in my Playlist I had going when I first paused to look back at them. Neither of them budged an inch. Eventually I was too afraid to stay and see what happens, so we started walking again. I had such an unsettled and anxious feeling and I kept looking back over my shoulder to see them still firmly in place. They didn’t move for as long as I was able to see them when I looked back. I have never experienced something like this before or since then.”
It’s safe to say that an aneurysm, mini-stroke, or stress response wouldn’t fit the bill in this case, and the notion that both the dude and his pooch could have been suffering from “absence seizures” simultaneously seems statistically unlikely, and not just due to the duration – though to be sure I’m no psychologist, neurologist, or even a statistician for that matter. Another important detail, which is an element we will explore more in-depth shortly, is that the wind didn’t move the guy’s hoodie or the hair of the dog. So all things considered, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here when I declare that, well, this anecdote was a fucking weird one.
Other proposed prosaic explanations for some experiences focus not the observed, however, but the observer – more specifically, the observer’s time perception. When a single individual witnesses a “time-freeze,” in other words, it could potentially be explained as a stress reaction related to the experience one might have in a car accident, when time seems to slow down. In the summer following my senior year, when I was attending summer school, I had a car accident and had this experience myself, and to be sure, it was interesting. In an evolutionary context, it also makes perfect fucking sense. After all, when you’re in a potentially life-threatening situation the triggered retardation of your time perception relative to your cognition would provide you more experiential time to take in more of the vital data provided to you by your senses so as to formulate more informed decisions on your next course of action, potentially saving your life. Granted, this is only the subjective experience of time slowing down, but it’s not difficult to extrapolate from this that the more extreme case of time perception putting itself on pause might provide additional benefits, at least supposing that it paused on a vital moment. Such an experience may not necessarily have such rationale behind it, however, or be triggered due to perceived near-death stress. It turns out that time slowing down, perhaps even being suspended in one’s perception, can also be the byproduct of an aneurysm.
However rare, these things have been known to happen.
What doesn’t happen, however, is two or more people having the same “time freeze” experience at the same time, even in an apparently non-stressful situation, at least unless you’re willing to accept a simultaneous aneurysm or stroke in both individuals which also produced the same rare, neurological effects with respect to their time perceptions. In other words, one would struggle to explain what a user by the name of Caydelay reported in conventional terms. As Caydelay explained:
“… this occurred to myself and a friend during August of this year. I remember we were driving down a very familiar stretch of road while coming back from a fishing trip. I just did a google maps search and the stretch of road is 633.3 ft exactly but anyways suddenly time seemed to freeze for us both and the drive lasted for what seemed like hours. I remember everything felt weird, calm and sort of warm. After the little glitch my friend and I both looked at each other and said “Did you feel that?” I have no idea how to explain it but it was weird as all hell.”
The aforementioned conventional explanations would also seem to suggest that while an individual in the midst of such an experience, regardless of their root cause, would experience their thoughts flowing at normal speed relative to their frozen sense perceptions, their bodies would nonetheless be bound to to the speed of their extremely retarded time perception. In other words, their bodies, too, would be frozen. Nearly all the cases I’ve come across report their experiences as having been otherwise, however, as we will explore below.
For the moment it should be pointed out that for most of the cases I’ve come across, which come from witnesses to the time-freeze and not participants in them, report a geographical area of suspended temporal progression whose population far exceeds that of an individual were seen to be seemingly frozen in the midst of running while staring in terror at the sky, or even a man and his dog suspended while on a casual walk. Instead, witnesses typically observe massive groups of people within a localized area that are simultaneously “frozen,” while the rest of the world seems to go on as usual.
There was, to provide an example, the tale shared by Freakshow-Wendy:
“This happened on a fourth grade field trip. Our class was passing by a museum with a campus-like entrance (and by that I mean everyone was sitting down, writing something, talking, it just looked like a college environment). We all walked on the sidewalk in pairs of two. I didn’t really look at the museum because I was busy talking with a friend, but when I did turn around to look, a strange scene greeted me.
Everyone was just completely still. They were like statues. No one was moving, some were looking at us, some were looking at each other and doing their own thing, but everyone looked frozen in time. Everything else moved but the people in front of the museum. I distinctly remember three guys sitting on the stairs: one of them looked like he was mid-conversation, the other one looked straight at us and the third had his head back like he was laughing, but he didn’t make any movements or noise.”
She nudged her friend and tried to bring it to her attention, but by the time they both looked, they were all the people were moving again. A similar experience was shared by Rosestrella:
“I was in the car with my dad this morning (he was driving) and we were traveling on a highway (which I won’t say for safety reasons). My eyes were wandering as we were talking and I looked up and ahead at a pedestrian bridge that stretches across the highway.
The bridge is some kind of metal, with a circular metal barrier/roof. There were a few people walking across, maybe 4 or 5, one person walking their bike, and a small girl (?) stretching her hand up onto the side of the barrier. I saw the people moving across the bridge (excepting the little girl) and then suddenly they all stopped at the exact same moment?? After we passed the bridge I craned my neck around to look at it – maybe I had imagined it – but every single figure was still.”
Just as the friend hadn’t seen the time-freeze in the first example, the father didn’t notice it in this one, but he did notice his daughter’s strange reaction. In these cases, I realize, only a single individual witnessed the “time freeze” zone, which still might lead people to wonder if this was somehow a faulty perception with respect to the singular witness rather than a truly objective phenomenon, so I now submit to you cases that involve more than one witness observing the time-freeze.
In another post, a deleted user provided an experience he had with the mother of his child as they were at the register in a Target located in Tampa, Florida. As they were checking out, as he explained, “the cashier started to seem off and things felt weird”. All of a sudden, “everything froze”, he said, “everyone in sight” and “even the air you could feel it” though he and his baby-mama were still able to move. Another moment passed and everything suddenly resumed as usual, but a customer from another register exclaimed, “What was that? Why did everyone freeze?” No one answered him, not even the deleted user, who confessed that while he “didn’t see the other customer move” it nonetheless “appeared that the three of us were the only ones that noticed it.”
They finished checking out and it wasn’t until they were exiting the building that both he and the mother of his child turned towards one another, confirmed that they had both experienced the same thing, and both expressed utter confusion regarding what had just happened. He added that they “still talk about it from time to time two years later.”
There was another interesting anecdote provided by an Aussie user known as Mcginlm72 that has relevance here. During the time this occurred, as she explained, summer was bleeding in and with it the hot weather. Consequently, the deafening calls of the cicadas during the daylight hours deafened the ears. It was midday as she was in her car with her two kids, aged 10 and 12, as she explained, and:
“… we were driving along a busyish road there was two lanes going in each direction. We pulled up to the traffic lights at a crossroads junction I was a bit back from the lights as it was busy and I could see other cars on each side of the junction.
Suddenly it went completely quiet and I mean deadly quiet there was no car engine noises, no birds, no cicadas, no wind blowing through the trees nothing!! I looked at the cars in front at either side of the junction and none of them were moving! Usually if one set of lights is red another is green but despite traffic being at all sets of lights no one was moving!!! I looked at my kids they seemed to have noticed it too as they looked confused but funnily none of us spoke!!
Then maybe a minute or more later everything started again cars, moved you could hear their engines and the cicadas started as well. My 12 year old daughter who was sitting in the passenger seat beside finally broke the silence in the car by saying “Well, that was weird!” When I looked at her and nodded she said it was like the world was paused and muted!!! I agreed we talked about it the whole way home and again this morning while driving them to school my daughter commented on how she didn’t understand what had happened. I am at a loss for any explanation. I cannot stress how quiet it was it was complete and utter silence and on a side note I have tinnitus 24/7 (damage from chemo) and I noticed that it was also gone during this event.
Has anyone else had anything like this ever happen to them or possible explanation to what it was?! if my kids hadn’t of been there with me and commented on it first I would have thought it was just me and my ears playing up but they both “heard” it too and yes they have no hearing problems.”
These cases don’t seem to merely constitute an individual in a “switched off” state or collective paralysis involving countless people, either, as strange as that would be, but are in fact far stranger. There are many cases which emphasize that it’s not merely people and animals that are frozen, but time itself.
There was an account provided by Mace6789, who said he was living on the second story of a two-flat at 107 Clinton in Joliet, Illinois at the time of the incident, which had occured some twenty years previously. “Right across the street from the building was a minor league baseball park,” he explained in the comments, which was known as “the Joliet Slammers baseball stadium” that had a white flagpole visible from his building. As he wrote in his original post:
“I smoked cigarettes, but the landlord asked that I not smoke inside, which was fine. So, I would go out onto the fire escape when I smoked.
It was a bright summer day – sunshine, breezy, nice weather. I went outside for a smoke. I finished up, but kind of just stood there, enjoying being outside, taking in the sights & sounds of living in a busy city. I happened to be looking at an American flag [on the aforementioned flagpole] flapping in the breeze, when everything just stopped. The flag was frozen stiff, all sound dropped out – it was like somebody hit the pause button. It seemed to last maybe 2-3 seconds, but I couldn’t really tell. Then, every[thing] snapped back in motion, sound immediately returned. I don’t know if I was frozen as well, by the time I realized something was off, everything started going again. Never had anything like that happen before or since.”
While he accepts that he, too, maybe have been frozen, not unlike the experience reported by Caydelay, another experience placing emphasis on the fact that time had seemingly frozen was posted by a deleted user:
“I was the passenger in a car, travelling home from a day out shopping in our nearest city. It was evening, probably 6-630pm in winter, so it was dark. We were stopped at road-works on a bridge with the lights of cars and of the road-works reflected off the sea below the bridge. But the sea wasn’t moving. I could see the texture of waves but they were completely still like the water was frozen in place. I’ve never seen anything like it! Weird doesn’t begin to describe it.”
In the comments he added that so far as he could tell, “the water was the only thing that was affected. The music on the radio and my wife chatting was exactly the same.”
While most cases that I’ve come across so far seem to involve one or more witnesses perceiving what seems to be a fixed, geographical zone in which time is temporarily suspended – which is admittedly weird, but something one can eventually wrap one’s mind around as a possibility – other cases involve witness who are actually in the midst of these “time-freeze” zones who are, for whatever reason, not similarly frozen. Instead, they retain full autonomy – even, apparently, the car they are driving. These are the cases, then, that become indistinguishable from the Oz Factor. Funkpag posted the following
“This happened a little over 2 years ago and I still think about it multiple times a week.
I was on my way to my shitty minimum wage job, driving down a shortcut that goes through a neighborhood. Regardless of the time of day the streets are always active (meth will make you antsy like that), especially in the summer where this took place.
I was about halfway down the road to the stoplight and to the left of me, a car has its blinker on to make a turn, there was a lady sitting on her porch steps smoking to my right and a person walking against traffic on the other side of the street.
I was trundling down the pothole filled road, when everything just…stopped. Porch lady was frozen with the cig to her lips way longer than is typical, street man stopped mid stride and the car’s blinker STAYED ON. That’s what really made me realize some fuckery was happening.
But…my car was still moving, and I could still move my body? Somehow I ended up the sole person on that street not frozen. People here talk often about a feeling of “wrongness” that’s very hard to describe and oh boy. I sure as hell know what y’all mean now. For me it had liminal space vibes but heavier, if that makes sense. It was also disturbingly quiet, sounds were kinda muffled like when you put a pillow over your head.
I drive maybe a couple yards to the bend in the street, and then everything is back to normal, like somebody flipped a switch. People moving, the turn signal blinking, no weird auditory distortion, just normal, everyday reality.”
Other such experiences are more enduring and the individual involved can also perceive time flowing normally outside of the time-freeze zone. Zjbarden actually posted about having such an experience right after he’d had it:
“I’ve got exams coming up and have had my own share of cabin fever, but I know for a fact that for around half an hour, my room was frozen in time. My alarm clock and computer clock was stuck at 1:16 PM, my water bottle would not produce any ripples when I tapped it; I also have one of those sand-timers and the sand in it stopped flowing (as in, there was still more left to flow into the bottom part); the light on my netbook quit blinking and just stayed there, my watch (not digital) stopped moving, and my chair would not move. I tried to at least talk to myself (thinking I was completely immune to this time freeze), but could not, and could only move around in the space my chair permitted me (which blocked me into my desk) and could only talk to myself in my head. Needless to say, I sat there, freaked out, just a bit.”
In the comments, Zjbarden added that during the experience he “could hear other people and look out my window and see people outside moving”, which officially makes this anecdote, more than any I’ve read so far, strongly suggest a geogrpahical zone with clear boundaries in which time is apparently suspended despite the fact that selected individuals (or objects) can nonetheless move freely, suggesting that time still passes normally for them. Most astounding is that this lasted so long that Zjbarden was able to note multiple suggestions of the temporal suspension in the roughly half an hour in which is was sustained: there were no ripples on the surface of the water in a cup when he tapped it with his finger, an analog clock that stopped ticking, the sand in an hourglass he had stopped flowing, and he couldn’t even move his chair, which is most curious. I’m also curious about how he stated “the light on my netbook quit blinking and just stayed there” – did the poster mean to imply that the power was knocked out, which would be at least implied if it stopped in the unlit position, or that it was locked in the lit state during the course of the experience?
While all the above anecdotes provide sound reason to suspect that the temporal flow within a specific geographical area can be temporarily suspended, they fail to provide the slightest suggestion of a potential source of the anomaly in question – though, as unexpected and as disturbing as they were, upon examination, some tales I came across did indeed seem to suggest such a source.
In some cases, the witness not only observes a time-freeze zone but also sees another individual clearly unaffected by it, both in a temporal an emotional sense. In the same old obvious Subreddit, for instance, a user by the name of Sl3ann3 posted a creeply fucking experience that has relevance here. A few years prior, she had been walking with her family through Universal CityWalk in Orlando, Florida, when she had been looking for a place to eat, so decided to look through Emeril’s restaurant. “I noticed it seemed a bit odd, so I went up the stairs to get a better look,” she explained. “Everyone in the store was frozen.” She subsequently told her boyfriend:
“… to come look at how realistic the fake restaurant was inside. He didn’t care but our son walked up and was also amazed. And at this point I noticed someone staring at us from the side (outside of the restaurant ). He looked creepy and gave off an odd vibe. One of those ‘you can feel them staring at you’ moments. He literally gave me the creepiest smile and then winked. It was awkward so I looked away.”
In the comments, she added details regarding the guy she saw. “The guy really seemed so out of place,” she wrote. “Everyone there is usually dressed for walking around and he was in a suit and hat. It was a hot summer day. I really felt like he did it. If it wasn’t him He had to have seen what I saw from where he was standing. And he didn’t seem freaked out. I just wonder why he would show me that.”
In the original post, she went on to say that it was then that she “realized that everyone in the restaurant was moving. The family I had been staring at for five minutes was now enjoying their meal. I watched them for another minute trying to figure out if they were very realistic robots until the dad flared over at me and made me feel like a weirdo. In that moment I knew that they were real . When I tried to explain to my bf he didn’t believe me.”
In the comments, she added that her son confirmed what she said about the guy to his dad and her boyfriend, yet confessed “he was also 7 or 8 at the time” and as a consequence she assumes “he would’ve agreed with anything I said. So I’m not sure if he really saw what I saw or if he just agreed with me to sound like we were cool and had both witnessed something crazy.” She also opened the original post by stating that the experience “really bothered me after it happened” and that she “obsessed over it for months and questioned everything to the point of having my first anxiety attacks.” She also added that she had “searched multiple times since then to see if there was some massive joke being played that day” but was unable to find any evidence.
“I certainly feel like the creepy man had somehow controlled the situation and was enjoying watching me watch them,” she said. “I keep telling myself that it was some magic hidden camera show or something” but she has, thus far, been unable to find any such evidence.
While I am well aware that her experience wouldn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, I certainly don’t believe she is lying, and especially in light of the other accounts we’ve explored. It also doesn’t escape my attention that the man she described, who could also perceive this apparent time-freeze zone but was clearly not only not shocked by it but was amused by the act that she saw it, and perhaps even her reaction, resonates quite closely to the more human-appearing beings described in abduction accounts and dressed in the garb typically described by UFO witnesses when encountering, subsequent to their encounters, the so-called “Men in Black.” Even the fact that his manner of dress seemed illogical given the “hot summer day” fits disturbingly nicely.
To add to the disturbing nature of this account, specifically the implication that a human or human-appearing entity either generated or was somehow involved in an apparent time freeze is another account, yet again posted in the aforementioned Subreddit, by a user going by the name of Fam5times. While this account is second hand, I nonetheless feel it is important to share:
“So this is a true experience that happened to my brother. A little background on him, he is a married man with 4 young girls and you average close knit family. He is a quite and honest person who keeps to his job and family.
This happened to him several years back. It was a Sunday morning and He was in church with his family. The time of year was December, within a week or so of Christmas. He was sitting thru the service just like any other Sunday when the experience happened. He was listening to the pastor read scriptures from the Bible when everything around him began to slow down. He describes the pastor voice, the movement of people, the ambient noise, everything starts to slow down until everything stops. He said everything had froze and he felt like he was in church with all manikins. He turns briefly to his family and they just look frozen in time. All this thought is processed in a second. He then says he turns to the pastor who was speaking and he is at the podium frozen just standing there. At this moment he sees a person walk out from the right side of the front stage. The person is behind the pastor and just slowly walking across from right to left. The person gets about halfway across the stage, when he turns his head and locks eyes with him. He never stopped just turned his head while in stride to make eye contact with my brother for a split second and turns his head back straight and continues to walk to left side until behind the curtain and out of sight. At this moment when the person walks out of sight, everything slowly comes back into reality. He turns to his wife and says did you see that man? She obviously is confused and he doesn’t have a clue what just happened! He said time literally stopped and everyone and everything froze in position while he was left to fully experience whatever just occurred.
Now about the person he seen. This is going to sound absolutely crazy and for some probably discredit this as bullshit. But the person that walked across the back the back of front stage was dressed just like Santa Claus. He tells me he had the beard as well as the red suit on??!! Idk if this is coincidence because it was nearly Christmas Day? He tells his wife about what happened and of course she laughs and he then decides this is something to keep to himself.
Does anyone, anywhere have even the tiniest clue of wtf happened and why on earth he would experience this all alone and no one else in the building? This is a 100% true account that happened to him believe it or not doesn’t matter. I am just sharing to see if anyone has ever had something similar happen to them?”
The Current Working Hypothesis.
“We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.”
— Paulo Coelho.
If the bulk of Redditors I’ve quoted above are to believed, it seems to be case that time can be stopped, paused, suspended, or frozen within a selected geographical area, a designated “time-freeze zone,” but despite this, for whatever reason, particular people can nonetheless move about normally within the zone. They can even see time flowing ordinarily outside it’s perimeter. Sometimes witnesses can even see another individual within the perimeter of this zone moving about freely, which naturally suggests to the witnesses that they are somehow involved in the time-freeze, perhaps even triggered it.
UFOs or beings that clearly constituted alien beings, however? None have been suggested in any of the Reddit posts I’ve come across, at least not as of yet.
Personally, at least at this point, I find it incredibly difficult to believe that all or even most of the above anecdotes were triggered by the aforementioned technology of the apparent ETI, specifically because absolute zero anecdotal evidence has been provided for it. Consequently, this would mean that there are either instances in which such time-freezes happen “spontaneously,” which so to say due to natural variables of which we are currently unaware in the context of modern science, or that they are somehow made to happen by individuals among the human population who have such psi abilities and either involuntarily demonstrate that ability or exploit that ability at will.
And at least with respect to the two anecdotes of this type that I’ve provided – the traditional Man in Black and, of all things, fucking Santa Claus – it would appear I thus far only have suggestions of individuals who can exploit it, or are in service of those who can, which is fucking disturbing, to say the least.
To ask whether such potential individuals are fully human or are alien, or are working on behalf of the aliens, and/or or at least in some part alien, would be remarkably weird in any other context for certain, but in the context of this particular writing project, perhaps considerably less so. After all, I myself have in the course of my real-time experiences, flashbacks, memories, or “dreams” encountered individuals that appeared to be human yet demonstrated psi abilities that, either in my own experiences or in the reports I’ve read from others, are otherwise associated with what are typically regarded as alien entities. Granted, in most such experiences of mine, regardless of the aforementioned category they fall into, they only demonstrated telepathy in some form and/or were seen in conjunction with the other aliens.
This is not always the case, however.
I had a disturbing, frustrating, and strangely vivid experience – call it a “dream” if you like; for all I know, that may very well be the case – that may have relevance here. It perhaps occurred in the late aughts or early 2010s; in any case, when I was living alone in my one and only efficiency apartment. I was standing before two mostly human-appearing individuals, save for perhaps their eyes, mind, and abilities, both of whom I sense I was quite familiar with. I associated them with two experiences, one a memory or “dream” I had as a teen in the midst of my flashbacks in which they – one blond-haired, the other black or brown-haired – guided a team of us down a dark hall, lit only by a blue glow emitting from one of it’s walls, which was lined with what reminded me of fish tanks, only my sense was that these tanks held fetuses of some type. Later, I felt they were the individuals present in the “astral projection” experience I referenced in a former post, Aliens, Auras, & the Indigo Children
“I did have an odd experience, perhaps merely a dream, on October 1st of 2009 that shed some light on the subject. I suddenly found myself in some rendition of the basement of my neighbor’s house across the street when I was young, just as I had in my initial “astral projection” in May of 1995, sitting on a couch in a rather drowsy state of consciousness. Two other individuals who I sensed to be male were standing nearby, though out of my line of sight, and they spoke to both me and with one another mind-to-mind. The conversation involved the physical body being nothing more than a sort of “post body” that served as a thin slice off the top of a body composed of a more subtle form of energy or matter. Furthermore, this body itself was just a part of a greater system of subtler bodies in which conscious beings coexist.”
In any case, in this far later encounter I was clearly angry out of my mind, trying with all my effort to swing fists at this duo, but my movements were all in slow-motion, and the two fuck-heads seemed incredibly amused at my efforts, which only fueled my rage, and so my efforts, all the more.
If humans might have, among it’s potential psi arsenal, this time-freezing ability, or if natural circumstances can, given the right conditions, produce it – and either one or the other, and more likely both, would appear to be the case, given the anecdotes I’ve collected – wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that an advanced ETI might have also experienced such things themselves? And given they are more advanced than us, which seems certain if the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon indeed constitute ETI, would it also not make sense that they may have incorporated this understanding into their science and subsequently exploited it in their technology, and might be utilizing this time-freezing tech in the context of the abduction phenomenon?
Could they be projecting a beam, umbrella, or curtain of energy from their craft that renders the temporal status of a selected geographical area effectively time-frozen while simultaneously allowing particular objects or individuals within that “zone of influence” with the typical freedom of autonomy they would otherwise experience until they deemed such liberty antagonistic to their own, personal objectives?
Could this help explain the disturbing sense of still, the ominous silence I have often heard, or rather failed to hear, prior to their apprehension? Could this explain the apparent lifelessness of those in the immediate area, who may have otherwise constituted witnesses? Could it explain my own sense of paralysis, either prior or subsequent to an encounter with them, that left me reeling with confusion, fear, and rage, utterly incapable of expressing a single thing until morning dawned and I could conveniently – nay, fucking desperately – slip it into the comfortable category of a dream?
I can’t say for sure. Sadly, I can never say for sure. Even so, I certainly think it could be the case.
And it certainly deserves investigation.
Transmissions to Earth 