Fears

As an adult I really don’t have any strong fears. I’m a little bit afraid of heights but not too seriously. When I’m at a high place like Tokyo Tower I just feel a slight sense of uneasiness or discomfort. On the other hand, when I was a child there were plenty of things that really scared me.

When I was a child I was afraid of aliens. I was worried that aliens would come to Earth and abduct me. I thought they would take me to their spaceship and perform experiments on me.

The reason for this fear is partially because of the era I grew up in. In the 90s there were a lot of cheaply made TV programs about alien abduction. These programs claimed to be documentaries based on real alien abduction stories. When I was young I felt very uneasy watching these programs. Of course now I am skeptical of such stories but at the time I thought they were true.

These TV programs were also part of a big UFO craze in the 90s. There were a lot of TV shows and movies about alien abduction. The most famous example was the popular TV series, “The X-files”. This TV show was about FBI agents who investigated aliens and other strange things.

Part of the reason I believed these stories was because my mother believed in aliens. She felt that all the shows were true and so she told me that I should believe them. She would often talk about different alien abduction stories. The one she talked about the most was the abduction of Barney and Betty Hill in 1961.

Barney and Betty Hill claimed that they were abducted by aliens who made them forget everything. They were hypnotized to remember the abduction and claimed they remembered being abducted after being hypnotized. My mother believed this story and bought me books about the Hill abduction and other stories.

When I became a teen and grew older I began to be skeptical of a lot of these stories. The stories often had problems. The details were not clear and they did not make sense. In the case of the Hill’s stories, there were some clear contradictions. They both said they had the same experience but the details were not the same.

Some stories were even shown to be hoaxes. One hoax was the crop circle hoax. People believed that aliens were drawing circles in fields on farms. These circles were very big. Later, some farmers said that they were the ones that really drew the circles. The crop circles were shown to be a hoax.

When I grew up I stopped believing in alien abduction and am not afraid of aliens. I think it is possible that aliens are in the universe but I don’t believe they are coming to Earth and abducting people. Also, I think being skeptical of strange stories is very important and people should not believe things without a good reason. Recently, the news has many stories that may or may not be true and it is important to think about the stories and decide if they are true.

Nathaniel

Vocabulary

uneasiness (n) – worry or anxiety
abduct (v) – to take someone away illegally or without their consent
skeptical (adj.) – doubting that something is true or useful
craze (n) – something that is very popular for a short time
contradiction (n) – a difference or disagreement between two things which means that both cannot be true
hoax (n) – a trick in which someone tries to make people believe something that is not true