Alien encounters, the type that involve UFOs and blinding lights and extraterrestrial hands probing you, often defy all scientific and logical explanation and are often the same kind of hoaxes baring huge fangs on the cover of The Sun ... ... until they're not.

While infinite faux encounters have been crawling all over the media even before War of the Worlds was taken way more seriously than the dramatization it was supposed to be, actual aliens do lurk among the sensational clickbait of the Internet. Except these accounts expose the real terrors that some Earthlings went through when they saw something they shouldn't have. Or ended up somewhere they shouldn't have. Or ended up with a passenger that shouldn't have been riding shotgun in their car. However bizarre it might seem to encounter an extraterrestrial light show thousands of feet in the air or to just vanish and show up in your backyard months later thinking it was only a couple of hours (presumably because you were on board something that traveled into the far reaches of space at the speed of light), these experiences that may not be as famous as Roswell and other Area 51's are even more chilling on account of them haunting the memories of people who never worked for the FBI or CIA or even SETI. You might expect a bizarre flash of something when you've been searching for it since the Clinton era. Not so when you're just trying to drive home after dark without your engine breaking down. Probe these 4 alien encounters that are almost (operative word here) beyond belief and even nonbelievers will find it impossible to stay in the cynic bubble.

Those aren't Christmas lights An amateur astronomer observed something beyond imagination after eyeing a bizarre white flash that was definitely not of this planet. Heat lightning would have been the assumption, but the night was clear and cloudless with no forecasted storms. Whatever it was briefly lit up the entire night sky with an otherworldly blaze. It tinged the surrounding air, which somehow felt heavier, with a mysterious metallic taste. Then an unexpected flash of red exploded in the darkness. When it seemed things couldn't get much weirder, the light show began. Alternating white and red flashes appeared, and someone out there must have been having fun twisting human brains because a third flash soon joined the production. It was almost as if they were being beamed into the sky as some sort of mysterious communication mode. Then came the noise that silenced everything. Frogs stopped croaking, crickets ceased their chirping and the night went deathly silent at the sinister whirring until every dog in the neighborhood started barking like it was the apocalypse. This whirring kept rising in volume as the flashes ascended. The alien fireworks have never been explained, but the astronomer and a legion of canine witnesses remain forever spooked.

02 The perfect storm (for abduction) Storms sometimes bring other things down to Earth besides rain. Thunder and lightning probably aren’t how you'd want to spend your birthday, but Jason Andrews of Kent, England got much more than cake when he turned four in July 1987. He began muttering complex mathematical equations as the sky exploded with lightning. Even Einstein probably hadn't been able to understand math of this level at that age, but Jason kept spewing numbers as if he was on the brink of developing an unprecedented theorem. Then the windows began to tremble when Jason turned to his parents in a trancelike state and said "They are waiting for me! I have to go!" His father struggled to pull him back from the doorway, and as he did so it was as if someone took a tranquilizer to the storm. The windows stopped rattling. The trance broke. Jason was being drawn towards something — an alien starship? A makeshift lab for probing human specimens? — and probably would have followed the invisible force that had him in its claws if it weren't for his altered state being shattered. Years later, Jason revealed that he had been getting nightly visits from something definitely not human. The controversial theory behind his experience is that he has some sort of remote viewing capabilities that attracted aliens to him. Whether or not science thinks this phenomenon is real, there is at least one person on this planet who certainly does.