tentative theory about entity encounters

epistemic status: I was two months postpartum when I thought of this

A few years ago I was rocking an infant and thinking about infant memories (which I do believe are somewhat accessible in some sense and at minimum do or at least can influence some of the adult’s texture of experience), and a friend who has since scrubbed her twitter account was taking a deep dive into “what exactly is going on with paranormal stuff anyways.” She posted something about alien/fae/entity encounter reports; the inspiring tweet is long gone so I have no idea what it said.

But it struck me that having a sudden and confusingly vague memory of tall humanoids with big eyes and mouths standing over you, picking you up (levitating you?), doing unclear things to your genitals, and giving off an aura of possessing mysterious knowledge…sounds a lot like a potential description of a preverbal memory of infancy. Babies are known to find eyes and mouths especially salient, they don’t have very good vision for the first few months, and diaper changes are probably pretty weird. Even the anal probes reported in some of these accounts; anal thermometers have only recently gone out of fashion in medical settings and are no longer recommended by doctors as part of a new parent’s toolkit.

Here’s my original tweet on the topic:

https://x.com/selentelechia/status/1390109510144987139

My friend uncatherio suggested that I post this somewhere Other Than Twitter, for the sake of making the idea more shareable and slightly less likely to disappear forever. I told her I would, months ago, and I promptly forgot, so I’m posting it now.

For the sake of transparency, I have done approximately no research into any reports of entity visitation from any era, and at the time, my friend who was doing the deep dive objected to my theory, for reasons I do not fully recall. My conception of “entity visitation” as a phenomenon came entirely via cultural osmosis and I have no idea if the stereotype is representative of what the “visited” individuals tend to claim.