“Whether it’s a false or genuine memory, the brain’s neural mechanism underlying the recall of the memory is the same.”
—PROFESSOR SUSUMU TONEGAWA
One spring evening in 2014, Daniel was driving his girlfriend along Route 183 on the way to her house near Winchester Center. As they rounded a curve they came upon an area just ahead that was congested with a dozen police cars and a half dozen fire trucks. They slowed to a near stop and viewed the scene. Large, domed, emergency lights were swirling atop the vehicles. Another fire engine passed them and joined the others just ahead. Firemen in full gear were heading into the woods off to the left where flames leapt high into the air. It became apparent they could not pass on down the road, so Daniel eased the car to where a state trooper was standing in the middle of the road. His patrol car looked odd; Daniel couldn’t quite put his finger on it. There were none of the usual flashing or twirling lights on it. The car was completely dark. He called out through the open window.
The state trooper, his back to Daniel, was watching the firemen and had not appeared to have seen the two of them in the car. Without turning to look at them, he told them to slow down because there had been an automobile accident. They stopped and waited 10 minutes or so. There were no pylons or other road barriers as would have been expected at the sight of a major accident. No one offered them any information or provided any further directions. They were left to their own devices. Daniel turned the car around. The officer’s uniform seemed odd, too. In fact, the whole setting seemed odd. In the confusion, Daniel couldn’t put it together, but he had been around police all his life and things just didn’t seem right.
Everything about the situation seemed out of sync—the language pattern of the policeman, his lack of direct attention to them, and the vehicles; the fire trucks with rounded fenders and hoods extending out front of the cabs; the ancient-looking twirling lights; and even the police cars that looked as if they were out of some classic car parade. The whole situation spooked both Daniel and his girlfriend. She scooted closer to him and put her arm through his.
Daniel and his girlfriend shared several possible explanations: Maybe there was a period movie being shot there—out of the Forties, perhaps. That idea didn’t stand up to even a moment’s scrutiny; there were no lights or cameras or movie support people. It remained a mystery—an eerie, unexplainable mystery. She clutched Daniel’s arm even tighter.
The young man followed the road to their left. It was an area with which they were familiar. Why, then, did the territory seem strange? He should have been able to travel those roads without having to think about it. That was not the case. What was wrong?
He slowed to a stop on a relatively untraveled dirt road with some houses on it leading into the woods.
“Let’s see if that road will get us back on track.”
His girlfriend nodded in agreement.
He turned and followed the road straight through the woods away from the accident, but in the end they found themselves back to where they had started. They both knew where they were. If they continued on that road they would soon arrive back at the scene of the accident. The whole experience was unnerving and Mary burst into tears.
He turned right, which should have taken them back to the exact location where they had encountered the cars and trucks and the fire and the state policeman. There was not a police car in sight! All the emergency vehicles were gone. There was no fire and no charred trees to indicate there had ever been one. The entire scene as they both remembered it had vanished like it had never happened.
It could not have been a figment of the imagination—they had both witnessed it. They both had emotional reactions to it and felt an unexplainable, unnerving confusion about it lingering on within them.
The two continued to his girlfriend’s house in silence and went inside with the strange and confusing emergency scene stuck in the forefront of their minds. They provided a brief description of the incident to her parents and, at the suggestion of her father, they went immediately to Google Earth and retraced their exact route, hoping to begin making sense of it. How could all of that have suddenly vanished, leaving no trace behind?
Google confirmed the route taken was exactly as previously expected. Thinking back, they determined there had been no cell service during the whole experience and that had never been a problem on that stretch of road before. Later inquiry of others who had been in that area at about the same time provided no information that would tend to substantiate what the young people reported. There were no television, radio, or newspaper reports of an accident on that road.
Of the several possible explanations for what happened to Daniel and his girlfriend, one could relate to a UFO abduction. There are many references in existence that report people returning from such an experience with gaps in their memories—as if significant portions of the experiences they had were wiped clean. Still other reports suggest that replacement memories may have been supplied by the “aliens” so that gap would be filled and the time away seemed less out of the ordinary. (Remove those new memories, which the aliens cannot allow the person to retain, but provide substitute memories which ostensibly fill that time period—memories that should make sense.)
It is possible that those replacement memories may sometimes be inaccurate representations of life on Earth based on imprecise observations by the aliens. In the case of Daniel and his girlfriend, had they been abducted and their brains wiped clean, the replacement memories could have been borrowed from a period in history that appeared oddly inaccurate in the process. The police cars, the uniforms, and the vehicles of the policemen and fire department drawn from an era just past, in that example, could be examples of such alien inaccuracies. One hundred years in Earth time might well seem like a mere second in their time frame.
It has long been held that erasing and replacing memories in the human brain is an unlikely if not impossible process and that contention has been used to cast doubt on such reports. Recent physiological research in the brains of mice, however, suggests otherwise. False memories have indeed been implanted in test animals. In fact, they worked so well that they completely incapacitate the animals in conditions their real life circumstances suggested should not have occurred. This new research certainly substantiates the possibility that extraterrestrials could, indeed, do the same in humans (Xu Lio and Steve Ramirez, in Science, 2013).