Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Alien Panic: The Fear & The Fascination
99 Plays11 months ago
In this first episode of Liminal Queens, we launch straight into one of the most formative and unshakable phenomena of millennial childhood: alien panic.
Why were we — a whole generation of kids — so afraid of being abducted by aliens? Why did we lie awake at night convinced there were UFOs outside our windows? And how did that specific, bug-eyed alien face end up burned into our collective memory?
We unpack the imagery, the abduction narratives, and the eerie media landscape of the 80s and 90s. We also explore the psychological roots of this fear, the cultural anxiety behind it, and why so many of us still remember these stories in unnerving detail.
Whether you were terrified of Whitley Strieber’s Communion, obsessed with alien documentaries, or just vaguely haunted by grainy reenactments on free-to-air TV… this one’s for you.
Credits
Created, hosted, written, produced and edited by Sabrina Hilton & Genevieve Teasdale Artwork by Sabrina Hilton
This podcast includes music and sound effects that are licensed for use through Epidemic Sound
Theme and transition music: Soft Sphere by Dovetail https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/iddduboNjy/
Additional Music
Close the Door Please by Lennon Hutton https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/0et4nfElzO/ Annihilated by Blue Saga https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/Fk1b7Zxhle/
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello friend, my name is Sabrina. I'm one of your co-hosts. Welcome to the very first episode of Liminal Queens. This is a podcast where my sister Genevieve and myself deep dive into the weird cultural moments that made us the millennials that we are today.
00:00:34
Speaker
This podcast is a space for us to shrug off the responsibilities and pressures of being grown-ups and escape into the strange, comforting and hilarious memories of childhood. This show was born out of late night sisterly chats, swapping memories and realizing how many of them we shared.
00:00:52
Speaker
and don't know about you, but the older I get, the more I find unbidden, random pop culture flashes from my childhood keep surfacing. And I want to talk about them because I know you have them too.
00:01:05
Speaker
Scenes from obscure movies, intense but short-lived toy obsessions, eerie shows we probably shouldn't have watched alone. Jen and I have become really fascinated with why those things stuck.
00:01:18
Speaker
Where did they come from? and what were they really about? What do they say about the culture that raised us? This podcast isn't about unpacking deep traumas.
00:01:30
Speaker
We're here for the weird and wonderful stuff that shaped the millennial psyche, from alien docos and cursed animations to saddle club and schoolyard fads. So why the name Liminal Queens?
00:01:43
Speaker
Well, liminal is a word that refers to the in-between, those strange transitional spaces or moments. do yourself a favour, go creep yourself out by googling liminal spaces and you'll see what I mean.
00:02:00
Speaker
And that's how I feel when I think back to childhood memory. It feels surreal, uncanny, little bit dreamlike. I often have trouble placing my memories in time or space.
00:02:13
Speaker
It just feels like they existed in this space where everything was shifting and a lot of stuff didn't make sense. And there's a lot of wonder and mystery to it. So that's the liminality of this concept.
00:02:28
Speaker
As for the Queen's part, that's just us being silly. Let us be the monarchs of all the weird childhood stuff that lives rent-free in your head today. Each episode, Jen and I are going to focus in on one topic.
00:02:43
Speaker
We're going to share our experiences and memories of it. We're going to do a bit of research and demystify some of the context behind the idea. How did it come to be? What was going on in the world at the time?
00:02:54
Speaker
and then Jen, because she is a psychologist, is going to take us into a bit of an analysis of why does this stuff really stick with us as kids? And how did it impact us? And why does it still haunt us today?
00:03:09
Speaker
So let's journey together through that strange liminal space-time that is childhood memory. And with that, let's dive into our very first topic. It's one that we believe was deeply formative for many of us.
00:03:23
Speaker
Alien panic. The fear and the fascination.
00:03:29
Speaker
Imagine this, listener. It's the middle of the night. You're a kid, lying in your bed, covers pulled tightly over your head. You're sweating, You're struggling to breathe.
00:03:40
Speaker
You're completely petrified. It is completely irrational, but you know that if you peek out, you are going to see it. An alien standing in your room, ready to abduct you.
00:03:54
Speaker
Your little kiddo heart is thumping so hard it feels like it might burst. You are frozen, terrified. You're in the grip of the alien panic that haunted so many kids growing up in the eighty s and 90s.
00:04:10
Speaker
Hey, Jen. Hello. Are you ready to A, make a podcast that we don't really have any time or capacity to make and to be talk about aliens? Yes.
00:04:21
Speaker
Let's do it because I don't have enough on my plate already. Absolutely happy to add something else to it. Just do lots of things really, really poorly. Yeah.
00:04:33
Speaker
Can you help kick us off by sharing why you and I felt so compelled to deep dive on this topic as our first episode? Sure. Well, I think for me it's because when we were kids, it felt like there was a really...
00:04:48
Speaker
prolonged period of time there in the late 80s, early ninety s where the topic of aliens was everywhere. So it felt like there was a near constant coverage of UFO sightings, abductions, government conspiracies, people's stories on and in every type of media. So i look, I know it probably wasn't the reality, but when we were young, it kind of felt like it was the number one global issue. And I feel like it really had an impact on us.
00:05:16
Speaker
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And as soon as we started researching this, it became really clear that it wasn't just you and i that thought that way or felt that way. When you do a ah quick search on Reddit, you can really quite quickly confirm that a lot of other millennials were both obsessed with and traumatized by the idea of aliens back in the day.
00:05:36
Speaker
and It's interesting to cover this topic now because it's um this is like one of those cyclical things, like the interest in aliens comes and goes, and it's at one of those points where it's resurfaced or reemerged.
00:05:51
Speaker
I'm not sure if you have... seen any of the coverage of this or whether it's just my Instagram and news feeds that always push these things to the top for me because my algorithm knows I'm so weird.
00:06:04
Speaker
But, you know, a couple of years ago we had, you know, the US government making these admissions that there what they call UAPs, so Unexplained Areas Phenomenon. That's apparently the new What are those things called, Jed?
00:06:20
Speaker
Oh, and an acronym? I don't even see how that is very different to UFO, like unidentified flying object that's exactly the same. and it It feels like such an arbitrary, almost corporate thing to do to just change that acronym.
00:06:34
Speaker
Yeah, potentially trying to change the sentiment around it. Who knows? Exactly. So they're like, look, there's lots of things that we haven't explained or maybe we've we've explained some of them. Doesn't mean that it's extraterrestrial life. Just means it's not explained. And then all of the fanatics are like, cool, cool, cool. So what I'm hearing is what you didn't say.
00:06:55
Speaker
I'm hearing that there's aliens. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. yeah Yeah, absolutely. is' a bit of a confirmation bias yeah going on there. Yeah, people just hearing what they want to hear. Yeah, absolutely. And um look, I think it's it is definitely sort of, I feel, like a cyclical phenomenon, but also maybe a change in terms of the ability to actually keep those types of things secret because of the proliferation of information that happens nowadays.
00:07:19
Speaker
And the fact that people can capture these things in real time, like the Tic Tac incident and and then share that more broadly. It's really difficult to keep that under wraps when people have the ability to actually capture things for themselves and the willingness to share it as well.
00:07:34
Speaker
You know, I think that that makes a difference from a cultural perspective too. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, spot on, spot on. ah Should I just quickly explain what Tic Tac incident was for anyone who doesn't know? don't want to get too deep into things, but that's multiple eyewitness pilots have come forward and verified the fact that there was this Tic Tac shaped ah aircraft that, you know, no wings, no apparent engine, nothing just shaped like a Tic Tac that could move at astronomical speeds that had an our engineering doesn't even touch that or won't even touch that for decades.
00:08:07
Speaker
And so that's the Tic Tac incident. And then it's really interesting to cover this now because, i mean, you and I, full disclosure, you and I recorded this episode a couple of weeks ago then we're just stitching our little intro together today.
00:08:20
Speaker
But now there is this... 3i slash Atlas discourse. ah This thing ah is apparently, it's either comet, it's either just a normal comet, or it is some kind of alien observational spacecraft. And that's the argument, the reason why ah i'm i'm saying I'm going to say experts, and then I've got like quotation mark fingers that you can't say experts, are saying that it is on an uh like an unnatural trajectory like a trajectory towards earth that is like way too deliberate and isn't moving in a natural way it's like oh it's it's happening again there's another one of these space uh spacecrafts or probes apparently this has happened before i've got no idea that comes past earth and like has a look and then goes away or comes here and kills us all so um to to be seen in october apparently
00:09:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting that that's, yeah, split people kind of in terms of the intent of it. You know, we're talking about an inanimate object compared to something that actually has sentient beings related to it. It's quite like one extreme to the other.
00:09:25
Speaker
but Yeah, this stuff is fascinating. And I just recalled that the main Navy pilot that actually ah like kind of witnessed the tic-tac is David Frave. So he was kind of the key witness to it. And obviously there were others that were were there too, to your point.
00:09:38
Speaker
Just want to acknowledge his work and just, you know, talking about that in a broader forum and sharing that experience. Yeah, yeah, and great personal risk. so Totally. But any who's all gone too deep because the topic's too interesting and we haven't even started like the body of the discussion yet.
00:09:54
Speaker
Getting back to where we are on this, we're really talking about what it was like in the late 80s and 90s when you were a kid and all of this alien stuff was out and about and really kind of infiltrating our tiny little pea brains at the time.
00:10:07
Speaker
i think, you know, no I don't know anyone from when we were kids or adults now who doesn't have some kind of movie, TV show, documentary or books about aliens that lives rent free in their head and just pops up when they least expect it So this episode I think really is for everyone and today we are going to share our core alien related childhood memories.
00:10:31
Speaker
Then we're going to unpack how the social and political conditions fueled the fascination at the time and explore why these stories gripped our young imagination so powerfully. And then just for a laugh, we're going to share our reactions from re-watching the alien media that haunted you and I the most.
00:10:56
Speaker
Sab, when I say aliens, what is the first thing that pops into your head? Hmm. Immediately, I'm seeing an alien face in my mind's eye.
00:11:10
Speaker
Or rather, I'm seeing the alien face, or what became established as the default alien face from the 80s. um I know that you know the one, Jen. It's the pale, elongated head that's shaped like an upside-down teardrop.
00:11:26
Speaker
It doesn't have a nose really or no real nose, just these faint slits, a bit like a Voldemort nose and um a tiny expressionless mouth. ah Terrifying.
00:11:38
Speaker
I think the worst part of this face was the enormous pitch black oval eyes. There's no pupils, there's no whites, there's just glossy empty pools.
00:11:48
Speaker
They stare blankly and they're completely devoid of emotion or any humanity. It really is the definition of uncanny because it looks humanish, but it's not human.
00:11:59
Speaker
And it looks alive, but it also looks dead. It's grey like a corpse. It's so bizarre. When you look at it, you just get this feeling that this is wrong. This thing is all sorts of wrong.
00:12:10
Speaker
This image really went mainstream with Communion, which is a book that was written by Whitley Stryber that came out in the late 80s, and it was about his alleged abduction experiences.
00:12:23
Speaker
So the cover of that book featured that now iconic alien face front and centre, and it was everywhere. And then the movie ah but adaptation came out in 1989, starring Christopher Walken, and we'll talk more about it later.
00:12:37
Speaker
And the poster covered the same imagery. So you'd go around as a kid at this time and you might see it in the grocery store or a bookstore or at the cinema or just posters anywhere advertising this stuff.
00:12:52
Speaker
And that should have been illegal, is my feeling. Why was that everywhere? I feel like it was really burned into the cultural consciousness and And as a kid and maybe as an adult, it haunted me.
00:13:05
Speaker
And I had regular night terrors about a tall, skinny alien with that face coming into my room to take me away. I've got to say that image of an alien was also imprinted in my brain and led to me pretty much sleeping with the covers over my head for...
00:13:25
Speaker
Maybe out and out. And so what about you Tell me one of your memories now that I've divulged my core soul fear. Okay, so there are a couple.
00:13:39
Speaker
The first is related to a TV show that came out in the early 90s called Intruders. It was a two-part miniseries that followed a therapist called Dr. Neil Chase as he investigated reports of alien abductions.
00:13:54
Speaker
Essentially, his patients, Mary and Leslie, who were played really convincingly by Mare, Winningham and Daphne Ashbrook, are experiencing some really freaky stuff that leads him to suspect the possibility of extraterrestrial encounters.
00:14:09
Speaker
Now, for me, wow, I had some really vivid memories of this show being downright terrifying, just really intense themes of invasion, so of body, mind, even private space, because these aliens be coming through the walls, y'all.
00:14:27
Speaker
I had really imprinted visions of people walking through my walls, coming to get me and just feeling pretty much unsafe in my house that wasn't even going to protect me.
00:14:42
Speaker
And that really stuck with me. What about you, Sab? Did you have any memories about that show now that I've described it? Yes, I have a very distinct memory about that as well. And I didn't realise that it was from the movie Intruders until about a month ago as well.
00:15:01
Speaker
So my memory is of you and i walking into the living room the in the middle of the day and mum was watching this show and we have just possibly were walked in at the worst possible time in that movie, in that three-hour miniseries we've shown off in the living room at the worst possible time to witness this scene, which was, it was a memory. So I'm talking about a memory within a memory by the way a memory of someone else's apparent memory of two little girls playing in the backyard it's the middle of the day and their dad is nearby as well they're playing in their backyard and it borders on a forest and they see this little boy and he turns around he runs away and they follow him and it's got this very dreamlike scene of them being like Oh, little boy, come back, come back.
00:15:51
Speaker
And they keep following him through the woods. and And then he stops at the edge of a cliff that's overlooking lake and hovering over this lake is a massive spaceship.
00:16:04
Speaker
And the girls see this and they stop. And then the little boy still has his back facing to them. But when he turns around, he doesn't have a human face. He has an alien face.
00:16:15
Speaker
And it was so terrifying. And you can imagine like in the movie, like the the sound effect or music that played at that time made it doubly terrifying. But that is so one of the scariest things I've ever seen.
00:16:29
Speaker
And it still freaks me out to this day. 100% vividly recall that scene and was absolutely terrified when that little boy turned around.
00:16:40
Speaker
I actually think my soul left my body at that moment.
00:16:46
Speaker
I love that. So the second memory that I wanted to share was about fire in the sky. So this movie from 1993 tells the supposed true story of Travis Walton.
00:17:02
Speaker
So he's a logger from Arizona um who mysteriously disappears so like five days after an alleged encounter with a UFO. So his friends who witness the event are actually disbelieved by their community when they come back.
00:17:16
Speaker
They actually suspect them of murder, which turns out obviously not to be the case when Travis appears like five days later. Mm-hmm. But to be honest, I don't remember ton about this movie, but the parts I remember are pure body horror.
00:17:32
Speaker
Travis being stripped naked, covered in some kind of skin-like membrane so he can't even breathe, restrained so he can't move, and then to top it all off, having his body invaded.
00:17:45
Speaker
and the scene... where they put probe in his eye, that's a keeper right there. Permanently branded into my memory. I mean, why an eye for goodness sake?
00:17:56
Speaker
I agree. I had to go to the optometrist yesterday and have eye drops put in my eye and I can't even do that. I think if I had to choose, if we do like a would you rather a butt probe or an eye probe, I think I'd go butt probe, honestly.
00:18:10
Speaker
think I would too. Yeah, and I just recall would have, i know as a child, i would have like just flashes of that scene in my memory. Like that is what stood out for me from that.
00:18:23
Speaker
yeah But it just stuck with me through all these years, could remember it. Just terrifying. Yeah. do Do you mean like it would be the middle of the night or something or even the middle of the day and you'd just be suddenly remembering eye probe?
00:18:36
Speaker
Yes, almost like a trauma that experienced that I experienced, which clearly I didn't, thankfully. It's so bizarre how our mind works. I'm thankful that I don't remember any of this fire in the sky thing. I don't remember this eye probe or anything like that.
00:18:52
Speaker
But what I do remember was the atmosphere or the feeling at the time, so around the eighty s and 90s, When we talk about alien panic, we're not just talking about one or two movies that got under people's skin. We're talking about a whole atmosphere.
00:19:06
Speaker
The topic of alien abduction and UFOs wasn't really a niche underground thing. It was everywhere and being beamed into our lounge rooms. There was really a proliferation of TV shows, especially in the early to mid 90s, that really centered on this idea of aliens not being a sci-fi concept, but a series of legitimate investigations um so shows like the x files sightings unsolved mysteries the extraordinary and then this there was a special alien autopsy fact or fiction and i remember going home being like oh i'm gonna watch this autopsy thing today when i was
00:19:43
Speaker
a kid, which I probably shouldn't have been allowed to do. um It just felt like it was constantly on TV in some way, shape or form. And sometimes it was at night, but also it was just randomly during the day like we just spoke about.
00:19:56
Speaker
You'd think that this kind of content would need to be hidden away or on obscure channels, but it wasn't. It was actually on free to air and easily accessible. yes Unsolved Mysteries definitely was.
00:20:08
Speaker
And I think what makes it more powerful is that in Australia, if you didn't have... cable TV, you only had access to like five free-to-air channels, ABC, SBS, 7, 9, and 10. And that was it.
00:20:22
Speaker
So when these things were on, it felt huge because everybody was watching them. And these shows weren't always labeled clearly as fiction. Sometimes, yeah, you thought that they were documentary or you thought that they were real.
00:20:35
Speaker
They were presented as something that was real and could happen to you. Like, this is a possibility. You could be abducted. Here's somebody's experiences. You'd be what? It's all like um featuring on the TV channels that usually present the news.
00:20:51
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So they were side by side with supposedly factual information. Yeah. And so the feeling that i I'm trying to and not doing a very good job at capturing is being alone at home or at a sleepover or something.
00:21:09
Speaker
This footage would come on and it would seem quite legitimate. They'd be like, you know, quite an authoritative American your voiceover of someone telling you about these facts, apparent facts of somebody being abducted, these beams of light, this grainy footage and all this stuff. And it it really didn't feel like there was anyone to say it's not real.
00:21:32
Speaker
Yeah, especially when, in our case, our parents are watching it. So if they're watching it, must be something worth watching. Yeah, or no one's supervising you. No one's supervising you and saying, hey, I know this looks real, but it's actually not real.
00:21:48
Speaker
Totally. You're just watching it and then you're just like, okay, that's a fact. Bye, I'm a kid. Off to be abducted now. ah Totally. I think that's a really great point and we're going to dive into that later. Yeah.
00:22:13
Speaker
So that's our download of memories that stuck with us. So trauma dump over. But you know what? There's a really important piece here that was missing for us as kids being exposed to this content, and that is context.
00:22:27
Speaker
So given we're allegedly adults now, we thought it would help to delve into the why of the prevalence of this information and this stuff and this obsession with alien panic.
00:22:40
Speaker
Sab, it's over to you now to fill us in on what on earth was going on in the late 80s, early 90s that sparked this veritable deluge of alien-related content.
00:22:51
Speaker
Yeah, some of this might surprise you. You might just be learning it now. i hadn't joined a lot of these dots myself until we went and did the research on it. And a quick side note before I get into this, a lot of what I'm going to reference happened in the US.
00:23:05
Speaker
And so you might wonder, how is that relevant to us given we grew up in Australia? Well, we did and we still do consume a huge amount of American news and media here.
00:23:17
Speaker
So this very easily made its way into our sphere. I'm going to talk about three key factors that really shaped the social and political context around aliens at the time.
00:23:28
Speaker
So firstly was the end of the Cold War. ah The Cold War was a tense period from the late 1940s to the early 1990s where the US and the Soviet Union were locked in a global power struggle.
00:23:42
Speaker
So they weren't fighting directly on battlefields, but there was a constant threat of nuclear war hanging in the air. And both sides were trying to outdo each other in weapons and space exploration and just influence around the world.
00:23:57
Speaker
It was basically the world's longest, most dangerous game of passive aggressive one-upmanship, except with nukes. And so would you say that's right? I just kept thinking like passive aggressive, passive aggressive when I was reflecting on the Cold War.
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really good take because there wasn't actually any action. It was very like covert and it has that kind of passive aggressive vibe. Yeah. Everybody just be low key stressed for decades upon decades.
00:24:28
Speaker
Then in 1989, the Berlin Wall, which physically and symbolically represented the divide between communist East and capitalist West, came down. And this really marked the beginning of the Soviet Union's collapse and the end of the Cold War.
00:24:42
Speaker
And so suddenly that decades-long sense of threat just disappeared. I don't know what it is about people that they could have just relaxed for five minutes, but but into that vacuum, um aliens entered the chat, this strange and powerful and um and unknowable thing.
00:24:57
Speaker
And that really allowed these fears of invasion and helplessness to continue and as they had over the last few decades, but now they were just perpetrated by something else.
00:25:09
Speaker
Yeah, and you know what? That's actually a thing. So it's known as horror vacui or nature abnors a vacuum, which was something that Aristotle said. It's like we can't and nature can't cope with there being...
00:25:24
Speaker
nothing within a space we have to fill it with something so like rather than just having no fear or or threat that's available humans will just naturally come up with something to fill that void oh i that's fascinating i'd never heard of that guess it makes a lot of sense but it's like could that just not be a thing just stop for sure can we just all relax Okay, so that was the first factor.
00:25:48
Speaker
The second factor is that there was a growing mistrust in government and institutions which had been simmering since the Watergate scandal in the 70s. If you're not familiar with what Watergate ah ease was, that was when the Nixon government was found to be engaging in naughty tactics during their bid for re-election.
00:26:08
Speaker
They'd broken into the offices of the Democratic Party ah to bug devices and steal documents. And what was worse is that they were found to be covering it up. And then in the 80s and 90s, there was the Iran-Contra affair, where the US was secretly and illegally selling weapons to Iran, which was basically funding a war, but not being transparent about it with its people.
00:26:33
Speaker
And also people felt that the US government had mishandled the AIDS crisis. They ignored it for too long. They underfunded research. They really deprioritized it because they felt it affected marginalized groups.
00:26:44
Speaker
And so you can really understand how people had this feeling of deep mistrust that authorities couldn't be relied on to protect everybody equally and were actively hiding things from them.
00:26:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. so I want to add one last point to the theme of growing government mistrust, the revelations of Bob Lazar. So in 1989, Bob went public with claims that he had worked on reverse engineering alien technology at a site near Area 51.
00:27:12
Speaker
And what made his story so compelling was the level of technical detail he offered combined with a sense that he was reluctant to speak out about it. He really didn't appear to be chasing fame or fortune. If anything, his claims had made his life harder.
00:27:27
Speaker
And even in recent interviews, you know, that still seems to be the case. He doesn't want to talk about it and it has been really shit for him. Absolutely. it has been. So that just helps build the credibility around his story, right?
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah. There's really something about his quiet conviction that makes it feel very credible, very believable. Personally, I'm really buying what this guy is selling. Same here.
00:27:52
Speaker
Anyway, his account reignited decades-old rumours of secret alien programs at Area 51 and fuelled the growing belief that the government not only knew more than it let on, but was actively hiding it.
00:28:04
Speaker
And then the my third and final factor here is the pace of technological change. And look, I know that we're living through rapid technological advancements now, you know, AI and smart everything.
00:28:17
Speaker
But in the late 80s and early 90s, there was this major shift where technology really entered our homes and our personal lives in a way that it hadn't before. Personal computers, VCRs, home gaming consoles, early mobile phones, all of that stuff started to suddenly feel possible.
00:28:35
Speaker
It was exciting, but it was also kind of unsettling. but it's It's not like today, where we're almost desensitized to constant tech updates. Back then, it felt like we were crossing into totally new territory.
00:28:47
Speaker
When you think about it, alien abduction stories from the time often featured a lot of advanced technology. So you've got spaceships, you've got people getting weird implants and being experimented on with strange tools.
00:28:58
Speaker
And that really mirrored both our awe and anxiety about what this rapid progress might mean for humanity. What I'm really getting at with all of this is that alien abductions and conspiracy theories about government cover-ups didn't take off simply because they were captivating or fantastical.
00:29:15
Speaker
They took off because they tapped into very real anxieties that were already bubbling away beneath the surface. The cultural and political context made people receptive to these ideas.
00:29:26
Speaker
The ground was really fertile, so to speak, which is why it had that really feverish, almost obsessive energy around it. Sissy, that's my rundown of the context. Thanks so much for sharing that context, Sissy.
00:29:40
Speaker
i think that having that now is really helpful and would have been really helpful then too. Wouldn't it? But of course, as kids, we're not we're not privy to that information. No.
00:29:53
Speaker
And perhaps maybe even if we were, its still wouldn't have really helped in terms of us understanding this content in a meaningful way anyway. Right? Yeah. The last thing I'll say is that after understanding this, I can't really tell if it makes me think that people are more rational or irrational than I thought.
00:30:14
Speaker
ah That's a good point. But I do feel validated that it was big, that it was a big idea, that I haven't imagined that it was a global phenomenon. It was. Yeah, it 100% was. It wasn't just us.
00:30:31
Speaker
Okay, so far we have discussed the content relating to aliens and alien abductions that's really stuck with us and how it's impacted us personally. We've deep dived into what was actually happening in the time that actually that led to this being such a big part of the culture at the time.
00:30:48
Speaker
Context that was entirely absent for us as kids, it was as we've just mentioned. Now we're going to deep dive into the psychology behind this stuff, sticking in our minds as children.
00:31:00
Speaker
and it's actually stuck with us to this day, right? So before I dive into the more of the detail, there are actually a few key psychological principles to keep in mind as I talk about this conversation.
00:31:12
Speaker
content in the context of kids' psychology. The first is cognitive development. So particularly the concept of concrete thinking. Young children struggle to distinguish between fantasy and reality, especially if that frightening content is actually presented in a realistic or dramatic way. So CGI, which wasn't around so much at that time, but intense music, emotional reactions. The So kids may actually interpret alien abductions as real possibilities, leading to fear, confusion, and even sleep disturbances or separation anxiety, right? And I've definitely experienced the sleep disturbances, and you've talked about that too.
00:31:51
Speaker
That's one concept. The second is emotional regulation. Children haven't actually developed the emotional tools to manage fear, shock, or anxiety, which are really big emotions.
00:32:03
Speaker
They often lack internal calming strategies and rely on adults' reassurance, right? So a scary scene can cause lasting distress, even if it's brief. And kids' reactions can be really intense or disproportional compared to adults because they actually really don't know how to cope with that big emotional response they've had internally. They don't know what to make of it.
00:32:24
Speaker
Yeah, and I'll just say as a as a anyone who is a parent of a young child, um especially in our generation of parenting where there's a lot more awareness of the fact that kids have big emotions and they need help navigating them, that makes complete sense to me.
00:32:41
Speaker
Yeah, and for me too. The third principle is metacognition. So the concept of kids having sort of limited self-awareness and the ability to reflect on their experience.
00:32:53
Speaker
So children are less likely to say, oh, this is just a movie or this is unlikely to happen. No, they don't naturally challenge or reframe irrational thoughts. Hmm. which means they may dwell on imagery or narrative, actually believing it could happen to them without recognising the fictional nature of the content, which really speaks to me. That's exactly what I was doing as a kid, right?
00:33:17
Speaker
Sissy, so can I just understand? This might make me a better parent. If your kid is afraid of something, you know, monsters, aliens or whatever, and you say to them, don't worry about it, it's not real, is that just completely useless? Yeah.
00:33:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's challenging. Yeah, I think it's ah usually probably better to help talk them through what the emotion they're experiencing because they can't really distinguish, as I've just mentioned, the difference between fantasy and reality themselves.
00:33:48
Speaker
So it's better to support and talk about the emotion that they're experiencing and work through that with them, from my perspective. There's also some secondary factors. Attention and memory is one of those. So frightening content is often remembered far more vividly by children because it's emotionally charged and it captures their attention.
00:34:06
Speaker
You know, that happens for adults too, but it's more extreme for kids. so And also lack of life experience. So without the knowledge that aliens are not a verified threat, children actually take this content at face value, right? They're just filling it in with unknown fear, which is exactly what we did. Like, what the hell is this?
00:34:22
Speaker
I don't have any context for this information, so I'm just going to be frightened about it because I don't know it. It's unknown to me. In terms of the content that we've spoken about, if we talk about communion for a moment,
00:34:38
Speaker
We've got Christopher Walken playing Whitley Stryber, the author that you mentioned before. He's haunted by something he can't quite name. He has beings that are visiting him in the night. There's lost time. There's glimpses of wide-eyed creatures pulling him from his bed.
00:34:51
Speaker
It's really dreamlike. It's really disjointed. It's exactly the way a child might process trauma. You've got flashbacks and things like that. And that's key. So children watching Communion don't need to understand the plot.
00:35:04
Speaker
They feel the atmosphere, which you mentioned before, the fear, the confusion. From a psychological perspective, communion mirrors the way kids experience that ambiguous trauma. Something bad happened, but they can't name it, can't explain it.
00:35:19
Speaker
So instead, their minds try to piece together in dream logic, monsters, visitors. And these images get lodged deep into the developing brain, especially because they trigger our fight-flight response, right, the emotional part of our brain, without resolution,
00:35:34
Speaker
Oftentimes, you see like one moment of the movie and you don't actually see what happens at the end. So instead, the child is just afraid, but never given a clear reason. And it's that unresolved fear that can echo into adulthood. yeah If we think about intruders, we saw this when we were too young.
00:35:52
Speaker
It features multiple people experiencing abductions, being paralyzed, floated through walls, subjected to bizarre procedures by emotionless aliens. It's clinical, it's repetitive, and it's deeply disturbing.
00:36:06
Speaker
yeah For children, Intruders introduces a terrifying concept. You are not safe, not even in your bed, right? Yeah. Not even with the doors locked.
00:36:17
Speaker
Your body can be taken. Your mind, it can just be read. Developmentally, it's catastrophic. Not even safe with your parents nearby. Exactly. So around the ages of six to 10, children are learning agency, body autonomy.
00:36:34
Speaker
When they see those boundaries violated on screen, it taps directly into fears of loss of control, violation and not being believed as well. And let's not ignore the deeper metaphor here. So for some kids, especially those that have adverse childhood experiences, these stories can become an unconscious mirror of real trauma.
00:36:52
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. The feeling that your body isn't yours and adults don't believe you when you try to tell them things, right? Or when they're there and like they saw you run off, but then when you tell them that something happened, it's like, what are you talking about?
00:37:07
Speaker
So in that way, like Intruders is more than a sci-fi show. It's actually coded narrative for powerlessness. And for some kids, it was the only language their brain had to process what happened to them.
00:37:17
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And the last one going to talk about is Fire in the Sky. This is medical horror and it's potent because so many children have experienced it. So I don't know about you, but like hospital visits, surgeries, or even just fear of needles, you know, watching someone helpless, confused, exposed, taps directly into those early medical fears.
00:37:39
Speaker
Especially when the doctors aren't even human. But like, I know for me, when I've had, you know, all of the dentistry I had to do when I was a kid, how traumatized I was because I had no control over it and I had to do it. And, you know, I might've had like really comforting doctors that had, didn't have giant almond dead eyes. Right.
00:37:56
Speaker
But it was still horrifying. Yeah. Right? So it speaks to something deep within me. Yeah. And it's also, again, like intruders, that subtler concept around not being believed. So when Travis returns, no one trusts him.
00:38:10
Speaker
His story becomes a source of shame for him. um For children, this reflects that real deep development need to be heard and validated. so So even if a kid doesn't fully understand the plot, the emotional undertones sort of sink in.
00:38:25
Speaker
What if something terrible happens to me and no one believed it Yeah, the fear is formative, like it's unforgettable. That stuff is really, really helpful to understand, Jen.
00:38:36
Speaker
it just shows how deep this stuff runs. This stuff is primal, primally terrifying. Yeah, absolutely. So what do these stories do to a child's mind, if we think more broadly for a second?
00:38:51
Speaker
So first, they're emotionally enrausing, so it means that they etch themselves into long-term memory. So the brain prioritises fear-based learning for survival. That's why you can't forget those wide black eyes, that strange hum in the dark, the moment the character is paralysed and can't scream.
00:39:07
Speaker
So second, they feed magical thinking, which is developmentally normal around ages five to ten. So at that age, fantasy and reality can blur. So a child doesn't just watch fire in the sky, they imagine it could happen to them. And that belief, even if fleeting, makes it really personal.
00:39:23
Speaker
And the third is that these films give language to things that otherwise go unnamed. Powerlessness, confusion, fear of adults, fear of being different. They become psychological metaphors, so a story your brain can tell to explain something that they don't understand.
00:39:52
Speaker
Thank you so much for that, Jen. That was really enlightening. have to say, as a parent, I find that very useful to know. and I certainly don't don't want the same thing to happen to my son. But look, I'll admit the other night, I thought that he was in bed and I thought he was asleep.
00:40:09
Speaker
And we were in the living room, we were watching Mobland, which is ah pretty violent. um And then hadn't noticed, but he was just behind me sitting on the stairs all of a sudden. Like he materialised out of nowhere and he saw some stuff.
00:40:25
Speaker
And so what can I now do to repair that? Look, that's going to happen sometimes. I mean, the idea is that our kids aren't exposed to that kind of content early on, but it's going to happen sometimes, you know, even to like parents that are super vigilant.
00:40:41
Speaker
So I would say that, you know, based on what I've just shared, talk to your child about it. How are they feeling after seeing that? Talk through the emotion with them, but also close the loop because like you and I have discussed in terms of our experiences, often we were just seeing snippets of something and we had no context for it or like no closure of the story.
00:41:03
Speaker
You just have these endless open loops about what happened. I mean, does the person was that person okay? um Was a resolution of the story? if you can, just resolve that for your kid. Mm-hmm. Yes, this horrible thing happened, but then this person came and they resolved the issue and that person who did the bad thing was brought to justice or something. So the story is closed and your kids not replaying it over and over in their mind could be helpful too.
00:41:31
Speaker
Yeah, might have to do a bit of a creative writing on that one because I'm pretty sure the resolution to what he saw was that more people then died and no one was brought to justice. Yeah.
00:41:45
Speaker
Look, that was pretty heavy. Like, that's a lot of stuff to take in. And so I thought we might just do something a bit fun, a bit silly. Communion and intruders, two key pieces of media for us.
00:41:59
Speaker
We said that we were going to go back and have a look at them, and we did.
00:42:10
Speaker
So first of all, Communion. Yeah. The rewatch of that. So I don't think I'd ever, as you said, i hadn't watched the whole thing as a kid. I'd seen bits and and i I believe the bits I saw were probably just in the movie trailer.
00:42:24
Speaker
So I reckon I've seen the movie trailer before. at the beginning of some other VHS. Yeah. And that's probably where i saw most of my stuff because the whole story of it, everything else, was really a surprise to me. The fact that Christopher Walken was in it was a complete surprise.
00:42:38
Speaker
I didn't even know that. No, I didn't either. I didn't either. And then when I rewatch it, I'm like, how did I not know? Because this guy is the entire movie. This movie is completely unhinged. I definitely would recommend ah a rewatch, not because it is a good film, but because it is a hilarious watch.
00:42:55
Speaker
And also any remaining fear or anything like that, it's lost all its power. You know, it's just ah completely gone. So it was fantastic. Christopher Walken completely unhinged.
00:43:07
Speaker
the The special effects and the aliens and stuff like that, like They haven't stood the test of time. It's not scary. yeah The dialogue's hilarious. There is a scene that I can only describe as an alien freak-off.
00:43:20
Speaker
Where he's partying with aliens naked. It's so strange. don't remember that scene at all. And it's like the whole alien spaceship having one big like schvitz, like one sauna or something and just sort of dancing around and he's an naked and he's saying, I'm naked.
00:43:37
Speaker
And then the scene that should be the most... terrifying when he gets probed is just hilarious i I mean I mean it's all like it's awful I mean they're sort lying down naked I'm like oh no how terrible but then at the point when he realized he's been probed he's just he looks at the alien and in a very Christopher Walken way he's like how dare you
00:44:00
Speaker
I'll kill you probing him And you know when you talked before about these things didn't have closure and they were unresolved? So in the movie, you know, he's he's a writer and he's he's got writer's block and then conveniently he gets abducted and then, oh, he's got something he can write about.
00:44:13
Speaker
And through his whole journey, he learns from the aliens that he's been chosen. Like, you know, his father was abducted and he's ab been abducted and his son will also be abducted. Generational abduction. What the hell? Generational trauma, abduction trauma.
00:44:26
Speaker
And his son is terrified and he's also having terrifying experiences. You know, the dad learns, oh, this is, ah you know, your special chosen one and this will also happen to your son. And then Christopher Olgan's like, oh, yeah, cool, I'm at peace with it. And it's like.
00:44:39
Speaker
well, what about your son? And it's just there's no resolution. It's just like who gives a shit about that kid? Just carry on. So that was fantastically fun to watch, so please go have a look at it.
00:44:51
Speaker
yeah Anything else you'd add on communion, Jed? Similar to you, like after watching it, I was just like, oh, okay, yeah, it really doesn't have the power. But the i alien face is like I don't think there's any getting away from how terrifying that is if there's a reason why it had was such a – a powerful image.
00:45:09
Speaker
um But yes, like the actual movie is just like so hilarious. The Intruders was still really visceral and terrifying. yeah the The people and the women particularly within it are just basically used to like breed alien hybrid, alien human hybrid babies.
00:45:27
Speaker
The scenes are really scary. Yeah. um I know that ah she ends up, like the main woman, she ends up sort of talking, going there and talking to them and not being so scared. But like the whole abduction stuff, that the abduction of her son, you know, her son being, you know, just she's not able to protect him. It was it very still very emotionally provocative. And I think particularly having a child as well, that really, really and hit me hard and it still does. So was actually quite good. The acting was really great. It was just, so I still found that really distressing.
00:45:59
Speaker
I agree on the intruders. I thought that it was like legit good. But yes, all the reproductive experiments, it was really, really distressing being someone who has a small baby at the moment.
00:46:10
Speaker
Yeah, really distressing. But also some hilarious stuff as well, I've got to say. There was this scene when the the mother who is being repeatedly abducted at night, returned to her home, whatever, she still gets up.
00:46:23
Speaker
She's making her kid breakfast and she burns the toast because she's like distracted having one of her, um she's just having sort of flashbacks. And then she says to her kid, you know, what do you want on your toast? And he's like, meh, jam or something.
00:46:35
Speaker
And then she goes to make the toast and she has another flashback and she's like, oh, ah She asked him again, oh, what did you want on your toast? like She's forgotten. And the kid just gives this like loaded look like he knows there's something really wrong with mum because she burnt the toast and asked me twice what I wanted on it. And I'm just like, my God, that happens to me every day. Have I been abducted?
00:46:59
Speaker
It's really, really bizarre. Anyway, that's just called having a baby or for me a perimenopausal brain. So that's just a great book. Give your mum the break, kid. give ah Give her a break.
00:47:22
Speaker
So what would we say, Sissy, in terms of sort of any key takeaways? We've talked about what our key memories were, and how that kind of affected us. We've talked about the socio-political cultural landscape that we weren't aware of as kids.
00:47:37
Speaker
We've spoken about why it stuck with us and what it was about our brain that made us remember this random scary stuff and essentially what our reflections are of that as an adult. What are your key takeaways going through this?
00:47:50
Speaker
Well, firstly, I've learned that being freaked out by aliens doesn't make me a weird kid or didn't make me a weird kid. When we understand the context and really review the sheer volume of content and information that was being pushed to us at the time regarding aliens and abductions, it's pretty clear that this was an unavoidable phenomenon.
00:48:13
Speaker
for that time. It's also helpful to understand the way that the movies and shows we were exposed to were deliberately designed to unsettle the audience and that really the core idea of aliens and abductions has legitimate psychological explanations as to why they hit and why they capture the imagination.
00:48:36
Speaker
And so even though we spoke a lot about how disturbing we found a lot of this, I still regard it with a lot of fondness too. And i did enjoy going back and watching some of that media that had previously been fragments of my memory and fragments of my imagination and to put them into the context of, you know, the full stories and movies that they came from.
00:49:04
Speaker
ah just loved exploring it. Yeah, I think I'd say it's so similar for me. Essentially after watching things too, i've just highlighted for me, really shouldn't have been watching this sort of stuff. And what does that mean as a parent?
00:49:16
Speaker
But also like question marks around what part of this is real and what is it made made up? I know some of these things and it was a big thing in the 90s, like based on true events. Now we know that there's evidence that there's other life forms, other beings that are coming here what's going to be What's going to turn out to be real and what's been fabricated? It'd be fascinating to see.
00:49:37
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. um That was really fun. Thank you, Sissy. Next episode, we are going to be covering off another cornerstone of our millennial childhood, which is shareware computer games.
00:49:50
Speaker
We're talking Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Commander Keen. Those were a really big part of our childhood, so we want to take a dive into those. So thanks for listening. We're so excited to be able to chat about this and hopefully have some shared memories with those of you that are listening. Thanks so much and um we look forward to chatting with you and chatting to you next week.